why we don't have a name, maybe

i haven't blogged in a while and went looking through my old-ish notes for things i could reuse as a blog post. i found this loose sort of squib about genre naming and how it might/could/does apply to literature. when i was studying linguistics the topic of genre etymology was interesting to me, although i was unable to really work on it as part of my program, so it's generally unstudious and without citation. i've cleaned it up a little bit for the blog and expanded it greatly. i apologize for the linguistics jargon.

Abstract:

The current movement or set of movements within online, independent literature, following in the footsteps of alt lit (~2006-2015), does not, and possibly cannot, in its current form, be given a 'successful' genre name, due to two reasons: 1) the dearth of productive genre identifying morphemes in literature and 2) the lack of cohesive aesthetic sensibilities in the current scene. i discuss basic etymological observations as regards (music) genre to set the stage for how genre name formation (generally) works in english. i then discuss "alt lit" and the current trends in "post alt lit" writing from an aesthetic/publishing perspective to set the stage for how standard genre name formation may/may not be applicable to the current writing scene, and why.

 

1. Music Genre Onomastics in English

i need to make a quick clarifying note that this is about english. i do not know much about onomastic genre etymology in other languages, but i wish i did. onomastics is simply the study of names.

here is a brief rundown on genre name morphology (morphology just means 'how words are formed'). question: how do new genre names form, especially from old ones? here are my favorite canonical examples to illustrate from popular music:

 

HEAVY METAL

Coined by journalists describing either a) production quality of a record by [the birds i think? the yardbirds?] due to 'aluminum sounding highs', b) being present at a jimi hendrix concert, 'sensation of heavy sheets of metal falling on the audience', c) folk etymology of 'metal is harder than rock', unverified. Consists of two parts: HEAVY and METAL. METAL became the 'productive root' for this genre, modified by prefixes: thrash metal, death metal, hair metal, etc. and, later on, by postfixes: metalcore, metalgaze, etc. so we see examples of genre morphemes (metal, -gaze, -core, death-, etc) 'competing' in position, which one bears more semantic value, etc. - if both 'metal' and 'gaze' are 2nd position by default, which one goes 2nd when they merge?

 

SHOEGAZE

Coined by journalists (note, this always happens), originally as 'shoegazing/shoegazer' due to early reports of Moose performing while singer looked at lyrics taped to floor, plus folk etymology of dependence on guitar effect pedals (positioned on the floor). Affixes quickly dropped to two-morpheme term 'shoegaze', with 'gaze' becoming the productive root in second position: shitgaze, nu-gaze, metalgaze. 'Metalgaze' is a good example of morpheme jockeying, as both 'metal' and 'gaze' are 2nd position roots, one has to go first. Most likely due to English preference for trochees (stress on first of three syllables: ME-tal-gaze vs. me-tal-GAZE)

 

NEW WAVE

Coined by journalists (natch) to describe the 'new wave of punk rock'. Quickly shortened to two morpheme 'new wave' with 'wave' the productive root, as in vaporwave, synthwave, darkwave. Interesting to note that 'wave' in modern contexts has lost almost all 'new wave' meaning, aside from maybe reliance on synthesizers, and seems to mostly act as a 'filler' morpheme to denote genre in an abstract sense, eg. 'synthwave' = 'synth music'.

 

Here are a couple other quick examples:

punk rock -> punk -> pop-punk, folk punk (punk in 2nd position)

hardcore punk -> hardcore -> core -> metalcore, breakcore

doom metal -> doom -> doomjazz

bebop (jazz) -> bop -> neo-bop, post-bop

popular music -> pop -> synthpop, dream pop

These are more or less the 'clean' examples where we get more or less productive morphemes that map to a genre: pop, metal, gaze, doom, core, bop, etc. But not all popular genres evolve this way.

 

Here is an example where a popular term does not neatly generate a productive morpheme: 'alternative rock' -> alt-rock -> ~alt-metal, alternarock, others(?). 'Alternative' seems like an unstable morpheme, not entirely clear what its semantic contribution is re: genre nor how it surfaces, eg. 'alt' vs 'alterna' vs 'alternative', which will be important later. Further stymied by its semantic import, simply meaning it is an alternative to something else that is backgrounded - an term used for its existing meaning, not created fresh for the genre, cf. shoegaze. also note that 'alt' isn't super productive in new music genres as finer-grained genre morphemes are, e.g. we don't see 'alt gaze' or 'alt punk'.

 

Finally, of interest, is when we get a genre with no morpheme strong enough to continue to merge. For example, 'post punk' is a very solidified, well-defined genre, but neither morpheme 'post' nor 'punk' is sufficient to denote the genre in new formations, eg. 'postgaze' is not 'shoegaze with post punk elements' but rather 'after shoegaze.' This happens i think with any temporal affix, eg 'post', 'new/nu', and some others. This is why we don't see clear etymological paths in the innovation on these genres, e.g., what is post punk in 1980 vs 2020? Post rock from 1990 to 2020? Feels like genres with these 'terminal names' end up lacking a clear historical development possibly for lack of name, contrast with black metal, where see end up with blackgaze, post-black, etc., even though post punk is older than black metal, so we'd expect more complex evolution of the genre - lack of easily coined identifiers for movements within the genre may end up just erasing movements altogether; there is only the amorphous post punk.

 

2. Literary Genre and Onomastics in English

 

OK now that we've talked about how genre names generally form and evolve, we can move on to literature. Here are some genres:

modern

post modern

literary fiction

realism

magic realism

new sincerity

alt lit

 

Many genres of literature are generically termed, eg. sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, and are indistinguishable form name alone from non-literature art in these genres, as in movies or television. While music has music-only genre terms like shoegaze, and cinema does to some extent e.g. mumblecore, literature seems to leverage distinctive genre terms the least. 

 

we do see 'fiction' as a predominant root for new genres. surveying wikipedia, there's "nonsense verse". "mathematical fiction", "literary fiction", etc. We see some level of productivity in fiction -> fic, literary -> lit. so we get "lit fic" and "alt lit." interesting in that 'lit' can be in both positions, similar to 'metal' and 'punk'.

 

With "lit" and "fic" as potential roots for 'literature' and 'fiction' and have evidence of genres coined by describing fiction with a pre-existing term, eg. "mathematical", much like 'pop music with synthesizers' is termed 'synthpop'.

 

so we can predict then that practitioners/consumers of "mathematical fiction" might refer to it as "math fic" or  "math lit" cf "math rock". Some googling seems to confirm this (controlling for some search terms, we find some blog posts and academic papers referring to "math lit" as a genre of children's literature:

The genre of math lit for children is not huge, but it is growing. My kid loves the early reader books by my friend and colleague Julie Glass (A Dollar for Penny (1998), The Fly On the Ceiling (2000)). I found Izolda Fotiyeva’s Math with Mom (2003) too late for my daughter but will definitely read it with my son.

 

If I could put just one resource in the hands of a teacher wanting to mine the many treasures of “math-lit” as a teaching tool for both mathematics and language arts, this would be the book.

 

but of interest to us is alt lit, in that the current indie lit scene follows in the footsteps of alt lit both in terms of style/influences as well as publication process, at least in the sphere i'm interested in.

 

3. Alt Lit

 

what is 'alt lit'? alt lit was a semi-popular literary movement that burgeoned on the internet, bucking traditional publishing in favor of blogs and curated online magazines/ebook repositories, social media, memes, etc. Stylistically it was often plain, disaffected, introspective, confessional, influenced by k-mart realism with emphasis on consumer culture, technology, and existentialism. it was often infused with bouts of fancy, dread, daydreams, 'extreme' imagery, and, of course, relationship drama. there was an emphasis on repetition of form, literary anaphora, and poetic play with syntax - either with very short sentences, punctuation/capitalization, or even overly complex, dense clauses.

 

i assume the name alt lit comes from 'alternative literary fiction' cf 'alternative rock', thus potentially "alt lit fic -> alt lit". quickly reduced to bisyllabic, two morpheme 'alt lit'. interesting note here is the rumbles of things like "neu lit" and "nu lit" in eg beach sloth blog posts from 2012 (i always enjoy seeing the failed terms proposed for a genre, in retrospect, e.g. 'post rock' referring to stereolab in 1993).

 

the term 'alt lit' seems to have been coined by (then anonymous) founders of Alt Lit Gossip, but i have to assume the term came about prior to this, perhaps ironically, or earnestly, by some outside journalism, seeing as how Alt Lit Gossip was founded in 2011, while Tao Lin (main figurehead of alt lit) had been publishing online since ~2004, with several books released in his iconic style prior to 2011. indeed, googling with date filters shows the rumpus mentioning "alt-lit" in discussing 'kmart realism' in 2009. vogue uses the term to describe dave eggers ~2001 (obviously this eggers link isn't pointing to what we'd call 'alt lit' today, although it showcases the semantic vacuousness of any term with 'alt' in the name).

 

another fun fact about genres is that notable, central figures to genres across music/art/writing/etc. almost always reject the term ascribed to their (pioneering) work. this is true from progressive rock (king crimson) to noise rock (zach hill/hella) to IDM (aphex twin) to, of course, alt lit - mira gonzalez, sam pink, jordan castro, and many other key figures in the original alt lit days all soundly reject/rejected the label for their own writing on twitter and in interviews. i'm using flimsy logic here but, to me this rejection of the term is almost always evidence of being a key figure for the term, haha. relatedly then anyone hyping themselves up with this term, especially in 2020 (ahem, josh, if you're reading) may as well be doomed to never gaining any cult status as pioneer.

 

i should also note here that for some number of (younger) people who are newer to internet writing and who didn't experience alt lit in its peak, the term "alt lit" is a stand-in for "alt right", the ~2016 term used to describe young, (extreme) right wing idiots on the internet. i think this is because of terror house magazine, whose founder is/was alt right/nazi/white nationalist and who has been central to various blow ups in the scene as regards harassment, publishing problematic people, etc. I'm not trying to be prescriptive when i say "alt lit" is not a stand-in for "alt right", but the fact is that the term 'alt lit' predates 'alt right' and historically has/had nothing to do with conservative politics; as far as i can tell almost all alt lit and post alt lit writers identify as to the left of the spectrum, with some random exceptions; what feels like the real political divide (aside from leftist vs liberal) aligns with some notion of 'free speech' and/or 'i am not my brother's keeper' - i understand most of the expat people often accused of harboring right wing views/pieces, for example, were staunch supporters of bernie sanders, but like with anything i don't think this is a simple left vs. right issue.

4. Post Alt Lit

anyway, alt lit is dead. it more or less died due to public backlash to the style and more damningly a series of scandals involving its key figures and institutions. but its impact is still felt today and we are seeing, i think, a sort of 'new wave of alt lit', at least in terms of style and interest in alternative forms of publishing (and less so the interpersonal dynamics and emphasis on new york city drug life and, i hope, predatory behavior). trends i've seen, i think, in which the scene today departs from original alt lit range from the pop culture under analysis (today there's more on 'always being online' as a default as opposed to a choice, video games [which are more 'normalized' in 2020], the military industrial complex, and overtly political content) to the expanded life experience of the authors (parenthood, different types of jobs/careers) to the level of irony (less sincere, more ambiguous in intention, or else much more sincere and unironic entirely) to the type of introspection (more nostalgia-based autofiction, in many ways more 'traditionally literary' than the here-and-now of alt lit) to the class aesthetics (emphasis on working class perspectives, junk food, and alternatives to traditional education/career paths, in contrast with alt lit's focus on college, big city life, and 'working in media/tech'). something else i've noticed is that, while alt lit figures were known for being prolifically self-promotional, post alt lit authors reject 'standard' approaches to self promotion on e.g. social media; they do not use hashtags, participate in "writers lift" or "follow fridays", seem to feel uncomfortable suggesting that anyone actually buy their books, and often (temporarily) delete their twitter accounts. we are also suffering, i think, from a traditionalization of online publishing, in that exposure is still mainly achieved through a submission queue process as opposed to a more grass roots, inner-circle based invite/solicitation model.

 

in terms of online venues, i see the neutral spaces blog as a sort of central melting pot across various subscenes; the prolific (and thus sort of hazy, in terms of scope) explicitly post alt lit venues like xray, maudlin house, and to some extent hobart; the 'vaguely transgressive' bloc of places like expat, surfaces, selffuck, tragickal, and cavity mag; the still-going older (sometimes tepid) alternative venues like the nervous breakdown, tyrant magazine, vol. 1 brooklyn, and muumuu house; the class of what i think are/were maybe the 'core' of the scene in mostly defunct venues like soft cartel, philosophical idiot, faded out, wohe, and others i'm forgetting, but where i'd also include back patio; and the myriad, peripheral flash fiction/mfa-lite venues like wigleaf and some others i don't really follow. there's also the prolific, vaguely literary, normcore kind of venues that often pop up and get a lot of hype but ultimately to me feel directionless and without clear aesthetic - barren mag, rejection lit, HAD. there's a lot of bleed over and crossing of these and other venues (i was torn on where to put hobart, for example), and i think many suffer from lack of editorial vision due to output and editorial staff size/rotation. there are other scenes i'm less familiar with, ranging from those that don't really publish but who are still a little crew of friends, to the safer lit places like moonchild and perhappened and etc., to the communist/anti-publishing outfits like paintbucket and prolit, to the various other thematic places like occulum and black telephone. in terms of book presses i'm thinking of back patio, house of vlad, expat, and to an extent clash, ghost city, maudlin house, 11:11, apocalypse party and some others i'm forgetting. there's generally a trend across these presses of publishing 'actual alt lit' names like noah cicero and sam pink, as a sort of signage, maybe, of editorial vision toward "post alt lit". 

 

if anything, i think this paragraph and its probably obvious, numerable omissions points to a large problem with a cohesive scene, in that there is a constant deluge of mostly uncategorizable content across a million little platforms. with the democratization of publishing (to whatever small extent it's actually been democratized) we have both a rising meaninglessness in what it means to be published as well as a continual burn-out culture and general obscurity; it's incredibly easy to be a nobody and to publish nobodies and so we shouldn't be surprised to see nobody in particular standing out. this feels in contrast to alt lit proper, where there were only a few time-honored institutions and an emphasis on one-time, collaborative/solicitation-based publishing, which, combined with the less active stream of social media, meant that publishing took on, i think, more of an 'eventive' sense. basically, there was less of it, it was harder to find, and it was much more heavily curated. we can complain about poor imitations of tao lin and what his centralized authority meant for people, but it's important to note that he curated and promoted these imitations. i want to take more time to think about this and where it may or may not be applicable today, but there's something bizarrely more individualistic in today's aesthetically washed-out scene than in alt lit, and this washing out means no particular sensibilities are really cultivated or explored, maybe.

 

i obviously haven't thought much on this, and i'd be curious to hear form people on what they think is happening, today, stylistically, across these communities. please comment or email me your thoughts, if you feel like it. but i think the amorphous nature of this lends itself to the problem of naming the scene, discussed below.

 

5. Problems in (Post) Alt Lit Onomastics

so anyway the question now is, what comes after alt lit in terms of onomastics? we have some obvious but wordy options available to us: "post alt lit", which i've been using here, "nu alt lit", "alt lit 2.0", maybe. we see some hits on "post alt lit" and variations on google, eg a review for sam pink's White Ibis described as post-"alt-lit", an interview with Bud Smith hesitantly referencing the amorphous writing scene in 2020, and a (tyrant books based) recommendation article. but we have the problem of wordiness - how many three-morpheme genres do we see naturally used? and is it clear for our purposes what "post alt lit" means as a style as opposed to simply a period of time? is 'post alt lit' clear in style or simply the writing happening after the alt lit world? what happened when i typed "new wave of alt lit" above, can we turn that into something useful? can we reclaim "new wave" and divorce it from the music?

 

the problem is compounded by the fact that neither morpheme in "alt lit" is strong enough in semantic meaning to successfully merge with other morphemes; neither 'alt' nor 'lit' in isolation can mean 'alt lit' in the way that 'metal' or 'gaze' or even 'wave' can evoke their historical music genres. 'Alt lit' is like 'alternative rock' or 'post punk,' I think a 'terminal genre name' that can thus only flounder with additional modification, which doesn't stick.

 

other issues are that there are fewer literary fiction subgenres compared to alternative music, ie. not as many productive morphemes available (basically just 'lit' and 'fic'), maybe because literary genre formation is slow and less open to experimentation across genres. For example, 'magic lit' does not mean 'magic alternative literature', 'alt realism' might not mean 'alternative literature realism'.

 

and yet another problem is that the existing genre names, eg 'realism', 'modernism', never become monosyllabic genre roots, eg we don't have 'mod' or 'real' when talking about literature. this hinders genre naming as well. what would modern alt lit be called? what would alt lit with magical realism be called? (note i think this is where post alt lit is sort of headed, maybe, in fits and starts)

 

5. Conclusion & Discussion

so we don't have a clear path from 'alt lit' to whatever is happening today, either aestheticaly or onomastically. this means that our best bet for a new genre name hinges on a brand new coinage, eg invention of the literary correlate of 'metal' or 'shoegaze' that may generate a new productive root, something that comes externally, e.g. via journalistic reportage, and that points out either some circumstantial (time, place, community aspects) or aesthetic component. while 'alt lit' was a more or less an umbrella term for a loose collection of advances in literary fiction (much like 'alternative music' being everything from like REM to Talking Heads to Smashing Pumpkins in the 80s/90s), there was still a general sense of aesthetics, eg. objective narration, disaffected voice, emphasis on consumerism and technology, etc. all novel genre terms require strong aesthetics for a new term to evoke (again cf 'metal' or 'shoegaze'), and yet the current pool of 'indie lit' is aesthetically diverse, even more diverse than the original alt lit scene. therefore, unless there's a clear movement to create aesthetically fine-tuned writing, a programmatic decision to invest in and develop a genre with a strong aesthetic a priori, there's little hope of a journalist-coined genre term and thus little hope at broader marketability as eg a 'movement'.

 

what we're stuck with, for now, is the washed-out "indie lit". this is plagued by problems of existing connotation: the demipopularity of indie rock from 2004-2014, for example, as well as lack of clarity in its denotation: is indie lit simply any kind of literature that's independent? that wasn't true for indie rock, with death cab for cutie going platinum in 2008 and arcade fire winning a grammy in 2010, and especially now in 2020 with "indie" meaning, apparently, anything that's not clearly pop or traditional rock - cavin has described maroon 5 to me as 'indie', for example, which is insane and funny to me. this is all to say that 'indie lit' now is only barely useful, and its ambiguity i think accurately reflects the ambiguous nature of the scene.

one last thing to note about today's scene is, i think, that it will most likely never be taken seriously in a larger way like alt lit was, due to a variety of reasons i don't know if i can do justice to here, but which include changes in internet publishing (e.g. vice no longer paying hundreds of dollars for short essays) and social media (end of blogs, rise of single-channel experiences on phones via twitter and instagram, etc). unless someone like ashleigh bryant philips or bud smith really break through as literary darlings and lift up everyone else in their wake,  i don't see today's era really making much of a splash. it's entirely possible that they or someone else 'strikes big' and moves up and out, but will they continue to run indie presses and publish in indie mags? we have a series of increasingly high hurdles to recreate the successes of alt lit, if even that's something we want to recreate (again, not talking about the scandals, but simply the output and impact). this is all to say that this whole discussion may be pointless - do we really deserve a name at all? possibly not, or at least not yet. thanks for reading.

update 11/9/2020: after publishing this at 9am on november 3rd, dawson (@dawtismspeaks) posted on twitter about the term 'alt lit', unsure of the historical baggage and 'anxiety' around the term, which sparked some good discussion where people shared their personal understandings of the term and, where, jake blackwood (@JBlackwoodSays) seems to have coined the term "cyber writing." the term is obviously in the vein of "so dumb it's funny" and quickly spread as a small-scale meme over the week, perpetuated mostly by cory (@melancory666) and crew, drawing confusion/curiosity/jokes from people throughout the scene, including junk funky and Dave. i like thinking that the term will catch on somehow because of how stupid it is (and how it doesn't make sense to me so much since it seems to refer to the medium and not the content or style, but, whatever, who cares). jack has had some serious-seeming tweets trying to articulate a sort of manifesto/reasoning for the term, and cory has mentioned working on an actual manifesto of sorts and has been seeking input from people, and josh sherman has sort of leaned a little too heavily into the term as a bit, i think, which feels 'on brand.' vaguely hoping this blog post gets archived as a primary source when the term becomes ubiquitous and famous.

brief book reviews

here are the three most recent books i've finished reading.

After Denver by Big Bruiser Dope Boy (11:11 press): i liked BBDB's first book(s) on clash, which i bought based on a tweet by troy james weaver. after reading that book, i interviewed BBDB for vol. 1 brooklyn. i've had a few stilted conversations with BBDB on twitter, mostly for/about the interview, and once when there was some drama about an editor giving his book 4/5 stars on goodreads. based on these poems, and on his tendency to express frustration about reviews of him/his work on twitter, and his emphasis on accuracy/clarity in writing (both in things he's published and in editing my interview with him), i feel proactively self-conscious about anything i say in this review, but which is good/fine, since it's public, and i should feel confident in what i write, or not write at all. this is a very small collection and i read it over two 'sessions'. 11 of the 16 pieces in this book have appeared online and i think i read maybe 8 of them before getting the book and so they were already familiar to me (i have strong but yet-unarticulated opinions, for no particularly good or defensible reason, about books consisting mostly of already-published material). this collection consists of something like 8 mid-length poems, 8 stories, and an epilogue (i don't have it with me and am probably getting the ratio wrong), with sectioning based on whether the piece takes place before, during, or after BBDB's time living in denver (the epilogue functions as a manifesto of sorts to emphasize/clarify that these are all autofictional, and that writing about oneself with little-to-no literary intervention should be pursued as the correct way, or a correct way, to write). each piece, aside from maybe one poem and the epilogue, revolve explicitly around what feel like formative, related-ish experiences from BBDB's life, with an emphasis on working at bars and a high school crush. since these are autofictional, there are thus some consistent themes and images throughout and emphasis his previous (two) major relationships, male authority, and being an autofictional writer. i like the poems the most, i think, in particular the longer narrative one about a customer who obsesses with/harasses him. some other poems are sort of post-modern vents of frustration about writing/publishing and being understood/interpreted, as i understand them. he tends to leverage a sort of angry absurdity, as i read it, a sort of "is this what you want, fucker?" attitude about 'tropes' and ideas in his writing, the (in)ability, for others to separate identity from art, i think. i can't pretend to understand the reality that leads to the complex emotions behind this, but i can empathize, i think, to some degree, maybe, or at least i hope i can, and the fact that i have found myself thinking about them a lot leads me to feel like he's effective at expressing them. the prose section mostly consists of "Slabs", a set of interlinked narratives about having a crush on a fellow football player in high school. in these pieces, he employs many complex and unexpectedly (to me) expressive sentences and a wide vocabulary (i think he refers to ass cheeks as 'orbs' at one point, which stuck out to me because of some twitter discourse i saw once about young adult and/or fan fiction overusing 'orbs' for 'eyes'), but i personally found some of this descriptive language distracting and dense. but i like that there is a dark sort of humor expressed via long, complex paragraph punctuated by a short punchline-type sentence, and these punchlines (for lack of a better term) include some of my favorite lines/imagery, such as a line that's more or less like "I spent most of the summer eating mint ice cream and masturbating" following a detailed description of the summer training for junior varsity players. in terms of sequencing, i felt curious about what seemed to me like a sort of imbalance, with one subsection including all the 'slab' stories plus one story about a married man having a bed wetting problem, the inclusion of which felt "inexplicable", both in terms of the flow of this section as well as the epilogue, which decries attempts at obfuscating ones life through literary invention - since i don't think BBDB is married, the artifice of the story stands out a lot to me. i felt similarly about the end of the Slab sequence, with what is a more or less straightforward, realistic narrative ending with an absurd, surreal, nonsequitur-seeming scene. i liked this ending, actually, and enjoyed thinking about it, and how to interpret it, but the epilogue then made it less fun, i think, to think about, and more confusing. after this section, i think the story about his dad is a highlight (with its earnestness and clarity in style), and the story about working at the bar in Minnesota is a lowlight (with how it underscores the main plot with a text messaged paragraph summarizing the plot), but both of which (alongside everything else), i think, contribute successfully to this sense of holistic self-examination; BBDB isn't trying to frame himself any one way in this collection of autofiction, but presents all of himself, from his maturity/strength to his immaturity/pettiness. in this sense i think it's a good collection, is successful at doing what i understand he wants it to do, and i wish it were longer.

Since I Laid My Burden Down by Brontez Purnell (Feminist Press): my wife read and recommended this to me, but i'm not sure where she came across it. it is relatively short but took me a while to read. it is a loose, mostly plotless narrative about a 30-something Black, gay man who grew up in Alabama but then moved to California. the plot mostly revolves around the protagonist attending to funerals/deaths of men in his life - father, lover, uncle, etc., with each physical location (house, church, apartment, store) serving as a launching point for a reverie from his past revolving around family or previous lovers. the prose isn't very consistent or exciting, and is often awkward in an amateurish, copyediting way (confusing pronoun reference, confusing pacing, etc.), sometimes leaving me confused as to 'when' a certain thing is happening relative to other things, but it is still readable due to the continual, sometimes surprising and exciting little flourishes, like some turns of phrases or unexpectedly clear/brutal punchlines. there is also a strong adherence to comedy, exaggeration, silliness, shock humor, etc., in a way that makes it feel like a lot of the stories are being told over some casual family gathering or meal. there is a big emphasis on tying homesexuality up with trauma/abuse, on a proposed circularity of young boys being abused and turning into men who abuse young boys, and on how families and communities can often 'absorb' these traumas, or something, toward a path of forgiveness, or framing personal experience within a larger context of societal experience, which i have feelings about, on its surface, but which i don't feel qualified to say anything about. i think the book mostly serves as an intense, in-your-face, intersectional exposure of a lot of personal and cultural experiences that are generally hidden from straight, white, affluent people, or as affirmation for those who experience similar lives. most of the (white, straight, male authored) writing i've read has, for example, a certain approach to religiousness/christianity, a sort of condemnation of and alienation from the church, whereas, in this book, the characters that you'd 'assume' would be most alienated from their church find a supportive community because of these absorbed traumas. i feel unqualified to really say anything about this book or its purpose, but i think it's a good book and i enjoyed reading it, especially because of a particular scene toward the very end, which i feel was exceptionally provocative and put the entirety of the novel up until then into a different light, for me, which instantly transformed the book, in my mind, from a particular kind of book into something else, in a good way.

Human Tetris by Vi Khi Nao & Ali Raz (11:11 Press): this arrived as a free bonus with my order of after denver. i think several people received this book as a free bonus, based on pictures i've seen posted on twitter, which made me think that it was an unpopular/uninteresting book that they had published too many copies of, or something, seeing as how it's the default free bonus book. it is a collaborative collection of ~100 'personal ads,' like from craigslist, but written to be poetic, provocative, etc. the formatting of the book is such that each piece is printed sideways, with the title printed normally, so the reading experience kind of sucks, and requires holding the book in a stupid way to accommodate reading the perpendicular lines (i read several without first reading the titles, because of this, but then realized the titles often function as part of the text). i think the square shape of the book helps when holding the book this way, since there is more bend/give, allowing you to sort of hold it fully sideways more easily. each ad revolves around 2-3 themes for riffing, e.g. "cinderella + food", with the posted locations seemingly unrelated to the text (but sometimes sporting a joke) and a pun-based social media handle. i felt like after reading ~10 of them, i 'got' the idea of the exercise and felt uninterested in continuing, but continued anyway, only to find that little changes from piece to piece. the general pattern is to mix some real romantic/sexual content with non-romantic/sexual content, often in mixed, sort of meaningless but evocative metaphors. for example, i'm making this one up: "me: a starving cyclist with a bad case of road rash. you: a horny recumbent bicycle from the junk heap. let me ride you while lying down and eating a cliff bar, then we can ride off a cliff together and splash around in my jock strap." it reminded me of momo's mcsweeney's piece about doing kung fu, which is unfair to these authors and all the probably thousands of people who have done these kinds of projects in the past, but i bring it up because it feels like something that'd be interesting on mcsweeneys, but not in a book. some of the reviews i looked through mention a strength in how it treats race, gender, and sexuality, but in general it felt like, aside from a couple satirical kind of riffs (esp. in the first poem), these aspects play very little role in the conceit of each ad -- it felt like the details of each piece could have (or may have?) been randomly chosen or procedurally generated. the book would probably be more interesting to someone who has used craigslist or other personal ad services and/or engaged extensively in online dating, which i haven't done, such that it functions as a sort of parody text, and so if you're familiar with the source text, it's probably more interesting/nostalgic/etc. I'm in a bad mood, i think. it's a fine book.

unpublished manuscripts

i don't have a particularly clear vision for this blog post. recently i've been reading more unpublished manuscripts. socializing 'as a writer' (i do not identify as a 'writer', i think, but i am a writer, i guess), as i understand it - or maybe because of my inability to understand anything, and so i rely on this as a form of socializing because of not knowing what else do to - means, more or less, talking about 1) recent experiences with publishing (rejections, acceptances, places under consideration for submission), 2) thoughts on/recommendations of certain books or stories, 3) complimenting or otherwise reflecting on someone's recently published piece of writing, and 4) trading manuscripts of unpublished material.

i enjoy reading someone's manuscript of unpublished material but i'm unsure why (i'm unsure why i like/do anything). part of it may just be because it's what people do, and i have nothing else to do, and/or am following along with the existing social etiquette. i have had productive DMs and email exchanges with many writers now regarding the above topics. many of these correspondences also involve small talk, personal confession, and discussion of current events (both world news/politics and indie lit drama). i have come to appreciate the way in which social media (maybe just twitter, due to how it's constructed) obfuscates, or easily allows for the obfuscation of, personal information. most writers i see in my little sphere and end up engaging with in some way are, more or less, complete mysteries to me. i do not know what many of them actually look like or sound like, where they live or where they're from, what they do for work, what their education background is like, etc. I have had many preconceptions about writers in this weird small sphere challenged once these conversations begin. for example, i have learned about both "secret MFAs" and "community college dropping out", about which authors people have or have not read, and even personal and/or romantic relationships with other writers vaguely within the same community. i enjoy learning about these kinds of things and seeing the way that it colors my understanding of the community, the people involved, their aspirations, etc., both in terms of general curiosity as well as helping me better understand myself, my aspirations, etc. in general, i feel like more people than i expected have some sort of desire to 'make it' as a writer, e.g. get long-ish literary fiction into prestigious journals, acquire an agent, and publish a book on (an imprint of) a major book press.

i feel like i am more or less open in most of my correspondence and i worry that this comes off as self-centeredness, which is a fear i've harbored since ~4th grade when my dad pulled me aside to tell me that i often talked over my friends (since that experience i have, generally, in person, become more reserved, meek, and dispirited in most casual conversation in person), and so i make, generally, a concerted effort to reflect on what i've said and emphasize asking follow up questions and/or including compliments, etc., in these kinds of conversations with other people. i tend to write lengthy, neurotic emails in a tone that is much different from  my tone here in these blog posts, my tweets, and my fiction/poetry. i feel, to some extent, like a failure for so poorly constructing a thoroughly consistent 'persona' across modes of conversation, as compared to other people. i feel worried that this discrepancy in communication style makes communicating with me jarring or frustrating or disappointing. i am often also easily overwhelmed by maintaining personal correspondence, especially via text message. i am currently sitting on a backlog of something like 8 people i need/want to send emails to (and thus several manuscripts i want to give feedback on).

anyway, the point of this post is about reading unpublished manuscripts i've been sent as part of these kinds of correspondences. as a means of being a conscientious, 'reciprocal'-minded conversation partner, i make an effort to ask people i talk to about what they're working on and for them to send it to me. i also 'solicit' manuscripts from people in a non-publishing-oriented way, out of genuine curiosity/interest, if, for example, their website is outdated with broken links, and i'm curious to read more of their writing, or things like that, in situations where we don't otherwise have an ongoing unrelated conversation. i have received 3-4 'manuscripts' that way, and several more from the 'exchange' type of conversation. i'm not sure if i'm making sense. i have a worry, as someone involved with a small press, that these kinds of interactions 'carry some weight' re: publishing, which i dislike, since it usually comes from a general, genuine interest/curiosity and less an active plan on 'scouting manuscripts'. sometimes people don't send me anything, citing its unfinished nature or nonexistence, although sometimes those people eventually send me something a long time later, citing a delay due to various personal reasons. i think, in general, from my personal experience with expectation/hope/etc., that these kinds of manuscript exchanges/solicitations 'result' in something publishing-related, cf. a friend of a friend passing on a demo to a record label executive, and i expect this vague hope is usually mutual, but so far i don't think it has happened, aside from me expressing interest in publishing two books for back patio press. in general, i do not know how someone initiates this kind of exchange with asking someone to read my own work, but it seems to be a thing people do, and do successfully. i have considered reaching out to people to ask them how they initiate these kinds of conversations.

i struggle with giving useful/good/reasonable/acceptable feedback on manuscripts for a few reasons. one is that i have basically no experience with 'workshop etiquette' from e.g. BFA or MFA programs or paid independent workshops, which means that  people who have this experience will expect a certain approach to feedback that i am unfamiliar with, which has resulted in me overstepping boundaries or making careless assumptions about a variety of things, resulting in me to some degree hurting the other person and flailing uselessly in apology. related to this is how to separate or communicate personal preference from helpful/useful/objective feedback. for example, i would not feel comfortable trusting my opinion on genre fiction because i do not know what makes genre fiction 'good', and/or i feel some vague sense of disagreement with what makes it good. this applies to 'literary fiction' in a similar sense; i have more or less strong personal convictions (probably misguided and stupid) about literary fiction. i think everyone is the same. i do not know how to give good feedback. i am bumbling through it, generally. i think i have an arbitrary insistence on high standards and am bad at just saying nice things. for example, one time i was talking with a coworker about the pastries from coffee places near where we worked and she tried convincing me that a certain place had really good cheese danishes and i insisted that she was probably wrong. she eventually bought me one to 'convince me' and i maintained that it wasn't very good. relating this story to my wife, she informed me that my coworker was most likely trying to connect with me on a human level and i had been an aloof asshole and that i should have just lied and said it was a very good cheese danish and that we should go to that place for pastries with some frequency, as friends. because of my failures at being a good manuscript exchange partner, i am now overly self-flagellating re: the 'force' with which i suggest or describe anything. i'm trying to think of a word here but can only think of 'demure', which doesn't make any sense and isn't a verb.

as a result my lack of experience/familiarity with providing feedback on writing, i often spend some amount of time dipshitily asking for what kinds of feedback would be useful to the sender, although i rarely get a clear sense of expectations, which isn't anyone's fault, i think, aside from mine. in terms of what kind of feedback that i have found useful for a given story, aside from generic 'praise' which functions as encouragement and copyedits (for typos, etc), i have benefited from hearing interpretations of the 'purpose' of a piece and how the choices in style, tone, etc., affect the execution of that purpose; in general, if someone feels 'confident' in how to interpret a piece of my writing, it feels like a sort of failure on my part, operating from a vague desire to write ambiguously and combat the idea that any given piece of writing must have a discernible 'purpose/moral' aside from evoking an emotion or presenting some kind of unique imagery. i'm not sure what i'm trying to say - usually if an editor, as part of a 'tentative' acceptance for a literary journal, suggests rewriting the ending of my story, i feel like this is evidence that i should not change the ending, based on how i feel about the endings in most stories published by the relevant literary journal. i do feel, however, that feedback on a manuscript as a whole, in terms of sequencing, pacing, size, etc., is very useful and informative, maybe because i tend to have lots of strong opinions about these aspects of a manuscript/book, and so it would feel validating maybe to see other people think of a manuscript in terms of these things.

i'm trying to think of instances in which my feedback was taken into account for a published book. i sent cavin extensive copyedits and some sequencing/cutting/rewriting suggestions for his book I Could be Your Neighbor, Isn't that Horrifying?. the largest impact was recommending that he cut ~3 chapters/stories that developed a sort of subplot that i felt was distracting from my understanding of the purpose of the book. he seems to feel like this was a good idea. i gave some general copyedits for Time. Wow. and suggested that one story be rewritten based on my understanding of a scientific observation which neil had gotten backwards; someone i told this to noted that it was funny to bring up scientific accuracy in a collection of fantastical, calvino-esque interpretations of scientific observations, but it felt important to me for some reason, and neil simply cut the story as opposed to rewriting it. i recommended that tj larkey cut 2 short non-sequiturish chapters from his book Venice, by way of messaging Cavin, who messaged tj, which he agreed to do. i think i gave useful feedback on giacomo's Chainsaw Poems but i can't remember what that would be, i think maybe some suggestions on a couple specific poems as he was writing them and not so much during the compilation of the book. i think i recommended that mike cut or reorder certain poems in an early manuscript which was later reworked into gateway 2000. i have been giving dan some edits/suggestions for watertown from a 'cohesive manuscript' perspective as well. nick farriella claims to have reworked an unpublished collection of his i read a while ago and in retrospect thinks it benefited from things i said, or something to that effect, which felt good to hear.

i also have embarrassing experiences of misunderstanding 'how things work' and not realizing that people charge money for manuscript consultations even though, i think, they don't explicitly advertise that this is something they do for money. in this way i feel stupid for having 'lead someone on' for a sale without realizing it and feel like this kind of interaction has negatively impacted my relationship with people. i don't begrudge anyone who does this but in general i personally feel uncomfortable with paying/charging for manuscript consultation (feels hard to articulate a personal opinion without sounding judgemental of others, cf. being a vegetarian - i think it's ok to charge/pay for manuscript consultation if it's important/useful/good for you).

brief book reviews

here are the books i've most recently read. they're all four very short books, which is funny to me, and is why i am writing this review so shortly after the last review post. they are also all, more or less, "alt lit", which is also funny to me

 

Thank You by Zachary German (AFV Press): i don't know much about afv aside from that they were/are like the norwegian contingent of alt lit, working with david fishkind on Logue but publishing mostly norwegian language chapbooks (i don't speak norwegian and can't parse out much about the site). this zachary german book is available as a free pdf. zachary german (now going by Jocktober the Mesh) was a kind of dickhead wunderkid back in 2008-2009 with a novel on melville house and some stories on bear parade, ny tyrant, logue, muumuu house, etc. this (chap)book is short and, for me, is primarily interesting in that it is autofiction and came out/was written (presumably) after the events in megan boyle's Liveblog, in which german and boyle 'broke up' but continued to suffer through living together and having sex for a week or something. my sense in reading Thank You is that this alt lit hey day and its associated relationships (both friendly and romantic) had a permanent, negative impact on him, and these stories are, maybe, an attempt to understand his life through a sort of detached, objective lens, which was also basically what his novel was like, but in this one the drama is more intense (less focus on fashion and college parties, more focus on abortions/international travel/hard drugs). in terms of style, Thank You is kind of more jaded and doesn't shy away from complex sentences (there's a good tao lin x zachary german interview where he notes that he edited Eat When you Feel Sad to preclude any complex clauses and introspection/evaluation, so there are a lot of instances of the same sentences throughout, which i think is cool, personally). the stories here are written with a mixture of journalistic-style clarity (few adjectives, lack of authorial 'opinion') but which, most interestingly to me, includes clear statements of not remembering things right. so most stories focus on a few key details and are awkwardly paced and include things like "he was holding a bow, like a gift bow, because it was his birthday, or someone else's birthday - I don't remember which." so this clarity of detail and lack of clear context is, for me, the strength of the stories in terms of writing. it sounds wistful, rambling, but also curt and bleak. the content is mostly interesting as another entry in the convoluted interpersonal drama of the alt lit figures, with some 'updates' from his life pre/during/post Liveblog, although there are some intense and provocative moments divorced form this context, like the scene in which he tries to mercifully kill a cat that had been hit by a car. this is a quick read, probably like 30 minutes of dedicated reading. i would read a longer version of this collection i think. zachary german/jocktober the mesh is currently suffering with addiction and seems to solely shitpost about politics and rap on twitter now.

I am Dave_Hello by Dave (self-published on amazon): Dave appeared mysteriously on indie lit twitter maybe two months ago and seemed to be a divisive shitposter/reply guy with an annoyingly positive attitude. Big Bruiser Dope Boy called him something like a "boomer steve roggenbuck" because of Dave's over the top typos and bad social media etiquette. there has been some discussion about "who dave is" (i have been accused of being dave, but i cannot fathom having the energy to post as manically as he does). i bought this book on the recommendation of kkuurrtt and cavin, who posted favorably about it on twitter, and because it was only $4, which seemed worth wasting if it turned out to be stupid. this is a book of poetry, and even though it's something like 120 pages, the font is mostly very large (and some pages are blank), so it's a quick read. the poems have that "boomer roggenbuck" vibe, with lots of typos, changes in font, strange formatting, smiley faces, etc. (i should clarify that i have never read anything by roggenbuck, i don't think, but i feel aware of his brand involving stupid typos and helvetica font), and content-wise range from bad/funny puns on his name to some kind of provocative imagery (i like the one about a cardinal dying the most, i think). the word "dave" is on every page (instead of page numbers?) and is frequently used in the text of poems, or as a sign-off, or as a address, or even a title, maybe. i'd say something like 30% of the text is the word "dave", sometimes coming both before and after a poem. reading the book makes it function sort of as a punctuation or something, and i think, weirdly, was effective in somehow tempering the pacing of the book. cavin described the book as "goofy", i think primarily because of its square shape, but i think it's a good adjective to describe the entire text. the funniest part of the book is the recurring references to Josh (i assume josh sherman? if i had to guess, i'd say he's Dave) and other indie lit writers in a non-malicious (maybe) way. he calls BBDB something like "Big Brother Doper Boy", for example, and talks about getting Doak to follow him on twitter. i think it's very clear that the book is written with an attempt to sound naive or autistic or something but it feels clear to me that it was written to be funny, sometimes more clearly in places than others, so that is maybe a point of failure for the book, where it feels like it's trying to make the humor seem accidental when it feels pretty carefully constructed. for example, there are several pages dedicated to asking for 5/5 goodreads reviews, but as far as i can tell, the book is not on goodreads, and there's a section toward the end where he includes blank lines and asks you to write you own poems with some words of encouragement after them, except for the last one, where it says "not very good, too many clichés" or something like that, which i 'get' and thus feels like a miss. i felt kind of uncomfortable/worried reading it, as it feels like it can turn malicious/mean at any point, but doesn't seem to actually do that. in this sense it's a sort of compelling read.

Nervous Assface (Gangster Remix) by Brandon Scott Gorrell and Gene Morgan(?) (Bear Parade): i don't think i ever actually read the entirely of the original nervous assface, and i'm unsure how i accessed the pdf for this gangster remix (doesn't seem to be easily found on the site, but comes up when you google) but i started reading from my kindle at night sometimes and loaded it up with all the random pdfs i have of stuff like this. anyway, it's the same as nervous assface but the character names (and a few other details) are changed to make the book about Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, and other rappers. the way that it was modified makes it clear that it wasn't just a 'find and replace' thing since one character is replaced by the entire group of Bone Thugz n Harmony and so required further modification of the text to say stuff like "one of them at a banana", but this was done sort of halfway in places, so i enjoyed thinking about whoever made this edit doing so manually, imperfectly. this is short, basically a chapbook, with little resolution to the plot. this one is maybe better than his poetry book because it's less navel-gazey and puts the anxiety into third person characters. i like gorrell's writing style, i feel like he was/is a sort of underrated alt it figure between this and his muumuu house book. he has a good way of escalating things into absurdity without it feeling dumb or predictable, for example in the scene where snoop dogg starts hitting on someone (successfully) at the bar, and in creating a sense of tension and humor in juxtaposing short declarative sentences to create a series of short, bristly loose threads in the narrative, or something. a something i didn't like was how there isn't much of a plot, so starting each (more or less unrelated) chapter feels like it requires a sort of cold start in terms of getting motivated to continue reading, but each chapter is worth reading, in general. i wish he was still writing/publishing. i would read a full-length novel by him. googling around, there's an interview on bookslut where it says he had written an unpublished novella. i just emailed him about it. maybe he'll send it to me. i have not heard back from him after ~5 days.

Weed Monks by Chris Dankland (self-published pdf): i've read this before, or i read most of it then didn't finish it, but then just recently (re)read it start to finish. i know about chris dankland by way of xray lit (he is a founding editor and boyfriend/husband/partner of jenn) but he was also involved with alt lit gossip at some point and has stories on the internet. this is a short collection of aphoristic-type, religiously phrased narratives about a mystical, mysterious sect of more or less independently-operating "weed monks." also included are crude photoshops of religious (christian) imagery with weed paraphernalia. there is a self-insert of Dankland as the 'scribe' who records these stories onto the notes app of his phone. it sounds on its surface like a completely stupid book but it actually is, in my opinion, very good. most of the stories focus on a single, life-defining moment of a particular weed monk, in which they use marijuana to achieve a sort of enlightenment. some of these have stuck with me, for example, comparing our time and purpose on this earth to that of a cloud of weed smoke, something about making others high before we dissipate forever. i can't really articulate why i like this collection so much. i think it's just very thematically consistent, unique, and clever. the length of each piece works well in terms of pacing and keeping you entertained, and the conceit doesn't overstay its welcome. seeing the weed monks in different contexts and hearing different apocryphal stories across different types of topics was engaging, to me, and the tone is consistent, never over-the-top or lazy, and there is a heaviness, emphasis on life and death, time. i have recommended this collection to people and think more people should read it.

brief book reviews

here are brief reviews of the last 3 books i've read:

 

I Want to Feel Happy but I Only Feel _____. by Mallory Smart (Expat Press): i bought this book for a few reasons: 1. mallory is nice to me and runs maudlin house, a book press and lit mag that i like, 2. giacomo highly recommended it, 3. i was ordering other expat books at the same time, and 4. bud smith blurbed it. these poems have a very alt lit introspection kinda vibe both in content (listening to indie music, feeling anxious and awkward, relationship stories, social media) and style (mostly lowercase text, lots of 'i want/i will' lines, limited metaphor/symbolism). i appreciate the book for this introspection and freedom of exploring feelings of self-consciousness in an unself-conscious way. the recurring autofictive elements, of traveling, for example, are nice, offering different perspectives of the same ideas/experiences, which complements the navel-gazey sense of unease, uncertainty of the self, etc. However, because of these common themes, some of the poems feel redundant within the collection. what's missing from this, that was in the alt lit stuff that came before, i think, is some of the flights of fancy, bored daydreams about godzilla or hamsters or the earth exploding or whatever - i'm not saying this book should have done that exactly but that this kind of external imagery worked to break up the internality of old alt lit poems (i'm thinking brandon scott gorrell's book here, mainly), and so something 'bigger' or even just different along some axis would have felt good in the collection. overall though i think it's good, it has a good rawness and leverages a lot of small details well to capture the landscape in which it was written. i enjoyed thinking about how it will be read a few years from now - it came out in 2017 i think and already in some ways it feels 'dated' in, like, i imagine a 17 year old gen z kid laughing at the references to the  now 'lame' millennial memes like grumpy cat. but i think this is just how things that are contemporary and real always end up, especially wrt the internet, or maybe it feels bigger now because the next generation is coming of age and the millennials are being edged out of relevance. it's not a negative thing, i think, just something i thought about while reading, which i think is a good thing, when personal poems make you think of bigger things.

 

Not I by Sebastian Castillo (Word West): i like sebastian's tweets (i've blogged about them before), his short stories on the internet, and his (chap)book 49 Venezuelan Novels on Bottlecap press. there is/was very little information about Not I posted on the internet prior to its release - i don't think i saw any excerpts anywhere, and the word west website doesn't list a genre or page count; sebastian seemed noncommittal about it being either poetry or prose or some kind of hybrid in a tweet, i think. so i had little to go on prior to reading. it's a short book consisting of 24 parts (12 sections with 2 subsections each). each section corresponds to a 'tense' in english, e.g. 'simple past', and consists of 25 lines, each using "I" as its subject and one of the 25 most commonly used verbs in english (according to a sort of prologue disclaimer) as its main clausal verb. sebastian is an english professor, and the book serves as a sort of love letter to 'the english language' from an english professor's perspective. there is no narrative, although there are clusters of thematically-related lines within a given section, e.g. about a relationship or about money. many of the lines are evocative and interesting on their own, while others are riffs on cliches/idioms/references, and others are kind of neutral. the way the book is structured, in my head, reduces each line to simply one interesting phrase or image independent of the more or less swappable tenses - the repetitive subject and verbs means that the first few words of each line kind of melt into the background - there's nothing meaningfully different to me about the impact of each tense (eg between "i have been trying to compose myself" and "i will have been trying to compose myself", as the tense doesn't necessarily interplay with the idea of composing oneself) so the real contribution of each line is just what comes after the tense markers or whatever. i might have preferred the book to just be a list of these images as gerunds or something, eg "feeling a breezy sangfroid / trying to compose myself accordingly / leaving my shoes by the door / calling for an insurrection against our friendship" but then he'd lose the gimmick and it'd just be a long poem, so, i dunno. my main critique is that, basically, the gimmick of the book was distracting, in that i felt frustrated by the lack of rigor/consistency in what is, at its face, supposed to be a rigorous/consistent textual exercise. for example, in some sections, he crosses out the beginnings of lines which he thinks will read awkwardly, eg. the 'want' lines in past continuous, as it would be 'ungrammatical' to write something like "i was wanting to go to the store". but he doesn't cross these lines out in other 'continuous' tense sections, so my frustration comes from the fact that there is nothing more 'awkward' about using 'want' in the past continuous than using it in the future continuous (both result in a progressive 'wanting'), but he strikes out those lines in one section and not the other. at the same time, striking out the lines at all felt lazy/frustrating (and invites the reader to propose their own lines - i would have suggested something like "i was wanting more for myself", maybe). a similar frustrating lack of consistency is that, up until page 73, every verb is unergative and in active voice - "I" is both the semantic agent/cause and the grammatical subject, eg. "I go to the park" - until page 73, when the 'know' line is randomly passive: "i was known to get out of hand;" the subject is no longer the knower. does this mean that some of the struck-through lines could have just been passives as well? why not "i was wanted for my crimes", etc.? also related to this inconsistency, in my head, is the use of phrasal verbs like 'come around' used in the 'come' lines, which, again, felt inconsistent with the central conceit of using the most common verbs - "come around" is a different verb than "come" from a lexical semantics standpoint; it is not the result of composing "come" with "around" but instead functions as a distinct predicate. i mean, he can 'technically' use phrasal verbs because they use the 'word from the list' (and he can do anything he wants, it's his book), but it strikes me as contrary to the heart of the 'english professor' exercise to not, like, be diligent about this kind of minutiae. there are <600 lines in the book so these arbitrary deviations especially stand out to me - maybe in a much larger/denser text, it wouldn't be so grating. it sounds like i'm being nitpicky or petty but i don't understand the purpose of a partial effort for a book like this - it'd be like advertising your book as being free of punctuation but then including a a bunch of hyphenated words and a couple semi-colons or something. i should clarify that i almost finished a PhD in theoretical syntax with a dissertation basically on unergative verbs, voice, transitivity, argument structure, etc. so i think i'm just "being a little bitch," and most readers probably won't care about these inconsistencies. aside from the gimmick of the book, there is good imagery in many of the lines [update: in personal correspondence, sebastian offers that this inconsistency was intentional, the narrative a comment on feeling constrained by the 'tools' afforded to us with language; i should have realized this based on the epigraphs and sebastian's interest in wittgenstein. i feel a sense of compatriotism in his risk/gamble in how the book could be read, cf barn poems]. i liked a good number of the ideas/phrases. i think he should publish a book of short stories or a long poem, but maybe he plans on making his bibliography some sort of postmodern performance art (cf 49, Venezuelen Novels consisting of 49 single-sentence stories) and never publishing a 'normal' book; i have no good, unselfish reason for why he shouldn't do this.

The Fountain by Kat Giordano (Thirty West): kat and i are twitter/writing friends and she asked me to blurb this, her debut novel, via unedited/uncorrected ARC pdf. kat is primarily known as/identifies as a poet but i have always been a fan of her prose, and this is her longest piece of prose to date, as far as i know. this is a 1st person narrative about an incredibly anxious/neurotic 22 year old woman who kind of semi-dates a 45 year old loser over the span of like two or three weeks. what i like about the book is that the first-person protagonist is incredibly self-conscious and socially awkward, but the narrator's prose is very confident and lucid - insightful, charismatic, full of jokes, relatable. i thought the way that you are wrenched through the obsessive, self-defeating actions with a very clear reflection was good and stands out to me as the purpose of the book. plot-wise almost nothing happens, with a lot of the scenes dedicated to stilted conversations and uninteresting/uncomfortable dates, which is realistic, i feel, and is sort of the purpose of the book i think: there's a strong theme of modern ennui, wasting time, feeling aimless, feeling isolated in spite of interpersonal relationships, etc. I do think at times the exposition gets redundant (when there are conversations about conversations) or inconsistent (when, after a long passage of minute details about interactions, whole interactions are left out of the text but then referenced later), but that's also part of its realism (and/or will change during the editing stage, based on a brief conversation w/ kat) - the minutiae is especially good place/time setting and i think will stand as a good representation of like the year 2015, with the stupid restaurants, awkward art fairs, the role of cell phones in public, lack of career opportunities, Netflix, etc. I also liked the downward character arc, the way that the protagonist struggles with going from feeling relatively strong convictions and openness to losing those convictions and closing off - following what one wants and then realizing it's not what one wants, especially relative to some of the other characters, and this role of arbitrariness, how everyone operates similarly aimlessly and with contradictions. i think the last chapter was my favorite, in its departure from the rest of the book in tone/content/pacing.

soliciting and submitting writing

this is a blog post about my experiences in soliciting/being solicited for things within/related to the writing world, how that's changed over time, and in what ways i screwed up or let myself be unreliable, etc.

i'm breaking this up into four loose sections: soliciting writing (as an editor), doing interviews, blurbs, and submitting writing. in many ways this is an incomplete essay. i've enjoyed writing relatively transparently about this related to 'networking' in writing.

SOLICITING WRITING

i have been solicited 2-3 times, i think, for a piece of writing. one time was by jason gong, who worked with alan good on the first malarkey zine called beer money. at the time, i had been friendly with jason because we liked each other's stories in soft cartel and philosophical idiot. i wrote a story based on the theme and sent it, then i think sent a slightly edited version 24 hours later. when the zine came out, jason said very kind things about me/the story on twitter and in an introduction to the zine. i think the goal with the zine was to make money for the authors, but i refused payment. my copy is hand-stitched by jason. i haven't really spoken with jason since, and as far as i can tell he may have stopped publishing writing online entirely. [update] i just DM'd him. he's doing well, and is getting back into writing, which is good.

cavin semi-scolicited me/i offered to send him something for the launch of back patio press. it was a short, single paragraph about stealing a car that i had rewritten a few times and had rejected from some other places.

jennifer griedus solicited me for the xray books idea, and she has supplied very good and reasonable edits for bobby digiorno will fucking die, which was something i had around the target word count. rereading it after the edits, i still feel good about it, as a story.

i had been 'soft' solicited by mike andrelzcyk for his Hey Buddy zine. unsure if this counts, since i was involved, kind of, in its inception. same here applies for screaming into a horse's mouth, giacomo's solicitation-only poetry magazine.

i enjoy seeing (new) magazines and presses follow and then unfollow me over time. i used to feel confused about these kinds of 'interactions', misreading them as interest in me/my writing and thus some step toward solicitation, but i have since come to understand that, for them, it's mostly a numbers game, an attempt to get more followers and thus build credibility; many of these magazines unfollowed me after a 0-7 days of me not following them back. i try not to follow anyone i don't care about, although for 'networking' reasons i follow some people that i have simply muted, and i feel conflicted about this, and curious about how many people have muted me for similar reasons.

i have solicited other writers for writing several times with mixed results:

in 2018 i was interested in starting a lit mag online for flash fiction that adhered to a strict word count, and solicited maybe 4-5 people, but i received only one piece, i think, and it was from cavin. i never did anything with the site because of this, and have since moved past the idea of starting/running this kind of website entirely.

sometime in 2019 i worked with giacomo to build a website that would host digital collaborative chapbooks, where 2 authors would write small, complementary collections. we solicited 6 people (three sets) aside from ourselves but only got content from one set of two people. i think cavin had asked 1-2 people to collaborate but they also declined. the website exists and only has the one collaboration on it, a haiku/haibun ebook by michael o'brien and mike andrezlcyk. i think it'd be good to try this again.

in 2019 i anonymously started/ran Small Poems 🍓, a twitter-only thing that published screenshots of small poems from open-submission emails. i started it with my own poem and solicited work, then saw a moderate amount of submissions per week for a few months. i tried to curate a flippant/positive persona as the editor and rejected very few poems. there was relatively wide interest across the various vague 'scenes' within indie lit on twitter. i mostly got bored with it and stopped responding to emails/publishing poems. i briefly retweeted old tweets and then stopped using the account entirely after a few shitposts.

in 2019 i started Spaghetti Memories, which is solicitation-only, although i have received 1-2 DMs about whether i accept submissions and 2 combination 'are you open for subs' queries + unsolicited full spaghetti memory submissions. of all the people i have solicited, 3 people more or less declined politely, and everyone else agreed and send something. i think it's a good website. i like the premise still and the variety of content. i publish very infrequently.

also in 2019 i traded manuscripts with no glykon, after having a pleasant/interesting email exchange after having a piece rejected for reality hands. i really enjoyed numbskull, and i asked to publish it with back patio press, after asking various leading questions about publishing, expectations, etc. In 2020 i asked dan eastman to send me what he'd been working on, or he asked for advice about what to do with his kind of short manuscript of poetry, and i really liked it and similarly asked some leading questions and asked to publish it with back patio, and encouraged him to write some more poems for it, then we could edit it down together, or something. i generally feel self-conscious about asking to publish someone's book because i feel like a bad publisher, short on energy/motivation, with relatively few connections or experience in adequately promoting books. while i like doing back patio stuff, it can be difficult, and we are not a very well-connected or established press, and in general i assume people can 'do better' than publish with us, although the more i learn about other publishers, maybe we're fine. cavin solicited, in this way, i think, the rest of the back patio (and soft cartel) print catalog.

in 2020 i made two zines about the covid-19 pandemic (The Quaranzine and The Quaranzine 2) and solicited several people, as well as relied on open submissions, for content. of everyone i solicited, i think only 2-3 people declined. of the open submission pieces, i accepted maybe 15-20%, with or without edits. i felt confused by some of the open submissions pieces. it felt like some people just look for any chance at submitting writing without knowing who the editors are or what their tastes/goals are. this experience made me strongly desire to possibly never be a real editor for a magazine (i mostly do books stuff for back patio, although i handled web submissions for about two weeks when cavin was very depressed and was facing a large backlog of emails, and this experience was very pleasant, i think because of how well cavin has curated the site so far and how talented he is at enthusiastically engaging with writers, and i happily accepted maybe 75% of the submissions).

there are some people i know not to bother with soliciting because i have the sense that they are often solicited for too many things and/or do not like me personally, even though i like their writing a lot. i have also been pleasantly surprised about other people responding positively to being solicited. i have had good experiences encouraging people to (continue to) write and/or complimenting their writing as well.

in general, soliciting strangers whose work you like when you have no name for yourself/clout online doesn't seem to work very well. i encourage people to forge friendships via reaching out with compliments and/or questions and having low-stakes, friendly conversations with people, and then, later, if you feel like you are more or less friends, you can solicit them for writing, or ask permission to publish something they've already sent you to read/edit as part of your friendship activities.

INTERVIEWS

i have interviewed a few people about their books and these interviews have been published online. i quickly got exhausted by the experience - it's a lot of work, and i was surprised by the unique, sometimes frustrating quirks many people had about the editing and framing of the interviews, which added to the mental effort required. 

i originally started interviewing people based on a pitch request for pank that gabino iglesias posted on twitter. he was encouraging at the idea over DM or email, but then basically ignored my emails for ~10 months, including emails where i said i was publishing the interviews somewhere else. the first interview, with troy james weaver, was published on the nervous breakdown, i think because joey grantham was by that time the editor, and he had published troy's book via disorder press (joey declined to run the rest of the interviews, but recommended i reach out to tobias at vol. 1 brooklyn).

i was lucky to have a good relationship with tobias, who was open and accepting of each interview i sent and gave few/no edits. if i had to independently pitch each interview the way most magazines expect, i would have done much fewer. i think this kind of open/trusting relationship is important and good for independent publishing, and the fact that most interviews/reviews need to be 'pitched' seems like an unnecessary obstacle for book promotion. 

the general lack of interest/purpose to interviews also contributed to me being uninterested in continuing them, as well - the results often felt like the work wasn't worth it.

i flaked on interviewing three people and i feel bad about it: steve anwyll, who i DMd to interview, and who agreed, but who had by that time done like 4 recent interviews online with people, and i felt like i had to read/listen to all of the interviews before i initiated mine so i wouldn't make him repeat himself needlessly, but the prospect of reading/analyzing each interview felt overwhelming and i more or less ghosted on him; rebekah morgan, who answered 2-3 questions over email but who then wanted to set up a phone call instead, which felt like a lot of work and logistics i didn't feel like doing, and i more or less ghosted, although we have briefly corresponded since in a friendly way over twitter DMs; and anthony dragonetti, who i originally reached out to, then he reached back out, then i agreed to interview again after i read his book, and then i more or less ghosted on the topic, mostly feeling uninterested in/overwhelmed by the idea of doing interviews in general and all the associated work by that time. i also reached out to joey grantham once for an interview in anticipation of raking leaves, but he left my DM unread. everyone else i've asked to interview has agreed.

ben devos solicited me for an interview with blake middleton for the apocalypse party blog, which i was happy to do, because i liked blake's book a lot (and his other writing, either published or sent to me directly). reading back on the interview, i feel kind of embarrassed by my dumb attempts at humor in the introduction. there was also some brief confusion about the venue for the interview, which i felt bad about, especially since there was/is very little content on the AP blog, and it would have probably better served blake to put it on vol. 1 brooklyn.

mallory smart also solicited an interview on behalf of michael seidlinger, and i felt conflicted because i wasn't sure i'd have the time/motivation to do it, but i ultimately agreed to be sent an ARC for his book, which i couldn't really get into, and then he independently was interviewed for vol. 1 brooklyn, and i more or less stopped caring/worrying about it. i do feel bad, though, about accepting the ARC without doing anything with it, and for this reason i do not feel comfortable being sent free books - at most i'd like to trade books with someone, or purchase a book from them.

i did a couple less formal/more flippant interviews with mike and cavin, and one weird/very silly one with mike, cavin, giacomo, and elizabeth ellen. i was surprised she agreed to it. i thought it was really funny altogether but i don't think anyone read it.

i am sitting on a half-finished 'formal' interview with giacomo about neutral spaces and chainsaw poems - it might be the last real interview i do for a long time.

even though they were often a pain in the ass and a source of anxiety for me, overall i felt good about conducting relatively-in-depth interviews with authors (some of whom had not been interviewed previously). it feels like a good thing i did and i encourage other people to do it (if you are reading this and would feel more motivated by having a dependable venue, reach out to me and we can do this through back patio press). all of my interviews were about/for books that i independently purchased, although melville house did send me an ARC (with two-day shipping) for my interview with lars iyer, but i had already preordered the book.

i was interviewed (about my book) on three podcasts (get lit with leza, malarkey public radio, and writing the rapids) and once over twitter DM by nick farriella, which was published, alongside a short review, on hobart. i reached out to joe directly about being on writing the rapids, and i think i sort of suggested to nick that he interview me, or review my book, or something, because we had been having pleasant conversations about writing and publishing around the time the book was going to be published. i don't remember how the malarkey one came about, i think alan mentioned it in the neutral spaces chat and then i followed up later.

BLURBS

i have asked people for blurbs for my book and i have been asked to blurb a couple books. i asked many people to blurb my book of barn poems and had a fun/interesting experience, but i feel less interested in writing about that right now. i feel like i've talked about it sufficiently on various interviews and online readings.

i offered a blurb for lindsay lerman's book after she kindly wrote a great blurb for mine, and i think it's funny/strange to see my blurb for her book's 2nd edition, because "author of 50 Barn Poems" seems funny/incongruous with her book, which is a bleak and meaningful and and well-written novel.

kris hall hosted my reading in seattle and we had a great time the night before the reading - i got him really drunk and we talked about all kinds of stuff and had a nice time. the poetry reading was exceptionally fun and i enjoyed meeting everyone and reading with everyone. after the poetry reading he proposed to his girlfriend. we've texted occasionally since and he asked me to blurb a collab book he self-published. i really liked the book, especially his section, and felt good about/encouraged about writing a blurb. it was a long blurb and i sort of expected him to cut it down some, but he didn't. he later invited me to read as part of his inside the bunker poetry series with house of vlad authors and some other cool people. i tried setting up a back patio reading with him but that never panned out for whatever reason, and we haven't really talked since. i think our communication styles are to blame: i'm on twitter and email mainly, and he prefers text and facebook.

brian alan ellis asked me to blurb sophie jennis's book hot young stars on her behalf, and i really liked the book and was enthusiastic/motivated to burb it well. i felt good about being asked and it seemed like a good 'fit' for me to blurb. i think it's a good book.

mallory smart asked me to blurb a book by blake wallin, who i hadn't heard of but looked up online and read/enjoyed some poems by. i agreed and he sent me a pdf, and i realized it was a long novel, and not a poetry book like i had expected. at the time i felt like i could effectively read and blurb a pdf for a poetry book, but not a full-length novel, and mainly agreed to be sent the book assuming it was a poetry collection. i read the first few chapters on my phone, awkwardly (book-formatted pdfs are, like, impossible to read on a cellphone) while waiting to pick up some tacos. it seemed interesting but very different from what i typically read/understand, and i felt like i would not be able to provide a meaningful or insightful blurb, as someone who doesn't really understand the literary tradition of that type of book, or something, and in fact my blurb would probably sound stupid to other people. i more or less ghosted on this blurb request and i feel bad about it. i would feel confident in blurbing a poetry collection by blake if given the/another opportunity.

i provided blurbs for gateway 2000 by mike and chainsaw poems & other poems by giacomo, because i talk to them every day and had read various versions of each book over the past year. i rewrote a few older stories/story ideas for maybe ~5 of the 50 blurbs for chainsaw poems.

kat giordano has asked me to blurb her novel the fountain which comes out...this year i think. i'm excited to read it. i think it will be a pdf that they send. i am going to ask kat for a word doc so i can more easily read it on my phone, i think, if they can't/won't send a physical galley.

SUBMITTING INTERNET WRITING

almost any writing i've published online that wasn't that solicited beer money story or published on the neutral spaces blog were submitted to magazines/editors either via email or submittable. i have had more or less positive experiences submitting writing to places. i have not suffered any abuse or inappropriate behavior from any editor. my longest rejection took just over 365 days, and was for a ~300 word single-sentence about a toilet that i submitted to barrelhouse. my shortest rejection was probably from smokelong - they take only a few days, usually. my quickest acceptance was probably for muskeg.

my best experiences were with cavin (as soft cartel), kat (philosophical idiot), tao (muumuu house), jenn (xray), and muskeg magazine. i have positive friendships with all of these editors aside from the anonymous editors of muskeg, but they were always nice in emails.

the worst experiences i had were with barren magazine, who responded to an attempt to withdraw a piece (that had been overlooked in the slush pile for several months) by rejecting and critiquing it, and instant lit, which involved a long email with ideas for a complete rewrite of the story and a proposed phone call to discuss it that never happened for some reason (the story was then published more or less as i had submitted it). i have also been called [submitter's name] once and been rejected via submittable with no email notification once, which are both funny but unmalicious. i enjoy hearing stories of strange interactions with editors, for example, when i found out that the poetry editors of one magazine seem to have no idea who the editor in chief of the magazine was (even though it's in the masthead), or something, and stuff like that.

xray was the first place to accept and publish a story i wrote, although i had a couple acceptances come in for stories i had sent out before i had anything published, for example from the jellyfish review. i felt self-conscious about that one, felt convinced they had partially accepted it because i had not been published before - their editor, i think, has posted about feeling proud of publishing peoples' first published stories.

in cover letters, i have stopped listing any credentials or previous publications, and now say some variation of "Thanks for your time, I hope you enjoy this story." i'm unsure what impact this has had (if any) on my rejection rate.

in retrospect i feel embarrassed about my activities submitting (bad) writing to "any mag with open subs" in a manic, pointless way for several months when i first started looking into online publishing. publications in places i don't care about or read feel purposeless and unfulfilling. i submit very little writing to places now, mainly to just a couple venues every once in a while, in an effort to 'stay relevant' and active, to 'support' people i like, to gauge reactions to new things i'm writing, to expose my writing to more people who may like it and/or encourage others to read it, and to help encourage people who write things that would appeal to me more because of shared aesthetic sensibilities to submit to the same venues, so that i can read more writing that i like and less writing that i don't like. 

many people i talk to feel very little interest/obligation in publishing writing online in an effort to prioritize publishing books, and other people i have talked to feel the same way but about publishing books, which has helped me understand that publishing any kind of writing is a purposeless treadmill of disappointment. when thinking about publishing, i often think about this interview i heard with Moby, who admitted to almost killing himself the night he won a grammy.