Wall Street Journal Article re: The slush pile

The Death of the Slush Pile

Excerpt:

As writers try to find an agent—a feat harder than ever to accomplish in the wake of agency consolidations and layoffs—the slush pile has been transferred from the floor of the editor's office to the attaché cases of representatives who can broker introductions to publishing, TV and film executives. The result is a shift in taste-making power onto such agents, managers and attorneys. Theirs are now often the first eyes to make a call on what material will land on bookshelves, television sets and movie screen.
Still, discoveries do happen at agencies, including the biggest publishing franchise since "Harry Potter"—even though it basically took a mistake to come together. In 2003, an unknown writer named Stephenie Meyer sent a letter to the Writers House agency asking if someone might be interested in reading a 130,000-word manuscript about teenage vampires. The letter should have been thrown out: an assistant whose job, in part, was to weed through the more than 100 such letters each month, didn't realize that agents mostly expected young adult fiction to weigh in at 40,000 to 60,000 words. She contacted Ms. Meyer and ultimately asked that she send her manuscript.

mise en scene

the sky and the ground and the point where they both meet were what i wanted to see, and its there everyday. but when i see it, it assures me that it's always been there. it's always been there. it's comforting. do you remember when you met someone new and they said interesting things and you guys hit the slow mo button on the "goodbye portion" of the proceedings, like allowing the opportunity to ask them out was being handed to you in an obvious subtle way. and you notice how endearing their handwriting is? it's as comforting as that, to be honest with you.

pshaw

pretty (ugly before)

Sunshine
Been keeping me up for days
There is no nightime
It's only a passing phase
And I feel pretty
Pretty enough for you
I felt so ugly before
I didn't know what to do

Sometimes
Is all I feel up to now
But it's not worth it to you
Because you got to get high somehow
Is it destruction
That you're required to feel?
Like somebody wants you
Someone that's more for real

Sunshine
Been keeping me up for days
There is no nightime
Only a passing phase
And I'll feel pretty
Another hour or two
I felt so ugly before
I didn't know what to do
Ugly before
Send "Pretty (Ugly Before)" Ringtone to your Cell

-Goethe

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”

heh

  It used to be if a woman wanted something she'd have to get it from her dad or a guy she was sleeping with. We were ALL like Persian women!-Natasha Leggero on Twitter.

neither here nor there, pt whenever again

“if you desire love in your life, cultivate it in yourself, in your own dreams and desires, in the mark you want to make during your brief span here, in the lessons learned, in the smiles as much as the scars. fill yourself up with love, rather than waiting for someone to do it for you.”-anonymous

“I want to beg of you much as I can to be patient
toward all that’s unsolved in your heart,
and learn to love the questions themselves,
like locked rooms, or like books that are
written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you,
because you would not be able to live them,
and the point is to live everything.
Live the question now,
perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day into the answer
-Rainer Maria Rilke

i'm going crazy

and i'm ahead of schedule and the music at the office is driving me to dangerously existentiali levels.

blowing off steam at my twitter, updating the office radio station playlist with my thoughts and bon mots

http://twitter.com/finethanksokay

i'm a gambling man:

i'm a gambling man:
i've got my mind
on my money
and my money on me.

source: albert einstein

“Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”

it's 5:30 pm and my sanctuary is an alleyway

it's 5:30 pm and my sanctuary is an alleyway
behind the building where i work.
there are trees, five feet away from each other,
singly making their residence on
archipelagic islands of soil bordered by concrete and
separated by a sea of pavement
littered with crushed dead leaves, cigarette butts
and empty liquor bottles.
they are not so much trees but indicators of
where to parallel park.

on the other side of a fence that looks like it's pretending to be a wall,
there are more trees: more colorful, bigger, healthier,
they are a gang bunched together while
mine are separated and isolated by gray rubble
and i can't help
but feel protective and defensive (so much so)
that when a bird pirouettes towards us and
nests with us (as opposed to them) there is a
sense of pride and i say to myself
"there's nothing wrong with us, and where
we are and who we are and why we are
why we are." we share the same sky,

and for christ's sake,

when i look up there is a crescent moon
patiently waiting for the sun to make its exit.
i close one eye and outstretch my right arm upwards
hoping i can grab a hold of a cloud gingerly coiffed
against a blue canvas, wondering if i can grip the sky
and gently split it open like lips &
i will hear something like "FFFFFT"
and hopefully i can see dark matter or
clusters of dense stars that form in the shape
of the fibonacci sequence. hopefully i can
find the sky's very own third eye watching me.

when i fail to do so, i go back inside and
when i go back inside i felt a sense of pride
being in on a secret with the alleyway,
as if we were the only mexicans
in a crowded elevator speaking spanish to each other.


i sat down and this was when i was excited to hear from you.
when you asked me how i was doing i said "fine" but
what i really meant to say was "i wish i can show you
something that i felt today" -- but don't get me wrong
because i really was fine, my ears burning biblically
at the idea of the trees finding each other's roots
and holding onto each other tight in the earth's crust.
and when you said "i'm glad", my foundation was sturdy yet
floating, like the atmosphere (for a second) thought it was water.

journal entries (relevant to the nature of this blog and its impending demise and rebirth)

Whereas I have been so committed to moving forward and making moves and have been restless with the fear of idle action as a realistic (fucking ridiculous) idea, I have not taken a step back. This month is all about taking a step back, and so I scoured my old journals and found two things that hold dear relevance to my situation, my optimism (mistaken for pessimism), my cynicism (mistaken for pessimism), my pessimism (which fuels my optimism and cynicism) and the hope that isn't bottled and marketed for it is free when I see a kid that waves at me in line at a grocery store.

(Warning: This is mad self-aggrandizing but it's my blog and I'm not getting paid for it. For those that came here to continue the serial narrative of my untitled novel project, I've stopped posting chapters after I think Ch. 6 but it doesn't mean I'm stagnant. It means if you like it you can wait and the process is too private for me to let you in just yet.)
---

June 5, 2008
i think i've earned one of those stupid introspective posts after a bevy of dumb poems and cheap laugh pictures i've posted.

i check my facebook page, the section of "People You May Know" so that you can add more friends. And all I see are names and faces of people I actually "may" know. People I would never actively seek out, people I've shared time with but have never actually made time for. It's kind of funny, thinking the world as just this fleeting spinning ball with fleeting faces abruptly interrupting the infinity that spirals out your creation.
But then, Karl Marx was the dude who said that philosophy is to real life as masturbation is to sex. people discredit smart people's sense of humor sometimes to search for some value and meaning and heavy-handedness. All I'm saying is Marx probably would have been a chill dude to have a beer with inbetween his quest for utopia.

i think i'm purposefully not trying to be linear about this, making it more esoteric than necessary. some say that's awfully pretentious, but fuck it i am pretentious in my core.

i've kind of discovered that my ears are less enthusiastic about loud noises. i appreciate arrangements and melody more than noise. when i would play with the radio when my grandpa would pick me up, he would call my music "jumping music". i think i'm veering towards his visceral spectrum. he really liked the fugees version of "killing me softly". god rest his soul. but then something like the minutemen come onto my random music player and i remember how exciting noise was. maybe i should stop making statements because if you stand by your statements you're standing by your past.

i've used the process of elimination to decide what i don't want, what i don't like, who i don't like to be and now that i'm nearing the ghastly spectre of 30 i find that all that skimming and separating of chaff from the wheat has proved kind and worthwhile. i see myself finding things that i do want, actively pursuing things i do like, and seeing the person who i do want to be like. it's like when you have a real good friend when you were six years old and now you sit back and think about how you thought they were going to be there for you all your life. it's not sad or depressing in the least. it makes what you have now all the more important.
when karl marx said that, i think he meant that people are content with complaining rather than doing something about it. finding that right balance between action and theory. the one who acts before thinking is as foolish as the one who thinks without acting. we live between fine lines, making sure to make sense. stop making sense.

in the last year, there are now two marriages and three engagements. that's a whopping ten of my friends taking that leap. for what it's worth, i am very proud of them although i'm not there yet. it's easier to say you want to get married when you find the right person. if you don't, it's kind of like saying you want a million dollars without working. i used to say i'd make a great uncle. i think i now would make a tremendous dad if given the chance, but i'm thinking too far ahead. i have to master the art of filling a class one cavity between then and now.

i think people underestimate how much of a dick i am and i kind of take advantage of that. i think people take advantage of my niceness and i let them because i am not nice to be a decent dude or because i have to. i am nice because i want to be. eliminate the martyrdom.

i picked my nose in front of a girl i liked yesterday. i think it's a nice little litmus test because c'mon like if you can pick your nose with someone after hella years why should picking your nose be a reason not to be interested in someone. i am making a statement. my name is pierre bautista and i pick my nose with reckless abandon.


i'm back in the business of getting busy, i'm letting things get to me when they should just be potholes i'd run over without a second thought, or unsuspecting detours that make my destination that much longer. i had a friend who once asked me why are things you get but don't earn so bad. i answered with a nod. i was busy eating mushrooms.

all i'm saying is that i'm a tired kind of happy right now, awaiting tumult and hard-work, awaiting the results that come afterward, but not expecting anything other what's in front of my nose. i'm in love with everything and it's better i kept it a secret.
---


Sept. 21, 2008
i'm not sure but i think it was norman mailer who said that the closest thing a man can get to the feeling of childbirth is writing a novel. delillo and dave eggers continued to extrapolate on that, discussing writing like being your baby and you see its flaws and its beautiful grotesqueness and when you show it to other people the only thing you hope for is that they see its beauty in the manner that you see it as well. of course, i'm just kind of going on memory and excuse me if i misattributed any of these concepts to the wrong people.

career specialist melanie trunk has reasons why you should stop toying with the idea that one should even write a novel, in fact she has FIVE. reason number four is that you make more money per hour flipping burgers that publishing a novel to which most writers i know would respond with "um of course".

david foster wallace, rest in peace, even talked about writing in a salon.com interview hella years ago:

Part of it has to do with living in an era when there's so much entertainment available, genuine entertainment, and figuring out how fiction is going to stake out its territory in that sort of era. You can try to confront what it is that makes fiction magical in a way that other kinds of art and entertainment aren't. And to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine. It's unbelievably difficult and confusing and scary, but it's neat. There's so much mass commercial entertainment that's so good and so slick, this is something that I don't think any other generation has confronted. That's what it's like to be a writer now. I think it's the best time to be alive ever and it's probably the best time to be a writer. I'm not sure it's the easiest time.

i didn't leave the dying industry of journalism because it was dying, or because we are currently at an impasse where the immediacy of blogs and the concept of print media are at a crossroads that print media is losing so badly that it is making a white flag to wave while they set up their servers for the web edition of their publication.

i left because one day i would like to have a family, you know that whole wife and kids thing. i am as much of a crass consumer as anyone as well, so i'll be damned if i don't get season tickets to the niners or a hi-def plasma tv. the endless deadline, overworked, underpaid aspect of writing about the local synchronized swimmer going to the national championship seemed insufficient to what i actually wanted. i won't say that i didn't love it because i did. so i came up with a plan to find a way to be fiscally safe while continuing my passion.

dfw's passing was a big surprise to me. he was a man who i admired and looked up to, someone who can see the world in a way that is both intimidating and comfortable and write about it in a similar manner. reading his essays was like someone showing you a rubik's cube and instead of telling you how to beat the rubik's cube he tells you it's concepts, it's mathematical possibilities, it's ability to allow people to concede to it. he gave you an apple and showed you its pulp, it's seeds, it's stem, it's thin skin. he was a master mechanic, not so much in love with repairing but in determining why things need to be repaired or why things don't, why we need what we need. because life, after all, is not a car that can easily be given an oil change every 2,000 miles. i've disagreed in a civil manner to people i respect that life is not simple, and maybe i am wrong. maybe i don't want it to be simple.

sure, deciding to simplify things that don't need to be complicated is crucial in keeping your sanity. i'm not saying overly deconstruct things that are unecessary and minute and unimportant, i'm just saying that when i see a tree then i can see a random space of land obstructing my view or a plant that gives me oxygen or even see a tree that had probably seen my native people struggle or celebrate and maybe kept a little kid shelter when all he wanted was his parents to understand him. there is no wrong answer... and i'm digressing i'm sorry.

i have built a respectable ouvre of contrived poetry and prose, some i even like and am proud of (go figger!). the most widely-circulated published stuff i've written was for the money and so they were not something to hang my hat on but i'll tell you this i do not treat writing hacky shit as a chore but as a challenge. that said, i'd rather no one ever read it.

what i was trying to say about david foster wallace is that his death actually resonates with me. here is another excerpt of his essay regarding kafka that i found over at marginalia.org:

[T]he horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. … [E]nvision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens…and it opens outward — we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.

it's actually weird to think he committed suicide because his despair was always approached at a very very analytical standpoint. it was never full-blown out there like, say, sylvia plath or kurt cobain or anyone else who were brilliant little assholes who made shit that will of course be indelible and crucial to the world at-large when they unearth our skeletons after the next ice age.

david foster wallace was a genius, the chillest dude in school that was approachable but i couldn't talk to anyways because what he said would go over my head.
but david foster wallace has given me strength now. i might not be the greatest writer ever and that doesn't matter. i always wanted to write a novel to challenge myself, document the world as i see it and share something to a world that has shared so much to me.

so thank you very much and goodbye mr. wallace. thank you very much, i'm ready to share:

i have chapter five posted up and im working on chapter six right now.

Ham on Rye

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.”-Henry Chinaski.

a lil sumthin sumthin

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and the sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

—	Ernest Hemingway in Esquire, December 1934

the dumbest girl i ever touched

the dumbest girl i ever touched
felt like velvet and smelled like
what a perfect sunday morning
can only wish to smell like.

she was exotic, despised narcotics
but indulged me as much as i
wished to patronize her and her words
and her dress that was inches too short.

and when i slept in her bed
she would hold me so tight
she never got the chance to
feel me like i felt us climax.

and when she would wash the dishes
i would read her shelley and i would
sing her t-pain and she would hum along
when she moved onto ironing my pants.

to her i was a pharaoh and to me she was
my countrymen and we both believed
in our hearts we were frauds and tricksters,
constantly trying to remember our own lies.

today the sky is as blue as dorian gray's eyes
and the smell of sunday morning is as faded
as the painting of dorian gray's eyes and my
father's hands are calloused; this is my

inheritance.

she would question her thoughts,
and when i corrected her she would
laugh like a thief getting caught. we
would argue and she was always right.

when i hugged the dumbest girl
who ever touched me, she smartened
up. her grip loosened. her eyes glistened,
she smiled and i'm sure the revelation
felt like childbirth; she felt me for the first time

and
the dumbest boy who ever touched her
had nothing to say.

the universe is intended to be discovered

I hugged my pillow to sleep
and the scent of your hair was nowhere.
The universe currently exists between
my sigh and when
you close your eyes.

I am not asking to be Columbus
and you the New World.
You are not territory
and I have no sovereignty
to place a flag on your landscape.

I just ask you understand
that looking into your eyes
and listening to your thoughts,
amidst your vulnerabilities
and your insecurities and your
strength and resilience

I have discovered a world
unique, a world beautiful from
the inside out. I have laid eyes
not on a world flat -- one which
I was scared existed -- but
a world in which my stars satellite
with gentle illumination.

self portrait on Aug. 17, 2009

dream song 34 by john berryman

My mother has your shotgun. One man, wide
in the mind, and tendoned like a grizzly, pried
to his trigger-digit, pal.
He should not have done that, but, I guess,
he didn't feel the best, Sister,—felt less
and more about less than us . . . ?

Now—tell me, my love, if you recall
the dove light after dawn at the island and all—
here is the story, Jack:
he verbed for forty years, very enough,
& shot & buckt—and, baby, there was of
schist but small there (some).

Why should I tell a truth? when in the crack
of the dooming & emptying news I did hold back—
in the taxi too, sick—
silent—it's so I broke down here, in his mind
whose sire as mine one same way—I refuse,
hoping the guy go home.

Danse Russe by William Carlos Wiliams

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
again the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

about waiting

there is no destiny,
only hope.
there is no sadness,
only time.
pull back the curtains,
there is no prophet.
there is no loss,
only faith.

so i'll continue shooting arrows in a fishing pond,
doesn't ever matter if my arrows are gone,
i've got hands and eyes and sense of mind
to know what's in it is sublime.