Boobs Friday for Internet Literature
Friday. I think Friday is okay? Friday actually kind of sucks for internet land because it’s the beginning of the weekend and during the weekend people aren’t at work all day jacking off on the internet not doing their real job and they are actually out like talking to people and being with real life friends. Fuck all that. The weekend is like my reverse weekend. I have a weekend through the week and the weekend feels like the week.
Internet literature definitely suffers on the weekends, there are less emails, less updates, stop being real people, mmk?
To combat the weekend slump of weekend, HTML Giant is pleased to present some tits.
As a gift to internet literature from our very own Kendra Grant Malone, here are Kendra Grant Malone’s boobs.
This hopefully will be the beginning of what I’d like to think of as Boobs Friday for Internet Literature.
Submit your boobs for future Fridays, get an acceptance to like elimae or Wigleaf via karmic booyah.
Next week is MEAN WEEK
In the face of all our current praising and cataloging of the good, HTML GIANT is proud to announce now that next week in our hands will be known as Mean Week. I mean, yeah, it’s fun to praise a lot of things, but sometimes you should be mean.
So all next week, we’re being mean. We might be mean even if we like you. We might be mean in a rotting hatred of your mother. We might expect you to be mean back.
It can’t be all lambs and roses. Mean Week is real.
Ryan Call, you’re going to have to find a way to be mean.
Sam Pink, let’s fight.
Today is J.G. Ballard Day
over at Dennis Cooper’s blog, The Weaklings.
For folks who don’t know, Cooper runs one of the greatest blogs on the net. He organizes his posts into massive, theme-driven “Days” and posts a new one daily, Mon-Sat. Topics range from literature to cinema to art to professional wrestling to gay porn to music to whatever else you can think of. He’s also a big advocate of collaboration and participation, and is always eager to have members of his blog community to guest-curate a Day of their own devising.
A semi-random sampling from the blog archives:
October 8th was David Ohle Day, guest-curated by Jeff
October 2nd was John Ashbery Day
On September 22nd we checked out some male escorts
On September 19th I curated a day of pictures of my friend Maggie
On June 7th we reviewed some of the history of Queer Punk
On May 6th we looked at 10 squats
March 13, 2007: A Basic Layout of David Lynch’s ‘The Air is on Fire’
Nobel Prize in Literature
I know we are supposed to be talking about ‘indie-lit,’ and that the Nobel Prize in Literature is on the other end of the spectrum, but there is some relation: a new disfranchisement.
The prize was announced today to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (what a name! Where’s your hyphen and accent mark Philip Roth?), who most of us haven’t heard of. From this article in The Independent:
The Nobel literary committee today infuriated the bookies, delighted the bookish and thumbed its nose, again, at the American book industry. The 2008 Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a half-British French novelist and philosopher, who lives in America and champions the “lost” wisdom of non-Western cultures.
The last American to win the prize was Toni Morrison fifteen years ago in 1993 (it’s odd, and pleasant that our national representative is a black woman). I don’t want to talk about politics. I just have some questions: is the American psyche becoming more obsolete under a global consciousness? Are we being symbolically punished for our foreign policy transgressions by a globally progressive institution? Or do we just suck? (By the collective ‘we’ I mean Americans, even though I’m Canadian.)
Pynchon and Salinger are burying their food in the woods. DFW is dead. John Updike can’t stop writing about his dick. If American lit has something to say, what is it?
Muumuu House
Tao Lin had been talking about making a press for a long time, he had a post once discussing the name, what should he name it, one of the names then was Muumuu House, and now MUUMUU HOUSE has sneakily snuck a website onto the web.
The site, sneakily snuck onto the web, is pretty chock full of stuff already, featuring new fiction, poetry, and Tao’s favorite-artform Gchats, featuring many of the likely suspects from a Tao-run press.
Most awesomely, the press has also announced their first two titles to be published in perfect bound print next year, Ellen Kennedy’s SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS in March 09 and Brandon Scott Gorrell’s DURING MY NERVOUS BREAKDOWN I WANT TO HAVE A BIOGRAPHER PRESENT in June 09.
This was all discovered in a post on Brandon’s blog, in which Brandon announced his retraction of the book from its previous acceptance at Greying Ghost press, which may or may not result in a promotional snafu for the book, if people decide to fuss about the switch or not.
Here is the very Tao-like ‘submission policy’:
To submit to Muumuu House find a person who has been published by or is associated with Muumuu House and read their blog. If you like their blog make a comment in their comments section in a sincere and natural manner, expressing your feelings. Eventually someone associated with Muumuu House will probably read your comment and click your name and find your blog. If that person likes your blog, to a certain degree, then they will probably tell other people in emails or in real life and then at some point you will probably be emailed, not necessarily about Muumuu House, but maybe about Muumuu House. I think this is more natural. It supports a ‘there is no good or bad in art’ mentality, is probably much faster and more efficient than emailing submissions and having people read them and respond to them, and I think it decreases loneliness, boredom, and despair more effectively than with ‘normal’ submissions, based on my experiences with the internet, I believe.
The MUUMUU HOUSE site is nice and calming to look at, the blue/black/white no photos feel is pleasant, it seems a very good thing.
Publishing Genius Wants Your Pictures
Adam Robinson is redesigning the Publishing Genius website and wants pictures, especially MSPaint pictures, from everyone. He wants to take these pictures and rotate them through the website at the top of the page. Once he has enough pictures lined up, he’ll launch the new site.
You can be famous for a week.
Go here for information.
Basinski Speaks of the Future
Michael Basinski is the old wise man of small press lit. At the University at Buffalo he runs the archives for chapbooks and anything indie lit related. The guy has been around and knows his stuff. As a student at UB I remember mentioning small presses to him in his office and his reply was something like, “sounds good…i’ll buy everything for the collection.” Basinski is the guy always fighting for indie lit, a guy you want on your side.
He’s also a great person to talk to about the current state of indie lit. With the rise of online, I thought it would be interesting to ask him what his thoughts were on the movement and where he thinks things are going.
The thing with online publishing is that no one is actively attempting to collect it. Therefore, it is up to poets and editors to be their own stewards and to get their stuff into repositories where it can be kept. Libraries and archives can’t do it. Take NY State – a three to ten percent cut across the board. Poetry, I assure you, will not be the saved sacred Apis Bull. So in this climate the art suffers. This is nothing new, of course. But again, it is the individual in this electronic world that has to archive and the editors of such also. I talk to archive folks about this but I get nowhere. That said, because so much is going electronic, there is an entire movement away from online publishing and a return to the individual hands on type of publishing. Type setting is being revived. Individually hand colored and hand made books are being made with frequency. The way we understand the small press has changed but it is still very much there. The question might be, who will know or be able to look at this wave of publishing in ten years? I mean… where will the documents and proof of existence be?
Basinski makes you think.
Hobart Oct ’08
Those always massive kids over at Hobart have once again proven their ability to stay on target despite supposed ‘slacker’ status. In addition to the brand new Games issue, which just came out and made me renew my subscription (which also has a series of deleted scenes style stuff on the web for your perusal, if you haven’t already, here), they continue in their monthly reams of goodness today for October with a new update featuring work by Tai Dong Huai, Ed Meek, Jill Widner, and Glen Pourciau, as well as an interview by the always ferocious Matt Simmons with Leni Zumas, which by the second paragraph had me wanting to buy her book.
Their other web feature, the always fun likes/dislikes section, well, I gotta disagree with this month’s dislikes. What’s wrong with BURN AFTER READING? And who doesn’t like watching a couple break up in public?
I am excited, though, about the new Hobart minibook forthcoming, Mary Miller’s BIG WORLD. Not mini at all.
Improbable Object
From Matthew Kirkpatrick, that guy who works for FC2 and, last I checked, coedits Barrelhouse, comes a new online journal: Improbable Object. In the first issue there is work by Blake Butler, Justin Taylor, Davis Schneiderman, and art by Bill Dunlap: Blake Butler wants to sell his face on Ebay, Justin Taylor writes “the truth about cemeteries is they only / exist because we all keep clapping,” and Davis Schneiderman takes us to the Island of Lost Souls and the Island of Blessed Sheep.
Good things happen.
I enjoyed the contents of this issue. I read each piece several times after drinking two glasses of scotch and three glasses of wine. It was a good experience overall. Matthew Kirkpatrick is doing something very interesting, and I want to watch him keep doing it. As I read Improbable Object, I thought of other online journals. DIAGRAM came to mind. So did Lamination Colony.
Improbable Object is a very clean-looking online journal, and one, I suspect, that needs more submissions. So if you’ve got awesome stuff lying around, send away; the submission guidelines suggest that you “submit something short” if you’d like your work to be considered.
I recommend this journal to everyone, sober and drunk.
open letter to the troll on tao lin’s blog
Dear when.parents.flee.the.country,
I don’t usually get involved in blog-related confrontations, for what I assume are obvious (though, perhaps, not to you) reasons. You are hardly the first troll/weirdo that Tao Lin has had to deal with, and I am sure you won’t be the last. That fact of Tao’s life has little–if anything–to do with me, other than that it makes me sad for him sometimes (also exhausted and pissed off on his behalf) but this isn’t why I’m writing today.
Agriculture Reader #2 was edited by my good friend–the magazine’s founder–Jeremy Schmall. I have some poems in it, and soon after that issue came out I moved to my present position as its co-editor. (Our next issue will come out in February 2009.) You probably noticed that the AGR is a handmade journal with a prominent design element. Its entire print run is somewhere in the low to mid three figures. We hope, therefore, that every copy we sell or give away will be cherished.
Your utter lack of civility, displayed repeatedly over the past few days in the comments section of Tao’s blog–including but not limited to stalkerish language and intimations of violence, compounded by the cowardice of your refusing to reveal your identity–makes me doubt your capacity to appreciate art in general, and the AGR in particular.
It grieves me that Agriculture Reader #2 may not be bringing you the joy you had hoped it would, but my greater concern is that you are not the sort of reader we are looking for. The AGR is a finite resource, every copy of it is precious, and I hate to think of even one copy being wasted. I hope you will consider returning your copy of the magazine, so I can give it to someone who can appreciate it. (Note that I do not say “will.” We do not require our readers to provide a guarantee of validation or an echo chamber of praise; but we confess to a bias for those with the capacity for comprehension and, if need be, civil discussion.)
Please contact me in the comments section of this post regarding my offer. We can exchange mailing addresses, or perhaps agree to meet at some neutral location. In exchange for your remittance of the magazine (undamaged, and with the included audio CD), I will bring you several paperbacks from the thrift store near my house. In a best case scenario these will be Tom Clancy’s Op-Center(TM) novels written by someone other than Tom Clancy, or perhaps some entries in the R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series.
Yours,
Justin