Dennis Cass Wants You To Be More Awesome

Great fun last night getting a call from the Mobys from Melville House publicist Megan Halpern, who helped relay my acceptance speech to the fine people at The Griffin.

Thanks to the dodgy connection and the crowd noise, it was a little hard to get exact read on the room. Nevertheless,  I distinctly heard the sound of a single, brilliant, highly stylized, postmodern (and at times exhausting) tear running down the face of fellow finalist Thomas Pynchon.

Don’t take the loss too hard, old chum. Your place in literature is secure, even if you’re kind of eating it on YouTube.

Also, if you’re reading this and haven’t read THE CRYING OF LOT 49, please stop reading this and get yourself reading that. There are some things you don’t joke about.

Finally, a huge thanks to friend and co-conspirator James Lotter for making the vid a reality.

A guy, a camera, and a grandiose plan that is at once achingly simple.

While doing my monthly ego search (go ahead and make your frequency jokes) I stumbled across the following link:

Download free HEAD CASE: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying To Understand My Brain

Having never heard of the reputable-sounding 4ebooks.org (my bad) I clicked through and found this delightful marriage of attempted digital piracy and spam gibberish:

Dennis Cass, “Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain”
HarperCollins | 2007-03-01 | ISBN: 0060594721 | 224 pages | PDF | 1,5 MB

Infiltrating the concern of neuroscience, Dennis Cass offers up his possess mentality to “research,” subjecting his nous and embody to automobile shocks, mind-numbing tending experiments, cigarettes, pronounce tests of his possess devising, and the comedy of Bill Maher. Like a slightly off-kilter martyr Plimpton, Cass, in his adventurous exploits, reveals the intricacies of fear, attention, stress, reward, and knowingness from the exclusive out. Along the way, he weaves in the news of his stepfather’s wild incurvation and take addiction, in constituent to his possess problems–which are many. Cass attacks the person of the manlike mentality with humorist and candor, motion favourite power into something distinctly human. Head Case is an clamant feature for anyone who has ever wondered, “Why am I who I am?”

I’m trying to imagine the person who has the technical savvy to sell stolen encrypted computer files, but is unable rip off the sales copy from the HarperCollins website.

Do they have some kind of Soviet-era laptop whose cut-and-paste function introduces error?

Was it dictated by a crack addict . . . to an opium addict?

Or am I just jealous about not having the chops to describe my own work as a “clamant feature?”

Last December, as you may recall, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi threw a shoe at former President George H. W. Bush.

I happened to be online when it happened, and I remember thinking, “Goody. This is just the kind of freaky, bite-sized news story that revealingly wends its way through the culture.”

The story broke on December 14, 2008. This was a Sunday. By Monday, what you think would happen had happened: late-night talk show jokes, op-eds about the significance (or insignificance) of the moment, reactions and counter-reactions in the blogosphere.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, I found these:

(GIFs are courtesy Top Ten Awesome Bush Shoe-Toss Animated GIFs from the Riff blog over at Mother Jones.)

I was floored. It’s one thing when people dash off a blog post or Photoshop gag, or put up a quickie video response on YouTube, but these GIFs are so slick and so good and so artful. And even if this is an admittedly minor phenomenon, it all happened—collectively and unconsciously—in less than 48 hours. Most important of all, even though these GIFs were made by amateurs, they are funnier and more pointed than anything I saw done by professionals. Seeing them made me wonder if I can still be competitive in this culture.

I have since calmed down, even if lingering questions remain:

If I’m going to try to be “up to the minute” then what skills/resources/attitudes will it take to keep up?

If I’m not going to try to be “up on things” then what is my relationship to the cultural timestream? Am I a week behind? A month? What are the risks/rewards of being outside of conventional time?

Regardless of my relationship to time, how can I make sure that my ideas are as transformational as they need to be in order to make an impact? What is too far? What is not far enough?

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present:

Auto-Tune the News

Have a great weekend!

Last year, I fell for Gmail Custom Time so this time I was ready.

Still, Gmail Autopilot both cracked me up and seemed entirely reasonable.

Managing Relationships

Thanks, Google, for making me laugh while taking over the world.

Earlier this month I received an e-mail from writer/producer Ian Daffern of Vepo Studios in Toronto. He wanted to know if the following was awesome:

I replied that it is, indeed, awesome. After all, who can resist a book trailer that has

1. self-deprecating humor;
2. a soda-can pipe;
3. Canadians?

I’m looking forward to reading Stripmalling. I will also be keeping an eye on Vepo Studios, a new outfit that’s specializing in Web video for the arts community and for publishing in particular.

My hope is that they find more clients who are willing to take risks. In the wake of the fallout from the “New Think for Old Publishers” panel at this year’s South by Southwest, I’ve been thinking that, when it comes to technology, it might be too late for book publishing to play catch-up.

We need the book business to start leading. I’d love to see publishing develop a Silicon Valley mentality, with start-ups like Vepo Studios taking big risks and pushing the bigger companies to innovate.

So nice job on The Way of the Smock, Vepo. Keep it up and keep pushing the form even further.

Thanks to the revised I Help U? tab, there’s been a recent influx of help-seekers. As a result, I’ve been more actively cruising aspiring writer blogs, which reminded me of the following (slightly edited and updated) post from the old Ning site.

A reader writes:

I’m wondering what the consensus is for the writer/bloggers out there about dealing publicly with rejection. I feel like it’s weird to keep blogging about querying and just pretend like rejection doesn’t happen, but then I always hesitate. I don’t want my blog to have a negative vibe, and what if an agent looks at it that day and sees “received another rejection today”?

The first decision you need to make is whether or not your blog is for your friends or for your career.

If the purpose of your blog is to amuse and inform your friends, then by all means blog away about searching for an agent, querying them, and receiving the inevitable rejection notices.

If the purpose of your blog is to build your audience; however, then you might want to skip talking about the road to publication. And the reason why might not be what you’d expect.

First, you are in no danger of violating the positive-thinking tenets of The Secret. Wonderful things happen to vile, negative people all the time.

Second, an agent isn’t going to see that you’ve been rejected and automatically think, “Hey, I need to reject that person, too!” Any agent worth his or her salt knows how to think for themselves.

No, the reason not to write about the process of getting published is that the process of getting publishing is incredibly boring.

For me, there’s nothing worse than reading a well-crafted, intelligent, funny comment to a post by Moonrat or Nathan Bransford, and then clicking on the writer’s name and having my curiosity punished with ramblings about where they are in their draft, or how they just sent a batch of queries out, or how they’re debating between Conference X and Symposium Y.

I’ve yet to see a single trying-to-get-published post where anything actually happened:

• A pack of ninjas never fights the author for control of her query letter as she tries to put it in the mailbox.
• The rejecting agent never sends a minotaur to claim the heart of the author he’s decided not to represent.
• The unpublished author who completes his word-count goal by July 1st is rarely (rarely) transported back in time and given the chance to kill Hitler and avoid WWII.

Rejection (and acceptance for that matter) has no drama, no flavor. Even if I’m rooting for you as a person, when I visit your blog I want to be entertained and/or informed. How is writing about the mundania of publishing going to accomplish that?

Exceptions:

1. To my knowledge, no one in our culture currently owns literary rejection. If this is indeed true, then you could become The Most Rejected Writer in the World. You would inhabit the role of the loser, the reject, the pathetic worm who doesn’t even deserve to be read, much less become published.

Your mandate would be to get your ass rejected as many times, and in as many different ways, as humanly possible, and then obsess about it until it almost destroys the rest of your life. You would become a stand-in for our collective disappointment and frustration with the literary world, and we would love you for it.

2. Another option would be to thinly fictionalize the rejection process. Turn your ups and downs into an mock epic battle or a faux mythology or a grandiose fever dream.

Both of these exceptions hinge on your ability to turn the publishing process into something more than it is. If you can transform rejection (as opposed to merely documenting it) then you might be on to something. Otherwise, hit me with something else.

Happy Friday, everyone. I’m off to the basement of the University of Minnesota’s Wilson Library, which is where I go when I need to take a break from the internet (wireless for students only!).

One reason for the internet break is I spent all of Tuesday morning binging on this:

Greg Rutter’s Definitive List of the 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced on the Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something

Have a fine weekend!

As I mentioned back in December, I’m teaching creative nonfiction at Carleton College this winter. (The course description is in this post.) Recently we were talking about how to attribute quotes and I said:

“In ten years, all this talk of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ will be gone. People will spend so much time online—and computing will be so ubiquitous—that people won’t bother making the distinction between a Facebook friend and a ‘real’ friend. It’ll all just merge together . . . but for now you’ll want to call out that difference.”

Most of the students laughed, but it was an uncomfortable laughter. A couple of them looked horrified, as if they didn’t want me even joking about it.

I was probably 25% kidding and 75% serious, but after the brief discussion we had I may have to revise those numbers. Conventional wisdom says that young people and technology go together like peas and carrots. But it’s not that simple.

If you really start talking to young people about computers, the Internet, etc. you’ll find it can be just as complicated for them as it is for us.

Score one for the humans.