brief book reviews

after somehow reading a lot of books very quickly a few weeks ago, i have since been slowly reading and rereading things, juggling books, finishing very few. these are the books i've recently finished reading:

my year of rest and relaxation by ottessa moshfegh (penguin): i picked this up used based on being vaguely aware of her/this book from hearing people in indie lit talk about and praise it in spite of it being popular and on a big press; the cover also seemed good and distinct and the conceit seemed like it carried a lot of potential. i listened to her episode of selected prose and felt offput by her business-like approach to writing books and making money from it, then got this book to see what it was like and if this sense i had of her approach to writing was reflected in the book. overall i felt disappointed, but it was a quick read.  i was interested in thinking about it from the perspective of my limited understanding of what women think about other women, how their relationships work, etc., which is a large part of the book, and i've enjoyed asking my wife questions about relationships between women after asking her to read some of it, and speculating with her why it's popular. in terms of the writing, it struck me as very typical of bestsellers, with a lot of confusingly redundant passages, telegraphed and manufactured drama, emphasis on set dressing/time period, and a limited scope of 'jokes' that recur frequently. i also felt aware of what seemed like very artificial, or self-aware, methods of introducing 'literary' content to make the protagonist more complex, like the framing of various childhood traumas/sad things with a cheeky "i am trying to think of things that make me sad; nope, not making me sad" context, but which still accomplishes the same (needless?) thing. the jokes were limited to riffing on and/or shittalking a couple simple supporting characters or easily-critiqued cultural things (hipsters, people who live in new york, creepy professors) and a recurring "ugh aren't i a total bitch lol" narrative. toward the end i found myself skimming passages where nothing really happens, prolonged lists of items in apartments, and vague reflections on the character's personal development. i got the sense that what people like about the book are the open cynicism toward things like, e.g., shallow people and pretentious stuff like contemporary art/music or aspiring to like those people/things, the breadcrumbing melodrama of the looming 9/11 attack, and the 'action' in the last third where she makes a plan with other people involved, sort of like a heist movie or something. i noticed she places a lot of emphasis on reminding us that this is taking place in 2000/early 2001 in awkward and obvious ways all to serve the ending, which i thought was dumb and reminded me of extremely loud and incredibly close, with its emphasis on being obsessed with footage of jumping out of one of the twin towers on 9/11. a small thing that bothered me early on was the confusing timeline of her graduating college (in ~1996) and living in this particular rich person neighborhood ~2000, wherein she makes fun of people who use bluetooth headsets while walking toy poodles, but the first mass-produced bluetooth headset wasn't launched to consumers until ~2002. this is a minor thing, but it really emphasized to me this artificiality of the narrative and setting, a laziness in execution, some kind of attempt at making the things/people she shittalks more relatable for a modern audience (the book was released in 2018). i can't imagine wanting to write a book that centers 9/11 so much in ~2016-2018 but i'm happy she made a lot of money doing it. i did like the emphasis on wanting to be asleep as a central plot element - this felt relatable, especially when i suffer from more extreme periods of depression and anxiety. i also the scenes from her childhood spent sleeping in with her mom, and the recurring bit about her liking whoopi goldberg, which made me smile/laugh almost consistently. i also enjoyed thinking of different, alternative endings or twists that would have been more interesting to me. i have the sense that this book could be a popular movie - it felt written like a movie, with the simple dialogue and characters - but would face complaints of antisemitic and anti-asian sentiments from a wider audience.

bonding by maggie siebert (expat press): purchased this based on reading an excerpt, or a story that wound up in the book. i generally feel mixed about expat books but i enjoy seeing what they put out. the excerpt i read was apparently one of the more 'normal' stories, with the majority actually being gory horror stuff. i am not super familiar with horror writing, but it seems like the most fitting description for this book, in the sense that most of the stories consist of a relatively intriguing, literary fiction set up that then pivots to some kind of spooky/violent ending. other stories, though, fully start and end in the horror-space, with some more humor, like the one about people living in a mansion and being attacked by spooky things, and the one about the alumni association, although the humor in that one is more or less just the premise of it. some stories are also more sci-fi horror, like a relationship drama played out via advanced virtual reality, and some are more understated/mysterious, like the one about a guy running over himself or something via time loop (this is the excerpt i had read and thought was pretty good). most stories emphasize or center body horror, gore/violence stuff as a key plot element. in general i was usually pretty interested in the first half of a given story (the normal part) and pretty uninterested in the horror half. the former is usually compellingly written and interesting in terms of character and setting, to me, with good prose, while the latter i feel usually revolve around some kind of horror movie trope like psychosexual gore, murder, religious imagery, and spooky blob monster things, and the writing seems a bit more clunky with passive constructions and descriptions. i noticed that 3+ stories reference: the word 'guts' or 'gut', eyeballs being popped/ripped out/open, internal organs being ripped apart, and 'facial bones' being 'shattered'. since i don't really consume much horror media, i don't have much background in knowing whether these are, like, unique spins on horror tropes or just kind of normal for the genre, or normal for the seemingly popular indie lit horror stuff; as an outsider to this genre, the images seem familiar, like the 'kid making spooky drawings' thing - feeling like this is in a lot of movies, etc. i would probably really enjoy a collection of vaguely strange/subversive stories by siebert that don't all pivot to or focus on a horror sequence - i thought her setups were really engaging, the dialogue was natural, and the characters/setting were mostly interesting and believable in a unique and impressive way. i liked seeing certain things acting as a throughline, like sort of setting multiple stories in the same 'universe', connected by a child abduction (i may be wrong about thinking all three child abductions referenced in the book are the same child - i didn't go back to verify names/details). i liked that most of the protagonists were 'down-and-out' people with shitty jobs looking for purpose/happiness in unique or small ways. the humor-forwarded pieces seem sort of out of place relative to the more broody/serious stories, so i felt unsure 'how to read' some of the stories/scenes in the context of the collection. basically i just don't have much familiarity with the genre - this might be 'great' or something, relative to things these books strive for. i liked that the acknowledgements section was earnest, long, detailed, and generous, and didn't just list first names. this is also the second expat book i've read where "retch" is misspelled as "wretch", which is funny to me - seems like retching seems common in expat books, something something about the books involving lots of wretched people retching. looked at the blurbs for this book - feeling like BR Yaeger's blurb does a good job communicating what the book is actually like, and most of the other blurbs seem like people just saying stuff. feeling like i'd disagree with the john samuel brown blurb, in that i don't get the vibe that bonding is specifically about some absence of sexual desire. trying to think...maybe the first and last stories center a disinterest in sex in their specific arcs, but i wouldn't say it's a theme in the book. feeling interested in writing more about blurbs when i write reviews.

pee on water by rachel b. glaser (publishing genius): saw this recommended places, i think by giacomo specifically, and got it when i bought a bunch of pubgen books during a sale. short stories with a strong emphasis on things being 'hard to grasp' temporally or in terms of viewpoint, shifts in memory, some dream-like sequences and vague action. lots of poetic language and turns of phrases mixed up with for deadpan/'vulgar' things, e.g the title of the book referencing pee (there's a person on twitter who edits a mag who likes to tweet about men writing about pee too much, which this reminded me of - seems good for more women and nonbinary people to write about pee). focus on interpersonal/relationship dramas, femininity, family, being in love with hard-to-love people/situations. in many ways the emphasis on 'hazy' narratives with this focus on language and themes reminds me a lot of joy williams, but these are also generally more playful and some involve science fiction stuff, like the one about astronauts. a specific thing that reminds me of joy williams is the use of exclamation points in a sort of sad or naively-coded way when talking about people from the perspective of someone else, something like (making this up) "Charles was always looking for dogs, on their walks. Charles and his love of dogs! What fun!" i felt like in general i enjoyed reading each story in terms of wording/phrasing but few stories really stuck with me in terms of the content or dramatic arcs. some seemed repetitive, like the one about the teenagers having a baby seemed to say the same thing over and over again. for this reason it took me a very long time to read it - i never felt really compelled to pick it up. i skimmed the last two stories, which seemed long and redundantly written, kind of melodramatic - the titular story does that broad sweeping "Things swam in the ocean. They crawled on the sand. Wind blew clouds around" thing for like 6 pages straight. the book feels to me, in my head, like it's a certain kind of candy, and often i'm not in the mood for that kind of candy. thinking about skittles hard candies for some reason. do you remember those? this book reminds me of skittles hard candies. DM'd giacomo about skimming/skipping the last two stories and he confesses to probably not having finished it.

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

brief book reviews

i remembered some more books i read a few months ago, and then recently for whatever reason tore through like 3 books in the past week:

the hole by hiroko yomada (new directions) - i bought her first book, the factory, on a whim in richmond virginia based on the cover (a photograph of a smoking trash bin in a pastel pink room) and ended up really enjoying it, reading it mostly straight through during a plane trip. the hole is different but still explores, i think, this sort of existential ennui about societal expectations and 'work'. while the factory was generally ambiguous, awkward, and evocative, the hole is a little more straoightforward and transparent, i think, in its 'moral', especially at the end, with a small sort of reveal. i felt intrigued by the ending but then thought about it later and i think i 'got' it. i have only read a few japanese authors so it probably sounds dumb for me to refer to this as an 'i-novel' but it's the vibe i get, similar to banana yoshimoto and haruki murakami, where the first-person protagonist conveys internal thoughts in a sort of rambling, casual, "this is who i am" fashion, conveying opinions and little anxieties throughout various scenes. early on i had a sort of 'worry' that it would be a kind of psychological horror book but it ended up not being like this. there are a few particular scenes, basically all the scenes with the brother-in-law, that i enjoyed immensely, and found a very unexpected and fun absurd humor in how she lets certain scenes 'escalate.' in particular, there's a prolonged scene with a lot of children running around playing, and it slowly amps up what the scene is like by including little details, slowly going from kids swimming to collecting bugs to throwing fireworks at each other to a bunch of kids cheering on a kid who's taking a shit in the middle of a field. little things like this, and how they were written, excited me and made me laugh. the overall vibe is strong and consistent, mysterious, confusing, frustrating, and interesting, and i like how certain characters that seem important are actually just set dressing and don't do anything or change, while the actually interesting characters are very interesting and complex in unexpected ways. it starts kind of slow, i feel - i didn't feel super enamored until maybe halfway through. then everything up until then felt worth it. i enjoyed thinking about the book after i read it.

potted meat by steven dunn (taurpalin sky): this had been recommended to me before but i never got around to reading it, i think because the description makes it sound exceptionally bleak and like misery porn, but the reality is that it isn't so bleak, and that it's a fantastic book, i think, and unique in its (continually unexpected) emphasis on tender moments and positive experiences. i think for every two vignettes about being beaten as a child or something similar, there's a vignette about a positive experience with a friend or family member. this is what stood out to me most and made it more endearing and interesting to me. structurally, it's a first-person autofiction 'novel' consisting of very short, 1-2 page vignettes in chronological order, from childhood to graduating high school. based on listening to a part of dunn's otherppl interview, it seems like more elements were invented or fictionalized than i would have expected. i'm generally curious about how people approach writing this kind of novel for these reasons. i think toward the end the vignettes got a little unfocused, or it seemed like some were kind of like b-sides that were added back in toward the end to try and 'tie up loose ends' but i didn't think they were super necessary and it weighed down the pacing a little bit. i liked some of the stylistic typos and spelling, noticed a lot of missing apostrophes, for example, which i think were 'effective'. while trying to convey my excitement for this book to giacomo by sending him pictures of some of the stories, he responded saying he didn't quite get it, maybe because of it being very american, and i felt compelled to describe the perspective as something like a Black scott mcclanahan book, but i don't think that's a very accurate or useful description, because the only real similarity is the setting - rural, poverty-stricken west virginia in the 90s. i'm curious about dunn's next novel, which seems like a sort of fragmented, 'experimental' hybrid novel about the military - feeling like it won't be as good as this one.

i don't know i said by matthew savoca (publishing genius): bought this and some other pubgen books during some kind of sale a long time ago - this one bc i remember seeing it listed in some old article or list about the best alt lit books, and felt curious. ended up feeling very disappointed - very often, after reading a chapter, felt compelled to put it down and do something else. feeling like people who include this in some kind of alt lit canon are doing a disservice to alt lit. coming off more aggressive than i mean to - it's a fine but mostly boring book. it's about two unemployed people (one is 'officially' depressed) doing nothing, going on a boring road trip, trying to think of what to do, and almost breaking up a few times. it's written very plainly with a lot of emphasis on little details, scenery, and what they did/ate/drank, in a hemingwayesque way, and then later the protagonist is reading a hemingway story collection, and then later thinks about how much he loves hemingway's stories. i think this makes what the author is 'trying to do' obvious and makes the book disappointing. hemingway's minimalism is interesting, to me at least, in the context of the actual events and relationship drama (the bull fights, the traveling, the exotic food/experiences, the love triangle), but this book has none of that, or at least it's not centered, so there's no, like, 'vicariously traveling' aspect of this book, just bored 20 somethings eating nondescript vegetarian food and complaining. unlike other 'good' alt lit books, there's no kmart realism or real details about the world/time period, and the narrator keeps vaguely pontificating about vaguely political ideas. it all feels very overly serious in spite of its baseline uninteresting scope and style. also, neither of the characters are particularly likeable, and i found myself secretly getting really hopeful/excited whenever it seemed like they would be breaking up so that the main character could finally seemingly feel happy and/or something interesting would happen. there were a few lines that i remember thinking were funny of clever, but they're pretty rare. also felt disappointed by the ending.

briefer reviews of books i read a few months ago:

pets: an anthology edited by jordan castro (tyrant): most of the pieces are pretty short and many were very similar - i feel like 2-3+ were about a woman with a dying cat. i think i liked yuka's the most, then tao's, then prescious's, then blake's, then sam pink's, and the rest are kind of vague to me now. i remember feeling a little surprised or let down at how short most of them are. felt like the selection of authors/styles was kind of random or unpredictable. seems like a fine book, good for what anthologies are supposed to be. jordan's intro was good, too

chilly scenes of winter by ann beattie: was surprised by this in a lot of ways. enjoyed seeing how similar it is in scope and tone to a lot of alt lit books, makes sense that it is often cited/influential. i enjoyed a lot of the little scenes and the internal monologue/anxiety of the protagonist and the associated dialogue of feeling fucked and unsure what to do, ever. felt 'impressed' by the 'boldness' of beattie to write a whole novel from the perspective of a guy, and to very accurately, i think, explore differences in thought/communication between men and women, based on how we are socialized, maybe, from my experience.

$50,000 by andrew weatherhead (publishing genius): bought bc of the hype and having read some of his poems online before. felt like it was pretty good. i enjoyed not using a bookmark and sort of randomly rereading/skipping/then reading again various lines over a few days. felt like some of the lines were a little overwrought/'philosophical', like things you'd read in a reddit comment or something. laughing about how it's triple-spaced, and how its triple-spacing was a key talking/publicity point during the promotional cycle, etc., is what encouraged giacomo and i to write two million shirts - i think our (deleted) first line was a riff about triple spacing.

horror vacui by shy watson (house of vlad): hadn't read anything by shy before aside from some random stuff online. giacomo highly recommended her first book but i haven't read it. in this she consistently does the same couple of 'tricks', like juxtaposing certain types of ideas very brusquely - like a small trivial thing to a very big existential thing - but i don't think i really like the effect it has, so i generally felt underwhelmed by the book, because that's sort of a cornerstone of most of the poems. also lots of discussion of astrology shit and things she tweets about normally so it felt like it wasn't a particularly exciting/unique experience to read. hard to really articulate this right. i guess it's just 'not for me', which is fine. i feel like the book has value regardless but i felt disappointed.

fun camp by gabe durham (publishing genius): looking up now three books on pubgen to confirm how to spell the author's name, i've noticed that the book descriptions on pubgen's website don't actually mention the author at all, and i had to look at the cover image to discern the author - seems like a bad design/usability issue, bad for author SEO, etc. bought this randomly during the sale. enjoyed the idea of it and several of the pieces but overall it felt overly long and repetitive. mostly dave eggers/mvcsweeneys-style character-voice/absurd humor driven vignettes about summer camp. seems like durham uses the same joke structure over and over - would have been a good chapbook, maybe, or the book could have been expanded in different ways than repeating the same kind of set up and structure throughout. some scenes include a reflexive, self-conscious self-reference to 'comment on' or diffuse 'problematic' ideas in a way that is intended to make the author look good in spite of the book still seeming 'problematic' for other reasons in another 10 years, or something. an interesting book that got kind of boring, basically. but i enjoyed thinking about summer camps because of it. felt surprised by how much press this book seemed to garner back in 2013.

brief book reviews

realized i had abandoned my blog halfway through writing a couple book reviews. these first two are from, like, november, i think. the last bunch are from what i can remember reading. since then and more recently. i think i'm forgetting several books, haha

Taking Care by Joy Williams (Vintage): this is a collection of stories. most revolve around, basically, "alcoholic parents", in retrospect. i think in some of the stories she does a wonderful job of capturing this strange ephemerality of things due to pointlessness, drinking, and isolation, where the writing and scenes are vague and evocative and really capture this reality she's describing. in other stories this strangeness is due to the protagonists - children or the elderly, so there's an ongoing vibe of how these internal or external factors influence how we experience the world. but some of the stories surprised me, in a negative way, with how she felt the need to sort of really clarify or set up her intention behind the story, and a couple were a little too transparently bleak. i also dislike that the second-to-last story is an excerpt from her novel Breaking and Entering, which i had recently read, and so skipped (it's possible it's a different version or outtake, but i didn't feel compelled to read it). but overall most of the stories are impressionistic and let you sort of contemplate or experience the culmination of little things in daily life to create a mood, which i found engaging. but what sticks out to me most about her writing in these stories is her evocative and powerful choice in adjectives/adverbs, especially in plain, staccato sentences, sort of like punctuation. i enjoyed thinking about what it would mean (making this example up to illustrate) to feel like my "life" was "rude" or something. these lines were interesting in terms of writing - the writer - and also the characters (and their self-awareness) and story, consistently across every story. i think this is interesting writing, to me, as 'literary fiction' in all the generic ways - quiet, domestic, (rich?) white people dramas - but in that each little detail feels impactful and important, in contrast with some other writing in this vein i've read, but i don't know enough about 'the canon' to really comment on this much. i look forward to reading more joy williams stories but i hope they aren't all based on these same themes of childhood/parenthood. but i liked the stories or scenes that emphasized things like ecological change due to human endeavors, plants, animals, etc.

Body High by Jon Lindsey (House of Vlad - ARC pdf) - brian sent me this over e-mail, which coincided with a stretch of nights where i had to stay up holding a toddler who doesn't sleep well, so i read this one on my phone in increments of maybe 45 minutes in the middle of the night over the course of a week. i feel like my appreciation for the book hinges on my (mis)understanding of various plot points and (changes in) characters and may be due to this bleary state of mind. overall, i was surprised, i think, at how 'straightforward' this book is, as a novel with a linear plot and resolution, considering the more alternative-leaning press and author, and also its emphasis on relatively 'heavy' and 'serious' themes, like incest/rape/pedophilia. it is a more or less 'action packed' story in the second half, with concise beginning and endpoints, reveals and 'twists', some degree of character development related to the established themes, and a good deal of exposition and scene-setting. so that's my biggest takeaway - aside from a few House of Vladian quirks (like a paragraph that's just a list of like 50 wresting moves, for example) it's, like, a normal book. most chapters start in media res, which is a fancy term i learned which means that each chapter starts after the start of some interesting action/decision/event to 'hook' the reader and then backfill the details a couple paragraphs in - for whatever reason this surprised and sort of bothered me, especially in the last half/third, since in this stretch the 'plan' that is concocted for [reasons] keeps (arbitrarily) changing in drastic ways, making each new chapter artificially confusing. in this way the in media res effect kind of wore me out, mentally (i'm trying to write this without including any specifics as regards the plot so i won't spoil it for anyone). the biggest thing i think that bothers me is how the narrator is written to be highly intelligent, thoughtful, motivated, virtuous, and grounded, or something, but the plot is more or less fueled by him being stupid or amoralistic in a few ways. there were several moments where it feels like someone would reasonably ask "what is happening" or "why is this happening" at some point, and the narrator is written to be someone who would ask these questions, but then never does. while i think part of this is narratively 'explained away' by some underspecified and kind of unmotivated 'drug binge', which would negatively affect everyone's ability to make decisions, it didn't feel realistic for the character. but i think with any kind of action-forward plot like this, you run into the potential for things to feel like they would be awkward to make 'realistic', so there's a trade-off on some idea of narrative propulsion and realism - i'm thinking here about how 'easy' it is for the narrator to find/access/confirm some information on a computer in the last few pages, with the relevant stuff, like, just saved to the desktop, on a powered-on, unlocked computer? i'm not trying to be too negative about this, like i said, because i think it's just something that happens with these kinds of books, which i usually don't read - you need to suspend disbelief in order to let the action unfold. i did also overall feel confused by the sort of jarring juxtaposition of 'slapstick' humor - some of which i thought was funny/interesting, like the jack nicholson corpse - and these serious, action-packed themes and the moralistic heroism; there are other moments where i think a scene is intended to be funnier than it reads because of this pallor of seriousness, like the scene in the sperm bank. this all comes off as negative, like i said, but i think is just me trying to understand what it is about these kinds of books that make me less interested in them in a general sense, and maybe i'm not the intended audience. in positive things, to me, i think he does a good job incorporating contemporary things like social media in a realistic and natural way, and the aunt character is very interesting and complex throughout. i also actually really enjoyed the wrestling subplot(s) and felt like it would have been even more interesting, to me, if it played a more active role in the story. i haven't read anything else by jon lindsey but am curious to look at his short stories (josh hebburn has hyped up to me a story jon sent to hobart). revisiting this in may, now, i feel continually 'gaslit' by how popular this book seems to be with everyone in the community, such that i kept revisiting it to see if i was just really out of it while reading it, but i feel the same way about it. some vague thoughts about what this means in terms of how people think about style and content - people like a certain kind of novel, and i don't like that kind of novel, i think, is just what it is.

las vegas bootlegger by noah cicero: this was great. the best adjective i could think of while reading it was "free." noah seemingly let himself freely write exactly what he felt like writing at any given stage. the story is a weird mix of social commentary and politics (which is standard for cicero) and a ridiculous adventure novel. style-wise, he leans into a unique and artificial technique for dialogue - the characters speak in a very plain, artificial way so that their message/role for the character's arc is made very clear in a way that's funny, and it's formatted like a play, basically. i can't really explain it well. the plot itself is compelling and silly. there are no special twists, kind of - characters are open and honest about ridiculous things. it feels very unselfconscious, or, like, if this plot were written by someone else, they'd try to introduce some bullshit about, like, things not being what they appear, or things being a trick or plot, because they'd feel like what happens is too ridiculous or simple. so it's like a rejection of a rejection. it's overall very funny, by design. i kept taking pictures of paragraphs to send to my friends.

noah cicero's wild kingdom by noah cicero:  these are short, plain poems about his childhood in a very small/rural town in ohio, framed by this autoficitonal artifice of the narrator talking about his childhood. the long section of dialogue at the end was good. i like the structure of this - i like that noah feels liberated to experiment with structure i awkward and unconventional ways. the poems themselves are mostly pretty good. there's some awkward phrasing a few places and i kept hoping for the endings to be slightly different, but i think he's consistent in letting them be what they are - memory is strange and never neatly tied up like a poem is 'supposed to be,' and these poems reflect that. found myself feeling nostalgic for weird little things regarding food and nature and family.

something gross by big bruiser dope boy: read this really quickly because of its quick structure and exciting subject matter. bbdb hates the term 'alt lit' so i won't classify it as that but it reads a lot like books like best behavior in its autofictional style and subplot about real writers/publishers. i enjoyed looking stuff up on twitter to figure out who some of the characters correspond to in real life, but i don't think i know enough to identify one of them. it's one of those 'inside baseball' treats in an otherwise really great book. i similarly talked about it a lot while reading it and recommended it to several people. the last half leans into the self-shame over shame-of-others, with very 'vulnerable' moves to include things that characterize the narrator as complex and difficult. in this book he builds on some things he's done elsewhere - there are sort of ironic/cynical puns and jokes, excerpts of very long and intense text messages/emails, and stylistically builds on some of his other longer-form autoficitional narrative poems, both in voice and structure, that sentograph line line line thing. several images that he included, i think knowingly for this reason, have stuck with me and others, and we talk about them sometimes, when things in real life reminds us of them. i also liked the theme of older/aging men doing a lot of drugs and dangerous sex, this sort of bleak reality that everyone seems to acknowledge but can't/won't escape. it's written with a lot of empathy, i think, under this more cold and critical tone. it's a complicated and compelling book.

the nickel boys by colson whitehead: this is one of the very few 'normal' books i've read in recent memory - famous author on a big press writing standard mfa kinda stuff. the story is bleak and engaging and presents a good perspective on things i had internalized the formal story behind, i think. it was a compelling read with lots of 'action' and 'drama' but i think this means that the style, clarity, and cohesion took a backseat. i felt like there were a lot of awkwardly written passages, and it does that thing of like, time jumping to 'hook' the reader, leading up to a big 'twist' at the end. would be interested in reading more books like this in terms of content/perspective that aren't funneled through the big five palatable-for-the-masses writing choices. also felt interested in it being one of those fictionalized accounts of something that really happened, based on a lot of research and, apparently, the reading/study of nonfiction, firsthand accounts of this type of story. between this and some other things i've read/listened to, it seems like this is a good method of writing a best selling book, and seems weird to me.

escapes by joy williams: i liked that these stories didn't feel 'samey' about alcoholic parents. really enjoyed most of them, felt continually inspired by her interesting use of adjectives and adverbs. some of the stories seemed overly bleak, like, artificially dark (like someone was mashing together dark topics - 'what if we gave a dying old lady a baby? nothing could go well, right?'), but most were good and intriguing. felt confused by the fact that there are two stories that are, apparently, about the same characters/events but separated by time, but on first read through, i felt like it was two versions of the same story, because of how much parallelism is written into them; these were also the least exciting, to me, maybe.

libra by don delillo: read this for a bookclub with mike but he read it much faster than me. i've forgotten a lot of what i thought about it, but enjoyed the ambiguity of plots, plots on plots, the sense of being in control when not being in control. felt like a lot of the writing/structure was needlessly pretentious or dramatic in a way that people who read best sellers like. probably wold have enjoyed it more if it just followed oswald - his sections were most compelling to me.

white noise by don delillo: i was given this and libra as an xmas present. everyone says this book is super great so i was excited for it, but felt generally let down. i think reading too much frederick barthelme and some other kmart realism stuff ruined it for me. it's basically that kind of book but with some more pretentious dramatic writing. i did like how he lets certain unique scenes play out, in spite of them being 'dramatic' scenes. i enjoyed some of the dialogue between the professors - felt like realistic 'guys fucking around at lunch' talk - but overall most of the characters felt very artificial and wacky for the sake of being interesting. i liked the move of letting audio from the television or radio bleed into scenes, like a part of the dialogue. felt weird reading about the toxic airborne event and how people react to it from the perspective of living in a global pandemic. it overall felt a little long and the ending petered out in a way i didn't really enjoy- felt like i was just skimming the last two pages.

bob the gambler by frederick barthelme: got this bc mike wanted to bookclub it, but he read it in like 3 days and it took me a couple weeks. i like the mid-90s setting and especially the emphasis on the narrator being kind of a jerk/idiot. felt refreshing to read a novel about a guy who does stupid 'bad' shit like littering. also laughed at several scenes, like him wearing a massive shirt for no reason. the gambling scenes and subplot were very stressful and anxiety-inducing, which i was impressed by. it's a weird book and felt like he was having fun experimenting with what it means to include things in a book - like he was flexing, kind of, his writing skills, but pushing on some ideas in a risky way. he could have just written a more popular, probably, action novel about gambling, but he didn't - the second half is very meandering and calm in way that doesn't feel like a succinct 'happy ending'. enjoyed various scenes and subplots in the second half.

tracer by frederick barthelme (counterpoint): this one is short and full of strange imagery and characters. he lets weird little dumb moments play out and people tell stupid little stories. there's a lot of standing around and not being sure what to do which feels realistic. i liked a lot of little scenic details and how he lets little scenes play out, like the narrator and ex wife fucking around wih their cars on the highway. i looked it up on goodreads and saw joey grantham gave it a 5 star review and just wrote "perfect."

painted desert by frederick barthelme: went on a freddy b kick, obviously. it's pretty long compared to his other books and felt very...transparent in its moral arc. like there's an obvious couple of messages and it just sort of plays out naturally, no twists or anything. i liked all the scenic details. made me want to go on a roadtrip out west. enjoyed the reference to that kids in the hall sketch toward the end. enjoyed reading it in 2021 and feeling like nothing in the world has changed since 1994, only we're looking for this end-of-the-world-disaster content on social media instead of television.

blogging again

in november, i deleted most of my internet presence, including this blog, but i maintained email correspondence, more or less, with people i had been emailing prior to deleting everything. on may 2nd, i returned to twitter in a transparently book-promotional way, for my new book, everything is totally fine.

between december and may, several people had reached out to me to ask me to send them some content that was on this blog, specifically the 'how to make a book' post and the 'limp bizkit' post. i decided to just reopen the blog, and then thought about writing more blog posts again. i enjoyed writing blog posts and felt good when people told me they liked my blog posts.

i'm trying to be better at being on the internet. i've been spending less time on twitter than i used to. unsure what i'll blog about but i might start with writing book reviews again.

why we don't have a name, maybe

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

Abstract:

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

 

1. Music Genre Onomastics in English

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

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

 

HEAVY METAL

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

 

SHOEGAZE

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

 

NEW WAVE

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

 

Here are a couple other quick examples:

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

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

doom metal -> doom -> doomjazz

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

popular music -> pop -> synthpop, dream pop

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

 

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

 

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

 

2. Literary Genre and Onomastics in English

 

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

modern

post modern

literary fiction

realism

magic realism

new sincerity

alt lit

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

3. Alt Lit

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

4. Post Alt Lit

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

5. Problems in (Post) Alt Lit Onomastics

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

5. Conclusion & Discussion

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

 

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

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

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

brief book reviews

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

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

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

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