Alt lit memories

I was there, reader. Sort of. Kinda.

The Point has a delightful, illuminating feature on so-called ‘alt lit’ that you should absolutely read. You should read The Point in general, actually, as they run work by great writers like David Sessions, Becca Rothfeld, and yours truly. The alt lit feature is written by Sam Kriss, that one-time enfant terrible from across the pond, and it brought up some memories of my own.

Some definitions are in order. The alt lit trend, as Kriss describes it, describes a group of writers mostly in their 20s, mostly living in, or adjacent to, that downtown New York scene known as Dimes Square. I found this rather helpful, as I, living out my life in the hinterlands of West Michigan, have heard the term ‘Dimes Square’ for, what, six years now, maybe, without quite understanding what it is, what styles it propagates, what vibe it embodies. And I still don’t entirely, to be honest! That’s the thing about scenes—you have, or had, to be there. But I think I get the basics. Hyper-onlineness combined with a weird reverence for a dimly-seen past, as evidenced by the fascination with the Catholic Church, that millennia-spanning institution. A writer named Honor Levy is perhaps the paradigmatic example here. Her book of stories, winkingly titled My First Book, features teenage girls spending all day online, playing NeoPets and watching beheading videos while applying lipgloss. As one does.

What I want to focus on here, though, is something Kriss just glances at, for obvious reasons. This is not the first time a group of writers were grouped under an umbrella called ‘alt lit.’ Over a decade ago, another group of writers got tagged with that very name. It was a whole thing! I should remember, because I, as an elder millennial, was there at the time. Or at least, I was around at the same time, reading the same books, staying caught up on the same blogs. Kriss, being a solid decade younger than me, wasn’t around for this whole thing. But I was, dammit! Sort of! And so I want to offer some observations from that time, to see how they compare with the current iteration of alt lit.

In the piece, Kriss identifies Tao Lin as the elder statesman of the current alt lit scene. This sounds about right. Lin has arguably become the most recognizable name from the 2000s alt lit cohort, the one who made the jump from small presses to the Big 5. His early novels were published with indie stalwart Melville House, including Richard Yates and Shoplifting from American Apparel. (The latter remains my personal favorite of his.) Then he published Taipei with Vintage, reaching a much wider audience than before. Since then, he’s gone on to become a health nut, for lack of a better term, writing books about psychedelic mushrooms and claiming to have cured his autism via a highly specialized diet.

Lin had one good trick back in the day. He wrote about millennnials, those endlessly mediated, bottomlesly self-involved creatures, as if they were unassuming, barely-vocal Raymond Carver characters. This was counter-intuitve. The thinking went that young people back then, live-blogging lives for the world to see, would become creatures of pure irony, never meaning what they say, always mugging for the camera, like the annoying neighbor on a TGIF sitcom. But Lin saw, early on, that always being online resulted in a flatness of affect, a bare recitation of daily facts and occasional moods, and nothing more. This was practical, if nothing else. Relationships conducted through Gchat needed to stick to bare facts just to be legible. Trying on sarcasm or irony would likely result in misunderstanding. We didn’t even have emojis back then, constructing our winkys out of brute text like medieval blacksmiths.

Lin lived in New York, and tried to leverage attention for his early work in very New York ways. He once plastered the neighborhood around NYU with stickers that read, simply, “BRITNEY SPEARS.” It was very Gabbo. But that does point to a major difference between the alt lit of the 2000s and the alt lit 2.0 of the current moment. Alt lit back then was far more decentralized, geographically speaking. Yes, Lin lived in New York, but many of the major players in the scene lived far away from Manhattan, from Brooklyn, from the East Coast, even. Blake Butler lived in his native Atlanta all throughout this time. Noah Cicero lived in Ohio. Scott McClanahan lived in his own native West Virginia, like some mountain man of 19th-century legend. Megan Boyle lived in Baltimore, though she took the train to New York frequently.

So how did this far-flung cohort of writers wind up getting grouped under the alt lit banner? The answer is that, in a counterintuitive way, writers were more online in the 00s and early 2010s than they are today.

Back then, the internet still possessed what could be called That New Car Smell. We were all so eager to hop in and take it around the block for a spin. Writers were no different. They hopped into the internet like Marty McFly leaping into the DeLorean and sped off into the future.

The hub of alt lit, the place where the scene was formed, was not Dimes Square, nor any other neighborhood anywhere. It was the website HTMLGiant, started by Butler. Built by him, literally. That was the center of the scene. The fact that it was constructed by the very writers who posted on it gave it the sense of discovery, of digital pioneers claiming their stake of the wilderness.

This makes me very wistful, honestly, perhaps even regretful. For while I read HTMLGiant religiously, following the latest flame war that deadgod started, I never posted there myself. It honestly never occurred to me? I was a late bloomer when it came to posting, as I didn’t get really get online in the sense that I currently am until about 2014, when I first got on Twitter. Before that, I related to the internet as a library more than a message board, save for the kind of life updates I placed on Facebook. I can’t help but wonder what doors might have opened for me had I posted actively on HTMLGiant back in the day. Perhaps I too could have published a chapbook with Publishing Genius!

Still, the alt lit scene felt potentially closer to me than it would to the hinterland-bound twentysomethings of today, I would imagine. I lived in Indianapolis for much of the 2010s, and while that was no one’s idea of a cultural hub, I did manage to get glimpses of the alt lit world. Christopher Newell, a regular poster on HTMLGiant, lived in the city, hosting readings at art galleries. I got to know him, and Matt Bell, and Sal Pane, and others whose words appeared on the very site that was the hub of this rather small scene.

But it seems that Alt Lit 2.0 is geographically located in one particular place—a New York neighborhood. I admit this seems like a regression to me, a falling-back to old-fashioned forms of cultural consolidation, but perhaps that’s part of its appeal. One real thing the Zoomers pick up on, with their affinity for cathedrals and Hellenic statues and whatnot, is the total, complete oppressiveness of the present. From streaming services rendering movies pre-1977 basically nonexistent to YA authors demanding that schools replace Old Boring Classics with their Bold New Retellings, so much of present culture works very hard to convince us that nothing old exists, and if it does still exist somehow, it is categorically bad for that reason. No wonder they’re going to mass! How else can you engage in an activity that’s been around longer than Diet Coke?

So it follows that Zoomers might be drawn to something so old-fashioned, so quaintly fin de siecle, as a scene. You know, physical people standing in physical rooms with their physical bodies. Sean Parker in The Social Network was wrong, it turned out. We didn’t move out of cities and onto the internet. We moved to the cities cause that’s where the internet was found.

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ALT LIT READING LIST

If you want to explore the first wave of alt lit more closely, here’s a place to start!

Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin

Lin’s funniest book, in the deadpan sense.

Adam Robinson and Other Poems by Adam Robinson

Peak of the hall of mirrors self portrait style.

Liveblog by Megan Boyle

The peak of the self-documentation school of writing.

Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan

Here’s a secret you can use to impress people at the next cocktail party: McClanahan, not Lin, was the real genius of alt lit.

Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

Master of strip mall surrealism.