Stop. Just stop.

Do you find that you have no ideas, no point of view, no talent, and nothing to say, yet inexplicably want to be a writer anyway? Are you having trouble cultivating an audience for your hacky, derivative excuse for humor? Kill both birds with this simple process:

1. Grasp at something that people find inherently hilarious, despite its overexposure and the fact that they are no longer ten years old—e.g., zombies, vampires, robots, monkeys, ninjas, pirates.

2. Wed this element to a piece of literature or a historical figure, so your readers will think that your book is satirical, and that they are smart for “getting” it, instead of recognizing it as the literary equivalent of a margin doodle made in 7th-grade English class.

3. Give it an awful title that imitates, to the point of copyright infringement, the titles of books already written this way.

4. Squeeze the trend until every last dollar is gone. Shake it, if you have to, like a bottle of ketchup that isn’t quite empty.

Get started now, because Abe Lincoln is taken, and Queen Victoria, and Huck Finn, and so many more it’s ridiculous. But one day, when someone says, “Remember those stupid monster-lit mash-up books a few years ago?,” you can say, “Remember them? They paid for my legal fees.”

Through its IndieBound program (an “evolved” version of Book Sense), the American Booksellers Association offers marketing tools for independent stores, including the “Indie Next” and bestseller lists, IndieBound for iPhone, and “talking points” to feed to “the media.” (Littered among the association’s marketing materials: the terms “handsells” and “shelftalkers.” I love PR people.)

I don’t need no stinking marketing materials. I come pre-brainwashed: When I go to the independent bookstore, I get a warm and generous feeling, as if I’m performing a community service. Since when does commerce constitute community service? Since the decision to buy a book at the local store became a decision to pay more money for the exact same product – after all that authorial heartache and before all that expansion of the reader’s soul, books are widgets they make at factories – than I’d pay at any of the legions of other sellers available to me via the Wi-Fi. Read more »

Electric Literature just released its second issue

So, imagine for a moment that you and all your amazingly talented literary type friends are put in charge (by the publishing gods) of revolutionizing the book business, the way we read, where and how and when we get new literature. What would you do? Take a minute. Think about it. The sky’s the limit. Maybe you’ll wander through fantasies of guerrilla poetry-fare where you go to the grocery story and stuff boxes of mac and cheese with lyric poetry for busy, unassuming moms to pick up for their poetically malnourished families. (I saw this done in a movie.) Or your dreams might be even more radical, interrupting congressional hearings to deliver, fully with costumes and props, your latest short story about the virtues of cannabis for the modern American family. The whole thing would be broadcast on CSPAN. These ideas sound fun. They might even get you some press, if they don’t get you arrested (or maybe if they do get you arrested), but would they really revolutionize the way we find and read literature? Probably not, but there’s a new literary journal, Electric Literature, that just might have the right idea. Read more »

I saw a movie the other night from 2004 that you’ve probably already seen, but which I’d never heard of. It’s called “I Like Killing Flies,” and is a documentary about a restaurant owner in the West Village of NYC, named Kenny Shopsin. It’s the best movie I’ve seen in years. The editing is brilliant. The subject, Kenny Shopsin, is fascinating. After watching, I wanted to spend hours in his restaurant being abused by him. Most movies are about explosions or sex or chases or good guys versus bad guys or fake redemption or people falling in love, and against impossible odds, finally coming together at the end to live happily ever after. Most movies seem idiotic to me, and make people out to be simple, transparent, and stupid. Most movies reveal nothing about what it means to be human. This movie does. And Kenny Shopsin’s a kind of hero in it. Read more »

language (n): a necessary evil

After all these thought-provoking posts this first week on Bark, I figured we could all use a light lunch.

Things to snack on:

* A California school bans the dictionary for being too sexy.

* Apple to reveal the fabled Tablet today. Geek out and play a bingo-style game during the announcement.

* Are pictures really worth 1000 words, or are they just really fucking weird?

* George Plimpton and Google Maps, together at last.

* Martin Amis wants to kill your granny (or at least make it easier for her to DIY).

* There’s something oddly intimate about the contents of our refrigerators.

* Excellent experiences with excellent editors (featuring our own Sam Ligon).

I recommend the soup du jour–it’s delicious. Enjoy.

…although Stephin Merritt has been doing so for twenty years, under alibis The 6th, Future Bible Heroes, Gothic Archies, and, most promiscuously, The Magnetic Fields. On The Fields’ new album Realism, the instrumentation takes the lead, while the songwriting, still colorful and charming, lags behind in autopilot.

In the early 199os, Nirvana sat in the throne of the castle mainstream rock built, scratching their heads and wondering how they were crowned king; Pearl Jam’s Jeff Amant held Eddie Vedder’s feet while he did crunches, training his diaphragm to belt out his trademark guttural bark, which would become the dreadful alterna-voice, mimicked by singers of such bands as Creed and Nickelback in subsequent years. Meanwhile, Stephin Merritt was in his basement with a cheap Casio, a drum machine, and a banjo, recording skeletal pop songs soaking in reverberated plasma; songs about living in abandoned firehouses, traveling to the moon with his boyfriend, and riding ferris wheels “under more stars than there are prostitutes in Thailand.” Read more »

Sid and Claire

When asked their advice for writers who want to be published in their journals, 99% of editors will probably say, “Read it. You’ll find out what we like by seeing what we’ve published.” I do know one editor who admitted—actually proclaimed—that he didn’t think it really mattered if someone read his journal because he never knew what he was going to like next.

Editor and founder of Burnside, Sid Miller, however, is from the majority group. Though he did offer this insight to NewPages.com, “we love poetry that surprises, finds beauty in truly unexpected places and that breaks your heart,” his general advice is to read poems that have been published in Burnside: http://www.burnsidereview.org/current.html. While he says that only 1% of all submissions are accepted, the odds don’t seem so bad when you hear his estimate that 1% of those who submit seem familiar with the journal.

Another way to gain insight into Miller’s poetic aesthetic, is to read his poems. He has a chapbook, Quietly Waiting, and three books of poetry: Sunbathing in the Ukraine, Dot-to-Dot, Oregon, and Nixon on the Piano. Here is an excerpt from his poem, “Central Park,” which was published in the Apple Valley Review: Read more »

Like a Sony Reader, except made from a Wheaties box.

By now you’ve heard (over and over again) about Amazon’s new royalty structure, announced last week. If you haven’t heard, you’re probably not interested much in publishing, but read it anyway. And I know there’s been a lot of ebook/Kindle talk on here lately (Scott’s excellent post, etc.). But now that the world’s had a few days to digest the Amazon thing, let’s talk dirty. (Full disclosure: a family member works at Amazon and I have a Kindle; try something before you talk shit about it. I dare you.)
Read more »