Letters to the Editor, Vol. I

Uh "Excelsior!" and whatnot

Just over six to sixteen years ago we put out a call for Letters to the Editor, and we’re only finally getting around to answering a few of the just-slightly-more-than-a-few letters we received. Your collective patience is very much appreciated. Stay tuned through the rest of the holidays, as we’ll have one more Eris piece and a year-in-review item on deck before the calendar turns to 2026. Keep on creepin’ on, folks. (And feel free to email our editors about whatever’s bothering you.) — The Management

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[We also downloaded NGL, an anonymous messaging app primarily used by teenage girls to psyop each other into thinking their respective crushes are homicidal with lust, so people could submit questions via our Instagram. Here’s the one usable question we got from there.—Sire]

do u like anyone right now?<-- great suggestion, bot! but for real what is or was your take on alt lit

— Anonymous tween (?)

Eris: To answer the first question, my current crush is Christina Ricci. Or possibly Dimitri Karakostas, whose recent essay for us is one of the best things we’ve ever published. As for alt lit, I’m planning on writing a full piece about it at some point (don’t hold your breath, it’s been languishing untouched in the drafts for over a year). To spoil the whole thing, my thoughts are can be summarized thusly: I think alt lit was one of the last literary movements in the anglosphere to genuinely reflect the material conditions of the world out of which it emerged rather than pastiche or long-passé MFA-core. That may come as a surprise considering how the scenes I generally align myself with feel about said movement, but let me also be clear in saying that I think most of it was still nonetheless tiresome. But it was at least “an attempt” at grappling with the conditions of the modern world aesthetically with form as opposed to just content, which is more than I can say of most of what dominates fiction these days. I agree with angelicism01 (in their now, I think, deleted post about him) that Zachery German was ultimately one of the most compelling figures the movement produced, and then he put his career through a controlled demolition so that was that. Eventually you had Tao Lin and Mira Gonzales publishing a book of their own tweets and that legit made me feel kind of sad, like they’d lapsed into self-parody. Gonzales at one point said she puts as much thought into her tweets as she does her poems—yes, I’ll bet. Now we have to contend with people like 𝓗𝓸𝓷𝓸𝓻 𝓛𝓮𝓿𝔂 doing it all over again and making all the same missteps—tragedy, then farce. What was one of the last movements motivated by the conditions of the world then itself became a style to be made into pastiche. Chat: Is our culture washed?

Sire: Up here in Canada we didn’t have an alt lit scene as such, but circa 2015 the younger writers of our metropoles were very much looking to Brooklyn for guidance / styling tips, particularly in Montreal where Metatron Press and online mags like Bad Nudes¹ published a lot of very flatly affected writing about taking Lexapro and watching 2 Fast 2 Furious and whatnot. The tweets, they were definitely being read aloud at the magazine launches in lieu of poems. The new haikus were they not!? (They were not.) In that moment, it looked as though we were in for an orderly transition from the cleverer gen-X novelists and poets (Ken Babstock, Sheila Heti, Heather O’Neill etc.) to a lineup of urbane MFA-bred millennials assigned to capture the ennui of the web 2.0 age in exchange for a ration of grant money and eventual teaching jobs. But, as with a lot of culture, that promised future was deleted when the Woke moment descended like a ReBoot cartridge and everyone found themselves playing very different roles than they had been just before.

Both the US alt lit scene and its Canadian echo were ultimately broken by the same factors: people suddenly noticing the overwhelming whiteness of our cultural institutions and enacting a patchwork of diversity five-year plans; a new taste for doctrinaire sincerity; a general sense we ought to be Doing Something about The Scene’s rancid sexual politics. There was little pushback against the turn because to do so seemed like positioning oneself as being on the side of the racists and the rapists. What do aesthetics matter compared with finally addressing oppression, right? This, as should now be obvious, is a false dichotomy, and I think it curbed the kinds of healthy debate over form and style that help shape art that is truly of its moment, that is new. Perhaps, like Soviet industrialization for 20th century Russia, we’ll find that the blunt force affirmative action of the 2010s was ultimately beneficial to contemporary art despite its brutal up-front costs. I do find myself a little nostalgic for alt lit’s slacker conceptual provocations, which I never thought would be the case at the time. Unfortunately the sort of 2.0 version we’re experiencing at the moment has an undercurrent of reactionary sourness that drains a lot of the fun out of it.

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Hey Discordia,

Loving what you’re doing over there. I don’t have a question, I’d just really like you guys to do one of your patented exposés on Rick Rubin. Something always felt off about him to me and then that Boots Riley tweet dropped and I felt ecstatically vindicated.

But I need more. And I know the Discordia gang are the ones to do it.

With love,

Dave

Eris: Lucky you, because we actually already wrote one. Boots Riley is the man and his allegations against Rick Rubin probably aren’t unfounded—Rubin has retweeted goons like Scott Adams and Mike Cernovich without comment. Not that that necessarily says anything about his abilities as a producer, but Rubin has also now claimed that he “knows nothing about music” and “[doesn’t] know how to use a soundboard.” Which feels like, you know, something that shouldn’t be the case when you produce music for a living for a whole fuck ton of money. He just sort of strikes me as a lazy guy, which is probably why he loves AI so much. To quote noted “child abuse investigator” Pete Townshend, “someone needs to occasionally slap Rick Rubin.”

@soulr.co

Soulr on Instagram: "“When was the last time you seen a bison i…

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Hi There,

I am writing out of frustration toward my lack of corporeal acquisition in regard to your publication. I’ve searched high and low. High being the Indigo book store on the third floor of the Eaton Centre, low being The Beguiling on College St. When I asked staff at Indigo where I may find The Discordia Review, I was met with a puzzled look followed by a search on the database kiosk. “Looks like we don’t have it. Have you tried Amazon?” The alarm went off and no one did anything as a meth addict walked out with a copy of the 2015 Guinness Book of World Records. I told them they must have it, as it is a Canadian publication, made in Canada. Another puzzled look as I was invited to join their rewards program and purchase a shopping bag for a dollar. So no luck there. I also didn’t get very far with The Beguiling, and I mean literally. I was one step in the door when the staff told me I had to wear a disposable Shoppers Drug Mart face-covering to be inside, otherwise leave. I rolled up my shirt to show them a branding I’d consensually received in 2022, the word “freedom” emblazoned from shoulder blade to poorly-postured shoulder blade (the “R” is backwards in homage to Toys R Us). They managed to shame me out the door faster than you can say “sovereignty.” Feeling hot under the collar, I found the nearest apple, carved a “K” on it, and tossed it inside. I did this for you. Watching from the window, I witnessed the owner emerge from his office with a bottle of bleach and glug-glug-glug douse the apple. He then picked it up off the ground with a ziploc bag, like a responsible pet owner, sealed it shut, held it between thumb and forefinger and carried it to the back at arms-length, elbow locked, brow sweating. So no luck there, either. I’ve barely looked anywhere and I’m all out of ideas! Any suggestions?

Thanks a bunch,

Jack Bride

Sire: Jack Bride is a product of Discordia’s MKUltra-style Project D.A.N.K., wherein we turn previously healthy members of society into raving lit-crit junkies who trash any shop that doesn’t carry our wares. If you’re a store owner, zine rack proprietor, or distributor who wants to make sure a grubby Jack Bride-esque drifter doesn’t come and throw rotten fruit around your establishment, hit us up at discordia.sucks@gmail.com to talk about how we can get our print catalogue into your little hands.

If you, a simple customer, want to order some Discordia zines, that same email works fine. We also have items for sale at the following shops:

Montreal: The Word, De Stiil Booksellers
Chicago: Quimby’s (once the package I just mailed them gets there anyway)
Nanaimo/British Columbia: a square house distro

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Dear Discordia,

Been thinking about how many new novels by ‘very important and exciting voices’ are so shitty. Is it because they’re all so navel-gazey? Is that the new-new-post-ironic-thing? Are they all just big inside jokes? Am I out of touch?

Who gives a fuck about Jordan Castro? He’s not even funny on Twitter.

What’s the fucking deal, man?

— Alexander Freud

@academicfraud

p.s. Ocean Vuong should be catapulted into the sun

Eris: I was blessed to have spent several years so unplugged from contemporary literature that I literally had no idea what the fuck was going on or who was who. I did this because I thought contemporary literature fucking sucked. Then when this blog started really going, because I was vamping on how shit contemporary literature is I realized I had to become re-apprised of its state. So I’ve been scoping the lay of the land. Yup! Still shit! I haven’t read any Jordan Castro but the concept for The Novelist was so revoltingly sophomoric that it makes me break out in hives of cringe just thinking about it. I read that he worships Nicholson Baker and boy howdy does that just sound like a description of a shitty Baker impression.

I really didn’t give that now-infamous Ocean Vuong piece in which I accidentally called him a gay pedophile enough of my time. If I hadn’t been in the middle of my supplementary exams that piece probably would have been about twice as long—I have since watched some of Vuong’s talk show appearances, for instance, and oh my GOD is he one of the most insufferable people to hear speak. Watch him on Colbert, you’ll want to blow your brains out. Everthing sucks now! Nothing is cool, nothing is interesting, we have to make our own cool and interesting—more than that, we need to wage an impossible war against it all, a war we will surely lose, just to give us back a sense of purpose. A doomed Culture Crusade, a united effort to capture the lost heart of the culture from the grip of slop, of pastiche, of institutional worms, of hackery, etc., and at least in inevitably losing we can die with our boots on.

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Dear Discordia, hello.

Humbly, I’ll admit I’m BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) graduate, though in theatre rather than writing. Every Thursday, we had a “contextual studies” class. I’ll never understand the name, but let’s call it “theory.” It was most people’s least favourite subject. I liked it. It was debate time. Slivers of these debates would leak into the end of practical classes, but here we really got to hash it out: What is theatre for? Can you really learn to act? Does anyone even care about theatre? Blah, blah, blah—exactly my cup of tea.

But I also found myself alone on one end of a recurrent debate: does politics belong in art? Or more specifically: does opinion belong in art?

The majority contention was that mere presence on a stage is political. […] I was infuriated by the insistence that to ‘tell the audience what to think’ is an act of sacrilege. That it renders all art propaganda. That audiences come to theatres (and galleries, bookshops, etc.) to be moved emotionally, not politically. Nobody wants to be told. […But] I think the real fear of politics was the difficulty of treading the line between statement and exposition. Opinion is, in general, not subtle. It is easy to overdo, and overdo painfully. And yes, I’ll admit, there is a lot of painfully shit, very opinionated theatre (we all know it). And we’re probably all remembering some of the crap we put together in our high school theatre classes. So yeah, it’s risky territory. But it’s compositionally risky, not intellectually. And of course, the greatest risk of all is that you might invite a response. That it’s all well-and-good within the thought-bubbled walls of the theatre school, but once you start inviting the public along, you might get a (oh god) centrist in your audience. Well, I say: good. Otherwise, why bother?

We were at pains to criticise the state theatre company for its whitewashed schedules and middle-class, blue-rinse subscription system that pumped out the drabbest and dumbest recontextualisations of already mediocre plays. But we never quite realised that we were doing the same thing, for a different circle of people. All the same, all cheesy, all—when lined up one after the other—predictable. In the five years since graduating, we have seen an endless stream of Fleabag-esque shows: people standing up there to talk about their painful love lives, saying nothing much at all (yes, breaking up hurts... And?). Once again, the mere appearance of the body on stage does all the politicking. Nothing is said at all. And we wonder why no one gets the grants.

[…] Thanks Discordia. Just another gripe with the fine arts degree system

Love, Sabina

Joshua Chris Bouchard, Discordia Astrologer: Thanks for the letter.

Almost all art becomes mediocre by majority. Humans attach themselves to anything they think gives them meaning. People think experience is synonymous with truth. One by one new artists try to become great artists. But how many great artists can there be given the staggering way they crawl out of their own lives? Expression is often an act of abject perversion. Making everyone watch as we dig our own graves and take a giant piss. Sometimes, when the mood’s just right, it’s like attending your own funeral—cliché, boring, and terribly forgettable.

Maybe we should just watch people explode all over themselves. A bomb of flesh for the ghosts to gag on. It’s our right to say nearly anything we want even when we’re cowards. Especially when we’re cowards. Bravery is a myth. And it goes on and on and on. An entire lifetime of thinking inwardly. There’s no point in resistance.

I’m sick. My mother/father/sister/brother/friend is dead. I come from a different place than you. Everything feels strange/transformative/confusing at my current age. They left me. I left them. Who is fucking who now? Who am I? Why am I here? Am I only a vessel for others to perceive the world?

Imagine a whole life with no consequences. We can talk about it all endlessly at dinner parties and funerals. Existential outhouses full to the brim with half-empty promises. And where is all the success? The accolades? The sweet vindication of respect? Surely, somebody must notice us on the precipice. Follow the track of blood. Our bodies flail uncontrollably, bash into each other like an orgy of inflatable tube people outside a used car dealership.

Maybe if I do it this way. At long last everything is permitted.

At least we can pretend we’re rich. And dignified. And worth something. The applause after the bow. The afterparty where we hide in coatcheck as we wait for someone who doesn’t exist to find us. We’ve lost our ticket. But still, they will take us into their warm gooey circle, comfort us like the weight of soft wool, and lay us down to rest.

Congratulations! You’ve been awarded the inaugural prize of: vitriol, stink, indignation, jealousy, convulsions, irregular heartbeats, anxiety, regret, shameless sex, trips to Europe, famous friends, betrayal, honest communication, apathy, humiliation. Best of luck in your future endeavours.

It’s a good fucking thing we have ideas. Even when they’re complete dog shit. Human waste dredged from the deep dark secret unconscious…whatever. To feel safe even for just an instant. The world keeps expelling the greatest artists of our generation like a termite queen. As the workers keep her well-fed and clean from abdomen to head. Art for the sake of art. Annihilation for the sake of annihilation. It’s thankless work but someone has to do it. And the work is never finished.

I guess there’s meaning in that.²

1. Eris: I was published in Bad Nudes back in the day, mind you, so I suspect that does position us somewhat adjacent to “alt lit” genealogically. I was in nearly every issue!

2. Josh was deep in a state of remote gnosis when we asked him to field Sabina’s question, so we weren’t sure he’d get back to us by press time. So here’s a bonus answer from Eris:

The “no politics” crowd often seems to assume that “politics” always by necessity equates with “didacticism” or “instruction.” Gravity’s Rainbow is highly political novel. Based on the discussions I’ve had with these sorts, they seem to often just be very willfully-ignorant readers—if a work isn’t shoving its political POV down their throat, they refuse to be cognizant of it at all, hence they are only “aware” of politics in art when it is at its most obnoxious and cannot be ignored. The truth is they’re just terrible readers. Conversely, the “all art is/must be political!” crowd, which is mostly to blame for all the aforementioned obnoxious, awkward, or otherwise ham-fisted political art in the first place, is also filled with people who are just as bad at reading. They tend to each have a handy pocket hermeneutic they whip out that they wield as a sort of Attitude Gauge: yup, that’s racist alright! This hermeneutic gauge is an extremely sensitive contraption set to start beeping madly at the first sign of tension, and all representation is immediately interpreted as both literal and endorsed.

Art should not shy away from the political, but it shouldn’t instruct either. This is mostly because art is interpretive, and if you make the goal of your art imparting a specific political message, you will always lose (just ask Upton Sinclair, whose socialist-tinged The Jungle mostly wound up being interpreted as a condemnation of meat packing standards), and are better off writing essays or articles, formats which communicate ideas more directly, and any attempt to make literature MORE direct instead risks creating irritating didactic slop. But work that shies completely away from politics often itself feels insincere, spineless, or contentless. A good writer should acknowledge where his work intersects with politics, handle these intersections thoughtfully (not necessarily gingerly, but thoughtfully), and let these intersections imbue the work with reality and purpose.