The amazing writer S. Bear Bergman has started a Kickstarter to fund a really exciting, much needed project: Flamingo Rampant–Gender Independent Kids Books. 

Why?

Kids’ ability to see themselves in books available to them is an incredibly valuable thing. Any parent, teacher, librarian, or caregiver will tell you that kids love books that reflect their daily experience. Kids with dogs like it when the kid in the book has a dog; kids with non-nuclear family structures cherish books in which families like theirs are shown.

Knowing this – or instinctively grasping it, as most of us do – makes it easy to see the value of children’s books with trans characters to trans or gender-independent kids (or kids with transgender family members).

More details here! This is definitely a project worth throwing a few dollars at.

Hey Mike is there a one stop poetry megasite where I can 1) go to read cool poetics essays by everybody from C.D Wright to Laura Glenum, 2) catch up on reviews of books out from presses like City Lights, 3) watch videos of shit like Joshua Clover getting kicked out of a bank, 4) scan all the current poetry news that stays news and otherwise, 5) dive into a nicely manageable monthly poetry journal that features one poem by three people per issue, especially if those people are like Noelle Kocot or something, and 6) speaking of people also maybe find smart interviews with people like Tyrone Williams? Also it would help if this online poetry megasite were based out of the American desert. Like not the proverbial American desert but some actual sand and shit. Like also if the site were designed to be as clean and navigable as a desert highway.

Hi Mike, that’s weird that’s what you want because that’s actually exactly something Sara Renee Marshall and Joshua Marie Wilkinson invented December 11, 2011 and launched on January 1st, 2012. And it’s based out of Arizona.

Oh cool, I like them. What is this thing called?

The Volta.

Awesome. Also why is there a light on your water pitcher that flashes different colors depending on filter age?

I have no idea, but it’s terrifying and soothing in equal measures.

Yeah, yeah, ‘equal measures,’ boring, whatever Mike, if you’re so fucking smart why don’t you go talk to yourself using some bloated smart person prepositional phrases like ‘that which’ while I actually do something with my life like checking out The Volta.

=(

Sorry just kidding Mike I know how you need relentlessly undiluted adoration all the time so don’t worry I still love you.

=)!!!

Wow I didn’t think you could put exclamation marks after emoticons, that’s really kind of a new low, please don’t ever talk to me again.

More information.

This week, I read an article in the New York Observer that baffled, bothered and bewildered me. The article tells a story about Marie Calloway, a “part feminist, part fame whore,” young woman writer (pseudonymous) who e-mailed a much older Internet writer in New York she admired, told him she was coming to the city and wanted to sleep with him, slept with him, and wrote a 15,000 word “story, “Adrien Brody,” about the experience. None of that is necessarily shocking though some of the details (his relationship status, for example), make the assignation a bit sordid.

We are in the age of Internet confession. Have blog, will reveal, memoir, pixilated for a hundred random strangers to read. Or more. I wonder about the cost of confession these days, and the reach.

“Adrien Brody” held my interest in a prurient way. I wanted to know how the “story” would end. Anyone, and particular a woman, who has been that age can find something to relate to—admiring an older man (or woman), wanting to have a perfect, connected encounter, dealing with insecurity and anxiety, the inevitable disappointment. The story is definitely written in the “Tao Lin aesthetic,” the near obsessive chronicling of one’s (or a character’s) thoughts, emotions, motivations, and actions in a highly detached manner. I’m probably a decade too old to appreciate this literary style but it is a style and one that seems to have gained purchase with a certain audience. There’s an interesting vulnerability to this writing at times, but on the whole, it doesn’t feel like writing. It feels like a writer confessing to a mirror, transcribed e-mails included. I suppose that might be the point.

Mostly, I found “Adrien Brody” sad because people (all of us) are awkward. I cringe whenever I see young people doing things they will probably regret in 20 years. When you’re in your late thirties, you will too. It’s kind of inevitable. I was also uncomfortable. I now know there is man out there who will talk about Gramsci during sex and say ridiculous things to sleep with a much younger girl and who doesn’t read the books he says he reads. I know he has a girlfriend who keeps nail polish at his house and that he’s insecure. I know he disappointed Calloway and, in the end, treated her the way the other men she has slept with treated her. That feels like knowing too much. But I want to know! But I don’t! I do! I don’t!

The vulnerability of the writer sharing how she felt about the affair was readily apparent. There’s something to be said for the honesty in the “story.” But is the story honest? Or is it a deliberate performance in service of the “story”? It’s hard to say.  In the Observer article, Calloway said, “I wrote to express my worldview/subjectivity because it felt then that no one had any idea. I guess ultimately I wanted to connect with others in order to feel less alone.” I have no issue with that. Writers, and women writers in particular, have long written in deeply personal, explicit ways for any number of reasons from wanting connecting, to wanting to achieve some kind of fame to wanting to explore a certain aesthetic.

I don’t need to deliberate the literary merits of “Adrien Brody.” I don’t need to get into whether this is a feminist expression of a woman’s sexual experience. This story is what it is and we’re all going to take different things away from it. I do, however, think it would be interesting to have a conversation about the ethics of “Adrien Brody.” Calloway working through her “expression of subjectivity” affects people. There are consequences.

When you write personally and intimately, difficult questions arise. Whose stories do we, as writers, have the right to tell? To what extent do we have the right to write about the people in our lives? What are the limits of good taste? Do we have to consider good taste and ethics when it comes to writing from our lives? These are not new questions. I don’t know if they have answers but “Adrien Brody” certainly makes me think such questions are still worth discussing.

And there’s the pseudonym. Writing pseudonymously is seductive. You can say whatever you want without consequence because no one knows who you really are. That freedom makes it easy to be daring, to write openly or even transgressively. Some of my favorite writers do so pseudonymously. Marie Calloway wrote about her life and her desires and her attraction to this “Adrien Brody” writer as is her right but she did so behind the safety of a persona and did not afford the same courtesy to the man she writes about so intimately. His identity is thinly veiled, at best.  However flawed he may be, did he consent to being written about in this manner? And so publicly?  Would Calloway have written “Adrien Brody” if she had to use her given name?

More than that, I keep thinking about the girlfriend of this writer. His relationship is certainly not Calloway’s problem. If he doesn’t value the relationship enough to respect it’s boundaries that’s his failing. But. The girlfriend is still affected. Did Calloway consider that? This story is all over the Internet. The people who know this writer and his girlfriend, who also read this “story” know he cheated and how he cheated. Relationships overcome infidelity all the time but it seems like a vastly more uphill battle when the explicit details of an infidelity have been left in the hands of a narcissistic, exhibitionistic writer who doesn’t display the maturity to consider consequences, particularly those consequences for the people in her story without the shelter of a pseudonym.

Calloway recently deleted her blog, said she doesn’t like being watched. That’s not quite the impression she gives, though, through her confessional writing. She wants to be watched so long as she is in control of how she is watched. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to extend that courtesy to the other people she writes about or who might be affected by what she writes. That is revealing, too.

The new issue of LIES/ISLE, which I’d been working on since like February or March or something, finally came out last month. It’s my favorite issue I’ve ever done, so I want everybody to see it. It features killer work from Ken Baumann, Helen Vitoria, Mitch Patrick, David Peak, James Tadd Adcox, Mike Buffalo, Erik Wennermark, Ben Segal, Tyann Prentice, Nate Dorr, Elizabeth Witte, William VanDenBerg, and Clayton T. Michaels. Halloween might be over but horror lives forever. This is also possibly the second to last issue of LIES/ISLE that will ever exist.
Check it out?

1) How often do you find that you stay online longer than you intended?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always

2) How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time online?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always

3)  How often do you prefer the excitement* of the internet to intimacy with your partner?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always
*haha, ‘excitement’

4) How often do you form new relationships* with online users?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always
*haha, ‘relationships’

5) How often do others in your life complain to you about the amount of time you spend online?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always

6) How often do your grades or school work suffer because of the amount of time you spend online?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often*
Always
*Started MFA in 2008 and on-track to finish in 2017. Slow ‘n steady.

7) How often do you check your e-mail* before something else that you need to do?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always
*’e-mail’ being twitter, fb, htmlgiant, pornhub, etc.

8) How often do you become defensive or secretive when anyone asks you what you do online?
Rarely*
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always*
*If the person asking is an avatar, never. If the person asking is a real live human, always.

9) How often do you block out disturbing thoughts about your life with soothing thoughts about the internet?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always*
*Though sometimes I block out disturbing thoughts about my life with disturbing thoughts about the internet, or disturbing thoughts about the internet with disturbing thoughts about my life, or disturbing thoughts about the internet with other disturbing thoughts about the internet.

10) How often do you find yourself anticipating when you will go online again?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always*
*Even when online.

11) How often do you fear that life without the internet would be boring, empty, and joyless?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always*
*Can you die online?

12) How often do you snap, yell, or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you are online?
Rarely
Occasionally*
Frequently
Often
Always
*My style is more ‘ignore’ or ‘block out anything human’ than snap

12) How often do you lose sleep due to late-night log-ins?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always

13) How often do you try to cut down the amount of time you spend online and fail?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always*
*Here is the set of rules I constructed and have never followed
a) No internet before morning meditation
b) No tweeting until after 3 PM
c) No more than 2 tweets per day
d) No internet after 11 pm
e) Only post Sunday Service at htmlgiant–do not become a litblogger.
Bonus: Sometimes I write a letter to god, or a letter to myself from god, asking for the power to stay off twitter for anywhere from 3-5 days. Sometimes I write it like an oath: “I, Melissa Broder, will not log on to twitter for 3 days” and then I sign my name. The most I’ve made it in 2 years is 2 days.

14) How often do you feel depressed, moody, or nervous when you are offline, which goes away once you are back online?
Rarely
Occasionally
Frequently
Often
Always

Dark Sky 14 is out! You should read Dark Sky 14 if you like mustached short Siamese women, a family crawling naked from the sea clutching plastic suitcases, counting bullet holes, Burt’s cans of nuts and screws, broken floating, a horse in a Dumpster, seagulls collecting Styrofoam with their beaks, Mars sex, kicking ants, cashmere moons, warbling accountants, smoke that turns into bears and vice versa, and anonymous book reviews where the book itself is the anonymous.

NOÖ [13] is out! You should read NOÖ [13] if you like  dance-offs, Russian salads, laundromats outside of burnt down malls, people who give you their ADD medication for your birthday, Ivan Lendl nostalgia, Hawaiians with machine guns, fake boyfriends, people who marry houses, confused police, sisters who are boxes of snakes, sisters who threaten you with ginsu knives, pummelhorsing social compromise, meat screams, oysters collected by widows, letters to jailed Lil Wayne, hearts too full of apples and wind, slut bags, triangle booth sandwiches, fucktrys, lung balloons, the bicycle in the wrong part of the neighborhood, the fast snapping motion of a neck during the fickle stages of a swan-dive, whiskey & chocolate, roller hockey coaches, furniture apocalypses, people who swallow entire friends, and eerie floating underwear. Plus one review of one giant book, a book written by a person named Adam Jameson Rod Smith Jennifer L Knox Brad Liening Jennifer Denrow Christian Hawkey Ryan Ridge Dan Hoy. Can you imagine calling for that guy in the doctor’s office? Luckily you don’t need a doctor to read either of these two new issues, but you might need a doctor after them.