Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 42

Year In Review

Well:



BABY




In other news, I achieved a little career goal by getting a piece into one of the Best American series, specifically my story "Thy Shiny Car in the Night" was reprinted in Best American Mystery Stories 2013. It's a tricky goal as there is nothing to really do except to publish widely and hope somebody notices.

Of course my novel Love Is the Law also came out. I was gratified by the attempts of my regular readers to recruit more readers via aggressive reviewing on amazon and blogs.

Limited hardcover and ultralimited lettered editions of The Damned Highway appeared. I forget whether they're sold out or not. I think the limited is.

My novel Bullettime inexplicably appeared in an audio edition via Audible.com this year, and the first sales report tells me that it sold eight copies.

In short stories, Bob and Ernie Fistfight In Heaven appeared in Cosmos.

Hideous Interview With Brief Man appeared in Fiddleblack.

I also had stories in a number of anthologies:
"The Drowsy Man Dreams" appeared in In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch. (This also marked the fiction debut of strangebint !)

"Vermont Muster" appeared in Shades of Blue & Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War.

"Drive the Warlike Angles Into the Sea!!!" appeared in Caledonia Dreamin'.

"Eureka!" appeared in Where Thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Edgar Allan Poe. (This story I wrote last Christmas Day. I hope to get writing of similar quality done this Christmas as well.)

"Hostage", which combined ancient Greek and Ashton-Smithian visions of Hyperborea appeared in Deepest, Darkest, Eden.

My taiji Lovecraft story "Wuji" appeared in Shotguns v Cthulhu.

A brief Marxian fable, "The Stray Dogs Learn Their Lesson" appeared in The Lion and The Aardvark:Aesop's Modern Fables.

My novelette "Arbeitskraft" was reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2013, edited by Rich Horton. (Not to be confused with the other four or five years best.) It was also recorded as an audiobook and made available via Infinivox in two of their audio anthologies: Steampunk Specs and The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 5.

My day job anthology The Future Is Japanese was nominated for the Locus Award, so I was able to visit Seattle on Pikachu's dime. Ken Liu's story therein, "Mono No Aware" was nominated for and ultimately won the Hugo Award, so I got to visit San Antonio on Pikachu's dime, and throw a party on it as well.

I got to visit my old stomping grounds Boston while attending the AWP Conference, and I also went to Portland for the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, which was fun, if sticky.

A small non-fiction volume, Quotes Every Man Should Know, also appeared. I also wrote an internal-use cultural encyclopedia and character sketches for the Fable videogame franchise, on the behest of Random House Worlds.

At a KGB reading in January, I announced my retirement from science fiction, fantasy, and horror, though I wrote several stories I'd previously promised to editors. Two of them, which will be appearing next year, are actually crime stories that fit the themes (scheming and carnivals) but contain no supernatural or science fictional element.

The Under My Roof movie script went into its seventh draft, about four drafts removed from my last whack at it. It was selected for the Oaxaca Film Festival in September. The main character now has a girlfriend, and a comically angry antagonist.


Literally not one week went by where I did not send someone, either formally through a GoFundMe/Indiegogo/whatever campaign or informally through blog post/Twitter/Facebook solicitations, at least $25 to keep their lights on or to pay for medical care or something like that. The economy is still clearly in the pits for very many people.

In physical news, I pulled my groin while wrestling at my local push-hands club, and later broke a toe in Brazilian ju-jitsu class, which occasioned my first-ever trip to the emergency room as a patient. I am officially getting too old for this. I visited both Texas and New York with the bum foot, which was aggravating.

Kazzie had a vestibular issue and is now hard of hearing and sight, but is still a spritely dog at age thirteen.

Coming up in 2014: I will continue to change diapers, and should soon be trying to keep my son from eating the dog's food or bashing his head against the furniture as he learns to crawl, then walk. I have a number of stories coming out in anthologies and literary journals, and am expecting my zombie novel The Last Weekend to finally appear as a limited hardcover only. My dayjob graphic novel, All You Need Is Kill (my script based on the Hiroshi Sakurazaka novel) is coming out, and will be excerpted and distributed to comic stores for free as part of Free Comic Book Day. It's back to Seattle, this time for AWP, where I will be presenting on a panel about teaching genre fiction in writing workshops, and to Portland again for the World Horror Convention.


Because I am stupid, I might try to start writing plays.

FULL BABYISM: Tongue Ties in Infants

You might have a tongue tie, likely a small one. Basically, your tongue is attached to the base of your mouth by a bit of flesh. It's totally fine. Sometimes though, the ties are quite bad, which can interfere with breastfeeding. (There are also upper-lip ties.) Doctors have grown savvy to this, supposedly, and check newborns for ties. But, there are multiple kinds of ties...



See IV, over there? Hard to find, I guess, since eleven professionals, including four lactation consultants and three doctors (pediatrician, family care doctor, and ear/nose/throat specialist) couldn't spot it on my son despite his issues with weight gain. (He was in the bottom 8 percent of growth) We finally went to this consultant (link to Yelp reviews, many of which have a similar story) who spotted the ties immediately, and sent us to a pediatric dentist with a laser to burn the ties off. Nine-hundred twenty bucks later (babies don't normally have dental insurance—no fucking teeth!) he's fine and eating well and gaining ~1oz a day.

But anyway, if you have a scrawny newborn, especially one who falls asleep on the breast, look for a Type IV tongue-tie.

Wednesday Quick Notes

A few years ago, my boss instructed me to write a two-page film treatment of one of our novels, All You Need Is Kill, to help our LA office VIZ Productions maybe sell it to the movies. Well, a few million bucks and five screenwriters (including a $3m payday for Dante Harper for the initial spec script, which was actually fairly close to the book) and innumerable drafts and then Tom Cruise's input and some reshoots and the introduction of new characters and a name change, we have this:



It's not terrible. Pretty neat, actually. Less boom-boom than I was worried about. I joked on the dayjob blog that rather than "based on All You Need Is Kill", we might say that the film is "thematically adjacent to All You Need Is Kill." Yes, it's whitewashed, but given the sales of the books and the orders coming in for the mass-market tie-in edition, the film remains a great commercial for the novel!


In other news, I have a new essay up on BullSpec, about my new novel Love Is the Law (which is under eight bucks, and fits in Christmas stockings, btw), in which I explain why it's actually like The Alchemist.

Tuesday quick notes

My LitReactor writing class, Start to Finish, begins January 9th. This is an online, asynchronous workshop-style class with "lectures." Four weeks, easy to squeeze in! Good if you're working on something specific. Do sign up.

My contributor copy of Caledonia Dreamin' came in today. See?



It's a nice-looking volume. My story is "Drive the Warlike Angles Into the Sea!!!" and I hope people read it. It was a labor-of-love type story, in that I was eager to be in this book for, among other reasons, the chance to write some Yes propaganda (the book itself is neither for nor against). I also only got £20 for it. But these days, I feel that a lot of anthologies are fairly cynical, with themes designed either for Kickstart friendliness (e.g., Twenty Authors With Blogs!), or being created via mix'n'match—Steampunk Zombies! I liked that this one is focused closely on language and place, and was wide open as far as storytelling goes. Check it out.

Colin Wilson died last week—we wondered if it wasn't a hoax when only the Times (of London) had an obit. It took all weekend for the other papers to get their file obits together. The UK press is playing one last round of "Bash Colin" as well, as in this sort of concern trolling into the afterlife.

Haven't seen any US newspaper obits for Wilson yet at all. The New York Times wrote about him... back in 2005. Don't wear yourselves out, Gray Ladies!

On the Question "Do You Take Reprints?"

A few years ago I met an online acquaintance for a face-to-face lunch. He was a writer and wanted the inside scoop on playing essays with The Smart Set. A genre fiction person, he was not very familiar with querying non-fiction magazines. (Hint: it's usually the managing editor or section editor.) So I gave him a few tips and a name. Then a few weeks later we met again and the guy told me, "I wrote to the editor and asked if they took reprints. He didn't write back." I didn't say anything but I did have a thought, and a prediction:

He'll never place anything with The Smart Set.

And indeed I was correct. I don't know if leading with the question of reprints was really the reason, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. TSS pays real money for real essays; why would they want second-hand material? Even in the field of service journalism, where evergreen material is constantly recycled and occasionally reconceptualized, material isn't often simply reprinted. (Reblogged, for free, by the lowlifes at Huffington Post, sure.) You have to rewrite, localize, whatever.

And in fiction, reprints are generally worth less than original material.

Now, it is true that we are living in what I called a golden moment for reprint anthologies. It's fairly easy to sell a reprint these days, even for the non-famous, but the markets themselves are generally reprint markets.

What I've been noticing lately is that when I make a note about wanting to see submissions or pitches for various projects I'm working on: The Big Click, or my day job anthology
Is this a bit of advice people are getting now? "Always ask if the editor wants to see reprints before offering anything new?" Because if so, it is terrible advice. As far as I am concerned, asking this question is like tripping the editor, dropping trou, squatting over him, and easing out a big snaking turd onto his face, while shouting, "This is what I think of you! THIS IS WHAT I THINK OF YOU!! YOU LIVE TO EAT MY SHIT!"

And needless to say, those authors just talked themselves out of consideration for those projects. If I wanted reprints, I'd ask for reprints. Hell, if I wanted reprints, I wouldn't need to make even semi-public calls. I'd read in the field I wanted to buy from, and contact the authors privately to solicit the reprints. My checkbook is large enough and my projects prestigious enough that I want new material, and I want excellent new material. It's even fairly easy for me to get—when I open things up, it's partially because I'm a little dissatisfied with the material I am seeing, and partially due to the same romanticism that made Haunted Legends the first Ellen Datlow project with open submissions, and that made Clarkesworld a magazine with no form rejection letter.

Now some editors may disagree with me about being asked about reprints before being offered new material. Almost surely some editor will pop up and say that they like any sort of question, professionally asked. And I'd like to say: consider the source. I note that the more mental energy editors put into some notion of fairness to writers, the less concerned they are about readers. That is, they don't have very many readers. POD anthologists with 1c a word budgets, CreateSpace publishers with convention dealer's room-only print distribution, micropresses with a 1000-book list with each title selling fifty copies...they may love being asked fancy business questions like "Do you take reprints?" Then they get to give fancy business answers like "Only if it's very good!"

And some of the poor semiliterate dears will even say, "But reprints have a place in publications!" or "What about that reprint you ran once!?" as if I said anything about reprints being unnecessary or forbidden. If you are confused, go back to the top of this entry and read it again until you hit this sentence. Repeat as necessary.

I, on the other hand, am working in a buyer's market. I don't like that kind of thing, and when I was starting out it was made very clear that absent specifics one should submit or query new material, not reprinted material. It should go without saying that of course when you have an opportunity open up before you, you grab at it with both hands! And that means having something ready to go, or making time and space in your life and schedule to produce something new. "Would you give me two weeks?" is a perfectly fine, professional initial question. "Do you take reprints?" is just a way to lose an opportunity so far as I am concerned.

nihilistic_kid @ 2013-12-05T14:20:00

Remember when we'd find out news like the death of Nelson Mandela from LJ before other sources?

Five Books I Loved This Year, And a Review

As usual, these are books I read this year, not necessarily books released this year. Though I think this time some were from 2013, or at least 2011 or 2012. These are in no particular order, though I guess the second book listed is the one I'd most highly recommend.

The Sound of Loneliness by Craig Wallwork. Terrible title, great book. Actually, this sort of book—bad wannabe poor writer in a working class neighborhood—is my "sexy vampire." Oh, is there a sexy vampire in that book? I'd better check it out! Anyway, Daniel Crabtree is a shitty writer with nothing but one friend in newspaper publishing, a dying uncle, and memories of his awful father. Then he tries to befriend a teen girl. I suppose it's very much in the mode of Knut Hamsen's Hunger, but funnier. The cover almost makes up for the title:



So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman. A great crime/social novel with an anarchist theme. My friend Benjamin Whitmer says that crime fiction is the only genre in which writers can authentically write about class in America, and I agree. So Much Pretty is a prime example. This novel offers multiple POVs and shifts back and forth in time in such a way as to make a tragic inevitability rather than a tedious "twist" of the old missing girl trope. It's also an amazing look at the dying towns of upstate New York (and really, any exurban area in the US these days). Hoffman, who used to write for The Fifth Estate doesn't make the mistake of giving the characters that share her politics an easy time of things. Perhaps little Alice Piper, a multivariate prodigy, is a bit of wish fulfillment, but complaining about wish fulfillment in a crime novel is like complaining about crime in a crime novel. A sign of quality: mixed reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, with many of the one-star reviews featuring comments like, "A book with so much potential but the author chose to bore us with numerous narrations and use a deep poetic way of writing that you read it & wonder what is even happening or the story trying to convey." Waaaah, it's hard! Someone told me lady writers make easy mystery books! Boo-hoo!

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe. Brian Keene pushed this book at me, and I started reading it on a plane, but I wasn't very excited about it. What a fool I was! This book is compulsively readable. I was steeped in Marvel comics in the 1980s, but like any dumb kid had little idea of the business decisions that influenced various storylines and product launches. Marvel Comics is full of tiny horror stories—when the firm was in bankruptcy there was even a rule against using too many paperclips. Jim Shooter was a giant in the field, and perhaps the world's worst person. I don't think one needs a minute interest in Marvel characters to enjoy this book; really, it should be required reading in B-schools, and among union organizers looking to penetrate the creative fields.

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan. The New York Times Book Review embarrassed itself when it declared this book an "English novel." It is a Scottish novel, written in dialect. Ursnay possible tae miss, ye cunt. Fifteen-year-old Anais (not her given name, duh) is in care and believes herself to be under the eye of The Experiment. She's not far from wrong either. Terrible things happen, but when life is nothing but a series of terrible things, what can be done, except maybe beat a police officer half to death for the sake of love? Did I say half? Make that three-quarters, or maybe seven-eighths... Ken Loach is producing the movie, so I am even excited about that.

Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson by Blake Bailey. I've discussed my fascination with literary biography before, so I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. What makes this book different is that Jackson is essentially a failure. He's known for one novel—The Lost Weekend—and then primarily thanks to the classic movie. But he's done more than many authors in that the phrase "lost weekend" has entered the English language and is used by people who have never heard of Jackson, making him as influential as the authors who coined the terms "catch-22" and "Big Brother" in a way. Like many of Bailey's subjects, Jackson was an alcoholic and a homosexual in a time when being out was a deadly risk. Jackson had great successes and massive failures, and thought himself a much better writer than he was. A great unfinished novel he'd been working on for years was supposed to match Proust. He also saw himself as the next Thomas Mann. Sadly, he spent a lot of his energy writing sentimental short stories for the slicks, in debt to his publisher, and going off on benders. He kicked booze more than once, but Seconal was even more addictive. We don't really ever get in-depth treatments of one-hit literary wonders, so there was a novelty interest here. Of course Bailey's bios of Cheever and Yates are well-known for their excellence–if you liked them, you'll like this one. It's the same sort of thing, except that Jackson is an even more pitiable and interesting figure.



In other news, my novel Love is the Law received this extremely positive-sounding negative review: 2013 in Shit: Love Is the Law. The blogger prefers books that are "aggressively poorly written." He writes, "There is a certain (spatial) dimensionality to the sorts of works of fiction that are poor examples of craft that I find lacking in writers like, say, Pynchon or Mamatas. There's worse company, I suppose." I get what he means. I can't manage that true underground don't-give-a-fuck, though it's part of my literary DNA. (Of course, Danielweski's book isn't underground DGaF at all—it was part of a transmedia commercial enterprise in conjunction with his pop star sister. But he aped DGaF so well.) Which wouldn't be a problem if I could manage Extruded Commercial Product For Idiots, Dispensed Annually. Hey girls, my characters are slashable! Hey fellahs, my heroes are witty and slick in the way you're too fat and ugly to be. So I'm stuck in the middle with(out) you. I'd like to recommend to him The Panopticon over So Much Pretty, though as I mentioned, for most people I'd make the opposite initial suggestion.

I also feel him when he says that he bounces off my stuff, even as he enjoys the concepts. I feel the same way about a ton of mainstream SF and crime fiction. I delayed this post to start reading Burning Paradise by Robert Charles Wilson, because it looked like the sort of thing I'd enjoy very much. A bit of the copy:

Cassie’s world has been at peace since the Great Armistice of 1918. There was no World War II, no Great Depression. Poverty is declining, prosperity is increasing everywhere; social instability is rare. But Cassie knows the world isn’t what it seems. Her parents were part of a group who gradually discovered the awful truth: that for decades—back to the dawn of radio communications—human progress has been interfered with, made more peaceful and benign, by an extraterrestrial entity.

But then I opened the book and started reading. The aliens, or at least their ground troops, are bland white men in fedoras, straight out of Dark City or Fringe, and are are full of green goo. In Sensation, at least mine were of "indeterminate ethnicity" and full of spiders! And Cassie? A teen girl, at least at the start, and even worse she's...well, here's a screencap:



Oh boy, a geek! Who is too smart and strange to have friends! Fuuuck yoooooooou, Wilson. There are certain commercial inevitabilities in novels that fall short of ruining the books, but that certainly taint them. Most readers aren't very sensitive to them—indeed, they crave 'em! I'm somewhat sensitive. The Year in Shit blogger is even more sensitive, it seems, or at least differently sensitive. At least he knows what he likes.

What did you like this year?

Today in Science Fiction

Black SF writer Samuel R. Delany is named grandmaster of science fiction by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.


And the latest tidbit leaked from the Secret Masters of Fandom mailing list of science fiction convention runners is

“Instead of insulting us, [Jim Hines] could be using whatever influence he has in social media to help recruit more PoC into our circles. They need to know they’d probably be much more welcome here than they might be elsewhere. (After all, many of us would love to befriend extra terrestrials or anthromorphs.)”

Whatever Happened to Buy Nothing Day?

I am not actually a huge fan of Buy Nothing Day. Like a lot of political initiatives these days, it is dependent on non-action rather than action, and it ultimately reifies the power of the market. That is, middle-class radicals make the same claims as middle-class conservatives: the market is the arbiter of truth, quality, ethics, democracy, etc etc etc. Whatever the market decides is correct. So on Buy Nothing Day, we are sending market signals to...whom? Well, to the market, one supposes. Bad market, stop marketing the marketplace!

But I do have to say that I prefer Buy Nothing Day to the new political "meme" (for lack of a better word, but it doesn't quite qualify as a political idea idea) I've seen cropping up this year and last—namely, one should not have a word of critique for Black Friday, doorbusters, long lines of shoppers, and the occasional worker trampling. Because you see, Black Friday shoppers are, or might be, poor, and the poor cannot afford quality merchandise other days of the year, and that further the poor are allowed to have quality things and to critique Black Friday is to be one of those nasty conservative sorts who want the poor to subsist solely on rice, beans, and pollution from the nearby coal mine until such time as Jesus comes to kill us all with His flaming sword.

Everyone deserves a My Little Pony.


The poor, entering the zoo enclosure to better be studied by social scientists.

This is not a Black Friday I am familiar with. When I was growing up—and if you want me to set the scene imagine plaster crumbling from the ceiling into the breakfast cereal while us kids ate it in our winter coats and with gloved hands because the heat wasn't on—Black Friday wasn't for "the poor." It was always the slightly richer relative, with money or even a van he could fill with goodies, and with the free time to get up early and go crazy with the shopping list. While always interested in a deal, me and mine were always more excited about deals that one could get on the waterfront in the days before containerization, the local flea market and the outlet store on the other side of the state line, and the discount on the stuff that everyone else already got two years ago. Be the last on your block to get an Atari 2600, and then settle in to watch some WHT because HBO is twice as much and the cable company was too afraid to bring precious copper wire down to the neighborhood anyway. Even in the days of the Cabbage Patch Kid craze, the idea of joining the hordes to wrestle for a plastic doll just seemed odd. There was a little out of the way joint, and if you knew somebody and weren't picky—sure, a boy doll would be fine—maybe you could get one for the actual sticker price. And if not, so what? You'll live.

And all this is because the poor I knew, at least back then, had jobs that required hours on the day after Thanksgiving. The boats must still be unloaded, of course the Greek diners were open, and furnaces needed servicing. Nobody was getting up at 5am to do anything but go to work like any other day, and sometimes even at the mall. If you had an extra day off, the real early Christmas present was three more hours of sleep, followed by a turkey sandwich.

There was even, I daresay, a little bit of pride in being necessarily less materialistic than the selfish, spoiled "rich" brats with their long Christmas lists. A dozen years ago, when I got on LJ, I was appalled to see people presenting their "Christmas lists" in public blog posts. Mind you, these weren't lists of presents to buy, but ones they hoped to receive from parents and grandparents. People in their twenties and thirties were posting these! By way of contrast, I was well-adapted to saying "Nothing, I don't want anything for Christmas" by age ten or so. There was also pride in a certain canniness—don't get jerked around by commercials, by fake "sales" created by first increasing the price and then offering a discount, and plus everything was cheap shit that would break ten days later. And batteries were never included.

I'm still teased, thirty-five years later, for having wanted a particular pair of sneakers as a child.

Now some of my relatives and the relatives of my friends were dedicated bargain hunters, and may have even tried early sales once or twice. They were considered oddballs for doing so. But no, the frantic consumerism of the post-Thanksgiving sales period was considered one more folly that snoots, climbers, suckers, and la-de-dah types went for.

Of course, things change. Poverty is certainly more generalized these days than in the 1970s and 1980s, and the one-sided class war is more pronounced. Poverty porn is common, and critiques of the obvious "errors"—the purchased ten-dollar wine bottle, the smartphone that wasn't instantly sold off (to whom?), daring to have children without $100,000 in the bank somehow etc.—are inevitable and ruthless. And Black Friday really is qualitatively different now. It wasn't until the last decade, after years of beating the drums for it by the retailers, that the day actually really became the busiest shopping day of the year.

And of course, there are many more poverty experts out there. You know, people who ate a lot of lentils while in grad school, or who had a bad year or two after their folks split up and suddenly mommy was serving Kraft Dinner a little too often. And they all have Twitter, and Facebook, and blogs of their own. But safely ensconced in the middle class now, they have changed their tune from "Buy Nothing!" to "Shut Up And Let The Poors Shop!"

But all casual analysis is autobiography, and thus so is mine: I'm still not seeing huge lines of poor people lining up and freaking out for Black Friday. Not in my current social milieu, not among my family, not from watching TV with an eye toward catching class signifiers. I am wondering aloud right now if middle-class moralists aren't confusing "poor" and "black" once again—TV cameras love to zoom in on a black body misbehaving, after all, and so the assumption is that the unusual person who gets into a shoving match is somehow typical of the crowd...but not of his or her race! That would be ( and is ) racist. So it gets deflected onto class. The poors just have to get to the store early and flip out, you see. Related to this is the shocking claim that poor people may not realize that they can stay home and shop online. Poors are stupid too, you see, or don't have the Internet, despite years of lining up at 4am to buy PCs and smartphones...

What I am seeing during Black Friday are middle class people and the upper ranges of what's left of the working class being suckered as they often are by spectacle and phony promises of deals and sales and The Latest Thing. And then some other middle class people seeing a chance to provide a lecture to those who find such displays distasteful. If the middle class likes anything more than a discount on some fancy bullshit, it's the chance to moralize.

The poor I've known, and the poor I've been, have always been a little cleverer than that. So, Buy Nothing Day? Of course not—that's just as moralistic. There's no reason not to buy a cup of coffee (Yes yes, "Make your own at home!") or a sandwich (the most sexist of food items), or a tank of gas ("Get a Prius, Earth-killer!"), but there's also no reason to waste hours on a line to buy not-very-cheap "doorbusters." The poor aren't being suckers for the hype; the hype is that the poor are suckers.

So personally, I'd rather buy nothing.

Black Wednesday

Over at Apex Publications, all books are 40 percent off until December 2nd, including Starve Better, which would be a great gift for the wannabe in your life.

Meanwhile, at PM Press, the holiday lasts a lot longer. Everything is 50 percent off, through the end of the year. You do have to perform some labor, however: the coupon code is Holiday. You can buy my systems novel Sensation this way. I started calling it a systems novel last week, because apparently the systems novel was a big thing when the book came out, but I foolishly hadn't retired from science fiction yet so nobody took me seriously except for greasy nerds. Systems novel! I'm a white man and I wrote a systems novel! Which way to the $1500-an-hour gig talking to MFA students?!?

And now, a proper Thanksgiving poem:

Eat your turkey
drink your wine
your days are numbered
bourgeois swine!