In an effort to find the name of some writing contests that people at Purdue have done well in, I stumbled onto this blog that lists upcoming contest deadlines. Sycamore's own Wabash Prize was featured there a few weeks ago. It's resources like this that still make me stand in wonder at what the internet can do.

I noticed the GSU Review is now publishing as New South (still out of Georgia State University), and their inaugural issue is available here. Two pieces of content that caught my eye are a story by Keith Lee Morris, a fine writer in my hometown who fiction edits the wonderful South Carolina Review, and a poem by former Sycamore poetry editor, Cody Lumpkin, now working on his PhD in Nebraska. Congratulations to Cody on the publication.

Bookninja points to this list of 50 crime writers you should read. I'm usually not a big fan of lists (they seem to be popular with newspaper bloggers that don't have anything else to write about), but this one is pretty good.

From our Events Planner:

While feedback on a piece of writing is often extraordinarily helpful—illuminating just that thing that we had most desperately needed illuminated—it can really just as easily be amorphous. Perplexing. Perhaps even misleading at times. Check out this online skit for Mitchell and Webb’s take on this necessary but odd system of dynamics. After I saw it, I came to suspect that I’ve been the villain as well as the victim in this scenario…

--Theresa D. Smith

My friend Alex sent me a Myspace bulletin directing me to this fancy online magazine of sci-fi etc. literature (his story, "The Human Moments" is on the front page). While I usually don't go for sci-fi or fantasy literature, the stories in this magazine seem interesting, and, honestly, I'm glad to know forums like this journal still exist. Perhaps old school slick magazines will make a comeback online (or maybe journals like Clarksworld are all over, and I just don't know about them? Drop some others in the comment bar if you know any).

Editorial Assistant extraordinaire Benjamin Kolp pointed this out to me today, which he found on BoingBoing. At the New Yorker website, TC Boyle is reading Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain," an amazing story. Many thanks to Ben for pointing this out. (And if you tool around their main fiction page, you can find writers reading stories by Trevor, Borges, Barthleme, and more.)

A Myspace friend sent this out in a bulletin. Some guy on the Internet went out to Facebook and looked at students' favorite books at a lot of schools, then checked the average SAT scores at each of the schools to graph the correlation between favorite books and test scores. The Holy Bible, Fahrenheit 451, "I don't read," and Fight Club were at the dumb end of the spectrum, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Lolita at the other.

George Singleton has a great essay on the process over at the Oxford American. From what I can tell, it sounds about right.

So what if this makes me a nerd at heart, this site is really interesting. It's a collection of video lectures by specialists in different fields, mostly asking a question or explaining some issue. It's a nice, brief way of noodling around in the intellectual world without having to fully understand any particular field, kind of like a truncated version of college. I stumbled onto Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do on YouTube, which led me to Why Aren't We All Good Samaritans, then Beauty and Truth in Physics.

A few weeks ago, Bookninja pointed to this thing, a humorous ranking of American authors, starting with the self-published "Centipede in the Darkness," moving up through "Three for a dollar feeder fish" to "9.98 PETCO Gerbil" and on up:

"$9.98 PETCO GERBIL: Anne Tyler/Carol Shields/Jane Smiley

Have won the Pulitzer Prize and other major awards but are thought of by most critics, writers, and journalists to be primarily romance authors or perhaps 'self-help' authors, partly because all their books are bestsellers but mostly because they are women who write about human relationships and are not from a foreign country. Make enough money to not have blogs, MySpace pages, or their e-mail addresses on the internet. Will never be written about in Review of Contemporary Fiction. Secretly considered 'unseemly in a wholesome way somehow' by serious literary critics; 'I don't know, is it okay to read these people?' by MFA students at Iowa Writers' Workshop; and 'I really, really want to stay away from those people and their books' by people who like Thomas Pynchon a lot."

The writer makes some astute points, such as women rarely achieve the "F-14 FIGHTER PLANE SHOOTING MISSILES AT CACTI IN NEVADA" success of Pynchon and Delillo, and that Philip Roth is "shit talked only by $9.98 Petco Gerbils or lower."

By Mary Godwin, Contributing Blogger

Travis Alber and Aaron Miller have developed a new way to share and comment on digital writing. Their site,  Bookglutton.com, launched its private beta this week. The web site is comprised of two pieces. The first, the main BookGlutton website, is a catalog and community where users can upload work or select a piece of public domain writing, create reading groups and tag literature. The second part of the site - its centerpiece - is the Unbound Reader. It has a web-based format where users can read and discuss the book right inside the text. The Unbound Reader uses "proximity chat," which allows users to discuss the book with other readers close to them in the text (thus focusing discussion, and, as an added benefit, keeping people from hearing about the end). It also has shared annotations, so people can leave a comment on any paragraph and other readers can respond. By encouraging users to talk in a context-specific way about what they're reading, Bookglutton hopes to help those who want to talk about books (or original writing) with their friends (across cities, for example), students who want to discuss classic works (perhaps for a class), or writers who want to get feedback on their own pieces. Naturally, when the conversation becomes distracting, a user can close off the discussion without exiting the Reader.

Additionally, BookGlutton is working to facilitate adoption of on-line reading. Book design is an important aspect of the reader, and it incorporates design elements, like dynamic dropcaps. Moreover, the works presented in the catalog are standards-based (BookGlutton is an early adopter of the International Digital Publishing Forum's .epub format for ebooks), and allows users to download a copy of anything they upload in this format for use elsewhere.

BookGlutton plans to open the beta to the public in the next month. This video introduction is an excellent way to "take a look around" before signing up for your beta invitation.

I was on the Missouri Review website this morning and noticed, at the top of the page, a banner that reads, "Befriend us on Myspace." I suppose it makes sense that a literary journal would be on Myspace, but still. It caught me off guard. You can check out their Myspace page here. From there, you might also notice Crazyhorse is also out there.

I just found this online poetry journal, Jacket, that promises to be, at the least, a very interesting read. All the previous issues are linked at the top of the page, archived for your perusal.  It seems that it's been around now for a while, and glancing back over the first 10 issues or so, you can see that it has come a long way.

The feature in the newest issue, Jacket 33, is a collective book review of Brenda Hillman’s Pieces of Air in the Epic, out last month in paperback. Twenty-Four authors give a short review that focuses on one of the poems in the book. I’ve never seen anything like this before, but I like it.

By Mary Godwin, Contributing Blogger

Since signing on to blog a bit with others at the Sycamore Review, I've been paying more attention to poetry. Of course, poetry isn't the only or even the main focus of Sycamore Review, but it seems to be what has happened to me as I paid more attention to literature online.

I was lost for a few delicious hours the other day in recorded poetry readings read by the authors themselves at The Poetry Archive. Here I watched and listened to Patricia Beers, Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, and Spike Milligan (this last, at first, only because his name was so inviting). Even poets Tennyson, Yeats, and Browning can be heard reciting their own works, though the recordings bear witness to the passing of time as you might expect. Poke around in "historic recordings" to discover a favorite of your own.

Taking an otherly turn, I came across works I found to be called "animated poetry" and fell down a particularly wonderful rabbit hole with Billy Collins (44th U.S. Poet Laureate) and the series of his poems available on YouTube. Picking a favorite among these just won't work, but "Sweet Talk," "Forgetfulness," and at the top of my list, "The Best Cigarette" found more than one viewing with me.

From comments left on one of the Collins poems, I wandered on my way to this amazing bit of fun, work the writer called "graphic poetry." It starts slow, but give it a chance: "Harder, Better, Faster, and Stronger."

There is no website that excites me more than is this online poetry journal, MiPOesias.  I get all tingly whenever it's updated.  New issues, often featuring invited editors, come out several times a year; and they're always filled with exciting new poetry from both well-known and obscure/emerging writers.  At first glance, I notice that the September 2007 edition features new poems by Campbell McGrath and Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop.  If you don't know who they are, you should probably start acquainting yourself now.

Check out some of the archived issues, too.  Everything is posted up free to view by anyone with an internet connection.  They now give you the option to buy it through lulu.com (a print-on-demand service I mentioned in an earlier post), if you feel like holding something in your hands.

My favorite issue so far: Gabriel Gudding's issue, The Strange Call, edited with the theme of "strange poems" in mind.  It certainly lived up to that.