death & facebook
iphgenia baal
We Heard You Like Books Press (15.95 american dollars)
Cliqued by proxy into Dodie Bellamy’s (born to sneer dismissively about the flank of her Buddhist sebum & riding some long expired mid-west working class cred) most fleeting and be-caped endowments (paper towel wipe of political-writer-arrogance-cum-mundane-new-narrative-diary-graph endemic to San Fran), iphgenia baal (the pronunciation of which is its own insufferable reparation / too patriarchal if capitalized / character white guilts yuppie pals into buying her drinks / prime to move copies with another super-ethical, f-the-corporation (ballsy maybe twenty years ago), slogan-wrought (SJW PP time) NPR chum trending its propagandistic new left media Iago ballyhoo (titling the hydra-dependent soapbox as it cousins her protests) inveigles readers (even one this mean and pasty) with the tale at hand, because attention, lost and gained (unto aforementioned death), is her book’s motif. Enchanting splotches tobogganed down daddy’s comforter (she’s not yet another victim in a half shell), the spanked array of politics and ass may be capable of rooting up an eye or two while a sophisticated talent endures below ideology (getting under the skin it aroused and bleeding the life out). It’s art, though, not a marriage, and for zero to five likes online, I’m willing to call baal an artist. Any click-count higher and I will correct my mistake and revert to the previous hatred. Her publisher (Jarett Kobek, to whom I apologize) wrote a brilliant book (Atta) that, to the shame of our anti-literate country, relatively few people bought. He then changed his approach and wrote a gimmicky (overtly) political conundrum (sneaking talent in) and profited, if any lit could provide the ink for a receipt (thumbs up and hearts from me, he awesomely Trojan horsed the culture).
Wage gap dilly dally or not (be I goober-level republican-menaced (which libel will knight me a Nazi for decamping from PC church) by inclusivity (however insincere) even having no position rich white guilt can finagle from me? – right wingers almost had countercultural heft for the first time in this safety scissors internet, but, of course, dropped the ball forthwith), baal’s lineage perjuriously discriminates from ipseity to rave, alt lit to shoehorned new narrative to civic spillover (not her fault, tis my psychotic fault: I see all current art tainted as such). On the other bland, certain strains of cosmopolitan undergrads gotta suck the sickle ‘cause it’s the furthest taboo megacorp paradigm. You couldn’t accuse the prose’s complete, if intentional, egalitarian lack of style (no decadent elitist aesthetics to distinguish individual vision above the official commonality (or satire of such?) – we live auto-mocked in our own sincere parodies) of an amateurishness fobbed off by somebody not ready to be published yet, because everyone writes plain now, and the point is online relatability. A lot of writers preemptively and defensively mistake hard-spun daily travails for bravery and show as much by treating any creative torque, any weighted line, like ostriches hiding in the sky. There are very few youths I relate to (with their clothes on), for a million self-puckering reasons, not just because most have been raised to be proud snitches (re baal’s delightfully bonkers, hottest of the nightmare lays, feminist PMS threats to shop some drug dealer casualty bro she got bored humping to the rozzers (bro is the weak American slur her brand prefers (though I like how sneakily off brand she ends up). We’re post scandals-that-require-an-actual-crime (concerning people with a millimeter of power or attention). Attention across platforms has become its own slithering context and we, target market, inhale the docious wet wipe. Anyway, a supermodel in a slightly less moneyed situation than the well-to-do partiers that surround her runs afoul of an edgier dope mule, then sticks us with the transcript for masturbation material (we are grateful). As the production company’s boiler plate seems to be to phantom thread us a little literature under the guise of accessibility, baal does work a scratch and sniff cemetery below the medium. I apologize for demanding a denser population from its sepulcher.
If you disdain communities (which, pardon, was once an artist’s goddamn thing – left / right / center: incinerate them ambidextrously), why not burn one down from the inside (London via San Francisco), with their own festering style, and reverse that vain society into art, because I don’t care about you or your stupid friend drama (flip Capote how he likes: that’s not writing, that’s social studies; good journalists flunk the beret) or why their names are being obscured into Russel Edson nouns or handed to me out of nowhere on a cute tray with zero exposition (don’t make me crave exposition, you’re the authoritarian square here, oppressed or not): stop journaling at me. I suppose I should join the mutual frig, included in and occluding on insert-author-name’s privacy (authors equaling the undertow of a national work front or group product regardless of intention), but baal veers smartly from this approach into a conceptual meltdown. She’s not your common protester for likes. She’s produced the best kind of degeneracy, mirroring the façade outdoors, forfeiting a malleably purchasable beauty and a fake, well-sponsored system-daddy revolt to spike her pathology across a piece of epistolary carrion.
Remember when the literary troupe trotted out the word “body” as some kind of critical whatsit because they all donned a classroom chicken suit? Foisting cowardly comments with pretentious handles of anonymity – like thirteen year old sexpot Lonely Christopher, for instance, a living being, I’m to understand (imagine Adam Scott with typhus, trying to look hard and experiencing the bends), who holds open forums across the social hemisphere as if he’s judging wine bottle insertion on American Idol, administering justices hither and tither with the dumb, barely-lingual conceitedness of an adiabatic politician, a real throwback to when scarfing too many dick-murdering pills was just for the moneyed – one short film featuring Julian Richings’s amazing mug is the closest this authorite ever came to a produced style (writes like a dog dug a chewing gum-sized hole in his (zis? xis? cherwivis? xxxlonely fizz? writer1110101012994?) professionally-lit headshot and vomited MDMA (that might be an improvement – more like toned but generic, traditional New Yorker stories, if their content was allowed to yawn ten percent less; as daringly homosexual as James Franco, a venereal rubric, a congressional yarn). Are we undoing language (L plus A plus ad infinitum) theory-head poetry back to plain-head New York School (the training wheels of simplicity, the presence of the poem, its presence!), back to Black Mountain School (before the beats, who at least wrote lyrically, were stripped of their poesy and the remaining politics were knighted into (again) new narrative – generations later the post-alt babies of Tao Lin really hate their dad because he’s better at their “style” (and lives!) than they are), back to Imagism, back to a faux-deep, concrete glyph disrupting William Carlos Williams’s eleemosynary day job, the breed kennel of Americana fast food verse, hack muckraking 101 (guest appearance from G. Stein speed-bagging my nutsack into the rhetorical loop it already was), all the way back to Fanny Burney (everyone today is her), pegged by under-read madman John Davidson as possessing the originality of ignorance, Burney’s frank tales reading like trained meat for profit?
I hope someone shoots the wings off my every concession. This book (death & facebook) is a fetish gone wrong by someone who might deserve their genitals (time will tell). A rare treat nowadays. At least this cool kid party transcript has a body count. The culmination seems to funnel the window-shopped death therein so the narrator can stroke her immaculate person. Death on an abstract grid, caskets wagging through the air for group approval – skip straight to the throes, the rattle, the lubed whisperings. That the dipshit who got lucky with her is a corpse may be the best part. If those eyes weren’t turned to goo, if he could even read in the first goddamn place, worms would twerk the dust deeper into his sinuses until they came themselves in half.