Authentic Marvin Malone signature (1 Viewer)

mjp

Founding member
malone.jpg
 
Are you sure it's real? I never saw anything written by Malone that wasn't in red ink. And I did get a few rejections from him. Yeah, it does look like his handwriting.
 
Yeah, genuine! I found it yesterday when I was looking for something else. I think it's the most concise rejection I ever got. Though there were better ones, like, "This is too DIRECT for Whatever Mag" - too direct? I took that to mean, "Ick, we understand this, take it somewhere else!"

Anyway, I couldn't find the thread with hooch's rejections, that's where this belongs.
 
Ah, how could I have not looked in the penis thread.

I would frame all of my rejections, but I'd need a bigger house to hang them all.
 
it just struck me as minimalism in the form of a rejection letter.

or a rejection letter in the form of minimalism. :confused:
 
Of course, I kept all my acceptances and rejections from Malone. I even kept all the envelops, including the padded ones that contributor copies came in. I normally drawn the line at padded envelopes in my archivalism, but Malone's envelops were so tidy, so expressive of his orderly mind, how could I reuse them like I do most other padded envelops? And even red ink on the envelops, if I recall. We should ask Christa if he owned any blue or black or green pens.
 
The only rejection I ever threw away was an early one, from Dick Higgins, about 1968, when I sent him my concrete poetry novel trainwreck masterpiece, WRAETHROM, and he wrote me a two page letter saying I had no talent as a writer and should give up literature and go into pre-med. That one was worth framing. But I was pissed and tore it up. The book is still unpublished, never seen by any other human eyes.
 
Thanks. Recently, I read some of the work he was publishing at the time as editor of Something Else Press, and a lot of it was crap. My stuff couldn't have been much worse, and may have been better. I think it was a case of who you know, not what you do.

No, this is not sour grapes. It only makes me laugh. No bile.

[...] my concrete poetry novel trainwreck masterpiece [...]

Of course, I'm joking about it being a "masterpiece". "Trainwreck" is more accurate. It's kind of Ulysses meets Bug Death.
 
Yeah, I know I promised to send you a copy, and I want to. It exists in only the one, original typescript. I need to haul it over to Kinkos and make you a copy. I'll add that to my list.

This book -- if worth publishing -- can never be scanned into a text file and formatted like a regular book. Some of it is traditional prose, with characters, dialog, a plot (sort of), etc., and some is what I'd call psychedelic stream of consciousness prose poetry (so far all this could be scanned into text), but in places it morphs into concrete poetry/typewriter art, and that stuff would have to be reproduced as-is, as images and not text. My hairball plan for this book is to eventually make a limited number of photo copies of the manuscript as-is (no editing or revising) and a box to keep it in, with a cover on the box and maybe an explanatory broadside laid in on top of the pile of paper. All of which has nothing to do with Marvin Malone's signature (sorry for going off topic again.)
 
I've made many o art out of rejection letters. I have piles and piles of them! They are from galleries and such. I think what's worse than a rejection letter is when they send back your materials in your SASE with nothing. NO rejection letter or any explanation of any sort. I've received a few of those.
 
I noticed over the years that I got fewer and fewer rejection letters from submissions. It wasn't that I got more acceptances, but editors just didn't bother saying one way or the other what they planned to do. If later I got the publication in the mail, obviously they had accepted it. If I never heard from them again, apparently they had rejected it. And then at some point I stopped submitting to most places unless I was asked, because I was asked often enough to use up most of what I wrote, if it was any good. As a result, I haven't had many rejections over the past decade or so. The strangest one, and possibly the most recent one, was when I was invited by a little magazine to submit, sent them some work that I thought was pretty decent, and then got a very snotty note from the editor who'd invited me to submit, ending with an invitation to try again. I never understood why he had asked me in the first place, and didn't submit to him again.
 
I don't recall the magazine's title. I'd never heard of them, got an invitation out of the blue, sent in some short fiction pieces, and got told by the editor they were crap. "Well, fuck you too, Jack" was what I wanted to tell him, but I'm too polite.
 

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