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typewriter
A collection of thirteen flash fictions by Jimmy Chen concerning the fluctuating technologies of writing, searching, and finding unlikely things in an all too likely world.
19 pages, saddle-stitched chapbook
First published April 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
September 29, 2010
Jimmy Chen, known for being the funniest writer on HTMLGiant, displays deeper experimental talents in this brief chapbook from Magic Helicopter Press (Mike Young, I'm starting to realize, has a fantastic eye for talent). Great stuff here about fonts having a love affair, sad people surfing porn, social networks, and Amish emails. You should get this.
August 19, 2020
Republished from The Short Review.
I find it almost impossible to explain what happened to me when I first stumbled upon Jimmy Chen's fiction. A flash in the brainpan, a jolt to the surrealist and sensualist side of any writer, a tectonic shift in fictional framework. And yet, that's not quite it.
This is not the kind of writing I usually like to read – a kind of quirky tongue-in-cheek humorist approach to flash fiction that strips out in most cases a protagonist or a storyline. In the pantheon of writers I've read, I almost want to say a young and less alcohol-addled Charles Bukowski (whom I don't enjoy by the way), but much less bitter and much more inclined to take a piss at himself. I want to say: proceed along this continuum of Bukowski, Palahniuk, Coupland to a new generation of young male writers with derring-do, a definite "I don't care what you think of me as I write this" attitude, like Lee Klein, like Tao Lin, journals like Lamination Colony and Eyeshot and Yankee Pot Roast and Thieves Jargon and very LOL, by the way(laugh out loud).
Take one of the pieces in this collection (I hesitate to say "story" because never has a genre so ill-define what this piece actually does in all its brevity) – An E-Mail From The Amish – in this flash, Amish culture meets the internet and an Amish tries to respond to the 1.2 million emails received by the community in a hotmail account set up for them without their knowledge in 1999. It's old meets new (nothing original about that), but who thunks up questions like "how exactly would an Amish respond or cope with the advent of the internet and Twitter and Facebook?”"Well, Jimmy Chen does. And all of it rendered in stereotype without an actual protagonist. Yet, you fall for it. All over it. I mean, the Amish guy can't figure out how to use the space bar on the typepad, and he still talks about how they use a horseshoe to churn butter. Seriously. It's precisely this ultra-modern, deadpan, wry and disenchanted voice I fall for.
The thirteen pieces in here are all geared around the concept of a typewriter or its progeny – the words or vernacular that spin forth, the down-the-food-chain proliferation of TYPING in an internet world. Most of the pieces center around a funky idea or concept such as the typographer who eats his typos and has to have a colonoscopy in which his proctologist might discover "a novella up his anus" (The Typographer), or the dawning of the apocalypse when we are all set to obliterate each other but find that we revel in the use of "lol" and "lmao" and other means of hyperbole (LOL) (the quote above is taken from this piece) or Garamond meets Malcolm Gladwell and is intimidated by his fro (Garamond).
It's not all quirky hilarics however. Jimmy Chen takes on some big themes in this miniscule collection – e.g. the whole emotionally-ambivalent way in which texting is done, people posting their entire lives in pictures on the internet, legal people doing barely legal things, illegal people doing perfectly legal things, the phenomenon of Youtube, and in a Kafka-esque satire, a man wakes up to 513 comments on his blog post (the Meta-morphosis).
Part of me has taken the giant mushrooming of the social internet phenomenon at face value. I take it for granted. I'm only frustrated when it's down. It gives me great satisfaction to be able to see who's online at the same time as I am. And I haven't really stopped to think how the daily use of it is a gentle grafting of new identity, or depending on your point-of-view, an abrasion of old identity. Without being all Aldous Huxley-like, Typewriter made me pause, take note. And I take note. I take note of how bite-sized chunks of fiction can leave behind lingering tastes of sociological history and satirical commentary. I take note of the quirkiness of today's world, rendered as lateral cut, and how we never think about it. I take note of my own traditionalist story-teller approach to understanding flash fiction and found the form so much more elastic and experimental than I ever thought.
Typewriter itself, as a collection, is not enough to showcase Chen's enormous talent. I didn't get a full sense from this collection of the breadth of his imagination nor the dexterity of his writing chops nor how truly funny he can be, not the way I did from his own website gathering of his prodigious publications in Embassy of Misguided Zen. But it's a good appetizer. I wanted more.
To be sure, he's not everyone's slice of pie. But if you're someone who comes to fiction with an intuition of its madcap and down-the- rabbit-hole potential, if you appreciate how "unexpected fiction" can sometimes broaden your mind, you are someone who enjoys a good chortle along the way, and you don't mind that the prose contains words like "anus", "mindfuck" and "douchebag", Jimmy Chen might be your guy.
I find it almost impossible to explain what happened to me when I first stumbled upon Jimmy Chen's fiction. A flash in the brainpan, a jolt to the surrealist and sensualist side of any writer, a tectonic shift in fictional framework. And yet, that's not quite it.
This is not the kind of writing I usually like to read – a kind of quirky tongue-in-cheek humorist approach to flash fiction that strips out in most cases a protagonist or a storyline. In the pantheon of writers I've read, I almost want to say a young and less alcohol-addled Charles Bukowski (whom I don't enjoy by the way), but much less bitter and much more inclined to take a piss at himself. I want to say: proceed along this continuum of Bukowski, Palahniuk, Coupland to a new generation of young male writers with derring-do, a definite "I don't care what you think of me as I write this" attitude, like Lee Klein, like Tao Lin, journals like Lamination Colony and Eyeshot and Yankee Pot Roast and Thieves Jargon and very LOL, by the way(laugh out loud).
Take one of the pieces in this collection (I hesitate to say "story" because never has a genre so ill-define what this piece actually does in all its brevity) – An E-Mail From The Amish – in this flash, Amish culture meets the internet and an Amish tries to respond to the 1.2 million emails received by the community in a hotmail account set up for them without their knowledge in 1999. It's old meets new (nothing original about that), but who thunks up questions like "how exactly would an Amish respond or cope with the advent of the internet and Twitter and Facebook?”"Well, Jimmy Chen does. And all of it rendered in stereotype without an actual protagonist. Yet, you fall for it. All over it. I mean, the Amish guy can't figure out how to use the space bar on the typepad, and he still talks about how they use a horseshoe to churn butter. Seriously. It's precisely this ultra-modern, deadpan, wry and disenchanted voice I fall for.
The thirteen pieces in here are all geared around the concept of a typewriter or its progeny – the words or vernacular that spin forth, the down-the-food-chain proliferation of TYPING in an internet world. Most of the pieces center around a funky idea or concept such as the typographer who eats his typos and has to have a colonoscopy in which his proctologist might discover "a novella up his anus" (The Typographer), or the dawning of the apocalypse when we are all set to obliterate each other but find that we revel in the use of "lol" and "lmao" and other means of hyperbole (LOL) (the quote above is taken from this piece) or Garamond meets Malcolm Gladwell and is intimidated by his fro (Garamond).
It's not all quirky hilarics however. Jimmy Chen takes on some big themes in this miniscule collection – e.g. the whole emotionally-ambivalent way in which texting is done, people posting their entire lives in pictures on the internet, legal people doing barely legal things, illegal people doing perfectly legal things, the phenomenon of Youtube, and in a Kafka-esque satire, a man wakes up to 513 comments on his blog post (the Meta-morphosis).
Part of me has taken the giant mushrooming of the social internet phenomenon at face value. I take it for granted. I'm only frustrated when it's down. It gives me great satisfaction to be able to see who's online at the same time as I am. And I haven't really stopped to think how the daily use of it is a gentle grafting of new identity, or depending on your point-of-view, an abrasion of old identity. Without being all Aldous Huxley-like, Typewriter made me pause, take note. And I take note. I take note of how bite-sized chunks of fiction can leave behind lingering tastes of sociological history and satirical commentary. I take note of the quirkiness of today's world, rendered as lateral cut, and how we never think about it. I take note of my own traditionalist story-teller approach to understanding flash fiction and found the form so much more elastic and experimental than I ever thought.
Typewriter itself, as a collection, is not enough to showcase Chen's enormous talent. I didn't get a full sense from this collection of the breadth of his imagination nor the dexterity of his writing chops nor how truly funny he can be, not the way I did from his own website gathering of his prodigious publications in Embassy of Misguided Zen. But it's a good appetizer. I wanted more.
To be sure, he's not everyone's slice of pie. But if you're someone who comes to fiction with an intuition of its madcap and down-the- rabbit-hole potential, if you appreciate how "unexpected fiction" can sometimes broaden your mind, you are someone who enjoys a good chortle along the way, and you don't mind that the prose contains words like "anus", "mindfuck" and "douchebag", Jimmy Chen might be your guy.
May 14, 2012
*copy & paste thoughts from reading blog*
i really like the physical texture of this book. i like the second page of the book which says ‘first edition april 2009, 75 numbered copies.’ i like things that have a limited existence, my copy is number 67. i like that the font this book was printed/typed in is named. courier new is a typewriter-ish font i guess. there is some information re where some pieces were originally published online which made me wonder at first how cohesive the book would seem when considered in its entirety instead of the individual pieces
i feel unsure what the word meta means, my first thought is ‘self-referential’ but that hardly clarifies my understanding of the term—wiki defines it as ‘the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and self-reflection.’
i’m not sure if what i am describing is metafiction but the first piece seems to consciously title itself as ‘the typographer’, ie. the person working behind the medium ie. the person writing this book, which makes me wonder if these stories are personal experiences/thought chains transformed into a third-person narrative. ‘blurring’ the lines between fiction and reality. but of course i don’t/wouldn’t know how much the author pours himself into his stories. suggesting that what matters perhaps is what the reader makes out of the story since when reading this ‘i’ am the one holding the typewriter. especially the last story titled ‘re: loading this typewriter’ seems like a guideline to usage
‘what does he mean by the word ‘typewriter” is what i probably would like to ask him
the book title itself refers to a specific/traditional medium of writing (though i don’t think the book itself was written via a typewriter) & yet the stories reject ‘traditional’ themes and locates itself firmly in the facets of ‘modernity’. the works constantly reference the use of the internet, youtube, facebook
but also themes such as isolation & alienation still remain (although now/in ‘current society’, these emotions emerge as a result of technology-based/computer-mediated communication) which i guess shows that even though the context of relationships have updated, and we now communicate at a faster speed/scope, these do not alleviate the fundamental (negative) emotions one may experiences when interacting with another
i like how many internet-related actions are described, i felt like i related to it, and thought about these things aren’t written about often, or how people seem to consciously divide ‘real life’ and ‘internet life’ when it seems to me that there is a clear interrelation. jimmy chen weaves technology-based-communications into his stories without making them seem tripe. felt like i understood the unspoken code of conduct re the way one is supposed to behave or respond on the internet
for eg.
‘if the two medium-rhetorical messages, the second, by nature, was more rhetorical than the first. the first message was ‘wassup 2nite’ followed, precisely 32 minutes later, by ‘we hangin out or wat?’ while both were posited questions, brandon only employed the question mark for the latter, because a question mark followed by an obvious question was needy. a question without a question mark, while grammatically suspect, conveyed nonchalance commonly interpreted as confidence’
read this and thought ‘yessssssss’
i guess because what is done on the computer often feels private (staring at the computer screen, refreshing pages for information etc) and i get self-conscious when someone watches me surf the net. feel like i can’t ‘do’ the normal things i do
i like reading ‘a second person’ which is a second-person account of the experience of watching a youtube video. i liked this especially ‘leaving emotionally vulnerable comments on each one for strangers to read, rejoicing in the same obscurity he resents, hoping that these strangers—if given the chance of real life—would be his friends’
i really like the physical texture of this book. i like the second page of the book which says ‘first edition april 2009, 75 numbered copies.’ i like things that have a limited existence, my copy is number 67. i like that the font this book was printed/typed in is named. courier new is a typewriter-ish font i guess. there is some information re where some pieces were originally published online which made me wonder at first how cohesive the book would seem when considered in its entirety instead of the individual pieces
i feel unsure what the word meta means, my first thought is ‘self-referential’ but that hardly clarifies my understanding of the term—wiki defines it as ‘the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and self-reflection.’
i’m not sure if what i am describing is metafiction but the first piece seems to consciously title itself as ‘the typographer’, ie. the person working behind the medium ie. the person writing this book, which makes me wonder if these stories are personal experiences/thought chains transformed into a third-person narrative. ‘blurring’ the lines between fiction and reality. but of course i don’t/wouldn’t know how much the author pours himself into his stories. suggesting that what matters perhaps is what the reader makes out of the story since when reading this ‘i’ am the one holding the typewriter. especially the last story titled ‘re: loading this typewriter’ seems like a guideline to usage
‘what does he mean by the word ‘typewriter” is what i probably would like to ask him
the book title itself refers to a specific/traditional medium of writing (though i don’t think the book itself was written via a typewriter) & yet the stories reject ‘traditional’ themes and locates itself firmly in the facets of ‘modernity’. the works constantly reference the use of the internet, youtube, facebook
but also themes such as isolation & alienation still remain (although now/in ‘current society’, these emotions emerge as a result of technology-based/computer-mediated communication) which i guess shows that even though the context of relationships have updated, and we now communicate at a faster speed/scope, these do not alleviate the fundamental (negative) emotions one may experiences when interacting with another
i like how many internet-related actions are described, i felt like i related to it, and thought about these things aren’t written about often, or how people seem to consciously divide ‘real life’ and ‘internet life’ when it seems to me that there is a clear interrelation. jimmy chen weaves technology-based-communications into his stories without making them seem tripe. felt like i understood the unspoken code of conduct re the way one is supposed to behave or respond on the internet
for eg.
‘if the two medium-rhetorical messages, the second, by nature, was more rhetorical than the first. the first message was ‘wassup 2nite’ followed, precisely 32 minutes later, by ‘we hangin out or wat?’ while both were posited questions, brandon only employed the question mark for the latter, because a question mark followed by an obvious question was needy. a question without a question mark, while grammatically suspect, conveyed nonchalance commonly interpreted as confidence’
read this and thought ‘yessssssss’
i guess because what is done on the computer often feels private (staring at the computer screen, refreshing pages for information etc) and i get self-conscious when someone watches me surf the net. feel like i can’t ‘do’ the normal things i do
i like reading ‘a second person’ which is a second-person account of the experience of watching a youtube video. i liked this especially ‘leaving emotionally vulnerable comments on each one for strangers to read, rejoicing in the same obscurity he resents, hoping that these strangers—if given the chance of real life—would be his friends’
Read
June 21, 2009I'm a big fan of Jimmy Chen, and I've read many of the stories he's published online, including some of the stories in "Typewriter." So I had high hopes for the chapbook. Maybe too high. I guess I was expecting "Jimmy Chen's Greatest Hits with Never Before-Seen Soon-to-be-Greatest Hits" or something and while there are some good stories in it, I didn't feel like they all got over the very high bar he has set with a lot of his other work. Okay, enough of that. The chapbook cost $6 and was still worth every penny. Buy it.
May 7, 2009
Morsels of goodness tightly packed to bursting with inventiveness and fun and wit and originality and all kinds of heart / belly filling happiness that is missing from your daily mind.
I discuss women, google and soup with the author: http://www.writers-bloc.net/2009/05/0...
I discuss women, google and soup with the author: http://www.writers-bloc.net/2009/05/0...
October 11, 2010
An essential mini-text of lite Gen Web 2.0 lit? At best, a little like Kafka's Contemplation. Always sort of 'sad' and 'lonely' -- even from the POV of a sans serif font. Never really revels in connection. A good, very quick, recommended, "right now" period piece–type read.
March 5, 2010
Clever
Hello, I'm literature for the twenty-first century
Favorites: Adding Friends, Helvetica, Tomorrow's Tiring
I feel like today's topics, mainly the internet and stuff like that, need straight forward images to capture those moments. Jimmy Chen gets that.
Hello, I'm literature for the twenty-first century
Favorites: Adding Friends, Helvetica, Tomorrow's Tiring
I feel like today's topics, mainly the internet and stuff like that, need straight forward images to capture those moments. Jimmy Chen gets that.
April 16, 2009
an uncompromising voice in canadian fiction
June 6, 2010
Touch the words with your soul.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews