Look, a new word to describe The New New Journalism! “Churnalism” is “journalism that churns out articles based on wire stories and press releases, rather than original reporting,” according to the neologism-spotting site WordSpy. Now all we have to do is figure out what to call sites that churn out half-literate articles based on Google Trends results, yet still manage to be indexed by Google News, and we’ll be all set as far as having at least of my two media-related reasons for despair (of today) properly identified!

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Today? A new poem by Eileen Myles. Yes.

Smile

It’s just not as much fun without a good
light and a sharp knife
I mean leaning into the peach of
it. People find the time
to get theirs sharpened somewhere
or use yours, or the one the horrible
subletter left. The drip in the kitchen is like
someone I know. Today’s cold
was an affirmation of the purchase
of yesterday’s new shirt. I knew the cold
would come some time but today.
I’m wearing that drip most of all.
My half made meal and even the space
that surrounds the incredible possibility
of hunger on and on like my favorite man
Frankenstein. The drip has tones.
A relationship with the holding
bowl that is only holding water.
All these rhymes all the time. I used to
think Mark Wahlberg was family.
So was Tim but close to his death
he told me he was adopted. Every
time he smiled he thought Eileen
is a fool. Or that’s what love looks
like. If I woke and my master was horrified
I would go out into the world with this
enormous hurt. And I have carried mine
for so long I now know it’s nothing special.
It’s just the fall and the sound of her sirens. It’s the agony
of being human. Not a dog who dies maybe six
times in the lives of her masters. Everyone’s phony
and made up. Everyone’s a monster like me.
Now I know everyone.

Eileen Myles lives in New York. Her most recent book is The Importance of Being Iceland (essays, Semiotext(e) 2009), and her last book of poems was Sorry, Tree (Wave Books, 2007). The Inferno, a novel about being a poet, is out from OR Books this fall.

Here is the Lane Bryant ad (for underwear!) (worn by and marketed to plus-sized women!) that was apparently too hot for airing during Dancing With The Stars and American Idol because it showed a lady heading off for a “lunch” while wearing only a trenchcoat, some lingerie, and a pair of shoes. Whether or not this is some big publicity stunt that the plus-sized fashion retailer devised is up for debate. Maybe the standards and practices departments at ABC and Fox are simply anti-nooners in general! But it should be known that the store has put up an irritable blog post about the whole thing that also manages to call out those freaky-annoying Playtex commercials.

We knew the ads were sexy, but they are not salacious. Our new commercials represent the sensuality of the curvy woman who has more to show the world than the typical waif-like lingerie model. What we didn’t know was that the networks, which regularly run Victoria’s Secret and Playtex advertising on the very shows from which we’re restricted, would object to a different view of beauty. If Victoria’s Secret and Playtex can run ads at any time during the 9pm to 10pm hour, why is Lane Bryant restricted only to the final 10 minutes?

It should be noted that the Playtex ads don’t merely show waiflike women, although the ads that have made it to television are pretty “unsexy.” For comparison’s sake, here is a video that shows off the outfit that Pamela Anderson wore while twirling and pouting her way through last week’s Dancing With The Stars. I guess it has a longer hemline than the trench?

(Oh and by the way, in case you were wondering? Lane Bryant is no longer a corporate sister of Victoria’s Secret. Both were owned by the mall-monopolizing Limited Brands until 2002, when LB was spun off to Charming Shoppes. I was all set to believe that this was some sort of crazy cross-promotion in which VS and LB would eventually come together and form a Voltron of bra-selling, but alas!)

[Via]

Hey, the President came to New York! Neato. Happy Earth Day! Oh, are you looking for your bike? Yeah that’s gone now.

Today’s big question: How long could you survive without food or water? It depends, says Science. Without food, but with water and vitamins, you could last at least a year. But vitamins and water are the key. (Sorry, fatties, that extra bulk probably won’t help you hold out any longer.) And without water you’re dead in a week. This article does not discuss how long you can survive without alcohol, but my own research suggests no more than six hours, and even then only if you’ve taken klonopin in advance.

by Jaime Green

I texted my sister: I’m realizing I need to invest in a food processor with a shredder wheel. This is pioneer cooking kugel, and she replied, hahah well it will bring you closer to your ancestors who made kugel the same way.

This all comes after I’ve asked her if she wants the kugel to be from both of us, and if so, if she can kick in a few bucks for my train ticket to Long Island tomorrow, because I’ve just dropped, like, twelve bucks at Whole Foods on these yams. The farmers market yesterday had none, and the produce at the supermarket by me is… well, I went to Whole Foods.

I also bought what is probably a completely absurd amount of sweet potatoes (and yes, I know I’m using yams and sweet potatoes incorrectly interchangeably, but so does Whole Foods, so eat it) (ha, “eat it” in a food column, anyway — ) I have too many sweet potatoes because I consulted with my mother on this recipe, which I’m largely making up. My mother, who usually makes literally three times as much food as gets eaten for big extended family dinners. This mother told me that for her potato kugel, she figures two potatoes a person, but sweet potatoes are bigger… so I end up with about nine, for a fourteen-person Passover seder. Plus a white potato, plus a seriously overpriced apple, both of which I could’ve gotten cheaper yesterday at the farmers market, if I’d thought a little bit more about this recipe in advance, if I’d made a few more concrete decisions.

So it’s 9:30 p.m. and it’s just me, my box grater, and an orange-stained cutting board and, eventually sweet potato kugel-a bastardized recipe if there ever was one-just like my shtetl ancestors never really did.

All I bought at the greenmarket was a carrot I don’t think I’m even using in this recipe. My friend and I had walked the length of the market twice, as per our protocol — once to scope, once to buy — discussing our various Life Concerns and Issues in complete disregard of the countless strangers’ earshots we were within. (An actor I knew who moved to LA once clarified for me the peculiar privacy of publicness in this city. In LA or, really, anywhere else, you have time alone, in your car, in this example, to be private. But in New York there is none of that, so we treat subways and sidewalks as protected space, as if we are alone or invisible. By necessity, by sheer force of will. I was twenty-two, so this was revelatory to me. And as we waited in line to buy eggs, speaking in maybe slightly lowered voices about personal Life Matters, I remembered this lesson, and embraced it.)

* * *

The previous weekend, New York had been graced with a gloriously unseasonable weekend for mid-March, and the big Union Square market was overwhelmed with dog-walkers, stroller-pushers, coffee-drinkers… sunglassed Manhattanites, and I guess I was one. It was a shock from the winter market die-hards: sparse local food devotees and fans of hot cider, and occasionally me just trudging through to drop off my compostables. (I keep a bag of scraps and eggshells in my freezer, and at least in the winter it doesn’t melt by the time I get to Union Square. Saving the world, half a garbage bag of apple cores at a time.) The sunshine brought out the crowds and the tourists and brisk business for the Starbucks on the corner, but for me it effected a seasonal amnesia: I forgot that this was neither July nor California, and found myself hoping for — half-expecting — something fresh and green.

But, of course, it was March, and produce’s spring is several weeks behind even the seasonable weather. So I bought one of last fall’s apples to occupy me on my walk up the market, and also because I don’t think I’d eaten any fruits or vegetables at all yet that day. I had ten dollars in my pocket, my usual summertime vegetable budget, but it was all just crates of parsnips and onions, all like, Fuck you, it’s not even technically spring, and I didn’t even need eggs, so I just dropped my apple core in a compost bin at the north end of the market.

After the apple for the walk up, a cider donut for the walk down and, because I refused to be entirely defeated by the barren market, and because it wasn’t actually barren, like a buck twenty-five of parsnips and carrots. Right before the subway I stopped at an upstate orchard’s stall for a small strawberry/apple juice, for the shocking mouthful of strawberry taste (take that, winter) of the first sip. I was emboldened by the 47% of my Vitamin C RDA promised by the label, but then dismayed that my greenmarket food even had a label, and came from a sophisticated enough operation for such exact measurements of Vitamin C. I guess I’d rather it be hand-inked by a grandma in her kitchen, and approximated in the dash-of-this, handful-of-that way of grandma recipes I’ve gotten the sense exist from TV. Going down the stairs to the subway, I snapped the plastic lid on the juice bottle and turned it upside down, to be sure that when I put it in the bag with the parsnips, it wouldn’t spill.

* * *

In mid-April there still aren’t any real greens to be spoken of, though last fall’s apples and parsnips are still going strong! I refuse to take into account the organic, biodynamic spinach that’s showed up, because it is super expensive. I don’t even know how expensive — it’s spinach that invokes “if you need to ask, you can’t afford it,” spinach like a boutique I won’t go into because I don’t understand how it works, with like one of each dress on the rack? Do rich people not work with sizes? I don’t know.

The Greenmarket’s twitter account (I’m going to ignore any invitations in that phrase to examine our modern urban attempts at quaint rusticity, because shut up, it’s a farmers market in New York and it has a twitter account, and I just want some vegetables, okay?) has been tempting me this week with workday talk of fresh greens, baby collards, and ramps. Even last Saturday there were greens starting to show up: stinging nettles, for which I am neither brave nor desperate enough; little bunches of dandelion greens that I won’t pay two dollars for, because that’s maybe half a salad’s worth of stuff that grows in my grandparents’ yard.

This morning their twitter had something about asparagus. Not “such-and-such farm has such-and-such specific thing.” Just “Asparagus is here!” “Here” is more than Union Square, and asparagus is obvs representing more than just itself. See also: the mania about ramps. (When I was little I was absolutely confounded by the seemingly subjectless grammar of weather declarations: “It’s raining.” “What is?!” “Asparagus is here” is sort of something like that.)

“Asparagus is here” gives me that anxious flutter I get about figuring out how early to show up for general admission things, like concerts and readings, the excited anticipation and the anxiety about the unknowably eager rest of the crowd. (I tend to get to things really early, and walk around the block until a line starts to just form.) I guess what’s amazing is that asparagus shows up every year, and it’s still making me nervous? Asparagus also lives in our supermarkets year-round, okay, but part of hitching (mostly) onto the seasonal foods is signing up for that cycle — the excitement as each new food shows up, from the spring asparagus to Brussels sprouts season in the fall; and then the downside, known as “December through now.”

I don’t know if “Asparagus is here” has a broad enough reach to include the puny farmers market up by me in Inwood, or if I’d be able to make it down to Union Square on Saturday early enough to beat the crowds. In a few weeks there will be 2-for-$6 bunches of asparagus languishing into the late afternoon, and in a few months I’ll be sweating my way over to the dollar-a-pound string beans to fill up my bag. I bought 99-cent string beans this week from my supermarket, plastic-wrapped on a little green foam bed. For some reason, that’s an okay contingency plan, but supermarket asparagus isn’t. I’ll see what I can find this weekend.

Jaime Green keeps not dressing warm enough.

A couple of times in the last month, Gawker Media sites have been all, “Hey that piece on your site was great, can we syndicate it?” Now, I am old. And for us olds, “syndication” is a term of art in the world of publishing things. In this scheme, people who are self-employed make a living by selling their work, for usually small fees, to a number of different publishers. It’s how things called “comics” used to work in newspapers (and currently “don’t work” most likely). And columnists, and such. Not a bad system for all involved. And now there is a new kind of syndication, as explained by the wonderful women of Jezebel today.

A little over a month ago, we began experimenting with syndications, that is, publishing already-existing content in order to bring a broader range of voices, and material, to the readers on our site…. Our interest in showcasing new voices and compelling content extends far beyond already established and well-known blogs, and, though we like to think our awareness and aggregation of stories for women on the web is fairly comprehensive, we do not have the time, or womanpower, to delve into every topic we’d like. This is where you come in. If you know of (or are) a web writer or blogger whose work would make a great addition to the site, please, let us know via email (send to submissions@jezebel.com with the subject header SYNDICATION SUGGESTION) what blogs/writers you’re excited about, why, and provide some links to relevant material.

We once accidentally syndicated a piece to a Gawker Media site, because it was a weekend afternoon and we were confused. What happens is they republish your piece in full and then provide a small link to the original source at the bottom! There is actually nothing in this process of “syndication” that resembles “syndication.” And then we were like NO THANKS and then we set an official No Thanks Policy (although of course contributors here are free to make WHATEVER decisions they think are best for them).

Because none of this means that young writers shouldn’t try to appear on Jezebel or Jalopnik or whatever! If it’s good for you, or you just plain feel like it, you should do it! But what’s happening is that those sites, which make a good deal of money, now are trying to have two tiers of writers. There’s the ones they pay (some well, some less well) and then there’s everyone else, who now they don’t pay at all. That this is how “figuring out a freelance rate” has devolved is unfortunate. (And in general, at least a few Gawker Media site editors are so confused by their budgets right now that they can’t figure out how much they pay freelancers, if at all. Some use the bonus pool as a slush fund for freelance; some are just like “I DON’T KNOW WHATEVER.”)

(As a sidebar, this is similar to what’s happening at magazine websites, where they have two tiers of writers, one for the web site and one for the mag. But at least they pay the website people!)

In the end, though, the freelance pay rate confusion is easily settled, when you take the pay rate down to “no money, just attention.”

The post on Jezebel is fascinating because, while it’s written really straightforwardly by the site’s editor, Anna Holmes, the headline is out of place, if you stop and think about it: “In Case You Missed It: The Brave New World Of Syndication.” Subtle! But she clearly gets it.

Update: Can I add something here? I just wanted to be clear that I’m a Jezebel fan, and none of the gripes above have specifically to do with Jezebel-and my beef largely has to do with the company and this new initiative that’s taking place across all the Gawker Media sites.

Most bloggers stay home. Because this is what you have to listen to, spoken at a cell phone, when you work at Starbucks. “Did you hear about the Toyota thing? With the cars? How they made them all wrong? Well it’s a big deal. And they called me and asked me to be one of the lead lawyers in the case. Did you hear about the news? In Iceland? Okay, so, there’s a volcano in Iceland, and the ash? All the planes? My friends have been stuck in the airport for a week and a half and they can’t get home. So I may just come home. Is mom there? Yeah, she was picking up the dry cleaning. And how does your stomach feel? Do you know what I do when my stomach hurts? I eat a little bit of yogurt.”

And then I made my own really annoying and loud phone call for a while, the end.

Let us geek out a bit and discuss the absolutely fascinating and sexy topic of pagination. There’s an excellent colloquium on the subject going on over at MetaFilter which you should definitely read, but I also have some thoughts and am curious about yours. Mine are somewhat mixed.

One of the things that’s most important to me about this site is that we try (most days) not to insult anyone’s intelligence (too much). We’re not deliberately SEO-baity. We don’t necessarily feel like we have to do a Famous Golfer story just because everyone else is and we might score a couple of hits from the search engines if we do. We’ll talk about anything, but only if we’re genuinely interested in it or have a compelling angle on it. (Let’s pat ourselves on the back right now!)

The fact is, however, this is a business, which is dependent on readers and traffic and pageviews. And as resistant as we are to being deliberately grabby for traffic, we need to grow the site to make it more attractive to advertisers and investors and such. It’s a line we try to stay on the right side of, but there are commercial realities to which we are not immune. David Cho might kill me for saying this, but I’d be very happy to see a site stripped completely of social networking appeals. There’s something that feels kind of cheap about it? But again, that’s just me. It’s probably good that I don’t get the only vote.

So, pagination: There is nothing that makes me feel less valued as a reader than seeing an article unnecessarily spread out over four or five pages in hopes of getting a few extra clicks. It is both annoying and insulting, and we’ve done our best to avoid that. If we start doing cheap galleries of celebrities’ drunkest naked moments, you should be aware that we’ve got our eyes on the bottom line and are not thinking of you. (Unless they’re really amazing drunken naked moments, drunken naked moments which speak to the unique times in which we live and convey the sense of confusion and change in a way that no non-gallery post could so do; in that case we’re going to gallery the shit out of those things.)

However: Sometimes articles are long. (For example.) As averse as I generally am to busting things up, I am also someone whose attention is easily diverted, and the option of having shorter chunks of a whole work makes it more likely that I’ll be able to read everything in a post. (Those of you who read the single-page version of that conversation very likely missed the part where a certain editor’s hotness was discussed, simply because it was buried in the back.)

There is also the question of image-heavy items. We all love the annotated White House Flickr feed, but there have indeed been times where the sheer number of people trying to pull the large number of images in those posts has actually crashed our server. Which means everyone loses!

One of the things we’ve insisted upon is single page view option for those that want it. It seemed to have worked just fine, and we’ll use it in the future. Don’t be worried that we’re now going to chop up every little thing in the endless pursuit of pageviews, but there are definitely longer pieces we want to do in which we’ll provide both choices. I think this is a pretty fair compromise, as compromises go, but I know that this is an issue which raises inexplicable passions in some people, so I’m perfectly willing to hear what you think about the whole thing.

This absolutely astounding “multiwavelength extreme ultraviolet image” of the sun, taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, shows that however much you want to celebrate the earth today, it is pretty clear what celestial body RULES. The sun is badass, and do not forget it. There’s plenty more amazingness here. [Via]