CNF’s Best of the Blogosphere

Right now Creative Nonfiction Magazine is putting together their next volume of Best American Creative Nonfiction, which is a print annual honoring, well, creative nonfiction.

This year they are looking to include a series of ‘best blog writing,’ which seems like a cool idea, and they are seeking nominations for good posts for their consideration, which anyone can nominate with a small amount of effort by putting in a couple of lines of info at their website.

If you are interested in nominating, here is some info, I nominated the best recent post I could remember from a friend’s blog, you should as well:

BEST OF THE BLOGOSPHERE

This may come as a surprise to some, but here at CNF, we consider
narrative blogs an extension of the creative nonfiction
genre–they’re innovative, exciting, honest, and popular. Blogs are
so popular, in fact, that it seems as if everyone has one:
politicians, movie stars, even the Godfather behind Creative
Nonfiction <http://www.leegutkind.com/blogs/>
.
As some of you may know, CNF has been collecting and publishing the
best of the blogosphere since the the inception of our annual The
Best Creative Nonfiction series. And while Volume 2
<http://www.creativenonfiction.org/cnfshop/product_info.php?products_id=122>
makes its way to bookstores and subscribers, CNF is already fast at
work compiling blogs for Volume 3–due out Summer 2009. But this
time, we’re doing things a bit differently.

We want you, the reader, to nominate the blogs you love.

We re looking for: Vibrant new voices with interesting, true stories
to tell. Narrative, narrative, narrative. Posts that can stand alone,
2000 words max, from 2008. Something from your own blog, from a
friend s blog, from a strangers blog.

The small print: We will contact individual bloggers before
publication; we pay a flat $50 fee for one-time reprint rights.
Deadline: October 31, 2008.

To nominate, click here
<http://www.creativenonfiction.org/blog_nomination.html>

Web Hype / 2 Comments
October 14th, 2008 / 11:21 pm

Internet Writing Advice

1. Don’t do anything. Don’t send stuff to people. Don’t write. Don’t think there are words. Don’t say words. Guess what about what you typed? Ieurnadbussum. I have $50,000,000 in my anus if I could just get it out, tomorrow we’re getting in the Wheat Thins. Don’t type to me if you’re just going to type.

2. Don’t type to me if you’re just going to type. Do you have a forehead? Are you sad? Yeah, that’s sad. I am hungry. If you can feed me, feed me. Look at the internet screen. How many times a day do you refresh your browser looking at Duotrope, or the website of that place that is running that contest that you paid $35 to get into. You could win. Did you know you could win? I am tired. Are you going to mail me the raisins soon? There are a fucklot of books. Masturbation done right takes at least an hour. Don’t type to me if you’re just going to type.

3. ‘Oh you have a story at Tom-n-Jerry Monthly? That’s cool. I have a story at Publish Barn, it’s sick, it’s about the universe. I write a lot and I like beer. Beer costs $4.50 a pint a lot of places, maybe if I write the bartender a poem he can give his girlfriend he’ll let me drink one free. No, he doesn’t give his girlfriend poems, his girlfriend doesn’t want a poem, his girlfriend wants to get beamed up the B, and he’ll give it to her. When is the new Night Train coming out?’

4. Vanna White turned the lit up letter and found a full-fledged character development decision wedged in between the light and the box turn space, she snuck it into her pocket between her alter-tits, and turned the letter and smiled really white, and after the show she went home and hid in the closet and vibrated the developed character into an arc against her systematically decimated hymen.

5. All my best friends are people I don’t see enough to hate.

6. ‘Oh you’re a writer? What’s your novel about? Have you read Christopher Moore? Have you read All the Sad Young Literary Men? Are you sad? Dude you are just so sad and jealous.’

7. ** HTML GIANT IS CURRENTLY RUNNING OPEN CASTING CALL FOR REALITY TV SHOW BASED ON THE LIVES OF INTERNET WRITERS, THE SHOW IS UNDER CONTRACT ALREADY WITH MTV, THIS IS NOT A JOKE, YOU MUST HAVE PUBLISHED ON ELIMAE, DOGZPLOT, BACON BEEP, LAMINATION COLONY AND ANAL DESIGN MAP TO BE CONSIDERED. FWD YOUR RESUME TO SOME EMAIL SOMEWHERE, WE’VE GOT IT SET UP TO FALL INTO OUR LAP AT THE DINNER TABLE, GENE’S GOTS A KID, I HAVE AN IMPENDING GOITER. **

8. ‘Will there be free booze?’

9. Suntrust Mortgage. Bye stock market. Part time work. Grading papers. Word count. Cover letter. New book day. Grease buffet. Dong farm. ‘Shark Sandwich? Shit Sandwich.’ Anal mission. Zachary German.

10. Bye.

Web Hype / 21 Comments
October 14th, 2008 / 6:03 pm

Memory Genre Sidenote

In relation to my rant on ‘memory loss trauma’ books that spoil the beef by wrapping it all together in kitsch and with a ribbon on top, if you want to see an example of a book that pulls off this kind of narrative in a way that feels authentic, new, and more valuable even than the sum of its parts, check out Robert Lopez’s PART OF THE WORLD, which is not only fun and entirely readable, but also does something new with language and sentence formation, which, if you aren’t paying attention to in writing, I’d say, you might as well be writing for the screen.

And for further reading, pretty much anything by Brian Evenson, especially in this case, THE OPEN CURTAIN, is so far beyond what the scope of the Galchen and McCarthy are going for, might as well just skip the training wheels and hit the big ride.

Uncategorized / 12 Comments
October 14th, 2008 / 5:35 pm

Boys and Men

Love in the time of wordpress

Entropy may not be the perfect word, but it does come to mind. Just go to any Youtube video and read the comments—the ‘natural corrosion’ from discourse to insult to empty violence. Despite names or aliases, the overall anonymity of the internet enables such proclamations as ‘go fuck your mother’ or ‘n*gger, etc.’ as surely one would remain reticent in person, for fear of a face bashing.

It may have been Mean Week that initiated the male adolescent rhetoric in the comment sections, though I fear I’ve encountered this before. There must be something about being a literary man with a college (or higher) education and a WiFi connection that makes him want to say “go fist-fuck yourself” or “i am kevin sampsell’s penis.” Maybe it’s one too many rejection letters, or a plot arc that simply snapped. As for Kevin Sampsell’s penis, I gather it’s in Garamond 10pt. small caps.

Perhaps it is male bonding, or ironic derision as a form of peer respect, that causes such obsession with: a) penises and/or cocks b) said penises and/or cocks with the same girth as Barry Graham’s head, c) fists as a phallic enterprise, d) the lack of having a penis, e) chopping off heads, f) blood resulting from the chopping off of heads, or penises, or severe fisting, g) bags containing feces, h) the introduction of staples as a means to secure dismembered body parts, and i) ad infin.

Only Gene Morgan, however angry and mean, is able to refrain from such homoerotic inclinations; rather, his mention of blood (“Be sure to bring a towel to sop your blood up off of my front lawn.”) and violence is of a more current-day protestant and territorial nature. He is not interested cock. He just wants to impose severe head trauma on you (outside on his lawn, away from his child).

We can all learn from Gene. In the future, keep your violence inside of your pants.

Oh, and my address is: 69 Gofuckyourself Dr.

Web Hype / 177 Comments
October 14th, 2008 / 1:33 pm

The Jeopardy! I’m Watching

Friends, here is the first of what I hope will be many and several “field reports” on the current state of Jeopardy! from my friend Danielle, who is the most incisive Jeopardy! watcher I know. Her socio-critical critique of Alex, the contestants, and everything else about the show is so dead-on and so consistenly furious, the only question you’re really ever left with is “why is she still watching something she hates this much?” The answer is simple: because Jeopardy! is one of the greatest television shows of all time. Danielle’s preferred forum for Jeopardy! studies is a live, collaborative environment resulting in a spontaneous, non-documented performance (that is to say: we sit on her couch, we watch Jeopardy! together and make fun of it, while trying to time our insults such that we can still keep pace with the game). Therefore, we are very lucky to have this record of her work.

“The Jeopardy! I’m Watching…”

…is like this bizarre, Lynchian masterpiece. Someone behind the scenes here was like “Hey how can I create some kind of embedded storyline that involves mining three nauseatingly awkward characters for all the pathos they’ve got” and his coworker was like “Well, we’ve got those contestants…” and the first guy said “Hey what if they had like a REALLY bad therapist?” and the coworker was all “I think I might have just the guy for the part…”and the past week or two have been like this long, dragged-out pilot episode of New Jeopardy! I mean, someone put these people out of their misery! Through some miracle they’ve managed to make it through the saddest life ever long enough to finally be on jeopardy, which is like at the very top of their list of stupendously compromised hopes and dreams, and then as soon as that first commercial break is over…POW! Sayonara LOSER! But the characters are like real weirdos. Not quite like Dennis Hopper wearing a gas mask weirdos, but not quite not like that kind either.

D.

Random / 4 Comments
October 14th, 2008 / 9:52 am

“boston review” or “shitty suck-sack”? you be the judge

in an attempt to be really mean, i decided to randomly attack a journal.  so i went to google and typed in “the most literary journal” hoping someone would have referred to themselves like that.  then i tried “mega awesome lit journal” and i got nothing.  then i typed in a stupid sounding name “the boston review” and ta-da, it exists.  here, for your spiteful edification, is me interjecting things into their about page:

“Boston Review is a nonpartisan magazine of ideas [yeah, shitty ideas]: animated by hope [and stupid-assedness] , committed to equality and reason [and being lame and butthole-y], convinced that the imagination eludes political categories [p.s.: we blow more than the show “m.a.s.h”]. We see each issue as a public space where people can loosen the hold of conventional preconceptions [really? or perhaps, loosen a stool into your mouth, just perhaps?] and bring this openness to bear on today’s most pressing issues [like what a good plot arc is]. Our mission requires that as editors we shun polemic and partisanship [and being not-dumb], uphold the highest standards of argument and evidence, value ambition and originality, seek widely diverse perspectives, and make complex ideas accessible [also to publish things as close compositionally to shit as possible without streaking the printer]. We have a national readership of men and women [and people who wear slippers in the reading room when they read our publication] who are engaged in the challenge of today’s world; who want deeper [anal] coverage of current affairs than the mainstream media offers; and who see the arts as an essential part of the human enterprise [yeah, the human enterprise of being a fuckhead with a shriveled penis that wears brooks brothers khakis].

Mean / 6 Comments
October 14th, 2008 / 12:27 am

i am a sucky piece of shit and i suck at writing

i feel perhaps my last post misrepresented my meanness.  sure i hate everyone, but the person i really hate, and towards whom i am most unfair in my meanness, is myself.  you see, i totally suck.  and so here is some meanness directed towards the real piece of shit garbage asshole in the internet community, me:

you are an unhappy fuck who will never have kids or anyone to smile at without being accused of creepiness.  you are an ugly man.  you have never benefitted anyone’s life aside from leaving it alone.  your best writing, if there is anything whatsover of any quality, is behind you.  you are basically a sperm that flipped out of your dad’s underwear and grew legs after one of your dad’s wet dreams.  you sleep on the floor of your apartment and sometimes you feel too destroyed to even drink water.  you have lived in over eighteen homes so you cannot form a lasting relationship with anyone.  you are a failure.  you will probably live a long life but accomplish nothing.  maybe you will be on tv once if you accidentally walk by where a reporter is filming.  you feel terrible when you see other people smiling and you see no difference between a person and a sock except when you come in the person you know for a fact they are not happy, the sock maybe but you’re not really sure, i mean you know.  you will be found in a closet somewhere surrounded by garbage and you will disappoint everyone you have ever known.  plus you suck at all video games created after golden eye.  you use slang that is just outside of cool, like “that’s the bomb yo” or “see you on the flipside, mac”.  you are terrible, you terrible person you.

Author Spotlight / 16 Comments
October 14th, 2008 / 12:14 am

Mean Mondays & Sleepingfish Online

So, Mean Week is one day in and I had so much fun already we’ve decided to make Mean days an institution here. In an attempt to keep the spurs on, Monday from here on out at HTML Giant will be known as Mean Monday. So you got Mean Monday and Boobs Friday (which, in other news, Kendra Grant Malone has now been upgraded to official Tits Editor, a round of applause please…), and as further things progress further things will progress.

That doesn’t mean Mean Week is being cut short: hardly so, we’re just getting started.

That means Lieutenants Malone and Maday and Call and Jones (upon his return) need to come out from behind their mother’s skirt and talk some mess, all damn it. You can talk about me mean if you want, but spit some fire for shit’s sake!

In the meantime as well, good things should be continued to be pointed out in the midst of the mean, so while I’m at it let me point you toward the firsts nodes in the most recent incarnation of the newly digital SLEEPINGFISH from Calamari Press, which is now operating in web content format with its head relocated to finer shores (and is currently seeking submissions, which you can find info on at their site).

The first update of the e-Fish contains two excellent pieces of fiction, SNOW by J.A. Tyler, which is an excerpt from a novel that will be coming out in the near future, as well as SUGAR by James Reich from the band Venus Bogardus, each of which set the bar for the high promise that the new electronic zzzFish will be sure to entail.

Shit, I feel weird being totally nice during Mean Week.

Derek, I hope you get bit on the ass by a tumored goat.

Web Hype / 6 Comments
October 13th, 2008 / 10:12 pm

Learn to be MEAN WEEK from the best of them

“Critics are the sum of their biases—they begin as arbitraries and end as certainties (the course of my own criticism has sometimes been the other way round). You can’t stand that ditherer Coleridge, she can’t stand that whiner Keats, I can’t stand that dry fussbudget Wordsworth, and we all hate Shelley—poets are Rorschach tests.”

          –William Logan, writing for Poetry Magazine, responds to people who didn’t like his NYTBR piece on Hart Crane.

 

And just to keep the MEAN WEEKness nice and fair, here’s Brian Henry at Verse Magazine, trashing William Logan’s then-new collection of criticism. Here’s a taste: “Despite his claim to read too many new books of poetry, Logan seems oddly unaware of the state of contemporary American poetry. He admits that trade presses have largely given up on poetry, but one would be hard-pressed to glean this from this selection of reviews.” OOOOOOOOOhhhhhh.

Author Spotlight / Comments Off on Learn to be MEAN WEEK from the best of them
October 13th, 2008 / 4:23 pm

Mean Week Looks Back

Coincidentally, the weekend before Mean Week, a book of essays from a poetry journal called The Reaper arrived for me at the public library.

The Reaper had it’s own little Mean Decade from 1980 to 1989, and it spent that time skewering poetry as it was and poets of note, and suggesting to readers that narrative poetry was the way out of the ever-widening gap between poetry and its readers. It helped give birth to the New Narrative movement. And New Formalism.

Fascinating stuff, really. Fussy? Maybe. But impassioned. Happily argumentative. Willing to call people out, too. Kind of like Justin’s critique of Valzhyna Mort there below this post, too, in that they dissect poems line by line and call bullshit when bullshit needs to be called—especially when the poets in their sights sail through a line without regard for accuracy.

I’ll post a few choice quotes this week. First, though, The Reaper’s Non-negotiable Demands in all their glory:

1. Take prosody off the hit list.

2. Stop calling formless writing poetry.

3. Accuracy, at all costs.

4. No emotion without narrative.

5. No more meditating on the meditation.

6. No more poems about poetry.

7. No more irresponsibility of expression.

8. Raze the House of Fashion.

9. Dismantle the Office of Translation.

10. Spring open the Jail of the Self.

Each demand is explained in the essay. I would encourage you to pick up the book to read them.

Keep in mind, also, that posting about The Reaper is not a full endorsement of their critique.  On the other hand, my poet friends: fuck you, read this.

All best,

Matthew

Web Hype / 8 Comments
October 13th, 2008 / 3:14 pm