Googling oneself — masturbation or just another way to say: I\u2019m a self-indulgent narcissist?<\/p>\n
I was awaiting the results of the 3-Day Novel Contest<\/a> as though it were a biopsy, obsessively searching out all links that would help me decipher when the winner would be announced. Jan Underwood, who previously won for Day Shift Werewolf<\/em> , said in a podcast <\/a>that she got an email New Year\u2019s Day which made me question the veracity of the Contest\u2019s official Tweet.<\/p>\n Before 11\/4, I was constantly bouncing from Huff Post to Wonkette, Politico and of course Nate Silver, as though by visiting often enough, I would influence the outcome which would be determined based on the number of hits (Luckily this may have been the case). Afterwards I applied the same magical thinking to the 3-Day \u2013 like it might increase my chances if I checked the website and googled early and often. (Except of course the Election delusion was shared by millions who wanted the same outcome whereas with the contest every one of the 500 suckers who paid their 50 bucks wants to win.)<\/p>\n I kept thinking about how my life would change if I won, how the novella I\u2019d submitted might be really good, how there was almost no chance of marketing a novella unless I won, how I\u2019m destined to never win anything, how the producers of Who Wants to Be Millionaire <\/em>just weren\u2019t that into me and I never got my shot to sit in the hot seat across from Meredith, how I showed early promise but let it slip away and time is running out and maybe HRT would be worth it even with the cancer risk\u2026<\/p>\n And there I was distracting myself on the Internet. Out for a metaphorical drive past a place I used to live. It\u2019s not surfing. How the hell is it surfing? It\u2019s driving. It\u2019s aimless driving with free gas on a highway with infinite exits. I typed my name, Pogo<\/em> (the name of a story I\u2019d written over 20 years ago \u2013 my entire published oeuvre<\/em>) and The Quarterly <\/em>(the legendary literary magazine in which it was published \u2013 known primarily because of its famous editor<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Previously I\u2019d done this and brought up links to used copies on Amazon, maybe Powell\u2019s and a blogger or two who was looking for old issues.<\/p>\n But somewhere on the second screen there was this: Danish is sort of like English with extra syllables, plus enough of the doc was in English for me to figure out that it was some kind of syllabus and in a unit entitled: Nature versus Man, in a course with readings from Shakespeare, Hemmingway, Arthur Miller, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, there I am \u2013 or rather there\u2019s that story I wrote so long ago featured in a literary mag that featured writers who were also up and coming but unlike me, actually arrived.<\/p>\n Google translation clarified that it was a secondary school. The document was to let parents know what the kids were reading. \u00a1Fijate! — as they say down south. How did the teacher even come across that story printed twenty years ago in a magazine with a circulation in the thousands?<\/p>\n
\n\u2022 [MS WORD] Undervisningsbeskrivelse
\nFra The American Way \u2013 an Introduction, (Prentice-Hall 1984) Kearny and Crandall, The Rugged Individualist artikel. Marion Stein, Pogo, The Quarterly 1989 …<\/p>\n