According to the most shrill of the Critical Lumpians (see Ed’s post below), we’re just a bunch of self-linking, traffic-craving, nose-picking, basement-dwelling maggots. Well, I’m proud to be a maggot and I’m damn sure aiming to make a few bucks off it.*
*Not really.
Aside to Ed: Sorry for piping in just to post a link to my own blog. I’ll make it up to you with a free Totebag!
[Our Save the Blogs coverage continues with a special guest post from fifteen-year-old cheerleader Shannon Byrne, who just received an C+ in her English 3A class and has some Michael Connelly team spirit!!!!!!!!!!]
Like, OH MY GAWD! It’s time to go all like EWWWWWWWWWWWW from those dorky bloggers with the taped glasses and the pocket protectors! They have bad B.O. and certainly NO team spirit! (Go Little Brown! Go Connelly!) The other day, I was passing Pietsch a note in class! And he was like, “What have the bloggers ever done for us?” And I go, “Exactly!” So I dropped my panties and pissed all over a scribbling my varsity boy did of Mark Sarvas! Ewwwwwwww! Grosssssss!
So, like, enough “newspapers are dying” stuff and we’re talking about, like, food chains and parasites. OH MY GAWD! Bloggers. EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I always look forward to seeing the annual ad on the New York Times book page announcing the American Academy of Arts and Letters new members and awards recipients. Today’s the day, and although some of the awards are in music, architecture and the visual arts, many are in literature. I’m thrilled to see a passel of my favorite writers on the list:
New Academy Members
Deborah Eisenberg
Mary Gordon
Allan Gurganus
Jim Harrison
Robert Irwin
Harper Lee
Annie Proulx
Steven Stucky
Billie Tsien
Gold Medal for Fiction
John Updike
Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts
Michael R. Bloomberg
Award of Merit Medal for the Short Story
Charles Baxter
Academy Awards in Literature
Joan Acocella
Charles D’Ambrosio
Barbara Ehrenreich
David Markson
Robert Morgan
Joan Silber
William T. Vollmann
Dean Young
Benjamin H. Danks Award in Drama
Adam Rapp
E.M. Forster Award in Literature
Jez Butterworth
Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction
Tony D’Souza, Whiteman
Addison M. Metcalf Award in Literature
Suji Kwock Kim
Rome Fellowships in Literature
Junot Diaz
Sarah Manguso
Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award in Literature
Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document
Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award in Literature
Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Congratulations, all.
Oh, and if you have never seen the Academy’s gorgeous headquarters, along with its sister institutions, on Audubon Terrace in way upper Manhattan, you owe it to yourself to visit this architectural marvel some summer afternoon.
The confused manatee wakes at 3 p.m. most days and begins writing at 10 p.m. after drinking a double espresso with soy milk. The confused manatee is unemployed. She has been rejected from Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Cincinnati Review, Other Voices, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Eclectica, Mad Hatter’s Review, Pindeldyboz, Hobart, McSweeney’s, Mid-American Review, NOON, and Fourteen Hills. The confused manatee’s hobbies include finding secluded areas and staring at them, touching the covers of literary magazines, and pushing seaweed into giant floating piles and then swimming away.
Bear829 lives in Greenwich Village with three humans. He enjoys shopping at Whole Foods, doing push-ups in his room, and petting his own head while saying, “It will be okay. It will be okay.” He emails his mother once a day.
Duotrope is, top to bottom, great. Check out the submissions tracker while you’re there.