#alt-lit

In these communities—products of an era of the Internet that's a little after the one I occupied, as a millennial closer to the middle than the end of that generation's span—"individual subjectivity," as Kissick puts it, "was forsaken in favor of pseudonymity, the impersonation of others, collective authorship, and collaborations with software." In isolation, I'm cool with each of these things except for the last one. Of course, there's no guarantee that any of them make for good art or lasting contributions to it—the title of Kissick's entry is "Senseless Babble," and he himself grants that "there's a fine line between nonsense doggerel and aesthetic innovation here, [as is] always the case with avant-gardes." And it's really too simplistic to say that the avant-garde generally is automatically good. Avant-gardes can be regressive; ours is pretty likely to be, as John Ganz wrote last year:

They pride themselves in being retrograde or blithely unaware along a number of axes, from declaring, as a last ditch Bohemian provocation, their fealty to conventional bourgeois values; their preoccupation with adolescence; appropriation of lower-brow or conservative religious themes; their affectation of not being the product of arts education but rather the native denizens of the dark underbelly of internet message boards; their deliberate cultivation of a sense of mental debility or confusion with results that less like Dadaist or Futurist experimentation and more just senseless chatter and maudlin ecstasy....

There's something akin to an accelerationist's empty zeal, too, in Kissick's piece, in claims like the one that the timeline has surpassed modernist poetry as a document of the collective unconscious and human subjectivity within it. A love for what is novel and ostensibly a challenge to what is simply because it's novel or a challenge. A love for form that disregards content. And a love that likely mistakes a mere turn of the wheel for something truly new and unprecedented. Turn the dial back ten or fifteen years and you'd find people saying much the same about alt-lit—though likely less effusively, jadedness and alexithymia being characteristic of that style and its partisans where volubility, profusion, and mania seem hallmarks of this one. We're saying something new, we thought then. And uneasy in the background hung the question: who knows if it's meaningful. (The answer, predictably: not very.) (But at least the question was there.)

Still, we're all here trying to articulate—to make something new, as in valuable, because it speaks to what only we can speak to.

I had an artist residency once in a decaying old building that tasted like Gothic decadence gone insane dripping with hallowed stories like vampire kisses whispering down the walls with a soft, alluring kind of madness.

I would write late at night kept company by little doves, the smell of paint I left on a wall in a fit of artistic pique or exasperation.

The only sounds were the soft call of lonely rain, the echo of clickety clack train track carrying pendulum people to and fro unhappily swaying side to side awake to asleep to awake to sleep until it all blurred into microdosing Mondays suits worn out to the races Tuesdays burn your paycheck on the pokies but don't burn it all down because where are we all going to live if we set fire to the doghouse?

It only takes a drop of rain to break a drought.

The most perfect kind of intimacy is the kind I have with someone who only knows me from the ink etchings left inside a book of poetry I have left in Elizabeth's. There will be no pricetag, it will not appear in stocktake, no, my footprints and their shadows will be the only evidence in the wood floors of quiet underfoot as I, the reverse thief, leave you the last breath of poetry, that one gasp you need to wake up from resuscitation to retaliation against a kind of living that is always trying to kill you, I will not be there, I never am.

Catch my answering machine, if you can. Like a fridge, it is always running, always hopping never stopping all ways out of breath.

I will be in the north, somewhere letting time and red dirt trickle through my fingers like I am holding the drought in my hands waiting for it to look beautiful, I think rich old white women might bottle it to take home to pristine porcelain tile floors, marble archways to say look, look here, isn't it dirty, and doesn't that make it beautiful?

You can commodity anything if you try hard enough.

Look at me selling my skin and stories for just one more bite of pie;

It only takes a drop of rain to break a drought.

I am dripping sweat and adrenaline, at this point in the poem my hands are wet and dripping, my lips dry and nervous and I am only here because someone made rain yesteryear.

I have been looking for it, dipping my fingers through dirt and time, and maybe I was looking for you, but that wasn't what I found.

Why is my mailbox always full of bills and not love letters? It is because I never asked for them.

All the best conversations start with hello.

The best books of poetry are slim, skinny; not like those instagram girls that bully and butcher your self esteem like they are ghosts haunting the tired walls of an old hospital folks let me heal myself with poetry in.

Critical it-boy Dean Kissick stylistically channeling old John Leonard with this wonderfully excitable opening to a review of Tao Lin’s forthcoming Leave Society. I will read Leave Society—do I have to read Taipei first?—and, if you missed it, I wrote about Trip two weeks ago, very skeptically, even though I enjoyed the reading experience. “Beware the man of one book,” they say; Lin’s read about five and doesn’t seem aware of the possible objections one might raise to those (not that I’ve read his specific chosen texts, but I’ve perused other treatises in the goddess/matriarchy and shrooms/ayahuasca line before). 

Kissick makes Leave Society sound like science-autofiction—this term was obviously at the tips of Dean’s fingers, but he sadly never quite arrived at it, so I’m coining it now—and I suspect Lin’s evolving new worldview, unpersuasive as I find much of it, empowers him to discover more and more of the sublime in his minimalist anti-style, a possible successor to DeLillo, who first showed us how to turn minimalism inside out to reveal cosmic miracles. Trip was billed as nonfiction, but in a novel it doesn’t matter if you find the worldview persuasive as long as the book’s fun and beautiful. I intended but forgot, in my essay, to describe Trip as Bronze Age Pervert for post-leftists, but, alongside references to anarcho-primitivism and the Lindy Man, Kissick puts Lin’s “n-dimensional Asian-futurist visionary romanticism” in just that context, invoking the new reactionary avant-garde I’ve glanced at here several times:

He appears to believe, or to want to believe, in a singularity of dreams in which our own creative thoughts, our slow and considered fantasies, rather than artificial intelligences or technological acceleration, might move us into the immaterial realm beyond: the imagination. The imagination as he describes it seems like a sort of heaven. As such, it mirrors other ascending spiritual movements of the past decade, from the popularity of shamanic ritual and ayahuasca ceremonies, on the West Coast in particular; to the revival of churchgoing among New York’s it girls and literary bratpack; to the cult of Angelicism (who notes, on his blog, “According to Leave Society, cosmology is kinda MKUltra, that is, what Badiou calls an ideology of finitude. In other words, any fear of extinction is just a default horror trope, and needs to be worked through”) or the nascent movement of “Network Spirituality,” which might be framed as a virtual heavenly community that rejects old models of individuality and reality. It’s in the imaginary realm, Lin suggests, that we can be free. He notes that of all the primates, it’s humans that spend the highest proportion of their sleeping hours dreaming. This might be our preordained role in the universe, to dream; and those dreams might contain the wherewithal to remake the cosmos.

Ashley Olson, “Another #MeToo Victim?”

where were you when the world was illusion? nothing more than a ghost or a fragment of thought. as if the airs above us cared for our fragrant minds, they whist us away upon these caravanning folds above to the sky in abundance, illuminating, really, that such benevolence would be bestowed on me, i was the tirer of the tower the writ in the caucused-mind, the fallacy meant to all destruction.

and yet, their wings flew me like a procession of various currents that coalesce into a single stream. the winds flow through me.

i would see these wolves abolished, the taint laid true and spread among us, the willing would see it for what it was this disillusionment of minds the rest would undo it entirely, seeking them the worlds of chaos out of favor for the entropy of worlds, they can't do it, they know they can't fight their fates outright.

would these wills of winds be so clear to me? could i see which direction this great one came from, or to which eye of storms bled this storm into reality ive never been so great at it, the foresight.

i can't be the only one here to stand so awakened, the rest will surely come eventually upon my call.

when no calls return the hero regrets, the lives upon his balance concede to his desperation and they collapse into ruin, as if his mighty fists falling to the ground caused this calamity to begin with.

an anger erupts with a sequence in mind it cannot be quelled now, nor subjugated it has encompassed all minds, an erasured memory taken abroad to your skies to analyze, you'll never fucking know.