Michael Bay eating a bowl of cereal
In the theme of Michael Bay memes lately, here:
The MLKNG SCKLS Is Not A Callous Video Game Contest
Today is the last day to submit an entry for Publishing Genius’s contest to win a copy of MLKNG SCKLS, a fake video game, and some drawing by Justin Sirois that I haven’t seen, but I have seen some other drawings he’s done, they’re great.
To win the contest you have to write 50 words about the video game, 6 Days in Fallujah, as if you were writing a blurb for the back of the video game. More info here.
Still More Harold Bloom… Hooded Negro’s YouTube Posts
I just discovered this, and it’s awesome. Part 1 is a general discussion of Bloom and his work; Part 2 focuses specifically on The Anxiety of Influence.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_WtTx2x5sg
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj7p_brtNA8
The Grand Gesture & Other Thoughts About Graduation: An HTMLGiant/Rumpus Joint Publication
A guest post cross published with the Rumpus by Eric Hanson (author of A Book of Ages) http://abookofages.com http://abookofages.blogspot.com
When he was 21 Langston Hughes quit Columbia University. He’d been there only a year. He signed on as a member of the crew on a steamship bound for the Canary Islands and Africa. When the boat was off Sandy Hook, Hughes took his college books on deck and threw them into the ocean.
The grand gesture impressed no one at Columbia University. But grand gestures never impress an audience as much as they impress the person making the gesture. We make some of our grandest gestures when we are young and nobody is paying attention to us. Everybody else is too busy working and we don’t know yet what work is. We are like the guy on the first tee who takes five practice swings and waggles his club around and looks repeatedly up the fairway with a serious expression, and then tops it thirty yards into the deep rough. We are novices, and novices are all about gesture and large ideas.
Dickface Compound Sentence Values Question
Which would be more valuable to you: 100 publications of pieces you liked a lot and were pretty proud of in various journals of small to medium-small circulation and of various reknown (from blogs up to occasional print journals that likely have a print run of 300 or 400 or less) or 1 publication of a story you are very happy with to very proud of in a journal of not megaalien level (ie: not the NYer or Paris Review) but of very well regarded and circulated in stores like Barnes and Noble (ie: Tin House or Ploughshares)? Why?
“In Search of Lost Time,” or, My Netflix Queue is Longer Than Yours
I’ve always considered Revolutionary Road the sequel to Titanic — where the young couple, escaping death, go on to get married and move to suburbia, only to find their own little patch of freezing water within. Every time Titanic is playing on TBS or AMC, I watch the entire thing (try heckling the frantic people at the end, feels aweome). I’ll watch any movie I don’t care. The greatest modern currency is time, and I’m a rich bastard. Back to Leo and Kate: Repetitive casting creates subliminal narratives, as the actors (as we know them) have as much to do with their characters as the characters themselves. Hollywood abridges the complexity of love into two categories: 1) The romantically ill-fated, and 2) the d-d-dumb. I’m not being a snob here, I actually enjoy these movies:
A Field Guide for the Literary Web Site: Authors’ Pages, A-D
Author websites generally fall into two broad categories: A) The Slick and Professional Page; these are useful when the author just wants a functional thing that will make other people take them seriously and some contact information just in case anyone has a bag of money to send them. Generally, it’s journalists who go this route. Take Richard Morgan’s website for example. (Bonus points for the Anagram.)
Then there are the author websites that are meant to do something else entirely, to be a thing in and of themselves. Maybe they have a good blog or art or something attached. Maybe they have some kind of page-maze to click through. Here are some of my favorites:
Ander Monson’s website (OtherElectricities.com) Monson has some great essays posted. The whole website reads more like an e-book than a website and the design is great.
Aimee Bender (Flammableskirt.com) I like the writing exercises section and all the illustrations are good.
Ben Marcus’s site (Benmarcus.com) is really awesome, but I think it’s broken or something right now. Ben had a section called “Disguises” that was a bunch of pictures of people who looked like him (Big bald headed white guys with glasses, Caucasian Jimmy Chens.) Don’t know what’s wrong with the…
Chelsea Martin (Jerkethics.com) Duh. I felt like I had to include this on the list even though you’ve probably all seen it. Chelsea’s drawings are rad. ( and the drawings are very good::: )
David Shields (Davidshields.com) Shields’s site is really well designed and the front page is a picture of his bald head.
More to come…
A deal from Dzanc: Suzanne Burns’s ‘Misfits & Other Heroes’
Dzanc Books is happy to offer the readers of HTMLGiant.com a special deal on our latest title. We’ve read some really nice things about Dzanc over here, and really feel that Suzanne Burns and her story collection, Misfits and Other Heroes, is one you’ll all enjoy.
Suzanne Burns’ Misfits and Other Heroes is a wickedly insightful, brilliantly constructed collection of 14 stories which are at once fearless and full of hope. In tales of the familiar turned on their heads, Burns introduces us to lovers and travelers, dreamers and daredevils, a man the size of a drinking straw and a magician with a masochistic streak. Acts of murder and mayhem run alongside a middle-aged woman dreaming of a different life. In each tale Burns consistently hits the perfect chord. The stories do not just present the strange, but use the bizarre to accent what is human in all of us. Mixing the best of Palahniuk with the keen clever humor of Aimee Bender, Burns is a writer of unique wit and wisdom. Misfits and Other Heroes is a debut not to be missed.
READ MORE >
Matt Bell’s ‘A certain number of bedrooms, a certain number of baths’
I remember the first time I read this story in Caketrain 4, I read it in the bathtub with some awareness of who Matt Bell was but not fully yet having found. By the end of it I remember going, “Oh, shit, this guy knows what is what and who is who.” I was right to go that, because since then Matt has only continue to slay and slay and slay, and yet this story, in all that time, in comparison to so much wonderful work he’s since published, has not lost an inch of its fine luster.
Herein Matt Bell demonstrates his amazing ability to meld the unknown and the curiously black with the most identifiable of human moments, without the baggage of sentimental cheese that often crops up in making something seem ‘human.’
NEW HTMLGIANT
The new site will go live this weekend, unless my wife has a baby.
If you have any observations or criticism in regards to the new site (and give me a little while to get it all working), please flame me in this post.
Love you guys, and I hope my small changes improve your overall HTMLGIANT experience.