Publicity is surreal, kindof like life

More fodder for my mini memoir...Tuesday is my 7-year job anniversary and 11-year apartment anniversary, and I moved to NYC in August 1996, which I still remember so clearly. I often have little clue how I got here, or even where "here" is and whether I like it or not. I'm reading Ellen Meister's novel The Other Life about a woman who can enter portals and visit herself in her alternative lives, one in which she doesn't have kids, one in which her mother is alive, and the questions it poses are fascinating. I bought it after reading her interview with Susan Henderson at The Nervous Breakdown. Who would we be if we hadn't made the choices we have, and if we were given numerous opportunities to toss away this life in favor for the road not taken, would we seize them? I'm not a character in a novel so I don't spend too much time pondering the paths I didn't take, just trying to make the best of this one. I'm attempting to tell "the" story (really "a" story) of how I got here in a mini memoir that I hope a major company wants to publish...we shall see, like with so many of the things I'm working on. No guarantees, but I'm trying to love the process. If it winds up being for sale, I will be sure to let you know. I'm not holding my breath, but I do hope it gets out there because it's been interesting to work on and try to figure out what I gave up and how I stumbled into doing the various things I do now and tackle things like hate mail, my misconceptions of the idea of what a "sex writer" is and what I love about writing and the creative process.

I snail mailed two stories recently as submissions to Zane's Chocolate Flava 3 anthology, and realizing that I needed to trim words to make the 3,500-word cutoff, and that I was actually really proud of the ways I'd tackled the subject, was a revelation. Lately writing has been, well, largely a chore, a task, a hurdle. Not fun in the least, and if it's all like that, I have to ask myself, why bother? Actually putting in the time and sending off those stories and making sure they were as good as I could make them, and accepting that "as good as I could make them" isn't the same as perfect or even good by anyone else's standards, but is literally the best I could do, made me feel a sliver of what I remember loving about writing.

I still do this horrible thing where I tell myself that what I've written sucks because it's not how someone else would've written it, and that's a self-fulfilling prophecy to never getting anything published right there. It's what I've done umpteen times, and the fact is, no, what I write is not going to be what someone else might've written, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's "better" or "worse." I should know after combing through thousands of stories for my anthologies that it's all subjective. Of course it is, yet that's so easy to forget when I feel doubts. So now I'm trying to just tune out all the other noise and focus on doing the best I can. It's meant cutting out dating and sex (until November0, and to a large degree, cutting way back on my social life and spending a lot of time alone which can be, yes, lonely. But it took me so many years of fucking around and accomplishing very little to realize that the things I want take time to accomplish, that I have to fight and push myself and slog it out to actually be able to be proud of myself. That doesn't happen by trying to go to every event and be supportive of everyone else's art and shove mine into those spare minutes here and there.

I struggle with that because I want more than anything to be a good creative citizen, to share with other people the art that moves me, and I do that, to the best of my ability. But there does come a point, and I think it's exacerbated in a city like New York, where you are pulled in so many directions that it can feel suffocating. It makes me long to move somewhere far, far away, somewhere far, far quieter, to lead a very different kind of life. And maybe if I can ever afford that, I will. I'm slowly starting to fall out of love with New York, certainly with the way I've lived here for most of my time here. This past week my body simply shut down and told me it couldn't hack that lifestyle. So I'm turning more inward and I find that, much as I hate myself a lot of the time, I like myself a good deal of the time, too, and even if I don't, I'm stuck with myself, and instead of turning outward, instead of constantly looking to other people who I think are smarter/cooler/sexier/better than me to give me a little of that validation, I need to find it somewhere inside. And if I can't today, I just have to hope I can work toward being that person who can tomorrow.

I really feel like I left this other person behind when I decided to take this sex and dating sabbatical. It was sortof decided on a whim, but it's not just about my actions, but my thoughts. I left a lot of baggage behind when I made that decision and maybe I should've done it ages ago, but I didn't, and I definitely learned a lot about myself, especially in the last three years of dating. I'm trying not to become a total hermit and still get out and about (theater recommendation: Saving Tania's Privates at NYC's FRIGID Festival - really fucking amazing, bold, hilarious take on having breast cancer, twice) but not feel guilty for turning down any invitations. It's selfish, yes, but it's also the only way I'm going to wake up in the morning and not feel total dread, which is happening less and less, but shouldn't be happening at all.

In the meantime, was very surreal for my great-aunt to say, "I'm sure you saw your blog in The New York Times." Um, no, I hadn't...I really have to laugh, mostly at myself, at the audacity of hiring a publicist and the inane maxim "sex sells" when my cupcake blog, which I do nothing to promote, gets press without us lifting a finger. So yay cupcakes, yay randomness, yay for the surreal, and yay for just keeping on plugging, even on the bad days.

I'm thankful for...

Cupcakes Take the Cake being mentioned in The New York Times. This marks the fourth time, and we got a pretty prominent link in the online version. Yay!

Who knew that when I was a very earnest, possibly clueless teenager writing endless letters to The New York Times that someday I'd be someone who gets consulted (I talked to the reporter for an hour) about the ins and outs of the cupcake business?

Molly Crabapple profiled in The New York Times

photo by Brian Van

If you didn't already know, Molly Crabapple drew the In The Flesh logo for me (for free!) and has been incredibly kind to me and In The Flesh over the years, not to mention being outrageously talented. I've interviewed her twice over the years: once for Gothamist, once for The Village Voice. She very graciously took me to The Box one night and every time I check out her her blog I'm in awe of her talent, productivity, and spirit. She is truly visionary and one of a kind. I'm honored to be her friend, and to own an original Molly Crabapple that not only hangs proudly on my wall but gets tons of comments every time I pass out postcards (Reverend Jen was like, "You look just like your drawing!").

She was just profiled by Carol Kino in The New York Times on Sunday:

With her long dark hair, artfully made-up eyes and demurely vixenish demeanor, she can suggest Morticia Addams, John Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland or an anime caricature. And because she is never far from her iPhone or her MacBook, little of her life seems unshared.

In fact, some believe Ms. Crabapple’s talent is neither making art nor modeling nor fire eating nor Internet branding, but her ability to combine everything in one seamless persona. Joe Wos, who founded the ToonSeum, the cartoon museum in Pittsburgh, calls her “one of the most innovative young artists out there right now” but argues that her influence extends beyond drawing. “Dr. Sketchy’s itself is a work of performance art,” said Mr. Wos, who runs the Pittsburgh sessions of Dr. Sketchy’s. “Molly Crabapple is an art movement in and of herself.”

Or, as Ms. Crabapple said matter-of-factly, “What you get in life isn’t about how much you cultivate your talent; it’s about how you cultivate your name.”

Certainly the last year has been good to Ms. Crabapple in terms of name cultivation. July saw the publication of her first graphic novel, “Scarlett Takes Manhattan.” Created with Mr. Leavitt, who wrote the text, it recounts the fairly pornographic adventures of Scarlett O’Herring, a fictitious 1880s New York circus performer. Its colorful pictures, made with pen and ink and colored in Photoshop, exemplify Ms. Crabapple’s style. Curves and facial features are exaggerated, bodies tumble through space, and each scene is filled with impossible Rube Goldberg-like architecture.

My cupcake blog in The New York Times

This was very sweet news on Sunday:

Frank Bruni mentioned Cupcakes Take the Cake in "Fois Gras Palates, Hot Dog Pocketbooks" in the New York Times:

How crazy can it get? Do a Google search on “cupcake blog” and see how many pop up, including “Hello, Cupcake!,” “Cupcake Project,” “Crumbs and Doilies,” “No One Puts Cupcake in a Corner” and “Cupcakes Take the Cake,” whose inventory of posts includes “cupcake kebab how-to,” “cupcake license plates” and “cupcake bakeries on Twitter.”

The cupcake universe is obviously richer, subtler and more varied than was once imagined, but can doughnuts really reward much reflection? Especially chain doughnuts of the most basic order?

You had me at "I'm Really a Whore"

Update: I'm better-ish. Still really weak and spaced out, despite sleeping for over 24 hours from Wednesday night through Friday morning, with little breaks. We'll see how the weekend goes - I have to be better for my hot movie date. Actually, it's a very mellow date but it involves one of my favorite restaurants and a trip to the video store and a very cute boy, so I really want to be better for that!

Onto books, my favorite topic...

Dwight Garner writes in The New York Times about Jane Vandenburgh's new memoir
A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century. I just went to the library and to The Strand the other day, but I'm still putting this high on my list of books I want to read ASAP. I mean, how could I not with that title and this, from Garner:

Do female novelists write about sex less often, and less skillfully, than men?

As someone who read Judy Blume in grade school, Erica Jong in high school, Anaïs Nin in college and Iris Murdoch during my barely employed slacker years, I’m not so sure.

But Jane Vandenburgh obviously thinks the answer is yes, and in her new memoir, “A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century,” she goes on a jagged little tear on the topic.

“Most women don’t write about sex at all, and if they do, they don’t do it very well,” she intones. Ms. Vandenburgh breaks the sex writing of female novelists into two classic and derogatory subtextual categories: “I’m Actually a Lofty Virgin” and “I’m Really a Whore.”




You can download the first chapter at Vandenburgh's website, where she gives this description of her memoir:

Jane Vandenburgh’s life began normally enough: she was born to a “certain kind of family”—affluent, white, Protestant, long-time Californian. But what started out as an all-American childhood of running barefoot on the beach, soon went spectacularly awry when her mother proved increasingly unstable and her father was repeatedly arrested for being in gay bars.

This was L.A. in the1950s. The author’s parents—each self consciously nonconformist—had met at Cal and had set out to be Bohemians, but were now increasingly caught up in suburban nightmare that was billing itself as the American dream.

Her father, placed in the mental hospital to be “cured” of his homosexuality, committed suicide when the author was nine. Her mother too was institutionalized. Jane was then raised by an aunt and uncle who inherited the Vandenburgh kids though they already had four children of their own.

This is a coming of age story that is lived against the backdrop of dramatic social change, as the manners and mores that controlled the sexaul behavior of both men and women were being forever changed. It’s a tale of events so remarkable they all but decreed that the girl who lived them would become a writer.

I'm in The New York Times

Okay, well, it's my book, Best Sex Writing 2009, and it's in the New York Times book blog Paper Cuts, but still, VERY exciting! They excerpt Daphne Merkin's piece "Penises I Have Known" - please check it out.

Speaking of this, stay tuned - in the next few days I'm going to post 10 Author Promotional Tips based on things I've learned/done/observed.



Read the introduction here

How to insert sex-negativity into your New York Times blog post about sobriety

I am working on a response to this for the Huffington Post, but wanted to share the way sex-negativity, and a view of sex that acts like we all think the same, can so easily weave its way into what was an otherwise interesting piece. Oh, and this? Is why we need more women and men writing about sex!

"Acts of Faith," Jim Atkinson, New York Times Proof blog

But our condition continues to be almost pointedly misunderstood by many in what I call the “social drinking majority.” I have pondered the reasons for this pretty much every day for the 16 years that I have been sober, and am still mystified by it. As a rule, Americans tend to be very indulgent of overindulgence. We give a lot of lip service to “eating right,” but that hasn’t stopped two thirds of us from becoming overweight. We still make a lot of noise about being a sexually responsible and moral people, but we continue to have a 50 percent divorce rate and support a multi-billion dollar pornography industry.

Leave cupcakes alone, David Rakoff!

Read my response to David Rakoff's New York Times Op-Ed slam against cupcakes in "Leave cupcakes alone, David Rakoff!"

What the NYT missed in its Boing Boing/Violet Blue story

Updated 7/8

I’ll preface this by saying that while I intently followed the Boing Boing/Violet Blue story last week, I essentially stopped after the last LA Times Web Scout set of interviews (linked below).

I actually took a break from the internet over the long weekend, and it was lovely. I did read today’s New York Times’s story, but haven’t read any commentary on it save for G4’s (who said that the Times is "actually paying attention," from which I beg to differ), so if these points have already been made, my apologies. Any relevant/interesting links/updates/errors, please do send them to me.

I could've just said that I made a tinyurl for it that sums up what I think: http://tinyurl.com/nytnonstory

I will also say that I have no vested interest in either outcome. In light of this full disclosure-urging post, I will say, I know, like, and respect Violet immensely. She has published my work and vice versa. I read her blog and column and Twitter regularly. I follow Xeni on Twitter, and once in a while I read Boing Boing, usually when it’s about cupcakes, but I’m not a regular user, and have gotten cupcake tips from her and Cory Doctorow, who I met and got an autographed book from at BEA. (I think that about covers everything there.)

I’m not up in arms about what Boing Boing did, but I don’t think it was a well-played move on their part. But that’s not really what I’m interested in right now. Clearly, this is a bigger story than whatever happened or didn't happen between Xeni and Violet, and while much of it is specific to Boing Boing due to its size and influence, I think there are broader issues involved that speak to how other blogs and major websites conduct themselves. But no new issues were presented by the Times piece that I can see, and other than a lackluster summary of the chain of events, they added nothing. And if you agree with me on that, what was the point of such a piece?

That being said, here we go. There are a hell of a lot of things wrong with Noam Cohen’s article, “Poof! You’re Unpublished.” We’ll ignore the fact that this ran on July 7, when the last LA Times blog pieces ran on July 2nd, or the “Freedom of the Press” tag, which I’m not really sure is what we’re talking about.

First of all, what kind of lede is this?

FOR generations, people and institutions have had second thoughts about decisions: stock exchanges delist companies; higher courts overrule lower ones; tennis players do over a disputed point; celebrities reinvent their personalities.

On the Internet, however, we have the technology to act more comprehensively: specifically, to unpublish.

Well, okay, thanks for the news flash that people have second thoughts about things. But I feel like this sets the story up to be about one thing, when really it’s about another. It sets it up to be about erasing information, as if it never existed, when that is not quite the case.

Update: In my original draft, I had this part about how the Times said that Violet was "in the process of trademarking her name," but that I was pretty sure that she had already done so by the symbol next to her name on the front page of her site, and elsewhere, but couldn't find the exact confirmation and this May 2008 AVN article said it's still in process. But Violet confirmed on Flickr that she'd already done so. It's all a blur from law school so I wasn't sure, but I'll add this to the list.

Problems with the article:

But when one popular Web site, Boing Boing, was recently discovered to have unpublished all references to a blogger named Violet Blue, some of its readers treated the decision as a step of utmost consequence, even though it took place about a year ago.

Violet’s original claim was that Boing Boing had removed all posts referring to her except one. I don’t have that single post link handy at the moment, so I’m not sure if it’s still active, but that was the claim.

Also, it’s a little disingenuous to tack on the “even though it took place about a year ago,” when people are just finding out about it now. Surely, if they’d known about it then, it would have provoked the same reactions. So the issues is not just that they unpublished the work, but that they did not publicly state they were doing so or comment on it in any way. Had they done so, it may have provoked a similar outcry, but maybe it wouldn't have.

In its online edition, the Times chose to link to Boing Boing (it also spells out the URL, presumably also in print, which I haven’t seen), but not to Violet’s blog, or, more obnoxiously, to the LA Times Web Scout blog which it relied on for its figure of “at least 70 or so posts.” When Violet is claiming that there were even more than that, you might think the Times would look into doing some original reporting.

I’m well aware that the New York Times is not a blog, but a newspaper, but to not provide the Web Scout link is sloppy and rude. And to not link to Violet’s site (which they could have just said was NSFW) when identifying her as a blogger also doesn’t serve their readers, though the same could be said for countless NYT pieces, including the one I was quoted in, about my cupcake blog. But, okay, we get it, the Times wants to endlessly write about blogs and here, use them as a source, but only occasionally link to them.

The main issue I have with the article, though, is that it doesn’t mention anything about the fact that you can still access this material, in this case via the Wayback Machine, which Boing Boing at least alluded to in their post. It also didn’t mention that now you can find all those cached posts at the site Ed Hunsiger last week created www.violetbluevioletblue.net (thanks to Aaron Landry for first alerting me to it), which he was able to do because of the Creative Commons license on Boing Boing’s posts. The fact that this material was unpublished from Boing Boing is true, but it was not unpublished from the entire internet. That is neither here nor there when it comes to Boing Boing’s decision and its implication, but it is crucial when talking about the idea of erasing a website’s history, which is what Cohen touches on multiple times in his piece:

One moment there is material on a Web site, the next moment it’s gone, and in such a way that nobody would guess it had existed.

And:

The twist, of course, is that for nearly everyone who lives with what the Internet says about them, being unpublished would seem a dream come true. Those photographs from the frat party can be unpublished? Who knew? The essay to the Mickey Mouse Fan Club, too?

And the most indecipherable (to me) paragraph:

For all the damage to reputations the Internet can cause, perhaps the greater anxiety from online communication is the weightlessness of it all. The whole World Wide Web can seem like a hall of mirrors — nothing tangible, no binding, no watermarks, no notary public seals. Where, exactly, is it? How do we know any of it is true?

Again, not only don’t I understand the above paragraph’s language, but I think it’s disingenuous. Whether what Boing Boing did was right or wrong is one issue, but in condescending to its readers, or perhaps speaking to ones who’ve never heard of Boing Boing, Violet Blue or, like, the internet, they are giving the impression with the above statements that these posts have entirely disappeared from public view.

Also, I think the issue is not simply that the posts were unpublished, but that that was done silently. The one hint of asking some important questions the Times does is:

Was Boing Boing deceiving its loyal audience by silently deleting the material, even if no one noticed the absences until a year later? What does it even mean to deceive an audience when it comes to a catalog of one’s personal writings? And does popularity convey different responsibilities to the people who produce a Web site?

But it doesn't ask anyone for an outside perspective, or really try to answer these questions, except for quoting Violet and Xeni, who both say pretty much the same things they each said to Web Scout.

Other things the Times missed:

Rex Sorgatz provided an example last week of Boing Boing taking down a post referencing him after he was critical of them. A question for some reporter to maybe ask Boing Boing is how common this is, or to go out and find other people who share a similar situation. I would imagine there are other people besides Violet and Rex to make a claim like this. If they are right that it’s about more than Violet Blue vs. Boing Boing, tell us how.

How have other high-profile sites dealt with this issue?

What other ways could Boing Boing have done this without incurring the wrath of so many commenters?

Beyond Violet herself, does a site like Boing Boing "owe" traffic to people? (Tony Comstock tackles this issue.)

There are a lot of issues at stake here, and I realize they couldn't tackle them all, but in my opinion, they didn't tackle any. Instead, they obscured some of the bigger points and just regurgitated a lot of things that were already stated.

And next up, though probably not until the end of the week because I am buried in work and have spent way too much time on this (did I say I wasn't blogging anymore? Actually, I said I was "laying low," and socially I have been; my laptop is my new BFF), I will share my thoughts on finally seeing the Sex and the City movie (yesterday), whether cupcake blogging is "safer" than personal blogging, and Emily Gould’s book deal and its discontents.