Cowering Literary Peons
This post’s a bit apples and oranges. Or rotten bananas and rotten (or as we say “Vrot”) pineapples. In fact it’s not very organized. And it is a response, in a way, to Blake Butler’s 15 Towering Literary Giants.
But, what’s a Cowering Literary Peon??
—a weasel?
—an overrated supposed Giant?
—a talentless p.o.s.?
—a fucking weasel?
—a fraction and no more than a real Towering Giant who came before?
A mix maybe. Or maybe just one of the above. And again, this is all apples and bananas. Etc. Etc.
ABOUT HTMLGIANT (Revisited)
Not exactly Literary Doppelgangers — more like “What I’m really thinking.”
Dane Cook
Mark Walberg
Haley Joel Osment
Sophia Coppola
Robert Dinero
Toni Morrison
George Clooney
Eddie Vedder
Sophia Coppola
Paul Reubens
Prince William
Melissa Etheridge
Shamwow guy
Jeffrey Dahmer
Bob Saget
Paul Giamatti
Rauan Klassnik fondles Seth Abramson
Before Rauan Klassnik joined the team here at HTML Giant, he did a little blogging in the realm of parody with a stream of posts that involved, in a semi-veiled way, the recently hotly discussed character of Seth Abramson.
Rauan provides the adventures of Sex Ableton.
They are pretty graphic, and obscenity laden, and freely riff of Sex’s wife and cock and etc, but also delve further, in the way much of Rauan’s work does, to larger ideas of identity, fucking, and, yes, love.
Here’s an excerpt:
She drops to her knees. Unzips him. There in the moonlight. In the corn.
And two hairless testicles pop out at her.
O, how cute, she exclaims, you wax!
But where’s the cock? she ponders.
And then it hits her: a house mouse cock!
O, My God she exclaims so loudly that the breath from the elongated twangy syllable she made of the word “God” swept over Sex’s balls and on to his tiny hidden cock. And it all tingles. Tingles like all the stars. All the stars crushed into a dot. A scorched waiting primordial dot.
It was as though the hand of God or some other great power or creature had touched them. He was petrified. Primary. Excited beyond the capacity of anything that measures. Mass or girth. Demons or Colin Firth.
I’m going to try to be mean now. It’s not really in my nature, but what the heck. Jonathan Lethem’s new book Chronic City is incredibly good, and Michiko Kakutani’s review is one of her bullshit, contrarian, stroke your hair with the right hand, punch you in the kidneys with the left critiques she seems to pull out for ambitious, talented—and dare I say it—”important” novelists every few books because she has some sort of pit in her psyche she needs to fill with displays of her power over them. (Or maybe she just didn’t like a book I liked, and I’m kind of an asshole. Yeah, probably the second one.)
Glimmer Stain
Glimmer Train used to be a decent, if not rather traditional literary magazine but in recent years, they’ve really pushed the limits of credibility running contests every single month. To my mind, a contest is only meaningful if it is the exception rather than the rule. Winning one of their ubiquitous contests is like winning $2 on a $2 scratch ticket or a free small soda during McDonald’s Monopoly promotion. Their newest contest, for the Best Start to a story, quickly prompted an appropriate amount of ridicule and yet we all know people will continue to submit their stories and entry fees ($10-$20 per entry) to Glimmer Train in the fairly futile hope that it means something. At what point do we concede that Glimmer Train has become a vanity press?
Grammar Lesson: Bridget Jones’s Diary
For my first contribution to Mean Week, I want to address something that bugs the living hell out of me: when attributing singular possessive nouns ending in the letter -s-, nothing changes from the way in which you attribute singular possessive nouns ending in other letters. Just add an apostrophe -s-. That is all. Don’t change anything or do anything differently. This is very, very simple.
For example:
Philip Roth’s novels are boring as fuck.
Ben Marcus’s novels are fun.
You see how I did that?
I did not write: Ben Marcus’ novels are fun.
[Because that doesn’t make any sense – Ben Marcus is one dude, not plural dudes.]
I also did not write: Ben Marcu’s novels are fun.
[Because that makes no sense. His name is Marcus, not Marcu.]
Not sure why so many people are incapable of understanding this simple punctuation, but I notice these mistakes occurring all the time — and it drives me bonkers!
Explain Mean Week Yourself! Sean Lovelace or Ander Monson
What? This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.
I’m sorry Sean Lovelace or Ander Monson (whoever really gets the credit), but you can’t use Amazon to host a literary magazine.
Please remove your stupid journal immediately. There is no editorial control. People are just writing all willy-nilly. It’s been around for more than seven months and someone submitted as recently as two hours ago. It should have died by now.
Meanwhile, my story was posted in the beginning and only 3 people found it useful.
This is exactly what’s wrong with indie lit. No one can read my story because too many other people are writing and all the editors are freaking crazy.
Dammit.