death egg

in early september, i published Death Egg by nathaniel duggan via back patio press. this was the first back patio book since sad sad boy, which i published in March 2022.

background and editing

i had maintained a loose email correspondence with nathaniel starting sometime in 2020, i think based on him sending me a poem for the quaranzine. we talked about our lives and poetry and indie lit drama for a while after this. i had given him editorial feedback on various poems during this time and encouraged him, i think, to make a collection.

looking at my email, on february 3rd, i gave him editorial feedback including "these are just great. great poems", a suggestion to change the name to death egg, and general praise such as "i really really find the thematic preoccupations and imagery compelling. the deployment of sci-fi intergalactic, video game, deep see, apocalypse imagery all mesh well, different hues of a perfect purplish blue. i think it's perfectly executed - the video games are not reddity wining or pop culture genuflection but are used as something to comment, i feel, on the larger cultural fuckedness, the integration of escapism into the despair pondering that feels subtle, effective, and non-clichely contemporary -- video games as the 'television of today,' etc. i can't say praise right, ever, i sound insane saying nice things, but i hope this makes sense[...]thank you for letting me read it. whoever publishes it won't do it justice." he did not pay me for these edits; i have also edited various versions of his short story collection manuscript, which i think a bigger publisher should put out, because it's very good.

after back patio fell apart in 2021/2022, and after i published some books unrelated to back patio, i felt more confidence in restarting the press mostly without cavin, and asked nathaniel to publish his book. before this i had suggested another limited-run book like orz, but then felt like trying something new/normal. cavin gave me his blessing to reopen the press in may. i reached out to duggan in june, i think, over twitter DM, to confirm my interest in publishing it as a back patio book.

once he agreed, i edited the book some more over maybe 3 rounds of edits, and then later 2+ minor edit rounds to clean up formatting and stuff. most of my edits were about sequencing, minor punctuation changes, a couple additional lines (partly through talking over DM and misremembering things from the poems, which he thought were good changes/ideas). some edits include "what about an exclamation point at the end of the first line?" and "recommend replacing last period with ‘, etc.’"

i only later learned that death egg is also the name of a spaceship or something from sonic the hedgehog. i do not know if this was intentional when he wrote the poem/lines about a death egg. i think it's a good, evocative, hard-to-say title that made the book feel unique. the sonic connection is mostly funny, and resulted in some good riffing online.

design

i did the inside layout and cover design. i used ms word and ms powerpoint. we iterated on the cover, manically, for like two weeks, before settling on the general cover we ended up with. stylistic themes to drive this work included bear parade/classic alt lit minimalism and anime. for a while there was a cracked egg on the cover, but this was eventually scrapped.

he wanted it to be yellow because he liked gg rolland's book on clash, which is mostly yellow. some versions accidentally used the same pink and yellow and font as my band's cassette three trucks, which was funny, but unacceptable to me, but, frustratingly for nathaniel, one of his favorite versions.

early on he had shared with me an image of an anime title card that he liked the look of. this is what influenced the final typography on the cover - the mix of japanese and the severe all caps serif font. another source of inspiration was the dvd cover for FLCL, with its bold yellow and black. i did not have the budget or interest to get a custom-drawn manga-style cover. i remember struggling with recreating manga-style 'beam attacks' using a free picture of a satellite with powerpoint for a while, then giving up.

the drawing on the final cover is from the public domain, i think from some lost in space comic, or something. i used similar pictures for interstitial art in the quaranzines. i get most of my free graphics from publicdomainvectors.org

the japanese on the cover is mostly from google translate, but some of it is the direct translation used from sonic the hedgehog for 'death egg.' i don't know much about japanese. an early ARC version we sent out had a 'pretend bad translation' synopsis that was embarassing, and which i thought i didn't include in the ARCs i had printed. the arcs were, additionally, very poor quality paper-wise and had a lot of formatting errors, and made me laugh a lot.

we decided on sans serif fonts on the inside to evoke classic alt lit aesthetics, because of the lineage of the poems/style and our shared appreciation for early alt lit. these aren't alt lit poems in any classic sense but have many shared reference points. i imagine someone more engaging than me could write up a better analysis.

i think the final product looks good and am proud of how it turned out.

promotion - ARCS/blurbs

i asked duggan for a list of potential blurbers and reached out to folks on his behalf. everyone had kind things to say, even if they didn't end up blurbing in time for the final printing. i enjoyed corresponding with people that i think/assume dislike me to this end. maggie nelson responded, unexpectedly, and gave me an address to send a book to, but clarified she didn't really do any blurbs anymore.

i also sent ARCs/final copies to people who do podcasts/reviews, but so far we never heard from anyone about these, although one person posted a picture of the book on twitter. i included a small press release, which i confided to josh sherman as "embarassing to write," not because of the book, but because of the vapid futility of writing press releases for small press books. i sent an ARC to the heavy feather review, but it was returned to me because the editors moved/changed. i also sent a free copy of the book to ~3 authors who i just thought would enjoy it, without expectation of promotion.

Promotion - local media

i reached out to several local maine venues for promotion, including duggan's alma mater university creative writing program to organize a reading. i was ignored by all of these leads except one daily maine-based blog, who requested a physical copy. one of the venues, a local tv channel, automatically blocked my email address.

Promotion - piss

the back patio twitter account reached out to several internet sex workers asking to send them books to pee on, as a promotional video effort, but this corresponded to the same week, or possibly day, that twitter made DMing people a bluecheck option only by default, so it's possible no one ever got the messages. this also includes dasha, a podcaster i don't know anything about. but we didn't ask her to pee on any books; we just asked if she'd like a copy, because she had posted about the same anime that inspired the cover design.

we also tweeted asking for folks to pee on the book if we sent an extra copy. i had forgotten who replied to this/was unsure how serious anyone was and only sent out one extra book, to coleman bomar, who peed on it and posted a video. later someone else from tennessee ordered a book and asked for some of coleman's pee, which i do not have access to. i am unsure why pee was a central theme for the book promotion, but it worked out well, i think, and made me laugh a lot.

Promotion - preorder bundles

we also offered a bundle of a shirt, magnet, and book. the shirt making has been a shitty, still unresolved saga, wherein i tried to have them made locally to support local businesses and save money on shipping. but i ended up working with perhaps the shittiest shirt printer in the state, who would ignore my emails, ghost me, forget to email me, argue with me, etc. currently the shirts are in a store location i cannot access until friday, and they will likely not be open on friday. i regret not going through the florida-based printer we used for the liver mush shirts, who were professional and easy to work with. i opted to send the books/magnets separately from the shirts, losing ~$70 on redundant shipping costs. i ordered only 40 shirts after announcing 50 bundles, based on the total sales (~14), and will keep one for myself and send one to nathaniel. the shirts will ultimately, i feel, be a net loss, and i will probably eventually offer them for sale at cost just to not have them in my closet anymore.

Promotion - misc.

i posted links to a few excerpts from other magazines from the book via the back patio account. none of these resulted in the original publisher promoting the book or, seemingly, liking the posts. we later made tweets tagging magazines that hadn't published the poems, saying they published them, in an attempt to trick the publication into promoting the book for free and/or make people laugh. only one publication liked their corresponding tweet, but didn't retweet it.

i made a new website for back patio to collate the press/reviews materials and book descriptions. i then reached out to kevin at powell's who asked for just such a list, so i secured a small order of back patio books, including five copies of death egg, resulting in a small section of shelf space dedicated to back patio books. the tweet about this got high engagement. i should reach out to more cool stores.

i placed a quarter-page ad for the press, including a highlight for death egg, in maggot brain magazine, a print magazine published by third man records and edited by the guy who wrote the 33 1/3 book about loveless, which should be out around now. this cost me $187. i would be surprised if it ends up paying off, but it seemed like a fun thing to do, and i like the magazine a lot (i also get a free copy of this issue, apparently). some of the other ads are for punk/diy record labels based on bandcamp, which is cool, in my opinion.

josh sherman invited me and nathaniel, and other people, to read at his chapbook release reading as part of misery loves company, which we hijacked, to comedic effect, i think, to promote death egg. nathaniel did a good job reading and i posted the order page a few times when people were talking about josh's book, which made me laugh. we got ~3 book sales during the reading. we've also scheduled a back patio mlc reading for 9/29, which will include, nathaniel, cav, dan, graham, kurt, tj, and troy.

i regret not reaching out to more internet and irl places early on for reviews/interviews. however, this time period corresponded to a family crisis which resulted in me taking time off of work and not doing anything much aside from acting in 'crisis mode' for my family for over a month. i spent ~1-2 hours/week during this time working on death egg. to this end i feel guilt about not being able to do more for the book/nathaniel.

finally, we opened the magazine for web subs just prior to announcing the book. this was a partly cynical/manipulative move to drive up engagement for the press and potentially sell more books. however, i am unsure this resulted in any sales we wouldn't have otherwise gotten. but overall it was good for everyone. we all enjoyed reading and editing the pieces we got and we have published, and will continue to publish, some really cool writing. i'm glad we reopened and we will probably do it again in january. i owe kurt a lot for taking on a lot of this effort when my life fell apart in august.

sales - preorders

we announced preorders sometime in august and i shipped the preorder books around september 7th. there were 62 preorders at the time, 12 of which were for tshirt + book bundles. we have since sold a few more of each.

the free promotional stickers for orders included random mixes of black and white stickers ("i love shitty poetry", "alternative literature", "death egg cover", and "back patio press logo"), glitter stickers ("back patio in barbie font on a gun"), holographic stickers (misc. "cyberwriter" series, featuring sebastian, derek, bram, and nathaniel), and a bold yellow (but small) "ask me about the death egg" sticker. i used sticker guy for the black and white stickers and sticker mule for the fancier ones. sticker guy is very cheap but slow, and their website is difficult to navigate. sticker mule can be expensive, but offers interesting products and has frequent sales.

only 3 of the death egg orders included other books/items: one person bought my book bundle, one person bought liver mush, and one person bought good at drugs.

i sent free back patio books to ~10 random orders, and gave free art or bonus stickers to people i know/like from online. as far as i can tell this resulted in ~3 promotional twitter pictures and one goodreads review for non-death egg books.

around september 7th i sent nathaniel $301 in royalties.

sales - amazon

around when i started shipping books, i sent nathaniel all the raw book files and manically worked with him to set up the book on amazon kdp as a print and ebook. amazon kdp/ebook setup is a pain in the ass and required several different types of files and arbitrary changes. for the ebook, i had to manually add page breaks (instead of using the keyboard shortcut, for some reason) to get them to register. we set up the amazon book using his own account such that he'd by default receive all the amazon royalty payments. this approach was modeled after sebastian castillo's book SALMON and inspired by the fact that it's a huge pain in the as to do amazon royalties (especially after taking over for cavin - setting up a new bank account, etc etc). in exchange nathaniel gets a smaller royalty split on the books that i sell. since being put on amazon, we've sold 2 copies of the book through flat dog distro but seemingly many on amazon. i hope nathaniel considers the money aspect equitable.

the book peaked at #53 in the contemporary fiction (books) category on amazon, spurred on by duggan's manic promotional tweeting and "post weird twitter" networking. he had also purchased twitter blue in anticipation of the promotion cycle, which he claims de creased his post engagement, ironically.

nathaniel says he's sold 45 copies on amazon since we uploaded it, which is impressive, i feel.

sales - conclusion

so far we've sold a little over 100 books during the first few weeks and gave away ~10, which is, in my opinion. very good numbers for indie poetry that doesn't take institutional promotion tactics very seriously. incidentally, unrelated, i saw that clash had sold over 12,000 copies of some stupid looking horror novel during this time. i hope that people who may or may not be seething about the death egg hype cycle, its participants, and its aura of success consider this disparity when subtweeting/shittalking those involved.

i anticipate the book selling more copies over time, especially if we see continued press interest from local or online avenues, and natural interest in the book as people talk or post about it. it currently has 3 amazon reviews and 8 goodreads reviews.

thank you to everyone who has purchased the book.

why we don't have a name, maybe

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

Abstract:

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

 

1. Music Genre Onomastics in English

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

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

 

HEAVY METAL

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

 

SHOEGAZE

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

 

NEW WAVE

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

 

Here are a couple other quick examples:

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

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

doom metal -> doom -> doomjazz

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

popular music -> pop -> synthpop, dream pop

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

 

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

 

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

 

2. Literary Genre and Onomastics in English

 

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

modern

post modern

literary fiction

realism

magic realism

new sincerity

alt lit

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

3. Alt Lit

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

4. Post Alt Lit

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

5. Problems in (Post) Alt Lit Onomastics

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

5. Conclusion & Discussion

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

 

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

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

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