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August 24, 2008

Here's an excerpt from the latest chapter I've been fiddling with of Oprah's Dead Son. Don't count on ever seeing it in print 'cause the only books you're ever gonna see in print are moneygrubbing bullshit books written by moneygrubbing bullshit writers, doctored-up by moneygrubbing bullshit agents, published by moneygrubbing bullshit publishers and promoted by moneygrubbing bullshit media dweebs. Oh, in case anyone thinks the excerpt sounds "anti-Semitic," keep in mind it's fiction and that characters in novels say all sorts of silly things:

OPRAH'S DEAD SON Chapter Forty-one (excerpt) "How do you know what we got Oprah down here to get to?" the old guy asks. "I know things I don't know I know," Isaac says, staring up at the dark, cherry-stained oak beams crisscrossing the white ceiling. "Do you know that your grandfather's ill-considered, anti-Semitic screeds creep me out?" Oprah asks sweetly. "He gets a little shrill, I agree." Isaac turns onto his side, props the side of his chin in his hand and shoots a sympathetic look toward his grandmother. He seems to have grown. His voice seems to have changed, too; it's deeper, more confident. He's become a thoughtful, clever kid right in front of Giselle's eyes. It's not even odd anymore that he can talk, he could more than likely walk on water if he wanted to. "Shrill?" The old guy's eyes widen. "Ill-considered? It was Isaac who called Jews the new Nazis—I'm defending them. I'm pro-Semitic. I'm saying rich guys are the new Nazis and that Jews just do their propaganda for them." "What about rich Jews?" Isaac asks. "Oh, sure. Rich Jews are the prototypical new Nazis, but there are twice as many new non-Jewish Nazis as there are new Nazi Jews." "I'm sure glad we got that cleared up," Oprah says. "As well you should be," the old guy goes on, undaunted by her obvious sarcasm. "Calling a Nazi a Nazi is the exact opposite of anti-Semitism, and any Jew worth his or her salt ought to be doing the same thing. Never again, ha! You say you don't want another Holocaust, you say you don't want another Hitler or Stalin or Mao, so what do you do? Go find yourselves a bunch of Nazi billionaires and carve out a lucrative little monopoly doing their propaganda for them? These new Nazis can buy any government in the world. They can make whatever laws they want to make, raise whatever armies, build whatever prisons and, thanks to Jews and guys who kiss up to Jews in media and entertainment, they can get people to do and say and think and buy any kind of cockamamie crap they want them to do or say or think or buy. Talk about a thief in the night, yikes, you're gonna wake up one morning and find that nothing but guys who run Nazi conglomerates and the Jews and guys who kiss up to Jews who do their propaganda for them have inherited the earth." Read the previous two chapter here. Or not.

If you wanna listen to some sample chapters from The Audio Book of Ginny Good, click this:

http://everyonewhosanyone.com/ggsyn.html

Here's the real book of Ginny Good in its entirety for free (everything I do is free):

http://everyonewhosanyone.com/ggsyn1.html

If you want a copy of the whole huge fifteen-hour audio book extravaganza on .mp3 CDs, give me an address and I'll send you a copy. There's a bunch of other stuff on my little website, too. Click some links and see. Thanks. G.

Gerard Jones
everyone@everyonewhosanyone.com
http://www.everyonewhosanyone.com

"...they'll have me whipped for speaking true, thou'lt
have me whipped for lying; and sometimes I am
whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any
kind o' thing than a fool: and yet I would not be
thee, nuncle..."

May 12, 2004

Hey, I decided maybe I need to win me some prizes in order to get people to read GINNY GOOD, so I'm gonna stick up a list of things people can win for writing books. In order to find out what prizes there are that are worth winning, I've been sending this e-mail out to people who might know about grants and prizes and awards and stuff, like book review guys and other people who wrote books and creative writing teachers. I didn't get many responses, but I got enough. Here's what the e-mail said:

I made up this website called Everyone Who's Anyone in Adult Trade Publishing a couple of years ago. It's a thousand pages long and has listings for 2,200 of the top literary agents, editors and publishers in the US, UK and Canada, along with a bunch of literary works in progress. It's also free. You might want to pass it along to anyone you know who has a book he or she is trying to get published: http://everyonewhosanyone.com I made up the EWA website 'cause I wrote this narrative nonfiction book (a "nonfiction novel" Truman Capote might have called it) by the name of GINNY GOOD for which I was trying to find a literary agent and a publisher. I managed to find one of each, but it wasn't easy. I spent ten years writing the book in the first place and it took another seven years or so to finally get it published—but the book kept getting better and better the whole time so that was okay. It's turned out to be an amazing book, arguably the most important book ever written about the decade of the sixties. Read it. Argue. Go ahead. Try to think of a better book about the sixties. I very much doubt that you will be able to. Ginny Good makes that Tom Wolfe Kool-Aid thing look like an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon stuck inside a classic episode of The Simpsons and makes T. C. Boyle's Drop City look like child's play, like fiction, like make-believe. The sixties was sort of a slick, defining decade that took forty years to finally get put into perspective. Here's the latest Ginny Good press release: http://everyonewhosanyone.com/other1.html Now I'm putting together a list of grants and prizes and awards I want GINNY GOOD to win, like the National Book Award and a Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle Award and maybe one or two of them PEN Literary Awards, etc., so people will read it 'cause people like to read things that win grants and prizes and awards and what I mainly want is for people to read the book. Then I'm gonna include a whole new page on the EWA website with a list of grants and prizes and awards books can win. If you can think of any cool prizes I should put on my little list for GINNY GOOD (or any other book) to win, let me know about them. Please feel free to forward this e-mail to anyone you feel like forwarding it to. Thanks. Gerard Jones

Okay, so I sent that e-mail out to around a thousand people or so and here are the prizes I came up with. I just did main prizes. You can find a bunch of other things you can win at:

http://www.pw.org/links_pages

Oh, and here's about a billion mostly UK Prizes and Awards:

http://www.bookinformation.co.uk/prizes.php4

I did get some sage sounding comments on the whole notion of the winning of prizes while I was compiling my little list which were pretty much summed up by the guy who said this:

"My own feeling about the whole commercial writing scene such as it is now is that though it was ails tough to impossible for writers it's now just mostly insulting. Awards and prizes are just a shameless way of publicizing books. You don't smell like money to a money shark; you don't get a prize."

He might be right and he might be wrong but the only reason I want GG to win a bunch of prizes is to get people to read it and the other the stuff I write and people read books that win prizes so I'm gonna try to win me some prizes. I might be repeating myself. I do that. As with all other aspects of this little directory, the prizes I chose to include and the order in which I chose to list them is more or less whimsical. Thanks again.

Gerard Jones
everyone@everyonewhosanyone.com

Nobel Prize in Literature

http://www.nobel.se/literature/index.html

The Man Booker International Prize 2008

Colman Getty PR
Middlexex House
34-42 Cleveland Street
London W1T 4JE

http://www.manbookerinternational.com

National Book Award

National Book Foundation
95 Madison Avenue, Suite 709
New York, New York 10016

http://www.nationalbook.org

National Book Critics Circle Award

National Book Critics Circle
360 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10010

http://www.bookcritics.org

Pulitzers

The Pulitzer Prizes
Columbia University
709 Journalism Building
2950 Broadway
New York, NY USA 10027

http://www.pulitzer.org

PEN Literary Awards

PEN American Center
568 Broadway 4th Floor
New York, NY 10012

http://www.pen.org

IPPY
Independent Publisher Book Award

http://www.independentpublisher.com/ipland/v4/IPAwards.htm

Hey, Ginny Good won itself one of these IPPY things for Best Aurobiography/Memoir of 2004. It would've won best whatever from all the other prize and book award places on this little list if anyone with any brains at any of those other places would've read it...but, alas, none of them have any brains or none of them read it 'cause they only read the money-grubbing twaddle publicists tell The New York Times to tell 'em to read. Oh, well. If you think I'm lying, I'm not. Check out this review: Gerard Jones: Ginny Good. When The New York Times reviews a better book than Ginny Good, I'll eat The New York Times. G.

National Endowment for the Arts
Creative Writers Fellowship

Application Processing
(Creative Writing Fellowships)
National Endowment for the Arts
Nancy Hanks Center
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20506

http://www.nea.gov/grants/apply/Lit04/fellowships.html

May 18, 2007

Here's an excerpt from an interview I just did, or, rather, an interview that just got did on me by Steven Augustine, about whom you can see plenty more if you click this and poke around the rest of his site:

IntraView #1: Gerard Jones

SA: What strikes me is how your struggle for or about or within Art is inseparable from your struggle for or about or within the notion of freedom in modern America. The political "sheep" and the literary "sheep" are as one. Those who buy the party line buy also the bestsellers, or buy the blandness of the concept of bestseller, wholesale. Some of them even want to be well-paid and popular writers...I imagine them having lots of discipline, sitting down every day for a few hours to visualize their book-jacket photos...visualize the blurbs, the readings, the royalty cheques...

The '50s are remembered as a "square", conservative, socially and politically repressive era. But it's always been my understanding that repressive eras breed interesting countercultures, and as "square" as the Eisenhower years were, they spawned The Beats, for example...a loose association of rebels which brings to mind names like Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac and even Paul Bowles, who, although clearly too suave to have been one of the scruffy Beats, was a kind of aesthetic godfather to certain aspects of the movement.

Does Bush-era America have its own "Beats", in your opinion? Are there new Corsos, Burroughs's, Kerouacs or even Keseys out there, do you think, thriving under the iron rule of the Neo Square? If not, why not?

GJ: I remember being at a "gathering" of some sort at a place called the Blue Unicorn on Hayes Street in San Francisco in around 1966 or so and getting into a fight with Kenneth Rexroth about the silliness of politics. He said it wasn't silly. I said it was. Nobody won but I worried that he was gonna have a heart attack 'cause his face was all red and he spit when he talked and his eyes bugged-out like his head was gonna explode. Maybe it was a stroke I worried that he was gonna have. He must have been sixty or so at the time. Poor old fuck, I said to myself. Now that I'm sixty or so I don't get into fights with little snotnoses 'cause I don't want 'em thinking I'm gonna have a heart attack or a stroke.

As long as the mechanisms by which ideas are spread are owned and operated exclusively by moneymaking ventures (as they all are except for a few unnoticed corners of the Internet) all you're ever gonna get to see or hear or read is stuff that promotes, protects and defends the art of making of money. It's complicated. I'm trying to figure it out in my Isaac book but it ain't an easy thing to simplify. People just think you're nuts. What gets written and read is what some moneygrubbing agent or editor or book critic thinks will make money, period. The highest praise a book can get is how long it's on the NY Times Bestseller List so squirrely little "writer" boys and girls try to please agents and editors and book critics by passing themselves off as the next Dan Brown. Yikes. I can't imagine anything more grotesque to try to pass yourself off as than Dan Brown, but I don't make any rules but my own.

Politics is superfluous. It's a sop, a distraction, a soap-opera, a Harlequin Romance, just another form of mindless entertainment. It sells stuff the same way every other form of mindless entertainment sells stuff. The "Bush-era" might have some significance as an eight-year period of time but otherwise it's meaningless. Which sectors of the economy are booming is what defines an era. "Big oil military industrial" seems to be holding sway at the moment. That'll change. Things have to change in order come up with different ways of making money. A different sector will take over. As for "Art," yeah, it's showing up all over the place but until someone figures out a way of making money off it, you're not going to hear about it. If you don't hear about it, it'll show up anyway, as therapy, as a hobby, as an end in itself, as art for art's sake. Virtue has always been nothing but its own reward. I do what I do without much hope of pleasing anyone but myself. That sort of underground, inner-directed "spirit" has always been and will always be around. Sometimes it gets noticed and sometimes it doesn't but whoever has it doesn't really give a shit one way or the other whether it gets noticed or not.

Gerard Jones
everyone@everyonewhosanyone.com
http://everyonewhosanyone.com

Dear Dipshit: I see my name on your Nazi creative-writing-teacher list, and, yes, I'm inclined to say fuck you, and I'm inclined to say this because you're blowing smoke when you should be doing something more useful with yourself. Jerking off, it strikes me, would be an improvement, provided you are able to jerk off, which, based on the evidence your provide, I doubt you can. Your head, son, is a marvelous thing to take out of your ass. Let your work speak for itself, and consider shutting the fuck up. Mike Magnuson p.s. Shut the fuck up.

Yo! Mikey! It's precisely the giddy, girlish gibberish guys like you churn out that greases the wheels of the all-pervasive Nazi propaganda network. Boys just wanna have fun, right? My work speaks for itself. So does yours. I've got lots of "creative" writing teachers on my little list...it's a term that's not terribly strictly defined. Thanks for your thoughtful words. G.

You're still a dipshit. If you think I'm girly, asshole, guess again. I'm smarter than you, and I definitely can kick your ass. I probably can't suck dick as well as you, though. And if you think I'm greasing some bullshit Nazi propaganda network, good gravy, how fucking lost are you in space? You think publishing that bullshit hippy memoir-slash-pudding-whipping of yours for not much money at a bullshit press qualifies you to rail on American literature? Read some, I'm telling you, and shut the fuck up. Magnuson

That Nazi twats don't know they're Nazi twats is partly what makes 'em such Nazi twats. I'm the best writer alive. You're a silly Nazi twat. G.

Dipshit, I'm a silly twat. And you're the best writer alive? Shit. What searing intellect we have on display at all times! If only the drunks at the corner bar could do so well. Dude, get a restraining order because I'm finding you and kicking the living snot out of you. That's all there is to it. Procure friends; you'll need them. Call me a fucking Nazi: Fuck you. I repeat: Shut the fuck up.

You are a silly twat, yes. Anyone who thinks "literature" is defined by how much money the writer got is a silly twat. Find me, kick whatever you want out of me. What a civilized response. Burned any good books lately? You can't help being a giddy, giggly, silly little girlish Nazi twat, I realize that. All you've been allowed to know is Nazi propaganda 'cause it's the only thing anyone will pay to publish, publicize and promote and what gets "paid for" is the only thing of any value, so of course you're gonna be a knee-jerk Nazi twat. It's not your fault. You're an innocent victim. Most everyone in America gets brainwashed beyond belief from cradle to grave. Oh, well. People have to make a living, right? Go read everything on my little website (including the e-mail exchange we're having right now) and listen to my free, fifteen hour audio book ("the greatest literary achievement of the 21st Century"), then get back to me. Take your time and maybe in the future you'll stop, look and listen for a second or two before you spew your puerile Nazi twaddle like a puerile Nazi thug. I forgot more than you'll ever know before you were born. G.

Dipshit, I'm supposed to be civilized when you're calling everyone in the publishing industry a Nazi? Fuck you. You don't know shit. You haven't learned anything to forget. Magnuson

Everyone in the publishing industry is a Nazi...and the media industry and the entertainment industry and the academic industry, etc. I have proof, documentary evidence, tons of it. Here's the chapter of my beautiful book I'm listening to at the moment. G.

http://everyonewhosanyone.com/audio/GGch31m.mp3

September 8, 2006

Hey, man. I like it. Totalitarian works perfectly! I hereby lower my shields and regard you in good stead. Your fan, Mag

I'm bagging the thing in another day or two 'cause it's gonna be done. Yippee! You're not my only fan but I forget who the other one is. G.

December 9, 2007

Hey, man. I plan on printing copies and dropping them from airplanes over major cities. mag

Yeah, yeah, start a whole new publishing company, Pigeon Shit Press. Wait. It's been done. I sent out 1200 "press releases." One guy told me to take him off my list, some chick told me I was hilarious, and then there was you. G.

(@) = Not a corporate fascist. (Feel free to apply for non-corporate fascist status...simply tell me in fifty words or fewer why you think you're not a corporate fascist.)

(*) = E-mail bounced. Correct information much appreciated. In fact, anyone who knows anything I don't know, let me know.

(!) = E-mail blocked (just mine, not yours), probably 'cause the intended recipient and/or the company by which he or she is owned and operated is an extra brainwashed, super chicken, corporate fascist goon.

(666) = Asked not to be contacted (by me, not by you), very likely because he or she is a happy little slave boy or a happy little slave girl and doesn't want it any other way, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Gerard Jones
everyone@everyonewhosanyone.com