Ronnie Scott on Phrasings

I went through the cover emails for the last 200ish submissions I’ve received for my magazine, thinking I would present the first lines here in case your own cover emails have started to bore you. I really just picked anything, unless it seemed identical to a line I’d already copied and pasted in.

Some of them are fairly awkward, so I should say that if I went through my own cover emails from the last couple of years, I would probably cringe so hard that it would basically count as vomiting. I’ve also sent some really weird rejections.

I think I accepted four of these, but from the opening lines, you would never guess which. In fact, I have probably never paid the cover emails this much attention before. I just download the files and keep them all in a folder, then do a Gmail search for the filename when it’s time to respond.

My own standard cover letter is: “Dear [NAME, not “Editor”, unless it’s multiple editors],

I’ve attached a short story for [YOUR MAGAZINE]. It’s about [HOWEVER MANY WORDS], and I hope you like it.

Thanks for reading,

Ronnie.

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Behind the Scenes / 26 Comments
May 3rd, 2010 / 12:47 pm

Noah Cicero Reviews Sam Pink’s FROWNS NEED FRIENDS TOO

Sam Pink's Book

Sam Pink told me before he wrote Frowns need Friends Too he traveled to the Upper Peninsular of Michigan in the middle of winter. He bought a snowmobile and traveled deep in the American forest. Sam Pink sat under a tall coniferous tree in the zazen and meditated for 40 days and 40 nights. During those forty nights the devil made him work each new day at a different occupation. One day he was a marketing agent making a commercial for Nike, one day he was a stock broker on Wall Street. One day he was he was a politician for a congressional restrict in Nebraska, and on other days he was a poor white factory worker in the Rust Belt making small plastic parts, a Mexican picking fruit in California, a black person that had made and became a nurse with a good 401K plan, then he became a billionaire with tax shelters in the Caribbean, he was a poor black crack head walking down the street with nowhere to go and nothing to do, a soldier hunting down terrorists in Afghanistan and finally one of those people that shop at Wal-Mart that scare normal people with their obesity, bad outfits, and mid 80s hair style. The devil made him try all these jobs and said, “Which job do you want Sam Pink? And Sam Pink replied, “You will never recover from how you treat yourself?” Sam Pink stood up, stretched, yawned, and walked out of the forest to a local bar in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He found several men and women sitting in a bar drinking draft beer. He sat at the bar and said, “I forcefed you smegma with my fingernail and we sat naked on the tile floor- carefully avoiding every emotion. We became normal again.”

A middle-aged woman at the bar with stretch marks on her belly from having three kids said to Sam Pink, “I don’t want many friends because I am too weak for that kind of work. I am too weak to have friends.”

Sam Pink Replied, “It is okay to hurt someone’s feelings. It is ok.”

The woman smiled and lit a cigarette.

The oldest man in the bar who didn’t know the difference between the Twin Towers and the World Trade Center said, “I don’t know what I am doing.”

Sam Pink smiled and said, “But sometimes I accidentally tell the truth. One day I will fulfill my greatest aspiration when I walk down the sidewalk and take off my pants and beneath the pants there’s another pair of pants and then I keep walking, never returning to retrieve the previous pair of pants.”

The people in the bar felt his words and knew this was bad. They could not allow such words and contamination of the youth to take place. Sam Pink saw there faces and said, “I’ve felt stupid and fake every time I’ve apologized.” Sam Pink laughed.

One of the men at the bar pulled out a hand gun and shot Sam Pink several times. Sam Pink laid on the floor of the bar and thought that the floor was dirty and said, “It will never be over.”

____________________

You can buy FROWNS NEED FRIENDS TOO here.

Noah Cicero blogs here.

Uncategorized / 17 Comments
May 3rd, 2010 / 10:39 am

We are professionals.

Behind the Scenes / 4 Comments
May 2nd, 2010 / 6:53 pm

Summer Reading

I’ve got an insurmountable stack of summer reading. Here are a few titles I see when I glance over at it:

Say, Poem – Adam Robinson
Dhalgren – Samuel Delany
The Invention of Morel – Adolfo Bioy Casares
The Worm Ouroboros – Eric Rücker Eddison
Language in Literature – Roman Jakobson
Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics – Lara Glenum, Arielle Greenberg, eds.
In the Metro – Marc Augé
Firework – Eugene Marten
Cyclonopedia – Reza Negarestani
Stupidity – Avital Ronell
Post-Continental Philosophy – John Mullarkey

What do you have in your stack?

Random / 162 Comments
May 2nd, 2010 / 5:07 pm

Life of a Star by Jane Unrue

This was our playroom now, shared bedroom too. Those walls that had been mine were ours now, papered in a faded floral, seams and corners peeling, bubbled in some places, cracked. On every wall a stitchery picture: scenes from storyland were also faded. Soiled. No glass. Frames: chipped-off painted wood. Threads pulled in places, evidence of little fingers that can’t keep from touching, pulling—as if doing so could take a body out of this and into that: round wooden door to mouse’s tree-trunk house; white wicket gate set in the background of a garden overgrown with purple blooms; enchanted cottage all but hidden in a forest thicket; green-and-ruby turret window that, despite the ravages of time and all those dirty little fingers, still appeared to be enough to make a castle glow. And in that decorated room that had been mine but now belonged to us, the place in which unpleasantness seemed not just possible but downright inescapable, I told her stories with more stories stacked on top, all set in carefully described locations peopled with the characters I represented and the objects I pretended (on behalf of characters) to see, pick up, and operate.

(Read more of this excerpt from Jane Unrue’s recently released novella, Life of a Star, on Ben Marcus’s blog. The book can be purchased from the publisher, Burning Deck.)

Author Spotlight & Excerpts / 6 Comments
May 1st, 2010 / 8:16 pm

Ron Artest on Writing

“We’ve got to find energy in an arena that is not our own.”

“I love the tension. I love when everything’s going wrong … In the NBA, they don’t promote guys like me. They like guys who like Cheerios, good guys. But I find a way to promote myself.”

“They killed us on the boards, but we kept playing. But that’s the game of basketball. If they kill you on the boards, there’s always something else you can do to win the game.”

“I was surprised he did that… I was ready for it.”

“I’m going to continue playing hard and out of control, like a wild animal that needs to be caged in. I’ll let the referees handle it.”

“I was just trying to do what I do.”

“Oh I’ve got all kinds of suits I’m gonna break out, yellow and orange, suede, velvet, and a cat in the hat suit.”

“I’m growing up, maturing, but at the same time I’m hood forever.”

Craft Notes / 38 Comments
May 1st, 2010 / 3:44 pm

Should a SS collection be all winners? Or is it OK to be like (most) albums. A couple hits, a few so-sos (with redeemable aspects, though), and, oh, a dud or two.

From BEWARE OF PITY by Stefan Zweig

He pities the fool who pities the fool.

But to my own astonishment I found the requisite strength again and again. In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has been given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering, acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal. […]
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Excerpts / 2 Comments
May 1st, 2010 / 10:21 am

The winners of the weird words for Words contest are Sabra Embury & Sean K. Their entries, respectively:

A fall, it takes, eats–mother crams him, burnt and opaque; her glimpses diamond heavy, dog tired dead, yes–their wall runs blood.

&

Her fall: a tired mother glimpses their dead dog’s burnt, opaque blood, “Diamond, yes!” wall-runs and takes him, eats, crams it.

&

Please email satorpress at gmail dot com to claim your book.

Friday Fuck Books and Everything Else, Too!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYye59dstRY&feature=related

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBBh7cvxK9w&feature=related

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZLkl15_d8&feature=related

And the greatest of them all after the jump, dear friends.

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Random / 14 Comments
April 30th, 2010 / 6:10 pm