A man likes the look of his own website like he likes the smell of his own farts. If you ever went to HTML GIANT and thought “something stinks around here”, it was Gene Morgan’s anal vapor. Gene Morgan is the leader of the pack of snot-faced lit-zits that percolate over at the “internet literature magazine blog of the future”. If you visit HTML GIANT you will notice threads sometimes of a hundred comments or more, filled with clever bundles of pretentious I-just-had-a-latte-with-my-professor bullshit, grab-ass chuckle fests, self marketing gone mad, Manson-family sycophancy, debutantes, fingernail insults, bullying, pulseless academic snobbery, bales of anonymous snark and kewl hipster talk, but you will not see any comments from me because I have been banned. Maybe I eat too much garlic?
I wrote Gene Morgan the other day to ask him why I was banned. He wrote me back:
You were warned several times that you'd be banned. You repeated the behavior, and then you were banned. I don't see how this is unfair.
If I farted in your face, and then you told me to not do it again or you'd stab me, it would be my fault that you stabbed me the next time I farted in your face.
Farting in your face,
Gene
*
Insulating himself from criticism is the rich man’s zen. One time this was posted on HTML GIANT: Should the commenter Mather Schneider be banned? The question got over 80 responses, and only two said to ban me. But if the boss doesn’t like you, pound sand.
I never heard of Gene Morgan until HTML GIANT. He’s got another website, too, another literary web site. It’s called “Bear Parade. Raaaar!” Oh, the inner child! Imagine Gene eating his Fruit Loops while propping up his false geniuses in online glory. The contents page of Bear Parade is Morgan’s list of 98 pound heavyweights, all of which are continually lauded on HTML GIANT, including Tao Lin, Zachary German and Tao Lin. I go to a piece randomly:
HIKIKOMORI by Ellen Kennedy and Tao Lin
Dear Tao,
Today I watched my ceiling fan spin for 6 hours.
Later I punched a hole in my tv to see how it worked. Inside were three hamsters walking slowly around a calculator. I feel smarter now.
Ellen.
dear ellen,
yesterday I hit my face with a stuffed animal for three hours until I was tired and then took a nap and then woke and hit my face with a stuffed animal for four more hours and went to sleep.
the stuffed animals were an alligator and a horse.
the horse was pink with a green head.
tao
*
Good poetry is an insane person trying to act sane; bad poetry is a sane person trying to act insane. Ellen and Tao are both sane and dull writers, but they’d like you to believe they are on the edge of their minds, creating art. You can’t believe a word they say. Who falls for this con besides tourists?
Another excerpt:
NOSFERATU by Noah Cicero
His feet keep walking.
A lonely night.
In a city that does not require a name...
The city has a McDonalds, Wal-Mart, several municipal parks, sewage, city-water, garbage men, coffee shops, several colleges, coffee shops, and even some poets. The city has obese women who sweat when it is hot outside, it has men who think their haircut is more important than commerce, and it has cats who shit in litter boxes and never know the touch of grass on their paws.
This is where Nosferatu walks.
Nosferatu wears a nice black suit and a bowler hat.
Nosferatu stops his feet.
Stands still.
Looks up at the moon.
The light shines down.
He concentrates on the beams.
He reaches up and grabs a beam.
The beam stays in his hand.
He brings it to his face and opens his hand.
The beam stays there swirling in a circle.
He then eats the moon beam and smiles.
*
Nosferatu? Gazzunhite! Cicero wipes his nose and thinks he’s invented a new archetype. Morgan seconds the notion. Did you catch that brilliant description of the urban landscape in the 21st century? Read it again for the “nuances”. It seems to me there’s sufficient emptiness in the lines themselves, but still there’s all that “breathing space” between them.
I wonder what kind of farts you get from eating moonbeams? I wonder what kind of farts you get from licking ass? Gene Morgan, if you keep putting no-talents on pedestals after I warn you not to, is it your fault when I stab you, right in your fat gut, and let the gas out that way?
Mather Schneider is the author of Drought Resistant Strain.
