I think alt lit is a rejection of the 90s and early part of last decade. When I first starting getting into literature in the late 90s and early part of last decade, everyone was still very much into either getting published by the Paris Review or writing like beatniks or punks and slam poetry. I felt completely dissatisfied with the whole thing...and I didn’t like Eggers, DFW (David Foster Wallace) and Franzen, I found them all bourgeois. I was reading like Sartre and Nietzsche at that time.
Then I noticed the Internet had websites, like 3AM and Word Riot, which just blew my mind. It made me really excited to see the new literature online, but the new literature didn’t satisfy me either. I wrote some things and Tao wrote some things independent of each other, and we found each other. And we both had the same types of complaints. He didn’t care about DFW, Eggers and Franzen either. I read once that DFW is considered the Jesus of alt, but in reality, no one even considered him worth talking about.
The influences we were talking about were much older. We could see, that the Internet had possibilities, that there were no rules on the Internet. A person could get a blog for free and write exactly what they wanted. And that was going to be the future.
Then I noticed the Internet had websites, like 3AM and Word Riot, which just blew my mind. It made me really excited to see the new literature online, but the new literature didn’t satisfy me either. I wrote some things and Tao wrote some things independent of each other, and we found each other. And we both had the same types of complaints. He didn’t care about DFW, Eggers and Franzen either. I read once that DFW is considered the Jesus of alt, but in reality, no one even considered him worth talking about.
The influences we were talking about were much older. We could see, that the Internet had possibilities, that there were no rules on the Internet. A person could get a blog for free and write exactly what they wanted. And that was going to be the future.
