Amy McDaniel—
***ESSENTIAL INDIE-LIT SECRET SANTA UPDATE: For those of you who ALREADY signed up, you MUST enter your MAILING ADDRESS. You weren’t asked for it automatically yet. Your recipient will, obviously, need it. So, GO TO THE “YOU” TAB on Elfster, then click on UPDATE YOUR PROFILE, and then ENTER YOUR MAILING ADDRESS and hit CONTINUE and then CONTINUE again and you’re golden. If you haven’t signed up yet, sign up and do this after you sign up.***
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HTMLGIANT Presents: Coal in Your Stocking
The other night at Poison Girl, I met a poet named Christian, an aquaintance of Gene Morgan. Christian was out for the reading and also celebrating his having been accepted to the program at The New School. During a hiccup in the conversation, Christian asked about HTMLGIANT, saying he hadn’t read it since Secret Santa. I asked him why, and he said something like, “Well, I feel ashamed of myself. I never sent off a Secret Santa gift. I couldn’t figure out what to get her.”
So I told him he should still do it, he had time, why not send off a gift? It’s okay if you can’t figure out what to get her, I said. The idea is to send a surprise, something you admire and want to share with someone else.
Yes, he said. I understand, he said. Yes, I should, he said. He said he was sorry, and he wrote this on the back of a receipt to show his sorrow. He said that I should post it for everyone to see:
Despite this apology (is it sincere? can it be sincere with three exclamation points? the underlining? the ‘ya’ll’? the cursing? I don’t know), I sadly doubt he will ever send off the gift, though I hope he will prove me wrong.
Regardless, I’d like to present him with HTMLGIANT’s first ever Coal In Your Stocking award.
Christian, for your lack of effort, I say congratulations! Good luck next year in school, and while I hope the best for you, I also have to say this: may you receive lots of coal in your stocking during the holidays.
Now I throw you to the wolves.
I know all of this happened a while ago, but I can’t help but post this last bit: those of you who still haven’t received gifts, I’m sorry. Those who took part, but didn’t send off a gift, please please do that.
Introducing the Underground Library Writers Project
Shortly after I posted about the Underground Library on HTMLGIANT, Ravi Mangla emailed PH Madore and me with an idea to set up a writer ‘buddy system’ of some sort. His idea, as I understood it, was to encourage more personal interaction between those who might not have originally sought each other out. I liked this idea, and will be helping Ravi Mangla put this together.
Ravi Mangla has written up specifics after the break.
Nice Hat
profile picture without evidence of flash that you took this yourself
and I saw the best minds of my generation
living in lofts
thinking they were the best minds of their generation
while the world hacked up tax breaks and jet fighters
-Death Lasts
Shake
by Joshua Beckman
Joshua Beckman has a wikipedia page.
Joshua Beckman has a page on poets.org.
Joshua Beckman is a great mind and a great poet. As early as 2004 you could google his name and ‘rock star poet’ would surface as a result.
Over the past ten years he’s published six books of poetry. His seventh, “Take It” is due sometime this year from Wave Books.
The first thing I read by him was his tiny, tiny book (amazon cites it at 6.1 x 4 x 0.5 inches and 3.8 ounces, I would say it is the size of about half a sandwich) “Your Time Has Come” put out by Verse Press.
This holiday season I Secret Santa’d myself and picked up “Shake” and “Something I Expected to Be Different.”
Start your New Year right and pledge to read a poem a day until you’ve mowed down his entire collection of works.
HTMLGRINCH: the internet literature __________ of the future
There are so many cool gifts coming through. I sort of wish now that I had somehow rigged this to make everyone send the gifts to me so I could pretend to send the gifts to everyone else.
Oh, Mean Monday…
Anyhow, last minute reminder: you have a few more days to send out your Secret Santa gifts (I am also late on this; I am not setting a good example here).
Another participant, Bernadette Geyer, posted a thank you at her blog.
Give and Take By Stona Fitch
I received Give and Take by Stona Fitch for free from Concord Free Press, which is doing this wacky experiment on “publishing and community” as they explain on their website. Now, part of the deal is I then HAVE to give the book to someone else, which is fine, as my htmlgiant secret santa will be getting it. Also you HAVE to give money away, which again is fine; this time of year I give money away anyway. But in a more general sense, my problem with all this is- I hate people telling me what to do. Nearly always, when someone tells me what to do, my eyes blur a bit and some weird rage lets lose in my brain. Once, I went to a Bikram Yoga class and it was in this heated room and the teacher started the class by saying, “even if you get really hot and feel faint and like you may barf or die and so you want to leave the room, YOU MAY NOT. You cannot leave the room! You can lay down for awhile, but you can’t leave.” Now, people, what happened was, eventually, I felt hot and shitty and I left the room! If someone says do this or you can’t do that- six and half times out of ten, I’m going to do the opposite. Every time my husband says “let’s just split desert” after we’ve had some insanely enormous dinner and we can barely move, I then order three. (One good thing is, he no longer says this for the most part. So now I mostly order two.)
But I digress. Give and Take is a book that chews on issues, a novel of ideas, and something I normally wouldn’t read. I like to read books I normally wouldn’t read, as long as I don’t have to do that twice a week, like when I worked in publishing. And Finch has a good mind, a clean prose style and moves the book along very nicely.
Fence Holiday Subscription Deals
In my email from Fence:
Dear Friend,
This year, give the gift of Fence.
Subscribe a friend (http://www.fence.fenceportal.org/subscribe.html) and we’ll send a gift-wrapped issue with a card indicating this is a present from you. We’ll even use your return address so they’ll never guess what’s in the package.
$17 = one year
$30 = two years
$300 = a lifetime of FenceMake sure to write “gift” in the “Special Instructions” field of our merchant interface, in the Shipping Address section.
It’s fast, easy, and cheap, and we promise to get it there in time, if you subscribe by 5 pm on December 17th. (http://www.fence.fenceportal.org/subscribe.html)
Secret Santas, do work.
Uncategorized / 56 Comments
December 15th, 2008 / 5:33 pm
December 15th, 2008 / 5:33 pm
Orange Alert Holiday Guide
not alicia pernell or ben segal
From Ben Segal:
Dear HTML Giant,
I admit a bit of self-promotion here, because I wouldn’t have found out about this probably if they hadn’t included my book, but I thought you might be interested in knowing about this:
What to Wear During an Orange Alert, which as you know interviews and writes about a lot of the people regularly contributing/featured here, just released their ‘Holiday Guide.’ It has a nice little write up of Sam Pink, plus also 4 other emerging writers, plus a list of the favorite 10 books of the year, 10 small presses doing cool things, and a bunch of art/music/random recommendations as well. It’s a nicely laid out guide to a lot of very exciting small press/general independent media releases from the last year and I thought that it might be of use to Secret Santas and also public Santas and Jews like myself who never actually do Secret Santas because they only make purchases for ex- and/or possible future girlfriends, but still like to buy those gifts from small presses.
Best,
Ben
I downloaded the ‘Holiday Guide’ last night (took me about ten minutes or so), and I’m slowly picking through the PDF file. Lots of recommendations for those looking for gift ideas and for those just interested in seeing what’s new.
Take a look.
Thanks to Alicia Pernell of Yippee Magazine for the tip as well.
McSweeney’s Announces Sale, Makes Up Clever Word
is this real? i dont know. is it too big? yes.
In my (and probably your) inbox yesterday was this from McSweeney’s, bless their hearts:
M c S W E E N E Y ‘ S C R A Z Y
E X C E S S I V E
S A L E
Apparently something’s going wrong with the economy. An econopocalypse, we heard. Thus, we have put together an emergency bailout package for the book-buying public. Once again, almost everything on our site is half-off, or even cheaper, for just a few more days — soon it’ll be too late to guarantee Christmas delivery, so now is the time.
And once again, we’ve got everyone on your list covered. We’ve restocked the immediately beloved “What Happens in La Brea Tar Pits, Stays in La Brea Tar Pits” t-shirt, and we’ve piled high the stacks of Comedy by the Numbers for your insufficiently funny friends. For all the hungry nondenominational holiday-enthusiasts in your life, there’s Lemony Snicket’s Christmas story The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming, and for the impatient McSwys newcomer we’ve got the Instant Gratification Subscription. There’s lots more on the site, and everything’s cheap, so click here.
And still the bonus: if you order more than $60 from our site, you’ll get your choice of either Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends or Nick Hornby’sShakespeare Wrote for Money, as a free reward. All you have to do is spend $60 (not including shipping); then, at checkout, find the promo code field and enter:
– MC01 if you want MAPS AND LEGENDS
– NH05 if you want SHAKESPEARE WROTE FOR MONEYMaybe you missed your chance before, or maybe you just want to stuff even more stockings. Either way, do not deny yourself these simple pleasures, the joy of giving and/or hoarding. Please go now: http://store.mcsweeneys.net.
The Second Crazy Excessive Sale ends this Friday.
Remember, here’s some more stuff to buy if you’re a Secret Santa.
‘How to Get Linked on HTML Giant’: A 2 Step Primer
For future reference, and because it’s recently come up, if you are wanting in the worst way to get linked on HTML Giant (man, I don’t blame you, it’s a firestorm in here), it’s really pretty simple. In fact it’s so simple, there are just two steps. Here are those two steps:
PRIMER STEP ONE: (For primer step one, I am going to defer to the guidelines for submission at Muumuu House Press, which I think are absolutely brilliant, and probably the most honest thing I’ve seen a publisher write about the way they select texts:
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 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. Muumuu House is edited by Tao Lin.
PRIMER STEP TWO: Do something good.
That’s it. Those can occur in any order. They can occur exclusively of one another. They are also dependent on me forgetting everything else already me like the fact that I really want to go run a few miles right now at 11:25 PM, which I will do right after I finish this, forgetting that and other bullshit, and thinking about these things that happen, which can happen at any instant, and then I will click the buttons and copy and past the address and you will appear like magic in the brown letters on the foam green backdrop (I am suddenly doubting my recall of our color scheme) and people maybe will see your name there and maybe sometime click on you even though if they are here and they are looking at the ‘other places’ section will likely have already heard of you because the people who tend to read shit here tend to give a crap about books and have probably already over the course of however long they’ve intermingled that caring about books with the internet somehow stumbled on those places, rendering our links section and any links section just another thing that is a thing is probably not worth mentioning most of the time, like old baby blankets and tennis socks. You might notice I haven’t added a link to the journal I’ve been editing for more than 5 years. That’s just how much it doesn’t matter. And anyhow, more often, things that get linked here that ‘we’ give ‘a shit’ (more Muumuu House props, I guess) about are linked in the blog body because this is a blog and that’s what the blog is for and that’s what happens. I am still typing.
The main way not to get linked is to blind query the HTML Giant email inbox because (a) I don’t know that anyone checks it regularly except for Secret Santa things recently, I know I have looked twice, again it is a ‘token’ (b) I like to find things and remember things rather than being told, I have a mother already and (c) refer to PRIMER STEPS 1 and 2.
The for certain for sure super way not to get linked, if you did go ahead and send one of those ‘link me dear god link me please!’ emails, is not to get your tits in an uproar when 6 days later you haven’t gotten an answer back (current flood of other inbox Santa happies notwithstanding), and then come publicly bitching about how you’ve published several of our writers so why not why not why? I’ll admit I’ve added two links to the links as a result of the editor emailing, but only because I did like those places, and they did not call out about who/what/when/where was published, and let me pick up the email on my own and think, oh, yeah, that’s cool, I can do that, I want to do that. Done.
I like a lot of things. I also like to be a stick in the mud and look at my own ass. It gets me off.