Parachuting The Game Ball In to 109,000 Screaming Fans
Journal of Universal Rejection
by Caleb Emmons at Pacific University
About the Journal
The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected. Despite that apparent drawback, here are a number of reasons you may choose to submit to the JofUR:
- You can send your manuscript here without suffering waves of anxiety regarding the eventual fate of your submission. You know with 100% certainty that it will not be accepted for publication.
- There are no page-fees.
- You may claim to have submitted to the most prestigious journal (judged by acceptance rate).
- The JofUR is one-of-a-kind. Merely submitting work to it may be considered a badge of honor.
- You retain complete rights to your work, and are free to resubmit to other journals even before our review process is complete.
- Decisions are often (though not always) rendered within hours of submission.
Instructions for Authors
The JofUR solicits any and all types of manuscript: poetry, prose, visual art, and research articles. You name it, we take it, and reject it. Your manuscript may be formatted however you wish. Frankly, we don’t care.
After submitting your work, the decision process varies. Often the Editor-in-Chief will reject your work out-of-hand, without even reading it! However, he might read it. Probably he’ll skim. At other times your manuscript may be sent to anonymous referees. Unless they are the Editor-in-Chief’s wife or graduate school buddies, it is unlikely that the referees will even understand what is going on. Rejection will follow as swiftly as a bird dropping from a great height after being struck by a stone. At other times, rejection may languish like your email buried in the Editor-in-Chief’s inbox. But it will come, swift or slow, as surely as death. Rejection.
Submissions should be emailed to J.Universal.Rejection@gmail.com. Small files only, please. Why not just send the first couple pages if it is long?
Archives
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[ click to visit the Journal of Universal Rejection website ]
I AM NUMBER FOUR App Out There
I AM NUMBER FOUR APP NOW AVAILABLE
DreamWorks official I AM NUMBER FOUR iPhone/iPod Touch app is now available for FREE download in the iTunes app store! Head on over and check it out!
Number Four has lost his phone! Download this app to help him complete missions, communicate with his friends, and keep the phone out of the Mog’s hands.
Along the way you’ll get inside information about Number Four, his lost planet Lorien and the upcoming release of I AM NUMBER FOUR. Play games and bump phones to unlock exclusive wallpapers, photos, and ringtones from the film. Download the app now and help John evade the enemy.
Don’t miss I AM NUMBER FOUR in theaters and IMAX February 18th, 2011.
THE POWER OF SIX – First look at the cover
Power of Six Jacket is Revealed!
Finally!!! The POWER OF SIX jacket is here for your viewing pleasure!
I know a lot of you have been wondering when POWER OF SIX will be on sale… look for it to invade stores in August 2011. As you can imagine, Pittacus Lore has quite a bit on his plate.
Richard Phillips And The Fame Monsters
The Fame Monsters
With his vivid, technicolor portraits of Robert Pattinson, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, and others, painter Richard Phillips explores the dark recesses of the red carpet moment.
In an age when nearly every major fashion house has a “celebrity services director” pushing photos of starlets and leading men wearing its latest pieces in front of step-and-repeats that further promote the brand, there may be no timelier artist than New York City–based painter Richard Phillips. Over the past decade Phillips has staked out a unique position in the white-hot center of the modern pop-culture nexus where film, music, fine art, and fashion constantly intersect at an endless stream of posh parties and openings. As such, his candy-hued, hyperrealistic portraits (shown at Gagosian Gallery in New York and White Cube in London) have insinuated themselves into a M.A.C campaign and the much-lauded, if fictional, Bass art collection on Gossip Girl.
“It’s probably the most disturbing show I’ve ever done, and there’s no pornography or political emblems in it,” [says] Phillips, referring to two hallmarks of his previous work. “The longer you sit with it, the truly diabolical nature, the real horror of it comes up. The idea of being caught up in ritualized consumption and these stars aren’t offering any alternative to it—they’re reinforcing it.”
Women who are not nursing and would like to get pregnant are encouraged to try it….
Cheaper Dryer Balls
When Kerouac Wrote Brando
Peter Yates Gone
Peter Yates, Filmmaker, Is Dead at 81
Peter Yates, right, on the set of “Bullitt” (1968) with Steve McQueen. Warner Brothers/Seven Arts, via Photofest
By BRUCE WEBER
Peter Yates, a British-born director whose best-known films were well-observed tales of Americana, including the car-chase cop thriller “Bullitt” and the coming-of-age, bike-race comedy “Breaking Away,”died on Sunday in London. He was 81.
Mr. Yates’s reputation probably rests most securely on “Bullitt” (1968), his first American film — and indeed, on one particular scene, an extended car chase that instantly became a classic. The film stars Steve McQueen as a conscience-stricken lone-wolf San Francisco detective, and the chase begins with him behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang in a slow, cat-and-mouse pursuit of killers who were in a Dodge Charger. It escalates into high-speed screeches and thuds on city streets and ends in a fiery blast on a highway.
The chase, often paired in discussion with a New York City counterpart from William Friedkin’s “French Connection”, featured McQueen doing some of his own driving: a camera placed in the car and peering out the windshield registers the violent shifts in the driver’s perspective as the car bounds in chassis-challenging fashion over San Francisco’s famous hills.
The Wrath Of God from Portsmouth
THE GUARDIAN: Final Testament Makes Best Books of 2011
The best books of 2011
Alison Flood anticipates the literary delights of the coming year
Christian-baiting has, of late, become something of a fictional trend. Philip Pullman goaded believers last year with his take on the New Testament, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which gave Jesus a manipulative twin brother. And Michel Faber’s novel The Fire Gospel saw Jesus die ignominiously on the cross with the entreaty: “Please, somebody, please finish me.”
But literary aficionados know that if it’s real controversy they’re after, there’s no one better than James Frey. His bestselling 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, contained various fabrications about his life as an alcoholic drug addict; his new novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, is out this spring, and looks likely to prove equally headline-grabbing. The book imagines what might happen if Christ returned to Earth, and was living in 21st-century New York, and having plenty of sex – with both men and women.
The story is written from the perspectives of 13 of his family, friends and followers – including an old rabbi, a young homeless man, and a surgeon. “It’s a serious attempt to write a valid Messiah story,” says Frey. “A book which addresses ideas of God and religion, and what it means if they are valid. I personally believe that if the Messiah were to arrive on Earth, he would not be an intolerant person who condemned people to hell for how they lived or who they loved.”
Frey has consulted an array of real-life religious and secular experts, from rabbis, Catholic priests and evangelical pastors, to neurosurgeons, lawyers and mental health experts. But, however well-researched the book is, its focus on Christ’s sex life will inevitably incite controversy. Why did he think the sex was so important? “Sex is part of love,” Frey says, “so if someone is preaching the gospel of love, then sex has to be a part of it. And I don’t believe that sex would be limited to sex between men and women. Jesus has sex with people he loves. So yes, in my book the Messiah has sex with men and women.”
Frey’s pretty sure that he’s “going to get blasted” for the book. But then, the writer adds, “I get blasted for everything I do.” He insists this wasn’t his motivation, however: “If you set out to enrage people, you’re just going to write a lame book. If you do it because you believe in what you’re writing, you can do something interesting and meaningful. It’s easy just to piss people off.”
The Final Testament of the Holy Bible is published by John Murray in April .
First iPad Album Ever from GORILLAZ
No More Book Stores On Magnificent Mile
Closing of Borders on Mag Mile a sad chapter
January 07, 2011|By Mary Schmich
Heather Charles, Chicago Tribune
By Saturday, Borders’ marquee Chicago store, at 830 N. Michigan Ave., will be closed for good. And — here’s what I think is the real news — the city’s premier shopping street will be without any bookstore for the first time in decades.
By Thursday, the cavernous old Borders was more rummage sale than bookstore.
Yellow tape, the kind ordinarily seen at crime scenes, cordoned off empty shelves, racks and tables that once bore the weight of millions of bound words. All fixtures were for sale.
The shelves near the front door, once occupied by best-sellers, now flaunted such obscure titles as “El Asesor del Presidente,” a Spanish-language biography of former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.’
Price: 5 cents. “While Supplies Last,” the sign said. No one was buying.
FindNumberFour.com
Robbins and Barrett Gone
2 Veterans Leave Village Voice
What becomes of New York’s most formidable muckraking paper when two of its greatest muckrakers are gone?
The Village Voice, the granddaddy of alternative weeklies, which enlivened political and investigative journalism in New York through its scrappy, hold-nothing-sacred approach, has lost Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins, two journalists who helped define the paper’s modern era.
The Voice without either man, some prominent New Yorkers said, is difficult to imagine. And their leaving raises questions about what kind of future the paper has in the city whose politics it fermented and culture it shaped.
“With the loss of Wayne and Tom, they lost Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle,” said Don Forst, who was editor of The Voice from 1996 to 2005 and edited the work of both men
Mr. Forst said their departures left the paper, which had already been downsized considerably in the last decade, greatly diminished. “It was a great institution for what it was,” he said. “It was not The Times. It wasn’t The Post. It was The Village Voice. And I think it was the role model for all folk alternative papers. I don’t know what they have left.”
The Title Treatment Site
Re-writing Twain
Publisher Tinkers With Twain
By JULIE BOSMAN
A new edition of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is missing something.
Throughout the book — 219 times in all — the word “nigger” is replaced by “slave,” a substitution that was made by NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Alabama, which plans to release the edition in February.Some English teachers were less than thrilled about the idea of cleaning up a classic.
“I’m not offended by anything in ‘Huck Finn,’ ” said Elizabeth Absher, an English teacher at South Mountain High School in Arizona. “I am a big fan of Mark Twain, and I hear a lot worse in the hallway in front of my class.”
Ms. Absher teaches Twain short stories and makes “Huck Finn” available but does not teach it because it is too long — not because of the language.
“I think authors’ language should be left alone,” she said. “If it’s too offensive, it doesn’t belong in school, but if it expresses the way people felt about race or slavery in the context of their time, that’s something I’d talk about in teaching it.”
Like A Shotgun / I Can’t Be Out-done / I’m Your Prostitute / You’re Gonna Get Some
I AM NUMBER FOUR in Super-Psyched Fifty
50 Movies We’re Super-Psyched to See in 2011
By
DreamWorks
‘I Am Number Four’
Release Date: Feb. 18
Starring: Alex Pettyfer, Timothy Olyphant, Dianna Agron
The Scoop: With both “Twilight” and “Harry Potter” nearing their ends, both the movie and book industries are scrambling to find — or create — the next big thing. Their first attempt at genetically engineering a blockbuster franchise, Franksenstein style? “I Am Number Four,” which was simultaneously developed as a book and movie series by writer James Frey and producers Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg. Up-and-coming buzz magnet Alex Petteyfer plays an alien kid marooned on Earth; when the evil galactic overlords who destroyed his home planet come to destroy his new home, he has to harness his new superpowers in order to save the world. And hopefully the film and book industries to boot. | Watch the trailer
If David Ulin Would Like To Submit A Story Idea to Full Fathom Five They’d Probably Take A Look At It
The first fruit of James Frey’s fiction factory
James Frey achieved a strange fame with his bestselling memoir that proved not entirely true, “A Million Little Pieces.” After going on “Oprah” to promote his book, he was brought back to face her displeasure about its exaggerations.
He moved to New York and wrote a big book set in Los Angeles. “Bright Shiny Morning” came out in 2008; David L. Ulin, who was then L.A. Times books editor, wrote it was “a terrible book. One of the worst I’ve ever read.”
But a little literary criticism wasn’t going to slow Frey down. As New York magazine reported in November, Frey has created Full Fathom Five, a company that recruits young MFA students to co-write novels with him — for as little as $500, $250 or even nothing — in hopes of sharing in the profits of their eventual blockbuster sale. The writing duties fell almost completely to the young writers: Frey would provide story ideas, writing guidance or polishing, and the connections to get the work published and in the right hands.
If it sounds suspiciously like a scam, Frey can show it’s not. “I Am Number Four,” co-written by Frey and recent Columbia MFA grad Jobie Hughes, under the pseudonym Pittacus Lore, was published in the fall of 2010. And that’s not all: It was subject to a film-rights bidding war, and the movie is being produced by Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios.
2011
HAPPY
NEW
YEAR
Reason #437 for Why Global Warming Is Good
Travels With Steigerwald
from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The Next Page: The fabulism of ‘Travels With Charley’
Sorry, Charley: After criss-crossing America in the tracks of John Steinbeck’s ‘Travels With Charley,’ Bill Steigerwald came to a conclusion: The esteemed work is something of a fraud. (Victimless, perhaps, but still.)
By Bill Steigerwald
A cornfield near Alice, N.D., where Steinbeck supposedly camped overnight and met an itinerant Shakespearean actor in October 1960.
ALICE, N.D. — “Hah!” I blurted out as a million North Dakota cornstalks rattled in the pushy October wind.
“Who were you trying to kid, John? Who’d you think would ever believe you met a Shakespearean actor out here?”
For three weeks I had been retracing the 10,000-mile road trip Steinbeck made around America for his nonfiction bestseller “Travels With Charley,” and chronicling it for the Post-Gazette.
I wasn’t in the habit of speaking directly to the ghost of John Steinbeck. But I couldn’t stop from laughing at the joke that Steinbeck played on everyone in the pages of “Travels With Charley,” released in 1962 to national acclaim and still revered as a document of the American soul.
No one could hear me talking to Steinbeck’s ghost that Oct. 12 afternoon. I was parked on an unpaved farm road in the earthly equivalent of outer space — the cornfields of North Dakota, 47 miles southwest of Fargo.
Seductively Dangerous
Seductively Dangerous
Without Thomas De Quincey there would have been no James Frey
By LEE SANDLIN
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) once observed that the arts don’t make progress the way that the sciences do. Instead, they tend to deteriorate. If you want the best science, Hazlitt said, you want the latest science; but for the best of any art form, you should go for its early days. 
His example was epic poetry, which has been all downhill since Homer, but the rule will work for almost any creative endeavor: Has anybody ever written better detective novels since Hammett or Chandler? Better science fiction since Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke? For that matter, when you’re looking for the best of literary journalism, the place to go isn’t Bookslut or McSweeney’s, but Hazlitt himself, and his contemporary and rival Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), who is the subject of Robert Morrison’s superb biography “The English Opium Eater.”
Hazlitt and De Quincey wrote for the magazines and literary journals that flourished in England early in the 19th century. They were the archetypal hacks, in that they’d write anything that would pay. But they also managed to invent, inadvertently and through sheer expedience, almost every form of modern magazine feature writing. Hazlitt wrote art criticism, theater reviews, book reviews and political commentary. He wrote a brilliantly vivid account of a boxing match that appears to be the first instance in English of long-form sports journalism. He wrote acidly witty portraits of his famous acquaintances and originated the snarky celebrity profile. Middle-aged and with a family, he fell in love with his landlord’s teenage daughter, and he took for granted that he should write a book about it—”Liber Amoris”—the “book of love” that could be the model for all those bloggers who overshare about their sex lives.
Lady Tee Gone
Soul singer Teena Marie, known for ‘Lovergirl,’ dead at 54
R&B singer-songwriter Teena Marie was found dead Sunday morning in her Los Angeles home, said her manager. She was 54.
Nicknamed Lady Tee, Marie burst into the music scene at the end of the 1970s and rose to fame over the next decade, famously collaborating with late funk legend Rick James.
The “Lovergirl” singer, born Mary Christine Brockert, released 13 albums, six of which went platinum. “A lot of black people swore by her and believed in her, as far as her music was concerned,” R&B singer Eddie Levert told CNN.
Merry Christmas
Girlfriend In A Coma With A Positive Vibe
Hear The Smiths’ Reggae “Girlfriend in a Coma” Take
While I’ve probably heard The Smiths’ “Girlfriend in a Coma” a thousand times at this point, the timeless tune’s reggae influence never really struck me… until today: A treasure trove of unreleased cuts recorded by Morrissey, Johnny Marr, and the boys in the mid ’80s hit the Web this week, including a take on “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” with the original final lyric (“There is a light in your eyes and it never goes out”), a John Porter-produced/band-rejected version of “Sheila Take A Bow,” and the aforementioned reggae-tinged arrangement of Moz and Co.’s trademark tongue-in-cheek jam.
Visit Slicing Up Eyeballs for the details
I AM NUMBER FOUR Extended Trailer
I AM NUMBER FOUR Aboard
Curtain Set to Rise on Spectacular Theaters Aboard the Disney Dream
Over the past few weeks we’ve given you sneak peeks at many wonderful features aboard our newest ship, the Disney Dream, which will welcome its first Disney Cruise Line guests next month in Florida.
Let me welcome you to another magnificent venue, the Walt Disney Theatre.
The 1,340-seat Walt Disney Theatre is located at the forward end of Deck 3 with balcony seating accessible from Deck 4. It’s one of the most technologically advanced theaters at sea or on land and it’s where our guests will be entertained every night with Broadway-style stage shows exclusive to Disney Cruise Line. During the day it’ll also present first-run movies, including some in Disney Digital 3D.
At midship on Decks 4 and 5 is the 399-seat Buena Vista Theatre, an Art Deco cinema that will screen first-run films and other popular movies, some in Disney Digital 3D too.
Upcoming films that will premiere at sea on all three Disney Cruise Line ships the same day they debut on land include “Gnomeo & Juliet” (February 11, in Disney Digital 3D), “I Am Number Four” (February 18) and “Mars Needs Moms” (March 11, in Disney Digital 3D).