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Years ago I used to think the advice ‘tell the truth but tell it slant’ meant that you were supposed to be smarter than your reader, and that telling it slant meant weird or funny. Then I stopped thinking that, and less years ago started thinking that it means you are supposed to be smarter than yourself, and that the show is out of your control, and when you stop trying to tell the truth so hard the truth will come out of your sound. Now I don’t know what I think, and don’t want to, and that seems better than the other two entirely.

36

Sean Lovelace knows nothing about nachos

nachos11_03_06

Anybody who happens to have bumped into the words or online speaking of Sean Lovelace (author of the recently released How Some People Like Their Eggs, which is fantastic and very smart (that will be my last positive reference to Mr. Lovelace in this post)) knows the dude really wants you to know that he loves nachos. It’s hard to get through a week of his blogging without at least some kind of reference to it, and to how much he loves them, etc., etc. He’s even published essays on the subject, including one in the David Foster Wallace memorial issue of Sonora Review.

To me, though, Lovelace’s endless tirading about the food seems overbloated, and in some ways insecure. It seems the food-language equivalent of truck nuts:

nuts

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Mean / 74 Comments
October 28th, 2009 / 1:54 pm

Gore Vidal Endowed Chair

arts-graphics-2006_1174783a.jpgIs Gore Vidal just old or did something bad happen to him? (I’m not so glib to write this post usually, but it’s mean week.) He’s been sitting down, by my estimations, since c. 2002 and I wonder what his problem is. Maybe he always wanted an Endowed Chair.

Here he is in his reading chair with what appears to be either flat champagne or apple juice. He’s gonna have to get up to pee soon, and I’m worried about his efficiency. Below on the left is an image from the 14th Los Angeles Times Festival and the wheelchair clarifies that the sitting down might be an imperative. Notice the Prada shoes — good to know the royalties are in good shape. The picture on the right is him as close to camping as he’ll ever get. The cerebral man has no need for a suntan. He’s probably petitioning for the invention of color photography.

14th+Annual+Los+Angeles+Times+Festival+Books+4T0cvMQ6N-8l.jpgCopy_of_Gore_Vidal.jpg

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Author Spotlight & Mean / 40 Comments
October 28th, 2009 / 1:33 pm

Writers like shitty music (a sampling)

1. The Beatles

If these guys

backstreet_boys

suddenly stopped playing songs written for girls to get wet over and instead started writing ‘serious’ music, I wonder if generations years later would go around quoting and praising these fine young men as the greatest band of all time…

Naw. Ruiners of everything good.

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Random / 243 Comments
October 28th, 2009 / 12:43 pm

Dan Nester Doubles Down on Mean: FUCK GERUNDS

gerund

Just fuck ’em.

Or better yet, let’s fucking fuck gerunds.

That way, it–the fucking–will keep going into the eternal present.

That is all.

—D.N.

Author Spotlight & Mean / 43 Comments
October 28th, 2009 / 11:48 am
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Click through anywhere to read the whole piece.

I’m a nurse, and I’ve seen the worst the system has to offer.

I remember Jim. He had worked all his life in a factory in Zeeland, Michigan. The latest round of layoffs had left him without insurance or savings.

Jim had an infection throughout his body that was serious, but treatable. After a few days, the billing department made their way to his room to discuss options with him.

The hospital was by no means telling him he had to go. Several doctors spoke with him about the severity of his infection. But after seeing an estimate of his bill, Jim left.

One week later, he died of an infection that could have been treated.

With 47 million Americans lacking health insurance, the stories add up.

Cicily Janus, former web editor for Opium, and author of two forthcoming books- Sick and Tired: An Oral History of America’s Health Care War and The New Face of Jazz, also fries a mean piece of chicken.

2

The Stupid Fucking “Tourist-Castle” Poem

The Tourist-Castle Poet Takes it !! (phase 1 of proposed torture)

I hate, I hate, I hate, I just fucking hate the stupid fucking Tourist-Castle poem.

Yes, I’ve just had it with this retarded, anemic variety of the Tourist poem. Almost all Tourist or Travel poems suck. But this one’s got super-human suction lips!

This poem is where some jackoff tourist (I borrow the word jackoff from Ted Berrigan talking about Irish Jackoffs trying to be radio waves at a St. Patrick’s Day parade), sits at a cafe or a park by a castle. Feels a glow. At peace. The most wonderful beautiful feeling ever. Like someone discovering the magic of sex. But worse! And then just has to write it down. In their notebook. Or, worse, on a napkin. Blah, blah.

These scourge poems invariably are titled something like:

“Lines Written at the Cafe Twimbledon across from the Castle Twimbledon, Twimbledon, Scotland, March 4, 2004” ……..(and if the poem WAS written on a napkin that makes it into the title too!

These poems are inevitable. Drop a novice poet in a foreign country and he’ll find a castle in two fucking seconds and the poem will be written, effortlessly, magically, on the spot (O Scourge!) and foisted on to some adoring public in some shitass review full of beautiful glowing Tourist-Castle poems. I’m just waiting for a review called The Tourist-Castle Review so I can bomb their fucking cars and offices.

Berrigan liked to beat people up. He liked Michaux for this same reason. I invoke you both now gentlemen: your fists and your swords and your delicate medieval torture instruments. And let’s push these fucking tourist poets down into the basements of the castles they so glowingly and sickeningly sang about. And let’s rack them and sack them and quarter them and make them eat thousands and thousands of Tourist-Castle Poems. And let’s suck the bowels from their asses with contraptions built especially for the purpose. Or, for lack of availability or simply for variety, a starving street rat.

Behind the Scenes & Craft Notes / 18 Comments
October 28th, 2009 / 9:16 am

Mean Week: On Beer

I don’t like beer.

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Mean / 131 Comments
October 28th, 2009 / 1:49 am

Paul Haggis Deservedly Mean to Scientology Because Scientology Undeservedly Mean to Gays, Everybody Else

From Paul Haggis’s public resignation letter from the Church of Scientology. Via Gawker, who have the whole letter.

The church’s refusal to denounce the actions of these bigots, hypocrites and homophobes is cowardly. I can think of no other word. Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent.

I joined the Church of Scientology thirty-five years ago. During my twenties and early thirties I studied and received a great deal of counseling. While I have not been an active member for many years, I found much of what I learned to be very helpful, and I still apply it in my daily life. I have never pretended to be the best Scientologist, but I openly and vigorously defended the church whenever it was criticized, as I railed against the kind of intolerance that I believed was directed against it. I had my disagreements, but I dealt with them internally. I saw the organization – with all its warts, growing pains and problems – as an underdog. And I have always had a thing for underdogs.

But I reached a point several weeks ago where I no longer knew what to think. You had allowed our name to be allied with the worst elements of the Christian Right. In order to contain a potential “PR flap” you allowed our sponsorship of Proposition 8 to stand. Despite all the church’s words about promoting freedom and human rights, its name is now in the public record alongside those who promote bigotry and intolerance, homophobia and fear.

The fact that the Mormon Church drew all the fire, that no one noticed, doesn’t matter. I noticed. And I felt sick. I wondered how the church could, in good conscience, through the action of a few and then the inaction of its leadership, support a bill that strips a group of its civil rights.

Author Spotlight / 10 Comments
October 27th, 2009 / 11:39 pm

Rants of the Rejected

drunk-dudeBradley Sands of Bust Down The Door And Eat All The Chickens just tweeted this link to an old letter he received from a disgruntled, rejected author in 2008. It seemed like a useful thing to repost for Mean Week. Here’s the beginning (wtf?):

Dear Bradley,

Where are my stories? What did I do wrong to deserve such a cold shoulder during The Mark Chapman Generation, Twin Towers, “Malvo”, academic massacre, Amish massacre, etc? Is that it, then, Bradley, you’re just going to leave me dangling? Ok, if that’s the way you feel. I’ve never seen 1 magazine in 40 years of doing this live more than a few years after being treated so shitty as you have treated me.

Any fun rants out there? Either ones you’ve received from authors or ones you’ve sent to editors?

Mean / 26 Comments
October 27th, 2009 / 11:06 pm