Mean
Angry People Blurbed Us
Yesterday, we posted about our birthday and had a Backwards Birthday Celebration. Thank you for your nice comments and emails. We really liked that. If you haven’t yet, send us an email to be eligible for the gift drawing.
Today, however, we celebrate the hate. I’ve tried to gather a few mean blurbs, some from our own comments section and others from around the internet. Some are sincerely angry, others are meant to be silly (I think?). I’ve pulled them out of context and pasted them below for fun, but no linkies. You could find the sources if you wanted, I guess.
Feel free to add to the blurb collection: complain, whinge, talk shit, poke fun, lambast, and otherwise roast us if you’d like.
That’s all from me today. Have fun and thanks for reading. I’ve got a bandwagon to board.
***
“Reading HTMLGIANT is a pretty good way to get burned out on contemporary literature. Honestly, they promote and overpraise some senselessly crappy stuff.”
“HTMLGIANT is a vanity site filled with a bunch of soft, douchey people clearly proud of the way life never afflicted them.”
“I thought HTMLGIANT was supposed to be some kind of subversive, eff-the-mainstream forum for people who don’t always fit in with the regular crowd. Come to find out it’s mainly a hype-machine site to just shill books and endlessly promote. Buying books seems to be more important than actually writing them.”
“The majority of posts at HTMLGIANT are self-promotions and promotions of friends, publishers, classmates etc. etc. Hey–didn’t Robinson self-publish his own book with his own face on the cover?”
“There is no prestige in being published in HTMLGIANT.”
“If you visit HTMLGIANT, you will notice threads sometimes of a hundred comments or more, filled with clever bundles of pretentious I-just-had-a-latte-with-my-professor bullshit, grab-ass chuckle fests, self-marketing gone mad, Manson-family sycophancy, debutantes, fingernail insults, bullying, pulseless academic snobbery, bales of anonymous snark, and kewl hipster talk.”
“I now am uneasy going over to HTMLGIANT, or at least commenting there, because I feel sometimes things get sweaty boy locker room in there.”
“HTMLGIANT: where kindergarten activities are appreciated.”
“Those bitches at HTMLGIANT.”
“HTMLGIANT talks a load of bollox…I struggle with what I perceive as its American Academia ‘in club’ vibe.”
“HTMLGIANT should drop the word future from their site. What they represent isn’t the future, but business-as-usual, promoting the same moldy postmodern aesthetic posing of the lit-hipster crowd. A more apt word than future for them might be static. Or, stale. Or the phrase, been done, with the possible addition, too often. Or, Literature’s Dead End.”
“The crimes of the HTMLGIANT gang are not to be considered lightly.”
“HTMLGIANTS’s readers are so mind-stunted they have no curiosity. HTMLGIANT’s young writers seem to have little imagination.”
“Fewer and fewer people on HTMLGIANT hear the words coming off their own fingers. Maybe it’s on its last legs again.”
“Every item at HTMLGIANT is self-promotion, some craven, some not.”
“The HTMLGIANT generation is the most brainwashed in human history, in that they’re bombarded, for up to 12 hours a day or more, by conglomerate produced media, through the various outlets of TV, internet, Ipods, etc etc. No generation has been so consumer oriented, which of course is the intent. Yet you’re all rebels and individuals, even though you think alike.”
“We all know the HTMLGIANT losers would be the first aboard the right fascist bandwagon.”
“Group think and mob behavior are common at HTMLGIANT, and it isn’t unusual for one who commits heresy against the literary dogma to be exiled from the community.”
“HTMLGIANT represents the smug and superior attitude of the current literary crowd, which is essentially academic and upper middle class.”
“Leave it to the HTMLGIANT crowd to eliminate love, death, family and loss as viable themes to write about. What remains? Baby-eating? Word juggling? Oxycotin daydreams?”
“If only HTMLGIANT could get its penis in its own mouth, then it could complete the circuit.”
“When one looks at or encounters the new generation of writers, one finds them congenitally incapable of questioning anything. Read their main sites like HTMLGIANT and you’ll see there a combination of relentless trivia, sillyness, and babytalk. They’re like pet turtles or hamsters kept in a shoe box, never having been trained to look outside the box.”
“I want to blow up HTMLGIANT.”
Buying books is definitely more important than writing them
[…] to try to underplay the fact that I was coming along on the tour in order to avoid accusations that “The majority of posts at HTMLGIANT are self-promotions and promotions of friends, publishers,… but then I realized I was way too excited to […]
Google around. They’re everywhere!
“Post-modern pocket pool; post-fart shower smell; whatevs- reading HTMLGIANT is like looking at white guy who’s sagging so hard you see his skinny little dick’s neck, then realizing you’re looking in the mirror.”
your momma’s so fat, she HTMLGIANT.
can it be mean week?
HTMLGIANT, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. HT-ML-GIANT: the leap of four consonants steps down in order to jump into an antisemantic explosion of a verbal megalomanie. H. T. M. L. GIANT!
She was HTML, plain HTML, in the morning, this website, as I read you standing in one sock. She was H in capitals. She was GIANT in my “bookmarks”. She was http://htmlgiant.com in my history. But in my soul she was always HTMLGiant.
the phoenix of mather/madore/wenclas whoops high & hard into the difficult bukowski night
coming some time this month.
I, more or less, agree with the comments listed in Ryan’s post. Interesting how no one here will actually bother engaging with their criticisms.
Here’s a comment from an article about Tao Lin on the Village Voice’s site:
The reviewer never said anything about him and a generation. The only people who call Lin that are his friends and members of his bandwagon. The guy who posted this on the blog is one of those people. The girl who wrote the TONY review was once Lin’s intern and volunteered at his publishing house. The people who post at HTML Giant include his old roomie and and his bros. The hype around Lin has been generated by Tao Lin and his friends. The NYTBR review seemed to take the book at its own merits. I can’t imagine anybody defending the prose that was quoted, at length in the review. And the other structural problems, too. The person who posted about tupperware is right, I think. I’m actually amazed that I got sucked in by this guy enough to be irritated and be following this.
yeah, i guess you missed mike’s post, since it was ‘too long’
http://htmlgiant.com/contests/to-get-free-books-you-have-to-read-the-whole-thing-sorry/#comment-81506787
feel like “interesting that” and “interesting how” never precedes anything but passive-aggressive/sarcastic snark
ha! i didn’t even realize my dick had a neck. any other guys around here have a dickneck? i’m gonna go take another look.
HTMLGIANT: I only read the headlines.
tl;dr dude. live it. learn it. love it.
b it.
I would read that book RIGHT AWAY.
I self-published the book with a cubicle on the cover. Narrow House published the one with my face on the cover. They are my friends though so it isn’t any good.
lol…hilarious…look at all the haters, hating
i seriously laughed at a couple, out loud even, ergo the lol, especially this one:
“If only HTMLGIANT could get its penis in its own mouth, then it could complete the circuit.”
my sentiments exactly. i read that and thought, ‘sweet x 3’
I’m not entirely sure why I show up here, but it isn’t the writing which is generally lackluster or inane. It is more the attitude, or lack of it, a sort of inward nihilistic narcissism which can be very soothing and it brings Nero to mind when he sings as Rome burns all around him.
Commentators, old and new, struggle with how talented Nero was as a singer and lyre player. He is quoted by multiple sources to have asked the judges not to take his position in mind when judging or when awarding the evening’s prizes. Extent reviews are limited and their honesty are difficult to assess as Nero the man was both reviled and loved at the same time and at different times by the same and different people over his short life. It is noted however that he was at times(but not always) a crowd favorite whether that be for his performance, madness, or occasional generosity, but, and I have never seen a disagreement to this, he did have the stamina, endurance, and dedication required to be an excellent, even great, rhapsode.
HTMLGIANT, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. HT-ML-GIANT: the leap of four consonants steps down in order to jump into an antisemantic explosion of a verbal megalomanie. H. T. M. L. GIANT!
She was HTML, plain HTML, in the morning, this website, as I read you standing in one sock. She was H in capitals. She was GIANT in my “bookmarks”. She was http://htmlgiant.com in my history. But in my soul she was always HTMLGiant.
Are there any sites sort of like HTML GIANT? Like competitors? Maybe there could be a rumble.
wow … these guys really hate you!
http://www.pakin.org/complaint?firstname=HTMLGIANT&pgraphs=3&gender=c
i remember the original htmlgiant, it was so much better than this htmlgiant, fuck this htmlgiant, lets all throw shit and cry.
i remember the original htmlgiant, it was so much better than this htmlgiant, fuck this htmlgiant, lets all throw shit and cry.
Big Other (http://bigother.com/)? I would enjoy watching a Big Other/HTMLGIANT showdown. I’m trying right now to imagine what that would involve. I’m thinking a walk-off a la Zoolander.
This is the best part:
HTMLGIANTS’s
ha, ooops. i believe that is my typo and not original. sorry!
Damn you Call!
Fine, the penis one then.
get over it dude.
Feel like the phrase ‘feel like’ conforms to all criticisms above.
Those who posted these comments are brushed off as angry haters and this is convenient and typical of academics who have no real story to tell and offer only a circle jerk of faux scientific bloviating. Reading this site is a migraine and a root canal.
“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” – Bukowski
I hate re-runs.
At least Bukowski’s parents had the good sense to kick him out of their basement, you little twit.
You laughed at that because it is a genuinely funny way of denigrating a crowd so full of itself (like this one), not because it is somehow pathetic. I just want to clarify that for everyone else reading you. You laughed because it was funny. Not because it was pathetic. And that means that somewhere inside you feel the truth of it. As do I.
trickwithaknife.com is a half-hearted effort at representing a truly alternative news blog. We let most anyone become a contributor (my application to Big Other, submitted through then-associate Jac Jemc, was denied on grounds of White Boy Viewpoint, although I have the least-coddled upbringing of any shit-slinger around…) and as such were for awhile hijacked by some Wessington guy and his crazy game or something. I dunno. Mostly this project is operated by Nate Tyree and I’m just hosting it and what not. But it’s still got a lot more potential than the scripted folly of HTLMGIANT. Perhaps I’ve let things slip on the technical innovation side, but I don’t care enough right now. It seems to be mostly unvisited and ignored. And oh yeah, it was the site of that Letter to HTMLGIANT I wrote awhile back, and the outrageous and most interesting thing ever happened: the retaliation was aimed at me personally, at my own personal blog. Yadda. Anyway we consider ourselves a competitor.