by Brandon Scott Gorrell
Muumuu House 2009
Reviewed by John Deming

Kind of Not Sarcastic

“Sarcasm is the refuge of losers,” declares Greg Kinnear as loser motivational spokesman Richard Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine, Hoover the finest role Kinnear has played since he was a loser art dealer in As Good As It Gets. Sometimes sarcasm is useful, or even necessary. But Hoover’s probably referring to people who fall back on sarcasm always. It’s not hard to find fault with the world. To quip about it sometimes helps, but one can only speak between finger-quotes for so long before nobody wants to listen anymore.

Tao Lin has navigated this territory in poetry over the last few years, annoying many, but also making some valuable observations about that strange social turn where internet identity began replacing physical identity: self esteem measured according to blogs, instant messages and Facebook friends, all in the silence of one’s bedroom. Now Tao Lin has a disciple, Brandon Scott Gorrell. Gorrell spends a lot of time on the internet too, apparently, but his first book, during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present, is so derivative of Tao Lin that it is hard to find much use for it. The poet is moody, sure, but his cracks at absurdity, or interesting repetitions, just totally smack of effort, man.

When Gorrel finds the line between sarcasm and irony, then the line between cynicism and skepticism, he proceeds to bust back and forth through both like a kid that summer camp counselors feel bad for in an afternoon round of Red Rover. The result is a string of purposefully immature free associations that never veer from a self-loathing so aware of itself it forgets that it might have been justified in the first place.The poems in during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present are, at best, funny, in the way that the Ninja Website is funny: they parade around their ignorant posturing with pride, so we are comfortable laughing down at them. They satisfy the need to feel juvenile, to pout, to say “as if I would really say that” after every thing you say. But this book is never really elevated to the level of satire; lines like “every high-level american politician is a rich, corrupt piece of shit” will never go beyond college freshman coffee shop banter. Lin, and even the guys at the Ninja site, have an air of curious menace about them; Gorrell, showing flares of talent, too often reads like he is trying to think of things to say, and that anything will do.

The first poem is a list poem called “potential poem titles”; some of them are charming (“i want to turn into wild grass and get eaten by a soft moose”), but most are painfully boring whims (“i’m going to take a bath in 13 gallons of warm coffee”). Most of the poems in the book work as such: lists of random urges toward predictable satisfactions. Take these lines from “i feel kind of alienated somebody teleport me to tokyo”:

not looking stupid is one of the primary factors that guide my behavior

i’m staring at the computer screen waiting for something to happen

my life is on the internet completely

‘fuck life’

i was kind of not sarcastic when i said i wanted to stab your face off

i keep thinking about fractions and percentages

the idea of fractions and percentages is my favorite idea in the world

He likes fractions and percentages? He must be pretty smart. Maybe this will get him girls or something. But let’s focus on the face-stabbing instead. Because for whatever reason, violence is his trusty fallback all throughout this book. Everywhere, people and animals are threatened with stabbings or with (and this might be my favorite new word of the year) getting “chainsawed.” The book jacket, designed by the author, boasts his narrator’s “low self-confidence,” “anxiety” and “alienation.” Self-loathing has its place in great art (see: Robert Lowell, Biggie Smalls, Kurt Cobain), but the troubling—troubling? No, annoying—thing here is the author’s need to project his violent impulses outward as much as inward. This book is like a diary that high school counselors would claim ad hoc presented an “obvious warning sign.” It isn’t long before you realize that his isn’t self-loathing at all. It is egotism in its highest form.

But now I’m getting all serious, right? He’s just kidding? Sadly, you’re probably right: this book is just that boring. Consider these “thoughts” from “i’ve been looking at the screen for a long time”:

there is nothing in my reality that I want enough to try getting
this is causing immense feelings of anxiety

Okay. But I am not your therapist. There is still no context for this suffering, or at least no interesting level of context. I’d much prefer self-loathing that wonders at itself, as in the lyrics of Lowell (“I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell / as if my hand were at its throat….”) and Cobain (“I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned. Daddy’s little girl ain’t a girl no more”), or computer-age alienation that steps outside of itself, like in the lyrics of Thom Yorke (“transport / motorways and tramlines / starting and then stopping / taking off and landing / the emptiest of feelings”). But Gorrell’s book is too pouty and repetitive, mired in insularity that refuses to go inside.

The venerable Ben Mirov says that the ostensible “badness” of these poems is an entry point. Mirov says that “At worst these aspects are sophomoric attempts to gain attention. At best they are Warhol-like mechanisms that force the reader to examine their preconceptions about poetry.” This is true, though I might contend that Tao Lin already accomplished that in this mode. Sometimes a creative curiosity shows through in Gorrell (“i think i only / care about myself how can / it be different”); and sometimes, even, originality (“you are a soft brown bear and i will hold you / and you will bite me”); but more often than not, he moves you about as much as the guy walking down the street in a black t-shirt that says, “I see stupid people.”

Sure, the poet of during my nervous breakdown is not alienated; he’s “alienated.” But weed through the layers of sarcasm, and you’re left at plain old alienation. Regular anxiety. Mirov says that “beneath everything, there’s a genuine emotional core, that is humanistic and empathetic.” I don’t disagree; the poet wants to say something, but doesn’t know what to say, so he tries to make the “not knowing what to say” his subject. He can do better. I think this poet has talent (see the “moose” line), and is best when he is unnerved, rather than trying to write poems that look like they do not try. I would like to see this poet invent his way into his next book. Because I’m just not convinced that repeating the words “there is nothing in my reality that I want enough to try getting” for two full pages makes this speaker’s suffering any more interesting, valuable or worth reading about than anyone else’s. (But that’s the point, man.) Yes. Everyone’s anxious. Everyone suffers. Report back something new, and keep the whining to a minimum.

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