BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing

By Seth Abramson, Jesse Damiani and Myung Mi Kim

Best American Experimental Writing 2018, guest-edited by Myung Mi Kim, is the fourth edition of the critically acclaimed anthology series compiling an exciting mix of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and genre-defying work. Featuring a diverse roster of writers and artists culled from both established authors—like Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Don Mee Choi, Mónica de la Torre, Layli Long Soldier, and Simone White—as well as new and unexpected voices, including Clickhole.com, BAX 2018 presents an expansive view of today's experimental and high-energy writing practices. A perfect gift for discerning readers as well as an important classroom tool, Best American Experimental Writing 2018 is a vital addition to the American literary landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Jul 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9780819578198

Book preview

MYUNG MI KIM

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Filaments  :  Tesserae

To shift the word experimental from its adjectival task (which conjures up the question/location/genealogies of historical avant-gardes) to its activity as a verb—to experiment. To experiment: to register, notice, discern the necrotizing effect of cultural norms motivated

and maintained by ideologies of monolingualism, pathologizing of difference, and capitalist will. To experiment is to be alert, to put on alert categorical, reductive, teleological stances that abrade the sensorium

To experiment is to tend poesis

This allegiance to the process of making initiates and retextures attention to radical pluralities, unveiling heretofore restricted, submerged conduits of sense-making and modes of perception

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During the months in and around the edges of shaping BAX 2018 (mid-2016 to the first few months of 2017) there was a visceral denigration of language, the person, the collective, and the public sphere, marked by strategic thwarting of refuge, intractable inhospitality, and unrestrained violation of the most basic of human rights.

cusp pivot halt torque aperture transience threshold emergent limn tensile : words that might begin to gesture towards the interrogative/reflexive writing presenced in this volume. While productively disparate, the writers curated here

propose shared concerns: there is an intrinsic link between diminishing biodiversity and diminishing language diversity, high prestige languages perpetuate a hegemonic agenda, infrastructures of dominance consolidate and regiment the primacy of fluency,

legibility, and readability.

These concerns are further problematized in works that jostle entrenched ideas of the stability and unicity of language, form, medium, and genre. Whether through translingual,

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Given coercive/calculated mass-scale displacements, the valence of militarist agendas, climate change, and waste products of predatory industrial practices that have rendered wide regions of the earth uninhabitable—it seemed crucial to consider the interarticluation between non-absorptive writing practices and new configurations for social affiliation and kinship.

inter/intralingual experiments, multiply conceived notions of genre, or writing that exceeds limits or parameters of identifiable mediums or contours of critical engagement, the writers in this edition of BAX attend to the kinetics of writing/perceiving, rendering

plural reading surfaces/planes, and formal heterogeneity. The graphic and the aural, the ocular and the tactile, the sonic and the semantic are constellated anew, recalibrating the scales of the particular and the scales of the historical continuum.

to experiment: to make visible the habituated, codified, acculturated (and their normatizing function) : to proceed in language and socio/cultural process in the edges and folds of the incommensurable, the non-equivalent, and the irreducible

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As with former guest editors of BAX, I chose not to include colleagues past and present, current or recent students, writers who were published in previous editions of BAX, and past editors of BAX. This means that many, many exceptional writers are not part of this volume. I made every effort to gesture towards small magazines and other publishing projects that may be less visible in the larger fabric of the discourse around experimental writing. One of my priorities in gathering material for BAX 2018 was to feature emerging writers. At the same time, recent work from some established writers made it possible to acknowledge/reframe the continuing stakes and commitments of experimental writing practices.

SETH ABRAMSON AND JESSE DAMIANI

Series Editors’ Introduction

RN, FWIW

By the time this appears in print, it will have been well over a year since two Google Homes were live-streamed talking to each other on Twitch. Like anything that happens on the Internet, this event will have faded behind a host of new blips on our collective radar, themselves about to give way to newer ones. But when we pause to more closely examine this moment, we find—as we do with much of the web’s strange detritus—that even the most minute, passing moments online can carry new intelligence on the future of writing, literature, and text-based art in America.

As a virtual space that perpetually performs the now-all-at-once, the Internet has brought with it a new paradigm of human consciousness—one that propels us toward nonlinear narratives and instantiates the paradox of ephemeral permanence. This new consciousness encourages us to align the speed of our thinking and meaning-making with the now-dominant mode through which information transfer occurs.

We shape these systems, and they shape us in return. Set, repeat.

This recursive sculpting has been going on long enough that we’re able to chart the many ways it’s changed us as people and as writers. In that Google Homes live-stream, we witnessed two iterations of the same artificial intelligence carry on a conversation with moments of absurdity and existential distress in equal measure, including highlights like a Rick Roll, wherein the Homes conducted a call-and-response reading of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit, Never Gonna Give You Up.

This moment was twenty years in the making, born of cyclical processes in which humans feed streams of information (coded as language) into digital systems designed to interpret them. These systems then produce newer, stronger, and more intuitive systems that we thereafter adopt, and therewith transmit newer and more robust data. Of course, this process is infinitely more complex, but it at least gestures toward the uncanny ways we arrive at literary art in 2018.

Even leaving aside art that is digitally inflected, and focusing instead on the operations of individual Internet users, we find both direct and indirect engagements with what it means to be human at the onset of the digital age. Idiomatic speech evolves so quickly that slang that once carried a five-year shelf life now expires in under five days. Remixing has become such a commonplace notion that it is, now, an institution within English-language composition. Comment sections facilitate tessellating, nonlinear discourse among individuals who will never meet in real life and who have not, in fact, even met in any meaningful way online. It’s an inversion of Warhol: no longer can we say only that anything, properly framed, is art, but rather that art can manifest instantaneously in any frame. Art is, in effect, anyone it wants to be, anywhere and at any time.

Yet for all this, our minds still seek to move at a pace we can readily accommodate. We therefore encounter perpetual tension between our own train of thought and the digital hive—itself a recursive process, inasmuch as this struggle manifests itself IRL. This relationship between part and whole, between micro- and macro-, between individual and collective, plays out infinitely every day, largely invisible to us. But as editors of an annual anthology of experimental writing, we find traces of it across the digital landscape: in the playful schizophrenia of Leo DiCaprio’s $11 Million Malibu Beach House and the Soul-Crushing Agony of Being Human, wherein Julia Wick bakes together genres as far-flung as the Q&A, the parody, and clickbait; in the metamodern riffs on irony endemic to ClickHole; and in the felicitous discoveries enabled by pairing comic strips with legalese from iTunes’s Terms and Conditions document.

So something very strange is happening to language rn—dare we say, strange af.

Art connects. It connects artists; artists and audiences; and members of an audience. The literary artists of an era are among the first to register that these connections are, themselves, perpetually mobile. As language and the delivery systems for language evolve, literary artists must recode not only how language is performed but also how it is accessed. In other words, writing is no longer merely something one does; it is, in the literal sense, a pursuit. The art of an epoch most likely to generate discourse is therefore that art that acknowledges its subject as a moving target. Art connects, but the configuration of possible connections is ever expanding and receding from our view. The artist pursues.

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We sense that in recent years, a sea change has occurred in American literary culture. While there continues to be a sizeable subcommunity of authors whose innovations not only seek connection but pursue increasingly remote and esoteric data streams, conventional literary production remains aloof from both the public sphere and, to a troubling degree, the pace of technological innovation. The reasons for this are varied, and expounding upon them finally beyond our brief. What we can report is that we are, on regular occasion, impressed and refreshed by the work of literary outsiders: technologists, graphic artists, narrative designers, activists, and public advocates who use language to play with audience expectations, risk vulnerability, invite meaningful if fraught dialogues, and secure a future for language in multimedia and transmedia expression.

In every American era, polemicists have spoken in reverential (or, sometimes, ironic) tones of the nation’s poets—a phrase intended as metaphor rather than matter-of-fact aggregation. What rhetoricians mean, or rather who they mean, when they appeal to the poets of the nation are those poets at the vanguard of exploring what poetry can do for a nation. The same is true, in fiction, of the phrase our leading authors. Meaning no diminishment of poets or authors as a class, when a nation cries out to its writers, it does so at the level of not the workaday professional literary artist but the reflexively revolutionary one. With this in mind, we hoped, in soliciting fifteen works for this anthology, and working with our guest editor to select another fifteen from a large stock of unsolicited submissions, to capture works (if not authors) that answer the nation’s call for continual self-renewal. We mean here not a renewal of the means of self-expression, but of the environmental conditions within which self-definition and self-determination occur.

Conventional literary culture in the United States is not, in this view, composed of shadowy gatekeepers or even august, influential institutions; rather, the literary culture we together have made, and which we hope this anthology will aid in unmaking, is born of a thousand individual and subcultural practices repeated with predictable regularity. We make the very literary culture of which we complain; it is not imposed upon us. Moreover, and ironically, our very insistence on crafting a guiding metanarrative for the fate of innovative writing in a competitive literary culture is, too, an obstacle. In the search for a communal metanarrative—innumerable think pieces, roundtables, and interviews on the condition of the written word in America—we risk suffocating the possibilities of the poetic form and idiosyncratic writing generally.

So a time of normative discourse must give way to a time of radical action. A period of studied subcultural formation must transition into a period of frenetic individualism that drives us toward unpredictable expressions and collaborations.

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In the early years of the Beat Generation, it could literally be said that the site of burgeoning literary rebellion was on the road. The pushback against conventional literary mores was disconnected from the spaces we now imagine to be conducive to such ends: the college campus; the literary magazine; the academic conference; the advocacy organization; the snark of the magazine critic and the snap of the metropolitan literary salon. Our road today, for better or ill—likely both—is a virtual one. So we call now, with this introduction, for a generation of digital rogues, many of whom might not identify themselves as creatives, but who will, anyway, recapture the resistance-in-situ of earlier generations. After all, the site of today’s countercultural gestures is the Internet, and increasingly these gestures are performed by non-artists, though no less dexterously or imaginatively for that being so.

Today’s literary pioneers are chasing a phantom: a fleeting thought about what art might become as we move from visual literacy to videocy, from videocy to electracy, from electracy to transmedia art, from transmedia art to immersive art, from immersive art to mixed reality, and well beyond any literacy we presently name. They continue to dissect popular metanarratives with their art, but they consequently reconfigure these disparate strands into works of art unique to our moment and, critically, anticipative of the next moment and the next. And even as they embody the palimpsestic idiosyncrasies of the digital age, such artists reach out to one another to pursue collaborations and to collaborate, too, with the mindful machines now ubiquitous in American popular culture.

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With the influence of corporate Big Data on the rise, the literary artist has never more keenly felt the duty of using every facet of the present environment—even those whose native ends seem to run contrary to the literary—as imaginative material. And as the dynamic uses to which this material is put begin to look less and less like the poetic forms to which we are accustomed, we discover new utilities, audiences, and connections for art forms once believed stagnant or perpetually marginal.

Barreling now through the first act of the twenty-first century, we find not only the number of our instrumental literacies increasing, but indeed the number of literary competencies available in the first instance. So we reasonably expect our most dynamic literary artists—the poets of the nation; our leading authors—to be masters of many discrete sublanguages, including, in addition to those mentioned earlier, one or more of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, cryptocurrency, bioengineering, postpostmodernism, radical interdisciplinarity, and the Internet of Things. Those who already feel as though our plugged-in environments squelch the creative impulse will shortly find (indeed, in a much shorter time frame than many would anticipate) that the buzz saw of near-future technology will render even the most audacious advancements of our present day quaint.

Imagine a cultural moment in which the functionality of a smartphone has broadened to incorporate wearable tech; in which our accoutrements communicate with our washing machines and our central AC; in which biometric data allows us to write ourselves into our culture (and be written to in turn) in more customized, intimate, and unsettling ways than we could ever have conceived or wished for. A moment like this will arrive within a decade—and without literary artists engaging the bleeding edge of such advances in content, the soporific effect of runaway consumerism will be irretrievable. Artists must capitalize the substances endemic to capitalism if we hope ever to arrest its ravages of spirit and substance.

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As series editors for Best American Experimental Writing, our simplest self-justification for the work we do as editors is that these pages provide a space with ample legroom for the weird, the creatively antagonistic, the formally homely, the conceptually byzantine, the inartfully pragmatic, the genre-bending, the transmedia, and the differentially effable. We, and perhaps you, came to experimental writing because it is, for us, the road that leads to all ends—a universal point of exchange and transfer to parts unknown but self-defining. In this era of dizzying technological advance, we add to this pleasurable sense of self-loss and self-discovery all the transformations enabled by virtuality and digital design. In all, we say with confidence that there has never been a more necessary or fertile time for daring literary endeavors—and we hope that in these pages you find an introduction, if not much more, to both present connectivities and the half-glimpsed future we feel the art of our times must strive to pursue.

BAX 2018

GEORGE ALBON

The No-Limit and Its Discontents, from 3.) Immanence

The back blurb of Poet A’s new book says that this work encompasses the wholeness of a world vision. Poet B’s new-book blurb says it addresses the longing to be at home everywhere. And I once praised Poet C’s new book as a modern-lyric demonstration of the world’s endlessness. Phrases like these collect around a certain outlook, one that celebrates poetry practice as all-inclusive, pan-disciplinary, immeasurably absorbent, ever-generative. (And not just poetry—the back cover of a recent pop-psychology book tells us that the universe is limitless, abundant, and strangely accommodating.) That these all-embracing gestures, so generous and benevolent, might reflect nothing more than a maximalizing ethos, and/or a personality that wants everything, or wants nothing to end, is an issue that rarely emerges from the enclosing warmth.

Franz K. deviated from his usual scrimp-cramp procedures when it came time to write down the Zürau aphorisms, and made a separate fascicle to contain them, allowing each a page by itself. Characteristically terse, these notes were different enough for him to imagine a larger space where they could range. In one such space he says, The conception of the infinite plenitude and expanse of the universe is the result of taking to an extreme a combination of strenuous creativity and free contemplation. So it was around back then, too. Except he says taking to an extreme, recognizing the reach in the embrace. Parts of ourselves know the proportionateness of universes—they can fit on the head of a pin and also seem extreme.

The healthiest way to have the embrace is to feel its peculiarity—to understand its boundless contours as a form of temperament. To know that your look into the cosmic telescope invites a look back at you, with the complementary shift in perspective, and corresponding judgments. There are records. And niches that play enormous, enclosing whole lifelines, delimiting whole partisans:

Roman treehouse. Stoics, their beautiful hardness. The importance of friendship, the resolve to do good, the balm of self-coherence. They lived in treehouses, booths wedged up in ceiba trees, a strange species whose topmost branches are the largest and sturdiest. Stoics came down for jury duty and such, but knew wherein beat the true communal heart. You could become one yourself but first you’d have to hold the total estate sale. You’d be living in your mind’s rightness, a clear experiencer and a tough nut. Instead of ranks of soft friends there would be a few tested and devoted ones. You would grow to honor the unfolding of your life along its crisp new divisions, lineations you would never have felt had you not switched to the cot. That the rest don’t understand—what would be our place, our state, if they did?

set of norms, but part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real." (Clifford Geertz) William F. Lewis’s account of a Rasta trial in his Soul Rebels was years after he’d read Geertz on local knowledge but Geertz’s work had stayed with him. G’s idea is that established notions of justice become unjust without imported notions. The reversal of the original judgment in Lewis’s courtroom made for a good day: a norm and a counterexample finding contact with each other and forcing a juridical advance. A small win, but an example that at times the law can be constructive of social life, not reflective of it. Cultural progress is always fragile and subject to reversals, but it is nice to know that the tonalities of the Different can on occasion alter the invested primaries—nice to know that what seems like universal fixity can bend to versions of the local, local not just as to place, time, class, and variety of issue, but as to accent—vernacular characterizations of what happens connected to vernacular imaginings of what can.

Rich