the Internet is for real

by Chris Campanioni

Overview

the Internet is for real inverts the autobiography in the age of dis-integration, calling into question all narratives of national belonging.

“Right? So that the universe could eat me & send traces everywhere, this book or the backroom countertop audio of the same scene.”

Sifting through—and re-writing—the films of Godard, the novels of Henry James, Twin Peaks, VR fantasies, Internet ephemera, and his father’s dreams of Cuba, Chris Campanioni reveals the materiality of our spaceless encounters, and forces us to reckon with the violence hidden below the sleek 4G surface. As he revisits his parents’ migration to the United States and his own first-generation dislocation through a blur of poetry, prose, and screen-play, Campanioni shows us that in a culture of self-dissemination and unlimited arrivals, we are all exiles under the sign of a mythical return.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949540062
Publisher:	C&R Press
Publication date:	05/01/2019
Pages:	550
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.22(d)

About the Author

Chris Campanioni is a first-generation American and the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland. He has worked as a journalist, model, and actor, and he teaches Latino literature and creative writing at Baruch College and Pace University. His "Billboards" poem that responded to Latino stereotypes and mutable—and often muted—identity in the fashion world was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was selected as Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece "This body's long (& I'm still loading)" was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. A year earlier, he adapted his award-winning course, "Identity, Image, & Intimacy in the Age of the Internet," for his first TEDx Talk. He edits PANK, At Large, and Tupelo Quarterly and lives in Brooklyn, where he wrote DEATH OF ART, also available from C&R Press.

Table of Contents

Table Of Contents

(birth)

Send Help 13

Book of Genesis 47

Private Moments In Moving Cars 73

On Permanent Display 93

Casual Encounters 105

Erasures 131

This body’s long & I’m still loading 145

please rewind tape & place in protective sleeve 177

In the Multiplex 195

Excess 219

how to begin is also where 228

(control)

-13 Opening Shot

-33 scores

-51 Installation in progress

-72 Art is for Necrophiliacs

-95 I am writing to you from the air

-130 Hot Tips For Healthy Living

-152 [no subject]

-247 A Place I’ve Only Ever Been In Poems

___________

-270 Acknowledgements

-290 Playlist

Editorial Reviews

“He is Frank O’Hara traveling the hyper-connected contemporary landscape via iPhone—spawning, recording, discarding speculative versions of himself . . . He carries his Situationism between cities, between countries, between periods in his life without rest or regard for boundaries. Campanioni isn’t playing at being clever; he is erasing himself to locate the sublime.” — The Brooklyn Rail

“Campanioni’s writing is playful, unflinching . . . a much-needed reminder of our endless potential for duality, in a world that too often suggests only polarity is possible.” — Harvard Review

“Award-winning author Chris Campanioni may, for better or worse, be the voice of our generation in which the internet is our stomping ground and making eye contact with our friends and family is a rare treat . . .” —Your Impossible Voice

“A hashtag, abbreviated quality . . . both deeply intimate and thrilling.” — Metal Magazine

“Bolaño meets DeLillo meets Borges . . .” —Red Fez

“Cuban-American writer Chris Campanioni’s new work is billed as non-fiction, but serves as much more. A dancey mashup of poetry and hybrid prose reminiscent of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets … a genre-bending glimpse into what feels like Campanioni’s private diary.” — Duende

“Hypnotic (and, at times, chaotic) … [an] attack of experimental yet digestible use of language …” — Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“While Chris Campanioni, like Borges and Cortázar, likes to play with form and perception, he doesn’t jeopardize the story he’s telling. He’s a performer. He knows when and how to reward his audience.” — Dead End Follies

“the Internet is for real is like no other book you’ll read this year. Border-busting, fearless, and exquisitely alive, Campanioni’s latest work thrusts readers into a world of self-projections and bold intimacy, techno-anxieties and cyber-bliss, political whirlwinds and cultural homecomings. the Internet is for real again proves that Chris Campanioni is his own remarkable genre. This is a must-read for the ‘post-Internet’ age and beyond.”

— Jennifer Maritza McCauley, author of Scar On/Scar Off

“the Internet is for real is obsessive, it’s compulsive—it throbs with the autonomic flush of being ‘seen,’ and the reflective terror of being ‘known.’ It scared me the way open water scares me, or outer space the vacuum of black. You read this book, and the book reads you right back.”

— Tommy Pico, author of Junk

“Critical theory collides with popular culture, technology, and personal narrative … a wonderful collage-like quality in its language, as well as in its form … the page becomes a visual field.”

— Kenyon Review

From the Publisher