look around you. is there a cat? are you experiencing existential problems? are you currently refreshing your network browser to see if that other disembodied internet person has furthered the argument about what surrealism is? do you read the believer? did you just laugh at a story on mc sweeneys about what it would be like if franz kafka had a little league team? do your poems suck really hard? and are you a pretentious asswipe? well then my friend, you are an internet writer. wait now, hold on, put those really skinny arms down, i’m not looking to fight it out with someone who experiences depression on so grand a scale as yourself. no doubt you’ve had it bad. but seriously, fuck you. you are passive, halfway philosophical, you write the same fucking autobiographical stories using the same contrived depression and angst and i could beat your fucking ass in a heartbeat. that’s right, i’m not even going to continue intellectually. i could kick all of your asses. so close your macbook pro (and stop ripping on whoever, most likely dave eggers or john updike because i am sure they are weeping onto their keyboards and listening to bright eyes, cursing that “writerdude78” just called them a “sellout”) and email me your address so i can come to your house and beat your skull in with my hand. i know this will alienate me further since like, or something, like physical violence is existentially fucked and like, you just want to write poems about being a pussy, and you can’t get hard anymore and you’re too busy defending someone else on their blog from a random commenter, like it even matters, but seriously, there is not one writer on the internet, with the exception of barry graham, who looks like he might be able to kick my ass, who i can’t fuck up. i hate everyone. the very idea of mean week is because you’re all pussies. fuck you. suck my cock. stop being a neurotic pussy and write something that makes you want to throw up when you read it.
all internet writers are fucking pussies and i could kick all of their asses
Brave souls submit
Severely rigid writer’s guidelines seem only to serve editorial anal-retentive impulses, which I sadly sometimes feel may be driving certain journals to begin with.
I often go to a submissions page and have to tread through 8 or so dense paragraphs of (ironically, often inefficiently written) prose about typing my last name after the word ‘submission’ followed immediately with two forward slashes and then the word count. Are they suggesting that failure to be so explicit will preclude their ability to just read the story? And what is it about including mailing address for online journals? Unless there’s some distant prospect of a printed anthology (at which point many addresses will have changed), the entire medium is exclusively virtual. Do these editors want to see if you live in a culturally viable city like New York? If so, just say so. The street number doesn’t help.
Cover letters are absurd. Writers are not ‘allowed’ to describe their story, thus left in the awkward position of either fawning over the journal, or trying to sell themselves with a list of past publications. This crap is completely useless. Just read the fucking story.
I understand that writers can be disorganized, and these editors are describing an ideal process of what can be a logistical headache, but please, try to be more intuitive and agile here. In the magic of email, the sender’s name is cited along with the email. Is it not possible to simply associate a story as originating from a particular email, one which includes the writer’s name? It just seems that if an editor is serious about publishing a story, he or she will somehow ‘figure it out,’ and if they don’t want to publish a piece, then it’s irrelevant anyways.
Perhaps more irritating is when editors ‘go off’ (usually for three paragraphs) on—not merely what they are looking for in a story, but—the moral ethics of what makes good writing in the most absolute and abstract sense. They say things like, “describe it, don’t say it.” I’ll fucking say it if I want to. I’m the writer here, you’re the editor. It’s my job to write, and your job to reject or accept it. It’s not your job to preach to a voiceless public about how to write.
For every editor, there are about 200 writers. By statistical default, editors have ‘the power.’ They should be nice, and publish what they like, and reject what they don’t. If their egos are still hungry, write them a story about a sandwich. Wait, Bukowski did that already…
October 13th, 2008 / 2:10 pm
The Inclusion of ME
In the comments of an earlier post today, Justin Taylor referred to the concept of people commenting over and getting upset about things in relation to ‘the inclusion of ME,’ which he is dead-on right, is often a big reason anyone whines about anything in writing. Writers, by nature, are often a very self-obsessed and self-aware bunch (‘Oh cool, nice on your story coming out, I have one coming out too…’) and probably somewhat in many cases by sheer means of survival, in that it’s such a slim game already. But I also think that this phenomenon, while perhaps at least in some way bent in their own mind to keep them afloat, is not only often troublesome and awkward, but part of the reason why in the end many writers give up.
There’s no argument that to get work published over time, no matter who you are, really, (unless you’re like Salman Rushdie’s son) takes a hell of a struggle. There are a limited number of venues out there and definitely limitless folks with things they want to say, so the idea that someone should get upset or angry about receiving, say, a form rejection letter ignoring their work (no matter what the reasons they feel this happened are) is ludicrous. Sure, it stings some, but in the end, we’re really all just people in the same boat and things happen for a reason. It’s an achingly cringe-worthy thing when people take it as a personal affront, or believe there is a conspiracy against them wherein the editors only publish their friends (which, yeah, definitely happens, and probably a lot, but there are reasons for this, which I will head into after the jump…)
when criticism is actually critical we call it MEAN
I wish I could tell you how many people–editors, event hosts, other writers–have approached me privately, strictly off-the-record, and complained about how much they disliked Valzhyna Mort’s Factory of Tears. But nobody wants to be the one to call Franz Wright and his Pulitzer out on their bullshit, much less risk ruffling the feathers of her otherwise highly venerable and respectable publisher, Copper Canyon. (Note: those are non-ironic assessments of CC. They publish Ben Lerner, Erin Belieu, and all sorts of other writers I love.)
Anyway, The Poets&Writers May/June covergirl has, as near as I can tell, racked up exactly ONE critical review. It was written by yours truly, for Coldfront magazine in April. I think Mean Week is a good time for everyone to revisit my work and tell me how brave I am.
October 13th, 2008 / 12:19 pm
Narrative Magazine is edited by George W. Bush
It seems a lot harder for an online literary journal to be smarmy in the way of Zoetrope: All Story: since it’s the web, usually there’s a bit more wide of a perspective, and you tend to get a better grab bag of unusual work.
Narrative Magazine is near the top of my list of online journals that feel like they are edited by George W. Bush.
First off, you have to ‘join’ the site so you can even read the posts. It’s a free website, but in order to have ‘backstage access’ (is this Guns N Roses?) you have to sign up and let them spam you, which honestly is probably too much hassle for a lot of people. Geesh.
Moreso, though, it’s the content. Right now on the site they are featuring a story by Kate Chopin…
Yes, that Kate Chopin, and no I am not kidding. I mean, in case you didn’t feel claustrophobic enough reading the Awakening in high school, they figured they should give you a chance to catch up with the new new shit. MMM.
For the most part, also, Narrative is known as a place where ‘slush pile’ is a thing that curdles in the whey.
Which is weird, considering their TWENTY DOLLAR SUBMISSION FEE, which I will discuss more after the jump.
October 13th, 2008 / 1:37 am
Against HTML, Giants, and HTMLGiant
The following essay was written last Friday in preperation for Mean Week. Had its author known Blake Butthair would have employed similar rhetoric, he would have posted this earlier.
1. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, which is a euphemism for ‘gay ass effects for little bitches.’ Most common examples of ‘text markup’ are bold and italics. Whoever wrote it had some major issues, this thing for reciprocity. Every ‘tag’ needs to be closed by an ‘end-tag,’ for example:
<head>
<title>I’m a little geek bitch</title>
</head>
HTML is also homosexual, for example:
<head>
<title>I swallow cum</title>
</head>
2. GIANTS are severely retarded people with gross birth defects. Popular culture tries to render giants who are either likable (Sun Ming Ming) or martyrs (Gulliver, relative scale). Anthropologically speaking, Giants represent the first stages of human devolution. Darwinian theory is as follows (paraphrased for you goddamn plebeians): the more you can survive this hell on earth, the more you can fuck as many people you can, the more kids you’ll have who share your genetic disposition, and the more they can continue suffering and fucking. My point is: don’t fuck giants.
3. HTMLGIANT is the brain (however dense) child of Blake Butler and Gene Morgan, who are both addicted to the internet and their daily attempts to excavate the hard white bumps found on the underside of their penile shafts (which, incidentally, implicates quite well that their conditions were exchanged mutually). All of the contributing writers suffer from some sort of Excavation Fetish:
–Kendra Malone’s nightly refrigerator ‘dairy’ raids (I can’t believe it’s butter).
–Shane Jones’ public library poetry section “ejaculatory duct exodus” (to quote the librarian).
–Matthew Simmons’ nearly fatal nose picks, in which he searches for a clue.
–Justin Taylor’s quarterly Zoetrope rejection letter tear-duct hemorrhaging.
–Josh Maday’s silent-yet-strong (cough, gay) soul, spurted onto his mirror like some over ripe human-sized zit.
–Ryan Call’s eyelash plucking bonanza, in his attempt to render his face even more difficult to look at.
–Mike Young’s ‘dry yet emotional acoustic song’ plopping out of his guitar hole and mouth.
–Last and least, Sam Pink’s annual anal-outcome, in which all the shit that’s been crammed up there by his teenage blogger friends finally leaks out, surely the year’s most translucent and anti-climactic creampie.
And as for you, dear reader. Holy. Fuck.
Everyone That Writes for This Site is Shit
Hi. It’s Mean Week. We are going to be mean to people. We are going to say things. We’re just being honest, and really we’re all a bunch of pieces of shit. We couldn’t write our way out of a paper bag (see, I can’t even make it a few sentences without cliche).. Here’s more reasons why we suck behind the jump:
MEAN WEEK: ‘The Editor/Multi-Book/Duh Named Effect’
I like new journals. I like journals with their own aesthetic and who invent themselves primarily because they want to put words in the world: words that likely would not have found a way to get read if that journal hadn’t existed. There can never be too many high quality journals. A node is a node.
Though not all new journals, or even existing things, seem bent for these reasons. It seems semi-frequent, and perhaps most pointed to the world of poetry publishing, where you see a tendency to publish well-known names and no one else. Scanning the contributor notes of certain journals you can often see what I now will call the EDITOR / MULTI-BOOK / DUH NAMED EFFECT.
When this effect is applied, it means the journal has been infected wherein all the words published in their particular nook are 90-100% consisting of writers who are themselves the editor of a journal, who already have one or several full length books out at indie presses, or are a combo of both, being a name that literally most everybody in the publishing world is already very familiar with. They don’t both with searching for new voices, with including some people as yet unexposed who can then be read as others can to the journal seeking the ‘bigger names,’ no, everyone in the journal is someone who likely would have little to no trouble getting their work in almost any existing poetry journal already out there.
So then the question is: Why do you exist?
Fresh Literary Magazine Reviews at NewPages
It’s that time again, kids. New literary magazine reviews are filleting eyelids at NewPages. You’ll find reviews of many fine lit mags. I am glad to see that the online venues are reviewed with the print mags, instead of at the bottom of the page. Also, leading off this batch is a review of Abyss & Apex, an online quarterly focusing on speculative fiction and poetry. (Is there such a thing as speculative non-fiction? Would that be science? Philosophy? I’d like to see some slipstream personal essays and such.) Anyway, these magazines are reviewed:
Abyss & Apex :: Arsenic Lobster :: The Colorado Review :: Cutbank :: The Deronda Review :: Dirty Goat :: Fulcrum :: Hanging Loose :: Juked :: The Louisville Review :: Monkey Bicycle :: Ninth Letter :: Paterson Literary Review :: Upstreet
And don’t forget the latest book reviews, too, if you haven’t gotten to them since Blake mentioned those. Good stuff all over the place.
One of my aims with this post was the shameless overuse of the word “review”.
Is it technically Mean Week today? This is a pretty nice post.
Well, that’s too bad. Fuck off.
October 12th, 2008 / 5:12 pm
The Sunnyoutside Expanding Empire
One small press I don’t hear much about but is very very good is Sunnyoutside, run by David McNamara in Buffalo, New York. David does an amazing job – producing beautiful little chapbooks from writers you may haven’t heard of.
Recently, David’s been doing paperbacks, which he plans to do more of in 2009. For next year, in paperback, we can expect books from: Tim Horvath, Nathan Graziano, William Taylor Jr., Chelsea Martin, Curtis Smith, Brian McGettrick, and Rebecca Schumejda. Also, a plan to get solid distribution to get more of these great books in people’s hands.
David keeps everyone up-to-date on Sunnyoutside happenings at the website.