Super Dork Day

Yay! I have good news. Someone out there is facilitating my self-righteous dorkdom and providing me with a platform to tell you all how right I am. And, they are paying me money to do it. How kick ass is that? 

You can thank Paul Anderson. I have already.

It appears that the Summer edition of Jamais Vu will contain a short analytical piece on the hidden

this is what it looks like. pretty.

truth of Shaun of the Dead. I’ve only read their first issue so far, but I highly enjoyed it. Heck, they had poetry by Bruce Boston and Marge Simon and the very first story was from Gary Braunbeck. I also dug the non-fiction pieces they presented, something that is hard to find in many current magazines. So I’m damn proud of this and will be bugging you all to buy come post time.

 So much wow to be had with the yay and the woo hoo and the oh my god get out of my brain!

This whole thing kinda makes up for the fact that I received a rejection from Maurice Broaddus, who writes the kindest rejection notices I have ever experienced.  I imagine legions of women not lucky enough to be his wife still holding onto the delicate way he told them to please stop hanging out on his porch.

In the mean time, I found this lurking in my email and thought it fitting to share:

I noticed this question come up fromsomeone else who crowdsourced the answer. Since I haven’t rambled on anything in awhile, why not this. Hell, gotta do something with that fuckin BA in English and Comparative Lit and it sure ain’t makin money. Or using grammar properly, apparently.

Short and overused response: Literature comments on the human condition.

We’ve all heard that saw, but it works for me. It’s what defines something I enjoy and forget  versus something that sticks in my skull and rattles around in there for awhile. It’s also a lot stickier than it seems on the surface. Of course, that’s the fun for me.

Some traditionally trashy and downright stupid novels and films do this. They may not do it well, but they do it. Similarly, some of the most erudite works out there do not. They wrap dense prose around obtuse events and call it a day. Thereby making smart stuff stupid and stupid stuff smart. Yay stupid.

The real entertainment value in all of this is that the decision cannot ever be reached in consensus. All of this hemming and hawing and splitting of hairs occurs in the interaction between the words on the page and the neurons in your noggin. Since our own experiences of the human condition vary, we all process them differently against the expressed representations of someone else's experience.