Why Is This Lovingly Made DIY Literary Magazine So Boring?

I was recently sent a copy of a literary magazine; it’s published by a nonprofit organization, so it’s not technically do-it-yourself, but it has a classic DIY feel to it: the pages are photocopied and stapled, and there’s a tiny little book of poetry rubber-banded inside. The cover is fastened with velcro. It’s absolutely adorable…and boring.

The stories and poems inside aren’t bad, they’re just presented in a context that’s started to feel as predictable as the Loeb Classical Library. Are there whimsical little line drawings? Yes. Are there tiny ads for indie bookstores in the back? Yep. Are there free-verse poems about bodies and birds and seasons? Voila. Are there winners of a fiction contest? Need you ask?

There’s nothing wrong with any of this—it’s just that the whole concept of a literary magazine right now feels stuck between stations, and the more an indie magazine screams integrity and scrappiness and sincerity, the more pointless it seems. Why not start a blog and save your Xerox money for bottom-shelf whiskey?

Before the Internet, things were different. When distribution was only on paper, writers who didn’t have access to conventional publishing had to get creative. There were mailing lists for photocopied fanfic, and the zine table at your local bookstore was an essential stop if you wanted to find writing that would actually surprise you.

This cute little literary magazine feels like a relic of that era. If you’re interested in adventurous writing, why replicate the conventional publishing structure—editor, publisher, customer—in miniature? Why not climb entirely outside that box?

Today you can post a story on Tumblr, you can format and distribute your own e-book, you can write an endless free-verse poem in the form of tweets. Curation still happens, but in a decentralized way: through retweets and reblogs. Everyone is a writer, and everyone is an editor. Distribution is instant, and free. Money is hard to come by, yes—but if you’re working outside the conventional publishing world, is it really harder to come by than it is offline? Now you can launch a Kickstarter, or sell your own stuff on Amazon, or offer to send writing or art in exchange for a few bucks of Adderall money via Paypal. No copier expenses, no begging booksellers for table space.

Best of all, creative writing—fiction, poetry, nonfiction—has become more diverse and exciting than ever. You genuinely don’t know what you’re going to get on Tumblr or Twitter, because anyone can use that space. You know who you’re following, but they’re constantly retweeting and reblogging people you don’t know. You can follow your favorite writers from anywhere in the world, and you can follow them right now—you don’t need to wait for them to be discovered by The New Yorker or Tin House.

I appreciate the impulse to make tangible products. It’s another way to present your work, and it adds a tactile dimension to the experience of reading. I’m glad there are still books and magazines along with the Internet, just like I’m glad there are movie theaters along with YouTube. That said, the Internet has raised the stakes for hard-copy publications: they have to add value. They can’t just exist as vessels.

To me, a lo-fi literary journal says, “Hey, isn’t it cool that I exist?” My response is, increasingly, just to shrug.

- Jay Gabler

The Tangential presents: FUTURE CITIES Release Party and Twin Cities Tumblr Meetup

We’re excited to announce that our Future Cities book release party will be sponsored by Tumblr. Where would we be without Tumblr? That’s too scary to think about. It’ll also be sponsored by our publisher, Hillcrest Media.

Please join us at the Nomad World Pub in Minneapolis on February 27th for a book release party and Tumblr meetup. For just $10 you’ll get entry, a copy of the book, and a free drink ticket while supplies last.

Other fun deets:

Musical Guests:
- The Golden Bubbles (featuring Tangential editor Chris Vondracek)
- Koo Koo Kanga Roo
- DJ @jimfrick of Wak Lyf (Curator of technodrome.tumblr.com)

Here’s what’s going to go down:
7:30 p.m. - Doors open
8:30 p.m. - A reading by the contributors
9:00 p.m. - The music begins

Please bring your party shoes. We can’t wait to see you.

Future Cities contributors, in order of appearance in the book:

Jason Zabel—a Tangential editor, formerly editor of the late great Twin Cities A.V. Club.

Katie Sisneros—a Tangential founding editor and a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Minnesota.

John Jodzio—author of Get In If You Want to Live (Paper Darts, 2011) and other story collections.

Becky Lang—creator of The Tangential and a creative at Zeus Jones.

Jay Gabler—a Tangential founding editor and the editor of Unreality House.

Sarah Heuer—a Tangential editor and a cowriter of PhiLOLZophy.

Crispin Best—editor of For Every Year, guy who recently ran through a parking area yelling, “I’m going through a lot right now!”

Heidi Schatz—a Tangential editor.

Kat George—managing editor of Portable.tv and contributor to Vice, formerly an editor at Thought Catalog.

Kelsey McDonough—a Tangential staff writer.

Christopher Vondracek—a Tangential staff writer.

Chrissy Stockton—a Tangential staff writer and a cowriter of PhiLOLZophy.

Book cover and flyer design by Caroline Royce

Not near Minneapolis? Order your copy of Future Cities here—just $7.99 for a hard copy or $3.99 for an e-book!

J.K. Rowling, Garrison Keillor, and the Battle for the Soul of Small-Town Life

I’ve been listening to the audiobook recording of J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, but I had to take a break from it. In Rowling’s first novel for adults, she gives us a small town full of Dursleys: jealous, insecure people who connive to land a vacant seat on a parish council. I switched The Casual Vacancy out for a few discs of Garrison Keillor’s “News from Lake Wobegon” monologues, which was like slipping into a warm bath of safe, simple comforts.

Why was Keillor such a welcome respite? Rowling’s book wasn’t particularly well-reviewed, but she’s at least buzzworthy—unlike Keillor, who at least one Minnesota magazine put on a thou-shalt-not-name list because he makes for such a boring story.

For all the success of Rowling’s Harry Potter epic, though, Keillor is still her better when it comes to simple storytelling. Keillor’s style is cinematic; beginning every monologue with “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Woebegon,” he then sketches his milieu in deft gestures—mentioning a few local traditions and a few unusual occurrences, and of course giving a weather report—before gradually zooming in on one particular person whose story he proceeds to tell. His tone is gently omniscient: he sees all and offers a bit of context, but he remains an observer more than an interpreter.

By contrast, Rowling is clinical. She sets each scene by telling us precisely what’s in a character’s head and then noting relevant details from the character’s personal history, so that we are prepared to precisely interpret the significance of unfolding events. She’ll often flip perspectives among different characters in a scene, so that we understand exactly how the characters are bringing their different viewpoints to bear. Little is left to the imagination—a technique that was helpful when Rowling was describing the unfamiliar fantasy universe of Hogwarts and Voldemort, but that becomes tedious when applied to mundane middle-aged middle-class lives.

One of the things that makes The Casual Vacancy “adult” is Rowling’s relentless fixation on the manipulative little games people play among their family members and friends. A husband gets himself a cup of tea, but significantly fails to offer one to his wife. A boyfriend agrees to go to an dinner his girlfriend arranged, but makes a point of accepting the invitation in such a way as to be able to say afterwards that he never really wanted to go. A wife drinks a bottle of wine while her husband is out, then quickly hides the empty bottle when he returns.

Certainly, things like this happen routinely in adult relationships, and not infrequently undermine those relationships to the point where they break. Keillor surely knows this; he’s on his third marriage. In all the 16 monologues included in the More News From Lake Wobegon set, though, the only whisper of divorce comes when an elderly man absent-mindedly forgets his wife at a gas station and she takes it as a sign that he’s fed up with her; at the end of the monologue, they reconcile and the man silently muses on the mysteries of marriage.

That’s the kind of thing that causes some listeners to detest Keillor, and it’s a reason why his stories are best served by being told aloud, one at a time—Keillor’s novel-length Lake Wobegon books sell well among his fans, but they’re long slogs to read from cover to cover, and despite his literary pretensions (he hosts the daily Writer’s Almanac on NPR), his prose in print has never received a fraction of the acclaim his radio work has earned.

Still, Keillor’s vision of small-town life is no less honest than Rowling’s. Keillor looks at Lake Wobegon and sees a population of people who are fundamentally kind and generous, whose ambitions and pleasures are modest but real, and who treasure their local community. Rowling, by contrast, looks at Pagford and sees a roiling kettle of resentment and bitterness, with residents forever grasping at a level of contentment they rarely achieve.

Each picture is incomplete, but each also represents a choice. When you look out at your neighbors—whether you’re in the country or in the city—do you choose to see people who are basically good and basically happy despite their inevitable frustrations and foibles, or do you choose to see people who are struggling every day to trust their lovers and friends and whose life represents the sum of the compromises they’ve been forced to make?

Personally, I’d prefer to see the world as a place where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are above average—rather than as a place where the men are weak, the women are ugly, and the children are constant disappointments.

- Jay Gabler

(Source: thetangential.com)

What the Hell Has Happened to Inaugural Poetry?

The worst possible thing that could happen to poetry has just happened again: a presidential inauguration.

Poetic rabble-rousers such as those housed in M.F.A. programs, high school literature teacher conventions in beige-y hotel conference rooms, and a few suburban Caribou Coffee open mic nights were probably as dismayed as I was Monday. If you were looking to return poetry from the brink of obscurity by pointing once-and-for-all to a contemporary, stirring display of prosodical power, you were sorely disappointed by all-around nice guy/memoirist/national poet laureate Richard Blanco, who basically got up and read some children’s book lines about unity and pencil-colored busses.

Once again, poetry was the time-for-a-piss-break-it’s-a-monster-ballad equivalent for the U.S. Presidential Inauguration. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

Maya Angelou said this in 1993 at President Clinton’s inaugural poem: “Your armed struggles for profit / Have left collars of waste upon / My shore, currents of debris upon my breast. / Yet, today I call you to my riverside, / If  you will study war no more.”

Ummm, yes.

Yes, those lines (a fairly straightforward, albeit elegant and sorta-bold statement to make in a capitalistic/militaristic empire) actually made it onto national television. In 1961, when the about-to-croak Robert Frost was asked to deliver a poem for President Kennedy’s inauguration, the old bard from Bread Loaf cooked up a real bore. But when the sun reflecting off the snow blocked his vision of the paper at the podium, he instead recited from memory a real jinjoistic, but stirring knock-out from 1942 called “The Gift Outright.” It includes this line: “The land was ours before we were the land’s/ She was ours before we would become her people.”

Ummm, double yes.

Which brings us back to the two most recent inaugural’s attempts at poetry. First off, cheers to Obama for foisting poetry out into our face—even though the old form’s protégé and now usurper, hip hop, was resting just behind the walls (where Jay-Z sat with his wife the Lip-Syncher-in-Chief). There have actually only been five poets to speak at inaugurations, but the most recent two are totally in the category of also-ran. Four years ago, Elizabeth Alexander read a poem that sounded more like a flight attendant’s speech (“Someone is trying to make some music somewhere”) and, curiously, began a trend of referencing pencils in inauguration poems (“Take out your pencils. Begin.”). This year, aside from a moving, albeit not uncouth line about Newtown, his grocery-bagging mother, and that bit about hope being a constellation we should map or whatever, Blanco sent the audience to the porta-Johns.

And not just because video cameras caught House Majority Whip Eric Cantor staring in bewilderment throughout the address (Cantor, in addition to being an asshole, is on record for skipping the president’s second primetime television address so he could see Britney Spears’ Circus  tour). But, Blanco’s poem was like Bono on an off day. Like post-Achtung Baby, Bono. A heavy oaring of monosyllabic truisms (“All of us as vital as the one light we move through”) mixed with undaunted sentimentality (“My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors”). It felt like something I’d download with pictures on my iPhone to put a kid to sleep tonight to. And that sun, that sun is for all of us, and so is the moon. We’re one. Made from many.

Basically, DO go gentle into that good Porta-John restless crowds, honestly please.

Blanco reaffirmed that in 2013 poetry has no purpose in American society other than to cobble together a few folksy images about playing nicely, supporting each other, and never giving up. Obviously I don’t agree this is poetry’s limitation. Obviously, I wish the President would’ve chosen anyone else: Ted Kooser, Junot Diaz, or Phillip Levine, all poets with “mid America” vibes that also lack YouTube videos attached to their names excoriating the Tea Party or corporate America or Rush Limbaugh or white people (GOD FORBID!).

But, poetry took a hit this week, people. Tuesday night at a bar in my town, our local poet laureate cornered me and leveled our generation for lacking any literary balls. I told him about my students struggling through Emerson’s “On Self-Reliance,” and he fumed, saying that in the mid-19th Century, “Emerson was a rock star! He went from town to town and people paid to see him—not even educated people, just regular Joes! You can tell your fucking students THAT!” He then went on a tear about the “Googlization” of millennials, a treatise slightly undermined when he backed up his claim with reference to a YouTube video. He then educated me on how handwriting got done right in the 18th Century, which re-awoke me to the fact he was crazy and should not win.

But, I’m worried. I’m worried for poetry that he might be right. That it’s been rendered—for whatever reason, capitalism, shorter attention spans, increasingly thriftiness in our language, the burgeoning STEM education movement in America—a glorified opportunity for cheesy, sentimental Hallmark bullshit to be spewed into American homes without any intellectual teeth. Yes the presidential inauguration is a ceremony meant for something grandiose and sparkly and heart-warming. But can’t our ceremonies be mixed with a little more ambiguity, challenging allusions, thought-sparking insights?

Aristotle says poetry is “a more philosophical and a higher thing than history.” But, if I’ve been disappointed at all about Obama’s presidency, I honestly think it starts with the anticlimactic inaugural poets. Please, next time, give me a reason to hate Eric Cantor even more for staring mindlessly and dumbly at the poet laureate. Not reason for bipartisan agreement.

- Dunstan McGill

(Source: thetangential.com)

Ten Opening Paragraphs for a Review of Mira Gonzalez’s “I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough to Make Us Beautiful Together”

“In the Victorian Era, sex was not thought to be enjoyable for women, who were famously advised to ‘lie back and think of the empire’ while their husbands plowed away. For women in the ‘alt lit’ community writing about sex today, the equivalent maxim seems to be ‘lie back and think of the Internet.’”

“Mira Gonzalez writes poetry that seems very true. I mean that both in the sense of emotional honesty and in the sense that she’s right, it does feel insane that you need money to develop a drug addiction.”

“Though it does contain the lines ‘I will touch your face using my entire body/ and we will recall a specific warm morning/ when we felt numbness in the space between atoms/ and our mouths tasted like the unattainable closeness of years prior,’ on every other page of I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough For Us to Be Beautiful Together, Mira Gonzalez is not the kind of poet who writes poetry like that.”

“The poetry of Mira Gonzalez might be described as ‘erotic existentialism,’ except that it’s not particularly erotic. In her poems sex often happens, but the act is described flatly and without detail, by way of explaining what her body is doing while her mind is contemplating the spaces between molecules.”

“Mira Gonzalez’s poetry collection I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough For Us to Be Beautiful Together arrives hot on the heels of the writer being singled out by Vice UK as an example of everything that’s wrong with the alt lit movement. That might be the best publicity she could have hoped for.”

“I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough For Us to Be Beautiful Together, a poetry collection by Mira Gonzalez, is being published in the same season as the first book by Marie Calloway, another confessional young female writer whose writing is native to the Internet. Sex is a frequent occurrence in both books, but whereas for Calloway sex is an extremely serious matter that occasions frantically intense introspection, for Gonzalez—like Megan Boyle—the act has a poignant absurdity. ‘He said “I’m gonna come on your stomach” 15 to 20 times while breathing heavily and putting his penis on different parts of my stomach/ every time I attempted to touch his penis he moved my hand away/ eventually I gave up on trying to interact with his penis.’”

“‘I feel like 400 dead jellyfish in the middle of a freeway.’ If Mira Gonzalez didn’t exist, Diablo Cody would have to invent her.”

“One day when I was an RA in grad school, I was eating lunch with an undergrad who I barely knew; unexpectedly, she broke down in tears and told me that a longtime friend of hers had started dating someone else, and that she barely saw him any more. ‘I just wish,’ she told me, ‘that wherever he’s going, he could just put me in his pocket and take me with him.’ I was reminded of that woman when I read the title poem of Mira Gonzalez’s new collection I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough For Us to Be Beautiful Together. ‘If I were two inches tall/ I would sit on your shoulder all day/ and nurture a relationship with your earlobe/ my hands would be too small to effectively touch you.’”

“I once asked Minneapolis poet Paul Dickinson whether he’d ever considered trying stand-up comedy. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘It’s better to be the funny poet than the poetic comedian.’”

“Mira Gonzalez portrays bleakness in such vibrant verse that it’s hard to believe she actually wants to starve to death during sex. Still, I’m inclined to believe her.”

- Jay Gabler is proud that the final poem in the book was first published at Unreality House.

Photoillustration by Mira Gonzalez via Tumblr

Ten Opening Paragraphs for a Review of Marie Calloway’s “What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life”

“I’m a man. Does that make it impossible for me to review Marie Calloway’s What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life, or does it make me the book’s target audience?”

“In all the reviews I’ve written, I’ve never felt my opinion is so unnecessary as in the case of What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life. The last thing the world needs is yet another opinion about Marie Calloway.”

“Marie Calloway, in What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life, has pulled off the unlikely feat of turning book publishing itself into a sex act.”

“I told a friend I was was reviewing Marie Calloway’s new book, and she said, ‘I feel like Marie Calloway is broken, and the kind of writing she’s doing is not healthy.’”

“The most profound chapter of Marie Calloway’s book What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life is the one that contains none of her writing at all. In ‘Criticism,’ Calloway superimposes the text of criticisms of her work over photos of her body—sometimes clothed, sometimes unclothed, always with a blank, indifferent expression. In doing so, she vividly dramatizes the difference between traditional confessional writing and confessional writing online, where feedback is instant and personal.”

“Once you start reading Marie Calloway’s What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life, you’ll almost certainly finish it. How do I know? Because the ‘sex’ category on The Tangential gets three times as many hits as the next most-popular category, and that’s where almost every chapter in this book would go.”

“Marie Calloway’s new book What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life is one of a few recent releases that feel like signposts marking the divide between old lit—where writing is something that you take the phone off the hook to do—and new lit—where writing is something that you pull your phone out of your pocket to do.”

“Is it even possible to review a Marie Calloway book without reviewing Marie Calloway?”

“A printer’s refusal to make copies of Marie Calloway’s new book What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life is occasioning trend pieces that lump the book together with Fifty Shades of Grey as an example of controversial books about sex, a ‘genre’ that’s supposedly growing in popularity. That fact just serves to show how unprepared the conventional publishing world is to deal with the likes of Marie Calloway.”

“Marie Calloway’s new book is terrifying. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is for you to decide.”

- Jay Gabler

(Source: thetangential.com)

In Defense of Alt Lit: Literary Criticism and the DIY Revolution

Over the past couple of days, the “alt lit” community has been buzzing over an unapologetically trolling post by Josh Baines on VICE.UK: “Alt-Lit is for Boring, Infantile Narcissists.” In a nutshell, Baines’s argument is that most of what is self-identified as “alt lit” is not good writing, and that the poor writing is not redeemed by the circumstances of its creation.

There’s not much that can be done with Baines’s aesthetic criticism of alt lit, since he doesn’t even try to hide his bias against the form and content of alt lit: online writing, often self-referential, featuring multimedia content. He notes, accurately, that “it’s writing that is written to be ‘Liked’ on Facebook and reblogged on Tumblr”—and he doesn’t say that like it’s a good thing. So, though Baines and I differ as to whether or not Mira Gonzalez is a good writer, I wouldn’t try to convince him otherwise—no person who does what she does is likely to please Baines.

Baines does concede that Tao Lin—a major inspiration for the alt lit community—is a good writer. “He nails the kind of weightlessness/aimlessness that people in their twenties feel without overstating it.” I agree, but it seems plausible that Baines’s assessment of Lin has been colored by the fact that Lin is by far the most established writer working in the alt lit mode: he has a publishing company and multiple books, one of which has now been adapted into a motion picture. He’s been the subject of an approving Wall Street Journal feature. Presumably Baines would say that Lin’s success has come about because he’s a good writer; that seems correct, but it’s also true that Lin no longer needs the support of the alt lit community, so he can afford to be above the fray. He’s established.

That’s not true for most alt lit writers, only a couple of whom have garnered notice outside the alt lit world. I was recently talking with a publishing insider; she told me that she’s not a fan of alt lit, but she had also never even heard of Steve Roggenbuck, an itinerant poet who’s a celebrity by alt lit standards and who has co-headlined readings with Lin as well as been featured in the New York Times style magazine. If even Roggenbuck is still below the book-world radar, then so are the likes of Gonzalez, Frank Hinton, Crispin Best (a contributor to The Tangential’s book Future Cities), Stephen Tully Dierks, and other alt lit luminaries. Can you blame them, then, for self-promoting?

Yes, apparently. In fact, that’s precisely what Baines is blaming them for. While he concedes that “there’s something genuinely inspiring about the way the alt-lit community spreads and disseminates work,” he thinks the alt lit community goes too far. “A browser-clogging collection of reblogs ruins the finished product in the same way that a book covered in 20 different quotes tells you it’s going to be terrible before you’ve even read the first page.”

So, if I’m following Baines’s logic: (a) peer promotion is good, but (b) uncritical peer promotion is bad, and since (c) alt lit sucks, (d) all promotion of alt lit must therefore be uncritical and, thus, bad. Conclusion: promotion of alt lit is bad, and the more there is, the worse it is.

This brings us to the whole question of what “critical” means in this context. Baines is coming in like an old-school critic, who sets out to tell you objectively what’s good writing and what’s bad writing. In his judgment, most alt lit writers are bad writers. That’s his call, but it should be observed that he’s making that call from a different standpoint than that of the genuinely old-school critic.

Back when writing required traditional publishers, the only writing that earned the attention of critics was traditionally published writing. When you criticized a piece of traditionally published writing, you were also criticizing its editor, its publisher, and even the booksellers who stocked it. Since publishing resources were limited, the publication of Author A meant the rejection of Author B, and so the critic was judging whether Author A was genuinely more deserving of publication than all the rejected authors B, C, D, and so on.

Today, alt lit publishes itself. It’s on Tumblr, it’s on Facebook, it’s on Twitter. Writers format, post, and market their own free PDF chapbooks. It’s written and read by people with relatively little money, so payment comes, yes, in the form of follows, likes, and reblogs. Alt lit writers know they’re writing for that world, and their work is tailored for those circumstances. It’s concise, it’s visual, it’s allusive and witty. It’s also self-referential, both because that’s always been a popular mode of writing and because there’s so little distance between the author and the publisher (they’re often the same person) that taking on an “objective” distance starts to seem absurd.

No one likes to be told their writing is bad, so of course there’s been plenty of indignation in alt lit writers’ reaction to Baines’s post; the fact that alt lit writing is so openly personal also means that being criticized as an alt lit writer is much closer to being criticized as a person than if you were criticized as a published novelist. That said, alt lit uses so few resources, and demands so little of its readers, that when you criticize it, you risk looking like a fool. Roggenbuck, for example, is like poetic Teflon: you might not like what he does, but you can’t criticize it the way you criticize conventional poetry because it’s so knowingly executed and self-contained. It’s not like some other poet is starving because Roggenbuck posted ten image macros today, and it’s not like it’s hard to avoid him if you want to.

For a genre that contains so much implicit critique of conventional literature—screw you, Scribners, I’ve got a Tumblr—alt lit features very little explicit critique of that world. Alt lit writers know they exist in a different world from that populated by conventional writers, and vice versa. Alt lit has branched off the mainstream literary tree, but now that it’s branched off, it’s largely content to leave the rest of the tree to itself, trying to keep the conventional publishing industry from dying. Alt lit exists in a post-publishing world, where a lack of money, retail space, and media attention is taken for granted. It’s self-sustaining, self-criticizing, and self-policing. Looking at alt lit from the outside and saying it’s bad is almost meaningless; it’s exactly what it wants to be.

Alt lit writers still identify as writers, but alt lit is also a world where genre and medium are becoming less meaningful as signifiers. Consider the GIFs that Roggenbuck and his fans make from his online readings. Are they poems? Are they photos? Are they movies? Does it matter? Only insofar as you need to choose whether to post them as images or text posts on Tumblr.

Baines doesn’t like the content of alt lit, and he doesn’t much like its form, either. He’s entitled to his opinion, and he and like-minded critics can continue to disdain and avoid alt lit. They have their work cut out for them: the kind of writing, and art, now classified as “alt lit” are only going to get harder and harder to avoid.

- Jay Gabler

Image: note to SNCKPCK from friendster friday, via Internet Poetry