I was around when alt-lit broke on the scene. It was always reactionary. Deliberately solipsistic and irrelevant-- pushed forward by segments of the established literary scene in response to more dangerous alternatives which have been since then wiped from literary memory. Not an exaggeration.
Several of our contributors (this is a collective account for the Neo-Decadents) have been around since then too and remember it playing out exactly as you describe.
the ULA seemed respectable yeah. Working class writers self-organizing is always the greatest threat to the guild. HTMLGiant was quickly infiltrated by the professors. We note too that working class writers will always be “tone-policed” for not following the party line and (most blasphemous of all) for directly criticizing or (unthinkable) claiming stylistic superiority to their “betters.”
I’d love to read your earlier posts if you wouldn’t mind turning on the AI voiceover the way it’s turned on for this one! I am in the throes of cybersick migraine land but this piece proved an odd salve.
So, now, having read this piece, only once and with an earlier-rather-than-late focus, I can say with a certain, certainty, that I have found, finally, who in fact the "donut people" are - at least on Substack.
I wrote for HTMLGiant. I published a literary journal with Blake Butler. I ran my own publishing company for ten years. Gian at Tyrant published my first novel. I now call a few of the people I met during those years family. I was "in it" as much as one can be said to have been in something so nebulous as an international collection of collaborators and friends.
I'll offer my perspective on Alt Lit in case it's interesting or helpful to anyone here.
I found Tao Lin and Blake Butler after idly Googling around. I started a Blogger blog and left comments on their posts because I enjoyed their writing. Eventually I published my own work and asked them to read it—and they obliged. I was a teenager looking for older friends and artists to whom I could look up and with whom I could tag along. What excited me about Tao and Blake was their desire to do something new and their willingness to publicly declare over and over again, and in different ways, that books are important, that reading is important.
When HTMLGiant started, the project gathered people who felt genuinely dissimilar to one another in many ways. Two values kept everyone together: a commitment to DIY and a desire to innovate. There were plenty of aesthetic, social, and biographical differences between folks like Kristen Iskandrian and Timothy Willis Sanders and Catherine Lacey and Mike Young and Lily Hoang. In other words, the "scene", insofar as it was understood to coalesce around the online writing and in-person parties from the folks at HTMLGiant, was not a monolith. Did we collectively get up to dumb shit that deserves to be lost to time? Of course. Did people in this group also produce great work? Yes.
There was a point at which HTMLGiant lost its centrality. I think it's around the time when bigger publishers started supporting some of the site's constituents. People got older, honed their ambitions, siloed. Then it was made clear that some writers had been violent and gross. People scattered. Friends and collaborators kept in touch, but by seeing each other in person or via email and calls rather than public comments and blog posts.
I can state confidently that the aesthetic ambitions of many people associated with the (necessarily reductive) label Alt Lit were not insular. Blake was writing to be in conversation with Beckett as much as Dennis Cooper. Wanting to read (and steal from) a wider range of texts, I went to college to read canonical texts in small groups—and when I wrote my novel A Task, I was trying to evoke Flaubert as much as Atticus Lish. This was a group of people just as likely to praise a contemporary novel as to fixate on the oddities in Tristam Shandy or The Pillow Book, even though our attentions at the time skewed current. While folks like Tao seemed to gather much or most of the NYC-oriented publicity, the scene was much more diffuse and its inspirations were much weirder than those working in a stripped down post-Carver declarative morass.
It's hard to neatly criticize—and historically position—something messy, but the artists and publishers whose work and relations composed "Alt Lit" can't be cleanly defined. At least not truthfully.
I am grateful for HTMLGiant. It helped me find lifelong friends and collaborators, expanded my aesthetic sense, and helped me articulate my goals for a future wherein literature is important.
I was around when alt-lit broke on the scene. It was always reactionary. Deliberately solipsistic and irrelevant-- pushed forward by segments of the established literary scene in response to more dangerous alternatives which have been since then wiped from literary memory. Not an exaggeration.
Several of our contributors (this is a collective account for the Neo-Decadents) have been around since then too and remember it playing out exactly as you describe.
What were the more dangerous alternatives? (Genuine question. I wasn't around for all this stuff and I'm curious)
The Underground Literary Alliance, for one.
the ULA seemed respectable yeah. Working class writers self-organizing is always the greatest threat to the guild. HTMLGiant was quickly infiltrated by the professors. We note too that working class writers will always be “tone-policed” for not following the party line and (most blasphemous of all) for directly criticizing or (unthinkable) claiming stylistic superiority to their “betters.”
I came
I’d love to read your earlier posts if you wouldn’t mind turning on the AI voiceover the way it’s turned on for this one! I am in the throes of cybersick migraine land but this piece proved an odd salve.
there is an AI voiceover?! We are still figuring this platform out hehe…more very soon…!!
Oh you know what? I think it’s just not on older posts, and should be automatic on new ones.
In any case, stoked to read more from you! I’ve been craving elaborate, daring, audacious fiction rather than careful OR edgelord minimalism.
So, now, having read this piece, only once and with an earlier-rather-than-late focus, I can say with a certain, certainty, that I have found, finally, who in fact the "donut people" are - at least on Substack.
intriguing but a lot of moaning
👻
👻
I wrote for HTMLGiant. I published a literary journal with Blake Butler. I ran my own publishing company for ten years. Gian at Tyrant published my first novel. I now call a few of the people I met during those years family. I was "in it" as much as one can be said to have been in something so nebulous as an international collection of collaborators and friends.
I'll offer my perspective on Alt Lit in case it's interesting or helpful to anyone here.
I found Tao Lin and Blake Butler after idly Googling around. I started a Blogger blog and left comments on their posts because I enjoyed their writing. Eventually I published my own work and asked them to read it—and they obliged. I was a teenager looking for older friends and artists to whom I could look up and with whom I could tag along. What excited me about Tao and Blake was their desire to do something new and their willingness to publicly declare over and over again, and in different ways, that books are important, that reading is important.
When HTMLGiant started, the project gathered people who felt genuinely dissimilar to one another in many ways. Two values kept everyone together: a commitment to DIY and a desire to innovate. There were plenty of aesthetic, social, and biographical differences between folks like Kristen Iskandrian and Timothy Willis Sanders and Catherine Lacey and Mike Young and Lily Hoang. In other words, the "scene", insofar as it was understood to coalesce around the online writing and in-person parties from the folks at HTMLGiant, was not a monolith. Did we collectively get up to dumb shit that deserves to be lost to time? Of course. Did people in this group also produce great work? Yes.
There was a point at which HTMLGiant lost its centrality. I think it's around the time when bigger publishers started supporting some of the site's constituents. People got older, honed their ambitions, siloed. Then it was made clear that some writers had been violent and gross. People scattered. Friends and collaborators kept in touch, but by seeing each other in person or via email and calls rather than public comments and blog posts.
I can state confidently that the aesthetic ambitions of many people associated with the (necessarily reductive) label Alt Lit were not insular. Blake was writing to be in conversation with Beckett as much as Dennis Cooper. Wanting to read (and steal from) a wider range of texts, I went to college to read canonical texts in small groups—and when I wrote my novel A Task, I was trying to evoke Flaubert as much as Atticus Lish. This was a group of people just as likely to praise a contemporary novel as to fixate on the oddities in Tristam Shandy or The Pillow Book, even though our attentions at the time skewed current. While folks like Tao seemed to gather much or most of the NYC-oriented publicity, the scene was much more diffuse and its inspirations were much weirder than those working in a stripped down post-Carver declarative morass.
It's hard to neatly criticize—and historically position—something messy, but the artists and publishers whose work and relations composed "Alt Lit" can't be cleanly defined. At least not truthfully.
I am grateful for HTMLGiant. It helped me find lifelong friends and collaborators, expanded my aesthetic sense, and helped me articulate my goals for a future wherein literature is important.
this is one of the best replies/counterpoints to these sorts of articles i've seen
Neo-geo
prudish? Marie Calloway worked until recently as a high end, high price escort.
these often go hand in hand…her written material is evidence of a fairly repressed and dainty mind
"Women do something with pen and paper, but is not and can not be writing." - Vladimir Nabokov