ToBS R1: talking shit about New Yorker while submitting frqntly to NYer vs. dream sequence w talking animals
[Matchup #18 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Let’s tie these together.
1. Don’t worry about it: your story/novel excerpt with the talking animal dream sequences is not going to get published in The New Yorker.
2. This might be why you have to talk shit about The New Yorker. You know you will never be published there.
3. This might be why you talk shit about God. You know he doesn’t exist.
4. But still, you submit.
5. But still, you pray.
6. Don’t worry about it: it’s okay not to know who you are. Every rejection will move you closer to some knowing. READ MORE >
14 mixed feelings on disliking cops
14. Got nervous reading out loud tonight. I know my voice trembled. I became aware of said fact, this trembling voice, and…and, and you know the cycle. Fuck. I felt low. I speak out loud FOR A LIVING. This happens about thrice a year. Any tips?
That painting will be sold for $25 million plus. Did you look at it or the “Christie’s employee” first? Just wondering. Just the posing of the “Christie’s employee” in this way to present the grotesque twisting of the self portrait should open some questions about art. Suddenly I sound like Jimmy Chen, but with much less eloquence.
14. The thing I see now is the poem written by two. Braided Creek is a book of poetry written by two. It is damn good:
Each time I go outside the worldis different. This has happenedall my life.*The sparrow is not busy,but hungry.
14. If the frame story narrator has no significant heart connection to the big story, the head-meat being told, remove the frame. My opinion. I am talking technique now. The frame should be very, very necessary.
A Few Words about the New Yorker
The New Yorker has the same giant bullseye on it that anything that has risen to the level of cultural significance will. It sits at the top of the news chain alongside the New York Times, but its volleys are more focused because it doesn’t publish every day, and instead of shotgunning hundreds of stories a week into the world, it offers four or five high caliber rifle shots. The day a new issue comes out, you’ll hear one or three of the major stories as a headline on NPR or CNN or the networks or even ESPN (the magazine has lately been taking aim at the violence football does to the bodies and minds of those who play.) Also, the numbers: It has the broadest circulation of the few remaining smart people magazines, and because it is the most prestigious magazine in the world and one of the best paying, it can have its pick of writers. It serves, therefore, not just as a mirror to American culture (albeit from a usually-lofty and Eastern vantage point), but also as an influential shaper of American culture. Among its readers are the some of the most powerful among us, and, like it or not, power gets to do the greater share of the shaping. The New Yorker has the ear of some of the shapers.
I stopped subscribing to the New Yorker for three reasons. First, it’s expensive. READ MORE >
Blake Butler—
Deborah Treisman responds to Qs about the New Yorker 20 Under 40 list via live chat. Heheh: “DEBORAH TREISMAN: I have a degree in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. I don’t think there’s only one kind of university at which aspiring writers can get an education. There’s an enormous range of educational opportunity out there.”
New Yorker’s 20 under 40 Revealed
The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list has been revealed:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32; Chris Adrian, 39; Daniel Alarcón, 33; David Bezmozgis, 37; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38; Joshua Ferris, 35; Jonathan Safran Foer, 33; Nell Freudenberger, 35; Rivka Galchen, 34; Nicole Krauss, 35; Yiyun Li, 37; Dinaw Mengestu, 31; Philipp Meyer, 36; C. E. Morgan, 33; Téa Obreht, 24; Z Z Packer, 37; Karen Russell, 28; Salvatore Scibona, 35; Gary Shteyngart, 37; and Wells Tower, 37.
Winners of our picks contest to come. What do you think of the list?
The HTMLGIANT 20 Under 40 Pick ‘Em Contest
Last week The New York Observer reported that on June 7th The New Yorker will name the top twenty American writers under forty, and we’d like to celebrate this really incredibly important event in the history of American letters by running a free March Madness-style Pick ‘Em contest for you HTMLGIANT readers. If you’d like to enter, all you have to do is email to htmlgiant [at] htmlgiant [dot] com your list of the twenty authors you think The New Yorker will select as “the key writers of this generation.” Then we all wait with baited breath until The New Yorker publishes their list! The top three entrants who have the most picks that correctly match the names on The New Yorker list will each receive a prize package. Should you wish to pay an ‘entry fee,’ please consider making a donation to any of the presses/publishers/people who have put up swag for the prize package; however, there is no requirement for an entry fee.
Details after the jump.
Adam Robinson—
I subscribe to the New Yorker, but I rarely read the poems in it very closely. And I have no intention of submitting my poems to them. But I don’t want them to stop publishing poetry. Why? This article in the NY Review of Magazines talks about that, and more. Who knew the NYer put out 29,000,000 pages of poetry every year?
A. Pope, Tao Lin, and HTML Giant walk into a bar…
This past week, there have been several blogs (plus the mention in the New Yorker) about Tao Lin and the reviews lodged for and against him. To be fair, I haven’t read much of Tao’s work, but I am entrenched in the pure spectacle of “Tao Lin.” Mostly out of boredom but partly because I can’t get away from it, even if I wanted to.
But consider this, in his Author’s Preface, Alexander Pope argues, “Poetry and criticism [are] by no means the universal concern of the world, but only the affair of idle men who write in their closets, and of idle men who read there.” So I’m back to the question of boredom. Why do we care who says what about Tao? And here, just look back at the comment streams about Tao. People seem to do more than simply “care.” They’re invested! I barely have time to care about the reviews written about my friends, much less any other contemporary. I have no desire to be an idle man writing in my closet, nor an idle man reading there.
It doesn’t matter much to me whether or not Tao (or any other writer, for that matter) cultivates this particular brand of hype. My concern has to do with the unabashed responses that indicate how very right Pope is. Even this post reinforces Pope’s argument that I’m simply an idle man—or woman in this case—reading in a closet.
Nick Antosca—
Macy Halford at The New Yorker Book Bench blog rips off (oh, okay, perhaps we’re talking parallel development here, as they say in the movie business) HTMLGIANT’s Haut or Not feature in a new thing called The Subconscious Bookshelf. In fairness, the Book Bench feature seems more oriented toward analysis, while HTMLGIANT was just plain old judging you. Anyway, I think HTMLGIANT readers (and contributors) should submit to The Subconscious Bookshelf…could be very interesting. What are you waiting for?
BEST MOVIES OF THE DECADE (THE NEW YORKER’S AND MINE)
Dale Peck as a child
And here’s Denby’s list of the best movies of the decade. The only ones that I really love are There Will Be Blood and Caché (even if it’s probably in my top 20 rather than top 10). He also includes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which I had extreme difficulty sitting through. I don’t care if the movie is about a guy who’s lost the use of his body and can’t even really open his eyes. I don’t want to spend the first twenty minutes looking at a lens smeared with Vaseline.
My list, which you should feel free to dismember, is after the jump.
READ MORE >
HTML GIANT MARKETING CAMPAIGN
In effort to increase unique daily visitors (and I’m not talking about in-call escort services), HTML GIANT will be employing tactics used by the following masters of marketing. It is our hope to usurp these kings of literature/publishing.
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[To do list]: Become vegan, get ‘severely depressed,’ attract ‘emotionally traumatized’ ‘females’ to make t-shirts and short ‘films,’ strive towards a ‘detached yet ultimately life-affirming’ philosophy, decrease pain and suffering, change font to ‘helvetica.’
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[To do list]: Use exclamation points to convey enthusiasm! Sometimes three!!! And fragmented sentences. Like this. Use quirky/informal language to describe institutional matters: “we really like the internet, we even use our server as a lunch table, and we spilled fanta on it.”
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[To do list]: Help shape Malcolm Gladwell’s fro, send writers to France or the Middle East, advertise Prada and Chevron on the back cover, incinerate slush-pile daily, publish anal instead of annal, insert subscription postcards every other page.
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[To do list]: Google ourselves every day hoping to be mentioned on some blog.
MEAN MONDAY: Aggressive Suitor
Got a special email last night from some dude, titled ‘Yeah, you.’ Uh oh.
Here’s what it had to say:
What’s up with your dead dick website? The motherfucker is cut-off on the left. Were you cum drunk when you designed it? Anyway dildo breath, here it is with your fake ass tough talk; What the piss is the pay for publication in your magazine? Most lit mags list it, why should I need to contact you about it? List it, Goddamn it! Do it NOW!! I write stories that make Hemingway, Fitzgerald and others of their ilk look like candy asses, suckling at their momma’s tit. I don’t have time to be coddling dirt dumb editors who can’t even layout a guidelines page – wake the fuck up!!
Christopher Roberts
I was able to find one online piece of work by Christopher Roberts, who writes stories that make Hemingway, Fitzgerald and others of their ilk look like candy asses, which is an an essay criticizing the closed-mindedness of the New Yorker (ironically at 3:AM Magazine). Bone crushing.
I’m not sure which way I offended Mr. Roberts, as I haven’t been able to link him to any of the journals I criticized the design of during Mean Week.
I did find him stickin’ it to the man from the inside on some writer’s publicity group called writers.net. Here’s his profile:
Chris Roberts
Agent: Writers net sucks
Brooklyn, New York, United StatesEmail: croberts7@nyc.rr.com
I live to run Writers net out of business – it’s run by a bunch of blowjobs.
Interests: Serial Killing.
Published writer: Yes
Freelance: No
Salivatory.
Anyway, to answer your question, dude, you must not have paid close enough attention to the ‘guidelines’ on our site (I assume you are talking about No Colony, though I’m not quite sure how websites can be ‘cut off on the left,’ does your monitor load backwards?) but let me point you to this thing right here on the front page:
We accept cash, credit, money orders, New Yorker subscriptions, and some forms of primitive coin or manual stimulation.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m on my way back to quivering in the vast throes of impending serial-killer-narrative innovation.
Good luck!
A JPEG PAINTS 1000 WORDS
The photos which accompany Pequin’s stories are always stunning, and as much as I advocate the breadth of words, I think they augment the stories.
Steven Coy (editor) has explicitly cited Lee Klein’s eyeshot for the image per text inspiration, the latter whom understandably didn’t cite New Yorker for having always done the same. In the New Yorker, the pairing of image and story seems conceptually unconscious. (I’m sure the politics of publishing both story and image takes precedence over any editorial ideology, if any, concerning the pairing.)
Eyeshot’s photos are quirky and playful, but they are somewhat detached from the story itself, and celebrated more for their inherent attributes. Coy is onto something different here. The photos at Pequin act as a kind of surrogate or residual ‘scene’ for/from the story; either that, or as a clever visual pun.
For example: Dream Date, about a not-so-great boyfriend and his girlfriend’s unmet needs, is accompanied by a scene looking down a pink stairwell into a dark hallway, a composition which shares the orientation of a woman’s spread legs. There’s even a light bulb (anatomically consistent) which supposes a clitoris.
In Animal Parade, a story about the mishaps of taking a wrong exit on the freeway, the image is of freeway periphery (cinderblock walls, telephone polls, fastfood signs, etc.). The photo has a way of snapping into POV function, embodying the view of characters in the story.
Per Pequin’s writer’s guidelines, stories are to be under 1000 words (ideally exactly 1000 words). Coy seems hell-bent on toying with the whole ‘picture paints a thousand words’ thing. Good for him, and good for us.
Uncategorized / 3 Comments
October 2nd, 2008 / 3:40 pm
October 2nd, 2008 / 3:40 pm
