Duotrope’s Digest (August 4, 2005-October 14, 2010) Duotrope died today, of its own name, some vague ailment of droopy eyelids and an ass so smart its brain filled its hole and then all the universe exploded into the nearest ceiling fan. Today dead, Duotrope of serial liposuction, as in the last time (Jesus, chill-the-fuck-out, you Heidi Blair Montag of a site. Hey guys, leave Newpages! We got bigger tits!) they crunk-a-ma-jigged the layout and then hit me and my kin up for money. (As I write this, Duotrope is status HIGH, as in YELLOW, 36% short of their monthly pecuniary quest. Year-to-Date they are 20% short, labeled HIGHE$$T, or Holy Fuck!, a RED alert 4 alarm {low} fire of tattooed lipstick. [Like our government, Duotrope has a color code system that all but douche bags ignore]). Duotrope dead of popped pronephros, dribble, dribble…Duotrope deceased, choked on the very versicolor vomit of statistics they choose to shove down our hoary throats (They eat it too, see? That’s how they know it tastes good.) Do you understand Willow Springs accepts 0% of submissions (well, fuck me and my latest Spam-villanelle), yet they reject 88%? (If you don’t believe me, go to Duotrope.). Dark times, folks. Death by jostled lynx this morning, Duotrope. Dead by sub-sprachgefühl, I mean divaricator/dust, of course. Or simple spoon? Note: Duotrope killed today by wound of flung nacho. Duotrope eaten by my father. Like every empire (or umpire) known to history, Duotrope has fallen. Croaked. Expired. Sad to report, that spreadsheet we once called Duotrope, dead as disco this morning, done, d-uh, died–of exposure.
One Obituary: Duotrope’s Digest
We Are All Very Busy Being Busy
We are all very busy. We are busy being busy. We worship at the altar and suckle at the teat of busy. When I say we, I mean you, me, us. We are a cult of busy busy people. If you are busy, we will follow you and drink your Kool-Aid. We love to talk about how busy we are. We say I’m busy, I’m busy, I’m busy—an exultation. We say we are busy and feel flushed. We are busy, therefore we are. To be busy is to be important and to be important is everything. We will Twitter and Facebook and blog our busyness and we will do so with the conviction of martyrs. We will bear our busy burden. The burden of busy must be borne because to be busy is to be important and to be important is to matter. We matter and are made of matter which is meta. We have work and school and work and school. We study, we teach, we grade and grade and grade. We live below the poverty line but revel in that poverty because we have a second and third job that keep us busy. We go to mind numbing office jobs where we are busy with boredom. We hold cushy corporate positions we love to talk about because we make so much money being busy we don’t have the time to spend it. We have meetings and sometimes we have meetings within our meetings because we are that damn busy. In our limited free time we edit three magazines and run a small press and we may never respond to you or actually publish anything but we’re on the masthead and we have many official sounding titles so we have proof we are that busy. We get so many emails each day demanding our attention and our time and we try to keep up but we cannot so we are busy stemming the tide of electronic correspondence, sending messages but never reading the responses. We have online presences so we have to visit several sites every few seconds to remind ourselves and everyone we know and love and loathe how busy we are. We write 3,500 words a day and then exhaustively edit those 3,500 words once twice three times and we make sure to mention on Facebook that we’ve done those things, oh yes, we will tell you what we’ve written for the day and how important we are for taking that care with our words despite how busy we are. We will tell you what we are going to write while you idle people are sleeping because we do not sleep, we do not need sleep, we have not the time for sleep. We will go places and meet people while we are there though we won’t spend too long because we are so busy. We’re in four writing groups where we critique the work of our friends and enemies and later talk shit about that writing to other friends and enemies. We read obscure literary texts and think deep thoughts about those obscure literary texts and write things about those obscure literary texts so everyone knows we are reading obscure literary texts despite the fact we are so busy. We curate two reading series and boast about all the Internet Famous writers who will be reading with us. We pretend we don’t watch television but really we do, oh how we do and we spend moments of our precious time thinking about the unbelievable fact that Vanilla Ice has a reality show on DIY and how none of the new TV shows this fall are any good even though we can’t stop watching them. We have kids and those kids never leave us alone when we are busy working on our laptops but the kids are so damn cute so we’ll bitch about how busy they keep us and how much we love them even though they get in the way. We’re married or in relationships and once in a while we have to have sex with our significant others and otherwise give them some attention. We look at our lovers day in and day out and acknowledge that yes, this is really it for the rest of our lives and while we’re so busy, we ignore the nagging feeling we are doing everything yet nothing at all because we are far too busy to do anything well and doing all of that each and every day keeps us extraordinarily busy—it is a vicious cycle.
{LMC}: An Illustration of one line from Sean Kilpatrick’s “The All Encompassed Drowned”
Ed: You can read a PDF of this story, here, so you can better participate. Buy NY Tyrant. If you would like to have the full PDF of NY Tyrant 8 so you can participate in this month’s LMC discussions, get in touch with me. But still, when you buy a literary magazine, an angel gets its wings.
Tortoise and the Hair

Malcolm Gladwell
Getting really tired of Malcolm Gladwell’s “genius” hair, that intentional stylization, or at least neglect, of the intellectually consumed. His 1999 appearance on Charlie Rose is proof that he understands what normal hair is (no comment on the tie). In 2008, on the same show, he looks either high on meth or himself. Gladwell has made a career of being a provocative thinker, and while I do find him pleasantly curious at times, his constantly enthralled persona is exhausting. One more cappuccino on the per-diem en route to The New Yorker offices and he’s gonna have an epiphany about foam. (What the tale don’t tell you is that a fast rabbit is running away from itself.) True, everyone is a poster child of their own cause; I’m just weary of the cause.
What’s More Annoying: Special HTMLG Self-Reflexive Edition
What’s more annoying:
How Amy McDaniel never misses an opportunity to remind us that she studied with David Foster Wallace, which somehow endowed her with a magical (foolproof) grammar wand?
OR
How I never miss an opportunity to come across as a rotten pretentious elitist who loves the sound of his own voice yet can’t seem to talk about anything of interest or importance other than worn out concepts like experimental writing?
OR
How often HTMLG discusses Tao Lin?
OR
The fact that Chelsea Martin is still on the roster, even though she hasn’t posted since the great Wiggergate fiasco?
OR
How Justin Taylor, the inventor of the “craven self-promotion” label, which (btw) appears to have been discontinued, can somehow always find a way of self-promoting in every post?
OR
How Jimmy Chen seems both extremely smart and utterly incapable of playing any role other than class clown?
OR
The way Roxane Gay champions good ole fashion storytelling, the way regular folks do?
OR
How Ken Baumann is so smart and handsome and successful?
OR
???
Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week.
Two Obituaries: Glimmer Train and Tin House
Glimmer Train (1990 – October 2010) Respected literary magazine Glimmer Train died of exhaustion yesterday evening, having finally succumbed to the strain of ‘going full steam ahead’ to ‘present stories in a handsome physical publication that people would keep.’ The literary community will fondly keep alive the memory of Glimmer Train by storing the colorfully illustrated issues in English Department libraries across the country. Glimmer Train is survived by its two founding editors, sisters Susan and Linda, and by approximately 22,250 contest finalists, many of whom will console themselves by listing the meaningless accolade in their submission cover letters. Funeral services will be held on Saturday, October 30th, 2010 at 2:30 PM, 1211 Glisan Street, Suite 207, Portland, OR 97209. Glimmer Train will be buried next to its siblings, Iron Horse Literary Review and Night Train, may they all rest in peace.
–
Tin House (May 1999 – October 2010) Bi-coastal purveyor of literary culture, Tin House passed away on Monday after a long battle with alcoholism. Tin House will be remembered for its tin-sided Portland office, now an iconic landmark to many literary acolytes; its popular writer’s conference, at which authors could add their voice to the desperate din; and its less popular ‘New Voices’ magazine feature, occasional evidence of the staff’s tin ear. Memorial services (Theme TBA) to be held Sunday on the hallowed grounds of Reed College, Steve Almond officiating. In lieu of flowers, please send receipts of your latest purchases from a bookstore. If you cannot provide a receipt, please send a written explanation in 100 words or less.
Shit I Don’t Like About Writers & Writing
– Hearing the words “writer,” “reading,” “poem,” “poet,” “the author of,” etc. more frequently than should any human regardless of his or her particular fondness, hobby, or paid work
– Ego, and reflection of ego onto others’ actions because the nature of ego is often that one can only see one’s self in another self
– The absence of self identity that seems to come along with so many of the more flagrant perpetrators of said ego, giving them even more excessive ability to flaunt said ego without losing any sleep
– Twitter and facebook feeds of writers who think about these “tools of social media” as personal sales pitches aimed at you, the “friend,” often unrelenting in their use of the terms of the 1st list item and w/o any form of layering of else that might lead you to believe they are an actual person
– “Tortured” updates on same social networks over how “crazy” today or tomorrow is going to be while editing or writing
– People who retweet Kanye West
– Kickstarter and other similar fundraising systems, which somehow have quickly become the means for acquisition of literary food stamps, even if a lot of people I like have used it to do some cool shit
– The simultaneous bent of many personalities or commentmakers to go on about how evil, ugly, mean, nasty, etc. in general negative or shitty a certain outlet is, matched with an equal to less bent of also complaining that things are “too positive” or “you forgot to include me” when said person or entity has made little to no effort to “get involved” on their own end
– How almost no writer ever has done a good job writing about what it is like to be obese
– How many writers are atheists and yet are proud of themselves as creators
– How the writers who are christian usually suck at writing
– How there are so many books now I can’t think
– How I’ve been reading so many of those books that I seriously am finally starting to get carpal tunnel from holding them up while on the stationary bike and from all this silly typing
– How I don’t quite have enough books now to build a new house out of them so I can sell the place I live in now and get out of this loft complex and live somewhere quieter
– When people don’t mention that their ‘is the author of’ refers to a chapbook, or call chapbooks books, or say chapbook out loud near me at all really
– When chapbooks cost $10 even though they might cost $2 to make most of the time
– People who “won’t read” chapbooks even tho some of them do some amazing shit a full book couldn’t really ever do
– Web magazines who have so little design skill that it actually hurts me more to not look at them than to look at them because I know the damage they are doing to all aura and yet people still submit to them and bitch about their slow response times
– Print magazines that look like they were designed in 1991 by someone who had bad taste even then
– Anyone who bitches about response times ever, usually signifying that they’ve never worked a day on the side of the editing table or even volunteering or trying to pay for the books that sit on the tables often unselling and just trying to break even and hardly reading anyway
– How proud people are of celebrities who talk about a book, like it’s some winged beast descending to kiss their face
– How at least a handful of people will hold this against me at least in a comment and think I think my shit doesn’t stink because I said any of this or that I hold myself to some other standard or that I think I’m special when really I’m just hanging out like anybody else I just sometimes will run my mouth and I like to think I have a lot of faith even when I bitch and this is all a big try
– People who pimp their social state of having or not having on either end, trying to justify lack thereof or surplus because someone has this or that or doesn’t have this or that or went here or there or didn’t or wanted to and didn’t and etc., as if anyone needs to or doesn’t need to experience anything or not anything to write a word down on paper and have it be something, as if those with money can’t think, as if those without money can’t think, as if everyone’s out to kill you because you are male female black white red candy sugar sandwich
– Gmail chat status updates that change every few hours
– Gmail chat’s winking box that goes back and forth until you click it and look at who said what even if you are on invisible and were trying to ignore the thing entirely but don’t have the balls to just log the fuck out
– People who don’t mind saying flagrant things about what other people say or do but won’t do anything flagrant on their own or outside the realm of people who will back them up
– People who think that because you made something that must mean you have to have it or you worship it or yourself for having had it or that you are out for glory in every move
– People who only ‘Like’ or comment on things when it involves something about them
– People with no sense of humor and/or who can’t laugh at themselves
– People who never get crunk READ MORE >