Tips For Getting Published
Rauan — boils it down
*****
[ …touched and overwhelmed by all the letters I get bemoaning the travails of getting published I spent the last few days locked up in my laboratory boiling my thoughts and advice down to the basics. The essentials.
Stick to my program and you’ll likely be a Bestseller before the cows come singing on down through their skulls full of rice (results not typical)… ]
*****
1) “It’s all about the writing”—well, you know, that’s absolute crap.
2)
If your nose
Aint brown, this book’s
Going down(like the Titanic, fire & Ice, blah, blah)
These sorts of mantras and reminders are vital. Tape this one on the wall over your desk. Engrave it on your sad, desperate brain.
publishing’s a cold-blooded beast
3) Lie, beg, borrow, steal, squeal, bribe, flatter, romance, fuck, suck, READ MORE >
NYFW COMMANDO CASTING FAIL & “THE ROOM”
Last week was particularly weird. It was–is?–New York Fashion Week. This always means there is a lot that is happening in which I am not particularly interested in partaking but will end up doing anyway, because I am interested in the act of mistake-making. Every year and season I have a different approach to the fashion weeks, but usually it is a combination of excitement and confusion for what might possibly happen. [1]
DIRTY LAUNDRY
This year the surprise came to me as I was sitting on Houston eating the Whole Foods pizza slice my friend Brenna bought me. I looked like I smelled and was wearing my favorite hat, which no longer exists because of this beautiful dog I was dogsitting. Three short figures approached me and started talking to me about doing a runway show, and I definitely did not say yes and I was trying to be fully uninterested but maybe I wasn’t convincing. Initially, I did a stellar job at ignoring the email I received following the proposition, a message that emphasized how much they would love for me to stop by for the casting. [2] But then, two days later I got additional strongly-worded texts and voicemail messages. “We really want you!” read an SMS my ego believed, and there I was in an ugly white room with fluorescent lighting in Midtown.
Unfortunately, I had shaved and they liked me much more with facial hair and stinky, so in the end this was a waste of energy. But I was also rolling and attended the casting underwearless, swiftly adhering to commands such as: ‘Take your pants off, please.’
Perhaps I self-sabotaged, but at least I didn’t have to wear cowboy gear in public.
Behind the Scenes & Craft Notes & Random / Comments Off on NYFW COMMANDO CASTING FAIL & “THE ROOM”
September 9th, 2013 / 1:42 am
September 9th, 2013 / 1:42 am
THIS SEPTEMBER ISSUE: TWELVE REASONS TO CHOOSE HARPER’S
THE BRIEF HISTORY OF HARPER’S CLUB
Six days ago I received an email with the subject: “HARPER’S MAGAZINE RENEWAL.” The line of argumentation the email included was constructed by the magazine’s “Circulation Director.” I never read it, because I believe everything it said: I didn’t need to be persuaded in regards to the absolute necessity of my continued subscription. [1]
The motive that initially made me subscribe to Harper’s was my desire to intellectually engage on a more personal level with a friend from college, Dan. We both agreed that the depth of our homosocial rapports was not adequately profound, and because we enjoyed discussing with one another we eventually came up with the idea of what we jocularly referred to as “Harper’s Club.” [2] Dan’s academic interests were very different than mine, but we both enjoyed challenging various points of view in our pursuit of forming an informed opinion.
The planning of The Club’s meetings became impossible and our friendship never deepened. Regardless of this failure I could not be happier for the epiphenomenal ramifications of our failed initiative. By encouraging me to think about familiar subjects in different ways, “Harper’s Club” regularly challenged me as a thinker. This held true even when I was the solitary member of the Club, and continues to be valid to this day. Every time a new issue arrives in my mailbox I expect to encounter articles that serve this mission. My expectations are pleasantly surpassed consistently.
THOUGHTS ON ADS (ATTN: MIGHT BE FEELINGS!)
“Instead of judging the poem, let’s become overtaken by it.”
Janice brought this up a few days ago, but I think it bears repeating. Johannes Göransson continues to mash blueberries and puncture orchids while juggling swords and cacti over at the Harriet blog this month with his “Corean Music” posts.
Here’s a powerful glimpse from his latest, which seems to reverberate across a similar body of water I attempted to canoe sometime ago with my “How To Be A Critic” posts:
What would it mean to wade through the plague ground as a model of reading/writing as supposed to transcending the tasteless “too-much-ness” of poetry? Well, I think for one thing, I would do away with the model of “access”—take away the idea that when we read (or listen or watch etc.) that we are agents, that we are in control and we try to “access” the passive artwork with tools we’ve learned. Instead of access, lets think about fascination: When I read poems that I love I am not in control, not in charge, not trying to access some meaning that will redeem the work (make the shit valuable). No, I’m enthralled, overwhelmed, spellbound. This is what Steve Shaviro, writing about the movies in The Cinematic Body, “fascination.” Instead of judging the poem, let’s become overtaken by it. Instead of reinforcing our position as complete agents of evaluation, let’s be compelled and possessed.
Every day that I don’t give up writing completely feels amazing
I’m not one of those people who feels the need to write all the time, as you may have guessed, from reading my other shit on this website.
I frequently turn over the possibility of permanently ceasing all writing outside of my job. It’s not unusual. I think other contributors have mentioned this impulse. I’ve considered announcing this in some kind of horrifically boring final post. It’s obviously not a palatable idea, because who gives a shit? Certainly not someone similar myself, the self-audience, who is probably too lazy to every submit a single piece of writing to micro-press, let alone establish a relationship with an agent or editor. It doesn’t fit with the frozen vibe. I don’t fear rejection at all. I fear wasting people’s time. I fear over-sharing. I fear talking to an empty room.
Th end of publishing is kind of like a party thrown by a really unpopular kid.
Let’s Plunder Baudelaire
My French hasn’t happened, barely has my English. What might allow me to translate Baudelaire any better? Have you seen the poorly Christian way being had with some of his lines?
Ses cris me déchiraient la fibre
is
Her screaming would drive me crazy
Her crying knifed the heart in me
Her screechings drilled me like a tooth
Her crying upset me horribly
Her crying tears me apart
Her nagging tore at every part of me
Save for contour, pasteurization, cluck by region, I know my reek, but this line from Le Vin de l’assassin or The Murder’s Wine or The Assassin’s Wine or The Wine of the Assassin or Sippy Vindicator is rarely caught right. Why should it be? Can we span our whip from known to felt? I’m saying it doesn’t wow to take a nineteenth century dandy with a peanut head, and of such a floral, copulating rigor, and pinch him to “drive me crazy.” He’s not young Britney batting curls. Baudelaire consistently scarfed his wig. What is the direct UN transcript of this lovely purple? The hissy fit runs deeper into Satan. He’s not workshopping; he’s pissing blood. I don’t care, because I’m translating the poem right now, out of French and without rhyme. I’m going to say Michael Robbins and few others on his level have by their genius made rhyming their property. I keep very afraid of my betters. Especially Robbins. I chose my last twenty dollars for his book when I was starving in Austin. It gave me a lot of meals to look up to, so if I rhyme it’s just a glitch in the word salad, sir. Please. I berate my own underneaths. I live in fear. Ariana Reines having brilliantly done legitimate work translating Baudelaire – let me distinguish, too: This is simply an act of poetic necrophilia, mid-lobotomy.
Brief Notes on Johannes Göransson’s Poetry Foundation Posts
Rauan Klassnik already wrote a little bit responding to the first of Johannes Göransson’s recent ‘Corean Music’: Art and Violence posts at the Poetry Foundation blog. Part 3: “The Autobiographical Account of The Diabolical Music of Translation and Kitsch,” starts with the lines:
Every immigrant knows that it’s impossible to translate.
Every immigrant knows that it’s impossible not to.
As the post introduces some of JG’s own autobiographical context into the discussion, these opening lines push me to immediately delve into my own autobiography and the troubles of translation, translating between languages, yes, but also between cultures, histories, philosophies, beings. (Also I’m taken back to Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for Monsters…)
He also quotes Kim Hyesoon from an interview:
Yes, poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times. My body is full of graves. A sepulcher is dug up, and a young girl comes out of it with her dusty hands in tears. A lady who is a young girl and an old girl at the same time feels the presence of the young girl. I feel that the 15-year-old me and the 50-year-old me come out of the sepulcher through an illegal excavation. Time is not a straight line, but just a flat hell, like a desert. I am a tomb robber who is robbing my own tomb. Things from my tomb are exhibited under the radiant sun. Every time it happens I feel crude.
This feels really apt to me. The sort of violence of extracting different versions of a self, extracting memories and translating those memories, a thousand lives and deaths trapped in the strange balance of a body, like a fucked up game of Operation.
Recently I found some of my mother’s old photo albums, an old yearbook, photos of her as far back as junior high, some from before she met my dad. I had never seen most of these photos before. I looked through each album with my dad, recording his thoughts, recollections, questions as we picked her out in group and class photos, speculated on her age and context. My dad had also not seen many of these photos before. It was a strange piecing together of an identity, an identity that is altogether very clear in our minds. She was his wife. She was my mother. And an identity, that instead of becoming magnified, clarified, starts to become shattered and fragmented. It is a violent and uncomfortable process. Who is this woman at the beach in the photos? What version of my mother is this? How do I extract her ghost, my ghost, from these old images?
It is strange to think about the violence of translation. JG writes:
It was an abusive translation project.
It was catastrophic translation.
I haven’t recovered yet.
I haven’t recovered from the violence and I haven’t recovered from the beauty of being drowned in a foreign language, a language full of strange and alluring words like “faggot” and “weirdo.”
I’m not doing a full response of JG’s posts, and regardless, you should head over to the Poetry Foundation and read them yourself, but mostly I’m currently too self-absorbed to make any connections that aren’t related to my own peculiar and particular situation. JG’s posts are full of interesting questions, including circling around an ancient one about the potential of art. I’ll stop here for now, but curious to hear from others who might be engaging with these ideas in different ways…
SICHA, CLINTON, CYRUS: THOUGHTS ON DIVERSE DEMOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION IN MEDIA
Choire Sicha’s first book is out. I haven’t read it yet, but it is called Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City. The book party was at the East Village gay bar “The Cock,” and I have to say I have never seen it as packed as last night, at least as a pedestrian who quickly walked past it from the outside. There will be a lot of talk about the book, because almost everyone who reads (a lot?) online knows of Sicha. The book follows a group of gay men and chronicles their lives, but for some reason I trust it to not be regressive, even before I read it. I choose to believe Salon, that it will be “among a next wave of books about gay folks as full American citizens that doesn’t bother walking them through schematic journeys meant to stand in for the American Gay Experience.”
The active endeavor to ensure the meaningful participation of diverse individuals in media is integral. It helps reach a realistic and more informed view on the specifics of a broader range of identities. However, the constant overanalyzing of public figures’ gender, race and ethnicity identification choices may end up harming the very purpose they were intended to serve: letting individuals receive merit-based recognition for their objectively high-quality work.
A recent example of excessive analyzing of such nature is that of Hillary Clinton setting up a twitter account. Since the first moment she signed up for the social media website many jokes–some witty, others offensive–have been recurring. An approach that stuck out to me as particularly idiotic was the interpretation of how she chose to order the numerous qualities that define her in her two-line bio. To assert that Hillary Clinton is “anti-feminist” because she starts her twitter bio with “wife” and “mom” before addressing her professional accomplishments, is not only naive and judgmental, it is also self-righteous and flat-out manipulative. Policing the way people choose to present themselves, and telling them they are not to be taken seriously as feminists because they prioritize differently then the average feminist is expected to (?) is childish.
Additionally, who does not know that she also has served as Secretary of State? Pure common sense makes the dialogue surrounding the topic redundant. I think this line of thinking contradicts the true sense of feminism, as in such a system of order the women are provided the agency to identify how to present themselves. What about the people who use humor in their bios? Is that unethical? Are we taking things–such as a public figure’s social media presence–that seriously, and if we are, whose fault is it?
MANIPULATIVE NATURE OF THE DISCOURSE
A piece in The Millions presented a family saga focusing on the case-hardened nature of the way identity is performed by the writer and her grandmother, who seem to fall into the trap of being defined by the social expectations their social identities in how they attain and use power.
“As mixed-race girls, we learned to take what we could from where we could to make a whole. That’s a vulnerable position to be in, susceptible to second-guessing and collapse, but it’s also a crash course in manipulation. Hence the posturing of invulnerability. The multitude of ways that my grandmother and I announced a lack of need, and presented ourselves as in solid control. We don’t need you, we projected, and therefore we may have to ignore what you need as we go about proving that to ourselves once and again. One of the only things I know how to say in Chinese is: Wo zi ze lai. I can help myself.”
After its initial appearance, the ideology of representation has slowly lost a large chunk of its significance. There are times that I feel like I am not supposed to not like non-white writing, even if some of it has to be mundane, dull and entitled. The worst is when the writing is also patronizing and borders delusional. In some ways, if the argument is reduced to powerlessness as its selling point, it cannot easily be powerful when the powerlessness is not real.
I am not Miley Cyrus’ biggest fan, but an open letter addressed to her on The Huffington Post offended me. The writer aggressively requests Miley Curys ought to stop disrespecting “what feels black.” What he means of course, is that she should stop trying to emulate the rap element that currently dominates pop culture: she is white, thus cannot and must not do these things associated with what the author considers parts of the black identity, such as twerking. To claim these as an exclusive element of black culture is silly, and certainly flawed at its core: it leads to a new separation and division among people of different races. It seems like the writer might not be comfortable with a broadly inclusive culture that is not segmented the way he views it, or at least that is what the tone of his letter indicates.
His main issue and the central issue with her is her requesting producers that she was trying to go for a vibe that “feels black.” Her creative endeavor to do that cannot be offensive. It can be successful or not. While it is difficult to decide which is the case, at the end of the video for “We Can’t Stop” she smiles wearing a grill. It is not a mocking grin, rather a smile of awareness. She knows what she is doing, and she is doing it with a sense of humor.
Author News & Behind the Scenes & Craft Notes & Haut or not & Random / 6 Comments
August 7th, 2013 / 1:21 pm
August 7th, 2013 / 1:21 pm
Another way to generate text #8: Writing through a foreign language dictionary
I’ve spent this summer studying French, and while flipping through my copy of Cassell’s French Dictionary, I realized it contains un roman caché, just waiting to be libéré.
Here’s all one needs to do:
- Flip to any random page on the foreign language side of any foreign language dictionary*. For instance, I just opened my Cassell’s to page 593 (in the French half).
- Copy down all of the English on that page, ignoring the French. (Republicans should totally love this technique!)
*You don’t need to use any particular language or dictionary. And the more dissimilar the other language is from English, the more varied the English-language results will be—see below for more on that. And of course you can use this technique using any dual-language dictionary, not just English–X, but I’m assuming English as our baseline since HG is (mostly) an English-language site.
Here’s all of the English on Cassell’s page 593:
Art & “Sound” Violence (Jhnns Göransson – A.D. Jmsn)
fascinated with “sound” violence”
Ovr at the Potry Fondation (yes, the Poetry Foundation) gust blggr Johannes Göransson begins his first post with a late 19th century qute abut Kren Music by Henry Savage-Landor:
This music is to the average European ear more than diabolical, this being to a large extent due to the differences in the tones, semi-tones, and intervals of the scale, but personally, having got accustomed to their tunes, I rather like its weirdness and originality. When once it is understood it can be appreciated; but I must admit that the first time one hears a Corean concert, an inclination arises to murder the musicians and destroy their instruments.
destroying it all
Jhnnes gos on to tlk about ART as a “zone which both hrts and is hrt” and how, qoting his wife Jylle McSney, “snd is a knd of violence” and, fnally, sying “I am invested in this violent aspect of art: it fascinates and hrrfies me.”
So, nyways, a few hrs fter I read Görssn’s engagng Ptry Fdation pst I found myself thking again abut snd, vlence, snd-vlence, and other thngs as I lay in a rlly hot bth reaing A.D. Jmson’s xcllent “Amazing Adult Fantasy”:
You’ll be the guy who finally knifed up Indian Jones. Some’ll love you and some’ll hate you. Some’ll never believe it and never give in. Some’ll send flowers. Some’ll look for and find the younger Indian Jones.
The casl skm-reader READ MORE >