Gene Morgan interview

October 31, 2013

Gene Morgan owns Settlement Goods & Design in Houston Texas. He started the online literary magazine Bear Parade, which published a lot of early work by Tao Lin, Noah Cicero, Zachary German and Ellen Kennedy, among others. He started HTML Giant with Blake Butler: ‘the internet literature magazine blog of the future.’

@pompadoured

How and when did Bear Parade get started? Who was involved in editorial decisions, like choosing which works to publish?

The site started in 2005, I think. I’m going to work off of memory here, but I feel like I started as the result of a “dare” from Tao Lin.

I had published Tao in a zine I put together, and was/am really excited about all of his work. I feel like there were a lot of interesting things going on with online literature at the time, and I said something about wanting to do a website geared towards the kind of writing I was interested in, and he encouraged me to do it.

From there, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, so I just asked Tao to send me something. What he sent was "this emotion was a little ebook". I read it, loved it, and wanted to publish the entire thing. He told me to pay him $50, and I did.

Choosing the work from then on was basically just “who’s out there that we’d like to see on the site.” Tao’s much better read and known than me, so I relied on him a great deal to solicit writers, while I provided the $50 and work of building and designing the site.

It seems like Bear Parade was very different from other literary websites that were around at that time. There were online literary review sites and online literary journals, but Bear Parade seems like one of the first websites to post entire chapbooks and short story collections by a single author, all for free. How would you describe the online literary scene before you started the site? Were there any specific websites that were inspirations for Bear Parade?

Things were good back then. Pindeldyboz, the original Opium Magazine, elimae, McSweeney’s Online Tendency, there was so much content coming at us on a weekly basis from such great writers, editors and online publishers, it was an ideal place to make something like bear parade.

Our format was something that happened organically. It was easier to work with a single author at a time, it felt more substantial visually, and made sense.  

Bear Parade also stands out from the pack because of its web design. The site looks really professional and cool. It’s easy to read. Reading something on the site feels similar to reading a print book, in the sense that it’s mostly text on a plain background. Do you have a philosophy or preference for how web design should compliment literary content?

The writing should be the focus, and it’s easy to focus on the writing with the format I chose. There are still some sites that do a similar format, and I still like those sites.

When an online journal gets some sort of sidebar, it loses me. It’s like the designer and magazine are telling me, visually, to go away to some other place, and that I should click a link and go to that place. I realize that Htmlgiant does that, and I’d like to remedy that problem in the next design.

How and when did HTML Giant get started? I’m interested to hear what HTML Giant was like at the very beginning—did it have a large audience? Were many people involved, or was it mostly a small group of people that were initially contributing content? How has it grown since then?

In 2007 I made a crude site with a composite-gif stegosaurus (like the bear parade gifs) and it said “htmlgiant” beneath it. I had no clue what it would be.

In 2008 I had the thought that I wanted a group-style blog for online lit and small press, and I told Blake Butler my idea. He had been having similar thoughts, so we got started on it.

The group when we began was large and diverse (at least stylistically and geographically), and there was a lot of head-butting and screaming and a feature called “Boobs Friday.” It was hellish and great. I had to meet with lawyers because we were getting threats.

At times I feel like we started something long-lasting and special that will never die, and at other times I feel like we started some obscure 90’s NBA magazine that had Muggsy Bogues on the cover 60 times before going belly-up. Both seem cool.

The site changes and will continue to change. Some things have worked well in the past and, for whatever reason, went away, and I miss those things. We’ve got a little money now, so we’ve been talking pretty seriously about what direction we want to move in. Personally, I know the site is a very special thing, and I hope it lasts forever.

Which site was harder to design and put together: Bear Parade or HTML Giant? Or did they both require equal amounts of work?

Bear parade was harder to visually design, but Htmlgiant is more of a business at this point for me, so it’s more difficult to handle. When you get to the point where you’re fucking with taxes, you’d really rather be doing anything else.

Do you spend more time reading print books, or things online? Are there any current websites (literary or otherwise) that really excite you and impress you, in terms of web design? Is there anything you wish web designers would more of, or do better?

I still read print/paper books mostly. And gadget blogs.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a literary site and gotten excited about the design. I might just be ignorant and not paying attention, though.

People have a tendency to use gimmicks or whatever cool new design thing is out there to design sites now, and I’m a little put-off by it. The text is what’s most important, and when you design using new-school web developer techniques or complicated content management systems, often the text is worse-off than with a basic HTML and CSS approach.

Basically, I wish more writers would take some time out and learn HTML and CSS. Writers know what looks best, but when they’re bound to the way template looks or a program functions there is very little room to experiment with format.

One of my favorite, most memorable things I’ve read this year was a short essay you wrote called ‘i am tired of being angry at people i would describe as being “horrible” or “bad”’. It’s the type of thing I want to print a million copies of and throw out of a plane onto a massive city populace, I want to leaflet bomb that thing all over town. I’m curious what your life was like when you wrote that, and if that came out of a response to anything in particular, or just a general feeling you had at the time. In any case thank you for writing it, it meant a lot to me.

I forgot about that one. Thank you for reminding me I wrote that.

I was in a weird place in my early to mid twenties. I liked clubbing and easy women, and there was a lot of drama because I was not an entirely healthy person. This poem was just the beginning to a long stream of emotional growth I’ve had over the years, largely due to my wife and children.

I still strongly feel like I have to just open-up and accept the world I live in. That doesn’t mean I’m complacent in life, but it does mean that I see great things in people I don’t agree with.

What have you been reading lately? Do you have any book recommendations, things that you’ve really enjoyed?

I love Tyrant Books and have enjoyed everything that Giancarlo DiTrapano has put out. Adam Robinson kills it at Publishing Genius. Aaron Burch and Elizabeth Ellen at Hobart are fucking great.

I recently acquired a nice set of Wave Books hardbacks, and I can’t stop reading them. I read a lot of poetry. Poetry is my shit.

I’m a big fan of small presses more than anything. I like a lot of diverse things, and following a few good small presses makes it easy to get a mix of great writers and books, without having to do much work. I work enough.

Any last words?

Like when I die? Probably not.