James McGirk

Blog

  • Rejection Statistics

    I found this list (written by a Christine Harrell on a content farm):

    -Cream City receives 300/month, accepts only 6 for each issue.
    -Florida Review: 200/month, accepts 4-6 for each issue.
    -Gettysburg Review: 350/month, accepts 4-6 for each issue.
    -Georgia Review: 300/month, accepts 3-4 for each issue.|
    -Hayden’s Ferry Review: 250/month, accepts 5 for each issue.
    -Indiana Review: 5,000/year, accepts 50 for each issue.
    -Iowa Review: 600/month, accepts 4-6 for each issue.
    -Midwest Quarterly: 350/month, accepts 5 for each issue.
    -Missouri Review: 400/month, accepts 5-6 for each issue.
    -North Dakota: 120/month, accepts 4 for each issue.
    -Paris Review: 1,000/month, accepts 5 for each issue.
    -Prairie Schooner: 500/month, accepts 4-5 for each issue.

    I have a feeling those numbers are high, at Columbia we have about 500 or so submissions for 5 slots, but fill most of those slots with solicited stories. So Paris Review receives 12,000 submissions a year for three issues (I think it’s three), but likely only takes one or two stories a year from the slush pile.

  • AN ATTEMPT AT UNRAVELING RIDGEWOOD, QUEENS


    New York City’s skyline should be familiar to most readers, a vertical city, slender shafts of steel and glass erupting from a jostling street culture, with an occasional verdant hamlet lurking in its shadows, courtesy of Jane Jacobs and Frederick Law Olmsted. At its core the city is a ferocious machine, churning through money and real estate. But at its periphery in places like Ridgewood, New York City remains riddled with shelters, and slightly strange.

  • Carbon Monoxide Scare II

    From Fast Company

    Still no gas. Apparently the damn furnace was installed so that the exhaust vents into the apartment above us. And of course he has his goddamned heat. Not us.

  • Escape!

    Taken from the Guardian

    There should be a sheet suspended from the washing line in front of the safe house: the white all-clear is missing. Probable the sign has been neglected, an enemy would try a false flag to lure you in, but the position could be watched. NEMESIS’ absence has been noted by now, at most you had a five-minute lead before they realized he would never return from the bathroom; no doubt sentinels are prowling the city. Drive on past. One block. Anonymous townhomes pressed together. Scattered lights. Parked cars. No heads. A cobbler. No sign of activity. Two blocks. Shopping corridor. Closed for the night. Empty. Pull in. Circle the lot. Attorney. Dentist. High prole boutique. Optics. Framer. Photo developer. Oriental cuisine, still open for business. Exit left. Double back abruptly, tires shriek out. Quick J-turn. Accelerate hard. Decelerate. Observe. No visible tail. Follow a lonely access road toward airport. Occasional articulated lorries rush past, connected to their cargos with coiled plastics. No passenger cars. No motorbikes. No one follows. Behind, NEMESIS lights another cigarette. Neon red on the horizon. Pull into a motor inn. Courtyard access. En suite bathrooms. Color television. Two motorway exits. Ample parking. Airport shuttle. Check in. Continental breakfast option ticked. Non-smoking rooms, two, to muddle the trail. Nemesis waits in the car. No one must see him. You must act as if they will. Return. Remove contents of ashtray. Unscrew Corps Diplomatiqué plates. Scatter ashes in hotel room. Find estate wagon owned by family. The American make with the inflatable balls, plush animal dolls, and sand pails will suffice. Switch plates. Catch an early commuter bus back to the capital. Stop at train station. Not the Grand Station, but an exurban one, on the outskirts, when the train has already filled. Standing room only. NEMESIS coxed along, tired and complaining, promised a dollop of jam dissolved in his tea (i.e. the way it ought to be.) Ride north to the border. Step off into a seaside town flocked with bargain hunters from the north. A docked fishing trawler waits. Diesel. Liberian registry. Suspicious. Singapore or Grenada is better. Ten thousand dollars currency pressed into a soot-blackened palm. Included in the price: a single knit sweater and two merchant marine certificates. You expect NEMESIS to comment, but he remains mute, gripping the handrail and gazing out at the rolling grey water.

  • An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Skeletal Schematic

    An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

    And here is the original:
    in-class drawing

  • Exclusion Zone

    Power Magazine – Exclusion Zone, Chernobyl, Ukraine

  • COULD STUDENT LOAN DEBT SPARK INSURRECTION?

    The spark that lit the tinder was a series of what began as peaceful protests followed by disproportionate – and uneven – countermeasures by the Tunisian government. Protests began after the public self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor left destitute after harassment by local authorities. Early media coverage was stifled and word of the protests leaked out through social networks and satellite television. Tunisian authorities reacted violently, then backpedaled and granted elaborate concessions (for example Pres. Ben Ali visited Bouazizi in his hospital bed shortly before the latter died and former fled.) The government seemed weak, arbitrary and cruel. People quickly lost confidence.

  • Carbon Monoxide, my old nemesis

    For the second time in my life I have nearly been felled from carbon monoxide poisoning. Is there information I can gleam from this fact? A less lackadaisical approach to gas heating… occasional unclogging of flues?

  • Lenin the extension student…

    Image from Mental Floss
    According to the Weekly Standard (reviewing NYU’s Gallatin division dean Herbert I London’s autobiography) – “The venerable philosophy professor Sidney Hook, mistakenly thinking the new division was an external degree program, asked London if a “great person” had ever graduated from such a program. So nonplussed was I by this question that I couldn’t think of a great person who had graduated from a traditional college program. .??.??. However, Professor Hook was waiting for an answer. Reaching into my memory bank, where trivia about everything from the etymology of “brouhaha” to George Kell’s career batting average swim aimlessly about, I blurted out, “Lenin.” A stunned Hook asked London how he knew that. “I said, ‘Lenin attended the University of Moscow extension division. I remember reading that fact in Bertram Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution.’ At that point, Professor Hook noted, ‘Anyone who knows that deserves my support.’?”

  • Third Semester Begins

    Wintery Mix from PICASA
    As is customary with beginnings of semesters at Columbia University a wintery mix has decided to accompany me this afternoon. (And yes that is a jangled sentence, but the weather is jangled, therefore my choice is apt, and I declare this with 3/4ths of graduate degree in writing standing – looming, towering, soaring! – behind my words.)