Canteen: The State of Creation

(from our Issue Six essay series, The Great American Novel: An Honor Roll of Fallen Genres)

THE GREAT AMERICAN Dialogue About the New Yorker’s 2010 “20 Under 40” List will occur at a mutual friend’s 25th-birthday party near the back wall of Spuyten Duyvil’s outdoor area around 11:15 p.m. on a Friday night in mid-May, a few days after the list’s June 7 release date is announced, between two male writers (b. 1982, 1983), published to varying degrees, with an unpublished male writer (b. 1984) standing alone to the left of the aforementioned, staring vaguely at an attractive girl in the distance while lamenting his life “sort of strongly” (though no less strongly than b. 1983 and perhaps sometimes b. 1982, who is a bit inscrutable in that regard) and with an amount of “something like sarcasm” and also “something like enjoyment,” having developed, along with a few other people, perhaps a “growing number” of people, including b. 1983, the ability, not always successful—not at all—to experience certain conventionally “negative” feelings with neutrality, aesthetic interest, “a kind of private appreciation,” and [other feelings generally felt only for “works of art”] via “detachment,” awareness and manipulation of “tone,” a strong “life context” of “wanting to console oneself in a manner that doesn’t ‘ignore’ anything,” and an intimate knowledge of the causes/effects of disappointment, self-destructive behavior, “feeling bad.” The dialogue will begin when b. 1983, in a moment of “vague, somewhat drug-induced, existential inattention,” sort of waiting for two or three people to “text him back” while not completely aware whose “turn” it actually is to “text [someone] back,” mostly only aware, sort of sleepily, though not “feeling sleepy,” of not being aware of anything specific, nonsequiturly says “the New Yorker’s ‘20 under 40’ list” a little loudly and tonelessly, like a cough or sneeze, and while still saying it feels that “simply” saying it will likely cause 5–15 minutes of “not interminable, moderately witty” conversation and being correct: the conversation immediately quickening, becoming louder, more overlapped, the disconnect between literal/“delivered” meanings re “words spoken” suddenly larger, eyeballs sometimes sort of “darting around” without exterior referents, phrases like “Keith Gessen,” “Granta’s list,” “David Remnick or whoever,” “probably Karen Russell” spoken at tones/volumes previously unused that night. “Jesus,” “damn,” “seems insane,” “that’s funny” spoken 50–70% more frequently than in “the average dialogue,” the previously alert peripheral vision of b. 1983 sort of “shutting down” as his brain excitedly (though still “idly,” and somewhat “sadly,” with an awareness of “faking it,” to some degree, or perhaps “forcing it,” rather, due to feeling “ever aware” that he’d ideally like to currently be with one of the people he’s sort of wanting to text him, “getting drunk” with her in an empty bar or sitting with her on his queen-size bed “on drugs,” not loudly talking about a forthcoming issue of the New Yorker in the outdoor area of a bar in Williamsburg) struggles to continuously and plurally form interesting, “quirky,” funny, perhaps “fucked-up” or “nonsensical” (wanting, to some degree, to manipulate the conversation, as b. 1983 “likes” to do with “any” conversation, into something nonrhetorical) commentary/jokes about the New Yorker’s forthcoming “key writers of this generation” list. Sentences like “I’m just going to kill myself probably if I’m not on it, to be ‘more newsworthy’ than it, to sort of defeat it, while also committing suicide for existential reasons unrelated to it” and “feels like I ‘should’ be on it but seems like because I feel that, in the manner I feel it, using the word ‘should’ like that, I won’t be on it, and not being on it will only affirm my feeling that I ‘should’ be on it, causing me now to sort of feel like I ‘should not’ be on it” will be intuited in a nearly pre-language manner, edited to some degree, and, before being spoken or personally articulated to any degree, deleted from memory—all within microseconds or sometimes full seconds, mostly unconsciously, in layers and overlaps—while, simultaneously, sentences like “I’m fucked then since I don’t have a literary agent” and “the Observer called him and talked to him for an hour” will be spoken without editing, sort of “written” aloud, without fear or hesitation, and with actual high levels of “success,” causing “immediate, unselfconscious” grins, “wide smiles,” and “brief, unscary, intensely tactful” moments of “life-affirmingly direct ‘eye contact,’” b. 1982’s eyeballs seeming, somewhat humorously, in b. 1983’s view, to actually “gleam” (or perhaps “glint”). The “apex” of the dialogue will arguably occur when b. 1983, who is known, to a medium-large degree, for having a blurb from someone who will almost definitely—or, after brief consideration, probably not, actually—be on the New Yorker’s June 7 list, says, a bit suddenly, after some sentences about Benjamin Kunkel, “they should just make it ‘20 under 60’ or something,” laughing a little, staring with “round, alert, sort of unfocused” eyes toward the “head and upper body” of b. 1982—whom b. 1983 has known for maybe five years, after seeing him on the Internet wearing an Against Me! shirt, emailing him—who seems to like what was just said, is laughing in response while seeming distracted in a manner like he’s going to say something immediately after laughing or maybe while still laughing, sort of bent forward, one foot against the brick wall at the back of the backyard of this bar that doesn’t serve liquor, for some reason, but does sell $20 bottles of wine—which later b. 1984, the unpublished male writer, will buy and drink, accurately stating to “a grinning b. 1983” the cost-effectiveness of it, in terms of “getting drunk”—finally saying something like “[the ‘group blog’ he writes for] was thinking about doing a ‘20 over 70’ list,” causing b. 1983 to honestly say “I was just about to say someone should do a ‘20 over 80’ list” while perhaps 15 other numeral combinations “flit” through his consciousness including “80 over 90” (predictably), “15 under 15” (predictably), “50 under 50” (“kind of stupidly”), something like “cat38finga7 under deconstr68,” and also something like “goddamn it…” (in the tone and structure, somehow, though, of “[#] under [#]”), the last two of which cause him to somewhat sarcastically feel “momentarily insane,” like he could “easily” become insane, or like he “knows” insanity. Until 47,301 A.D., the only documentation of the Great American Dialogue About the New Yorker’s 2010 “20 Under 40” List will be the essay you are currently reading, authored, according to this sentence, by b. 1983 (who “commits” to it suddenly, impulsively, early one evening, 40 minutes before meeting another b. 1983 to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at Sunshine Cinema, thinking things like “just going to do this ‘fucking’ thing in less than an hour,” quickly feeling, then, though, “excitingly high” levels of interest in it while typing the first few sentences, “much higher” levels of interest in it than the 2–6 other “much more financially beneficial” “projects” he’d previously been “working” on, for “what seems like months,” he’d told 2–4 people in emails), who will give “the birthday girl,” whom he “had a crush on” for something like 35 hours in 2007, Undeleted Scenes by Jeffrey Brown, which he will have bought earlier that night from the Strand, going upstairs with “strong intent” to “find and buy it” after idly “wandering around” the fiction section, around 7:30 p.m., feeling sarcastically “lost” for an amount of time while displaying a “neutral” to “vaguely depressed” facial expression, removing and returning Coin Locker Babies from an eye-level shelf, perceiving “no used books by Lorrie Moore even with [something about A Gate at the Stairs’ success]” with some confusion, remembering vaguely—in response to “some confusion”—that the Strand had changed, at some point, via “new owner, or something,” had, sort of inexplicably, stopped “stocking” even used Richard Yates books. Zero human beings will know (until time travel is invented at some point, rendering the concept/verb “to know” incomprehensibly “complex,” however), or even “consider,” at the time of the writing of this essay—of which b. 1983 first “felt vaguely attracted” to via “the potential $300, at .30/word, he could ‘net’ via ‘no research,’ ‘simply’ a kind of ‘riffing,’ and probably ‘little to no editing’”—that, of the 452,193 spoken dialogues in the United States about the New Yorker’s 2010 list of 20 fiction writers, the dialogue documented in this essay will eventually be viewed, more than 45,000 years from today (May 19, 2010), with both mainstream and “alt” acceptance, as the “great” one, to varying degrees of sarcasm re “great.” It will be 47,301 A.D., a few thousand years after an alien civilization’s fifth-largest graduate school has purchased Earth from a subsidiary of “a minor corporation” to use as its main campus, when a drug-addicted “alien” will pay its roommate the current human being equivalent of “as much free Adderall as you ‘need,’ plus $20” to write its final term paper, which it will submit to the alien equivalent of Harper’s four months later, when an editorial assistant who “has a crush on” the aforementioned “drug-addicted alien” asks said alien to send him something because there’s currently a strong interest in “Earthling literary culture” from 2005–2015, beginning the two-year process of the “term paper” being “only lightly edited” by the now “associate editor” and published and anthologized and republished in book form, with footnotes by the six “leading intellectuals” of the time, winning the alien equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, due mostly to the cross-cultural/societal appeal, in terms of prose style and tone and focus, of the drug-addicted graduate student’s roommate who wrote the “term paper” in seven hours, sort of “idly,” after ingesting the alien equivalent of 30 mg of “extended release” Adderall, citing only the essay you are currently reading, which she discovered, via the alien equivalent of LexisNexis, in an issue of Canteen, itself featured, to some degree, in the “term paper,” and which, inexplicably and surreally and somewhat “scarily” predicts her situation, in 47,301 A.D., though not perfectly, she realizes with some confusion and increased fear, though also increased excitement, sitting on her bed, reading this essay for the first time, as “her reality” will be, and is—or perhaps mostly “was,” already, from some effecting perspective in the vastly incomprehensible, unenterably spacious future—via “some weird defect of something already weird and ultimately ‘mysterious’ to b. 1983 as he types these words, now, in some vaguely receding past,” actually “47,501 A.D.”/“third-largest graduate school.”

Tao Lin is the author of six books of fiction and poetry, most recently the novel Richard Yates. He is also the founder and editor of Muumuu House, a literary press.