i am a sucky piece of shit and i suck at writing
i feel perhaps my last post misrepresented my meanness. sure i hate everyone, but the person i really hate, and towards whom i am most unfair in my meanness, is myself. you see, i totally suck. and so here is some meanness directed towards the real piece of shit garbage asshole in the internet community, me:
you are an unhappy fuck who will never have kids or anyone to smile at without being accused of creepiness. you are an ugly man. you have never benefitted anyone’s life aside from leaving it alone. your best writing, if there is anything whatsover of any quality, is behind you. you are basically a sperm that flipped out of your dad’s underwear and grew legs after one of your dad’s wet dreams. you sleep on the floor of your apartment and sometimes you feel too destroyed to even drink water. you have lived in over eighteen homes so you cannot form a lasting relationship with anyone. you are a failure. you will probably live a long life but accomplish nothing. maybe you will be on tv once if you accidentally walk by where a reporter is filming. you feel terrible when you see other people smiling and you see no difference between a person and a sock except when you come in the person you know for a fact they are not happy, the sock maybe but you’re not really sure, i mean you know. you will be found in a closet somewhere surrounded by garbage and you will disappoint everyone you have ever known. plus you suck at all video games created after golden eye. you use slang that is just outside of cool, like “that’s the bomb yo” or “see you on the flipside, mac”. you are terrible, you terrible person you.
Mean Mondays & Sleepingfish Online
So, Mean Week is one day in and I had so much fun already we’ve decided to make Mean days an institution here. In an attempt to keep the spurs on, Monday from here on out at HTML Giant will be known as Mean Monday. So you got Mean Monday and Boobs Friday (which, in other news, Kendra Grant Malone has now been upgraded to official Tits Editor, a round of applause please…), and as further things progress further things will progress.
That doesn’t mean Mean Week is being cut short: hardly so, we’re just getting started.
That means Lieutenants Malone and Maday and Call and Jones (upon his return) need to come out from behind their mother’s skirt and talk some mess, all damn it. You can talk about me mean if you want, but spit some fire for shit’s sake!
In the meantime as well, good things should be continued to be pointed out in the midst of the mean, so while I’m at it let me point you toward the firsts nodes in the most recent incarnation of the newly digital SLEEPINGFISH from Calamari Press, which is now operating in web content format with its head relocated to finer shores (and is currently seeking submissions, which you can find info on at their site).
The first update of the e-Fish contains two excellent pieces of fiction, SNOW by J.A. Tyler, which is an excerpt from a novel that will be coming out in the near future, as well as SUGAR by James Reich from the band Venus Bogardus, each of which set the bar for the high promise that the new electronic zzzFish will be sure to entail.
Shit, I feel weird being totally nice during Mean Week.
Derek, I hope you get bit on the ass by a tumored goat.
Learn to be MEAN WEEK from the best of them
“Critics are the sum of their biases—they begin as arbitraries and end as certainties (the course of my own criticism has sometimes been the other way round). You can’t stand that ditherer Coleridge, she can’t stand that whiner Keats, I can’t stand that dry fussbudget Wordsworth, and we all hate Shelley—poets are Rorschach tests.”
And just to keep the MEAN WEEKness nice and fair, here’s Brian Henry at Verse Magazine, trashing William Logan’s then-new collection of criticism. Here’s a taste: “Despite his claim to read too many new books of poetry, Logan seems oddly unaware of the state of contemporary American poetry. He admits that trade presses have largely given up on poetry, but one would be hard-pressed to glean this from this selection of reviews.” OOOOOOOOOhhhhhh.
Author Spotlight / Comments Off on Learn to be MEAN WEEK from the best of them
October 13th, 2008 / 4:23 pm
October 13th, 2008 / 4:23 pm
Mean Week Looks Back
Coincidentally, the weekend before Mean Week, a book of essays from a poetry journal called The Reaper arrived for me at the public library.
The Reaper had it’s own little Mean Decade from 1980 to 1989, and it spent that time skewering poetry as it was and poets of note, and suggesting to readers that narrative poetry was the way out of the ever-widening gap between poetry and its readers. It helped give birth to the New Narrative movement. And New Formalism.
Fascinating stuff, really. Fussy? Maybe. But impassioned. Happily argumentative. Willing to call people out, too. Kind of like Justin’s critique of Valzhyna Mort there below this post, too, in that they dissect poems line by line and call bullshit when bullshit needs to be called—especially when the poets in their sights sail through a line without regard for accuracy.
I’ll post a few choice quotes this week. First, though, The Reaper’s Non-negotiable Demands in all their glory:
1. Take prosody off the hit list.
2. Stop calling formless writing poetry.
3. Accuracy, at all costs.
4. No emotion without narrative.
5. No more meditating on the meditation.
6. No more poems about poetry.
7. No more irresponsibility of expression.
8. Raze the House of Fashion.
9. Dismantle the Office of Translation.
10. Spring open the Jail of the Self.
Each demand is explained in the essay. I would encourage you to pick up the book to read them.
Keep in mind, also, that posting about The Reaper is not a full endorsement of their critique. On the other hand, my poet friends: fuck you, read this.
All best,
Matthew
the meanest soldier in the woods
My first Mean Week post is totally cheating because I’m not going to be mean and, instead, shall direct you to my favorite Mean Poet: Joseph Massey. Joe lives in the woods in Northern California where he is like a gentle Swiss bear. He drinks taco beer and sculpts word machines of fern-smelling delicacy. But on the internet! O Lord. On his LiveJournal blog, Mr. Massey is a cranky son-of-a-bitch and not afraid to take it to your ass with a whip made of questionable meat products. Witness this gristle he dropped recently into a favorable review of Peter O’Leary’s memoir:
It’s an antidote to so much of the bullshit that counts as what it seemingly must mean to be a poet these days, thanks in huge part to the MFA android machine. It’s a palate cleanser after spending too many hours — shame on us! — reading blogs where you come away disgusted, as if you had just eaten a pillowcase full of cotton-candy washed down with generic cola, as if poetry can be reduced to the ego-bloated emptiness of notices of acceptance and rejection by journals and magazines that are mostly amorphous blobs of visionless shit, mirroring the very system that supports them, and the endless crowing over the scramble to get books published that no one will read because their only audience is a CV.
Joe’s even got a poem coming out in The Nation, so you know his agenda is like political and shit. That’s right, Blake, political.
all internet writers are fucking pussies and i could kick all of their asses
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.
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…
Uncategorized / 16 Comments
October 13th, 2008 / 2:10 pm
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.
Uncategorized / 12 Comments
October 13th, 2008 / 12:19 pm
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.
Uncategorized / 114 Comments
October 13th, 2008 / 1:37 am
October 13th, 2008 / 1:37 am