Here’s the history of Eyeshot’s Hindenburg Complex of Infidels & Crusaders, a semi-literary site (ie, online literary “e-zine”) I edited from August 1999 until August 2014, more or less.
The site was probably best known for the rejection letters I sent and posted and for some of the good stuff collected here.
It was a pleasure to receive and facilitate the international electronic dispersal of usually unconventional, generally short prose pieces by everyone from Zadie Smith, Daniel Alarcon, Randa Jarrar, Tao Lin, Blake Butler, Elizabeth Ellen, and so many others who would later publish in more prestigious locales to a soldier in the Egyptian army who sent oddly phrased and spelled love poems and probably somewhere like two hundred other writers from around the world, not to mention a hugely popular (went pretty viral in 2001) interview with an autofellator.
We Are Were 7’5”, 297 lbs, Blushing, Swervy, Salivicious, Aquarian
Welcome to a quick history of the semi-literary website known as Eyeshot’s Hindenburg Complex of Infidels & Crusaders (“Eyeshot.net” or “Eyeshot,” for short).
A few things inspired our “launch” in August 1999:
1) An article by Vince Passaro in Harper’s said “With the Internet comes the possibility of such an inexpensive distribution system of large blocks of language that writing essentially will become volunteer work, and similiarly oriented toward triage for victims of our culture.”
2) Circa 1998/99, the good-natured awesomeness of our experience with the saintly people at The Barcelona Review, our correspondence, translation, and publication on one of the earliest/best lit sites, amazed us. (All this relatively new internet stuff seemed really cool at the time — revolutionary was a not uncommon word used with regard to its potential.)
3) A lot of semi-crappily conceived, unattractively named conventional sites at the time seemed to ape well-established print journals that consistently (and, in retrospect, quite rightfully) rejected the Eyeshot editor’s early submissions. And even some of the less-pukey conventional sites, like the now-defunct Blue Moon Review, repeatedly rejected our shit. And so we reduced the then-unbridgeable aesthetic distance between editor and writer by submitting our stories to our own site and then accepting them (though please realize that we didn’t bother sending submissions and acceptance letters to and from ourself, largely because we’re not insane). And we ultimately tried to make a place that used the medium to its advantage, offering rolling posts instead of so-called “old-media issues.”
Read the rest of the site’s history here. Or browse the archives.