David Fishkind—
After traveling, spending time with your family, overeating and drinking, how do you deal with all that post-Thanksgiving guilt?
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Ken Baumann—
if there’s anything you need to know about “contemporary indie lit” it’s that all you need to do to get a book published is write one – Impossible Mike
{LMC}: Hug Beecher’s One Before Bed and It Hugs Back
Beecher’s One has an effect on me, and not just because of the wonderful stories. More than any other journal I have read, holding it evoked an emotion, much like the words did. When nobody was looking, I may have rubbed the journal all over my face, took deep breaths over its pages and whispered secrets into its binding, which I have learned is called a “naked” binding. How sexy.
Daniel Rolf is responsible for my affection for the design. He said the original concept for the binding was to make the first issue a “simple container for the text, but also something interesting to hold and look at.” Well, he surpassed that goal by quite a bit.
Angles
On November 22, 2011, at approximately 2:05 PST, at the time of this post’s inception, a version of UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi walking to her car (with the parenthetical “higher quality,” as proposed by the uploader) had been viewed 873,526 times three days after it had been posted. Its like-to-dislike ratio was 4485:91 (or, ~49:1). It captures the 2:39 minutes endured by Katehi and relished by us all for her to walk to her car through a considerate berth of protestors, silenced in their greatest form of protest. This is when I began to take them seriously. It is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen, in its humanity, restraint, and ultimate respect for another human being. Of course, we understand that Katehi is being publicly shamed, and judged, and the silence is indignantly rhetorical. A less popular version, shot from another angle, its camera operator incessantly “a little behind” and somewhat crouched, had, at the same point in time of this composition, 98,064 views, with a ~55:1 like-to-dislike ratio. Although it is parenthetically and ostensibly “HD, best quality,” it will forever remain a subordinate version of the greater version, the latter’s historicity democratically bestowed by the aesthetic inclinations of the people: they preferred the perpendicular “real time” camera angle, the purplish fragmented light and sporadic halos caused by an array of camera flashes perhaps heightening this eerie inverse Coronation of the Queen. Media accelerates history, and it seems Katehi will go down as the Chancellor of a large liberal California University who was to be held responsible for the violent assault by her police on her civilly disobeying class; and all the PR letters from the Chancellor’s office carefully crafted by administrators with Master’s degrees to both justify and mitigate, could not assuage the gross verity of pepper-spray being casually administered on a group of solemn protesters, whose imminent tears would be heard over cameras, some of them held by the protesters themselves, as they shook and writhed towards vertigo — all emitted through the quicksand of memory known as the internet, in truncated and fragmented versions of the same event, each vying for a piece of history. Sometimes it is difficult to ask a question when the reward of silence has just commenced. What would you have done? I don’t believe there are good people and bad people, and a line in between. That would assume I’m on the right side, and my world ends the moment I believe that. This post is an elegy for seeing things from another angle.
We Can’t Sit This One Out
At UC Davis, students protested nonviolently, the campus police responded, an officer casually sprayed a group of student sitting their arms interlocked, like plants, he became a meme and, along with the police chief, was placed on leave. Many people in many places expressed outrage, students participated in a powerful, silent protest. Assistant Professor Nathan Brown wrote an open letter to Katehi expressing his outrage. The UC Davis English department has changed their website so that the header issues a call for the chancellor, Linda Katehi, to resign and for the police force to be disbanded. On a national faculty mailing list I’m on, a member issued a call to action stating, “We cannot sit this one out.” During turbulent times, writers often ask themselves, how do we write about this? How do we respond? What is our responsibility to social change? How do we participate and avoid sitting this one out? Poet Robert Hass wrote a New York Times editorial that has been widely read and lauded but he also avoided sitting this one out because he and his wife were at the Berkeley protest. As writers, do you feel a need to respond to what happened at UC Davis, or UC Berkeley, or at any of the occupy movements? Do you feel the need to physically participate in these protests? Why and how?
A D Jameson—
Hello again after a little bit. Question: what would you say is the best post ever published here at HTMLGIANT? Feel free to nominate more than one post (and include a link if you can).
In a week or two, I’ll post a follow-up tabulating the top choices. Which won’t mean anything, necessarily, but might be fun to look at.
14 hands at the neck of the creature
1. This flash by Shellie Zacharia is one of the best I’ve read in a goodly while.
14. For you glazed and sootstreaked aspiring MFA/MA folks, Cathy Day writes some do’s and don’ts concerning the Statement of Purpose. Good stuff here, and made me realize (I read grad apps) most applications are very similar–they DO a lot of these DONT’S.
2. Hey, all you Slaw-Cheeks, you know what: The brouhaha over Markham’s wholesale cribbing of other writers’ work is an instructive reminder of how rarely ‘original writing’ actually is.
3. Have you experienced “Fire Island Sideshow” by Jon Cotner and Claire Hamilton?
- In Fair Harbor we hear a Yorkie growling frantically. Gary always holds Brutus’ leash because last summer Brutus was almost killed by the high tide. This gets difficult around New York City, where law requires that human beings walk dogs. But Gary won’t let people near Brutus.
4. Dude writes stories that are Facebook updates.
5. I know, why don’t we all comment about what we are thankful for?! Really? Me neither. Fuck off.
Obituary: Deer
Deer (1350 AD – November 22, 2011 AD) — Deer dropped dead of exhaustion this morning after a celebrated career as a poetic muse, chapbook cover model, ambassador for the bands Deerhoof, Deerhunter, Antler, Deer Tick and Deer People, and beloved 2-term mayor of Etsy–from which he launched a tote bag endorsement deal. Deer is reported to have had identity struggles lately, exhibiting bizarre behavior, including attempted arson of a microbrewery and allegedly asking a group of poetry MFA students “How many of you bastards actually encounter deer on a regular basis?” — in response to which one of them handed him a limited-edition letterpressed broadside. Deer is survived by wolf, bear, tree, squirrel, fox, sparrow and owl. Memorial services will be held in Amherst, Portland, Oakland, and of course, Brooklyn.
Seen here with friends in happier times.
Midtown Skin Essay Series Part 2 of 5: Hedge Fund
Hedge Fund
It’s ten AM, do you know where your money is? Who touches your credit? Who makes it feel safe? Touching candy, scraping paper skin over the fires of the market, these are the goals of the new new Downtown set. These are the men and women who give your money value, who quantify your life growth. They deal your commodity. They are the men and women who take your life and make it fabulous.
She whispers to money before she dreams, in her loft Downtown. Money takes her to bed. She kisses her own power like an empty vase
On the other side of the world, in New Jersey, money begins to seek power. It begins to roll in the direction of Wall St. It divests itself from your retirement plan. Money wants to be in Manhattan. Money wants to be strong with sexy friends, cigars, power boats. A vacation for money would be a week on the beach at Battery Park, in the 1980s, during the bond market boom. Your money wants to merge, to kill. Your kids go off to college, your money goes off to war.
And now your moeny has gone digital – just like your love life. Your money is dating your iPhone. Your money is fucking your second wife in the back of a Towncar. Every morning at 9:30 AM Eastern, your money sits at a Bloomberg terminal and watches itself breathe.
You can’t have your money now. It belongs to math and it belongs to disappearing mental real estate – the headline market, the gold hedge, the metals sector. Your money is bored by you. Your money is long gone – blowing lines of coke in some Russian death bar with the twin daughters of a brand new oil baron. Say goodbye to your money.
Previously: Happy Hour
how to snort an owl
For many years my doctor has prescribed owls to me in pill form to help me cope with the mental disorder of my personality. He said, “Swallowing owl pills will help you not suffer as much attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Owls are composed of a number of amphetamine salts that are thought to increase the amount of dopamine in the brain. Like many stimulants owls affect the area of the brain that controls the amount of rewards or pleasures you are capable of feeling. Sometimes after I ingest an owl I experience a psychological positive value that is beyond any positive value I have ever experienced from the natural pleasure systems of eating, drinking, fighting, or doing sexual movements. Recently, I have been under a lot of stress. My throat has been really dry and it has been very difficult for me to swallow the full grown owls my doctor has prescribed. As a result, I’ve had to develop a new system of ingestion that involves snorting the owl. READ MORE >