Flatmancrooked has decided to offer Expedited Submissions where a senior editor will respond to such submissions in 14 days or fewer. The fee? $5. I understand the inclination, have definitely considered some sort of tiered submission structure, but remain uncomfortable with the idea of charging for submissions (and conversely, paying to submit). As a person who enjoys instant gratification, I like the idea of knowing the time frame within which my work will be considered. That privilege just might be worth $5 to me. Then again, I am increasingly less preoccupied with things like response times. And yet. And back and forth I go. Thoughts? Will you pay to play?
Peter Taylor on His Teachers
(from Conversations with Peter Taylor, edited by Hubert H. McAlexander)
Bonnie Jo Campbell and the Strategy of Negation
I keep returning to Bonnie Jo Campbell’s story “The Solutions to Ben’s Problem,” which was first published in The Diagram, and was subsequently reprinted in her collection American Salvage as “The Solutions to Brian’s Problem.” (American Salvage was originally published by tiny Wayne State University Press, and then republished by Norton after the book became an unlikely but well-chosen National Book Award finalist.)
“The Solutions to Ben’s Problem” is structured unlike any other story I’ve read. The problem, which is never directly articulated, is that Ben’s wife Connie is a meth addict who can’t moderate her increasingly dangerous behavior. To make matters worse, READ MORE >
some things that i ate this week and a review of how they tasted
slapshot (starring Paul Newman): I was the coolest guy that ever lived and you were a hair stylist and the goalie in our love was from a foreign country and would yell at us and then the factory closed down which made everyone in town sad because people would soon be really poor and they would have to kill themselves, but it was okay because I was still really cool and this guy from Princeton was good at hockey even though he had dad issues and then the owner gave birth to three retards that liked to punch things so the team started winning again and I slept with the wife of the other team’s goalie and then someone said ‘Faggot’ and another guy said, “This one time I was in Florida and the snatch was crawling out my boobs.” And the guy from Princeton became in touch with his feminine body which made you raise your eyebrows and I raised my eyebrows and then we looked at each other long and hard and you said, “New York City,” and I said, “Minnesota,” and our love was still a goalie from a foreign country but it had grown into a shape that smelled like three retards born out the ass of a nation of absurdity that sometimes laughs when people say, “Faggot.”
the external combustion engine by Michael Ives: Some kids were in the park doing bad things. I yelled at them. You told me not to yell at them. There was something interesting in our shared thoughts, but the afternoon didn’t quite go as planned. I think you went into the movie business and I went into education. Someone either you knew or I knew got me a job at a school where someone I knew once went, but I think it was only temporary. The world is going to end. This makes me upset because I can’t do anything but watch it end and I wish that instead of doing this I was looking at you as you watched the whole thing end.
the box man by Kobo Abe: I was homeless or maybe you were homeless and at some point we decided to be naked and homeless together in a box, but another person wanted the box so you gave me some money and I gave the box to him, but he wasn’t who he said he was because someone had paid him to be them and they just wanted to smoke morphine all day so they kept paying him to be them so they didn’t have anything to do but smoke morphine and he was tired of being them so he decided he was going to be me which is why he made you pay me to be me and then I was no longer homeless and didn’t have to live in the small box but instead I lived in a really large box with you until you got tired of me and moved out of my large box.
babyfucker by Urs Allemann: A man was in a room that was the worst place to ever be and that man was me and maybe the room was me too but I was afraid to look at where I was even though you might have been in the room. I was very much in love with you or maybe you were on the balcony, but I just couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes because I was afraid I was doing the worst thing that a person could ever do and you would not be able to help me because I was touching the things that were bad to touch in the way I was touching them.
Lacan gets punk’d
A young ideologue punks Lacan in the name of situationism by pouring water on his desk and pelting him with soggy paper.
Reminds me of the part in Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” that goes:
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
Pranks as politics.
Two Bejeweled Holiday Offers; Of Both I Did Partake
[I]
Get any two Single-author titles for only $12 w/ free U.S. shipping
[I did Ghost Machine by Ben Mirov + Cure All by Kim Parko]
[II]
Instructions:
1) Purchase one title via PayPal.
2) When completing your order, put the title of your free book in the “Shipping Instructions” line.
3) Your books will arrive in 7-10 days.
As always, shipping for all orders purchased through our website is FREE.
This offer is good through December 31, 2010. Limit 3 (Three) free titles per order.
[I did A Prank of Georges by Thalia Field and Abigail Lang
+ Adorno’s Noise by Carla Harryman]
The good, the bad, and the wandering eye
Thus, there are only good and bad novels. The bad novel aims to please by flattering, whereas the good one is an exigence and an act of faith.
Here Is An Obscure Book of Poetry I Like
I only learned about Steve Davenport’s Uncontainable Noise because it was published by tiny Pavement Saw Press in 2006, and Pavement Saw Press was based in Columbus, Ohio, where I happened to live, and the assistant editor there (who was also a night manager at the Kroger’s supermarket where I sometimes shopped for groceries) was taking classes from a friend of mine, and pressed a copy on my friend, and soon my friend was pressing copies on everyone he knew. And, as it happens, the night my copy was pressed on me, my second child was unexpectedly (and dangerously) born three months early, by emergency C-section. And so it was that I found myself in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, one hand in an isolette, those fingers touching a baby the size of my hand, and the other hand holding a copy of Uncontainable Noise, reading poems with such muscular titles as “Arrange Their Sea-Smooth Bones In Fourteen Broken Rows” and “Last Night My Bed A Bed of Whiskey Going Down” and “Murfy Blesses The Cowboy Of Drunken Love’s Love.” The preferred form of the poems was the Yodel, which is, as best I can tell a fourteen line poem of twelve syllables per unrhymed line, which contains at least one if not twenty-seven words of the relative intensity of slaughter, bomb, swagger, massacre, exploding, or, in the case of “Watch The Hot Young Women On Puritan Benches,” blow, beat, and bang bang. The rest of the poems take such forms as the horse opera, the clap-without-cure, the mountain price, the hayseed flaneur, and the hundred-line drunken cowboy sonnet. And I almost forgot to tell you about thirteen-page cycle of contentious love poems, the lovers in question being Georgia O’Keeffe and Wallace Stevens, who do things like drive to Holy Ghost, Illinois; perform their love in trees; move West and argue about flowers; make like monsters over New Mexico; go for their guns; plead with the seven angels of confusion; drink outside a bowling alley; and undo their bundle of hiss. READ MORE >
Most editors really want your shit to be as awesome as you think it is
Ever go back and look at the things you wrote and submitted years ago and thought were great then and felt miffed or mad when they were rejected, and then realize with that time passed between, Hey, holy shit, this sucked, thank god nobody published this, I can’t believe I didn’t realize… ? So, maybe it’s not always the case, and maybe some editors’ tastes are too safe, or behind the curve, but maybe more often you could think of a rejection as a second chance, and say thanks for the protection.