[Matchup #27 in Tournament of Bookshit]

I don’t know.

I’ve never had a blog.

I haven’t been on Facebook in almost a year.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this, what the fuck “Trolling for spelling errors in your blog vs. changing your Facebook profile pic daily” means.

This would be so much easier if I’d been given something easy, like:

Jimmy Chen vs. every woman on HTMLGIANT.

Or HTMLGIANT 2009 vs. HTMLGIANT 2011.

Or being Matt Bell vs. not being Matt Bell.

Or telling Blake no vs. telling him yes.

(Is it possible for the gender with the vagina to tell Blake Butler no?)

Fuck Blake Butler. Fuck HTMLGIANT. Fuck “mean week.”

That’s what I should have said.

But being the hungry-for-attention person/writer/gender with a vagina I am, I said yes. I thought spitting out a couple hundred words would be easy.

(I was thinking something along the lines of the former (trolling for spelling errors in your blog) being a solitary act, the neuroses of which can only be known by the perpetrator (boring!) vs. the latter (changing your Facebook pic daily) being something we can all witness and make fun of and enjoy (interesting!).)

Instead I spent a week avoiding any sort of “real work” on the collection I was supposed to have finished December 1^st, choosing to fixate instead on the 200-500 words I would write for mean week.  So typical.

At one point during this week I was out having drinks with other writers (because I don’t know any real people), one of whom was Sean Kilpatrick (big name drop! This is like a blog post mentioning Tao Lin and Megan Boyle except for the fact that no one gives a fuck or two shits about either Sean or me so it’s not like that at all. Also, Sean and I aren’t married, or even separated, and as far as I can remember, have never done drugs together or gone to Target together or made smoothies.).

Anyway, someone (probably me) mentioned HTMLGIANT and Sean said something about being asked to write something for mean week and I said me too and for a few seconds we were both really excited, hoping one of us could help the other understand what it is we were supposed to write but then neither of us knew so it didn’t help at all.

I’ve since asked Sean to send me what he wrote, but he’s been avoiding my emails. Maybe he’s worried I’ll copy his fucked up, babies-aborting-other-babies’-babies style of writing? I wish I could.

I considered emailing Jereme Dean for help.

Mostly I wanted to know where the fuck this guy has been.

Why he no longer comments on HTMLGIANT.

(I barely know any of the commenters anymore. Who the fuck, for instance, is DeadGod? It’s so much less fun when people don’t use their real names. Or their real fake names, at least. Or whatever.)

I miss Jereme.

Wait. Where was I?

Maybe this should be about giving a shit what people think about you vs. not giving a shit.  (Jereme seems like he doesn’t give a shit. I should try to be more like Jereme.)

Or whether the Internet makes people neurotic or merely caters to neurotic people. (Probably I should find a way to make this all about me:)

Admission: any time I make a comment on HTMLGIANT, I do so and then quickly get offline. I never look back to see if anyone said something in response to me or “liked” my comment or whatever. (I will not look at HTMLGIANT during mean week.) (Which seems to make no sense. Why the compulsion to say anything? I have no idea.)

I think mostly what this is about, is whether you’re the type of person who writes something on the Internet and feels secure/smug/confident or the type who is immediately racked with regret and self-doubt and self-loathing. Such as I am now. (Well, maybe not self-loathing. That’s probably going too far/being overly dramatic. But self-doubt and regret definitely.)

But there is that compulsion to say something. (Dare I say?) to say anything.

So let’s say this is about compulsion and name compulsion the winner so we (read: I) can be done thinking about this and think about something else. (Like Sean Kilpatrick and why he’s such a dickhead and won’t show me his writing and do drugs with me. Fuck you, Sean. )

I miss Jereme.

- Elizabeth Ellen

- – -

[Ed. note: Since this judge didn't explicitly make a selection, I briefly considered entering Elizabeth Ellen as the winner and having her represent there forward, but then realized she would automatically dominate any pair up on principle alone, therefore, EE is the unofficial winner of ToBS. After that, I flipped a coin.]

WINNER:  trolling for spelling errors in blog posts

While we’re on the recommendation circuit, let me recommend Elizabeth Ellen’s brilliant essay “Stalking Dave Eggers” in the latest issue of Bookslut. It’s funny, sad, thoughtful, full of amazing parenthetical asides, wide-ranging in a clever way and honest in the best of ways. Click if you want to read about how we live in the age of clicking.

I wish I had met Elizabeth at AWP. I think I spoke to her once, but I never found the courage to introduce myself. I don’t really have a rational explanation for my being timid, and I realize how silly of me it was to worry about that sort of thing. I think, though, it had to do with my feeling awe, maybe, in her presence. Elizabeth Ellen’s was one of the first names I remember seeing everywhere when I began to discover that writers had made their way onto the internet.

So it makes me really happy to post Elizabeth Ellen’s word space/essay for you.

___________________

When I’m working on my novel, which I’m supposed to be doing two hours every morning, I write at the desk in my bedroom (photo 1). The novel’s a fictionalized account of the two years my daughter and I spent in a shitty little apartment in a small town in Michigan after my divorce so there are photos of us from that time along with some of Skeet Ulrich (photo 2) who’s sort of the visual inspiration for the 17 year old neighbor Elvis in the novel (originally I had photos of Milo Ventimiglia up because my daughter and I were watching a lot of Gilmore Girls a year ago but then I realized Elvis was more the football playing type and (no offense, Milo) Milo just didn’t seem like the type to throw a football). I keep these books (photo 3) on my desk because they’re the ones I’ve read more times than any other and when I’m stuck in my writing I open one of them and read a little and hope for inspiration, though usually I just end up sprawled out on my bed reading, so maybe they only really help with procrastinating and making me realize that by comparison my writing is shit and I’ll probably never write a decent novel, but, whatever. I still like having them there.

Occasionally, when I can’t work at home, I drive across town to this little strip mall parking lot and sit there and write in my car (photo 4). I got this idea from one of my favorite films, American Movie. The guy in the movie parks at the airport to write when he’s stuck on one of his screenplays. It seems to work. One time when I was writing in my car a dude in a security car pulled up to ask me what I was doing and I had to explain I was writing and then what I was writing because he still didn’t seem to get it. I’m not sure what he thought I was doing in my car at ten in the morning. I should have asked because I’ve been curious ever since. I’m worried about this strip mall. There used to be a Hollywood video and a Chinese restaurant and some other shops and now the only thing still open is an Asian grocery store. I’m not really sure what happens to strip malls after they die but I guess I’ll find out soon.

The other desk (photo 5) I work at is a built in off the kitchen and usually when I’m working here it’s on stories on my laptop or I’m editing stories for Hobart or emailing people or whatever. There’s a corkboard wall here and I’ve filled it with pictures and quotes over the last couple years. One of them (photo 6) is a quote from Henry Miller on his watercolor painting hobby sent to me by my good friend Jeff Parker. Another, probably my favorite quote, is from Bukowski (photo 7). It’s actually a poem he wrote in response to someone asking him what he would tell his students if he taught creative writing and the first line is “I’d tell them to have an unhappy love affair.” And it ends the same way, “have another unhappy love affair.” And right next to that is a quote from Rose McGowan on how she always stays too long in a relationship, which for some reason I think is kind of funny (the fact that I thought enough of the quote at the time to hang it up, I mean, not that she stays too long in relationships, though, yeah, that too.).  Finally, I have a postcard of Louis Bromfield (photo eight) who is a writer from my hometown Mansfield, Ohio. He won a Pulitzer in 1927 and lived in France and was part of the whole “Lost Generation” scene with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Stein for ten years and then returned to Mansfield to farm and write books on farming and now he’s virtually forgotten. But whenever I go home I go to his house, Malabar Farm, and take the tour. He had a lot of boxers and you can still see where they scratched up all the doors.

_____________________

Thanks, Elizabeth, for this. Everyone, thanks for reading. Please check out Elizabeth’s stories/poems if you haven’t already, maybe order a book?

I’ve written about her before, but frankly, I could write about her every week. Check out her website for all thing Elizabeth Ellen, including contributions to A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness (Rose Metal Press and a forthcoming chapbook with Paper Hero Press. Here are some power quotes from the woman who was largely responsible for my change in opinion of “online writing”:

From an interview in 3am magazine (linked here):

As for getting noticed…I don’t know. You can always try to be controversial, I guess. That’s certainly one way of getting noticed. Initiate a public feud. Be a dick. Write about it on your blog. That sort of thing. Other than that, I’d say just keep doing what you’re doing. This is going to sound like total, lameass bullshit, but I swear it’s true: I enjoy writing. I love it. I get off on it. I don’t do it to be in a particular magazine or to get a particular publisher’s notice. Not that I wouldn’t be stoked to be in The Paris Review or Tin House or with a major publisher. Of course I would. That’d be awesome. It’s just not something I think about on a daily or weekly basis.

Here’s another quote from the 3am interview that I love:

Maybe I should rely more on my imagination, but something compels me to write about the truth, or the truth as I know it. Laziness, perhaps.

And here’s an excerpt from “Breathing Lessons” found in her collection, Before You She Was A Pitbull (Future Tense Books, linked here):

Only after I felt him inch his way inside me did he release his grip on my hands. He let go and they remained where they’d fallen on either side of my head. His hand moved then to my neck, encircling it first gently with his fingertips before closing completely around it. My back arched, offering up more of my neck to his hand, as though I was familiar with this technique, as though I knew what I was doing. I didn’t.

Being sort of old school and timid of new things, I didn’t realize that the internet indie lit scene rocked until I read Elizabeth Ellen. Fucking A.   I didn’t even know who Barry Graham was until I read everything that Elizabeth Ellen has ever published and everyone knows how important Barry is to me.  The clarity of  emotion! The  rawness! Her boobs! I worship her. She makes me a better writer just by having read her stories. And poems. Read her story on Dogzplot right now and tell me that it isn’t one of the bravest, twisted things of beauty that you’ve read. I also like that she’s got a tween, like me and Barry.  I like everything about her and I don’t know her at all!  You can read about her life story though at Michael Kimball’s “write your life story on a postcard” thingy. But really, buy her chapbook, Before You She Was a Pittbull. Then, hang out all day on her author website, clicking away at all of the links. I think she needs to update her website, though, and I would offer to help her with that because I love her so much.