New stuff: “Secrets Laid Bare: An Interview with Susannah Breslin” and “Letter to Persephone, Before Mother’s Day: A Poem by Sarah A. Etlinger” and “Cocktail Party: Fiction by Terese Svoboda” and “Pleasure Principle: Flash CNF by Ruth Williams” and also a bunch of micro and cartoons.
Hi.
I’m thinking this week about the endless content, endless listicles, endless Canva-generated infographics, endless TikTok shorts, endless chatter, endless chasing of likes, endless AI prompts, endless algorithmic filtering, endless discourse. Thinking about this early-’90s Sub Pop song/poem vibe from the late Steven Jesse Bernstein: “More Noise Please.”
“Maybe we can’t live without all this goddam noise,” he writes. “Maybe I need the noise to write poems, make love, and eat. I’m going to hang a sign outside my window that says, ‘More Noise Please’ or ‘Thank You for Making Noise.’ … Without you, I could not live—I could not have written this poem!”
I don’t know. Maybe this wasn’t the best way to start a newsletter that tries to get you to click on links to content. Oops.
Okay But Seriously, MORE NOISE PLEASE
We’re opening poetry and visual art submissions March 1st. Mark your calendars. Prepare to make some noise.
Susannah Breslin Wrote a Goddam Memoir
And she didn’t like it. Or maybe she did. I don’t know. I’ve never met her. Over the past 20+ years, I’ve interviewed her, published her fiction, published her nonfiction, published her photography…but I’ve never met her. She’s out there in the world somewhere (L.A.) doing what she does, putting out words. The words she put out this time make up a memoir called Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment.
Last November, when she first told me about her new book, I responded, “Of. Course. I. Want. This.”
We agreed to do an email interview. The book arrived in the mail from Los Angeles. Then I went on a trip to Zion National Park. I ate at a nice (for Zion) Mexican restaurant. Indoors. Stuff started falling from the sky onto my fiesta-colored plate and face. I looked up and saw nothing. Then it fell again. It was bird poop. Indoors. With no bird in sight.
Shortly thereafter, I got the first eye infection of my life. I went to the doctor. The doctor said that it wasn’t from the bird poop but that also on second thought maybe it was. For a few weeks, it hurt to read. The Data Baby book-reading was postponed halfway through the story.
Then I moved to a different house. Then it was Christmas. Then I got what was almost certainly COVID the day after Christmas. Suddenly it was January. Finally it was time to finish her book.
I liked the end of the book because it wasn’t some bullshit (or birdshit?) feel-good ending.
Great. It was time to do the interview.
My resolution for the new year was to set and stick to deadlines, so I set out to interview Susannah on a deadline. The best way to meet my self-imposed deadline seemed to be to send blocks of questions at once. But this didn’t work because I flubbed the questions in haste and they didn’t go together well and the flow of the piece, on my end, totally flopped.
But the great thing about
is that she’s a professional writer/content creator/noisemaker and turned my crappy interview questions into gold by writing top-notch responses. Here are some clips of what she said:I don’t think I believe in true selves. I think a true self is a lie memoirs use to sell books. Like, especially to women. Like: Hey, ladies, if you can just find your TRUE SELF, whatever the hell that means, then you’ll hate yourself a little less than you do because that’s what pop culture tells you to do as a woman—think of yourself as broken or ugly or fat so you’ll buy some product to fix the problem you supposedly have.
I wonder if I were to interview my personal algorithm that has turned me into the person I am today what it would say about who I am. I think the algorithm would say that I am the true self it wants me to be, not something inside of me.
And
In my opinion, the search for the true self is a fool’s errand. And I believe people who are younger than me are catching on to that. And they don’t want that bullshit anymore. They don’t want to be their supposed true self. They want to be the person they are right now, at this moment, in all their messy, imperfect, wabi sabi glory, and I am really down for that.
I think authors of memoirs sell this baloney true self narrative to push their product, which is that, you know, it’s not enough they wrote a book—they found their true self along the way! That is the promise of the memoir. That in the end the narrator will emerge transformed into the person they were meant to be. I love books, but writing a book does not on its own transform you. I have found many other things in my life to be more transformative than writing a memoir, like, for example, having a malignant tumor inside of me but surviving that or growing up riding horses and falling off them a lot or wanting to kill myself sometimes but then my mom dying and then not wanting to kill myself so much after. Why would a book transform you? Life does, not words on a page.
And
Writing this memoir forced me to shed that armor and be more vulnerable. Or at least that was the task, in theory. You know, I don’t really like memoirs, which are often written by women for women. I think of myself as someone who as a journalist has historically appealed more to men. Memoirs oftentimes are just the vomiting of emotions. I find the idea of doing that repellant. So I really struggled with the whole book, to be honest. One reviewer described my tone in my memoir as dispassionate, or something to that effect, but that was kind of the point.
And anyway that’s a long way of saying you should read my interview with Susannah Breslin.
Pause for Promo
I got sick of ads and datamining, so I removed them from the site. I replaced them with a donate button. So far, we’ve received no new donations in February. That is some Charlie Sheen-level #WINNING.
Which, you know, I don’t blame people for that—why send money to strangers on the internet who band together to create what is ultimately less than a drop in an endless sea of content?
Maybe we’ll try turning on an option to subscribe through Substack so people can support the site. Do you want to do that? I think if we get a few pledges by the end of the month, we’ll try it. Here you go:
I thought if we got enough donations we could cover the basic costs and try to pay writers, but so far that hasn’t happened. We’ll keep trying to find a way to make it work.
New from Terese Svoboda
Terese Svoboda has two new books: Roxy and Coco and The Long Swim. We recently published her short story “Cocktail Party”:
The closet stands open: four suits of various male tints, a shirt with an orange stain, suspenders in surrender. Cocktails, says Dad. With people who vote.
I take a seat on the bed beside him. You have to frame being 94 as an advantage, so many more clever political moves, more fascinating stories. The hindsight alone.
Hindsight is what I'm worried about, says Dad, hoisting himself off the bed toward the suits. I don't think any of them fit. The waist alone.
I look around for a clean shirt.
Some people, he says, waste away. That's what's supposed to happen.
You're an exemplar of vigor, I say. Let's go shopping.
He's sorrowful for a minute—about the expense? the waste of an expensive new suit, given his age?—then he reaches for his shoes.
This Is One of Those Situations
In which it has been so long since I’ve written a newsletter that there’s too much to talk about. Did you read this poem by Sarah A. Etlinger? You were probably at AWP when we published it. Perhaps you missed this essay by Ruth Williams. But maybe the algorithm showed you her video reading of the piece:
Towards a Belated Birnbaum Memorial
I have been working on a collection of memories of Robert Birnbaum. My deadline-driven intention was to have them online by February 20th (his birthday). But I realized this week that the timing wasn’t going to align with the full collection of the material. The good news: You can send notes about Robert in response to this email & I can still include them in the piece.
Is That Everything?
I don’t know. I got kinda lost in the speedy composition of this message. Was it Capote who said about Kerouac, “That’s not writing, that’s typing”? This is typing, but to make matters worse, I’m not even as good at typing as Jack Kerouac. Sorry. It’s been this kind of week:
Next week will be better. Next week starts with Jack Bedell.
Dharma Bummed,
Matt B.
Person Who Posts Content Online
Identity Theory