Janice Lee—
“Novels Are Fantasies of Powerlessness and Power” — Great interview with Adam Novy & his novel The Avian Gospels up at Biblioklept.
2
ToBS R1: work at Best Buy vs. undergrad Lit 101 adjunct
[Matchup #6 in Tournament of Bookshit]
BECAUSE OF DIRECT HORROR: THESE THOUGHTS CRIPPLE A FLAG AT THE SIGHT OF MONEY, THE WILL TO EXPLAIN, TO FLAP A SALE – I MEAN NIHILISM STANDS ABOVE THE FEELING ATHEISM TOO CLOSE TO ANY BELIEF I MEAN ALL GROUPS DON’T EXIST OUTSIDE THEIR DOOKIE NOTHING IS WORTH BUILDING A COMMUNITY ABOUT BECAUSE WE CAN’T STOP BEING PEOPLE SOME DISEASES ROCK YOU TOW THE LINE SKIPPING POPES DO THEIR FLEAS I AM SO FAR BELOW I AM THE SCALE CHAFED BY ASKING GREAT WRITERS I WILL FURTHER YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH MURDER HOLOCAUST WHATEVER SAYS ‘I AM’ SMOTHER YOUR SPERM BEFORE THEY EXIT SWIPE THE SLIT REAL WAG CONDUCT THE BABIES FROM YOUR ANUS DIP THEIR MUSIC PLEASE HUGS I ONLY WORSHIP ACCIDENTS AND CRACKROCK ANY ADULT WANTS TO CONVINCE YOUR MONIES HIS LACK OF DANCE MEANS WINNING ALL PHILOSOPHY IS CASTRATION ANYONE BORN IS A POSSIBLE RHETORICIAN AND MUST THEREFORE BE SHRED INSIDE THEIR CRIB PLEASE EMAIL ME (TANGOROBOT@GMAIL.COM) A LOCATION TO MEET THERE AND DISCUSS I AM WEAK AND ALWAYS ARMED MOTHERFUCK HOW CAN I HELP YOU TODAY?
– – – READ MORE >
{LMC}: January’s Selection: Versal 9
In January 2012, we will be reading Versal 9, a literary journal out of Amsterdam. The editors of Versal have been kind enough to offer ten four two one remaining free copies of the magazine and a discount for those who buy the magazine. If you’re interested in a free copy, e-mail me with your name and address.
The sale price for LMC members is $10 instead of the usual $14.95. You can buy the issue here.
Versal is a literary & art annual out of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Versal was founded in 2002 by American poet Megan M. Garr to help foster the translocal literary community in Amsterdam. In 2010, Versal was named one of seventeen “Indie Innovator” presses by Poets & Writers Magazine, which called it “the most visible product of a passionate group helping to sustain ‘transnational networks’ for writers.”
Community, wide-reaching aesthetic and bold design have been at the core of the Versal project from the outset. Today, Versal is built by a volunteer team of nearly 20 writers and artists around the globe. The team is currently working towards Versal’s 10-year anniversary, which will be marked by the release of the tenth issue in May 2012.
ToBS R1: livetweeting vs. [yourauthorname].com
[Matchup #5 in Tournament of Bookshit]
at first, this seems like a simple issue of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). if we can choose which of these chill concepts is better for SEO, we can make a pretty fucking nice decision.
SEO from Wikipedia:
“As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.”
INTERNET LITURATURE thrives on grabbing the largest possible number of eyeballs from several key market demographics (angry teens, cool moms, depressed dads, etc.) and pushing the solid messaging that has made our community strong – sex, alcoholism, and the [blowjob?] lip-gloss of higher education. these concepts are essentially our core story, being spread across the globe at the speed of light. the key to critical happiness in modern literature is to be the one delivering theses stories in the most SEO way possible. READ MORE >
Why Audiences Can’t Sit For or Stand The Tree of Life
What is most surprising about the premiere of The Tree of Life and its subsequent box-office failure due to a powerfully negative word of mouth is that if any film was the right film for the right moment (that moment being our living in a time of spiritual, economic, and environmental disasters), it is this wonder of images. The film presents the world as harmonious and cracked (humans are those fractured, nature is another story), yet spatial—intimate in childhood, while thunderingly antiseptic in the present day matrix of skyscrapers and homes equipped with plasma screens. As consumer culture tightens its grip on our souls, here is a piece of craftsmanship so sure of its place apart from imitation art (also known as Oscar bait—Dances with Wolves, et al.), that it happily eschews many drab protocols and the rub-a-dub sentimental stew of traditionally arching storylines and instead, gives us images that aren’t simple, that have to be read, that have to be reflected upon and interpreted, that ask us to share in their beauty rather than be repelled and manipulated by a gratuitous splatter of plot points and snappy, smarmy dialogue where one asshole rips another to bring the audience into the product’s fold, as so many of these products are the brainchild of some starstruck, cash-hoarding producer, or a Hollywood star struck by scandal, needing money to quell attorneys and so gleefully takes a gun or three and blows holes in the bad guys for a few hours more.
ToBS R1: flarf vs. AWP
[Matchup #4 in Tournament of Bookshit]
If my own personal feelings toward a thing had anything to do with it, flarf would win this in a landslide, but feelings are not real. Last year, I introduced a flarf poem by K. Silem Mohammad to a class of fifth grade students while teaching a poetry unit for an unpaid internship (it was the one Mohammad poem I could find without cusses or things a fifth grade teacher could get mad at me for). The students became immediately enamored with the flarf process and the possibilities of poetry that refused to do whatever it is that poetry has been expected to do since the first caveman uttered the first O! Poetry was finally fun to these kids. They wrote poems that were funny and surprising in ways that only a child or google can be surprising. But now I can’t help but imagine these children, thirty years from now, well into their poetry careers, paying $190 ($150 if they pre-register) to attend their own book-signings, getting stupidly drunk and sleeping next to a stranger in their hotel rooms, and then possibly fantasizing about responding to an htmlgiant post about whether or not they’ve gotten laid at AWP with “i can’t remember.” Then, redirecting their browser to Google, the poet will search for blog posts about their own AWP readings and find their name only in a long list form and this will happen again the next year and the next year. The poet will then go to Whole Foods or Costco and buy some food for vegans or food for cheap and carry it all back home in their ugly AWP tote bag and once back home the poet will gis “AWP” with this suggestive result.
– – – READ MORE >
ToBS R1: excessively long list of credits including pushcart nominations in your bio vs. the guy who goes 20 minutes over the suggested reading time
[Matchup #3 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Guy who goes 20 minutes over the suggested reading time gives zero shits about the undergrads who are there for extra credit and texting so hard out of boredom that their fingers are bleeding. Like a stalker he is patient, in front of you when you don’t want him to be, and prone to define the two of you spending ‘quality time’ together as him reading while you sneak airplane bottles of Absolut from your purse—at first surreptitiously, but soon you’re throwing them back with grand, hyperbolic gestures; you’re punctuating his sentences by tilting back your head to the point of detachment to contort your throat into the shape of a more-perfect funnel, because his giving-zero-shits-ness is contagious. The booze is creeping up and you begin to enact a series of escapist hallucinations: locusts start pouring in through the ventilation and people scream and overturn their seats running for the door, but not this guy—he’s still reading, like a violin player serenading the fleeing passengers of the sinking Titanic. His words won’t stop coming and they’re painful, so you try to inflict a greater pain upon yourself to make your ears stop stinging. You think back and rip the Band-Aid off the worst psychological wound you have. You’re weeping because your mother doesn’t love you and the guy happens to look up and see your emotional tears; he is sure you are crying because his fiction is so moving and he decides to tack on an additional few pages and go 25 minutes over instead of 20. He has rendered you drunk, fragile, and wrought with uncontrollable tears. READ MORE >
ToBS R1: Facebook status updates re: present MS word count vs. Alcoholism
[Matchup #2 in Tournament of Bookshit]
OMG how I loathe the assbaitishness of your posts telling everyone how many words you’ve written. But I don’t know, maybe I should be like fucking thanking you, because by telling me how much you’ve written, I can be sure I will definitely never want to read what you publish when you finish it, if you finish it, since you seem so busy telling me how much you’ve written, and that takes time away from tweaking your shit. If you write 5,000 words, chances are that 4,950 of them are shit, and chances are even greater that the 50 you have left over are in the wrong order or something, and when you finally get those lined up right you will probably be able to lose half of those as well, so the word count of your status update itself turns out to have a higher word count than what you’ve really actually word doc-written, and it’s probably more interesting because at least your status update tells me how pathetic you are, something that whatever you’ve been word doc-writing happens to leave out, unforch. READ MORE >
ToBS R1: ‘magic realism’ vs. living in brooklyn
[Matchup #1 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Wikipedia defines magical realism as “an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world.” A more specific definition favored by a former instructor was that magical realism tended to concern itself with a world that was like our own–i.e., real–with the exception of one fantastic element. Sometimes that one element has profound implications for the ostensibly real world of the story, and sometimes it doesn’t, as in Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, whose flight-and-invisibility granting magical ring MacGuffin/conceit is mostly polite enough to stay out of the way of the realist novely bits.
There are two main things to know about magical realism.
First, it is probably the least honest genre since realism. In “Simulacra and Simulations,” Jean Baudrillard writes that “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” What he means–in part–is that we allow ourselves the childish fantasy of Disneyland precisely because it makes the rest of our lives seem real, adult, and reasonable, when they are really anything but. The one permissible fantastic element in magical realism is the Disneyland to that story’s America. By clearly defining the one fantastic element as unreal, by saying “the magical ring is the fantastic bit,” we implicitly argue that the rest of the story depicts reality. We exalt realism as a successful duplication of the real world. In its apparent play with the categories of real and unreal, magical realism as she is played actually asserts an uncommonly rigid division of the two. It is realism’s unwitting helpmate in manufacturing the smug confidence of the American middle and upper-middle classes in the justice, normalcy, and fundamental realness of their position in the social order. This is one of the two reasons I hate it. READ MORE >