Friday, July 31, 2020

Pseudonym Rankings by Giacomo Pope

The world of writers is populated with scheming liars who live behind fake names. It is time to name names. Prepare for judgement.
- "Giacomo"


[note: this is a guest post by Giacomo Pope. he pitched the idea to me and i agreed to post it on his behalf. it went through several iterations over twitter DM and email.]

[second note: i sent a draft of this, with some edits and questions, to giacomo shortly after he lacerated his head on a street sign.]

Giacomo reviewing my edits after lacerating his head on a street sign

This is a blog post about pseudonyms written as a list with a very scientific and precise scoring system. It's like rotten tomatoes, except a high score means that I've judged the author to be using a pseudonym and I don't talk about films at all. Disclaimer: I am writing this introduction after cutting my head open and I'm not really paying attention to what I'm writing. But yeah, whatever. Here's an IMDB of named names. You have been judged. - "Giacomo"


Sam Pink
82%

Sam Pink was once at a party and someone asked Sam what his favourite colour was, and then Sam responded pink but regretted it and changed his mind and said blue, but everyone had already heard pink and everyone at the party was laughing at him and so he said, i said pink, but i only said pink because i say my name before answering any question, as you know. so what you heard, when you heard pink, was actually my name: Pink, and then you all heard my favourite colour, which is blue. and all his friends said "i thought your name was Boccaccio" and he said "no, it's Pink and my favourite colour is blue."



Chelsea Martin
0%

For "Chelsea Martin" to pick a pseudonym she would have to have a name that wasn't "Chelsea Martin". For "Chelsea Martin" who isn't "Chelsea Martin" to pick the pseudonym "Chelsea Martin", "Chelsea Martin" would first have to think of the name "Chelsea Martin". For "Chelsea Martin", who isn't "Chelsea Martin" to pick the name "Chelsea Martin" after thinking of the name "Chelsea Martin", "Chelsea Martin" would have to decide to use the name "Chelsea Martin", instead of the name "Chelsea Martin" had before becoming "Chelsea Martin" as a name to attach to "Chelsea Martin's" art. For "Chelsea Martin" to feel like "Chelsea Martin" was the name of the person who made the art that the person who wasn't called "Chelsea Martin" made, the person called "Chelsea Martin" would first have to make art as "Chelsea Martin". For there to be art made by "Chelsea Martin", the person who isn't "Chelsea Martin" would have to already be "Chelsea Martin", making art as "Chelsea Martin" for the person who isn't named "Chelsea Martin" to look at to decide if the art "Chelsea Martin" felt congruent to the art made by the person who isn't "Chelsea Martin" to be sold as art made by "Chelsea Martin". Therefore "Chelsea Martin" was making art as "Chelsea Martin" before the person called not called "Chelsea Martin" was making art. Therefore "Chelsea Martin" has always been "Chelsea Martin".



Bud Smith
91%

Feel overwhelmingly that "Bud Smith" was a name picked to subconsciously inspire friendship between "Bud Smith" and other members of the community. When I message "Bud Smith", i say "hey bud", which makes me feel calm and relaxed, like I'm messaging a good and kind friend. I am 90% certain is part of some evil plan. Potentially his name could also be a reference to "smoking the devils lettuce", or even the flowering of "opium buds". When I say "bud," am I really saying "foe"???


Mike Andrelczyk
23%

I find Andrelczyk very hard to spell, but I'm an idiot. Luckily I message Mike every day so I copy paste it from our Twitter DMs so I don't need to learn to spell it myself. Potentially problematic if Mike spells his own name wrong. Sometimes Mike says he wishes he had a pseudonym, which seems to suggest he doesn't... but Mike plays chess, so I wouldn't put it past him to be playing mind tricks with me. This move is known as the Poet's Gambit.



Noah Cicero
80%

"Noah" might be Noah's name, but "Cicero" seems too good to be true considering the political edge to a lot of Noah's writing. If Cicero is Noah's real name, then he's another case of people becoming their names. The first case of this I remember was being taught physics by a man named Mr. Newton. He was a strange man who told me to work harder after getting 100% in a physics exam. Feeling interested that I have made the speculation about Noah's name as an opportunity into sharing a fact about myself where I make myself seem intelligent. Going to keep it in, along with these sentences.


Big Bruiser Dope Boy
0%

No one would pick that as a pseudonym, must just have weird parents.



Joseph (Joey) Grantham 
50%

"Hi I'm Joseph, but my friends call me Joey" seems innocent on the surface, but under the kindness and the moustache lies the mysterious workings of indie lit's most gruesome sociopath. Over the course of the past few years, Joseph (Joey) Grantham has worked his way up through the independent literature scene, from a small indie press run with his sister, to being the editor of the lit mag associated to the worlds most important and likeable podcaster. Unsatisfied with the power over the nervous breakdown, Joseph (Joey) Grantham went after Brad Listi himself, killing Brad and hiding his body in the hollywood hills in the summer of 2019. We will never learn of the true identity of Joseph (Joey) Grantham until we see it on white letters, on a black board in a mugshot, with crocodile tears falling under the rims of his glasses.



Cavin (Bryce) Gonzalez
13%

Cavin is a friend, but how well do you really know anyone over the internet? His middle name comes and goes, and I've heard dark rumours of an early life as Mr. Sinatra. I suspect Cavin's real name is "Jethro" and the dog he posts photos of his just his way to allow the truth to air in a safe space.



Crispin Best
17% + 99%

I went to a church the other day and there was a hallway filled with stained glass pictures of various saints. One of the saints was "St. Cripsin". I took a photo and tweeted the photo of the stained glass picture of saint crispin to Crispin Best. Honestly thought up until the point "Crispin" was some punny name linked with "Crispin off your bacon" or something. Now I just feel like Crispin was named after a saint. Almost totally sure in display of domination, Crispin picked the last name "Best" to establish an intimidating presence on social media.



Elizabeth Ellen
5%

I'm instantly suspicious of alliterative names, but EE's whole shtick seems to be catastrophic honesty, so using a pseudonym would just be really weird. Going to just assume EE's mum liked the letter E.



Tao Lin
0%

Certain that Tao would use his real name. Would be very surprised if Tao did not use his real name. I can imagine Tao sitting there for a long time thinking about whether to use a pseudonym, but deciding that it would be better to not use a pseudonym.



Sam Pink (again)
73%

"Sam" appears to me as too American Italian to be called "Sam". If Sam was short for "Samuele", "Santo", "Santu" or "Sarbaturi" I am 96% certain "Sam" would just use his full name, as those are great names. Imagining "Sam" is actually named "Giovanni", or maybe "Ludovico", and picked "Sam" so it was easier to write in crayon.



Zac Smith
99.999%

Surely no one would write 50 poems about barns and put their real name on the front? Zac has a proper job, with proper friends. Family, people who love him. Can't believe it for a second that he'd let that barn open its doors for the world to look into. He also mentioned his name rhyming with "Larry" at some point, when we were shit talking poems that rhyme, which seems suspicious, in retrospect.


Blake butler
1%

Alliteration means this was obviously once a pseudonym - however I’m almost totally certain that after the first few books Blake published, "Blake" legally changed his name to become Blake. I suspect that this was to help him stop feeling weird when random people on the internet sent him emails referring to him as “Blake”.



Juliet Escoria
100% 

I read Scott Mclanahan’s book and listened to a podcast with Scott Mclanahan in which he refers to Juliet as Julia. I do not think Juliet's last name is Mclanahan, but I also don’t think it’s Escoria.


Daniel Bailey
42%

There's something elegant in how many letters are shared between "Daniel" and "Bailey" which makes me think that this was done on purpose. Decided to write "Dn By", as a minimal name, as though I can cancel letters on both sides. Buying a poetry book by Dn By. Being taught poems by dn by. bydnby as a signature on a book contract. Doubt re: pseudonym in the form of knowledge that "Daniel" named his blog "Horse Juice", and with ideas like that, I feel like if Daniel was picking a pseudonym, it would probably be something as earth shattering as "Horse Juice" and that "Daniel" is indeed just "Daniel".


Scott McClanahan
??%

Every time I think Scott's name I sing a little song which goes "Scott McClanahahanahanahaahahan" and giggle and lose focus. No idea. Great name though.



Steve Anwyll
3%

Feel almost completely certain it is important for Steve to attach his real name to his writing. Feel this on the level of his dedication to authenticity. Steve feels like an authentic man. Feel like I can imagine an interviewer asking Steve whether he uses a pen name and Steve telling the podcaster only a coward would use a pen name.



Raymond Carver
100%

I see you Gordon.



Megan Boyle
1%

After writing Liveblog, I'm not sure there'd be much of a point in writing under a pseudonym. Potentially picked a pseudonym before deciding to write the accountability blog, but feel that if this was the case, "Megan" would have included thoughts within Liveblog such as "Asked mom about how good my pseudonym was, like on a scale of 10 while watching homeland, but didn't listen to her response. Opened the bathroom door and flushed the toilet".



Troy James Weaver
68%

Feel Like Troy's name is Troy, but that either "James" or "Weaver" has been added to make sure Troy would be considered with other three-named authors such as David Foster Wallace, William Carlos Williams, Karl One Knausgaard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Michael Earl Craig, Edgar Allen Poe, R L Stein, Joseph (Joey) Grantham and Philip Seymour Hoffman.



Brian Allen Carr / Brian Alan Ellis
50%

One of these guys is real, one of them is an alter ego. I refuse to believe that this tiny bubble of indie lit has two separate people with such confusingly similar names. I've talked with Brian Alan Ellis, which makes me think he exists, but he could also exist as a pseudonym online, living day-to-day as Allen Carr. Laughing about how both of these people have three word names but that I forgot to add them into Troy's investigation. Decided not to edit them back in as some form of authenticity to the investigation. Potentially both are the pen names for Bret Easten Ellis for when he want to stop writing about being white and instead focus on the higher arts such as wrestling, or Alf.



Brad Phillips
13%

I first became aware of Brad while he was lying to people with funny fake business cards. Feel strongly that Brad is good at making art about lying, but that his name came before the lies and is probably real. Feel like it's important for Brad to be Brad while doing Brad things, like lying. Maybe he has won me over, and I am just another mark in a lifetime of art-cons.

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Top Ten Writers on Twitter

i originally wrote this in a bout of mania inspired by the old vice shit that people would write and apparently get paid hundreds of dollars to publish. i think there's a lack of navel-gazing and community-promotion in different venues these days - twitter feels very locked into twitter. instead of pitching this stupid thing anywhere, i'm putting it here. on rereading it, i'm working on changing how it's written, so it can feel more earnest, i think.
--

As a writer - and for writers - Twitter is a fun medium. Are we past peak writer Twitter? Absolutely - with alt-lit's drug-fueled livetweets and overly-personal confessions long gone, Twitter is turning, slowly but surely, into Facebook Lite, a place where millennials post personality quiz results and complain about their neighbors.

But it's also, for many writers, one of many generic dumping grounds for hashtags and new book announcements, thanks in part to the hundreds of identical articles full of tips for promoting your shitty new eBook, thanks in another part to the writers who are on Twitter begrudgingly, just to engage their loyal fans with non-committal retweets for upcoming book tours and interviews. I think it's just, maybe, like everything else, but still, in that way, bad.

So far, if you base your opinion on what I've written, Twitter is mostly bad.

But Twitter can still be a force for creative good for writers, and I don't just mean in terms of vaguely viral #AmWriting tweets about working on a novel draft. And I'm not talkign about it as a place to make friends and connections, which happens, and which I've done and benefited from, in a person-to-person way. I mean there are still writers - people who write - using the medium to exercise their creativity and voice in the act of tweeting. This writing on, and for, the medium, is a conscious distancing from self-promotion, networking, SEO-optimization, and whatever marketing bullshit people usually associate with being a writer on twitter. I'm talking about "Pure Tweets", the tweet for the tweet's sake, the injection of literary goodness into a never-ending feed. Something something hellworld, doomscrolling, blah blah.

This is a list I've compiled to celebrate - and encourage - this kind of writerly tweeting, and hopefully inspire more people to tweet this. There are many writers on Twitter I love, and even for their tweets, but I'm also narrowing down the field in terms of: consistency, frequency, original content to retweet ratios, and 'all that jazz'. It was a lot of work, so you better enjoy this: a list of some of my favorite writer, or writer-adjacent, tweeters in 2020.
 



Andrew Weatherhead
@weeatherhead · Apr 23
Feel like my cats are extracting a cat person out of me, like a zip file

Andrew Weatherhead is a poet. You should buy, and read, his jangly, fragmented "book-length poem" $50,000. While for a while I wouldn't have recommended Andrew's tweets due to his emphasis on cataloguing his work out routines, I've since come around to enjoying his tweeting. I think his book coming out got him back into the swing of things. Andrew's tweet strengths lies in his provocative introspection. His tweets are a medium for him to peer into his own mind...

Andrew Weatherhead
@weeatherhead · Apr 6
Keep thinking “Dave ‘Easter’ Eggers”

...and find the inexplicable...

Andrew Weatherhead
@weeatherhead · Apr 22
I keep hoping that Girl Talk will come back and remix my life somehow -- all my poems, my art, make me better or something, beatmatch my bullshit, cure me

...but also, ultimately, sometimes, his tweets deliver a deft punch to the deflating writerly spirit in all of us:

Andrew Weatherhead
@weeatherhead · Apr 21
Reinvigorating my novel by changing the title to “Who Cares”

Follow Andrew and you will see good writer tweets. I think he's consciously tapped into what I'm tapped into, re:good tweets, a kindred spirit in the hunt for, and desire to manufacture, good tweets.


TWS
@timothysanders · Apr 16
ordered a bidet for my ass

Timothy Willis Sanders was around a few years ago in indie lit, with small press (and out of print) books from 2010 and 2014, but he's still around and he's still tweeting and he's still tweeting with a panache for the written word. Like his evocative fiction, often disjointed and strange, TWS's tweets engage me with their turn of phrase and irreverent nature. From observational comedy...

TWS
@timothysanders · Mar 29
my bank emailed me to say that in these tough times they are still committed to me. thank you bank.

To dark, humorous confession...

TWS
@timothysanders · Mar 13
rude of my emotions to make me cry again

To self-aware digs at "being in the writing scene"...

TWS
@timothysanders · Mar 4
so far i’ve met 6,00,000 people at awp & they’re all in the same mfa program

...TWS offers a solid repertoire of writerly tweets. Follow him for a good mix of the personal and the cutting, the sweet and the strange, and read his books for more of the same (sorry for rhyming).



momo @SighPilot · Apr 25
some words/phrases i have repeated in recent personal emails: fuck bubble, modified calvinism, collective sheltering inertia, crisis=opportunity, telegraphed intention, cosmic equations, folly, ranches, psychobabble, collapsed anus, yeah, looping, cardinal, extrapolate, slowdown

Momo doesn't have a book, and he barely has anything in any online lit mags (but what he does have, well *chef's kiss*, as they say). But he's a writer through and through, treating your twitter timeline like his Kerouacquian scroll of paper. And with under 500 followers, he's yet to let his art decay into an ego-feeding engagement frenzy. You should follow him, though, to see if we can make him go insane.

From the classic introspective monologuing:

momo @SighPilot · Apr 15
just thought ‘gimme all the deets’ in shithead brunch voice apropos of nothing immediately discernible while brushing my teeth

to the stupid depressed dad jokes (he's expecting, so it's ok):

momo @SighPilot · Apr 11
a tisket
a tasket
a custom crocodile leather casket

to the punchy short-story-in-a-tweets:

momo @SighPilot · Apr 6
an ongoing, open zoom meeting where participants come to shave their heads in silence

Momo's a welcome addition to anyone looking for good, writerly, tweeterly content. I endorse his tweets.


ava wolf
@wownicebuttdude · Apr 28
roommate said that yesterday her boss overheard me marching up and down the stairs with the cat in my arms yelling "BIG BOY STINKY BOY BIG BOY STINKY BOY"

Ava Wolf doesn't have any books either, because fuck you, we have the internet (unless you count a digital-only 18-page microchap as a book, which you probably should, because it was released by the indelible Ghost City Press). But, speaking of internet, she's a solid tweeter who specializes in self-deprecating introspection about food, clothes, and, hey, even books. The versatility of her subdued humor rips and grips, from dry one-liners...

ava wolf
@wownicebuttdude · Apr 27
some tweets are good. some tweets are bad.  that’s life baby

to her stylish exercises in autofiction...

ava wolf
@wownicebuttdude · Apr 24
very exciting plans this weekend. for instance, i will be wearing a bathrobe, laying down, getting back up, taking a sip of water, laying down, computer, getting back up, wiping something (body? counter?), laying down, opening book, closing book, computer, etc.

to, somehow, actually good content about cats (rare in 2020)...

ava wolf
@wownicebuttdude · Apr 24
people ask how i can tell my cats apart. "both of your cats look the same," they say. ha! fools... one is a beautiful and elegant creature with silken fur, while the other is simply a bunch of ketchup in a ziplock bag with googly eyes

Bold and contemporary, Ava's tweets are that rare type of good tweet written by someone with an unpretentious ability to write well - truly a writer who tweets, not simply a tweeter who writes, or a writer who tweets to promote writing. This is the sunshine quadrant, the intersection of intent and execution that all good writers-on-twitter should target.


Mira Gonzalez
@miragonz · Apr 22
the last thought i have before i die is definitely gonna be something insanely stupid

Mira Gonzalez is not a best-kept secret. She's an OG alt-lit tweeter (even though she hates the label, like all good alt-lit writers do) with an out-of-print poetry book on Sorry House, ~30k followers and even 50% of a book of tweets (Selected Tweets, co-authored with Tao Lin, on Tyrant Books). While she's a strong meta-tweeter - consistently dunking with observational commentary with her finger on the timeline's pulse - I recommend following her for the sheer variety of topics she tackles with her self-assured, confident style. Check our her range, from weed thoughts...

Mira Gonzalez
@miragonz · Apr 27
seems like the whole point of golf is to play as little actual golf as possible?

to political commentary...

Mira Gonzalez
@miragonz · Apr 10
oh your candidate is a rapist who can't form a coherent sentence after 3pm? idk, that sounds like a You problem

to provocative fun facts...

Mira Gonzalez
@miragonz · Apr 23
just learned that one-third of all divorce filings in the US include the word "facebook"

...Mira is a must-follow writer who brings a good breadth and engaging relevancy to the feed. You can also mine her accounts (yes, plural) for some classic, hey-day twitter shit, including an account dedicated to her aborted attempt at reading Infinite Jest.


one love asshole
@oneloveasshole · Apr 26
was gonna post a pic of my unpublished manuscript printed out but remembered i’m not that kind of asshole.

Steve Anwyll is a Canadian author. His novel, Welfare (Tyrant Books) was one of the best books I read in 2019. While his novel is heartbreaking and raw, and in interviews he's enthusiastic and honest, on Twitter, Steve is a depressed, angry asshole. His lowercase, staccato, and bleak tweets are grounding and refreshingly meditative. From his self-deprecating self-empowerment...

one love asshole
@oneloveasshole · Apr 18
everything i believe in is bullshit and that’s ok.

to his unexpected philosophical treatises...

one love asshole
@oneloveasshole · Apr 22
you frisbee toss an expired pita out the window. it explodes in a cloud of dust on the sidewalk. and that's all there is to this life.

to his ability to 'connect the dots'...

one love asshole @oneloveasshole · Mar 5
looking at a pile of dust i swept up and thinking pretty good haul.

...Including Steve in your timeline is a good, often hilarious way to keep yourself off your high horse. He truly wrenches the most out of the short form that Twitter affords us, as any good writer should.


a;sdkfjasdlfj;d
@asdkfjasdlfjd · Jul 21
With the sensation of making a historical insight, caught self depressed at desk job beginning to conceptualize my sadness as rats scurrying around in my brain, like the ratatouille movie where they steer and control you, guided by sad rats

Nathan Duggan has some stories and poems on some places on the internet. He lives in Maine and has been using his twitter to curate a very strong, inventive, and engaging series of vignettes about work, self-worth, and crustaceans/slugs/insects. From our personal correspondence and from reading his writing, both published and non-published on the internet, i think the crustacean/slug/insect thing goes deep and may be one of the best/unique themes in writing I've encountered lately. Because of his consistently good tweets about crabs and muck...

a;sdkfjasdlfj;d
@asdkfjasdlfjd · Jul 11
Going to go to the beach today maybe, where there are, among other things, crabs and muck

...that good office depression life...

a;sdkfjasdlfj;d
@asdkfjasdlfjd · Jul 9
Thursday at work we get a little giddy. We talk maybe too loudly in the cells of our cubicles, we cackle and sneer. 'Another day another dollar,' rolling our eyes so hard they go into the backs of our heads. Outside it is raining -- perhaps it's been raining our whole lives

...and droll observational humor...

a;sdkfjasdlfj;d
@asdkfjasdlfjd · Jul 3
There is not a single law against it, but for some reason swimming in the marshes of my town has always seemed 'forbidden' to me

... I told him recently to repurpose several of his recent tweets into a short-chapter, kafkaesque, vignette-style book about working a shitty office job. I think it would be a good book.


sebastian castillo @bartlebytaco · 18h
yes i am 32... the age jesus christ infamously went “beast mode”

Sebastian Castillo is, in my mind, a principal player in making jokes about writing on twitter. With a chapbook of single-sentence "novels" on Bottlecap press and a hybrid prose/poetry collection forthcoming from Word West, Sebastian is unassuming, unpretentiously pretentious, and consistently hilarious. I think his experience as an adjunct writing professor in NYC has helped him hone is droll absurdism, his self-aware silliness. From his ongoing dream journals...

sebastian castillo
@bartlebytaco · Apr 2
dreamt that diet coke cost $40 a can. no way am i going to pay that! in the next dream, i was a field mouse running away from a big, ugly ogre who was trying to cook me up in his soup. no thanks!

to his seamless, stupid pop culture punchlines...

sebastian castillo
@bartlebytaco · Mar 14
just wrote this play called king lear. it’s about this huge dumbass old guy

to his revelatory, Bernhardian confessions...

sebastian castillo
@bartlebytaco · Apr 19
my mother said when i was a child the funniest thing in the world to me was frosty the snowman. to me, nothing was funnier than frosty the snowman

...Sebastian is probably indie lit's best-kept secrets, at least in terms of tweets. In a world of viral inanity, his tweets will remind you that, yes, writers can use their knowledge and power to be interesting, actually.


Neutral Spaces - Intern
@a_neutral_space · Apr 22
me, reading submission guidelines for some wix site lit mag with ads and 206 twitter followers: "damn my BEST huh? you want my BEST? damn alright i guess you deserve it"

Filling the void, I think, left behind by the likes of @muumuuinterns and other strange, anonymous, shitposty literature community accounts, the Neutral Spaces Intern - who is definitely not Dave Eggers - has captured my heart with his consistent mix of @dril-style dumbness to prescient commentary-on-the-commentary...

Neutral Spaces - Intern
@a_neutral_space · Mar 19
poetry? more like DICKSUCKETRY

And poop jokes...

Neutral Spaces - Intern
@a_neutral_space · Mar 17
my poems about shitting into a teacup have been nominated for the national book award. finally

Dav- I mean, The Intern - is a daily lit community supplement, the guy in the corner making the jerkoff motion and drinking from a forty while the rest of the party argues about Lorrie Moore or whatever. I'm also partial to the quick snatches of the Intern's personal narrative arc, when we get to see them; whether drunk on his fixie or punching in at the k-mart distribution center, the Intern's story is odd, beautiful, and oddly beautiful.

Neutral Spaces - Intern
@a_neutral_space · Oct 9, 2019
drumk on my fixie,and i have stolen twenty eight dollars worth of hanburgers from the enemy. timme for ooetry



mark leidner
@markleidner · Sep 6, 2018
each morning I put one uncooked ravioli in a thermos. i pour hot water over it, steeping it like tea, and then i drink it all day at work (i work at the white house) and at the end of the day, as i take the last sip of the tea, the soft ravioli slides into my mouth, and i eat it

Mark Leidner is great. He's an incredible artist. He has books of poetry on some small presses, a delightful collection of short stories on Tyrant Books, a few short film credits, and who knows what else in the works. He's a legit "creative" whose work is tight, focused, surreal, and meticulous - Only someone like Mark Leidner could write a 50 page love story/political thriller about ants and keep you gripped the entire way through, or a book of aphorisms that never runs dull. And his tweets are similarly powerful, strange and evocative. I highly encourage you to follow him, as his pure content to general self promotion ratio is incredible; he's almost a purely content-driven tweeter who scores 3-pointers with every shot. From his running X-Files bits...

mark leidner
@markleidner · May 19, 2015
mulder: in heaven will we finally be able to punish each other without causing each other to suffer?
scully: I don't know, mulder

to his aphoristic nanofictions...

mark leidner
@markleidner · Jun 24, 2012
unnecessary stop signs every ten feet on an endless highway with no intersections

to his running "unhinged guy at the podium" bits...

mark leidner
@markleidner · May 14, 2019
[pounding pulpit] we live on god’s ass

Mark is a top choice for anyone looking for good tweets by a good writer on a regular basis.

Monday, July 27, 2020

brief book reviews

this is an attempt to articulate my thoughts on some recently read books without pitching formal reviews to venues or deciding on some star-rating like on goodreads. i've spent a lot of time thinking about the role of reviews in 'the online writing community', the centralizing nature of avenues like goodreads, and the 'pointless frustration' of 'submitting' book reviews to places for publication. i want to write a blog post sometime about my feelings on how the internet has changed and what it means for things like promotional work, hype, engaging with readers, etc. but for now i'm just going to use this blog to write reviews, at least for the time being. i like feeling like i have the freedom to write my honest thoughts without feeling like negative or neutral ideas are inherently unwelcome because of the idea that the review should be about elevating/promoting a book/author. it also allows me, having written the stuff below already, to make connections between multiple books, and allows me to write reviews for older books as well as newer books in a way that's more satisfying than adding content to the goodreads database.

here are the 3 books i most recently read and my thoughts:

Faceless in Nippon by Dale Brett (Expat Press): I 'met' dale online through neutral spaces i think, or maybe just on twitter. we talked about shoegaze, which is a shared interest, and we talked about the idea of writing prose in a way that reads like how shoegaze sounds, which i haven't since thought too deeply about, but which is something dale says he's tried to do in a recently released chapbook/zine thing, which i haven't read. i bought Faceless based on kind of being friendly with dale online and some excerpts i read online (i think i only read one excerpt out of what seems like maybe 5-7 that exist online, which feels like a lot of excerpts). i like a lot of the book and read it pretty quickly. i read it during times when i don't normally read, which i've come to understand means i'm enjoying the book more than average, because of how structured my days are. the chapters are very short and there is a general narrative arc with some character-based subplots. i think it could have benefited from some editing (both copyediting and from a larger cutting/keeping/sequencing perspective) - the chapters vacillate between present and past tense, and there are some redundant passages (nearly identical ruminations on rejecting the mortgage/family/suburb life in the beginning and toward the end) and some passages that stifle the flow of the narrative. but that latter part is probably a personally negative thing, as i don't get much from dale's main aesthetic focus of cramming a weird adjective into every noun phrase to describe some setting, but people seem to respond to it online, so whatever. these are front-loaded in the book and I mostly skimmed them when they came about later on. related, there are experiences referenced in the book - going to punk clubs, seeing live music, etc etc. - which don't get any space in the narrative, which is a shame because i think they'd make for really great content with dale's voice/perspective. i think the biggest strengths of the book were the clear and open narratives revolving around the protagonist's love interest and other expat friend, but these sections are in the minority. i think the friend gets like 2 chapters and the girlfriend gets maybe 4. the scenes about riding bikes around and drinking beer, fucking around, feeling lonely but together - these appealed to me, and they really tied together, by the end, what i thought was great about it, which is that it's ultimately a novel about the experience of trying to be an expat - the romantic arc of living somewhere new and, eventually, getting over it. i think this is what makes the book unique, and it's something that i feel we can only really get in indie lit, as opposed to making it more specifically about the relationships between lovers and instead between a person and a place. i also liked the way that dale plays with his power, as an author/narrator, in making shit up. there's a chapter about a strange food/beverage that was really surreal, enticing, confounding, and interesting. the way that he wrote about it from an emotional point of view, and the ambiguous way he described it, made me google it after reading that chapter, but it doesn't exist, which impressed me. i thought this was a powerful move and could warrant a larger critical analysis of this chapter, and others that were similar. it was obvious that he had fun writing some parts of the book, and felt serious during others, which something something something range of styles and emotions from a literary perspective. so, overall, i think it could have been a great book, but as it exists it is a very good book. i could see dale's next book being a great book, especially if he gets more comfortable with cutting the fat. it feels like a debut indie album, where the melodic hooks and guitar sound outweigh the sprawling tracklist and weird production choices. stupid comparison but whatever. but it makes sense, since it's his debut indie book.

Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams (Vintage Classics): Bought some books by Joy Williams based on a tweet by Tao Lin saying that she was one of his most-read authors (and pictures of him wearing a cool purple joy williams tshirt). I had no other expectation in going in, but i ended up thoroughly enjoying it. I can see where she would have influenced his kmart realist/alt lit style in some ways, but her style is in some ways more complex and vague than his earlier work, and in this one especially, i got a lot of, like, pynchon/robbins/general 80's-style 'kooky character'-based dialogue, which i didn't expect. i was most moved by the emphasis on strange details and evocative turns of phrase. i felt like characters were never really 'introduced' and they faded in and out, which, combined with the section-based jumps in time, made it very dreamlike, or like i had skipped a page at times. in this way though, it felt uniquely 'challenging' as a novel-reading experience similar to when i first read thomas bernhard. and speaking of which, i assume he was/is an influence, especially in the way that some 'insane' characters end up monologuing/dialoguing throughout the book, to sort of, just, explore, i think, their madness and communicate it in a provocative way. however, in a way that doesn't seem to exist anymore in indie/alt lit, there are, like, 'twists' and 'reveals' and 'life or death' stakes, especially toward the end. it also felt like there was a good deal of symbolism that could be analyzed if i felt compelled to, but i don't, so i won't. in this way i see it sort of as a bridge between 'typical' big press novels and 'atypical' indie novels. the cover of this edition is, in my opinion, atrocious. it looks like a shitty beach read book for a book club. i enjoyed thinking about its previous owner buying it for that purpose and thinking "what the fuck" maybe 3 chapters in. this is her 3rd novel. i'm excited to read the novels that came before and after this to get a sense of her arc as a writer, and to read 99 stories of God which mike andrelczyk recommended to me and i bought based on some pictures he sent.

Supremecist by David Shapiro (Tyrant Books): Read this really quickly. The pages are really thick, photo-glossy, because of the many photographs. and the chapters are short. i didn't know what to expect going in at all, but ended up really enjoying it. it's very narrative-driven with kind of cliche plot points and the dialogue is often incredibly artificial, like from gilmore girls or an Aaron Sorkin show/movie, which i think is intentional, and i think makes it feel more like a movie. this sounds bad on rereading but i thought it worked fine. like, i could see it being a good little movie. i liked the inclusion of the photographs and the design, an obvious (but good, still) commentary like in the book, on supreme, the brand. and i liked the topic, the 'purpose' of the book is good, concise, clear, unique. i liked the strong characterization of the characters, the narrator, the travel partner, the other people they talk to. it's mostly set in japan, which paired nicely wit Faceless, seeing similar but different articulations of the same kind of things, especially the junk food - i laughed at how much 7/11 beef on a stick the narrator eats. laughed at some other lines and dialogue, the absurdity that he leans into a lot. i felt like the ending was good. i remember telling jessica it was "sweet" how it ended, like, endearing in a way. the artificality of the dialogue is probably its only real 'problem,' and some of it feels shoehorned in, and isn't as good as the bleak little scenes, eg. narrator falling asleep in a running bath in a hotel and then doing express checkout.

ok

trying to think of what else i read recently, running out of energy to write more of these right now. might just start here and continue this in the future, not retroactively write about any other books i read in the recent past. future posts will be about the below books, maybe.

i'm currently reading:
War on X-Mas by Alan Good
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
Frowns Need Friends Too by Sam Pink
The Collected Works volume 1 by Scott McClanahan
Imaginary Museums by Nicolette Polek
The Sellout by Paul Beatty

i'm reading them all sort of randomly when out walking the dogs or before bed or sometimes in the afternoon. i also got some books on plant and insect identification, i wanna spend more time with those, too. another book i bought used, on flower identification, is falling apart, the binding has turned to yellow dust. i might cut out some of the nicer looking flowers and use them for an art project with my toddler.

Friday, July 24, 2020

writing in progress

unsure if this is interesting to anyone but me but i felt emboldened by thinking about the transparency in publishing talk recently to write something like this. envisioning this as part one of two parts, one about work in-prep and my plans/goals/work done for them, and another about previously published stuff and insider details and thoughts on it, both in terms of mags and book presses. this is the first part, about what i'm working on or have worked on but have not published, might not ever publish, etc., which is dumb because i have only published one book, of barn poems, which was ~60 pages, whereas all of this stuff totals like ~400 pages maybe, or something.

the writing i am working on

1. i have roughly put together a collection of flash/short stories. my working title has been Today is Totally Fucked but in trying to pitch it i've moved to calling it Everything is Totally Fine. it is currently ~60 stories, ~24k words. some stories are only a sentence or two, some are as long as ~2k words. some of the stories have been on Hobart, X-Ray, and Maudlin House and the Neutral Spaces blog, although everything pulled from there has since been very reworked. the genesis for the project was, originally, a plan giacomo and i had about starting a bear parade-style website that would only do dual/collaborative ebook things. i wrote ~6 stories and he wrote ~8 poems, something like that, that complement each other well, and he coded it up so it'd look really nice. he's since repurposed those poems for Chainsaw Poems and Other Poems and i've rewritten my stories in some drastic ways for this collection.

a few weeks ago i emailed a pitch for the collection (and an excerpt) to yuka at soft skull via her catapult email, based on richard chiem doing the same thing, which he said in an interview on either other ppl or zero point fiction, for King of Joy. i feel like it will be ignored for three reasons: 1) i'm a nobody, 2) the stories aren't good, 3) soft skull has, as of march, stated they only accept agent-submitted pitches for fiction. i have also dm'd gian at tyrant books to 'shoot my shot' and see if he wanted to read it, and he responded favorably and asked me to email it to him, which i did, but haven't heard back yet (i don't know the typical timeframe for any of this), and i have low/zero expectations. i queried an agent i found listed on a blog who said he responds to all queries, saying that i simply needed help pitching to soft skull and/or melville house, and that otherwise didn't want/need any other agent-like help, but he responded (quickly) saying he doesn't represent fiction anymore. clash has expressed interest based on twitter interactions and me asking leza if they'd be interested in seeing it as well, although christoph edits the fiction for clash, and he may not like it.

i don't currently care about getting this book, which feels like my 'best' current project, on any other presses besides these 4. even though i like several presses, i don't feel a desire to move 'laterally' from clash to a similarly small press, which feels like something a lot of people do, but i don't see much purpose in it, personally. i have vague thoughts about liking it when an author stays on the same press for multiple books, in the way that bands do this on record labels, and to work toward a more clear aesthetic/expectation/working relationship between author and press - this could be another blog post i think. anyway, i feel 90% certain it will come out on clash in the next year or two, and i hope that they don't feel bad about me trying to pitch tyrant and soft skull, or for assuming they'd even want to publish it, but i feel like this is normal, writers trying to move onto bigger presses that invest more in galleys/reviews/etc. anyway. these stories are very much in the vein of bear parade stuff but i diverge in certain, and i think, important ways, although i have a fear that this influence will be too 'obvious' and people will view them as imitative and derivative of this style. similar to how i felt self-conscious about people thinking the barn poems were 'stupid', i feel like people will think these are similarly 'stupid', or maybe worse, both stupid and derivative.

2. some of the stories cut form the above collection i think, maybe, will be reserved and rewritten for another Untitled collection that will be tonally distinct from TiTF/EiTF and more internally consistent. i currently have 3-4 of these stories, and one, about a mattress, is about ~7k words and i feel like needs to keep growing. another one won an award hosted by mythic picnic, because it was published on wigleaf, and they sent me $150, which i donated to the Minneapolis Freedom Fund (this was, i think, maybe, the only time i've 'accepted' payment for writing, aside from a smaller version of this same prize...or something...for the same story). sam pink dm'd me to compliment a version of one of the sections i had posted on the neutral spaces blog, but i think he only read it because he logged on to post his own story or poem, but it was still nice to hear that he liked it. other people have complemented the 'no future' story on wigleaf in private correspondence. i haven't spent much time 'compiling' this collection, mostly on writing/fleshing out stories which i think will be a part of it, so far.

3. i have a document i am calling Normal Stories which consists of generally longer, sadder, more boringly literary fiction stories, most of which have been published on, for example, soft cartel. a few of the stories have not been published. i like them but am struggling with what they mean in terms of my voice/brand/whatever. i will most likely not do anything with this collection.

4. i sent jenn from x-ray a ~12k word story called Bobby DiGiorno will Fucking Die based on a sort of solicitation for a vague idea about starting a print or ebook-only (?) press for manuscripts about this length. this reads confusingly - i wrote it, then sent it, because of its length. jenn has put it into a google doc with suggested edits i haven't looked at in a few weeks but seemed fine/good/minimal when i first looked. it is about pizza brand-sponsored lifestyle icons acting as sort of like the face of/machinations behind the ruling class in the near future. it has a bunch of silly shit in it and i like it, i think it's a fun story. cavin has read a couple iterations of it. i just remembered that i sent it to ben devos at apocolypse party as well, who declined to pursue it, citing a stylistic shift in the press, which is reasonable. at the time, on sending it to him, and still now, i felt/feel conflicted about whether i want it to be a book at all, but i think it's maybe important to just make books instead of otherthinking this.

5. to celebrate/promote giacomo's book on ghost city press this year, i wrote Chainsaw Blurbs and Other Blurbs, as an homage, also, to his book of blurbs for my book. i like the idea of us writing books of blurbs for each other. i really like the longer pieces i wrote for it, or repurposed from other older writing, especially. it will be limited to 50 copies. we haven't announced it yet, though, so, haha. whatever. i think people will like it. it's 50 blurbs, about ~8k words.

6. i am collaborating with giacomo on a long-form poem. the google doc is currently titled POEM. it is a stylistically rigid, intentionally ambiguous stream of consciousness that loosely centers around being in heaven and thinking about celebrities. it is currently ~6,666 words. i think it is funny and insightful and we are both enthusiastic about it. we've had some pretty extensive discussions concerning the poem and how it relates to, comments on, or conveys sexual relationships, gender, and celebrities, in the process of writing and editing it. giacomo is very thoughtful and a good person. collaborating on it has been fun and invigorating. here are two lines from it: "Thinking about an octopus while rinsing Bill Gates’ underwear in the sink / Thinking about an octopus doing laundry in the sink because Alexis Bledel’s washing machine is broken"

7. i have been compiling and writing more small poems. i kind of want to do an old-school digital chap kind of thing with them, maybe get other people to make similar ones and make a site for them all. i also wrote something like 75 more barn poems as part of a fundraiser for bail funds a few weeks ago. it was very taxing but i feel good about maybe 50 of them, as barn poems. unsure what i'll do with any of them.

8. i have two abandoned/whatever novels called Yarn (~65k words) and Give Up (~50k words). Yarn was basically the first thing i wrote, before everything else here, and i'm not sure how to describe it. it is vaguely 'normal' in terms of literary fiction and 'higher stakes' ideas like death/birth/power. it is sort of 'mysterious' and uses lots of made up words and explores themes of cognition from a philosophical/linguistics perspective and how societies are, or could be, eventually, structured. it tracks different perspectives and i employ a lot of different voices/narrative conventions and i focused a lot on sort of complex, strange phrasing and avoiding/pre-empting idiomatic cliches. it was inspired by the snippet of out of the world that knausgaard included in book 5 of my struggle, the scene of firefighters looking at a burning building. cavin has read a draft of it and thinks it should can be easily finished and that it should be published but i'm less sure. in my head i feel like it has 'big debut novel energy.

excerpts from Give Up have been on sleazemag/derelict lit and the neutral spaces blog. it is about a grad school dropout / in-school suspension supervisor mostly feeling depressed and eating junk food, thinking existentially and thinking about existentialism, and dealing with a dead father/sense of home/place/purpose while living in the midwest. it was very much inspired by lars iyer's spurious novels. it was basically the second thing i wrote. i've sent versions of it to some people but i think only no glykon and nick farriella read/skimmed it. nick had good feedback using fancy mfa terms and no glykon complemented the internality of it, i think. i submitted an early version of it to a metatron contest and tried querying one agent about it. i feel a sense of regret/idiocy about both of those things, in retrospect. for a long time i felt optimistic about it, about publishing it, about being critically acclaimed, etc. but have since considered it more or less abandoned in a way that feels freeing. i briefly considered completely rewriting it into a long-form narrative sequel to 50 Barn Poems, which i would call 50 Barn Poems 2, but i don't have the energy for this, i don't think.

Thursday, July 23, 2020

artistic direction of the no future tshirt blog

thought a little bit today about what i want/don't want for this blog.

i had some conversations with people about this blog and other blogs. and i read some other blogs - some contemporary, one my internet archived xanga from 2005-2007. i felt incredible boredom at one of the former, incredible shame at the latter. i also enjoyed other blogs i've read. more people are starting them, which feels good.

so i do not want it to be a diary, a mild survey of 'what i'm doing', nor do i want it to be a place where i post embarrassing political or personal opinions. i want each post to have a purpose, and i want to emphasize writing - books, writing, reading, publishing, and other writers. of the posts i have already queued up, this is the theme so far. i like it.

ok

giacomo

giacomo made a joke on twitter asking that i blog about him so i'm going to blog about him. this is a post about giacomo. i was thinking about what i would say and i realize that a lot of people online don't know anything about other people online so it might be interesting if i just list off stuff i know about giacomo so other people can know these things too.

Giacomo Pope 
(this is giacomo)

giacomo, in his personal, irl world in the united kingdom, goes by "jack". i, and almost everyone who only know him through the internet, call him "giacomo" or "giac". cavin pronounces "giacomo" like "gee-ah-co-mo" which i think is funny.

giacomo has a sister and a brother. his sister is younger than him by something like 15 years. his brother is only two or three years younger than him. his brother, i think, is some kind of professional, "good", non-artist person, or something. [update] his brother is also a photographer, so he is not a non-artist. giacomo recommend describing his brother as "moral." neither of us are entirely sure what that conveys, but it feels appropriate

giacomo's father lives in italy and giacomo's mother lives in the UK.


we 'met' over the internet because of music. here is an excerpt from the afterword in my forthcoming book of blurbs about his book of chainsaw poems:

[W]hile we’re both writers, we actually found each other through music. I became obsessed with Giacomo’s musical accompaniment to Sam Pink’s despairing recitation of Your Glass Head Against the Brick Parade of Now Whats, which was released as a collaborative album between the two in 2017. Giacomo then found my music, a short EP titled Three Trucks, which was also posted online in 2017. We thus started talking and soon found in each other similar passions – for music, obviously, but also for weird internet poetry, for minimalist design, and for our special type of humor.

 giacomo is very hairy. i think he's hairier than cavin. both are hairier than i am.

giacomo has recommended me several books that i didn't like, and he has recommended me several books that i did like. he owns more poetry books than i do, and based on a quick survey, he owns more books by women than i do, which i feel bad about, and i am working on closing that gap. re: books i didn't like, many other people i the indie lit scene have praised the same books or recommended them to me, so i don't think it's a giacomo thing, but a me thing.

giacomo is doing a phd in maths. 'maths' is how british people refer to 'math'. to them, maths is more like 'sports', whereas to us, math is more like 'music.' i think this is a very poetic observation that is also very wrong.

we talk every day over twitter DM. i'm 98% confident we talk every single day.

i am giacomo's friend on linkedin dot com

i don't think giacomo has a facebook

giacomo and i have collaborated on, and continue to collaborate on, many projects, writing-based and otherwise. i think we're very similar in certain ways about coming up with and trying to execute ideas and 'schemes,' except he's more technically and artistically savvy than i am. for example, shortly before he curated neutral spaces to host writing cvs for indie writers, i had made the same kind of page for sam pink, hosted on tumblr, and considered making more for other people. i think this is one of many examples where we basically thought of the same idea independently, only now we talk about the ideas as they come up.

giacomo's apartment has a lot of plants in it, and his bookshelves look really cool.

giacomo loves his partner holly very much. i think she's the one who does all the plants.

i realize now that i know a lot of other stuff about giacomo but this is probably enough for a blog post about him. i don't want to say anything too personal or weird at this time. i am waiting for him to confirm that he is ok with the content of this post.

oh, giacomo is also really into cryptography, which i think is cool and something i don't have the brain or patience for. i admire his interest in, and dedication to, cryptography. i think there is a 50% chance that giacomo will abandon the 'independent internet writing scene' in favor of the 'hobbyist internet cryptography scene' in the next 5 years.

[update] giacomo has approved of this post and suggest an edit about his brother, which i included as an [update]. not sure if this [update] thing makes sense but maybe it does.


Wednesday, July 22, 2020

reflecting on blogging

i've been enjoying, so far, this blog. i spent ~20 minutes looking up how to use blogger and do simple things. the way that it still encourages you to include and tinker with a bunch of little bullshits is fun, feels like old myspace/xanga days, which makes sense, since it's a blog.

i've also written 4 or 5 blog posts already that i've 'scheduled' to be posted over the next week. so this blog isn't that exciting in a public way, yet, i'm excited about it. i have already enjoyed the more freeform way i can layout my thoughts and i have enjoyed thinking of more blog post topics. i don't think i'll post 'creative' writing to this blog. i'll continue to use the neutral spaces blog for weird writing ideas i want people to read and submit to websites i like for more finished/edited pieces. maybe this will change. this feels very bloggy, this self-reflective, self-referential, blog-specific blogging. it's nice though.

multiple people have expressed interest to me about blogging as well. feels like a good thing.

starting a blog

i've been thinking a lot about how the internet has changed since i felt more like i enjoyed my time on the internet. blogs specifically were great spaces, and there's nothing new to be said about them in general terms.

my best personal relationship with blogs was centered on blogs that focused on sharing/cataloguing/archiving music. there were a lot of great blogs dedicated to completing digital discographies for generally unknown bands, based on genre, region, etc.

i recently thought about music i used to listen to all the time, especially during the summer i worked the closing shift at a bagel/coffee place / bar in ithaca ny near the cornell campus. i would listen to Henry's Dress on my earbuds while sweeping the patio and walking down the hill at like 2am. i got all the henry's dress music, including a bootleg taping from a live radio station performance, from the burnt toast blog. the guy was passionate about them and completing the discography and, importantly, sharing download links. looking through my old computers, i couldn't find the mp3s anymore. all gone. no idea where to. so i looked up the blog and bam, still there. a post from 2009 with some mediafire links that still worked. and now i have the music again. it's incredible.

the burnt toast blog also featured his exploits buying records off of ebay, and he'd post weird drawings. it was earnest and exciting. and there were a million other blogs like it. for the indie lit kids, tao lin and the other alt lit squad obviously lived and died on blogs. the twitter-only life is desolate compared to these old days. the idea of spending time in a space, curated by a person, dedicated to their ideas and art and passions, is appealing. and now tao lin is blogging again, and i've enjoyed his post about writing for magazines (and getting paid for it). that was engaging. i want more content like that and i want to make content like that.

this won't be like burnt toast or tao's blog. i don't' know what it will be. but i want to experiment with spending less time on twitter and more time creating and consuming longer-form content on blogs. i think i'll post writing and thoughts on writing and books mostly. we'll see. ok. thanks.