ToBS R1: hating on Jonathan Franzen vs. hating on Jonathan Safran Foer
[Matchup #16 in Tournament of Bookshit]
You meet a woman and wake up to her bookshelf:
• 30-50 copies of Elle
• 1984
• [something by Chuck Klosterman]
• Everything Is Illuminated
You say, “Okay,” to her while she sleeps. READ MORE >
ToBS R1: emailing yr writing to people you dont know vs. readings w/ so many people reading no one listens
[Matchup #15 in Tournament of Bookshit]
emailing drafts of your writing to people you dont know
Right now I am picturing the recipient of one of these drafts: What, why? the recipient—let’s say she is a she—might be thinking, upon discovering this unexpected draft in her inbox. The brief note accompanying the draft says something that is nice enough, but also fundamentally presumptuous. It states the author’s reasons: “I’ve been a fan of your work [or blog, or Twitter] for quite some time now…” READ MORE >
ToBS R1: gordon lish vs. foot fetish
[Matchup #14 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Background – Feet
Casanova dabbing at some polenta around his mouth, glimpsing the toe cleavage of a passer-by, dropping his neckerchief, hanging his head, leaving his still-full plate on the table, going after her.
F. Scott Fitzgerald looking through the peephole at Zelda (hyperventilating in her chair), writing something in a notebook, lying on the carpet so he can see, under the door, her bare feet shuffling back and forth.
Goethe with writer’s block, sketching a foot, a viaduct, a foot, a cliff face, a foot, a shoe, a foot, a liberty pole, a castle, a foot, a foot, a foot.
Dostoyevsky at a bakery, queueing behind a woman, noticing her sandals, leaving loafless to follow her home, being invited in for vodka in his imagination, his stomach a sad animal.
Elvis looking at a pamphlet, blinking at the words “somatosensory cortex” rereading them for the fifth time, wishing he was holding a pineapple close to his face, wishing he was 13 again with his mother tired from work, taking off her shoes, relying on him. READ MORE >
ToBS R1: no-taste design aesthetic online magazine vs. facebook updates of what you ate / listened to
[Matchup #13 in Tournament of Bookshit]
In the Really Fucking Ugly corner, weighing in at less than a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a pound, is the entire coded structure of happydogmomlitjournal.blogspot.com. Happy Dog Mom Lit Journal is a newcomer on the scene, but has recently secured training with the Google AdSense and AdWords programs, showing off a stiff upper right corner text ad box that flits out ads for Moleskine journals and Tin House magazine subscriptions. Its ability to fly almost completely under the radar––to not have a single pair of eyes look at it, at all, for years, save the eyes of its own mother and master and pen-name bedecked story feeder, among the occasional algorithmic complimentary link bait––is truly amazing. It’s a stunning example of incompetence, laziness, a journey retarded before it’s even begun, and a complete lack of aesthetic sense beyond the named, repuked text-based emotional “landscapes” that can cohere, almost accidentally, under forty thousand clicks or more, here called curation. READ MORE >
ToBS R1: NaNoWriMo vs. ‘What is your novel about?’
[Matchup #12 in Tournament of Bookshit]
On “What is your novel about?”…
The kneejerk hatred of “Wiyna?” has partly to do with the dread of trying to encompass an entire novel in a soundbite, along with the sense that revealing something that took a lot of effort and patience to write a novel about, something that the author may have spent a long time probing the aboutness of, something that now probably has an amount of sacredness to the author, to casually remark, “It’s about…” can be taken as an attempt to devalue/demystify the novel from the author’s point of view.
But for as loaded as the question comes at the author, it is almost a necessary question for the asker on a primary level. To be in conversation with an author who says, “I wrote a novel.” and says no more, it’s human nature to at least think the question “What’s it about?” or “What is it like?” or “Can you please give me some kind of concrete idea or image related to your novel so I can attach it to my memory of ‘you wrote a novel.'” One reason the asker may not completely appreciate the weight of the question is because many products of mainstream entertainment have obvious aboutnesses. For the sake of casual conversation, “Schindler’s List” is simply about the holocaust. “J. Edgar” is about J. Edgar Hoover. “Superman,” “Spiderman,” and “Batman,” are about Superman, Spiderman, and Batman, respectively. When your novel’s title is a bit abstract like “There Is No Year” or “Us,” the mind has a hard time nailing down even a thread of aboutness. And human beings like aboutnesses. They like people who like aboutnesses. So answering the question politely may leave an impression on the asker that this author is a nice person and maybe we can be friends now. READ MORE >
ToBS R1: literary marriage vs. child of famous author’s novel
[Matchup #11 in Tournament of Bookshit]
So what about Percy and Mary Shelley? That’s a literary marriage I can get into. They lived in a big house in Switzerland and floated around an ambiguous sexual circle and wrote pretty fun shit. I mean, if you’re going to get married to a writer that seems like a fairly successful way to go about it. Personally I’ve always been pretty wary of the idea of being… with… a writer. So maybe the open thing works? Maybe the only reason to marry a writer is so you can have sex with your bros and still be accepted by society? I like Keats and Byron; they seem chill. But that’s not even the best thing about the marriage. Only through such a union would any of us have seen Frankenstein, and I like Frankenstein. The problem with this argument lies in the fact that the sci-fi/horror story directly refutes literary marriage’s win. Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Wollstonecraft was a famous author, and Frankenstein is a novel. So it’s a draw. Disregard the Shelleys. READ MORE >
ToBS R1: announcing yourself as ‘available for interviews’ vs. following several thousand people on twitter
[Matchup #10 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Announcing yourself as ‘available for interviews’ seems fine to me. I don’t see anything wrong with letting people know that you’re available to be interviewed. It’s different than saying ‘interview me’ (command) or ‘I need people to interview me’ (desperate) because it conveys information in a non-obligatory manner that also makes the person announcing it seem busy and ‘prestigious,’ to some degree, via the implication that s/he isn’t always available to be interviewed.
Following several thousand people on Twitter seems like pussy shit to me. Following a small amount of people means you either fuck with people you like and/or follow people based on the quality of their tweets. Following no one means you don’t fuck with anyone else’s tweets. Following several thousand people means you fuck with whomever and/or are trying to garner ‘follow backs’ to increase your amount of followers. To me, following a small amount of people or no one is hard; following several thousand people is pussy shit. READ MORE >
ToBS R1: “everybody has a story” vs. “show don’t tell”
[Matchup #9 in Tournament of Bookshit]
“Everybody has a story”
But I don’t like the story of a woman unsatisfied with her marriage, her greying hair still shoulder length from the 60s, taking a creative writing class at the community college, getting all nervous in her Hyundai parked outside under a leafless tree, going over in pen, again, the final revisions of her 3000-word story: the one about a woman her age, of average median household income, whose husband is also a strong but silent type reoccurring satellite figure in her empty life; who, like the amateur in jean overalls now crying in her Korean-made car, also drinks gin in her pajamas at night while playing solitaire, in an unnamed though evocatively New England-y town, whose racial demographic is similar to hers, except in the story the friendly mail man who dies of cancer because something needs to fucking happen is African-American, which her instructor (a man with both a novel and pony-tail “out”) told her she should include before she submits it to Glimmer Train, because those ladies are into black guys probably. READ MORE >
ToBS R1: ‘is the author of’ vs. bowties
[Matchup #8 in Tournament of Bookshit]
BOW TIES
Seems like boys (girls later) who wear bow ties are either those who’ve never seen their own asshole or they’re so preoccupied with their own asshole they carry a snapshot of their asshole in the leather handbag they refer to as a ‘tote.’ Either a douche or a douche. There are exceptions, of course, as there always is with FASHION, that grand meatus of illusion, and so we’ll give pervs like Pee-Wee Herman a pass ’cause he knew that in order to sport a ridiculous trademark you gotta show a little dick. The tools I’m talking about are the casual bow-tie wearers, the straight twink walking down San Francisco’s Valencia Street with a Vonnegut tattoo whose ‘girl’ owns more accessories than books, and who has never read Tom Wolfe but knows enough to pass him off as a ‘fashionable guy’ and there’s something about that bow around a str8 twink’s neck that makes me think of a half-assed suicide attempt, a bottle of Tylenol PM chased with a bottle of $10 corner store Gnarly Head Pinot Noir, or ‘X marks the spot’ like DECAPITATE ME HERE FOR GOOD HEAD. I’ve attended three readings where the readers wore bow ties and I imagined their soft putty nutsack flesh twisted around the neck instead of the $19 American Apparel polka-dotted cotten. I attended San Francisco’s Literary Death Match and met Todd Zuniga and stared at his bow tie the same way my ex-boyfriend stared at women’s tits. Seems like bow ties would be much cooler if they were made of ball flesh, not to mention pleasing a man’s sack would be easier/more accessible, tho it depends on the dickhead. I don’t really know how I feel about girls in bow-ties. I mean, I like the gender-queer bois who sport ties, but straight girls who sport bow ties seem like bitches who don’t give head and powder their puss. I guess if a girl has to wear something around her neck I’d rather it be a dog-collar attached to a leash, but that seems mean. Maybe if Vonnegut had sold these instead of overrated paperbacks, I’d appreciate the attempt to convey intelligence through neckware. Tie a bomb around your neck and whisper ‘god is in the details.’ READ MORE >
ToBS R1: Calling yrself editor-in-chief of online jrnl vs posting pics of other people’s books on facebook
[Matchup #7 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Why do you call yourself the editor-in-chief (or even the chief editor) of an online lit journal? This isn’t The New York Times. It’s a fart with a header. It’s a blogspot. You are the editor-in-chief of a blogspot. I hope you cite your role as editor-in-chief of the blogspot when you submit to other blogspots. I hope mad honeys come to your release party for the blogspot. I hope you get a lot of ass.
Lucky for you there is a literary action that is a shade lamer and that is…
Posting photos of other people’s shitty first books on fb with the caption “Look what came in the mail! Going to be a great weekend!”
No. It is not going to be a great weekend. READ MORE >