Your Momma’s so dull, she thought hair dressers had a cut and paste job.

Your Momma’s so out of shape, she runs out of room evens when she sets.

Your Momma’s so dirty, her writing has to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb.

Your Momma’s so cheap, she plagiarizes from Project Gutenberg.

Your Momma’s so simple, she always asks if it’s copy edit, copy-edit, or copyedit.

Your Momma’s so repetitive, she dittos quotation marks.

Your Momma’s so old school, she thinks the Chicago Manual of Style is the Marshall Field’s catalogue.

It’s a little-known fact that Ezra Pound once proposed that some of the greats of American Literature compete in a boxing tournament. OK, that’s not true, but if such a tournament had been held, here’s what would have happened.

Here’s the bracket:

Fight 1: F. Scott Fitzgerald vs. Franz Kafka

Fitzgerald shows up drunk, on a butcher’s tricycle, and has to be lifted into the ring. He saunters over to the opponent’s corner where he has a conversation with the stool. He calls it Zelda, hugs it, then falls asleep. Meanwhile, Zelda Fitzgerald, his manager, is nowhere to be found. (Suddenly hip to technology, she’s back in the locker room playing the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on a Gameboy.)

Initially, Ezra Pound had informed everyone that the charity matches would be a professional-wrestling style match and told everyone to wear a costume that representative of their work. Soon thereafter, Hemingway suggests they make it a more manly sport, and suggests boxing. Pound agrees, but never gives Kafka the news that the format has been changed. Kafka, having no idea how to represent himself, let alone his work, decides to dress in a giant beetle costume like a post-metamorphosis Gregor Samsa. For added effect, he brings along his manager, a boa constrictor named Indiana.

Result: Fitzie is disqualified.

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The Millions posted an interesting essay this morning called “In Defense of Autobiography” by fiction writer Jennifer Miller. She writes:

This is perhaps the the greatest hang-up of the modern novelist — that fiction is somehow unsophisticated or inherently cliché if it is rooted in the writer’s own life, and that writers should be creative enough to invent entirely new worlds and find drama only in the unfamiliar.

This may be a familiar topic of conversation for you. It’s come up in form & theory courses or  dinner conversations or late-night debates at the bar. It’s something I find fascinating: there seems to be a prevailing attitude that knowing a work of fiction is rooted in autobiography makes it lesser than. People argue that knowing it’s autobiographical distracts the reader, prevents them from suspending disbelief and embracing the world of the novel. Knowing it’s autobiographical means it was less finely crafted, that the author has less skill, imagination, or both, and (my favorite) must mean that it was therapy for the writer.

But wait, we might say. Didn’t Hemingway advise to write what you know? Isn’t all fiction, to a degree, autobiographical? Isn’t writing fiction about exploring what it means to be human? Aren’t all fiction writers like crows, picking up the shiny, unusual things we come across in our own lives, taking them back to our nest and hoarding them until we decide what to do with them?

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The poetry world has a paranoid side. If you ask Anis Shivani or certain folks in the avant-garde crowd, American poetry is a shell game. It’s rigged. And in certain circles, it’s clear that there is an us, and there is a them.

For instance, after a recent controversy in poetry land, there was this comment:

The entire official world of poetry publishing is corrupt from the top down to the smallest little contest – and the NEA is a facilitator of that. It is a world of mutual back scratching MFA grads with middle names like “Lavender” who elevate the word “vanity” to heights never before seen. Geoffrey Gatza (yes, I published with BlazeVox and donate to them) is one of the handful of honest, innovative publishers who are trying to deal with the real issues facing real poets and their readers – hence the hatred heaped on him by the officials patrolling the boundaries of verse culture.

This made me think of something from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals:

The notion of resentment is central to the book. In it, he makes a distinction between “slave morality” and “noble morality.” He writes:

…Slave morality from the start says “No” to what is “outside,” “other,” to “a not itself.” … In order to arise, slave morality always requires first an opposing world, a world outside itself.

Or as the philosophy department at Lander University puts it,

For Nietzsche, vanity is the hallmark of the meek and powerless…Vanity is a consequence of inferiority.

So when certain crowds get riled up, you see comments like this:

Two of the best considerations on this matter…were published last fall by…one of the central figures on the Buffalo poetry scene.

There’s a profound sense of self-importance—and yes, vanity—in that statement. It almost sounds like a perverse version of John Winthrop’s famous “city on a hill,” as if Buffalo were a beacon, preventing wayward poets from entering perdition.

Needless to say, the very notion of a “scene” speaks to a dichotomous, us. vs. them approach; “scenes” are defined entirely by them, by the Hegelian “Other” (which Nietzsche was damn familiar with).

And does Buffalo’s “scene” merit that much importance to begin with? While I admire a number of Buffalo poets and presses, I have to say that Buffalo’s crowning achievement is its hot sauce. (Frank, of Frank’s hot sauce fame, is surely what Hegel would call a world-historical individual.)

That’s the thing: I’m far less interested in a scene—I’m far more interested in good writing wherever I can find it. Needless to say, there are numerous great poets scattered across the country, and many of them aren’t any part of a “scene.” Case in point: One of my favorite poets works at car service on the West Coast.

Moreover, the folks in favor of a “scene” always seem to attack the opposition, as Nietzsche puts it, “in effigy.” In other words, it’s one big straw man argument. Even though that’s a logical fallacy, it doesn’t mean it’s not convincing; folks use fallacies for a reason: they work.

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You may have seen that the NEA/Blazevox controversy was recently mentioned in the Huffington Post.  In a post that hit the web yesterday, Geoffrey Gatza was interviewed by Anis Shivani.

After reading the interview, I wanted to address one portion of the interview.

About halfway through, Mr. Gatza says:

I would like to make it known that in our offer to publish books with a co-operative donation, if the author did not want to participate in this we also made an offer to publish their work as an ebook in Kindle and EPUB and PDF format and have it available on Amazon.com and iBooks. And if that was still not acceptable, we could wait until our financial outlook was stable and we would then publish their book without a donation. I think that this is a fair arrangement, as do many writers. I think that this is a very successful program and we were able to promote good writers. (Note: Emphasis is mine)

The problem is, he’s not telling the truth.

In my correspondence with him, I specifically asked him if my book would be published if I did not contribute. After I got Gatza’s initial acceptance, I emailed a few pals and they said that they had been given the “offer” and declined, and Mr. Gatza had published their book later, sans donation. I was hoping that this would be the case. (I would have been fine waiting.)

Instead, when I asked him if my work would be published if I did not donate, his response was “No of course not.”

I point this out, not as an accusation, but as a matter of fact. On this matter, Mr. Gatza is simply not telling the truth. I feel obliged to correct him, not because it speaks to his veracity, but my own.

Many in the poetry community seem to view Mr. Gatza as something like a saint. Given his substantial contributions, that may be justified, but even saints are capable of lying.

A brief and partial defense of Lionel Shriver’s new book, “The New Republic.”

Claire Dederer, writing at Slate, hates this book. I have yet to read it, so I cannot address what should be the bulk of her critique–the actual book.  But I can rebut Dederer’s unfair, childishly immature, and Gawkerish interpretation of Shriver’s author note.

There’s so much that’s wrong with this paragraph. First and foremost, there’s Shriver’s condescending tone about provincial Americans of 1998 and their supposedly dismissive attitude toward terrorism. (In 1998, al-Qaida bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.) Shriver, American by birth, has lived for over 20 years in the United Kingdom, and there’s a whiff of snobbery in the implication that she used to be one of those people, but fortunately has moved on to the higher cultural elevations of Europe, leaving all us dumbasses behind.

Why won't you call me?

You don’t know why it didn’t work out. Maybe you cheated on them. Or maybe they cheated on you, and after a week straight of them having to work late in the office you finally realized that they’re unemployed. Maybe the sex was no good. They called you by other people’s names or they were catatonic during, and with a closed mouth and glazed, dead eyes they stared up watching you the entire time. Maybe the sex was too good. After a marathon lovemaking session, where orgasms were exchanged like gunfire in a war zone, you walked bow-legged outside realizing you missed three days of work. Maybe they never loved you to begin with. You don’t know. The fact is its been a week, a month, a year and you’re still waiting for their call.

In many ways waiting for a positive response from a literary magazine is like waiting for that awkward phone call from an ex-lover. The opening scene of the movie Swingers perfectly captures the psychology of what it’s like to send you work out into the world, and the anxiety associated with that uncertainty. Pay close attention. The strength of this metaphor hinges on your cooperation:

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It’s not like I feel I cannot communicate, but I’m tired of standing on a layer of ice somewhere in the mist and it comforts me to know that it doesn’t care if you had a bad day.  I was in a wonderfully stimulating and inspiring group, but for those of you who have yet to stumble, it’s required for all literary bloggers.

My voice is hearse. At least that’s what I’m telling my unemployable self.  Thinking of my own history, it’s fully responsive with all the touch-patterns, like gently moaning in your sleep or the outer stretches of terrain you scarcely knew existed.

If you haven’t stopped reading allow me to make a few suggestions.  You need some ‘me’ time.  Eat some food. Create successful images. Beg forgiveness. Keep on rolling.

I’ll admit I got sucked in. I made a substantial commitment and spent a lion’s share of my time keeping up.  The prototype means artistic pursuits—spontaneous bursts of passion—are utterly elusive.  Users create stunning commentary and careen through slushy streets.

The outrage over leaving the passenger seat can be utterly liberating so don’t ask permission.  Too few are listening.  10,000 variations of nomads make a Pulitzer Prize winner look like a Billy-Goat troll amid a thousand bohemian chumps who look just like me. Like the bald eagle that flew between two clear-cut hills and disappeared, I’m in favor of being stupid in all the right ways. Read more »

I’m going to go ahead and assume that since you’re here, this isn’t the only literary blog you read. Maybe I’m wrong, which happens far more often than I’m capable of admitting, but I’m betting you read something, whether it’s The Millions or HTMLGIANT or The Rumpus or your local indie bookstore’s blog. So you’re lurking around these places, and one day you realize, they’re all writing about the same shit, over and over again. And then you realize, Hey, I could write about the same shit over and over again, too! And to that I say: of course you can. And I’m here to help you crank out that very shit. Here’s how:

1. Post something incendiary about gender or race. If you could get something like a transcript of a Caitlin Flanagan interview, that’d be awesome. Or you could just take quotes from her book and put them in Q&A form. Wait…DIBS.

2. Insult a famous writer who most literary people consider a god. But choose carefully. Look, it’s not shocking if you don’t like Munro, okay? We don’t need to hear you describe at parties how you don’t like her stuff, as if you were soooo anti-establishment for not liking her work, and you want to make sure everyone knows how anti-establishment you are. If you don’t like that aesthetic, you don’t like it. Cool. But to make a really controversial post, you’ve gotta go after someone legit in a way that isn’t lame. It’s gotta be semi-researched and vaguely believable, but mean as hell. Throw in some cheap shots for good measure, to ensure the crazies comment on it.

3. You’ve always got an ace up your sleeve: the ol’ MFA or anti-MFA debate. Everyone whines about how they’re tired of arguing over it, except that those same people read the arguments and comment like crazy. You could get away with between 4 and 16 of these a year, maybe more. You can point-counterpoint that baby to your highest traffic of the year.

4. This is key to any literary blog: if you are the main person running it and everyone knows you’re the main person running it, you’ve gotta promote the shit out of yourself. Your story just got published? One of your editors should probably mention that in a sidebar. You have a film coming out? Your blog should review it, and that review will be favorable, of course, even if it’s tempered with a few gentle criticisms like, “I questioned the casting of the sixth-most-important character” or “I thought it could have been longer.” Your band is playing a show after the local Rotary Club meeting? Perfect. Make sure to use your blog’s social media to promote your personal accomplishments. That’s what it’s there for, right?

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Books are slammed with a 19% tax in Chile, the highest tax on books in the world. This tax is nearly twice what the author earns from the sale of each book. In the United States, books are taxed at well under 10%. In most other Latin American countries, books aren’t taxed at all. The book tax in Chile was imposed after 1973 by Augusto Pinochet (who, by the way, has recently suffered a legal title change in primary textbooks, demoted from “dictator” to “military regime.”)

The consequences of the book tax for print literature have been grave. Readership is way down and people aren’t buying books. They are, however, using the internet. Chile has the highest internet usage per its population in South America, beating out even Brazil and Argentina. The most frequent internet activity is checking one’s email. 9 out of 10 internet users have Facebook, but more and more of these users are also accessing their news online.

As a writer who is interested in publishing in both Chile and the United States, these statistics offer a practical lesson. I’m realizing that an important part of being a writer is more than just “knowing your audience.” You have to know how your audience is accessing what its reading. If I want my work to be read in Chile, print publishing is clearly not the way to go. Yet its hard to find online venues that pay authors. Read more »