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.

brief book reviews

feeling weird because for the last couple weeks i was unable to read as much as i usually do. part of this was because i suffered from a prolonged, acutely painful gout flair up that lasted ~10 days, preventing me from walking my dogs in the mornings, which is usually when i am able to read almost uninterrupted for ~20 minutes each day. and then shortly after that subsided, my toddler stopped sleeping well, and now most nights i have to sit with my toddler to induce sleep and wake up and repeat one or two times in the middle of the night, making my own bedtime chaotic and ruining my energy level throughout the day, meaning reading books at night in bed is harder than usual.

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

Blood-Soaked Buddha / Hard Earth Pascal by Noah Cicero (Trident Press): i've been slowly reading through noah cicero's catalog of books. i think i read nature documentary first (which i liked a lot), then the human war (which i didn't find super gripping at the time but appreciated that for its time was rightfully impactful), then go to work (which i liked the first half of more than the second half, but i admired noah's confidence/ambition in writing the second half the way it is written), then give it to the grand canyon (which i liked a lot, and interviewed noah about on vol. 1 brooklyn), then best behavior (which i really liked, and pestered my friends about for maybe a week while reading it). i'm thankful that he has such an extensive and varied bibliography and that i can continue to find and enjoy his writing for the foreseeable future. i like how small the book is and often kept it in my back pocket. i thought it was funny that it lists an editor in the credits (nate perkins) but is kind of edited poorly, eg it consistently uses "everyday" when it should be "every day", etc., but it was also edited better than best behavior, which i think maybe wasn't edited at all. the book is non-fiction, basically an open, concise, and lucid philosophical text about noah's views on spirituality/life outlook and his personal experience with reading/understanding buddhism. he spends a lot of time more or less critiquing aspects of american religion/spiritualism/conservatism which is familiar to me as someone who also more or less grew up in Ohio. i felt like his invented examples of people/outlooks and experiences, while reductive and cartoonish, were still effective in communicating his points and made me think in terms of how i view people and where i could use more compassion/understanding in my daily life. i like that he accepts that he doesn't know everything, that he has no authority over anyone. i liked his simple, often playful, sincere tone, for example one paragraph ends with the line "Comets are cool!" and another ends with "I was super annoying!" I also liked his honesty and personal details, and once you get past the first few chapters full of nietzche and sartre and buddhism quotes, he grounds his argumentation in his personal life and experiences and those of his friends and family. i personally find a lot of value in autobiography/memoir/autoficiton and i think noah is very good at writing this way. i also accept that, now, having read many of his books, he often writes about the same things and events, but i think it's interesting to think of his body of work as interrelated, non-discrete, offering various looks at the same topics but from different perspectives in style, eg nonfiction vs fiction and in time/place/experience. i can't compare this book to other books on the topic of buddhism; it's my first and only text on buddhism that i've read, but i found it insightful and helpful. i've been recently struggling with my emotions, anger, feeling tired/drained, feeling present and engaging with family because of things like my toddler's inability to sleep through the night, the global pandemic, etc., so it was good for me to read about this and think on it, get some help/tips on being mindful, etc. I think if i instead read a book about buddhism that just presented a bunch of those 'hard to understand' quotes with nebulous morals or points, like...about a guy hitting someone with a stick...or about someone eating a corpse in a cave...without the grounding of noah's emphasis on explaining things well, i would feel frustrated and turned off. i feel ok admitting that as a white man from ohio, i benefited from having a white man from ohio explain some aspects of buddhism to me as an introduction to the topic. i will probably try to read some more of the source texts that he references, in the future. my brother in law is a buddhist, but we haven't talked much about it. he is a person of many great passions (hiking, thrifting, board gaming), who has many collections (music boxes, minerals, instruments) and works as an arborist, which i think is cool. i know mike andrelczyk knows a lot about buddhism and talks about zen a lot. he's a lot more zen than i am, probably one of the more chill people in indie lit.

Heck, Texas by Tex Gresham (Atlatl Press): i bought this book on a recommendation from cavin, who was very enthusiastic about it, i think because cavin had/has been excited about reading/writing books that experiment with form, especially screenplay-type structure, like that jin woo book on 11:11, and a book that cavin himself has been writing/editing that's written sort of like a hybrid screenplay thing. tex and i (and cavin, haha) had some short pieces in a bad lung press digital zine last month and i liked tex's piece the most out of the whole zine, i think, so based on that and cavin's rec i bought Heck, Texas. i'm writing all this to sort of illuminate aspects of my book-buying system, so i can better understand myself re: what influences me to buy a book and maybe leverage that to help sell more of my own or others' books. aside from a Mike Kleine book, this is the only other book on Atlatl i've read, and the press feels, in my head, kind of like a smaller and less gimmicky Inside the Castle because of this (every time i think of Atlatl, i think of joe bielecki saying it out loud on his podcast, and the sound of it sounds funny to me). anyway, this is a book written mostly in fragments across 3 sections, basically each page is a separate fragment, with different font, format, etc., with some illustrations and handwriting, stuff like that. it's generally based on vignettes centered on a nowhere shithole town in texas, with a lot of non-sequitur-seeming vignettes about really bleak things, mostly (brutal) death and violence, hard drugs, flagrant homophobia and racism, inflicting trauma on kids, all to (satirically) condemn a lot of aspects of american (small town) culture, i think. as brutal as some of the scenes/vignettes are, i think they're effective in reminding me in different ways, that the 'real' world differs from being online, in that while absurd/satirical, and while a lot of the scenes (esp. around classrooms) feel like experiments in 'dead baby joke'-style black comedy, a lot of it also feels very realistic, probably is happening right now all over the country, etc., and is effective in condemning things via the explicit brutality. the 'narrative' during the first two sections, as much as there is, is 'unreliable,' with different perspectives/imaginings of the same (bleak, violent) events. stylistically, it isn't really a book i would pick up on my own if i didn't have some personal relationship with the author or someone like cavin to recommend it. i think part of what made it hard for me to really enjoy is that the constant shifting of focus, topic, characters, events, etc. without any grounding or framing makes it hard for me to feel invested in any particular passage. each new page requires caring about the page as a generally independent piece of prose/poetry/art/whatever, and the lack of narrative movement made me feel more apathetic as i read. another thing that sticks out to me, which makes it hard to feel invested in starting each new page, personally, is that tex frequently uses the same set up + punchline combo of an 'intense' paragraph set up followed by a one-line punchline that diffuses everything, e.g. a dense paragraph of a man 'madly' pontificating about existentialism to, it turns out, an apathetic stripper, or when a Black man monologues a heartfelt confession about race relations to a white man who's just talking to him, we find out, to mug him. this happens frequently in the first section, and after the first couple times i felt myself feeling like "ok i get it" after the first 2-3 sentences and then skipping to the last line for the 'joke' which i knew was coming, so i could move on. in this way i think the stylistic decisions sort of interfere with each other -- the narrative ticks and recurring structure undermines a lot of the actual writing, which i think in a different context would maybe be more impressive/powerful. not sure if this makes sense. overall the texts range from sort of schlocky serious/spooky to flippant black comedy -- while some of the attempts at being mysterious or whatever don't feel super effective (like the 'creepy' slanted handwriting throughout), there are a lot of different kinds of jokes, and many of them i felt were pretty funny, and some i didn't get i think because i don't know much about cinema (there's some recurring joke(?) about a johnny depp movie which may or may not exist). the third section (written as a screenplay) is my favorite part of the book, as it has a narrative arc, is based on a single (interesting) character, and is more consistently funny and enjoyable to read, imo, and i guess in retrospect requires the first two sections, to some extent, to create the setting. i wish the third section were longer, i think, in that it ends kind of arbitrarily (something something comment on purposelessness/arbitrarity of life). overall it makes sense to me that tex would reach out to werner herzog for a blurb (which he got, which is rad imo) -- it feels like a book someone into experimental film would read/write. i like tex and i like some of his writing i've seen online, i just don't think i'm the target demo for this particular book, which is fine, because this kind of writing is sort of designed to challenge/put people off; i'm not a particularly cool person and i don't really watch or care about movies. this kind of book also feels 'vaguely popular' right now in twitter-centric indie lit, with atlatl, inside the castle, and now apocalypse party and other online venues investing in horror-adjacent, fragmented, 'visual' narratives, or something like that, i think. my favorite parts in the first two sections were the craigslist/facebook posts about sex and missing persons and stuff like that and the long paragraph about popping a zit.

Two Against One by Frederick Barthelme (Grove Press): this is the first frederick barthelme book i've read. i picked it up based on that tao lin tweet about the authors who wrote the most books he'd read, and barthelme was like number 3 or 4. i've also seen, maybe because i'm paying attention to the name more, some discussion in my twittersphere of his short stories, which i'm curious to read. i think this book is unique in many ways and i can see how it influenced tao lin and earned the term 'k-mart realism', as there is an emphasis on consumer culture being wholly integrated into the daily life of every character, and barthelme spends a lot of space in the prose on things like buying/using consumer products, eating snacks (and a lot of frozen/microwaved foods), thinking/talking about furniture and decorations and home appliances, considering minute details of car interiors and how people drive, and the contents/appearances of strip malls/other roadside stuff. all these things feel unique to read, to me, as opposed to in other books where most of these things are glossed over if they're not central to the plot. here though i think they are kind of central to the plot, in the way that 'nothing really happens' and all the characters live explicitly purposeless lives such that buying and using consumer products is kind of like all they have to depend on in breaking up the monotony of their otherwise pointless lives. some of these scenes, and some of the wording of things (at some point the protagonist feels like 'his life is fucked', which was good/funny/encouraging phrasing to read) are very very appealing to me, while a lot of the plot points (like some digression's about the protagonist's mother) and bits of monologue/dialogue seem extra pointless. when some chapters began, i'd feel excited, while when others began, i'd feel like putting down the book to take a break. toward the end of the book i felt like it could have been edited down significantly, and i kept thinking about how sebastian castillo tweeted that barthelme reportedly often skimmed books and assumed other people did too, or something like that, and it made me wonder if his books were written 'to be skimmed' or something like that, hence this book's slow/undirectional nature. i appreciated the way that 'how i felt' about the central idea of the plot -- the protagonist's semi-estranged wife trying to convince him to agree to an ill-defined, non-sexual, three-way marriage -- kept changing based on the introduction of 'new evidence,' in that i would go back and forth in my head on whether what was happening was 'unfair' or not re: infidelity and companionship. i liked that everything, for everyone, at all times in the narrative, seemed ambiguous/vague, even though this sometimes made for a sort of frustrating reading experience. i also think barthelme is exceedingly talented at identifying and writing about small details, including facial/body movements, and i wouldn't be surprised if this were influential for sam pink, for example, who, to me, is exceptionally talented at describing face/body movements (and many other details about people/the world). something that did stick out to me though is that a lot of the dialogue is confusing, i think because of how tone isn't really conveyed sometimes, and characters use idioms or phrasing that's unfamiliar to me, so, like, someone will give a little monologue about their feelings, and someone else will respond with like (i'm making this up) "That's a lotta fresh coffee on the stove," and then some other person will be described as looking hurt and be like "Ok now don't get mean," and I will have to try to figure out from (limited) context clues what the fuck "that's a lotta fresh coffee on the stove" is supposed to convey, to what degree it'd be read as mean, etc. After maybe the first third, i was unsure how it could possibly end, but i think the ending was good in a weirdly cathartic, funny, and sort of rushed way. i sort of had the sense that he didn't have a particularly good idea of how to end it, and went with one of the funnier ideas that popped into his head, which appeals to me from a writing perspective.

 

thank you for reading my book reviews. i'm currently reading a joy williams collection, mallory smart's poetry collection, and since i laid my burden down by brontez purnell. i picked up, briefly, the knausgaard book about munch, but didn't feel compelled to continue reading it, although i had been independently thinking about how i like how he describes people and artwork as 'open' or 'closed', and in the ~3 pages i read, he used these terms to describe artwork, haha

stupid book covers

sometimes i fuck around with book cover ideas that are mostly stupid, or sometimes serious, or to augment a joke, or not-quite-a-joke, in a group DM, but usually they don't end up being used for anything. this post is a collection of some of the covers, because i think they're kind of interesting.

1. sometimes cavin sends silly selfies to me or in a group DM and i turn them into fake book covers. this one is from a selfie cavin sent me when he was working security at a health clinic during peak covid. i think his hair looks cool in this picture:

 

 

2. this one happened in two stages. the first was sebastian castillo riffing on twitter about the cover for his book not i, how he liked the real cover, but joked that he wished it had included a picture of him doing skateboard tricks in front of the guggenheim museum (which was on fire) or something like that. i made a quick photoshop thing to that effect with sebastian's face and replied to the tweet with it, which got word west to follow me on twitter, i think. then i joked with some people in a group DM about repurposing my old longer 'normal' stories to make Tao Lin the protagonist of each one and self publishing it (replete with unauthorized melville house logo) - hence the synopsis referencing actual stories i've written for this fake cover. i liked the idea of it being confusing about who wrote the book / what the book actually was. but altogether it seemed like an overly weird thing to try to publish in any capacity, but i still think the cover looks cool. i also like the idea of calling stories "touchdowns":

3. this is me putting a joke mike made into a book cover. i like jokes like this, about convoluted ideas followed by "and Other Stories." i like the font on it. i would probably pick this book up if i saw it at a book store. edit: mike actually wrote a story based on this, and it was published on xray. i have been trying to encourage mike to write a collection/novel based on this character/setting and he seems to be working on it to some capacity:

4. i struggled for a while coming up with a cover for chainsaw blurbs & other blurbs. i'm happy with the one we landed on (giacomo was very supporting/encouraging), but this was one of the later contenders. i like the weird emptiness of the back image:

 

5. i briefly toyed with the idea of making a sort of imprint under back patio for a chapbook run with thematically similar covers - public domain drawings about death/skeletons and bold colors. i think cavin will be doing something similar, a bundle of 'mini books' in 2021, unrelated to this idea. i think i was dissuaded by the general purposelessness of publishing books and lack of plan after making some covers. unsure about the font, but in general i think they look cool:

 

6. this is an idea i pitched to jenn at xray when talking about Bobby DiGiorno Will Fucking Die, which seems likely to be published as part of a small novel(la) series by xray. it is based on the cover of the sellout. turns out that even though jenn asked about my thoughts on a cover, they already have a cover scheme idea, so this won't be the cover, but i really like how it looks and would like to make a book that looks like this, either for myself or someone else, at some point:

i enjoy making book covers, although personally i think i would like to have a book with hand-drawn art/text sometime. i feel less compelled by plain, digital design on book covers.