The unstoppable force that is the Pank literary magazine empire asked me to do a column for them, which gave me the perfect opportunity to pitch something I've always wanted to do: write my own straight-faced version of "King's Things: It's My Two Cents," something Larry King did every Friday with his old USA Today column and other places. 

I pitched it to a lot of places, but it was Pank was the first place to let me do it. Check the first one here; it will be archived here.

An "It's My Two Cents" column is three-dot journalism. Termed by the late San Francisco columnist Herb Caen as far as I can tell, three-dot journalism comprises shortish pieces and bits separated by ellipses. It's part of the family tree of gossip and show business articles that others did and still do. I'm surprised more people don't still use it, although you could say most blogs and all Twitter posts are three-dot writing of some stripe or another.

We've done collaborative Two Cents-style columns in my classes and published them online here and there.  I always say to my students, if you think experimental essayistic writing lives in some ivory tower somewhere or exclusively in translation or rests in those so-called lyric ones, you're wrong.  King is the OG.

But it was Larry King brought it to certain heights of batshit craziness.  He's spawned many a parody, on SNL with Norm MacDonald and The Onion, straightforward homage-imitations here and elsewhere. People lamented the column's end in 2001. He brought it back on CNN's website, but it's not the same.
 
Then came Twitter. King's Things' bits-and-pieces, fragmented style is perfect for for 140-character microblogging, and so when Larry started it there, more than a million people followed. 

My Pank column will run on Fridays, as long as I can keep it up,  My one spin on the original is that I include links to other places in the series of tubes.

Labels: essays, It's My Two Cents, Larry King, Pank, Shameless self-promotion, three dot journalism