Mean Mondays & Sleepingfish Online
So, Mean Week is one day in and I had so much fun already we’ve decided to make Mean days an institution here. In an attempt to keep the spurs on, Monday from here on out at HTML Giant will be known as Mean Monday. So you got Mean Monday and Boobs Friday (which, in other news, Kendra Grant Malone has now been upgraded to official Tits Editor, a round of applause please…), and as further things progress further things will progress.
That doesn’t mean Mean Week is being cut short: hardly so, we’re just getting started.
That means Lieutenants Malone and Maday and Call and Jones (upon his return) need to come out from behind their mother’s skirt and talk some mess, all damn it. You can talk about me mean if you want, but spit some fire for shit’s sake!
In the meantime as well, good things should be continued to be pointed out in the midst of the mean, so while I’m at it let me point you toward the firsts nodes in the most recent incarnation of the newly digital SLEEPINGFISH from Calamari Press, which is now operating in web content format with its head relocated to finer shores (and is currently seeking submissions, which you can find info on at their site).
The first update of the e-Fish contains two excellent pieces of fiction, SNOW by J.A. Tyler, which is an excerpt from a novel that will be coming out in the near future, as well as SUGAR by James Reich from the band Venus Bogardus, each of which set the bar for the high promise that the new electronic zzzFish will be sure to entail.
Shit, I feel weird being totally nice during Mean Week.
Derek, I hope you get bit on the ass by a tumored goat.
Mean Week Looks Back
Coincidentally, the weekend before Mean Week, a book of essays from a poetry journal called The Reaper arrived for me at the public library.
The Reaper had it’s own little Mean Decade from 1980 to 1989, and it spent that time skewering poetry as it was and poets of note, and suggesting to readers that narrative poetry was the way out of the ever-widening gap between poetry and its readers. It helped give birth to the New Narrative movement. And New Formalism.
Fascinating stuff, really. Fussy? Maybe. But impassioned. Happily argumentative. Willing to call people out, too. Kind of like Justin’s critique of Valzhyna Mort there below this post, too, in that they dissect poems line by line and call bullshit when bullshit needs to be called—especially when the poets in their sights sail through a line without regard for accuracy.
I’ll post a few choice quotes this week. First, though, The Reaper’s Non-negotiable Demands in all their glory:
1. Take prosody off the hit list.
2. Stop calling formless writing poetry.
3. Accuracy, at all costs.
4. No emotion without narrative.
5. No more meditating on the meditation.
6. No more poems about poetry.
7. No more irresponsibility of expression.
8. Raze the House of Fashion.
9. Dismantle the Office of Translation.
10. Spring open the Jail of the Self.
Each demand is explained in the essay. I would encourage you to pick up the book to read them.
Keep in mind, also, that posting about The Reaper is not a full endorsement of their critique. On the other hand, my poet friends: fuck you, read this.
All best,
Matthew
all internet writers are fucking pussies and i could kick all of their asses
look around you. is there a cat? are you experiencing existential problems? are you currently refreshing your network browser to see if that other disembodied internet person has furthered the argument about what surrealism is? do you read the believer? did you just laugh at a story on mc sweeneys about what it would be like if franz kafka had a little league team? do your poems suck really hard? and are you a pretentious asswipe? well then my friend, you are an internet writer. wait now, hold on, put those really skinny arms down, i’m not looking to fight it out with someone who experiences depression on so grand a scale as yourself. no doubt you’ve had it bad. but seriously, fuck you. you are passive, halfway philosophical, you write the same fucking autobiographical stories using the same contrived depression and angst and i could beat your fucking ass in a heartbeat. that’s right, i’m not even going to continue intellectually. i could kick all of your asses. so close your macbook pro (and stop ripping on whoever, most likely dave eggers or john updike because i am sure they are weeping onto their keyboards and listening to bright eyes, cursing that “writerdude78” just called them a “sellout”) and email me your address so i can come to your house and beat your skull in with my hand. i know this will alienate me further since like, or something, like physical violence is existentially fucked and like, you just want to write poems about being a pussy, and you can’t get hard anymore and you’re too busy defending someone else on their blog from a random commenter, like it even matters, but seriously, there is not one writer on the internet, with the exception of barry graham, who looks like he might be able to kick my ass, who i can’t fuck up. i hate everyone. the very idea of mean week is because you’re all pussies. fuck you. suck my cock. stop being a neurotic pussy and write something that makes you want to throw up when you read it.
The Inclusion of ME
In the comments of an earlier post today, Justin Taylor referred to the concept of people commenting over and getting upset about things in relation to ‘the inclusion of ME,’ which he is dead-on right, is often a big reason anyone whines about anything in writing. Writers, by nature, are often a very self-obsessed and self-aware bunch (‘Oh cool, nice on your story coming out, I have one coming out too…’) and probably somewhat in many cases by sheer means of survival, in that it’s such a slim game already. But I also think that this phenomenon, while perhaps at least in some way bent in their own mind to keep them afloat, is not only often troublesome and awkward, but part of the reason why in the end many writers give up.
There’s no argument that to get work published over time, no matter who you are, really, (unless you’re like Salman Rushdie’s son) takes a hell of a struggle. There are a limited number of venues out there and definitely limitless folks with things they want to say, so the idea that someone should get upset or angry about receiving, say, a form rejection letter ignoring their work (no matter what the reasons they feel this happened are) is ludicrous. Sure, it stings some, but in the end, we’re really all just people in the same boat and things happen for a reason. It’s an achingly cringe-worthy thing when people take it as a personal affront, or believe there is a conspiracy against them wherein the editors only publish their friends (which, yeah, definitely happens, and probably a lot, but there are reasons for this, which I will head into after the jump…)
Against HTML, Giants, and HTMLGiant
The following essay was written last Friday in preperation for Mean Week. Had its author known Blake Butthair would have employed similar rhetoric, he would have posted this earlier.
1. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, which is a euphemism for ‘gay ass effects for little bitches.’ Most common examples of ‘text markup’ are bold and italics. Whoever wrote it had some major issues, this thing for reciprocity. Every ‘tag’ needs to be closed by an ‘end-tag,’ for example:
<head>
<title>I’m a little geek bitch</title>
</head>
HTML is also homosexual, for example:
<head>
<title>I swallow cum</title>
</head>
2. GIANTS are severely retarded people with gross birth defects. Popular culture tries to render giants who are either likable (Sun Ming Ming) or martyrs (Gulliver, relative scale). Anthropologically speaking, Giants represent the first stages of human devolution. Darwinian theory is as follows (paraphrased for you goddamn plebeians): the more you can survive this hell on earth, the more you can fuck as many people you can, the more kids you’ll have who share your genetic disposition, and the more they can continue suffering and fucking. My point is: don’t fuck giants.
3. HTMLGIANT is the brain (however dense) child of Blake Butler and Gene Morgan, who are both addicted to the internet and their daily attempts to excavate the hard white bumps found on the underside of their penile shafts (which, incidentally, implicates quite well that their conditions were exchanged mutually). All of the contributing writers suffer from some sort of Excavation Fetish:
–Kendra Malone’s nightly refrigerator ‘dairy’ raids (I can’t believe it’s butter).
–Shane Jones’ public library poetry section “ejaculatory duct exodus” (to quote the librarian).
–Matthew Simmons’ nearly fatal nose picks, in which he searches for a clue.
–Justin Taylor’s quarterly Zoetrope rejection letter tear-duct hemorrhaging.
–Josh Maday’s silent-yet-strong (cough, gay) soul, spurted onto his mirror like some over ripe human-sized zit.
–Ryan Call’s eyelash plucking bonanza, in his attempt to render his face even more difficult to look at.
–Mike Young’s ‘dry yet emotional acoustic song’ plopping out of his guitar hole and mouth.
–Last and least, Sam Pink’s annual anal-outcome, in which all the shit that’s been crammed up there by his teenage blogger friends finally leaks out, surely the year’s most translucent and anti-climactic creampie.
And as for you, dear reader. Holy. Fuck.
Everyone That Writes for This Site is Shit
Hi. It’s Mean Week. We are going to be mean to people. We are going to say things. We’re just being honest, and really we’re all a bunch of pieces of shit. We couldn’t write our way out of a paper bag (see, I can’t even make it a few sentences without cliche).. Here’s more reasons why we suck behind the jump:
MEAN WEEK: ‘The Editor/Multi-Book/Duh Named Effect’
I like new journals. I like journals with their own aesthetic and who invent themselves primarily because they want to put words in the world: words that likely would not have found a way to get read if that journal hadn’t existed. There can never be too many high quality journals. A node is a node.
Though not all new journals, or even existing things, seem bent for these reasons. It seems semi-frequent, and perhaps most pointed to the world of poetry publishing, where you see a tendency to publish well-known names and no one else. Scanning the contributor notes of certain journals you can often see what I now will call the EDITOR / MULTI-BOOK / DUH NAMED EFFECT.
When this effect is applied, it means the journal has been infected wherein all the words published in their particular nook are 90-100% consisting of writers who are themselves the editor of a journal, who already have one or several full length books out at indie presses, or are a combo of both, being a name that literally most everybody in the publishing world is already very familiar with. They don’t both with searching for new voices, with including some people as yet unexposed who can then be read as others can to the journal seeking the ‘bigger names,’ no, everyone in the journal is someone who likely would have little to no trouble getting their work in almost any existing poetry journal already out there.
So then the question is: Why do you exist?
Chapbook Publishers E-Panel at EWN
Dan Wickett is getting it done over at the Emerging Writers Network.
He’s just posted a great Chapbook E-Panel, participants in which include Kevin Sampsell of Future Tense Press, Ander Monson of New Michigan Press, C.M. Mayo of Tameme, Kristy Bowen of Dancing Girl Press, Carl Annarummo of Greying Ghost Press, and Justin Marks of Kitchen Press.
It’s a lengthy post, but worth the read. Dan asks the particpants questions about the history of each small press, production details (business and design), submissions policies, the chapbook as a form, etc.
New Poetry Journal – Rooms Outlast Us
Rooms Outlast Us is a new poetry journal run by a couple of people I worked with back when I edited fiction at Phoebe. Earlier today, I emailed/gchatted with one of the editors, Danika Stegeman, about it, and she said the journal is modeled after some of the smaller poetry zines that were out in the 50s, 60s, 70s, like the Evergreen Review, which was originally published by Grove Press (before the journal moved online in the 90s, I guess).
Here’s what she said officially:
Rooms Outlast Us will be a small print journal, approximately 40 pages per issue, and will include poetry and poetic criticism. Our emphasis is on showcasing writing from more established poets alongside emerging poets. We are hoping to accommodate writers working on longer works and sequences as well (so the journal will generally favor fewer poets with more pages per poet, rather than many poets with fewer pages). The first issue will be coming out in early January and the journal will be published bi-annually after that.
Rumor has it that they’ve got Matthew Savoca and Laura Sims to contribute to the first issue.
Submissions should be sent to roomsoutlastus[at]gmail.com.
Editors: Danika Stegeman, Ethan Edwards, and Justin Kielsgard.
Boys and Men
Love in the time of wordpress
Entropy may not be the perfect word, but it does come to mind. Just go to any Youtube video and read the comments—the ‘natural corrosion’ from discourse to insult to empty violence. Despite names or aliases, the overall anonymity of the internet enables such proclamations as ‘go fuck your mother’ or ‘n*gger, etc.’ as surely one would remain reticent in person, for fear of a face bashing.
It may have been Mean Week that initiated the male adolescent rhetoric in the comment sections, though I fear I’ve encountered this before. There must be something about being a literary man with a college (or higher) education and a WiFi connection that makes him want to say “go fist-fuck yourself” or “i am kevin sampsell’s penis.” Maybe it’s one too many rejection letters, or a plot arc that simply snapped. As for Kevin Sampsell’s penis, I gather it’s in Garamond 10pt. small caps.
Perhaps it is male bonding, or ironic derision as a form of peer respect, that causes such obsession with: a) penises and/or cocks b) said penises and/or cocks with the same girth as Barry Graham’s head, c) fists as a phallic enterprise, d) the lack of having a penis, e) chopping off heads, f) blood resulting from the chopping off of heads, or penises, or severe fisting, g) bags containing feces, h) the introduction of staples as a means to secure dismembered body parts, and i) ad infin.
Only Gene Morgan, however angry and mean, is able to refrain from such homoerotic inclinations; rather, his mention of blood (“Be sure to bring a towel to sop your blood up off of my front lawn.”) and violence is of a more current-day protestant and territorial nature. He is not interested cock. He just wants to impose severe head trauma on you (outside on his lawn, away from his child).
We can all learn from Gene. In the future, keep your violence inside of your pants.
Oh, and my address is: 69 Gofuckyourself Dr.
October 14th, 2008 / 1:33 pm