It's an honor just to be nominated....

Here's a little bit of good news for International Women's Day: My blog post on rape for Guernica is a finalist for the 3 Quarks Daily blog prize! Thanks for voting. Wish me luck with the judging!

New Blog Post

Over at Guernica!

It's my first post there, and it's about rape in 1747 and today, about Clarissa and about Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Please do read it and leave a comment!

Pearls & Power, 2

My post from last week on the signification of pearls in literature and a dustup on the Woolf listserv has been nominated for a prize for arts & lit blogging over at 3 Quarks Daily.

Voting ends tomorrow. Vote for me!!!

Edited to add that I made the seminfinalist round! Hooray! Thanks so much for voting. Now, 3 Quarks Daily will send the top 8 or so on for judging.

Tweet, tweet

Well, I have signed up for a Twitter account and it's a delicious time suck. You can sign up to "follow" me. It's not that interesting, I promise.

Still, you can go there and find all kinds of wonderful news and terrible things and links, like this one to a hilarious video parodying the process of getting a book published, from typewriter to bookstore. (Via Sarah Weinman) Oh, it's worth every second of its 3:37.

Memes

Remember the old meme about going to page 56 (or whatever) of the nearest book & typing in the 5th sentence (or what have you). It always seemed dull to me. But I am "facebook friends" with a boy (man, now, for sure) that I went to high school with. I had a huge crush on him but he was way out of my league AND younger than me. No dice.

He is a glass-blower now.

He posted the meme and got these results:

• The color of joy.
  
• Feeds on fish, small mammals, and other prey.
  
• Our balance, the horizontals we want to achieve, come out of the interaction of movement in three planes: the knee moving forward, the elbow moving sideward, and the head moving upward.
  
• In fact, several psychologists argue that the tendency to respond to items on the basis of characteristics other than content may be minimal.
  
• It is the attachment to the results and the assumption of the existence of an actual responsible individual that cause the problems.
  
• Brush border enzyme (embedded in the plasma membranes of microvilli).
  
• More vigorous varieties of gourds can get quite heavy and are likely to need more substantial canes.
  
• Although he is not actually discouraging interest in the flat, he likes the status quo.
  
• My mother of course saw clean into the marrow of those dreams, and laughed.

My mother is no doubt laughing now.

Back to Junot Diaz....

More of the Best, more BAHLER, plus: JERSEY!

Michael was asked: How Has Being From New Jersey Influenced My Writing?

Answer: Got me.

Dan Wickett asked me to help spread the word about this new anthology by letting New Jersey writer Michael Bahler guestblog at Jersey City's own Fernham...I hope it's sparked your interest in checking out more literary magazines and, especially, picking up a copy of Dzanc's new anthology...

BEST of the WEB: More Michael BAHLER

Michael Bahler writes:

The Perils of Online Publishing

My first online story, “Stephanie’s Blood,” was about a woman who bit her toenails. My girlfriend at the time was so excited when it came out, and she emailed the link to all her friends. The next day, however, she was not so excited.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Will you please tell everyone I don’t bite my toenails?”

My second online story, “Virgin Annie,” was about a guy lusting after a Korean woman named Annie K— who he suspected was a virgin. Just last year, I received a surprise email from a real-life Annie K—.
“I googled my name and found your story,” she wrote. “I am Korean, but I am definitely not a virgin.”

I recently showed the “The Stiff Jew” to a colleague.
“Michael, you’re Jewish?”

But my most harrowing online publishing experience had to do with a story I wrote entitled “My Blankie. My Penis.” The opening paragraph of the story read:

“Herpes. Could it be anything else? I’d slept with Adina on a Saturday. The condom had burst. I’d woken up five days later with itchy red dots up and down my penis.”

Around the time it was posted, I was interviewing to become a federal prosecutor. I’d made it all the way to the third round, and had met with the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. “I have no doubt,” he had told me, “you could do any job in this office.” I was also doing online dating, and had been emailing a woman I really liked.

I received a form rejection from the U.S Attorney’s Office, and the woman blew me off. These two developments could have had something to do with “My Blankie. My Penis” showing up first when my name was googled.

I love online publishing, but I think it’s unique from print journals in that stories become readily available to people who might not necessarily be interested in reading them as stories. It makes publishing a little dangerous. My father told me that I should start writing under a pseudonym, but instead I changed the heading on my resume from “Michael Bahler” to “M. F. Bahler.”

The site that posted “My Blankie. My Penis” later reinvented itself and took down my story. I changed my resume back to “Michael Bahler.”

Guestblogger MICHAEL BAHLER: The Saga of The Stiff Jew

Michael writes:

I originally wrote the “The Stiff Jew” for an anthology about Jews dating gentiles (called something like “Was She Worth It?”). The editor of the anthology ultimately passed on my piece, emailing me: “Hi Michael, I thought the narrative was obtuse and underdeveloped . . . . Best wishes and Happy Rosh Hashanah!”

So I took “The Stiff Jew” and I showed it to my writing mentor, an established fiction writer who usually heaped praise on me.
“This is probably the worst thing you’ve ever written,” she said.
“I don’t remember showing you everything I’ve ever written.”
“I’m not saying it’s not salvageable, but it needs a lot of work.”

So I forgot about the “The Stiff Jew” until I saw that Swink was accepting submissions for an upcoming online edition with the theme “taking sides.” Since my piece was—on a basic level—about taking sides on Jesus, I sent it over. Almost two years later, I got a response:
“We love it. We want to publish it an upcoming edition. Please say yes!”

Somewhat ironically, “The Stiff Jew,” written for a Jewish anthology, has now ended up in an anthology with so many gentiles.

Curious? Check out the new Dzanc books anthology, collecting the best writing from online literary mags, The Best of the Web 2008

We interrupt this blog...

A few weeks back, Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network, Dzanc Books and formerly a force behind the Litblog Co-op wrote to ask if I'd let a guestblogger pop in to help draw your attention to Dzanc's new anthology, The Best of the Web, 2008 (edited by Steve Almond). To me, Dan is one of the real heroes of the literary blog so I jumped at the chance to participate.

The idea behind the anthology is to collect some of the best writing from online literary journals in one place: a *great* idea, and one that really shows the coming-of-age of blogs, online publications, and the links between technology and literary life. It's an exciting prospect.

Since I blog from New Jersey, Dan's paired me up with a New Jersey writer and contributor to the anthology, Michael Bahler. He'll be posting here tomorrow. Enjoy!

(Cowper and Stevenson, Jones and Robinson will have to wait...)