Elimae for October
There is a new issue of Elimae up for October, and it is pretty huge and sexy.
It has work from people I know like Stacy Kidd, Kim Chinquee, Angela Woodward, Brandon Gorrell, Mike Topp, Forrest Roth, Kyle Minor, Brian Beatty (no mean week posts yet on Beatty, for or against, I need to make some assignments?), Sean Patrick Hill, Ravi Mangla, Ben Segal, J.A. Tyler (aka the exploder, how does he do it?), Noah Falck, and Jamie Iredell (Atlanta represent).
There are also a lot of others I don’t recognize the names of, which is great.
I like how elimae’s size varies each month depending on how much stuff Cooper got that he liked. There is no size limitations, the issue does not ‘fill up’ and there’s no ‘good work gets turned down.’
Elimae is a role model like my dad except I think Elimae sometimes smokes pot, and it probably goes with hookers.
Elimae is a great example of minimalist design making the language look really good, there is just something clean about it, despite the hookers.
Read em up.
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October 15th, 2008 / 2:18 pm
October 15th, 2008 / 2:18 pm
Fiction Workshops Examined
I don’t know what the secret of success is for writers, but I doubt it has anything to do with writing workshops. To be blunt (and it is Mean Week), it seems like you’re just paying strangers to take mild interest in your work. This might even be the case with an MFA in writing—who knows; I work full-time at an office and publish mere ‘flash’ online, so that tells you how much I know.
I google imaged “fiction workshop” and have written about some photos I’ve found.
I. NOT ENOUGH CHAIRS
Maybe they’re gearing us up for a life of the ‘starving artist,’ or maybe it’s some Hindu thing. All I know is, any more pressure on that women’s coccyx and she’s gonna accidentally CTRL-A and hit backspace. There goes two weeks of writing lady. Life is unfair, you should hit the save button more often.
II. IN A HURRY TO LEAVE
The guy’s already zipped up this bag. Shawl women in the middle is looking at for the nearest fire escape. Ms. Happy on the right can’t believe it’s already :57. They are thinking “I’m down 300 dollars and my ego is still a wet fish flopping over the barren plateau of my non-existent career.” Either that, or we got some major bladder issues.
III. UNHAPPY BLACK PEOPLE
If art is indeed a microcosm of society, then, as usual, the black people are pissed—and for good reason. I imagine they just got through reading five stories about boyfriends and living in apartments and trouble with granny or a weekend in Cape Cod that turned out colder than one thought. Tiesha (let’s call her that) works two jobs at KFC and Carl’s Jr., and she’s not in the fucking mood to hear white bitches moan about a blowjob gone bad.
IV. JUDGMENTAL BODY LANGUAGE
If you are a writer, deep down inside you think this: “My stories are better than this asswhipe over here. What kind of self-involved baby writes in the first-person anyways?” Graciousness is a myth; we are all resentful at attention directed at someone else; like every time Blake gets into another journal (which is every other day), I say ‘fuck him, I hope he cuts his cornea with the table of contents.’
V. WOMAN LIKE TO BE OUTSIDE
I’m not one for creating gender stereotypes, but seriously, women think fiction is better outside for some reason. It must have been E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India that started this fascination with abandoning one’s domestic prison and going outside into the sand swept wind. Of course, take away their sunglasses, suntan lotion, sunhats, and folding chairs and they’d be fucked. They’d come back into the foyer looking like Bukowski’s nose, or worse, Joan Didion’s face. (Be nice now, it’s mean week.)
John Gardner Bitch Slap
I planned to keep quiet about this, maybe ignore it until some other posts pushed it into the archives, but after a few days, I still couldn’t stop worrying about it. Also, I knew Blake Butler wouldn’t leave me alone until I said something mean for Mean Week, so here’s a shot.
Recently, this guy talked some clever shit in the comments section on my post about new poetry journal Rooms Outlast Us. He said something like how HTMLGIANT and the people who write for it have some moral obligation to keep an eye on small presses so that all those struggling poets out there are treated fairly. He said:
The people who publish Rooms Outlast Us might be righteous people but the chapbook contest they are running is bad karma and hopefully until they change their guidelines no one will send manuscripts for possible publication. A twentry dollar entry fee for essentially nothing is way bad and everyone who enters should feel like they’ve been screwed under the current guidelines. At the very least they should give everyone who enters a one year subscription to their ‘zine. The winner should at least get a token 100 or 200 dollar prize for winning. Otherwise it ain’t legit. And is a waste of everyone’s hard earned money.
After I suggested he email them to ask for specifics and reasons behind the contest guidelines, he lamed out:
It would be nice if they listened to little-old-nobody me. I like to think others are in agreement with me. I mean, they have a 200 copy print run. If you are the winner unless you are shane jones, blake butler, tao lin or one of the other superstars of indie lit it’s not likely you are going to sell that many. In the meantime, the losers who are footing the bill for the winner’s chapbook (and maybe a few Happy meals for the publishers) are getting nothing for their selfless contribution. And being HTML GIANT is now the hub of indie lit info they should feel slightly obliged (morally) to post about it. I mean, as nice as posts with tits in it are nice to have lets counterbalance that with helping out less knowledgable writers and holding small presses accountable for questionable practices that are a miniscule cut above vanity presses.
Now, I’m sure Christopher Robbins is a nice guy. He knows his stuff. He’s linked his blog to lots of indie lit ‘superstars,’ which is step one to becoming famous, I think. He drinks beer and has a goatee. He’s down with other people’s poetry. And he kind of looks like Tom Green, which is awesome. Seriously. I am being serious here. And I hope he doesn’t want to murder me after this, because, really, I don’t feel personal hatred towards him. I don’t even know who he is?
But, on this whole matter, I have to respectfully say that he’s full of shit.
Here’s why:
Uncategorized / 64 Comments
October 15th, 2008 / 1:30 am
October 15th, 2008 / 1:30 am
How Not To Design an Online Lit Mag
It’s not hard to design a nice website. Even if you know dick-all about HTML or builders, it’s pretty easy to find someone who does, and pretty easy to build a minimal site, or a weird and compelling on, that compliments the words. With all the crap against lit journals in the world, the last thing we need is when someone is actually interested enough to have a look, that they come see some cookie-cutter eye-sore that looks like it was designed by a ‘special’ 8th grader in 1995 (in a bad way).
Take a site like DIAGRAM: this site looks so nice sometimes I just sit and stare.
Other sites, though, well, they’re still on training wheels, and those wheels are made of Jell-O.
(1) Expanded Horizons: What in the shit is this? First of all, when I come to your page, the first thing I see, the VERY FIRST THING, is you asking for donations through Amazon. Not a table of contents, not even some bitmapped image of a goat with a lily flower. Just begging for money. First of all, we all know it costs money to run a journal (even though with an web journal it is little to none) but if you are going to build your site with that bit of info up front, you’re making it hard for anybody to even get interested in what you’re supposedly promoting enough to want to give you money to ‘keep you afloat.’ I mean, it actually took me a minute to find the link to your first ‘issue’ so that I could even read what you are ‘publishing.’
This is a pretty long post, so if you’re interested, we’ll continue after the jump.
Uncategorized / 22 Comments
October 15th, 2008 / 12:09 am
October 15th, 2008 / 12:09 am
CNF’s Best of the Blogosphere
Right now Creative Nonfiction Magazine is putting together their next volume of Best American Creative Nonfiction, which is a print annual honoring, well, creative nonfiction.
This year they are looking to include a series of ‘best blog writing,’ which seems like a cool idea, and they are seeking nominations for good posts for their consideration, which anyone can nominate with a small amount of effort by putting in a couple of lines of info at their website.
If you are interested in nominating, here is some info, I nominated the best recent post I could remember from a friend’s blog, you should as well:
BEST OF THE BLOGOSPHERE
This may come as a surprise to some, but here at CNF, we consider
narrative blogs an extension of the creative nonfiction
genre–they’re innovative, exciting, honest, and popular. Blogs are
so popular, in fact, that it seems as if everyone has one:
politicians, movie stars, even the Godfather behind Creative
Nonfiction <http://www.leegutkind.com/blogs/>
.
As some of you may know, CNF has been collecting and publishing the
best of the blogosphere since the the inception of our annual The
Best Creative Nonfiction series. And while Volume 2
<http://www.creativenonfiction.org/cnfshop/product_info.php?products_id=122>
makes its way to bookstores and subscribers, CNF is already fast at
work compiling blogs for Volume 3–due out Summer 2009. But this
time, we’re doing things a bit differently.We want you, the reader, to nominate the blogs you love.
We re looking for: Vibrant new voices with interesting, true stories
to tell. Narrative, narrative, narrative. Posts that can stand alone,
2000 words max, from 2008. Something from your own blog, from a
friend s blog, from a strangers blog.The small print: We will contact individual bloggers before
publication; we pay a flat $50 fee for one-time reprint rights.
Deadline: October 31, 2008.To nominate, click here
<http://www.creativenonfiction.org/blog_nomination.html>
Internet Writing Advice
1. Don’t do anything. Don’t send stuff to people. Don’t write. Don’t think there are words. Don’t say words. Guess what about what you typed? Ieurnadbussum. I have $50,000,000 in my anus if I could just get it out, tomorrow we’re getting in the Wheat Thins. Don’t type to me if you’re just going to type.
2. Don’t type to me if you’re just going to type. Do you have a forehead? Are you sad? Yeah, that’s sad. I am hungry. If you can feed me, feed me. Look at the internet screen. How many times a day do you refresh your browser looking at Duotrope, or the website of that place that is running that contest that you paid $35 to get into. You could win. Did you know you could win? I am tired. Are you going to mail me the raisins soon? There are a fucklot of books. Masturbation done right takes at least an hour. Don’t type to me if you’re just going to type.
3. ‘Oh you have a story at Tom-n-Jerry Monthly? That’s cool. I have a story at Publish Barn, it’s sick, it’s about the universe. I write a lot and I like beer. Beer costs $4.50 a pint a lot of places, maybe if I write the bartender a poem he can give his girlfriend he’ll let me drink one free. No, he doesn’t give his girlfriend poems, his girlfriend doesn’t want a poem, his girlfriend wants to get beamed up the B, and he’ll give it to her. When is the new Night Train coming out?’
4. Vanna White turned the lit up letter and found a full-fledged character development decision wedged in between the light and the box turn space, she snuck it into her pocket between her alter-tits, and turned the letter and smiled really white, and after the show she went home and hid in the closet and vibrated the developed character into an arc against her systematically decimated hymen.
5. All my best friends are people I don’t see enough to hate.
6. ‘Oh you’re a writer? What’s your novel about? Have you read Christopher Moore? Have you read All the Sad Young Literary Men? Are you sad? Dude you are just so sad and jealous.’
7. ** HTML GIANT IS CURRENTLY RUNNING OPEN CASTING CALL FOR REALITY TV SHOW BASED ON THE LIVES OF INTERNET WRITERS, THE SHOW IS UNDER CONTRACT ALREADY WITH MTV, THIS IS NOT A JOKE, YOU MUST HAVE PUBLISHED ON ELIMAE, DOGZPLOT, BACON BEEP, LAMINATION COLONY AND ANAL DESIGN MAP TO BE CONSIDERED. FWD YOUR RESUME TO SOME EMAIL SOMEWHERE, WE’VE GOT IT SET UP TO FALL INTO OUR LAP AT THE DINNER TABLE, GENE’S GOTS A KID, I HAVE AN IMPENDING GOITER. **
8. ‘Will there be free booze?’
9. Suntrust Mortgage. Bye stock market. Part time work. Grading papers. Word count. Cover letter. New book day. Grease buffet. Dong farm. ‘Shark Sandwich? Shit Sandwich.’ Anal mission. Zachary German.
10. Bye.
Memory Genre Sidenote
In relation to my rant on ‘memory loss trauma’ books that spoil the beef by wrapping it all together in kitsch and with a ribbon on top, if you want to see an example of a book that pulls off this kind of narrative in a way that feels authentic, new, and more valuable even than the sum of its parts, check out Robert Lopez’s PART OF THE WORLD, which is not only fun and entirely readable, but also does something new with language and sentence formation, which, if you aren’t paying attention to in writing, I’d say, you might as well be writing for the screen.
And for further reading, pretty much anything by Brian Evenson, especially in this case, THE OPEN CURTAIN, is so far beyond what the scope of the Galchen and McCarthy are going for, might as well just skip the training wheels and hit the big ride.
Uncategorized / 12 Comments
October 14th, 2008 / 5:35 pm
October 14th, 2008 / 5:35 pm
The Jeopardy! I’m Watching
Friends, here is the first of what I hope will be many and several “field reports” on the current state of Jeopardy! from my friend Danielle, who is the most incisive Jeopardy! watcher I know. Her socio-critical critique of Alex, the contestants, and everything else about the show is so dead-on and so consistenly furious, the only question you’re really ever left with is “why is she still watching something she hates this much?” The answer is simple: because Jeopardy! is one of the greatest television shows of all time. Danielle’s preferred forum for Jeopardy! studies is a live, collaborative environment resulting in a spontaneous, non-documented performance (that is to say: we sit on her couch, we watch Jeopardy! together and make fun of it, while trying to time our insults such that we can still keep pace with the game). Therefore, we are very lucky to have this record of her work.
“The Jeopardy! I’m Watching…”
…is like this bizarre, Lynchian masterpiece. Someone behind the scenes here was like “Hey how can I create some kind of embedded storyline that involves mining three nauseatingly awkward characters for all the pathos they’ve got” and his coworker was like “Well, we’ve got those contestants…” and the first guy said “Hey what if they had like a REALLY bad therapist?” and the coworker was all “I think I might have just the guy for the part…”and the past week or two have been like this long, dragged-out pilot episode of New Jeopardy! I mean, someone put these people out of their misery! Through some miracle they’ve managed to make it through the saddest life ever long enough to finally be on jeopardy, which is like at the very top of their list of stupendously compromised hopes and dreams, and then as soon as that first commercial break is over…POW! Sayonara LOSER! But the characters are like real weirdos. Not quite like Dennis Hopper wearing a gas mask weirdos, but not quite not like that kind either.
D.
“boston review” or “shitty suck-sack”? you be the judge
in an attempt to be really mean, i decided to randomly attack a journal. so i went to google and typed in “the most literary journal” hoping someone would have referred to themselves like that. then i tried “mega awesome lit journal” and i got nothing. then i typed in a stupid sounding name “the boston review” and ta-da, it exists. here, for your spiteful edification, is me interjecting things into their about page:
“Boston Review is a nonpartisan magazine of ideas [yeah, shitty ideas]: animated by hope [and stupid-assedness] , committed to equality and reason [and being lame and butthole-y], convinced that the imagination eludes political categories [p.s.: we blow more than the show “m.a.s.h”]. We see each issue as a public space where people can loosen the hold of conventional preconceptions [really? or perhaps, loosen a stool into your mouth, just perhaps?] and bring this openness to bear on today’s most pressing issues [like what a good plot arc is]. Our mission requires that as editors we shun polemic and partisanship [and being not-dumb], uphold the highest standards of argument and evidence, value ambition and originality, seek widely diverse perspectives, and make complex ideas accessible [also to publish things as close compositionally to shit as possible without streaking the printer]. We have a national readership of men and women [and people who wear slippers in the reading room when they read our publication] who are engaged in the challenge of today’s world; who want deeper [anal] coverage of current affairs than the mainstream media offers; and who see the arts as an essential part of the human enterprise [yeah, the human enterprise of being a fuckhead with a shriveled penis that wears brooks brothers khakis].
Boys and Men
Love in the time of wordpress
Entropy may not be the perfect word, but it does come to mind. Just go to any Youtube video and read the comments—the ‘natural corrosion’ from discourse to insult to empty violence. Despite names or aliases, the overall anonymity of the internet enables such proclamations as ‘go fuck your mother’ or ‘n*gger, etc.’ as surely one would remain reticent in person, for fear of a face bashing.
It may have been Mean Week that initiated the male adolescent rhetoric in the comment sections, though I fear I’ve encountered this before. There must be something about being a literary man with a college (or higher) education and a WiFi connection that makes him want to say “go fist-fuck yourself” or “i am kevin sampsell’s penis.” Maybe it’s one too many rejection letters, or a plot arc that simply snapped. As for Kevin Sampsell’s penis, I gather it’s in Garamond 10pt. small caps.
Perhaps it is male bonding, or ironic derision as a form of peer respect, that causes such obsession with: a) penises and/or cocks b) said penises and/or cocks with the same girth as Barry Graham’s head, c) fists as a phallic enterprise, d) the lack of having a penis, e) chopping off heads, f) blood resulting from the chopping off of heads, or penises, or severe fisting, g) bags containing feces, h) the introduction of staples as a means to secure dismembered body parts, and i) ad infin.
Only Gene Morgan, however angry and mean, is able to refrain from such homoerotic inclinations; rather, his mention of blood (“Be sure to bring a towel to sop your blood up off of my front lawn.”) and violence is of a more current-day protestant and territorial nature. He is not interested cock. He just wants to impose severe head trauma on you (outside on his lawn, away from his child).
We can all learn from Gene. In the future, keep your violence inside of your pants.
Oh, and my address is: 69 Gofuckyourself Dr.
October 14th, 2008 / 1:33 pm