At Foxtrot Market I see a woman who looks like Lauren, who looks like Amy Fisher, who looks like the Long Island Lolita, who looks like Charlotte Gainsbourg in My Wife is an Actress, who looks like The Strokes lyric “the room is on fire as she’s fixing her hair,” who is Kelly in black knee-high boots, who looks like the Billy Joel lyric “she’ll bring out the best in the worst you can be,” who is Rebecca in her trim puffer, who is Josh Tillman’s Emma eating bread and butter like a queen would have ostrich and cobra wine.
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I’m grinding my teeth like Lauren—not the Lauren above, Lauren Oyler’s cipher in Fake Accounts. At least that Lauren could leave New York. I can’t. According to her latest Bookforum squib Oyler has given up on contemporary fiction and thrown her arms around early Beatles. I can’t say I blame her. What is the sex-novel-with-no-sex scenes-in-it she’s subtweeting? Is it Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service? I adore the punishment of gossip.
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“Saying the quiet part out loud” is the new “writing the way you talk.”
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The stock characters of autofiction: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, bike messenger, haircut, teaching load, new media company, the city, Latinx or Black tutee, Berlin is the Boulder of Germany’s Denver, “the city,” an AA meeting with surprisingly good coffee, post-Dimes Square, radiator, electronic bill pay, Dad called, the Snapchat filter that makes laughing look like crying.
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Don’t give it away too soon, don’t let it go on for too long. The Sunday writer lives or dies with how much time they can protect between the hours of 4AM and 1:30PM. The rest is the war on drugs.
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Last night in the region of Chinese food that sits between Armitage and Fullerton, Matthew said he had to go to the south side this morning to attend the funeral of the Black woman who raised him. His white birth mother, living now in the spring training Florida of Trump’s Chicago, told him to be careful.
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As my drunkest friends say, it doesn’t really matter what they call the bitters on the printed menus. There’s just a bit of bitter in all of them.
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I like to create coincidences. I like to be put on lists. I insert my copy of Elizabeth Ellen’s Person/a into the Free Library. I’m hoping someone finds it who until now had never heard of Elizabeth Ellen. This person will see Ellen’s careful novel in the Free Library, pick it out, and look very closely at the sentence I underlined on page 143. They will take the book home and say to their partner Lucas, “So this is weird, Lucas. I never heard of this person/a, and then this week they blew up my feed and then I find her book in the Free Library??” And Lucas will respond, “Holy shit, Amanda, that goes on our list. Now you can concentrate on one book instead of one billion tweets.”
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Astra Taylor interviewing Žižek in a garbage dump. With the rats scurrying behind them in the unbearably rank piles, Žižek tells Taylor they could turn the other way, follow the bluebirds singing, but mankind should make a garbage turn instead, ratify ourselves even more. Žižek, the philosopher slob, calls it ecology without nature. Bukowski, the fictional slob, called it the tragedy of the leaves.
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An artist who doesn’t believe in themselves is not a topic for my work it is a topic for a bartender or a therapist. A businessperson who doesn’t believe in themselves, that is a topic for my work. The trader who can’t buy the dip. The dentist with unbridgeable doubts. Apollo tired of turning virgins into trees.
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The literary elite: books are quite useless.
The political elite: let’s loudly ban the books.
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Sam Kriss writes the Internet is dead. It should’ve been a rehearsal. Picturing Sam Kriss on the telephone with Substack customer service—that’s a bouncy topic for a novel. His writing style like Raskolnikov with the second old lady in the killscope. It seems insane to me I used to post long paragraphs from his work to my Facebook and Aunt Janice would make the Home Alone face and leave a comment asking if I was OK. Kriss’s writing has never been OK. He’s growing a Jim Morrison beard in a Bob Dylan’s beard world. If the Internet were still using social media, it would likely reply that its death has been greatly exaggerated, but as druid John Michael Greer writes in 2009’s Ecotechnic Future, the Internet (if it’s dead, we can capitalize it again) is an “exotic technology” and its downfall will cost you vanilla beans.
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I like how slow we’re all getting. Maybe we’re already breathing the air in space? Sometimes I think I want to “post something in time,” in time for WHAT? If we’re destroying a Van Gogh for an ecology without nature, can we destroy a Giacometti next? David Markson had no qualms about burning Man Pointing for fuel. Destroying data centers is also a romantic idea, if the centers contain my immortal student loans.
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I dreamt an anon frog quote tweeted me with the words: too many themes.
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Look at that person, says the child. Watch out for that boy, says the father.
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GD Dess surveys the cult of craftism and tackles Blake Butler’s “slowly dying school of the Lishian sentence.” We’ve achieved well-written essays on why well-written books are boring. We are again pro-Oedipus. We crave the end. Dess’s essay omits the only big ticket post-Lish book that crashed language this year, back in January, Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi, opting instead for the medium rare beef prosody of Raven Leilani’s Luster. Both books, as I’ve written about elsewhere, answer important questions about bike messenger discourse.
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Wives want king-sized beds. Husbands want to be left alone.
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Over the cookies with advertistments on their fortunes for Bitcoin exchanges that have since gone out of business, we talked about how Matthew’s secondary mother, like the Internet, lived too long, suffered too much. I offered the title of Lynne Tillman’s Mothercare and confessed the word would enter my vocab womb, unlike inflationary bon gotchas catachresis and polysyndeton and epanalepsis which make me queasy, like I just google imaged prolapsed anus. On the Internet they pretend we won’t live forever. But forever is all we’ve got to look forward to.
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I was back in Lincoln Park this morning and I was sitting in the playground behind the monkey bars near the see-saws in front of the big boy swings and holding up real high Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text so all the hype babies could wonder what it would be like to have me for Dad instead. The only thing integrated in this hood are the autumn leaves. They look like the borders of covid puzzles. They resist ethical description in an ecology without nature. The novelist in me, not my best feature, notices that this rich white fantasyland is named Oz Park. None of the children forget to cough into their elbows and there are extra peanuts in the Halloween cupcakes. The witches are graceful, the dinosaurs fall on their spikes. The girls are better at everything, especially hippie dancing. The dinosaurs will make the witches pay.
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Why the need for more than one book? Ben Lerner’s 10:04 is right at least twice a day. My story goes that for years Henry Miller, an inventor of autofiction, took the same copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace onto the rush hour subway and nudged his fellow straphangers out of the way with its imperial spine. Then his wife left him for a woman and Mr. Miller, an inventor of honorary Jews, left War & Peace for Paris. Just like Tolstoy feared he would.
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I lament the whiteness of it all. Aging male users tired of fingering oblivion declare the Internet squirted and as luck would have it they owe no reparations. My white son begs to watch videos of Yellowstone’s destruction. His future is a fat-positive hyperobject. I say to the white woman at work, is your trip to Yellowstone going to be sullied by the horrid floods, and she says, no, Stu, we’re going in another entrance! Will all of the entrances soon be exits? Or will our hell, like Sartre’s, appoint the furniture of the Second Empire? I hear all questions in Darth Vader’s anti-technocratic voice, when the computerized father thinks he’ll have no trouble freezing his child of the desert: all too easy.
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When I don’t understand my art I better make sure I understand Scott La Faro’s explanation of “Gloria’s Step.” The song name originated because LaFaro knew the sound of Gloria’s footsteps when she came up the stairs to their apartment, not because she was a dancer. It wasn’t the profession that inspired LaFaro, but the person closest to his bass.
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A meme I think about a lot is you weren’t at that Foxtrot Market, you weren’t at Oz Park, you don’t know a man named Matthew, you thought about, but didn’t actually, put Ellen’s Person/A in the Free Library, you are your own drunkest friend, you never moaned for man, you didn’t read the essays, there was no son or mothercare for all, there was no woman at work, and you never found Coltrane in Lauren’s eyes you never woke up near Rittenhouse Square and you know nothing of the culture that created hip-hop music. You never withheld that work of art.