Selected Commentary on Marie Calloway's what purpose did i serve in your life

Just finished Marie Calloway's what purpose did i serve in your life. Her book, like the stories of which it's comprised, has generated a lot of controversy. Sometimes the conversation about the book is more interesting than the book itself. I've collected snippets of talk from various blogs, lit magazines, Amazon reviews, and discussion boards. 

Here are a few favorites:  

"The most touching chapter involves a gentle British man easing Marie into prostitution."

"Marie has written the book we all want to read in this era of internet stalking and reality TV."

"Marie Calloway is being given Publishing Deals for Hardly doing Shit" 

"Much in the same way that the girl on her knees getting facefucked is running the entire show, Marie applies the rules of BDSM to the author-reader relationship"

"perfectly suited for the contemporary attention span."

"Calloway’s novel contains a number of image macros ripped from her publicly shared gdoc diaries. These contain facebook chats, criticisms pasted over nudes of herself, and cyber-sex re-pastes. When reading, one may feel like part of a wound gaping about Calloway’s body."

"The nastiest most fucked up sex of your life will not occur with random strangers, no matter how hard you try. It will occur with people that you love and trust, who expose the darkest weird shit of their souls."

"Unadorned depictions of rough (+ occasionally vanilla) scenes of intercourse proved the least interesting"

"Would like to read about her experience as a biography that is continuous and not as broken up."

"No one cares about her ‘talent,’ …What people care about is youth. And I sincerely hope that Marie Calloway is strong enough to withstand the next five years of people telling her that she’s ‘talented’ when what they mean is ‘young.’"

"The Poor Girl has so Much Self-Loathing! And the Naïveté! Is this where an American Sx Education gets you?"

"People saw what they wanted to see in the blankness, which, to mix metaphors, was primarily a reflection of themselves. So no one was really interested in writing about Marie Calloway." 

"There is no real arc or moment of growth or revelation at the end." 

"The Book is a Blip, my Friends, a Can of Beer, a 25 Minute Porn set in a Blank Apartment featuring Blank Actors Zero Passion Obscured Genitals and downLoadable for Free off the Web"

"the Pics are Shitty Quality and Black and White" 

"Personally, I don’t find any of these qualities to be particularly problematic"

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I'll let this stand on its own, rather than offering my own review/opinion piece. The last thing we need is another one of those.

The Novel Has Arrived. And Its Free.

My novel, The Backroom Diaspora, is now available online as a PDF. It's free, and I hope people will read it. It's a fun read, I think, and it's basically about porn.  

I'm interested in the tension between literature and technology. I believe the form and vernacular of digital media can be applied to the novel in a way that doesn't just dress up the story to look contemporary but reshapes the narrative on a fundamental level. The Backroom Diaspora is a novel-blog hybrid, with textual/graphic play in the tradition of Mark Danielewski and Marie Calloway. At its core, my novel is an addiction story, but instead of focusing on addiction in the usual sense, it explores its characters’ relationship to the most abused substance of the digital age: information. 

I'll admit, the word "blog" is off-putting to many readers. As formal techniques, blog posts, instant messages, and other modern epistolary forms have been overused. With that said, I think my book approaches these forms in a different way. I promise this: the book is not what you expect. Okay, that's all I'll say about it. Hope you'll read it. 

Like I said, there's porn.

If Anyone is Reading This

I started this blog as a place to promote my writing, my writerly identity, and to provide links to various online journals that have published my work or work by other authors whom I like. Like any good blog, it's a fundamentally narcissistic endeavor.

I have three followers and they're all Google accounts I own. Someone needs to come like or follow or comment on my blog.

Do I really want to commit the time necessary to keep a blog and build up a following, or will this be both the first and last post I ever do on what--let's face it--doesn't usually offer much of a return on investment, so to speak.

My writing is available in the publications section above. Check it out, if you want.

As far as blogging goes--this is exhausting. Maybe I'll try Twitter. But probably not.