"I screamed and ran to smash my favorite slot machine. I said to Mabel, I said, ‘I wanted to write a romantic poem in the Schlegel sense of romantic poetry, so a novel in the Bakhtin sense of a novel, and it does that for me. And I like the idea of purely mechanical seams cause I think trying to make the facilitating part of artworks smooth or interesting or pleasant ruins art. And I wanted to do something with the papers I wrote in the first few years of grad- school, that were playful and weird and not part of a larger intellectual project and I wrote because I liked the way they ‘looked’ as part of my life at the time. So I’m happy with it, especailly now that I figured out the epirgraph. Oh, and I like that blogs are the one thing that we read backwards, and I think for things that don’t involve complicated sptial action seeing things unfold backwards is a lot more instructive and suspenseful than seeing them unfold forward, and makes for a better form of narrative thinking, for the standard Kierkegaard reason. And the few reverse chronological things that people made are about relationships, which is one big story running through the text, but this is framed as a bildungsroman and I think that a reverse chronological bildungsroman is cool. Also I like the idea of a biography that includes only the super-intentional, and my blog includes only things that I thought were my perfected self for at least a month after writing them (otherwise I’d delete), and it’s kind of cool that the first thing I said on my blog the week I moved to the states was ‘I want to be only the best of me all the time.’ Also I like the idea of framing these five years as my negotiation with America, which they are though I never think about it. And ‘I said to Mabel, I said’ is this Simpsons line that was a slight meme online back in 2005 and is rumored to be from Gatsby and rumored to be from Wodehouse and is from neither so I love that it’s this ghostly stand-in for the depiction of casual speech in literary fiction/an internet hallucination of a hilobrow cartoon’s memory of the literary representation of casual speech. And I like the Thomas Bernhard endless-monologue style of novel and wanted to do something like that. And I figured, the actual contents are really strong so people who haven’t followed my writing in the last five years might find it compelling even if they’re not the post-langpo/post-conceptual crowed who could get any of the above from the act of cut-and- pasting a blog and adding ‘I said,’ though I mean the people who can get any of the above from that are also people who don’t care about the above because it’s sorta literary fiction patter, way more a response to Elif ’s dissertation and to ‘The Possessed’ than to avant- garde poetics, not because I want to but because I was thinking about Trisha’s post-conceptual narcissism and trying to think about my life-in-text-generation, my ideas and jokes and notes and comments that I’m so invested in, along some aesthetic category and it turned out to me that my mode of production in saying things is so novelistic, that when I make a joke the asymptote is it integrating into a novelistic continuum/tension with the rest of the things in the world, so I’m stuck with the tradition of the novel as the category for thinking about myself. And I like how there are papers in there that I wish were shorter cause they ruin the book for me by being too long but make it unreadable as a novel even though the novel was supposed to be this form that can take anything into itself, so it’s not a novel but the fantasy of a novel, the idea that the novel is supposed to be able to take in materials that are too affectively weak for a certain kind of poetry and too affectively strong for a different kind of poetry.’
And I said, I said, ‘at least the N+1 piece on the cultural politics of drinking cider instead of beer hasn’t come out yet so happiness is still possible.’ And I said, I said, ‘irony represents the real relationship of individuals to their imaginary conditions of existence.’ And I said, I said, ‘is there a name for the kind of cold- on-hot aesthetic that’s the one in lots of artscene synthpop and performance and also like Spring Breakers and some tumblr and Lana Del Ray? Like a super tactile sensuality left in the freezer to ice- over thing? Like booty-melancholia or something?’ And I said to Mabel, I said, ‘I used to know a person who was so upset that people who put a lot of time into learning things get to be considered more scholarly than her and I thought it’s an insane thing to even feel but I’m kind of upset that people who are all-in artscene synthpop experimental film noise whatever people get to be considered more artscene synthpop experimental film noise whatever than me.’ (…)“
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Amerikkkkka [4th ed.] out on GPDF Editions. Digital and Print.