Mickey Mouse Sweaters
Choosing clothes can be very vexing. Sometimes I think that the turmoil of buying clothes is similar to the kind that exists in the Middle East. There’s screaming, destruction, and lots of second-guessing.
My most recent fashion crisis involves not a weird YouTube video but a Mickey Mouse sweater. I first saw the Mickey Mouse sweater at a vintage store in the East Village. When I noticed that marvelous boy mouse on the faded blue garment I became awfully excited.
White Boy Drag: Jackie & Lily Talk, Episode 1
Not White Boy Drag, just a white boy
This is a conversation. It is 1:06am MST. We are both HTML Giant contributors. We are also both Asian. This is happening IRL.
Lily Hoang: So, imagine there’s someone sitting at a café, smoking a cigarette, drinking a fucking Americano, reading David Foster Wallace. What do you think?
Jackie Wang: Who is this wienerschnitzel? Lemme guess. A white boy with lots of feelings.
LH: Haha, no, it’s me: I’m in white boy drag!
JW: White boy drag?! That’s an interesting term. What exactly does that mean? You’re not going to kill yourself and make everyone else feel bad about it, are you? Cause that would be taking the performance a little too far!
LH: Well, it’s hard being a white boy, I gotta admit. Like you don’t know how hard it is. The guilt. The burden of genius. All the privileges. It’s hard to balance, keep the head sane, ya know?
JW: You know what I hate about white boys? They’re always complaining about how they can’t get laid, but it seems obvious to me – like – why they can’t get laid. Should someone tell them? Should I be the one to tell them?
Interview: Reader Who Yesterday Finished The Recognitions
HTMLGiant: So how long did it take you to read the book?
David Fishkind: Three weeks I think. It took me about three minutes per page, so… forty-eight hours. I spent two days reading the book.
HG: Did you ever read the book in public places or leave the book out purposefully when visitors were over?
DF: It was a library copy, so really, it didn’t matter. But yes, I read it on the subway and kept it on my bedroom desk and in my backpack.
HG: How did you deal with it? Do you think you’re a big man or something?
DF: I don’t know. I thought I’d feel proud of myself. I ate seven or eight handfuls of blueberries when I finished. I didn’t cry or anything. Sometimes I looked words up in the dictionary.
HG: Have you read other Gaddis? How did this book compare?
DF: No. I guess maybe I’ll read JR in a year or a few months or so. I guess I’ll read them all if I don’t first die.
HG: Did you ever read the book while on drugs or alcohol?
DF: Once or twice I’d had a some alcohol to drink, but it didn’t really do anything. I didn’t feel drunk, though I was… I didn’t tell anyone I was drunk… so…
What the Facebook IPO Means For Young Writers
Nothing Left To Buy:
A detailed analysis of the Facebook IPO:
i’m the only finance writer without any understanding of desire. i’m soft like the sound of a dead freeway or the jam band that plays in a warehouse above the impossibly cute shopping district. all the helpful selling colors. this is china in the future. the TVs are 40% thinner in 2050. american is 40% thinner. there are fewer white babies. people want things like food that is free from toxins and movies with uncompromising ethnic super heros. little kids want to grow up to be anything. anything at all would be better than youth. education today is like an expensive prison for brilliant young interns with no tasks to complete. there’s nothing but screens showing images of other screens. jean baudrillard’s nephew was right about that french restaurant – it’s really delicious if you can get a reservation by email. no i can’t give you the email sorry. i was asked not to.
Does the Pulitzer suck, and if so, whom?
Winners of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize will be announced today at 3pm. Any predictions? The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded to no one, apparently. Nominees were Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. I’m curious what you think of the prize (Fiction category or in general). Is it
a) a highly prestigious stamp of approval that guarantees an enjoyable and edifying read
b) a mainstream award given to a conventional, palatable work (though the work may be formally inventive in superficial ways), leading to increased sales, certainly among readers of “serious literary fiction” but mostly among a segment of people who want to acquire cultural capital without too much effort
OR are you an enlightened in-betweener? If you tell me I will put it in a pie chart. I remember “at one point in my life” having a lot of fun making lists in a .txt file of Pulitzer winners and a future reading order that I would never end up following. I also remember (much later) finding Finding a Form by William Gass in the library, [I don’t mean this to sound like a conversion story. Beloved was pretty phenomenal. Lonesome Dove features a river full of snakes.] and reading this on the first essay’s first page:
…the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill…
from “Pulitzer: The People’s Prize” by William Gass
from “Pulitzer: The People’s Prize” by William Gass
Cover Fail
The difference between a press you’ve admired for years and a press you’ve never heard of is the former is willing to pay a little money for its covers. There are presses that have been around for decades, that pour their sweat and tears into publishing more words than any of us realize, and that absolutely no one but a tenure committee cares about because they can’t be bothered to pay for a decent cover. I’m not above designing without the proper training myself, but I at least pay for raw art to use on my magazine’s covers — and I do try to actually design. I didn’t want to call anybody in particular out, and it’s insanely easy to replicate the bad covers that drive me up the wall, so I made a few shit covers of my own. If your press’s output looks anything like this, for the love of God, stop what you’re doing and find a freelancer to do something better.
Now let’s talk about what happened here:
POPULAR POST
This post yesterday was goddamn funny. I almost laughed my ass off. I laughed, and I enjoyed the laughing, because I am worn out, time kills you, existence is terrifying, laughing is the meds, it feels good to be included and not to be the one getting laughed at. The laughing is temporary shelter from bigger extinction, by way of smaller inclusion. I’m not alone. Someone else is alone. Not me.
The post made me sad too. I laughed, but I couldn’t laugh my ass quite off. Almost off but not quite. Like, I laughed my ass ¾ off but I also watched myself laughing and was like: You so stupid, gurl. That’s you he is making fun of. ALONE. You are up there alone. If one of us is up there alone, it is you. It is always you, in a Schopenhauer sense, nah mean?
I felt like a cog, too: cog-ish, cog-esque. I thought about “mean” and I thought about it as a hits-generator. Perhaps, first and foremost, mean is a hits generator. We are helping to generate hits! Hooray!?
The etymology of the word “mean”, according to etymonline, is:
“I’ve seen with growing disgust…”
“The Mona Lisa Curse,” by Robert Hughes. Part one of six.
UPDATE: “Apart from drugs, Art is the biggest unregulated market in the world.”
The One MFA Program to Rule Them All
Scott Kenemore is very angry that his beloved Columbia University has fallen to #47 in the Poets & Writers MFA rankings and he’s going to tell you exactly why Columbia has the awesomest MFA program in all the world.
1. Columbia is expensive and that makes it awesome.
2. Fancy writers teach at Columbia and that makes it awesome.
3. Writers who go to cheaper schools end up selling chapbooks in quantities of 500 (?) and teaching at those terrible regional universities in fly-over states so Columbia is awesome.
4. He has written six novels! All his Columbia friends are equally successful. Even though you may not be able to name one of his six books, Columbia is awesome.
5. Only writers who attend Columbia (or the one school he considers superior, Iowa) have genitals. The rest of you have the smooth plastic of Barbie and Ken so Columbia is awesome.
6. Unlike the thousands of writers at other MFA programs, or heaven forbid those writers who dare to write without the degree, students at Columbia want to be successful so Columbia is awesome.
7. The MFA rankings should include a category for manuscript placement and FOUR FIGURE advances so Columbia is awesome. (That last idea, minus the suggested prestige of a four figure advance is a good one.)
To summarize, Columbia is the awesomest and only MFA program worth attending if you are a serious, important writer. Other than Iowa.
Here is a rational, smart response to all this MFA ranking business (via Hobart’s Tumblr).