Last night, internet poet Steve Roggenbuck emerged from his home on Twitter to read live(!) in person(!) in someone’s far Northeast living room. (I’m still not sure whose living room it was, but there was definitely a kitten present! Thanks random poetry-loving cat owner! That was really cool of you, to have Steve Roggenbuck in your living room!)
Roggenbuck’s reading style is so, so funny. He’s caught flack in some circle-jerky, now-shuttered corners of the alt lit internet for… I guess having happy persona? Which is an odd criticism coming from a literary scene so built on posturing, like, more than normal. ANYWAY, Roggenbuck read from his new book Calculating How Big of a Tip to Give is the Easiest Thing Ever, Shout Out to My Family & Friends with the delivery of a hyper-literate seven-year-old with hyperactivity problems and a lot of enthusiasm, which I mean as a compliment, because I’ve been to SO MANY BORING, QUIET READINGS and Roggenbuck all but guarantees that your mind won’t wander.
Calculating How Big of a Tip to Give is the Easiest Thing Ever, Shout Out to My Family & Friends is a collection of very short stories that sound like magnanimous, drunk Gchats, with overlong titles unrelated to their content, including “Together We Can Burn Down John Mayer’s Home,” “when i meditate it feels like i am practicing to be calm & gentle in daily life. i really like it and it helps me a lot,” “At parties my main focus is high-fiving people & telling them they’re doing a great job,” and “People’s usual reaction to seeing a cute animal is saying they want to own it.”
Throughout his reading, Roggenbuck discussed Tinder (people who use it act like they’re jokingly using it, but really they like it), barriers to fair compensation of domestic work (patriarchy), and one particularly raucous previous tour stop, where he’d led his audience in a chant of “Together We Can Burn Down John Mayer’s Home”—just the title, and (presumably) all in good fun.
Calculating How Big of a Tip to Give is the Easiest Thing Ever, Shout Out to My Family & Friends might seem gimmicky, and oh, it definitely is. But it’s also a brilliantly earnest, unapologetically strange piece of writing, and one of the best possible arguments for what’s come to be known as post-internet art. I’d take it over Tao Lin any day.
So sad I had to work. Luv that dude’s stuff!