Welcome to a quick
history of the semi-literary
website known as Eyeshot's
Hindenburg Complex of Infidels
& Crusaders ("Eyeshot.net"
or "Eyeshot," for short). A few things
inspired our "launch" in
August 1999:
1) An article by
Vince Passaro in Harper's
said "With the Internet comes
the possibility of such an
inexpensive distribution system
of large blocks of language that
writing essentially will become
volunteer work, and similiarly
oriented toward triage for
victims of our culture."
2) Circa 1998/99,
the good-natured awesomeness of
our experience with the saintly
people at The Barcelona
Review, our
correspondence, translation, and
publication on one of the
earliest/best lit sites, amazed
us. (All this relatively new
internet stuff seemed really
cool at the time -- revolutionary
was a not uncommon word used
with regard to its potential.)
3) A lot of
semi-crappily conceived,
unattractively named
conventional sites at the time
seemed to ape well-established
print journals that consistently
(and, in retrospect, quite
rightfully) rejected the Eyeshot
editor's early submissions. And
even some of the less-pukey
conventional sites, like the
now-defunct Blue Moon Review,
repeatedly rejected our shit.
And so we reduced the
then-unbridgeable aesthetic
distance between editor and
writer by submitting our stories
to our own site and then
accepting them (though please
realize that we didn't bother
sending submissions and
acceptance letters to and from
ourself, largely because we're
not insane). And we ultimately
tried to make a place that used
the medium to its advantage,
offering rolling posts instead
of so-called "old-media issues."
So, in sum thus
far: some writer/reader
dude in his mid-to-late 20s, a
loser who'd worked in an
antiquarian bookstore for $7/hr
and had just started working as
a medical editor, this wannabe
schlub who couldn't get his
stuff published anywhere,
started a lit site. And then he
populated the site with his own
unpublishable stories,
attributed to pseudonyms. Before
too long, uninspiring
submissions rolled in, with the
occasional story that made it
all worthwhile. He continued to
post his own oft-rejected
stories under ridiculous
pseudonyms, and short9oddities
that could only be posted online
(and only if the editor and
writer were one and the same).
A move to Brooklyn
in August 2000, plus the very
important arrival of a digital
camera, helped particularize and
prettify the site's very simple
design (a hybrid of Suck.com and
the original framed look of Ubu.com).
Despite the simplicity, we've
always wanted things to seem
intentionally labyrinthine in
terms of navigation.
So now what? Oh
boy! Life in the big city! NYC
feted our undernourished
consciousness with certain
cultural events, for example an
early McSweeney's
reading and an after-hours
Will
Oldham
show. And then things
started to take off in the
summer of 2001 when we posted a
very popular piece about American
Writers
and Their Hair soon after
a bawdy interview (that's
recently been removed) with a
very flexible man. Then the
oddities we posted got odder
as a crew of youngish writer
types, many inspired by the
humorous heydey of McSweeneys.net,
started submitting postable
stuff.
Did the Eyeshot
editor try to differentiate
Eyeshot from the previously
mentioned site? He did. (That
little Q&A just then was a
little joke related to a syntax
trend at the turn of the century
that derived from the
aforementioned popular site.)
Maybe for a while a few hundred
people who were "into" offbeat
literary websites might have
thought of Eyeshot as the
perverted alternative to the
previously mentioned,
extraordinarily more popular
site -- a site that at the time
inspired (or influenced or
spurred or in some way was
related to, or at least seemed
always in the mix somehow or a
dominant domain to consider if
starting a new lit site etc) the
creation of sites and print
journals that lived for a while
and then either:
1) Died a quick
death like the American
Journal of Print, Reinventing
the World, or Facsimilation
2) Lingered
lovingly then expired like Haypenny,
(Parenthetical Note), Dicey
Brown, Uber.nu, Sweet
Fancy Moses, Surgery of Modern
Warfare, Pig Iron Malt,
Bullfight, Somewhat, Absinthe
Literary Review, Taint
Magazine, and finally
after a long good fight, Pindeldyboz.
3) Or have somehow
sort of humbly and awesomely
beat on against the endless
current of blogs, youtubes,
social-networking hubs etc, such
as Hobart, Monkeybicycle,
and Opium, or the
slightly later Yankee Pot Roast.
4) There was also a
later wave of kindred sites,
some still operational or at
least still accessible, created
and run by contributor friends,
such as Duck and Herring,
Konundrum Engine
Literary Review, Lamination Colony,
and Pequin.
5) And King Wenclas and the Underground Literary
Alliance were always
around
for us to muss with.
Whew. Lots of
sites. (So sad that most of
those sites in italics above, if
you enter their old URLs in a
browser, now lead to weird
generic pages offering debt
consolidation -- if not
something more hardcore, as
expected, like sites loaded with
links to unicorn
porn). And of course there
were other sites sort of
unrelated to these (like Failbetter, 5_Trope) and
others not necessarily unknown
to us (though more or less
forgotten), and some may even
still exist . . .
Please remember
that you're reading the history
of Eyeshot, and that we're
talking about the history of
literary sites from our POV, as
opposed to that of, for example,
webdelsol.com,
which has always been around and
which linked to Eyeshot early
on, thereby amazing us by
officially recognizing us. But
what's cool, we think, is that
all these sites -- related or
not, still alive or not -- were
part of the first, real,
semi-communal wave of using this
thing called the internet to
post writing that was generally
accessible, admirably
amateurish, often
bawdy/humorous, and sometimes
even unexpectedly inspired.
So then what
happened?
Around 2002,
blogging became popular!
Eyeshot contributor
Lindsay
Robertson's blog was voted
best in NYC by the Village
Voice!
Eyeshot contributor
Maud
Newton created her seminal lit blog!
Chicago blogger Zulkey got with
our
first literary escort!
Even Neal Pollack
started blogging (we won't get
into the Yankee Pot Roast/Neal
Pollack online roast fiasco . .
. ).
And as the trend
turned toward blogging,
excitement re: the creation and
upkeep of silly lit sites seemed
to steadily ebb . . .
But, seriously, for
a time there really had been a
sense of excitement about all
this online lit shit! A
community of recognizable names
contributed to a handful of
sites and everyone e-mailed each
other and met in person and made
babies or got married and some
have been together ever since.
We helped this
along best we could with our
literary escort service.
But other than acting as a
textual vehicle for heterosexual
sex, Eyeshot in particular ebbed
and flowed, offering:
Several volumes of
rejection
letters
A hugely successful
Silent
Reading or two
in NYC
A "photofiction"
series of stories that are 1000
words about a picture
And several
dozen
(hundreds?) of pieces
contributed by writers from all
over the world, including a
poet in the Egyptian Army
and a
kiwi.
Something we posted
even won the first storySouth
Million Writers Award for
Fiction.
There was a Drachen
Fliegen epoch, a Jamie
Allen epoch, a Steve
Delahoyde epoch, a Donnie
Boman epoch. Ginny
Wray died. And every once in
a while in the summer and around
Xmas, we posted nothing.
All this (and way more) happened
before 2004.
But then . . .
In 2004, the
Eyeshot editor moved to Iowa
City to attend a graduate
program, where it was rumored
that he would learn to write
creative fiction, or at least
chill for two years and watch a
lot of baseball and Bergman and
Herzog movies. Despite all the
time graduate school provided,
natural inertia and Midwestern
ennui (especially compared to
all that old-fashioned energy of
NYC) and other mysterious forces
teamed up to decrease the
frequency of Eyeshot's
postings!!! Slower times in
Eyeshotville . . . But we showed
heart! We never quit. We offered
correspondence
from
distant lands. We
experienced a tornado.
And we celebrated the passing of
a
master writing teacher.
In 2006, we
resituated Eyeshot operations in
Philadelphia .
. . Things continued to move
along relatively stably, if
still comparatively slowly, at a
pace of about one new posting a
month.
In late 2008, we
had a burst of e-enthusiasm,
adding the Readerly
Resonance Chamber and a collection of well-liked
posts.
In 2009, Roderic
Crooks's "Fuckbuddy" took second
place for the 2008
Million
Writers Award, and on July
23, almost exactly ten years
after we conceived the site, we decided to stop reading
submissions and posting short
fiction so Eyeshot might evolve
or dissolve.
In August 2009, we
started posting a few things but
not exactly like some efffin'
blog, thank you.
And then in October
2009, we started reading
submissions again and posting
new contributions.
In January 2010, we
called it quits again in
terms of reading
submissions.
But then, in June
2010, we started reading
submissions and on July
4,
2010, we started doing
bimonthly "issues"
featuring one story and other
stuff.
We stopped reading
submissions again in late
November 2010. But then in
December 2010 we started doing
something different and
undefined that vaguely felt like
the good old days when ye olde
internet love was new.
In mid-to-late
February 2011, we reopened
submissions -- but not
electronic (e-mail) submissions:
you had to send a postcard with
your e-mail address and as much
of the story as you can fit on
it. This
actually
worked for a bit. We also
outsourced our daily archiving,
announcements, and general
evangelical activities to a site
called Twitter but then thought
that was idiotic and deleted our
account.
On October 26,
2011, we reopened electronic
submissions and decided to try
to put some energy into creating
a safe online space for spastic
semi-literary texts.
On April 21, 2012,
we closed submissions again
(this time forever!). Again, we
figured the site would continue
(maybe through solicitations or
editor-provided posts etc) but
we wouldn't read contributions
from strangers.
But then on July
21, 2012, we decided to open submissions
again. WTF not.
And then on August 25, 2014, we
decided to call
it
quits for good, once and for
all. For real this time . . .
And then in July 2017 decided to
re-open submissions because why
not.
And then a little before the
end of 2017 decided to close
again, most likely forever. Just
don't have the time or energy or
interest.
Eyeshot has always
been solely owned and operated
by one guy (but
not this guy).
If
you would like to make contact
or register complaints or send some ecards via
electronic mail, the address is
lee at eyeshot.net.
As always, please
print everything and send links
to people who'd trot all hot for
what we got, but please realize
that all text and images are
owned by their creators.
Here's the complete
archive.
