The Twelve Days Of Lists: Top 3 MySpace Friends I'm Pretty Sure I'd Despise If I Really Knew Them

1. John The Author. I'm sure John is a perfectly nice guy, apart from his raving love of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and his hatred for left-wing malcontents and his strident belief that Al Gore and Hillary Clinton might be reading his "heroes" list and understanding that John is speaking of them when he speaks of left-wing malcontents.

2. WRHammons. I'm not precisely certain what a WRHammons is, but what I've sussed out is that WRHammons runs a board on MySpace where writers are supposed to post their stuff so agents can find it.  The way the agents find it is that, uh, they Google themselves and because WR has mentioned them in his message board and MySpace page, they then see the writing left by the authors looking for agents and then, uhm, I guess Binky emails said writers and the next thing you know, everyone is having lunch at Michael's with Sonny. I can't tell you how many writers I know who've found an agent by posting their work on a MySpace message board. It's a really great bit of advice. Everyone should totally do that.  In addition to providing this service, WR also has some real estate information and resources for runners available, too, so that's nice.

3. Soulful Pen. Poets, by and large, make me crazy. It's that poet voice. You know what I'm talking about. That fucking cadence. The snapping. The bit where they dedicate a poem to another poem, or they write a poem about writing a poem, or they write a poem about a poem they wrote but cannot recall writing because it happened only in their mind while they stared longingly at a passing cloud. Now that's not to say I hate all poets. Donald Hall, for instance. Love him. Sharon Olds. Adrienne Rich. Raymond Carver. W.H. Auden. Ice Cube. But then I visit Soulful Pen and I think that if we really met each other I might be rude to her, particularly if I met her after reading this moving exchange between Ms. Pen and Deepak  Chopra on her MySpace:

Enthusiastically, I asked Deepok Cheopra, "What inspires you to write?"

Grinning he responded, "To expand my readers knowledge, so they can find inner awareness."

Nervously I admitted, "Because of your writing I became aware of the coincidences, and realized that I too am a writer."

His eyes filled with happiness that he had touched another's life, he cupped my hands and said, “I knew my writing touched you, it is obvious in your aura.”

Smirkfully, I think that I want to drive a rusted screw driver into my eye. Ponderingly, I wonder if Deepak really was such a grand inspiration to Ms. Pen since she doesn't know how to spell either his first name or his last correctly. Maddeningly I admit that I made a little bet with myself that Ms. Pen's books were either published by PublishAmerica or iUniverse and was not surprised to find that PublishAmerica was the culprit.    

Comments

[Dean]

The publication of Ms Pen's timeless works is yet another reason to hate Publish America.

[MinorRipper]

Great post, thanks. Not sure if you've seen this brief recent CNN piece on Gore, but I think it's quite well done. Here's a link to the youtube video www.minor-ripper.blogspot.com

[Man with Chronic Poet Voice]

Said in a soft, serious tone, tinged with a pathos for no particular reason other than I am reading aloud:

The Day the Blog Burned

Verbose entries linger on the steel electric divide of fiber optic cables
Holding, lovingly like a fist of rose petals, the contents of your words
Prompting unsavory and bilious postings
All coolness sabotaged by the likes of Ms. Pen and her Legion
The Day the Blog Burned

Fucktards surround your withering wit
And breath fire out their hairy nostrils
You burn, proudly, bravely, in their congflagration
As Paradiots laugh in the galleries, celebratiing
The Day the Blog Burned

Ahem.

Uh. Sorry. I'll shut up now and go crawl back under my rock.