Updates

This post simply brings to your attention things worthy of attention, with extremely light commentary from me.

  • Ellen Kennedy’s new book Sometimes my heart pushes my ribs is available from Muumuu house. This is probably widely known, but I wanted to officially note it here. Ellen Kennedy feels like a Dorothy Parker who doesn’t have enough energy to rhyme.
  • Chelsea Martin’s new book Everything was fine until whatever will be released March 2009 by Future Tense Books. Watch her read this piece. The ingrown logic and breath-taking/sigh-inducing excess of each subsequent line reminds me of Tao Lin’s ‘the next night we ate whale,’ except each line is different.
  • The prolific J.A. Tyler redesigned Mud Luscious archives and ML Press, and his entire site. He would scare me if he wasn’t so nice. His obscene publication list is prone to make one feel like a slacker.
  • Juked No. 6 is out. Check out the contents and order. Juked is one of the oldest literary websites out there. It makes me feel good that they are so consistent and devoted.
  • Robot Melon Issue Seven is live, including J.A. Tyler, Crispin Best, yours truly [gag], Ryan Manning’s ode to Sam Pink, and one of my personal favorite online writers, Krammer Abrahams. I really like the ‘head trauma at night in the woods’ design.

So those are my updates. I could not find a picture that embodied this post. [*UPDATE: Ryan Manning sent me a picture to post for this post. The 4 colors do not match the 5 updates. He was no doubt driven conceptually.] Thank you for supporting online literature.

Web Hype / 6 Comments
February 24th, 2009 / 4:43 pm

Thank you, UbuWeb, for giving me some Hitler today.

skiss

UbuWeb is the gift that keeps on giving.

Today’s stumbled upon wonderful thing? Benjamin Weismann reading “Hitler Ski Story.”

You should seek out Weismann’s book Headless, which appeared as part of Dennis Cooper’s Akashic books series Little House on the Bowery.

I like Weismann’s book. There are any number of quirky writers out there. Some are even not entirely bad. (Some are actually pretty good.) Weismann is not quirky. He’s not amusing. He’s not wry. He’s not gentle. He’s straight on absurd. The stories don’t just inhabit there own little worlds, parallel to our world. They tear our little world down, grab the necessary pieces, and burn the rest of the shit in a gigantic bonfire. You can actually smell the blaze on his fiction.

Here’s Weismann on Smokelong Quarterly.

Here’s an LA Times list.

Author Spotlight / 2 Comments
February 24th, 2009 / 4:16 pm

Word Spaces (7): Peter Davis

hm200This week in the triumphant return of HTML Giant Word Spaces, we have the kindly and brilliant Mr. Peter Davis, author of the quite hilarious and smart and new-voiced Hitler’s Mustache, (which, with such a great cover, how could you pass up? though the poems are just as awesome: you can read examples of them here) and much else, including, most recently, a series of beguilingly ultra honest poems such as these here. Peter Davis lives, teaches poetry, writes, and raises a family in Muncie, Indiana, where he has so kindly taken the time to tour for us the spot where his words do the make.

READ MORE >

Word Spaces / 11 Comments
February 24th, 2009 / 12:46 pm

Where is my Oscar?

SPORT S0CCER WORLD

Zach Plague, author of boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, coeditor/designer of featherproof books, and mastermind behind Bleached Whale Design, said fun things about HTMLGIANT at Poets&Writers.

They call it ‘the internet literature magazine blog of the future,’ and I’ve decided joking or not, I think they’re right.

Thanks, Zach Plague, for the good words.

Web Hype / 6 Comments
February 24th, 2009 / 10:18 am

‘I Hate This Essay’

passout3

This comment came late to Mike Young’s ‘Magazine Debasers’ essay. I wanted to post it here, because it is cute.

Anonymous comments:

I hate this essay. This is all about the insular world of MFA “writing.” And if the author was at a “top tier” journal, he wouldn’t have written it. But his own journal isn’t even third-tier so he has to come up with this essay to defend it.

Truth is, most journals are full of sloppy writing, soft ideas, poor thinking, and all manner of third-rate junk.

I hate the MFA world. I am an independent: no degree, no connection to universities. I am a writer and I am published.

Here’s my criteria for submitting to a magazine. It’s simple. I just look at how much they pay. That’s number one. Second is the audience. I look at their circulation (if it’s print) or their hits / ad rate (if it’s onine). I’d sacrifice a little pay for more eyeballs, sometimes, but it’s all about the money.

In other words, 95% of those “journals” are immediate nos for me, since they don’t pay squat.

But that’s how writing should be. It’s how it used to be. If more writers went independent, and avoided the MFA schoolteacher CV “credit” world completely, then there would be less of these lame journals and maybe more real outlets that paid.

Remember, a magazine pays its writers because the magazine is professional, the writers who work for them are pros, and above all they have *readers*. These lamebrain unpaying journals don’t have any of that. Who want them? Not me.

Hooray!

Mean / 70 Comments
February 23rd, 2009 / 9:38 pm

Narrative Magazine (‘the gold standard of online publications’) wants $20 to read your short-short

Reporting live from the Narrative Magazine offices, my man Russell Jones, AKA ‘The Only Black God’ AKA Osiris AKA Big Baby Jesus:

WalMart’s down the street, son.

But I mean really…

Web Hype / 84 Comments
February 23rd, 2009 / 5:06 pm

AWP Chicago: A Human Being’s Notes

 

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Browsing through the many post-AWP posts for something that does something that I don’t know what, maybe something worth mentioning, or something else, I found this up at Agni (via the Newpages blog): ‘AWP Chicago: A Gamer’s Notes’ by JS Tunotre. I read it and tried to think of how it applied to my AWP experience. I found myself resisting it, wanting to respond. Then I told myself I wasn’t going to post about AWP, especially not one of those ‘thank-you’ posts to everyone (which are fine and fun to read, but there are just so many of them, and I can only read so much about how weird it is to meet people in real life whom you’ve only known online). But I changed my mind today when I realized that I couldn’t focus on the student papers piled on my desk. So here goes:

Before you read on, recall that we’ve already talked a little bit about the ‘submissions game’ here, so maybe this AWP post will pick up a little bit where Mike Young left off?

And if you haven’t, please read Blake Butler’s BE AN OPEN NODE post for some more thoughts that sort of go with what I’m thinking here.

So, to the essay. Give it a quick read, then come back and let’s talk. Also, you should know that I’m reading/responding to JS Tunotre’s essay honestly. I’m aware of its satirical qualities, its humor, etc, but I think Tunotre is describing a common perception about AWP, publishing, writing, and so on that I want to treat as a serious argument, despite his framing it in gamer’s language. We can also discuss how serious Tunotre is about this issue in the comments.

Okay, enough delay. My first question after you’ve read the essay is this: does Tunotre speak for you?

I am speaking here for all of us who still cannot walk into a room, a literary arena, without immediately seeing it as a complexly graded hierarchy, a scarcely disguised Hobbesian jungle, tyrannized over not by teeth and claws, but by their verbal equivalents.

Probably not, unless you are a robot, in which case you are probably small and round and vacuuming up all of the crap after everyone leaves town.

Or you are insanely intelligent, live alone in a garrett that you never leave, and write very long books, in which case you have no experience with crowds anyhow.

But seriously, does Tunotre speak for you? I’m curious to hear from people who think of AWP this way (or any other social interaction for that matter).

READ MORE >

Mean / 143 Comments
February 23rd, 2009 / 2:26 pm

Rumpus Love: Special Police-State Romp Edition

Hey it’s been a while since we spoke with Stephen Elliott about The Rumpus, the awesome online magazine he runs.  So I thought that this would be a good time for us to check back in and see what the site’s up to this week.

“Winston Smith is 39” by James Warner.

Winston Smith is 39.

And, rereading 1984 for perhaps the fifth time, so am I.

I notice now how conscious he is of being middle-aged. Orwell tells us early on that Winston has a varicose vein above his left ankle and has to take his time walking up seven flights of stairs. He has difficulty touching his toes when instructed to do so by the instructress on the telescreen.

A Long Interview with Bill Ayers.

What we thought fascism would look like was that it would have two faces: the face to black people was going to be increasing depression, increasing economic hardship, and the murder of Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. That’s what fascism looks like. That’s exactly what it looks like. Targeted assassinations. Terror against communities. I was in Detroit during the riots of Detroit, I was in Cleveland during the riots in Cleveland, I was in Chicago during the riots in Chicago. And what that looked like was fascism. They were lining up bodies in Cleveland like cordwood. It was disgusting.

The face of fascism in the white community would be conspiracy trials. What we envisioned for ourselves were endless trials, endless prison sentences, conspiracy indictments. And it was all happening. I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That’s what fascism was going to look like. That’s what it did look like.

Even Sugar, the advice columnist, gets in on the social meltdown action!

Dear Sugar,

How in the fuck am I going to survive the econopocalypse? Seriously. What’s your plan? Do you have a plan? What should my plan be? Holy. Fucking. Shit. I am so scared.

[She responds:]

[…]The long dream of American consumption is over. Gil Scott-Heron told us this would happen 25 years ago. Nobody listened. That’s our national specialty, it turns out. That and porn. You can count on the government to keep printing money – it’s what they do when the tea leaves read “busted” – but the real recovery program will be taken on by you, brother. Your personal economy is just about to wave bye-bye to the inefficiencies of abundance.

Speaking of porn,  one of the (relatively) more upbeat pieces currently on the site is this addition to The Rumpus Oral History Project, featuring porn performer Lorelei Lee.

Porn was an incredibly therapuetic thing for me. I got to go into rooms with people and experiment with being vulnerable in a place where I had no emotional responsibility. I went into work and people said, “What do you want to do today? What don’t you want to do today?” Nobody ever asked me that before in terms of sex. I could decide at any time that I never wanted to go back. I had to be there for four hours for the shoot and I got to deal with whatever the emotions were afterword on my own.

Not that everything in LL’s essay is sunshine and simultaneous orgasm, but it’s a fascinating insider’s take on an endlessly complicated subject. Also, fyi, the link to LL’s piece is SFW but several of the links from the piece are not.

Tough times call for tough heiresses.

Tough times call for tough heiresses.

Uncategorized / 3 Comments
February 23rd, 2009 / 1:13 pm

Fairy Tale Review Opens Submissions

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Fairy Tale Review wants your Little Red Hiding Hood-related submissions.

The Red Issue will be Fairy Tale Review’s sixth annual issue and, as the color suggests, will be as as devoted to Little Red Riding Hood as was dear Mr. Dickens. This is will be the journal’s first truly themed issue and we welcome your newest and brightest writing to it.

They’re reading submissions from Feb 15th to June 15th.

Read their call for submissions.

Uncategorized / 2 Comments
February 22nd, 2009 / 9:30 pm

NYT loves “Telephone,” the new play by Ariana Reines

What are those distant, garbled voices on the line? What is the significance of that wavery technological hum that bears an alarming resemblance to heavy breathing? In such moments it feels as if there’s nothing lonelier than being alone on a phone. Reach out and touch someone? Ha.

“Telephone,” the inspired and utterly original new tone poem of a play at the Cherry Lane Theater, probes such feelings with the sensitivity and detachment of a heart surgeon.

The play is an adaptation of Avital Ronnell’s The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, a critical theory text which, according to that same NYT critic, was “created at the height of Derrida-style deconstructionism and laid out (by the graphic designer Richard Eckersley) in the style of a Dadaist phone book… Under the direction of Ken Rus Schmoll, a cast of three and a sharp-eyed design team turn what might have come across as gobbledygook into a stylish and stimulating show.”

So cheers, Ariana, and to everyone in NYC, the show is playing at Cherry Lane Theatre through February 28th (even though there doesn’t seem to be anything written about it on CLT’s website) so catch it while you can.

MORE OF ARIANA REINES

The Cow which won Fence’s Alberta Prize, was published in 2006.

Coeur de Lion was published by mal-o-mar editions in 2008. I wrote about Coeur de Lion (and Katy Lederer’s The Heaven-Sent Leaf) in my FLAUNT magazine column (print only- it appeared in issue #100).

The Agriculture Reader #3, the magazine I co-edit, contains a new piece of prose by Ariana Reines.

Ariana Reines poems at Coconut Poetry.

The real deal. To the real deal's immediate right (photographer's left), wearing his signature green hoodie, basically not in the photograph, is yours truly. - Stain Bar, Brooklyn, 2008.

Author News / 14 Comments
February 22nd, 2009 / 5:52 pm