Mean Week is Your Week too, I guess 2
Last year when we opened up Mean Week to you mean freaks a lot of people had things to say. Don’t think we’ve been mean enough this year? Didn’t shit on something you wanted to see shit on from afar, such as, maybe, us? If so, now’s as good a time as any.
Please use this thread as a place to say whatever you want about whoever you want. Your comments will remain anonymous . It’s all just games in the first place, unless you want it to be more.
Go?
Amy McDaniel—
CONTEST! My favorite line in Lost is when Sawyer walks up to Jack and Juliet mid-intense-conversation and says to them, “What yall doing, arguing about who’s your favorite Other?” In the spirit of that and mean, who is your favorite HTMLGiant troll, past or present? deadgod? MFBomb? mimi? Christopher Higgs? Mather Schneider? phmadore? What would your grandfather say if he met the troll? Winner gets to direct a bromantic comedy with the troll and any 3 of our contributors or frequent non-troll commenters.
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Mean Week is Your Week too, I guess
Things don’t feel mean enough for Mean Week. Things feel like they should be more mean.
Please use this thread as a place to say mean things you feel no one else is saying. If the only way you feel you can say exactly what you mean is to be anonymous, go for it. I promise not to look at or share IP addresses, and no one else can see them. Total privacy. I won’t blame you for not coming out of the gate. Just want to hear some real spit and shit from anybody. About anything, myself included. Only respect can be gained.
Go?
Mean Week vs Puppies and Rainbows Week
Darby Larson has posted about Mean Week over at his blog. I like Darby. He is good at arguing things, and he thinks hard about things. Many of his comments on blogs are very thoughtful, and I usually read them and think I should make my brain smarter in order to respond to them.
Darby on Mean Week:
I don’t think mean week has been mean, by my definition of it. The problem is that if it were mean, then there would be consequences. Friendships would end, would have to be mended over time, would depend on a puppies and rainbows week just to heal.
Maybe we could learn a thing or too from Gridskipper, a travel blog, that had its own Mean Week back in 2007. Apparently, they traveled places and were mean to babies.
Where is everyone?
“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 WEEK: ‘The Editor/Multi-Book/Duh Named Effect’
I like new journals. I like journals with their own aesthetic and who invent themselves primarily because they want to put words in the world: words that likely would not have found a way to get read if that journal hadn’t existed. There can never be too many high quality journals. A node is a node.
Though not all new journals, or even existing things, seem bent for these reasons. It seems semi-frequent, and perhaps most pointed to the world of poetry publishing, where you see a tendency to publish well-known names and no one else. Scanning the contributor notes of certain journals you can often see what I now will call the EDITOR / MULTI-BOOK / DUH NAMED EFFECT.
When this effect is applied, it means the journal has been infected wherein all the words published in their particular nook are 90-100% consisting of writers who are themselves the editor of a journal, who already have one or several full length books out at indie presses, or are a combo of both, being a name that literally most everybody in the publishing world is already very familiar with. They don’t both with searching for new voices, with including some people as yet unexposed who can then be read as others can to the journal seeking the ‘bigger names,’ no, everyone in the journal is someone who likely would have little to no trouble getting their work in almost any existing poetry journal already out there.
So then the question is: Why do you exist?
Next week is MEAN WEEK
In the face of all our current praising and cataloging of the good, HTML GIANT is proud to announce now that next week in our hands will be known as Mean Week. I mean, yeah, it’s fun to praise a lot of things, but sometimes you should be mean.
So all next week, we’re being mean. We might be mean even if we like you. We might be mean in a rotting hatred of your mother. We might expect you to be mean back.
It can’t be all lambs and roses. Mean Week is real.
Ryan Call, you’re going to have to find a way to be mean.
Sam Pink, let’s fight.