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.
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 and here are some
books
to
read.
