Roundup
A Few Items of Interest
There’s a writing contest with a $149 fee, no guarantee of publication, and whose administrators claim all rights to your writing if you enter the contest. That sounds pretty fantastic. John Scalzi breaks down all the ways in which this contest is vile.
Seth Fischer has a new project where you can write over the Internet. He is looking for submissions.
Anis Shivani has come up with some new rules for writers and continues to show his contempt for the academy and other things. I definitely understand the position Shivani is advocating but what he’s saying is not really new. I am a bit old school in this thinking, perhaps, but rather than worrying about rules as a writer, I largely prefer writing. Shivani baffles me.
Andrew Shaffer has a response for Shivani’s “rules.” I love what he has to say.
The Collagist is having a chapbook contest with the winner to be published this fall by Dzanc.
Rose Metal Press has announced the winner (Tiff Holland’s Betty Superman) of their annual chapbook contest. The book will be released in July 2011.
Bullett Magazine seems pretty sexy.
Laura Ellen Scott’s Curio is being published one story at a time over at Uncanny Valley. It’s worth a look.
I’m glad Shivani comes down like Zarathustra from the mountaintop to periodically share these dictums.
Shivani’s rules are hilarious, but I’m reading them as a deliberate parody of what bitter creative writing professors tell students about the business. Once I got to “Seek Unemployment,” I got the feeling that I shouldn’t be taking this stuff at face value.
thanks for the nudge, roxane!
shivani’s puffhost piece(s) might be repellently ‘meta’ satire, but, as shaffer points out (at the link in the blogicle), it’s a consistent act:
shivani is or is pretending to be obsessed with professionalized literariness (mfas, log-rolling, bootlick/backstab corporatism, etc.) having destroyed high america’s high literary high high high point at his blog and in his other published high literary high journalism
I’d say Shivani’s a bit too hyperbolic to be completely genuine in his attacks on MFA programs and academic literary culture in general. A lot of essayists/columnists troll people for a living, which is what Shivani seems to be doing. Maybe he should find a hobby or go outside or something.
Until I came to the internet I had no idea writers spoke so obsessively and constantly with each other about how to write. Or how not to write. Or to pet their cats. Or how to sound more and more like each other until a near-neural pattern of publicized works manifest as a hive mind and bootleg reality on a shitty casette that used to hold French lessons, when they probably could’ve just learn French.
I agree with Dave. I quit reading. I just figured Shivani was making some hyper joke.
between Shivani’s overwritten rants and seth abramson’s typical brain dead “essays,” it seems like Huffington Post is aiming for the worst written books section on the web.
I don’t know if Shivani can be said to be writing satire– deadgod, are you suggesting he’s taking his own position and then exaggerating it, taking it to its logical extreme? As Shaffer noted, he’s so much in line with his earlier polemic (he’s publishing a book of polemic essays, ugh) that appeared first in Boulevard, and then was reprinted at Huff Po, that it’s hard to locate him. I don’t know that he’s not being earnest (how could you write such turgid prose and not be earnest?); I think he might know he benefits from saying controversial things (like how much he hates Franzen, Olds, that whole post on 15 overrated writers or whatever), but I don’t see judgement or intention, and I think calling him a troll insults trolls, who are at least fighting the naive and orthodox for lullz, not inventing some new set of rules for writers that aggrandizes his own work and aesthetic. Also, when you write regularly for the Huffington Post and are about to simultaneously publish three books and you advertise those books in a journal as established as Boulevard, aren’t you participating in the very system you claim to shun– aren’t you gaining prominence in that system even as you claim it’s the devil?
Some of those ‘rules’– like, look to master texts, don’t seek niche or conform to convention, try to actually say something, don’t get caught up in self-promotion– are sensible, if obvious. The rest is bloviation, jealousy, bitterness, and nonsense.
Is this parodic hyperbole too, aiming to make fun of the casual dismissiveness of writers in comments streams? I can’t tell anymore where the parody ends!
This comment would make some fucking sense if you hadn’t posted it on a blog about writing.
YOU came here.
Mirror, mirror. Get one.
That’s not really what I meant, and I don’t think it’s that hard to see that in what I wrote.
OK, now I’m confused. Were you being satirical?
I am assuming your first sentence is a slam of Shivani.
Te fourth sentence on how everyone writes the same I’m having trouble with. Is that the satire part? The whole MFA or internet writers or whatever never holds up for me. I always wonder if the person has read these authors. They never write alike. They write like they are from two different poles on two different planets, Tao Lin meet Kim Chinquee. Etc.
The last part, the French thing, I liked but didn’t quite get.
Then again I am often dense.
Mostly it comes out of a sense I had, well before I was on the internet in any way, from studying writers as writers, interacting with each other and exploring their craft with each other. When writers get together in more intimate settings (take Leigh Hunt hosting writerly soirees with Keats or Shelley, or even sites like this, which are just large enough to formalize their discussion more, while remaining self-contained) there is often profitable discussion. I have nothing against swapping craft notes, or writers just talking to each other. But the instant writers, in groups or even as individuals, began taking notions Public (which this site technically qualifies as, though not in the same way someone like Shivani is achieveing, if you see the difference) they became so tendentious and general as to have stifled themselves out of all potency, assuming there was some to begin with. Before I got on the internet, I knew this as the phenomenon best exemplified by a Certified Loudspeakers Ezra Pound or Allen Ginsberg, people who loved (CAPITAL M) “Movements,” which always struck me as stylistic equalizers for attempting to corral your generation into writing how you think they should. This was mildly annoying to read through, in general, but mostly avoidable. When you get on the internet, though, with the vast swathes of Poetry Forums where people are trained how to give critiques and how to write their poems precisely to fit the resident mods’ tastes, with the endless resources for the act of writing, and the weird tendency (by authors famed or minor) to read and write about the act of writing, rather than creative output. I don’t know if I’m alone in thinking this is weird, or even alone in seeing it as such, but it seems prevalent enough that there should be some universality to my observation. In any case, Shivani happened to touch a particular vein of diatribe and grandstanding which brought out my distaste in these matters.
I happen to think this site is very good about discussing a wide panoply of actual texts and subjects, with the craft notes and writerly discussions generally centering around things more coherent and enjoyable than the standard cheer-leading or cat-herding, which is part of why I did choose to come here.
If I were writing the post over again, apart from adding an *ed to learn, I would been more specific in my word choice than ‘writer’.
Well, writers talking about writing, in any way or venue or pre-web or post-web, is mostly nauseating.
But the internet magnifies. So the worse most base things become worst things. And louder.
This reply was solid, a mini-essay. Hey Blake, email NLV and have him/her post on this
tx
No, I think it is a sincerely really bad books section. Granted, they don’t pay their writers and I pretty much all of the writing on the Huffington Post is awful.
No, Michael, I don’t think Shivani’s persona/perspective is a put-on; I think he’s outraged/outrageous in a professional – you could say: institutional – manner. He’s found a way, through some mixture of sincere reaction, calculation, and response-to-reward, to brand himself, hasn’t he?: Shivani the Courageous Bullshit Detector.
And why not? – despite being a sophomoric and densely overpopulated bandwagon to ride on. It’s a brand with a stratospheric q-factor – who doesn’t think she or he really knows shit from Shinola? who wants to be too much of a pussy to stick it to The Man?
And, as you say, mixed in his arguments are plenty of perfectly commonsensical ideas, points that bear repeating: each of us thinks there are overrated writers; publishing is a careerist business, full of people who don’t care about and even obstruct literature; there’s a zillion perfessers and criticks who are ego-freak disciple-cultivating despots or autopiloted dead beats or whatever — the corruption that’s everywhere is in books and literature, too.
What might make this latest salvo a rancor-magnet – and, I think, what causes
people to think it’s all a troll act – is the naked self-contradiction: “refuse recognition”? “don’t pursue a niche”?? “aim for zero audience”?!? ‘Ha ha – thanks for sharing, Sparky.’
– but, to my soil-dulled olfaction: garden-variety hypocrisy.
Kind of fun to read such a passionate call to reception-indifference, though, eh?
No, Michael, I don’t think Shivani’s persona/perspective is a put-on; I think he’s outraged/outrageous in a professional – you could say: institutional – manner. He’s found a way, through some mixture of sincere reaction, calculation, and response-to-reward, to brand himself, hasn’t he?: Shivani the Courageous Bullshit Detector.
And why not? – despite being a sophomoric and densely overpopulated bandwagon to ride on. It’s a brand with a stratospheric q-factor – who doesn’t think she or he really knows shit from Shinola? who wants to be too much of a pussy to stick it to The Man?
And, as you say, mixed in his arguments are plenty of perfectly commonsensical ideas, points that bear repeating: each of us thinks there are overrated writers; publishing is a careerist business, full of people who don’t care about and even obstruct literature; there’s a zillion perfessers and criticks who are ego-freak disciple-cultivating despots or autopiloted dead beats or whatever — the corruption that’s everywhere is in books and literature, too.
What might make this latest salvo a rancor-magnet – and, I think, what causes
people to think it’s all a troll act – is the naked self-contradiction: “refuse recognition”? “don’t pursue a niche”?? “aim for zero audience”?!? ‘Ha ha – thanks for sharing, Sparky.’
– but, to my soil-dulled olfaction: garden-variety hypocrisy.
Kind of fun to read such a passionate call to reception-indifference, though, eh?
Great sentence. Nonsense is the key word to end, the caboose (there were once these things called cabooses….oh never mind).
Writers are such pussys sometimes.
Aiyo, I sought unemployment. Spent time on the streets. I was looking for work, but I ended up being a professional poet. Performing, writing, selling books at events. Being homeless was the greatest gift I could’ve had to myself and my writing. When you’re stripped, you begin to realize who you and it shines through in your writing. Someone who scoffs at “Seek unemployment” is maybe missing the point of what he is saying.
Get out of your bubble. Get to know you. Because until you’ve found three credit cards in three days, back to back, and having eaten for a few days and you want some cigarettes and some food —- maybe you buy food, maybe you buy smokes, maybe you turn the cards into the cops. You think you’d know what decision you’d make, but then you’d be wrong. Or right. Do you know for sure? That’s the point.
1. Disobey the System.
He’s saying don’t Google yourself or use highways while driving to work or even shovels. Use your hands to dig holes. When Xbox says hit START I make a bath and coffee. Then hit Y.
2. Ignore Publicity.
Don’t use the Internet. He just said that. Pay attention.
3. Shun Crowds
Translation: crowds shun him.
4. Seek Unemployment.
Now he’s just being lazy. An M.C. Escher of contradiction here. I assume he is tiring. What’s next—we seek aging?
5. Converse Only with the Classics.
Translation: Do not buy, read, review his books. Got it. Plus it pissed me off when I converse with a book and it won’t answer. Just a blank stare. It turns away and all I have is spine.
6. Refuse Recognition.
Are we still talking about writing?
7. Don’t Pursue a Niche.
Are we still talking about writing?
8. Aim for Zero Audience.
I’ll see you at your next reading, sir.
9. Accept Failure.
Cough.
10. Think Small.
Well, he’s not a hypocrite.
“Get out of your bubble. Get to know you.”
Really?
Agreed about it just being garden-variety hypocrisy, and logically contradictory. I think that’s what I most resist: this construction of enemies, as if the entire mfa-system and all the writers in it and all of academia and commercial publishing were in combination the man, who can only be defeated by the courageous, bold, humble, convention-bucking, fame-immune young Turks like…himself, and maybe a few of his friends. There are legitimate critiques of the mfa-system and its effects on contemporary fiction and poetry, just as there are huge problems with the current state of commercial publishing, which is in crisis and certainly rewards mediocrity and salability first. But those critiques won’t come from Shivani.
Very nice.
Roxane? You’re the best.
$149 story contest’s apparent slogan: ‘Put Your Writing Where Your Mouth Is’ …?
that sounds exceptionally painful.
Flush? or Slush?
i mean, i’m not making that up: http://www.firstonepublishing.com/images/stories/whowantstobeanauthor3_copy.jpg
Excellent thoughtful response. Well presented. I really like the quotes from my post. And then the deadpan Really? With the question mark. Really superb stuff.
“Aim for Zero Audience” <– if anyone takes this one seriously, he/she definitively shouldn't be writing.
I just took Shivani’s thing as heavy-handed satire, you guys really think it’s more metafancy than that? I mean, whatever regardless.
Not that I think he’s right or wrong, to each writer his own.