Baby Got Books

today i wrote this thing about this collection

I’ve been strangely fond/jealous of the Brooklyn-based writer/poet/hipster lit media it-boy Tao Lin for some time now. His first novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, was about, um…hang on, I have to consult my notes…ok, here, I found my review of that book, written right after I read it:

Tao Linn’s (sic) first novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, if listed by plot points, would include: Elijah Wood, dolphins, pizza delivery, sadness, more pizza delivery. At times painfully mundane, at times razor-sharp with emotional truth, Linn’s novel is the sound of ennui on an iPod being listened to on the morning train to somewhere. Is this the result of the 20something overeducated hipster putting pen to paper? Yes. Does his voice sound like anyone else’s ever could, or would? No.

Obviously, I was so struck by the book that I couldn’t even spell Lin’s last name properly. He didn’t care, however, and sent me this as a “thank you”:

In case you can’t make it out, that’s a copy of Lin’s first poetry collection, You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am, inscribed to me and with a picture of a squid and a puffball looking thing.

Given how frequently Lin pops up on Gawker these days (he recently sold profit shares to help finance his forthcoming novel and there’s a bit of bluster that he might be the force behind my current favorite “scenester” blog, hipster runoff), I could probably sell that on e-bay for a pretty penny, or at least a $50 American Apparel gift certificate. Also given his cultural near-ubiquitousness (at least for those of us whose sole definition of “culture” is “what’s going on at Galleycat at the moment?”), it makes sense that Tao Lin would swoop in and take some of his over-educated under-paid chain-smoking vegan friends and publish them, as Muuumuu House.

(Full disclosure: I want to be one of Tao Lin’s friends.)

The first of those books is Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs, a prose and poetry collection by Ellen Kennedy. Despite the fact that her bio lists her as living in “northeast Pennsylvania”, I’d peg her as a Brooklynite on par with Tao Lin, if, you know, I had enough of a schema about such things to make such statements.

I say that because Ellen Kennedy writes the sort of pop-culture stream-of-consciousness-if-your-consciousness-is-both-emotionally-wounded-and-deficit-of-attention prosaic poetry that instantly reminds me of Tao Lin. In fact, if I didn’t know Tao Lin was Kennedy’s publisher, I would write to Tao Lin and say “Tao Lin, you need to read Ellen Kennedy. She has a poem in her book called ‘I Went to the Grocery Store Today’ and the first line goes ‘I bought blueberries, raspberries, pears, grapes, a pizza/and a giant orange’. You would like it. You are a lot more famous than I am and so you can probably afford to buy a copy but I am sure she would send you one.”

That’s what I would say, but I needn’t.

Kennedy’s collection obsesses over the mundane-sex and bodily functions and food and heartbreak. Hers, akin to Lin’s and very much a product of an emergent literary scene, is a writing style that requires appreciation of self-absorption to the point of laceration, pretense, and heartbreak. It’s conversational and tossed-off and possibly trite and also possibly brilliant at the same time. If beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, why can’t those obnoxious Moulin Rouge themes of truth and love and justice and brilliance and all that other stuff be, also? Poems like “I Like Every Time We Have Sex” are everything and nothing, depending upon the way you read them. Some will see nothing, some will see everything.

The two pieces that bookend the collection, “Eoody Mobby” and “Norm Macdonald”, are rapid-fire Gilmore-Girls-dialogue paced celeb-namechecking pieces of Gawkerpoetry that basically serve as gatekeepers for the intimate flesh-and-blood beating in the rest of the book. If you can make it through the door, you’re the type of person who needs what Kennedy’s writing is serving. If random dips into Woody Allen taking out cash from an ATM machine seem too much like fan-fiction to you, Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs will be lost on you. It’s all just a matter of perspective. For me? That title poem broke my heart.