Indie Lit Fall Playlist

 at 6:54 AM on Sep 3, 2021, while cooking breakfast, i tweeted:

interested in writers i know and/or like emailing/messaging me about a song they associate with autumn, so i can compile a blog post and companion playlist

 

when people reached out to send me a song, i requested a little write-up, saying something to the effect of "wonderful. thank you. could you provide a little write-up as well? a blurb would be ideal, some kind of personal story or anecdote, or analysis, something. thank you" so that there could be interesting content to go alongside the playlist itself. some people responded quickly with a song, but required more time to write something, or basically ignored my request for a write-up. i enjoyed laughing at the idea of writers not wanting to write.

below is what i got from people in a sort of arbitrary order. a spotify playlist can be found here (note: two of the songs are not available on spotify)

 

reading the write-ups, i like the common themes people mention in their relationships to these songs: depression, melancholy, and transparently thematic lyrics or song titles. i also enjoyed seeing different things people associate with fall that i associate with other seasons - for example, i delivered pizzas in the spring and summer mostly, but nathan dragon associates delivering pizzas with fall. i also enjoyed only really being familiar with only a few of the songs people sent me.

"銀次伊藤こぬか雨" by Ginji Ito

Fall music for me doesn't have the qualities of a category I can name, unlike, say, summer music. Just know it when I hear it. This is one of my favorite songs, and I feel it is a song exemplary of the fall—walking through an empty park while wearing a light jacket, etc. I do not know what the lyrics say, as I do not speak Japanese, and I have not looked up a translation. I suppose that is another somewhat-maxim I feel about music: lyrics don't really matter, unless they do. The arrangement is so beautiful. I really treasure this song. That's all I can say.

---Sebastian Castillo 

 

"Banshee Beat" by Animal Collective

The first Animal Collective song I heard was "My Girls." I saw a video of three old people reviewing contemporary music. Breakfast at Sulimay's Music Reviews is a program from Scrapple TV from Philadelphia. Which is weird because I lived in Raleigh at the time and had never heard of Scrapple. Now scrapple's my second favorite pork and corn based breakfast meat and I live in Philadelphia.

The old people didn't like "My Girls." They said it was too repetitive and that nothing would come of the band. Despite their opinion, Animal Collective became my favorite band for a long time.

I worked backwards through the discography. Their music made me feel excited and somewhat insane because each album seemed better than the last. I remember telling friends, "They never miss, they can't make a bad album."

Feels was the album I liked the most. It's mostly analog sounding instruments looped and sampled. I liked the way Geologist talked about the album. How the band tuned their instruments to an old piano their friend had. It was experimental and strange but still pleasant. It was music I could put on and win people over with eventually. It was music that made me feel like dancing.

The drums and keys and guitar on "Banshee Beat" remind me of a campfire. Leaves cracking under feet on the brick campus. Rain falling while walking to class. A bowl in my jacket pocket.

There's also something lonely about the song compared to the others on the album. It's whispered. Avey sings on it with Geologist and Panda Bear doing harmonies and ad-libs. But the type of loneliness in the song is only possible with friends. It feels like stepping away from party noise to wash your face in the bathroom and think what's waiting outside.

---Graham Irvin

 

"October" by Jackson C Frank

If you google “jackson c frank october lyrics” you’ll get a version that has the first line as “Halloween is signal I received in France”, which should really be “Following” but now I always listen for Halloween instead, see if I can make it out or if I can get it to sit in that colorblind space of perception where it could totally be one thing or the other, you have no idea which. Halloween is my grandma’s birthday, followed pretty close on by my wife’s birthday, then her mom’s, then mine and Thanksgiving and my nana’s and then Christmas. This makes it kind of sad to hear JCF sing “And it's already over in October / Already Christmas every year”, skipping that whole procession, so now when I listen to the song I just think of a slow march of cake.

--- Tom Snarsky

 

 

"Tom" by Codeine

---Troy James Weaver 

 

 "The End Complete II: Radio Bye Bye" by Coheed and Cambria

Honestly the whole album, Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV, Part Two: No World For Tomorrow is an autumn album for me. I'm pretty sure I've listened to it every autumn since it came out in 2007. It came out on the 23rd of October, so that's an easy enough reason. It came out in the fall and I listened to it obsessively as I had with their three previous albums. I was a freshman in high school at the time, 15, and had started to move away from being more of a bring fantasy books to school to read in class nerd to a wear all black and hang out with the kids with weird hair and Tripp pants who play smash bros in basements while listening to System of a Down nerd. Only one of my friends was into Coheed and Cambria at the time, and my interest in the band surpassed his very quickly.

This being the fourth Coheed and Cambria album made the rotation of albums fit in perfectly with the seasons. Their first album, Second Stage Turbine Blade is a spring album, their second, In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: Three is a winter album, their third, Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV Volume One: Fear Through The Eyes of Madness is a Summer album. I still go through each of these albums once a year, usually during the season I associate them with.

I have lots of music that I associate with seasons, I have a roster of summer artists, I generally also go through and listen to a bunch of psychobilly and horror punk during the fall as well.

The song itself, "Radio Bye Bye," is a great autumnal song. It's got their proggy basslines, a very poppy melody, cheesy lyrics, but a dark tone and overall theme. There is still the brightness of summer, but a longing sadness, knowing that something is coming to an end. I usually listen to this song whenever a relationship of any kind I'm in ends, by the way. It's a great song for endings. The whole album is the apocalyptic end of the band's original storyline. (I assume you're aware of Coheed and Cambria's schtick, but, if not, they're a concept album band with a running story throughout almost all of their albums.) This album also came out during a tumultuous time in the band's history, it was barely made, and with it being the "end" of the story, a lot of fans were anxious to know if there'd be another album or if the band would go their separate ways. A spate of solo albums from members was coming out around this time too, adding to the anxiety. 

---Joe Bielecki

 

"Mad World" by Gary Jules

idk why “mad world”.. maybe its the music video. there are leaves.

OHHH

MAD WORLD = Fall bc Donnie Darko, which takes place in the fall near halloween

---Cavin BBall Bongzillaz 

 

 

"Secret Knowledge of Backroads" by Pavement

My primary way of listening to music is the CD player inside my 2009 Honda Civic. I enjoy viewing my car as a ~$6000 CD player, or alternatively also as a 3000 lb CD player. I own about 10 CDs. I get anxious changing discs while driving and maneuvering 3000 lbs of steel, highway hurtling so fast everything, concrete and sky alike, looks torn—during a blizzard, I once crumpled a car like a beer can simply by swerving at a slug-like crawl into a guardrail—so I often just let the same CD repeat for the entire drive, sometimes for hours. For this reason, I like listening to disc one of the compilation album Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe and Reduxe by the band Pavement, because it has 24 tracks. Track 23 is “Secret Knowledge of Backroads.” It sounds like a breakdown on the side of the highway. Nothing abrupt and fiery, but rather the slow, prolonged halt of an 18-wheeler, like a whale’s moaning. I spent my youth beneath the earth in mildewy basements, so I chart life in terms of video games and anime, summer the cicada flash of Neon Genesis Evangelion, winters cold with Metal Gear Solid’s fortresses. This song, to me, is the “Metroid Prime 2: Echoes” of Pavement’s music (Metroid Prime 2 is also the “autumn” of video games). Whereas the original Metroid Prime was almost cartoonish with its video game tropes, lava levels, forbidden space research labs, sentient plants spitting acid as boss fights, Prime 2 is a bleak sequel, its world husked: smog-fogged skies, polished killer machines patrolling lifeless corridors…A few lyrics I like from “Secret Knowledge” are Kick the sand / Kick the can. A Honda Civic crumpling like so much aluminum. Kick it in the face of another man / So you kick it out, it’s out of town. Robots, long outliving their creators, relentlessly pace a gleaming necropolis. I’ve never felt like I do now.

 ---Nathaniel Duggan

 

 

 "Ogre" by Richard Dawson

This song reeks of fall. The music video, which I just watched in preparation for this message, actually opens with sun shining through barren trees, and people scavenging through fallen leaves. The song builds to what I would call a crescendo of melancholic euphoria, which is a feeling I associate strongly with autumn. There’s also a line in the song that goes “There comes frightful news from town / Of great evil abound” which makes me think of October and Halloween, and there’s a sort of Wicker Man vibe to this song, like the villagers coming together to perform something sinister.

---Ben DeVos 

 

 

"Summer Breeze" by Type O Negative

 I'm a fuckin halloween boy, so just ignore the fact that "summer" is right there in the title for a goddamn second, okay Zac?  I live in Southern California, where the differentiation between summer and fall is slim (Levi's 511) as hell, so what is a season to you might not be a season to me (so defensive). But one thing that always seems to break with the equinox is nights cooling down to sweatshirt-based wardrobes, wind blowing rustling leaves that may or may not fall, and spooky movies. Though kind of a shit film, I Know What You Did Last Summer features a Type O Negative cover of Seals and Crofts' "Summer Breeze" that should not bang/drone as hard as it does.  This song reminds me of nights turning cold and the fear of death lurking just around the corner. Happy Birthday Zac, and remember age is just a number.

---KKUURRTT

 

 

"Saturday" by Fall Out Boy

 possibilities feel endless and they are, because you're fifteen and haven't fucked up yet. you don't even know fucked up yet. you kiss softly, laugh loudly, weep in the middle of the night. you get mad over nothing and forget it the next day. someone gave you adderall or some acid. someone else gave you a hickey. someone else gave you a handful of CDs, whose songs will be burned into your psyche until you die, the first time and the last time. everything feels important right now. the way summer slides into fall, making each breath you take more thrilling. the way it feels to make three sandwiches for two hungry friends who got stoned off a coke can in your backyard. the way pop-punk still pays homage to hardcore even though it definitely isn't anymore. you think it's all pretty sad and wonderful, and you're right. you think you know all a person needs to know about love and sorrow and joy. you do know all you need to know. it's saturday.

---Austin Islam

 

 

"Maple Leaves" by Jens Lekman

Heard the song for the first time in the fall of my senior year of college. Went through a big Magnetic Fields phase that summer and someone tipped me to Jens Lekman. The sample sounds lifted from Saturday morning cartoons, but Jens performs like a weary lounge singer. I worked at a coffee shop at the time and I remember a weeknight closing shift. The place was packed, but it was just a bunch of studying students so it wasn't busy and I remember this song coming on my iPod which was hooked up to the soundsystem and I watched the leaves blow across the street and waited for someone to ask me who sings this song.

---Kyle R. Seibel 

 

"Yeah Right" by Dinosaur Jr. 

This is the perfect song to listen to while skipping middle school, strolling through the streets of suburbia and dodging cops on a crisp fall day. The visceral riff is perfect for tightening your hoodie strings and stomping on crunchy pine cones. The driving melody pairs well with angsty mischief and the smell of fresh spraypaint. J Mascis’ melancholy, bittersweet vocals are the perfect soundtrack for picking through cigarette butts in front of Kroger, hoping to find a long one. I don’t even remember who gave me that mixtape, but I remember playing this song until it warbled and never quite making it to school as the landscape turned from orange to grey and the rhythms became more sprawling and earthy. I suppose it’s a really poignant breakup song too, but I was 13 so I didn’t know anything about that.

---Jerome Spencer 

"Autumn Sweater by Yo La Tengo"

In its tempo, pacing, the vocals, the classic bass riff, the tambourine, it all feels chilly but sunny. Being in a car bopping around. Like I'm delivering pizzas again or doing errands. September/October music. Definitely not November music.

---Nathan Dragon 

 

 

"Some Nights Intro/Some Nights" by fun.

I associate this song with autumn because I listened to it on my weekend trips to the city. I was fifteen years old, and I would be staring out of the window, admiring the bokeh forming on the window. For some reason, I will only listen to this song during the autumn and winter seasons. The lyrics in the intro discuss disillusionment and falling out of favour with the world around you. I was very depressed in high school, and those weekend trips were the only things that kept me going. It was a whole other life that I dreamed about. I watched handsome older men drink wine under heat lamps outside bars. In some ways, I feel as though I lived vicariously through this song. It’s a song about feeling hopeless and alone which is something I can relate to. I flourish in the nights of autumn, and Some Nights gives me visions of how I imagined life to be when I walked the streets of the blurred city.

---Courtney S. Gray 

 

 

"I Want to Ce Cold" by The Microphones

I cheated a little bit when choosing this song. The first thing that came to mind when thinking of "fall songs" was something off U2's October because the album is called October and has a picture of the band looking cozy and I have the record and like to put it out next to my record player in October. But I don't especially love any songs from that record, and plus, even though early U2 is magic, they're super unhip now and I'm a little bit embarrassed about liking them, though clearly not embarrassed enough not to still mention it here, first. My second impulse was Modest Mouse, but I don't want to keep being exclusively associated with them. My third instinctual impulse was The Microphones.

I looked at last.fm to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything, scanning through logs of what I listened to in fall months over the years, starting in 2006 when my data on that site began (after an earlier purge of embarrassment over what portrait my listening painted of me as a person—revealing a recurring theme of anxiety over musical tastes here). Those were my "formative listening years," and left the biggest impression/shaped my enduring tastes, etc. And I have a horrible memory.

My anecdote/memory is: every time I hear or feel or think about pretty much any natural force/seasonal cycle (wind blowing, rain pouring, first snow falling, etc. etc.) this album comes to mind. And I love the way the songs run together such that, unless I'm looking at the tracklist, I don't always know when one ends and another begins, or that one stretch is actually two songs. Fall feels folksy to me, so acoustic guitars seem right, and fall feels like the time to be "in your feels," and the crunchy drums and pianos all feel really emotional. There's something so relatable about the body ache/surrender of "I Want to Be Cold." I like that this one rocks pretty hard. I love the declarative simplicity of saying "I want [something about a natural force outside of my control to overwhelm me]."

 ---Crow Jonah Norlander

 

 

"Is there any always" by Glifted

---Maggie Siebert

 

 

"Lepidoptera" by Bedhead

In the fall of 2015, I think, I was very depressed and was getting into more slower and sadder music. For whatever reason I saw that Numero Group was releasing this Bedhead box set and I was really interested in spite of never listening to the band before. It was a lot of money at the time, but I bought it anyway, feeling dangerous and manic, and I listened to the digital download while I waited for it to arrive. I spent a lot of time walking around that fall listening to music, and especially Bedhead. All of it really spoke to me - the mumbling, the quietness, the space, the simplicity, the lyrical themes. To me, it was very new and exciting, and paired well with how bad I felt all the time. The quiet and slow approach they had calmed me against the often overwhelming anxiety, especially as it related to the academic year starting again, when I generally felt the worst, and the depressed lyrics made me feel understood and less lonely. This song is from their third album, Transaction de Novo, where they experimented the most - some more uptempo songs, different time signatures, some more folksy Americana - but this is a more or less 'classic' Bedhead song, perfectly encapsulating their oeuvre, I feel, and so in that sense it encapsulates the entire season of fall.

 ---Zac Smith

 

 

email vs blog

i want to write something for my blog that isn't just a book review, but i also have many emails to respond to, from friends. i enjoy writing and receiving long emails, but i also, for whatever reason, get paralyzed by the task of responding to a long email. i have been thinking a little bit about what i choose to say in emails vs what i choose to say in a blog post. i think direct communication with someone where you have context, historical precedent, and some amount of mutual vulnerability is freeing in a way that a blog can't be.in an email to a writer, i mentioned writing lots of emails to other writers, and then later included random excerpts from those emails, which was funny to me, sending things i wrote to other people to someone else.

for this blog post i've decided to just list some non-sequitur-seeming lines from emails i've written to other authors. in compiling this, it sort of reads like a bunch of tweets, which seems interesting

excerpts of emails i've sent to other writers

i like the idea of peeing as a defense mechanism, and how effective it's been. it's like it's his niche combat move to compensate for being slow and fat, like a pokemon or something.

i've read some random good things by various people. 

there's a great little scene where the characters are watching some video footage of a riot and a guy beats this other guy's ass, knocks him out cold, then pulls down the dude's pants and psray paints his cock and balls, and the characters watching are like "what the fuck," talking about it, and the one guy is like "yeah no spraying the guy's cock was retarded."

feel like i felt that way and said something to that effect to you a long time ago but now i feel differently. 

the most depressed i ever felt, maybe, was when i was applying for jobs to get out of grad school, but part of that was also knowingly applying for jobs i knew i was unqualified for, in academia, which i'd only get if i could also finish my dissertation, which i knew i couldn't do. 

bruiser is dope (heh)

i go back and forth. i try to send some stuff out throughout the year to stay 'engaged' and like i'm 'contributing' or something. always bummed me out when my favorite authors stopped sending shit to indie mags so i wanna keep doing that to spite them

you gotta trust toddlers

i have some vague conviction that how gen z uses social media will change things in the next few years - there's that push to decentralize/publicize social media but gen z is doing it via public and private networks/accounts. and people are being sick of being sold to, of everything being monetized, of everything they say being potential fodder for retribution in 1-10 years

feeling embarassed about you 'already knowing' birds have 2000+ feathers

i've only seen one person directly/indirectly shittalk me/the book

i've been waking up every day at 5:45 to do chicken chores for months now and do i breathe in the bright morning air, look at trees, smile and think of god in the details? no, i just blearily carry out my duties and then try to go back to bed as soon as possible. it's stupid, and i feel stupid for thinking it'd be different.

every time i think of the author, eugene marten, i think of the comedian, eugene merman, who did this stupid and weird internet show in like 2008

i remember listening to george saunders on otherppl and him saying something like "what you want to write might not be what people like - you should find what people like and write that" and it left a bad taste in my mouth. i don't think i care about what people like in a broad sense, and am more interested in what interests me or feels innovative or interesting based on my experience or perception of writing.

i get uncomfortable meeting people or talking to strangers

a partial list of music other writers have recommended to me

Troy James Weaver
troy DMd me through the back patio account at some point when i wasn't on twitter to ask for my phone number so he could ask me for music recommendations, and to just talk. we've only texted a few times - i'm really bad at texting (have ignored all texts from my family group chat for ~2 months). i recommended fiction by pope to him and he recommended deserve by weed to me. i like that we recommended each other single-word albums by single-word bands. the weed album is very good. i like the emphasis on good melodies and guitar noise. this album, like fiction by pope, feels like a very good post-shoegaze, riff-based album. troy and i also share am affinity for shoegaze and sparklehorse.

Benjamin DeVos

i interviewed ben in 2018 about his books and asked whether lord of the game was named after the death grips song, and he said that it was, and also that the bar is low was named after a song by pissed jeans. i listened to and enjoyed why love now by pissed jeans, but in particular a few songs, including "the bar is low", the video for which i would often send coworkers on my 'team' while shittalking other 'teams'.

Mike Andrelczyk

has recommended both extensive beat poet reading lists and phish playlists to me but i have, embarrassingly, never done anything with this information. i love you, mike.

 

Bud Smith

at some point in 2017 or early 2018 Bud Smith and I DMd on twitter briefly because, i think, he had tweeted about some music production documentaries/interviews, and i wanted to learn more. we mostly talked about music during this exchange. i told him i was holding my sleeping toddler and listening to turn on the bright lights by interpol. bud recommended like 4 artists or albums but i only really bothered checking out one, Light Information by Chad VanGaalen. i ended up listening to this album frequently, mostly during my morning/evening commute, while driving, and sometimes at home while cooking or doing other things. i really like it as an album. i think i described it, to bud, as something like if BAND had gotten into talking heads instead of OTHER BAND. i have since forgotten which bands i had thought of at the time. will come back to this. I don't think bud likes me. I can't remember the bands.

Cavin Bryce Gonzalez

cavin has almost exclusively recommended music by mac miller to me. I've listened to a playlist he sent me of mac miller songs. i enjoyed how depressing they all seemed but i had a hard time paying attention to the lyrics, as is typically the case for me.

Graham Irvin

graham and i have been emailing for a while, and 2000s indie rock has been a central discussion point for us, i think starting with talking about wolf parade. graham has recommended a lot of music to me because of this. i have been most excited about rozwell kid, who have a song about putting identifying information/clothing into a Wendy's trash can. rozwell kid feels to me like if weezer was still good and paid the guy from the mountain goats for lyrics. i keep intending to listen to more rozwell kid but my headphones don't work with my phone right now, for some reason, so i have been unable to 'listen closely' like I'd prefer. update: spent 30min driving around dark county roads at night with windows down while listening to precious art by rozwell kid. it smelled like rain and i got emotional while thinking about graham. gunned it through a thickly wooded road with my brights on, laughed at how it seemed like I was driving through a fantasy world tunnel of trees. update 2: i think too shabby is the best rozwell kid album, and i recently purchased it on vinyl.

Crow Jonah Norlander

crow and i both like some of the same bands, like early modest mouse, and for this reason crow will occasionally ask me if i am familiar with some B-tier indie band from the 90s. i am familiar with many such bands but somehow never any of the specific bands that crow messages me about. for example, he told me he's been getting into you're living all over me by dinosaur jr., which is an album i owned on vinyl but for some reason never actually listened to. i listened to it via streaming the day he recommended it and enjoyed it but felt distracted. i remember liking how apathetically the guy sings. i told crow a minor story about how j mascis is relatively active in the massachusetts shoegaze community.

 

Sebastian Castillo

late addition to the list bc i was trying to remember recommendations after i published originally. sebastian and i have emailed a few times and we talked about music a little bit. he recommended this bad Lilys, whose first album happened to be on Slumberland records (1992) while I recommended Henry's Dress, whose only albums happened to be on Slumberland records (1993-94). i like that we independently recommended each other music from the same label and time period. when i listened to the Lilys album, i realized i had already heard it, or parts of it, from back when i was really into shoegaze, and it was nice to listen to again. we talked breifly about how in many ways it's better than MBV's isn't anything while doing similar things, sonically.

i think i'm forgetting many other people, hence the partiality of this list

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.