#alt-lit

[lligkv]

I'm always on-guard against conservatism in my thought. I think of myself as left in my sympathies; I also know I'm at the age where youthful commitments morph, or break under the weight of compromise. Like the ones involved in life in the American professional-managerial middle class. Entry into a certain income bracket, the structure and demands of day-to-day life, the pieces of practical work, like the management of bills, that are necessary to stay afloat, and the many entertainments you can use to while away the hours you don't devote to a job—they all serve to narrow one's horizons; it's so easy to end up stranded in the cul-de-sac of your stupid individual existence. I also have some very rudimentary, instinctive associations I've carried with me since youth. Just as conservatism is bad—because retrograde, oppressive, contingent on baseline assumptions about the self-interest of human character to which I'm not willing to commit—"avant-garde" is good, because it challenges that conservatism. So it was interesting to come upon Dean Kissick's contribution to the feature "What Happened to the Avant-Garde?" in the latest issue of The Drift and think that, based on my last post, he'd probably put me in the arrière-garde—which favors what is past because it's a means to reject the present and future—while he locates the avant-garde in online communities at which I mostly look askance: "schizo-affect" Substacks, the work of Honor Levy, and other venues that seem to thrill to the possibilities that AI and machine learning technologies might hold for art and human subjectivity.

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.

But then there's Lisa Robertson in her novel The Baudelaire Fractal, which I just finished. The novel is another Künstlerroman, the story of an artist's formation, and over the course of her literary apprenticeship, the protagonist decides that, as she puts it, "I was no avant-gardist; I had no interest in abolishing grammar. Rather, I studied it, in a casual way..." Perhaps that's where my own allegiances lie—in working with the world as it is rather than abolishing it; exploring the possibilities it holds without tipping into what I think will degrade it, such as technologies like AI; most crucially, tempering the excitement of the new with some sense of what the new might be worth... Robertson's narrator, for her part, determines that her literary project will entail work with the sentence: "By what profound calculations," she wonders, "could the contours of the sentence be transformed, and what would I then become?"

[vormov]

go with the favor of the southern winds (lips of ashes)

the unknown speaks through me these our last words, paradise be it at a willingness to die, nor a fealty to light.

i'll never know which way to go if these blessings of fog hide our lies, like i was born to perish gone to dust before i begun, as if the words i say were of forgotten tongues never the lesser to speak words of faith.

i should know better.

i always knew i was the weaker one, yet i'll go further than anyone else no fear. like the ghosts following me are giving guidence, those speak to me with that certain illumination as if i'll never know these winds that gale at us.

where was i? never mind.

***

cold cold wind bear with me these nights that we might stoke a fire bright and let the heavens envy our might.

for we forge and toil, bring light to oil and never will go again to this midnight sun, our bleak spectre in the sky.

you shine like a beacon.

cold cold wind bear with me, we might fight this apparition with our gifts deny anything majorly engulfed, we'll fuel off of the fumes.

***

we've seen where this road goes, we know the inevitable spot it travels to. i'll go anyway like this cold, scared kid i'll go away like they cant see me or feel what i know, i'll go.

never to know where i was i'll go endlessly to find a way to go as if the words i spoke flowed out of the winds wildly before it bellowed my mouth.

i should know better.

***

please know we are of ether fleeting wisps on the wind like the others were blowing right past us as the leaves in the sky, a wonderous notion.

please let me see the sun that i might heat the cold and warm my wings the fates are at a crux, the wind has never been better to fly.

and again you'll see it with your own eye a glimpse into the unknown, know that you are not alone.

for we speak the ways of the winds, and i should know better.

[luthienne]

James Baldwin, from Another Country [ID'd]

[meanwhilepoetry]

I'm just trying to become someone who the child inside me will not hate. I'm trying to be everything she needed and did not receive. She is so lonely still. It's not fair that she is so lonely still.

Nikita Gill

[vomitingwords]

and then I learned

how to cry

without tears

falling from my eyes

behind clouds // ma.c.a

[fuddieduddies-art]

may 8. papà forbade mirrors in the house lest we fall victim to vanity.

[sufroyo]

some environment practice !! _(:з)∠)_

[longreads]

In this new Longreads essay, Megan Marz asks: why does the literary world still hold online writing at arm’s length? 

While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down.

People like to say the internet speeds reading up, but a personal blog, read in real time, can slow a story’s pace down to the timescale of life; the thickest book in existence can be read in less calendar time. Not even the author knew when a blog would end, which is what made it feel so alive.

Read Megan Marz’s “Poets in the Machine” on Longreads.

[llovelymoonn]

alice hoffman practical magic

kofi

[librarycards]

PSA for all who hate censorship and live in Florida!

Banned Books USA is offering a free (only pay for shipping) commonly-banned/challenged books in FL. These range from kids to adults, fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. They'll keep sending them as long as they can afford it, so please donate if you have the means, and share with those who could benefit from it, especially educators and those who care for kids.

Here are just a few from the list that I recommend:

Toni Morrison, Beloved and The Bluest Eye

Marcus Ewert, 10,000 Dresses

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

Junji Ito, The Art of Junji Ito: Twisted Visions

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools

Mariko & Jillian Tamaki, This One Summer

Tillie Walden, Spinning

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

[dislocatedwishbone]

— Wendy Cope, Spring Onions

[tellherium]

It was Never about You //

3 of 3: Poems From the First Evening I've Spent Alone in Over a Month

[luthienne]

Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick, from Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics

[meanwhilepoetry]

Sometimes I think about how beautiful it is that humans sing despite it all. That through suffering, we still sing. How even on the worst of days in the world, there were still people singing. The way a mother sings a lullaby to her crying baby to soothe her. Or the way sailors sang sea shanties out even on choppy oceans to build a sense of familiarity and camaraderie as they worked. Or how even in the depths of the earth, coal miners sing. Isn’t that the most beautiful thing about the human spirit? That we found a way to reach each other in the darkness. To let each other know through song, that do not worry, I am here. Let us sing together and ease each others fears.

- Nikita Gill

[animatedjen]

You're not the only one who survived.

[magnolia-sunrise]

Did he who made the Lamb make thee? - this is heavily referencing Jacques Fabien Gautier d'Agoty's "Anatomical Angel" illustration, it's also inspired by William Blake's art, specifically "The Great Red Dragon" and his poem "The Tyger"