Hello, Online Submission Manager

success_key1More journals are turning to the online submission manager option. It’s fast, easy, and organized. Response time can still be slow, but that’s just how it is. The following seven linked journals are some “bigger” places that now have an online submission manager option:

One Story, Columbia, Quarterly West, Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, Fence, Agni

There are many more out there (ex, Diagram) and most likely through 2009 more journals will adopt the online submission manager model. One major plus, after you send that story or poem with a few mistakes you just caught, you can simply withdraw with the click of a button.

Uncategorized / 113 Comments
January 5th, 2009 / 1:32 pm

O Captain, My Captain: Lish Power Quote #4 & 5

girls

Scare myself, change the terms, rearrange the rules, let recklessness overtake me, see if I can outrun habit, make a friend of chaos.
My Romance, pg 25

Extra bonus righteousness for your Captain-buck quote:

Yes, yes, yes, yes, writers, fucking writers, fucking rewriters, fucking usurpers, fucking assassins. Skip it, names. I am sick of it, names. Me, I will see you in the lobby.
My Romance, pg 141

Excerpts / 12 Comments
January 4th, 2009 / 12:20 pm

The Internet: Serious Business

The image is facetious, but I think we – you and me and everyone we don’t know – are onto something. The internet’s constraints and agilities are being used in wonderful and inventive ways. I’ve noticed writers and editors either reappropriating online aesthetics or its practical functions. Here are three examples that kind of show a spirit to this point:

I. Mark Baumer’s everydayyeah will post a 365 word story this year, running one word at a time. He chose Jesse Ball, who just published The Way Through Doors. [Blake Butler’s review forthcoming in The Believer, April.] One simply could not ‘distribute’ or publish in this form without the easy accessibility of the internet, made more so with the advent of RSS feeds and Google reader. Baumer seems obsessed with finding beauty in the redundancies of every day. True, it will take a devoted fan to check in every day, but let’s compromise: how about every week? We might even learn something about Ball’s structure.

II. Jillian Clark’s brilliant poem (haiku?) untitled under her “so i go in alone” blog post, wherein the entire poem is comprised of wikipedia picture captions.

an okapi cleaning its muzzle with its tongue
an okapi at bristol zoo cleans itself
okapi at chester zoo
an okapi reaches for some leaves

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Author Spotlight & Web Hype / 19 Comments
January 3rd, 2009 / 11:42 pm

I like the book “Histoire d’O (the story of O)”

storyofoeroticheaddress

The “Story of O” is a French erotic novel written by Anne Desclos (originally under a pen name). Desclos wrote “O” as a series of letters to Jean Paulhan, her lover and eventual publisher, in response to Paulhan’s claim that a woman could never write like the Marquis de Sade.

Many terms used in contemporary BDSM are attributed to Desclos’s novel. It is a story of female submission, torture, sexuality, objectification and (ultimately) of love. The character O is whipped, chained, branded, beaten, pierced, dominated and fucked. Basically O is a submissive good girl who allows all of these somewhat horrific events to occur by granting her masters verbal permission to perform the acts.

The ending is beautiful and will upset some.

The story is fiction and should be treated thusly by those who find the novel misogynistic or disagree with the submissive nature of the heroine. The book was written by a woman, not a man, as an act of love.

Who are we to cast objections over love between two lovers.

I Like __ A Lot / 25 Comments
January 3rd, 2009 / 2:05 am

It feels good to be home @ 11 pm on Friday night posting about Gary Lutz, it feels right

200901I am glad I am not out being a jerk off.

I am glad I stayed inside to read this lecture on sentences, originally delivered by Gary Lutz at Columbia, and now reprinted in the new issue of the Believer (which also has an interview with Gordon Lish, & from the preview on the site, it looks really funny and righteous). Lish is also on the cover. Believe that.

This lecture by Gary Lutz is probably the most apt deconstruction of language in sentences and how a certain breed of languaged sentences are made. I would show this lecture to people who asked why their story about the Russian expatriate looking for his father wasn’t quite enough just on story alone even though everyone in the boardroom was crying.

As I read the lecture I kept highlighting pieces when I thought ‘this would be a good part to quote when I blog about this lecture,’ though every time I read a new graph, I kept deciding to highlight that one, because every line in the lecture is right on the $$$. But we already knew that.

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Uncategorized / 18 Comments
January 3rd, 2009 / 12:31 am

new from Mud Luscious

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In my email (also probably in yours?), a message from JA Tyler, editor of Mud Luscious:

readers & the like.

 

look, look, look:

 

mud luscious issue six is live & death-defying. new work by brandi wells, jamie lin, jared ward, charles lennox, laura hirneisen, lauren becker, tim jones-yelvington, m.d. kempis, ryan dilbert, howie good, kyle hemmings, & drew kalbach. this issue also includes a review of every online & print work available from publishing genius press.

 

go here to view the issue: www.aboutjatyler.com

 

ml press also opens today for pre-orders of the jan. trio:

 

LIKE IT WAS HER PLACE by kim chinquee

A HEAVEN GONE by jac jemc

SOME OF THE LETTERS THAT WERE CUT by michael kimball

 

each volume is $2 (includes shipping), is limited to a single run of 50 copies, & will ship jan. 15.

five-month subscriptions are also available. $30 / 15 volumes.

 

go here to support ml press: www.mudlusciouspress.blogspot.com

 

also the new flash collection by j. a. tyler EVERYONE IN THIS IS EITHER DYING OR WILL DIE OR IS THINKING OF DEATH is available now from the achilles chapbook series. this collection will only be available in a signed, limited edition of 50 copies. $5 (includes shipping).

 

go here to order: www.aboutjatyler.blogspot.com  

 

read up & share out.

 

happy 2009.

JA Tyler has reviewed the entire Publishing Genius catalog. That is exciting.

Someone should review the entire Dalkey Archive catalog.

Presses & Web Hype / 2 Comments
January 2nd, 2009 / 5:11 pm

I like Jimmy Chen a lot: the many minds of JC

jimmychen

Jimmy Chen contains Asian multitudes

I think in future litmus tests of potential significant others, one could do well by presenting to them a bibliography of Jimmy Chen, inclusive not only of his fiction, but his blogging, his persona, his internet collage. Then watch their face. If they aren’t with it, they are worthless. Send them crying to their moms.

Knowing Jimmy Chen exists in the world has on more than one occasion made me feel better about my life, and about writing. This is strange, likely, as I have never met Jimmy, never even Gmail chatted with him, or had much direct correspondence with him outside of brief emails and blog comment banter. And yet in most every instance of him I can remember, I have come to believe that if more writers were like Jimmy Chen, this whole game would be so much better off.

There are lots of ways I could define this sweeping statement, but rather than explain why he is a good person (which I believe he is), or positive for the mind, or just plain goddamn funny, I’d rather look at what he does more concretely, and in the mind of how what Jimmy does can be used as a model or a mindset worth trying to strive for.

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I Like __ A Lot / 28 Comments
January 2nd, 2009 / 4:38 pm

An Excerpt from Conversations with Angels: What Swedenborg Heard In Heaven

The Devil

The Devil

  There still exist people who follow the work of Emanuel Swedenborg in this world. He was a Christian mystic (who influenced the likes of William Blake, a favorite of mine, as well as Borges and Jung and Helen Keller) whose work sometimes intimidates me, because he saw so much that I sometimes feel he really hallucinated all the time after a certain point in his life. And that scares me and breaks my heart. Then again, he was a man who had found salvation and inspired a new Christian religion. Maybe he was truly blessed. I guess we’ll never know for sure. That said, he knew for sure. His books are published by the Swedenborg Foundation. Here’s a funny bit about running into some devils:

 

 

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Excerpts / 32 Comments
January 2nd, 2009 / 2:28 pm

NOÖ 9 is righteous like Psalm 69, believe that

ministry-psalm69New NOÖ for 09, ladies n gentz. Get at it:

Welcome to 2009. To celebrate, NOÖ [9] is now out: noojournal.com. New features: Ryan Call as Associate Editor, handkerchiefs, reviews, a blog (noojournal.blogspot.com), and sleep sounds.

The new issue features prose, poems, art, and otherwise from: Nick Antosca, Deborah Blakely, Vic Cavalli, John Casey, Jimmy Chen, Christopher Cheney, Tanya Chernov, Jack Christian, Bryan Coffelt, Brooklyn Copeland, Michael DeForge, Gabe Durham, Rachel B. Glaser, Evelyn Hampton, Kyle Hemmings, Michael Hsiung Grace Jamison, Mike Jauchen, Greg Lytle, Erika Mikkalo,, Patricia Parkinson, Adam Peterson, Ashley Reaks, Bradley Sands, Peter Jay Shippy, Randy Thurman, Jono Tosch, and Rebecca Volinsky.

Thanks for reading. Print copies coming in ~3 weeks. Let us know if there’s any good spot near you to distribute free literature.

Also be sure to check out Magic Helicopter Press (http://www.magichelicopterpress.com). There are chapbooks from Mary Miller and Benjamin Buchholz available.

We’re going to be sharing a table at AWP Chicago in February with Publishing Genius and Lamination Colony. We’ll have an RC helicopter. Literature of shenanigans. Maybe we’ll see you there.

Uncategorized / 2 Comments
January 2nd, 2009 / 2:06 am

GOD WORSHIPS US

FROM BARRY GRAHAM:

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Random / 4 Comments
January 1st, 2009 / 6:21 pm