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.

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?”

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?

Auto-Tune the News

Have a great weekend!

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

Managing Relationships

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

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.

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.

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!

“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.

Without giving it much more thought I’m off again:

to pick up some Katamari Damacy wallpaper,

to find out if the puppets in the unofficial Dandy Warhols’ video for “We Used To Be Friends“ are as funny as I remembered,

to find out if Stanley Fish wrote Textual Power (he didn’t; Robert Scholes did),

then back to Wikipedia to read about Gilbert & Sullivan because I’m thinking of using Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy in my class,

which gets me thinking about Pygmalion because one of my books has a Pygmalion-esque element so maybe I should get some work done and see if there are is something I can learn from ancient Greece.

So: reading, reading, reading. Reading the Wikipedia entry about Pygmalion (mythology). Then I come across this line that makes my face hot. About how the movie Groundhog Day is a “Pygmalion story, but this time the material the sculptor works on is himself.” And I think to myself, “That’s a great line. I’ve heard that line before. Where have I heard that line before?”

I remember the Stanley Fish blog post and feel flushed with discovery. “Is it possible that a Renowned Intellectual Ass-Kicker steals quotes from Wikipedia?” What do I do with this information? Are there authorities (other than Fish, of course) who can be alerted?

Then more reading and I come to the end of the paragraph. There is a citation. Go back to the original Fish post and read it more carefully and quickly discover that the Wikipedia entry is, of course, a copy-and-paste job. You idiot. Stanley Fish doesn’t steal from Wikipedia. Wikipedia steals from Stanley Fish.

I know this, and yet in that moment it was easier for me to imagine a distinguished writer being a lazy thief than it is for me to imagine a total stranger taking a minute to improve a seldom-visited page of open-source online encyclopedia. It’s as if somewhere in all that linking around basic commonsense (not to mention giving a professional the benefit of the doubt) got left behind.

Does this kind of thing happen to you?

Yes, some of the sites (and their subsequent books) cited in the article are shallow, infantile, unessential and perhaps even contributing to the decline of our culture. (I’m looking at you, Stuff on My Cat.)

But there are also examples of writers and artists who used the Web to find an audience for otherwise unmarketable projects. If you’re not an established writer (and increasingly if you are) it’s getting harder and harder to sell projects that are perceived as too small, too quirky or even too voice-driven. It’s encouraging to see that the Web can provide a back door.

Still, there is a larger question behind the A.V. Club’s feature. What do we want out of books?

Is a book just a shape an idea can come in? Or are books a form whose unique qualities need to be articulated, respected and perhaps even fought for?

Do we reject books that aren’t sufficiently book-like (whatever we decide that is)? Or do we embrace anyone and everyone in the hopes that a healthy book industry will ultimately take care of the good even as it tolerates the bad?

Typically, book marketing advice is geared toward either teaching you how to follow the rules of the system, or, in some cases, how to game the system.

For example, because Amazon sales rankings are based on the rate of book sales, some people will tell you to have everybody you know buy your book at the same time, thus catapulting your title up the charts (even if it’s only for a moment). That’s gaming the system.

As for following the rules of the system, you know what that looks like:

Join Toastmasters and learn how to be a public speaker! If you have an upcoming television appearance, practice in front of a mirror! Take an acting class! Try beta blockers! Practice mindful meditation! Do everything humanly possible to become someone you’re not!

What I like about the IBR is that they’re saying to hell with all that. In the world they’re creating, introversion is a virtue, a badge of honor, a strength. Introverts need to band together, articulate their shared experience, and stand up for themselves (albeit introvertedly). Why change when you can organize?

I am usually on the side of adaptation, but in some cases the play is to bend people to your will rather than submit to theirs. It’s not easy, but the long-term rewards can be great.

As Jack Nicholson’s character says during his opening monologue in The Departed, “I don’t want to be a product of my environment; I want my environment to be a product of me.” (Never mind that he gets killed at the end; he had a great run.)