McSweeney's Internet Tendency

First, a backstory.

In 2007, a handful of us here at the University of Alabama got together and started a flag-football league. This was mostly done out of boredom with the sports that we were playing...one can only play so much basketball and softball, for the most part, was usually a gigantic failure, mostly due to the fact that it's difficult to play softball with anything less than 12 people. The setup was relatively easy; there's a park across the street from my house, I stole my roommates' NFL football and we bought some super cheap flags (that easily break...the same flags we still use) from Target, and away we went.

Of course, to alert everyone about the fact that we were playing football now as well as when/where the games would be taken place, I would send an e-mail to the UA English listserv. The e-mails started innocently enough, a basic date/time/place thing, perhaps a little quip here and there about the current state of affairs, so on and so forth.

For whatever reason, in September of 07 I must've gone completely insane because I started writing gigantic football opuses to the listserv, things about injury reports, various half-time festivities, so on and so forth. It probably came forth from my boredom over the thesis that I was 'supposed' to be working on and wanting to write something ridiculous each week. Anyway, these emails took on a life of their own (including, at one point, getting me kicked off the main listserv; no worries, we are on an auxiliary listserv now with plenty of blind CCs so that pretty much everyone can read it anyhow) and I was creating quite a collection of them, even auctioning them off at the Black Warrior Review annual fundraiser.

And so, one day, I decided to send one of the e-mails over to McSweeney's Online just for kicks and to see if they'd be interested in publishing one of them. The first one got a 'positive rejection' and so I sent them another one, leading the editor to ask me 'How many of these do you have, exactly?' After I told him I had about 50, he decided that Mcsweeneys would publish a few every couple weeks ago.

And so, I present to you E-mails Sent to the University of Alabama English Department Flag-Football Team, with the promise that there will be more to come.

As with a lot of people, McSweeney's was my first ever knowledge of this magical world called 'Literary Magazines' (Dave Eggers had quite an effect on 19-year-old Brian...I think it was a lot of people's introduction to meta-fiction and even proved that memoir doesn't have to be written by people who have done extravagant things, although, to be fair, being a finalist for Real World is pretty rad), and so being somewhat affiliated with the McSweeney's empire has been a goal of mine for a long time. In other words, I'm thrilled. Woo!

To celebrate, I'm going to go eat pizza at Joel Brouwer's house.



Michelle, you look good tonight, girl!