Obituary: The Faster Times
The Faster Times (July 9, 2009 – October 9, 2010) The Faster Times, an online newspaper known for attempting to find a way to make the internet pay writers, was pronounced dead on the scene of what Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz called a “perverse and often baffling” three-day riot and siege of the Cobble Hill brownstone that the The Faster Times just purchased. “Who knew that journalist-bloggers had the upper body strength, let alone the organizational capacity to riot?” Markowitz asked.
Sadly, the Faster Times was torn limb for limb by a mob of seething, red-eyed editors who chanted about revolution, wasted hours and, inexplicably, the crappy font choice. “Justice, I say, Justice!” one editor screamed. The New York Times declared the riot a “a twee, revolution in the journalists’ minor league.”
Among TFT’s greatest advancements to Internet Media during its short but thorough run, was it’s idea that Facebook ‘Likes’ could be converted into dollars, though this plan never actually came to fruition. Had the likes-to-dollars conversion occurred, The Faster Times’s editors and writers could have been the 95th highest paid collective of journalist-bloggers in the first quarter of 2010.
In lieu of flowers, the remaining two editors who didn’t wish the Faster Times a slow and painful death are asking for mourners to “Like” the Faster Times’s Corpse’s Facebook page.
MEAN WEEK Writing Prompt
How about you just go write something, asshole? Stop: blogging about writing, commenting on blogs about writing, surfing the web for youtube videos that might somehow “inspire” you to think about your “craft”, hanging out at dull author readings, having a beer with a boring writer after a dull author reading, having a beer (or five) alone when the laptop is sitting right there with a barely considered manuscript on it, starting another online literary journal or blog, playing video games and trying somehow to appreciate them on a “narrative” level, reading a book because you are “researching” something, getting involved in some “project” that is loosely connected to “literary” work, masturbating while high, etc. etc., and write. I mean, you’re a “writer,” right?
2 Obituaries: One Story & Failbetter
One Story (June 24, 2002 to October 25, 2010) The offices of long handed and literary-Illuminati-color-coded One Story collapsed this week in a grand gesture of at last fully defining in unwavering lifelike syntax their own definitive time, setting, and central theme. Long teased and haunted by their authors’ knack and exuberance in the construction of sentences that end the story as exploration before it can begin, the corpus of long story has whispered in its ruffling thin pages a yearning for at last the transcendence of the human spirit into the beyond, at last concretely demonstrating that yes, we all die, and yes the human heart is large, and yes, A really does lead to B if you line it up right. Survived by a collection of sentences clearly of a reputable but closely related bloodline, a brief but heartwarming reflection on One Story’s days and times will be issued to all past subscribers as well as anyone who has serially submitted to their enterprise every single open reading period since their inception, which notably and privately led to their development of the now ubiquitous Submission Manager (since bastardized incessantly by at least three anarchistic, freely sharing knockoffs), which affords self-hating pencil pushers across the globe the right to realize just how ridiculous this whole submit-then-wait-then-hate-then-submit-again thing is. Meanwhile, the spirit of the One Story lives on: truly, by now, a single story in our minds, espousing all. Friends and relatives remain hopeful that the termination of the ephemeral notion of the singular short story proves to extend beyond its time into a one to three book contract for those involved on the merit of this leap of faith into the demonstrable prowess of details that is the narrative short prose masterwork, more evidence that even if Raymond Carver is dead he isn’t dead and neither (for real this time) is Michael Chabon.
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Failbetter (May 10, 2000 to October 25, 2010) At last deciding to put their money where their browser is, longtime publishers of romantically edgy online lit Failbetter succumbed to their own moniker and failed as hard as they could, driving their proverbial website animus into the proverbial nowhere of even this special little world called the online. Originators of the insanely-long-submission-response-time-even-if-you’re-just-a-website rule of thumb, Failbetter will surely be preserved only as we all remember them, if we remember anything, which in my case is that year when AWP was in Atlanta and these dudes showed up in suits standing next to a laptop on a table telling you to check out their website right there in the Hilton so that you might remember to do the same again when you got home, though as I recall again the web connection in the Hilton’s basement sucked and you couldn’t even do that, a pretty decent failure on the part of online literature perhaps in some way predicting this biggest and baddest of all failures, again ahead of the curve of all of us in publishing or elsewhere still supposedly extant, like gash marks on the wrists in a vertical fashion years before the gun goes in the mouth.
Geography Thursdays #7: Human Landscapes in SW Florida
The Rotonda West neighborhood, originally developed in the 1960s, never quite fully completed, located in Charlotte County, Florida. Map, Street View. (© Google/Data SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCO) c/o Boston.com
One Obituary: Duotrope’s Digest
Duotrope’s Digest (August 4, 2005-October 14, 2010) Duotrope died today, of its own name, some vague ailment of droopy eyelids and an ass so smart its brain filled its hole and then all the universe exploded into the nearest ceiling fan. Today dead, Duotrope of serial liposuction, as in the last time (Jesus, chill-the-fuck-out, you Heidi Blair Montag of a site. Hey guys, leave Newpages! We got bigger tits!) they crunk-a-ma-jigged the layout and then hit me and my kin up for money. (As I write this, Duotrope is status HIGH, as in YELLOW, 36% short of their monthly pecuniary quest. Year-to-Date they are 20% short, labeled HIGHE$$T, or Holy Fuck!, a RED alert 4 alarm {low} fire of tattooed lipstick. [Like our government, Duotrope has a color code system that all but douche bags ignore]). Duotrope dead of popped pronephros, dribble, dribble…Duotrope deceased, choked on the very versicolor vomit of statistics they choose to shove down our hoary throats (They eat it too, see? That’s how they know it tastes good.) Do you understand Willow Springs accepts 0% of submissions (well, fuck me and my latest Spam-villanelle), yet they reject 88%? (If you don’t believe me, go to Duotrope.). Dark times, folks. Death by jostled lynx this morning, Duotrope. Dead by sub-sprachgefühl, I mean divaricator/dust, of course. Or simple spoon? Note: Duotrope killed today by wound of flung nacho. Duotrope eaten by my father. Like every empire (or umpire) known to history, Duotrope has fallen. Croaked. Expired. Sad to report, that spreadsheet we once called Duotrope, dead as disco this morning, done, d-uh, died–of exposure.
We Are All Very Busy Being Busy
We are all very busy. We are busy being busy. We worship at the altar and suckle at the teat of busy. When I say we, I mean you, me, us. We are a cult of busy busy people. If you are busy, we will follow you and drink your Kool-Aid. We love to talk about how busy we are. We say I’m busy, I’m busy, I’m busy—an exultation. We say we are busy and feel flushed. We are busy, therefore we are. To be busy is to be important and to be important is everything. We will Twitter and Facebook and blog our busyness and we will do so with the conviction of martyrs. We will bear our busy burden. The burden of busy must be borne because to be busy is to be important and to be important is to matter. We matter and are made of matter which is meta. We have work and school and work and school. We study, we teach, we grade and grade and grade. We live below the poverty line but revel in that poverty because we have a second and third job that keep us busy. We go to mind numbing office jobs where we are busy with boredom. We hold cushy corporate positions we love to talk about because we make so much money being busy we don’t have the time to spend it. We have meetings and sometimes we have meetings within our meetings because we are that damn busy. In our limited free time we edit three magazines and run a small press and we may never respond to you or actually publish anything but we’re on the masthead and we have many official sounding titles so we have proof we are that busy. We get so many emails each day demanding our attention and our time and we try to keep up but we cannot so we are busy stemming the tide of electronic correspondence, sending messages but never reading the responses. We have online presences so we have to visit several sites every few seconds to remind ourselves and everyone we know and love and loathe how busy we are. We write 3,500 words a day and then exhaustively edit those 3,500 words once twice three times and we make sure to mention on Facebook that we’ve done those things, oh yes, we will tell you what we’ve written for the day and how important we are for taking that care with our words despite how busy we are. We will tell you what we are going to write while you idle people are sleeping because we do not sleep, we do not need sleep, we have not the time for sleep. We will go places and meet people while we are there though we won’t spend too long because we are so busy. We’re in four writing groups where we critique the work of our friends and enemies and later talk shit about that writing to other friends and enemies. We read obscure literary texts and think deep thoughts about those obscure literary texts and write things about those obscure literary texts so everyone knows we are reading obscure literary texts despite the fact we are so busy. We curate two reading series and boast about all the Internet Famous writers who will be reading with us. We pretend we don’t watch television but really we do, oh how we do and we spend moments of our precious time thinking about the unbelievable fact that Vanilla Ice has a reality show on DIY and how none of the new TV shows this fall are any good even though we can’t stop watching them. We have kids and those kids never leave us alone when we are busy working on our laptops but the kids are so damn cute so we’ll bitch about how busy they keep us and how much we love them even though they get in the way. We’re married or in relationships and once in a while we have to have sex with our significant others and otherwise give them some attention. We look at our lovers day in and day out and acknowledge that yes, this is really it for the rest of our lives and while we’re so busy, we ignore the nagging feeling we are doing everything yet nothing at all because we are far too busy to do anything well and doing all of that each and every day keeps us extraordinarily busy—it is a vicious cycle.