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.”
“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
“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
“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
“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
In his book The Dialogic Imagination, M. M. Bakhtin observes that “the poetic symbol presupposes the unity of a voice with which it is identical, and presupposes that such a voice is completely alone within its own discourse.” For Bakhtin, one of the distinguishing features of poetic language is the use of the image to convey content that is narrative, emotional, or philosophical in nature. Even more importantly, the poetic image, in Bakhtin’s estimation, arises out of the sonic and stylistic terrain the poet has created, responding to, and directly informing, the behavior of the language itself. Two recent hybrid texts explore, and fully exploit, the possibilities that poetic language holds for innovative prose writing. Chris Campanioni’s the Internet is for real and Elizabeth Powell’s Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues invoke recurring imagistic motifs as structural devices, the end result being a narrative arc that is not easily charted by familiar literary conventions. With that in mind, the image, for both of these gifted prose writers, lends a sense of order to, and circumscribes the boundaries of, the imaginative terrain that these vibrant, complex characters traverse. Though vastly different in style and aesthetic approach, these innovative practitioners share an investment in expanding what is possible within the artistic repertoire of fiction, carving a space for lyricism, ambiguity, and experimentation within the familiar act of storytelling. This destabilizing impulse is most visible in these writers use of metaphor. As each book unfolds, metaphor is no longer mere adornment, a rhetorical flourish at the end of a lovely stanza. Instead, vehicle and tenor become organizing principles, offering a source of unity, and productive tension, within each novel’s carefully considered meditation on the nature of representation. As Powell herself writes, “…until we can see clearly the way of the flower to the sun, we shall dwell in the photograph of the free world, forever and ever. Amen.” ... Like Powell’s novel, Chris Campanioni’s hybrid text, the Internet is for real, takes as its primary consideration the necessary tension between reality and representation. For Campanioni, this friction is amplified by technology, social media networks, and the their undeniable presence within interpersonal relationships. The work’s central metaphor, then, becomes the photographic image as signifier, rendering the physical body an “immaterial daydream” and a deceptive chimera. As Campanioni himself asks in one of the book’s more essayistic sections, “The camera is us. We have become so fully integrated into the machine as to become its greatest development: a living snapshot.” If the boundary between reality and representation has been dismantled by the rise of readily accessible social networking, what does this mean for art? In Campanioni’s estimation, the parameters of art are then expanded, as the most quotidian tasks become, at turns, performance and narrative, our being in the world a “visible plastic symbol,” an adornment, and a satiric impulse. Campanioni writes, for example, in one of the book’s many discrete prose episodes: You make your way through a rave-like jungle as each crystal bulb pulses and changes color, swaying as though you are the jungle: a body forgotten or fused with an ecosystem or system of hardware. The self that has left its own skin. The word “system” here is telling, as Campanioni reminds us of our place in the various economies of language and representation that circulate around us. Social networks, then, become a kind of auction block, the subject’s performance a commodity, its artifice intended to secure a place within this larger system of valuation. By describing the self as “a rave-like jungle,” he posits the individual as a nexus for transpositions, transactions, and transformations when considering these larger systems of labor and value. However, Campanioni’s work is most provocative in its considerations of deception in these technologized environments, in which the photographic image becomes a way of reclaiming power and agency within a broken cultural mechanism. As Campanioni himself asks, “Send this message without a body or a subject?”
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If the act of representation is the most self-conscious of metaphors, then poetic language is a dramatization of the distance between the vehicle and its tenor. After all, there is no metaphor without some degree of separation, that bright aperture between language and its point of reference. Powell and Campanioni show us that in this gap, this fissure, transformation becomes possible. The ascent into the realm of the symbolic, that diction which generates possibility after possibility, becomes, for Powell and Campanioni, a way of destabilizing the familiar architecture of story. As Campanioni tells us, “Storyteller and stagehand; lyrical and expository, theoretical and autobiographical. I want to always be both.” - Kristina Marie Darling brooklynrail.org/2019/03/books/Beyond-Metaphor-On-Prose-by-Chris-Campanioni-Elizabeth-Powell
Chris Campanioni, Drift, King Shot Press, 2018. A couple arrive at a Mexican resort town as grisly murders escalate, crowds converge in Manhattan for an End of the World party, a journalist’s search for the real story leads him to the facts of his own disappearance. . . Chris Campanioni’s DRIFT is an apocalyptic riddle, a countdown to dead time, where what’s scripted begins to blur with what’s real and the pervasive fear of being surveilled is matched only by a desire to keep filming.
“DRIFT is a dizzying, nightmarish journey through our final days. This is one of those unique works, existing somewhere between Julio Cortázar’s 62: A Model Kit, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, and maybe Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia . . . Campanioni has written an hysterical, existential glimpse of a parallel now populated with disappearing lovers, converging singularities and technological depression.”—Chris Lambert
“I want to capture everything,” a character says in the opening pages of Chris Campanioni’s new novel Drift, echoing the very millennial compulsion to document everything, and mirroring the attitudes of the twenty-somethings that inhabit the 400-plus pages that follow. Written over the course of ten years, the book fits nicely into Campanioni’s output, sliding next to last year’s equally impressive, The Death of Art (C&R Press). Hard to categorize as ever, Campanioni has returned with more fractured narratives filled with an unlikely pack of auto-fictional models, college kids, Jersey Shore party-seekers, extroverts, and cynics, all seeking to document their existence by all means necessary. Channeling Bolaño’s 2666 formal structure, Chris Campanioni has crafted another terrific glimpse into our modern anxieties, and our compulsory need to “capture everything.”
Drift is composed of six sections, four of which are based on seasons of the year. Each section follows a variety of non-linear narratives. Mostly we follow a model named Chris Selden—presumably the auto-fictional Campanioni. The reader traces Selden through photoshoots in Palm Desert, trips to Brazil, romantic entanglements, and more. Selden, equal parts cynic and playboy—a la some character from Rules of Attraction or Glamorama era Ellis— believes that everyone born in 1985 is “doomed.” He also speaks at great length about resenting the artist’s insatiable need to observe: The fact that I can’t look at someone, at anyone, without sizing them up, without writing them into the story. Every encounter in life viewed from above; a tracking shot from the camera eye of a cruising hawk. It wears on me. Cameras constantly pace behind most of the proceedings in Drift, from photo shoots to coffee shops in NYC. Much of the narrative is described as if everything is being filmed, and the line dividing what is being recorded or not within the narrative becomes nebulous. Words like “tracking shot,” “scenes,” and “stagehand” are used in subtle ways intermittently throughout to elevate the feeling that everything is being captured, recorded. Like The Death of Art, Drift captures aspects of the modern millennial zeitgeist perfectly. Characters constantly alternate between deciding to document the present moment or just experience it. Campanioni’s characters often crave the actual experience but oftentimes they find themselves living in a purely fabricated representation of experience. The world as simulacrum occupies big ideological spaces within Campanioni’s work. In a passage titled “This Must Be The Place” (one of the many Talking Heads references), the narrator reflects on the fallibility of memory: Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of eyes, hair, a name or a face. It is not a record, it is an interpretation. A representation of the actual experience. A fake. Or take for example Selden’s experience as a model in Palm Desert. When time is running short and the crew are unable to shoot in neighboring Idyllwild in the mountains above the desert, the crew recreate the backdrop of Idyllwild on the computer. Idyllwild was the greatest thing I’d never seen…tall pines, sweet-smelling cedars, legendary rocks…eventually they’ll stick my body somewhere among those pines… Here the world of simulation has become more ideal, more desirable than the actual world, than actual experience. The main conflict to be found within Drift is the tug and pull between real experience and manufactured, surveilled experience. The allusions to 80’s new wave and indie music abound through the pages of Drift. Chapters titled “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “Girls on Film” broadly work to highlight some of the themes within the text, but also seem to be calls to Campanioni’s musical literacy, if anything else. Twenty-somethings hop into cars where the stereo plays Talking Heads, and casual conversations are had in coffee shops about the legitimacy of genre names like “dream-pop” and “chill-wave.” In Drift, things are begging to be defined and made tangible, but in a world that feels like a production set, real meaning and the correlated experience are always out of reach. Sections titled “Atrocity Exhibition” (I-V)—borrowed from the Joy Division song of the same name—fracture the narrative even further, providing little vignettes that confound, further exploding any semblance of narrative. This almost apocalyptic stylistic approach works in tandem with the apocalyptic tonal nature of the book. Not only are there end of the world parties—including heightened anxieties around the end of the Mayan calendar (2012)—but the book as a whole feels prophetic of a certain “end times” mentality. Much like in his previous novel Death of Art, Campanioni wrestles with his public image and how it is represented online. In one section, we are privy to a long transcript of messages Campanioni—or his auto-fictional self Chris Selden—has received from admirers across social media. Inquiries range from requests to befriend Selden, to questions about his diet and exercise routine, while other inquiries prove to be more probing and vaguely problematic. This section works well to display perhaps the ramifications of a public life like Selden’s that is readily available for consumption, for commodification. Like most of Campanioni’s work, his new novel works best when it’s ideas are constantly in motion from one page to the next. Drift could not be a more apt title for a book whose ideas drift from page to page, appearing like a revelation and then vanishing just as quickly. Shifting from autofiction, to memoir, to metafiction, and realism, sometimes all within the course of a few pages, Drift is a book that begs us to put it back together, to frame our own narratives, and to follow its often transcendent insights in our own lives. - Michael Browne http://angelcityreview.com/drift/
Have you ever stopped to analyze the flow of thoughts inside your head while commuting or running errands? The mind is an unruly place in which we live other, different lives than the one we're actually living. The one we should care about. I do this exercise often because freaking myself out is a low-key passion of mine and I've thought of it while reading Chris Campanioni's novel Drift. I'm not even sure it qualifies as a novel, but I'll use the term for lack of a better one. But man, it was quite a head trip and I've enjoyed it despite not understanding everything. When I say Drift barely qualifies as a novel, it's because it's a series of interrelated stories. They're all based around a recurring character named Chris Selden who, from what I gathered, is a metafictional stand-in for Chris Campanioni himself. Selden is a committed actor, model and well... duh, writer, who everyone loves for reasons that sometimes have to do with who he really is and sometimes have to do with the person he pretends to be for a living. And when you're committed to your craft the way Selden is, it sometimes becomes complicated to differentiate reality from film, fabricated news stories, warped perception people have of you and the fiction emerging out of all this. Of course, Drift is a novel that questions the nature of reality. It asks the question: what is reality when your life is devoted to creating different forms of fiction? Do you have such a thing as reality or is your reality the sum of your fictions? That's a lot of mental juggling, I know. But, I've enjoyed Drift because I believe this question applies to more or less everyone. And this question is exactly why I believe fiction is important: it can inform and shape your reality if you let it. Drift makes its case for it in a warped and dramatized way because it aims to entertain first an foremost, but it's not any less pertinent. Drift doesn't resemble anything I've read before, but if I had to give you a comparison to writers you may know, think Jorge Luis Borges or Julio Cortazar. Maybe throw a little bit of J.G Ballard's apocalyptic imaginary in there. It won't be everybody's cup of tea. Novels like Drift don't straightforwardly deliver themselves and require active participation. It's not every reader that will accept having to make efforts to connect the dots. But while Chris Campanioni, like Borges and Cortazar, likes to play with form and perception, doesn't jeopardizes the story he's telling. He's a performer. He knows when and how to reward his audience. So, I'm proud of myself here. I managed to explain to you why I enjoyed Drift and say almost nothing about Chris Selden's quest, which is another layer to this novel I'll leave you to unfold. This book doesn't have mass appeal at all, but it has a magnetic power that will draw people to it. Drift isn't a book you can read casually, at the beach or the airport. It chooses you. Its fleeting, shifting sense of reality and metafictional will confuse and alienate many readers. But it will also captivate those meant to read the book. I can't tell you whether to read Drift or not. It's a conclusion you need to draw from yourself after reading this review. But know that it's far removed from conventional storytelling. - Benoit Lelievre http://www.deadendfollies.com/blog/book-review-chris-campanioni-drift
In one of the first stories of Chris Campanioni’s Drift, there is a photographer named Jared Garrett who repeats over and over again his desire to capture everything, going so far as to wonder – beneath a purple sky, listening to coyotes howl in the distance – if he could capture the silence within a moment. This character’s fervent aspirations reflect what the author seems to be attempting throughout the rest of the book: to capture the things we cannot see, to describe what we have no words for. Campanioni digs deep, weaving together the mundane and familiar as well as the bizarre and glamorous in ardent pursuit of the right words that could express feelings within moments where most people simply say, “You had to be there,” or, “you have to experience it to know.” Here is how a character describes blacking out:
I often have these fainting spells. In bars, hotel lobbies, concert halls. In the passenger seat of a cruising taxi, doing fifty, maybe sixty, hands and head out the half-held sliding translucence. Flickering black spots weave in and out of focus like cue marks in an old film. Imperfections of reality. My soul contracts until my body crumples to the floor. . . Either I suck in life too fast, or too much, or too often. Or life sucks me dry. A hiccup in the vacuum of eternity. I am choking.
Drift weighs in at just under five hundred pages and carries the weight of a lifelong journey, although somehow managing to not feel bloated. I read this one in the same amount of time I take to consume most novellas, and I’m sure it’s due to the hypnotic (and, at times, chaotic) nature of the prose. Chris Campanioni uses every tool in his arsenal to just say what he needs to say, not shying away from parentheses or shifts in point-of-view or even footnotes. And, somehow – I don’t know how the fuck he pulls this one off – it doesn’t come across as rambling. All of it makes sense, even the sudden bursts of poetry that pause the story in the middle of a sentence.
A fog so thick it sinks you. The dirt and the wind and the current from the river just in the distance, lapping like an echo in your ears, damp and red from the sweat and the cold. . . The sound of your own footsteps, each breath and each step so in sync as to forget which is which, the body and what’s leaving it.
It’s largely due to this attack of experimental yet digestible use of language that I’m not positive what to consider Drift. Is it a novel that spans multiple relationships across multiple dimensions? Is it a collection of stories carrying a similar tone? I don’t know. I grew up next to the Gulf of Mexico, and my family would go to the beach often. My siblings and I – against the wishes of our parents – would swim out from sandbar to sandbar, trying to get as far as we could before being yelled at to swim back in. We were stung by jellyfish, wary of sharks, and sometimes shoved under by waves we didn’t see coming. There was an excitement as well as a serenity to drifting out into the ocean, though – a sort of poetry in escaping our natural habitat on the shore. This book conjures that same excitement and serenity, as well as that same tension that there may be sharks swimming just below your feet. Novel, short story collection . . . doesn’t matter what you call it, this book will one day be considered a classic. - Kelby Losack http://vol1brooklyn.com/2018/04/17/capturing-the-silence-a-review-of-chris-campanionis-drift/ Chris Campanioni,Going Down, Aignos Publishing Incorporated, 2013.
Named Best First Book for the International Latino Book Awards, one of the best novels of the year by the Latina Book Club, and a "must-read book" by the New York Post.
Chris Selden is drifting after college graduation until he finds himself developing a career in fashion and media. During the day, he becomes a commodity, a body that is traded and sold, merchandised and marketed, while at night, he is a journalist for the Star-Ledger. Soon he is living two lives, both of which are based on their own set of fabrications. But Selden discovers that he is also drifting downward, falling into a state in which he barely recognizes himself, becoming further enveloped in a culture where even reality is a copy of a copy.
"A writer, teacher, actor and model, in his debut novel, Campanioni draws from his experiences to bring readers along for a ride ... a must-read book." - New York Post "Campanioni's life experiences give him a unique perspective. Rather than writing about fashion or journalism as an outsider looking in, he draws from a rich array of personal stories. The inquisitiveness and attention to detail he needed as a reporter has fueled Campanioni's fiction writing."- Manhattan Times
"If Gatsby is considered the last great 'New York Novel' ... then Going Down by Chris Campanioni is like Muhammad Ali in the Fight of the Century. The writing style is like a child of Martin Amis and Reinaldo Arenas, full of linguistic poise and observational quips." -The Banner
You always want to act like you’re in control. Even if you’re only pretending.– Mark Van Etty Engaging. Captivating. Exciting. New writers are always told, “write what you know.”No one can dispute that Chris Campanioni knows a thing or two about being a model and so we are not surprised that his first novel would be set in the glamorous world of fashion or that our protagonist would be a mini-Chris. What we are surprised at is at the novel’s dark tone.Our hero is a tragic figure -- restless, bored, lost.His backup plan falls through, and it is not until tragedy strikes at the heart of him, that he finds the courage to step back from the fame, the money and start anew. Campanioni writes with a frank, open, engaging style, with great narratives, vivid descriptions, lots of action, and numerous flamboyant characters.The author does gloss over the drug and sexual abuse rampant in the industry, and we must admit the endless flashbacks are distracting.But despite all that, readers will still be captivated by his insights into the world of fashion and the life of a male model -- an extravagant world everyone dreams of but few ever enter. BOOK SUMMARY:Chris Selden is a pampered, privileged college grad from Bergen County, New Jersey.He is a “poster boy” for the new breed of Young Productive Americas but with no prospects of a job of any kind.In fact, he’s what could be termed an educated bum, living at home with his parents with big dreams of becoming a journalist.And though, he does get a job as a writer at the local newspaper, it is modeling that pays the bills. A writer by day, a model-party boytoy by night, Chris pursues both his passion for literature and his modeling career.Within months, his face is plastered all over billboards and magazines.Modeling leads him to acting and he is soon the newest, but nameless, bartender in Pine Valley (OLTL soap). His Cuban mother Ana is super proud; while his white father wants him to find a “real” job. Chris is soon meeting the right people, going to the right parties, getting the call backs, enjoying the fame and fortune coming his way, while his real love of writing at the newspaper proves unfulfilling.He soon learns that journalism is not literature, and when the office finds out about his modeling, he becomes a joke. Our hero becomes a tragic figure – bored, morose, jaded.Like in his favorite novel, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY by Oscar Wilde, Chris is pursuing a life of beauty and fulfillment of the senses but the wild life of debauchery has an adverse effect on him.He may be smiling for the cameras but inside he is depressed, unhappy.The earlier, naïve Chris had always planned to have a backup plan if he ever found himself stuck somewhere and wasting his time.Here he was wasting his life away, and though he kept hoping his writing would save him, it doesn’t.In fact, being a journalist is boring and Chris soon quits New Jersey and his day job to devote himself to modeling in New York. Our hero soon becomes lost in the shallow, cut-throat world of fashion; Living in a luxury penthouse with other models and wannabes like himself; Partying the night away hoping to be seen; sleeping with an endless parade of women. Chris both enjoys and abhors his existence, but when a budding film producer offers to make a documentary of his life, Chris is all for it.The documentary is a hit and makes it to the Cannes Film Festival.Now his fame is international.And it is not until his loving mother develops dementia, that Chris realizes the emptiness of his life. With his mother’s death, Chris finally admits and acknowledges that he was “going down;” sinking into despair.He runs off to Brazil to find some peace and do another modeling gig, another soap role.He finally admits to himself that he is lost in a dream he never wanted, and this time finally, truly breaks away and returns to writing; hoping to finally find peace and redemption in literature. - Maria Ferrer http://www.latinabookclub.com/2013/12/review-going-down-by-chris-campanioni.html
Chris Campanioni’s ambitious debut novel, Going Down, tells the story of model and journalist, Chris Selden. Unsure of what to do post-college, Selden finds himself tempted into a world of popularity and commodification as a fashion model. He is ultimately consumed by his own spectacle. The book opens with less of a scene and more of a barrage of images–flashing lights, demands for “languor” and “desperation,” a flurry of production assistants who seem to suffocate the protagonist. It is difficult to find one’s bearings in this world. Flashbacks come early and often; perhaps this is meant to represent Selden’s fragmented voice as he musters through his identity crisis since it has the chaos of stream-of-consciousness without using first-person. For much of the book, Selden works as a model by day, a journalist for The Star Ledger by night, and in the hours in between, the perpetual partying “it-boy.” He approaches both potential careers with a sense of irony and heavy skepticism, but he ultimately gives up his position as a reporter. Selden is psychologically thin, morose, and somehow amidst all this fevered activity, bored. With existential angst and cynicism in line with Holden Caulfield and Quentin Compson, Selden seems to both condemn and adopt the principles of this nasty, image-obsessed world; however, this book is not the traditional bildungsroman it is touted to be since the protagonist fails to reach much moral or psychological growth despite a severe personal loss and international travel. If one continues to participate in a lifestyle one abhors, how much growth can occur? The reader is held at arm’s length from the protagonist at all times and so, we wind up with an unreliable narrator who professes to want to write more than anything, but his actions throughout the book say otherwise; he’s as much in love with the image of the writer as he is in love with his own image. However, if the reader pays attention, he/she can also see Selden’s vulnerability and self-doubt about his own creative abilities: “In college, he had written a few things that had excited a few people, but he lacked the confessionary air of honesty necessary for a writer of any import, and it was this inability to get to the heart of anything that reduced his fiction to a reprinted still life of water lilies; a pretty picture, sure, but nothing as transposing as the real thing. He stopped short in the excavation because he was afraid of what he might find” (8). Some time later, in one of many confusing italicized sections, the narrator claims Selden has “fashioned himself an existential hero in this way; tortured by time and circumstance, alone against this onslaught of immovable forces we call fate…But rather than feeling sorry for himself, he thrived on it; this secret knowledge of self-awareness, a distinction of separation which bordered on superiority. In short, he was totally delusional.” Is this Selden narrating from a great distance? Where does one land when even the narrator and protagonist profess knowledge of the world’s construction, its artifice? I don’t know, but maybe that’s the whole point. Midway through the book, Selden is living in a luxury apartment owned by a wealthy family and occupied by their spoiled daughter and the transitory coterie of people she finds interesting. It’s an endless, mind-numbing party of self-worship. Everyone sleeps around, but even sex doesn’t hold anyone’s attention. This world is reminiscent of Andy Warhol and his Factory exploits; as I read, I kept thinking of Warhol’s famous quote, “I am a deeply superficial person.” Selden continues to love and despise himself. Of course it seemed inevitable to him that his friend Dave made a documentary about him. What else could these characters who are not friends, and are, at best, shell characters (mere projections of Selden’s own eyes), do but point their gaze at him, and share it with the masses? It’s gaze upon gaze upon gaze–a dizzying Russian doll construction. Selden never decides “whether it was better to be the art, or the artist” (127). As much as I admire Campanioni’s ambition and, at times, playful structure and form, it is not as successful as say Jennifer Egan’s similar approach in A Visit From the Goon Squad. Campanioni isn’t dealing with an expanse of time like Egan; as a result, rather than enhancing the story, the structure becomes distracting. Campanioni is influenced by the Situationist International movement, in which avant-garde artists and author/theorist Guy Debord claim, “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” Since Debord committed suicide in the 80s, I wonder how he would interpret social media and contemporary society. Campanioni raises salient questions with his Debord-influenced, chaos-driven prose style especially when taken in context with Debord’s claim in his “Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle,” that all life becomes “repressive pseudo-enjoyment.” Pseudo-enjoyment seems to be Chris Selden’s underlying thesis on modern life; as a result, things get dark, but part of me wishes Campanioni had kept going, pushed further, and shown us what happens to Selden when he loses everything, when this world obsessed with perpetual youth, constructed beauty, and excess finally turns on him. He knows he’s addicted to this life, but he has yet to hit bottom. All that said, Going Down has many lovely and tender moments, most of which occur with his family, and in particular between Selden and his Cuban mother, Ana. In one of the most poignant scenes of the novel, Selden wonders if he should tell his mother the truth about his dissatisfaction with living life as his own doppelgänger: “If he told her everything, she would be overwhelmed and disconnected, a story without any context…And then there was the matter of removing the blanket, crushing the façade and shattering her world. Chris knew how painful that could be. It reminded him of the first time they all had huddled into the Volvo station wagon, making their way south to visit his abuela in Miami. A jovial family trip had turned devastating for him in Jacksonville when the realization hit Chris: he would not meet a smiling Mexican with whiskers and a poncho, welcoming them “South of the Border” at he end of their journey. That he would, in fact, not meet anyone named Pedro during any portion of the trip. He had never really stopped looking” (128). It’s no secret that Campanioni himself is similar to his protagonist; he is a model, an actor, a journalist, and creative writer. I look forward to reading his future work when he pushes to fully excavate, as I’m most interested in what he might find. - Beth Gilstraphttp://www.fjordsreview.com/reviews/going-down.html
Brooklyn is chock-full of unique and talented writers, but Chris Campanioni stands out. He began his career as a journalist, which is not particularly unusual, but he also works as a model by day and teaches fiction writing and literature in the evening as a professor at the City University of New York. The Brooklyn Heights author, who recently released his debut novel “Going Down,” will appear in Brooklyn Heights to discuss his book this Sunday, Nov. 3, at Red Gravy. A former journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle and the Newark Star-Ledger, Campanioni started writing his novel over six years ago when he began working simultaneously as a model and a copy editor. “In 2007, I was mainly exploring the issue of ‘growing up,’ especially in today’s society in which the sociological parameters of adulthood have become increasingly outdated,” said Campanioni. As he delved deeper into his writing, however, Campanioni realized the stakes were rising. “The novel became more than just a coming-of-age story and an exploration of my generation,” he said. “Going Down” focuses on the fashion industry from the lens of a Cuban-American journalist and male model. Struggling to manage such separate careers, the protagonist soon realizes he is living two lives, and as each becomes increasingly complex, he feels he is losing sight of himself. While Campanioni’s book explores the distinct experiences of being in the newsroom and on the runway, it also gives voice to a Latino model – a traditionally underrepresented figure. Though Campanioni is often traveling for work, he feels fortunate to call Brooklyn home. In fact, Chris Selden, the protagonist in Campanioni’s novel, jokes at one point in the story that sooner or later, everyone moves to Brooklyn. That rings true for the author himself; in a recent interview Campanioni told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “My mother actually lived in Greenpoint when she came to the United States from Poland, so I was always familiar with that area, but I became acquainted with Brooklyn Heights when I began dating my girlfriend, who has lived on Hicks and Joralemon since she was a child.” As a writer and model, aesthetics are particularly important to Campanioni. “Brooklyn Heights is one of the most picturesque places I’ve ever lived in—so I feel especially fortunate that through all of my work-related travels, I’ve stopped here for the last three years,” he told the Eagle.“Because I do much of my writing while I’m on the run, and more specifically, running, the location is especially great because of all the fantastic trails bending from Red Hook through the Promenade and into DUMBO.” Campanioni also values the distinct literary culture that permeates Brooklyn. “I love the energy and passion, and also, the committed audience following; you don’t see weekly readings on this level in other cities,” he said. “With so many established and emerging authors and artists situated in this area, there’s no better place to be as a writer and a reader.” - Samantha Samel brooklyneagle.com/articles/2013/10/30/heights-writer-model-celebrates-debut-novel-at-red-gravy/
Chris Campanioni, Death of Art, CR Press, 2016. Death of Art dissects post-capitalist, post-Internet, post-death culture; our ability and affinity to be both disembodied and tethered to technology, allowing us to be in several places at once and nowhere at all.
“The future is trash. Recycling it, re-arranging it. Making it beautiful again.” “Lately I had been thinking about writing a memoir because everything else I’ve ever written is a memoir while pretending to be something else and I figured it was time I did something else, which was a memoir. So much of my life is predicated on pretending or performance. Language had become another performance for me. One in which I could show off and show myself. At the same time.” Chris Campanioni starts by cutting out his face in every fashion editorial he’s ever been in. The confession begins. Unless it’s another performance, moving from the Lower East Side in 2015 to the Cannes film festival in 2011, Beverly Hills 90210 and the Day-Glo gaze of the Late Eighties and Early Nineties. The quality of a photograph is called into question in a culture that is oversaturated with them. The desire for image to be replaced by a different, more symbolic charge of the written text and physical utterance is a call to restore faith in art’s sustainability. Death meets birth for its eventual renewal. In re-evaluating the genre, Campanioni also re-evaluates our cultural capital, as well as our current modes of interaction and intimacy, exploring narcissism through the lens of self-effacement, pop culture, the cult of celebrity, and the value or function of art and (lost and) found art objects.
“Campanioni’s writing has a really hypnotic rhythm. Something very Donald Antrim to this, except Donald Antrim isn’t in his twenties writing for the next generation of readers.” –The Wrong Quarterly
“Campanioni offers us references and reflections on city life, highlighting the tension between being in an environment filled with anonymous potential and the highwire act of maintaining intimacy in a world where every thought can be recorded and published for everyone to see in an instant.” –Prelude
“Campanioni’s use of question and insight and the overall humanity of this work is beautiful and impressive.” – Saw Palm
“Campanioni’s style is awesome. It’s like Bolaño meets DeLillo meets Borges, which is everything I ever want out of a reading experience.” – Red Fez
“Campanioni’s poetry is poignant and honest, possessing a sincere (if skeptical) romanticism that is necessary yet rare in the 21st Century. These poems stand the test of time.” –LIGHT/WATER
“A strong but delicate linguistic tour de force.”–Bellingham Review
Writer Chris Campanioni gives a crucial glimpse into our modern narcissism with his new book of memoir / non-fiction / hybrid text / does it really matter, Death of Art. Despite the ostentatious title, Campanioni tactfully avoids repeating oft-argued cliches regarding art’s apparent demise, and instead uses the title as an entry point for talking about identity, language, social media, and modern life as a kind of performance. The book begins with Campanioni sitting around with a stranger cutting his face out of magazines in which he modeled. The book follows this act of self-immolation throughout, as Campanioni struggles with trying to refashion his own image and his own identity, in a world where these things are valued above all else. Campanioni is frank and open about his stints as a model and actor, and his struggles with the performative aspects of both. The text almost becomes a space where Campanioni can explore himself; a liminal space where he can avoid binaries and social norms and—in a way—deconstruct himself: I had lately been thinking of a project titled Death of Art, which itself came from the blacked out title of a poem I’d just written called ‘Death of the Artist…’ Cutting out my face could be the beautiful overture. Formally, Death of Art moves from vignette style passages of memoir, to essays and poetry. Campanioni’s tone alternates from playful, to philosophical, to the banal and the confessional, and all at a blistering pace. His subjects range from 90210 and Tinder dates, to social media narcissism and celebrity culture. An obsession with 90210 and a brief reference to Care Bears in particular become interesting pivot points for Campanioni to make comparisons between the empathy of our former analog world, and the disconnectedness of our modern digital world. Death of Art brilliantly taps into our insatiable need to be seen and felt via social media, and how life is not experienced in our modern age, but rather, documented. The Facebook photo as preferred cultural currency to the actual image and experience represented. The same way that our generation will look back on our lives in sixty years and there will be plenty to see. Probably we only wish we would have lived it too. In the section titled “Self-Interested Glimpses,” Campanioni adopts an essay style (as he frequently does) and argues that “Authentic experience has been replaced by fetishized experience; existence becomes object.” In Campanioni’s world, the Instagram photo of a sunset now reigns supreme over the actual sunset. This is not a wildly new concept, as many postmodern thinkers have believed that society and modern culture have started to place more importance on “simulacra” or the simulation of reality, rather than the object itself. For Campanioni public spaces have become zones of anti-social behavior. He argues that the increased access to each other that social media provides us has “led us to become less tolerant, less sympathetic, and less understanding.” This is exemplified in the book via the nearly tweet sized entries describing a series of Tinder dates where he struggles to make eye-contact and prefers to meet in coffee shops, hotel bars, or “anywhere public enough to pass through, in transit, like anyone else. Just passing through.” The Tinder passage in particular reads like a detritus of ineffectual millennial dating experiences that only work to solidify Campanioni’s belief that our ability to connect is stunted, not enhanced, by applications like Tinder. Much of the book is devoted to Campanioni’s self-reflection and almost reads like some playful postmodern diary. The author is constantly engaged in a dissection of his own image, striving and hoping to dismantle it. “The Internet has its own idea of me, and so do its worshippers. I want to create my own idea of me. Maybe the Internet will follow.” Campanioni’s concept of life being fetishized but not experienced, is nicely juxtaposed with passages that reflect his childhood: We lived our days as if they were scenes in a musical; we danced & continued to sing. Sometimes in Spanish or English but also often in a language made up by my father, a practice I’d adopt too, & which became my true joy in life: the pleasure of words & the sounds they contained. Whether it meant anything was besides the point; it meant everything. Here childhood is reflected upon nostalgically and without the author’s jaundiced view of our current culture’s unchecked narcissism. It’s also indicative of Campanioni as a great linguaphile, and the simple pleasure he derives from the physical sensation of the words exiting his mouth. This runs counter to the mechanized way we communicate now: Face-to-face meetings have given way to my face on your touch screen… Death of Art is a punchy hybrid text that holds its own intellectual weight and does well to not veer off into pretension nor cliche, which is no minor triumph considering it’s broad and aspirational title. Campanioni is a serious writer and a world class thinker, and there is something great to be gleaned from his latest offering that seems to revel in its ability to avoid classification and open up a dialectic about the modern ways in which we communicate. - Michael Browne http://angelcityreview.com/death-of-art/
When Robert Rauschenberg abraded the surface of a de Kooning drawing in 1953, he did more than create a new art form. He demonstrated that art’s greatest affirmation could reside in the negation of surface. Poet, memoirist, and essayist Chris Campanioni adapts the dialectic for the age of the smartphone. For him, it’s not about the A/B binary of original object and subverted result; Campanioni brings Situationism to the party, generating texts with performative constraints that are often obscured as the writer erases his path to the final product. Death of Art is Campanioni’s fourth book in less than three years. Published by C&R Press in October, it follows a collection of poetry and two novels that explore media, fashion, tourism, and terrorism. Death of Art offers a synthesis of the previous work, both in its performative stance and its mix of poetry, fiction, and memoirist essay. Fans of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Warhol’s Diaries will enjoy the pop culture references and wry insider sensibility it brings to fashion shoots, commercials, and other mediated rituals of intimacy. Readers of Andrew Durbin’s Mature Themes (Nightboat) and the recently augmented edition of Lynne Tillman’s Madame Realism (Semiotext(e)/Native Agents) will recognize the consumerist desire for self-transformation through objects. The book is framed by an untitled prose opening and almost thirty pages of a section entitled “Scenes Deleted After the Release.” The eleven sections between also finger the edge of the screen—sometimes in nervous gesture—others with gleeful affirmation of the fictive. “Half of life is pretending. The other half is pretending,” Campanioni writes in the front matter, both as a spoiler and a tutorial: everything to come should be regarded with a fluidity reserved for film, music, and the other kinetic arts. Campanioni resists the fixity of self; as performer, he passes from situation to situation, from one role to another. With a fondness for 90210 and Foucault, he is Frank O’Hara traveling the hyper-connected contemporary landscape via iPhone—spawning, recording, discarding speculative versions of himself. In “To Love and Die in L.A. (Cut It Out),” Campanioni hires a stranger off Craigslist to remove his face from every print ad in which he's appeared the past eight years. The stated objective is “The Death of Art,” an imagined project that gives the book its title. Its real goal is engaging the stranger in a dialogue about identity with the constructed self Campanioni has prepared for the occasion. In “Screen Play,” this back-story is erased, leaving a poetic frame that asks the reader to provide the emotional architecture Campanioni has removed:
Dear
the time of day for listening to jazz and
opening the windows to see
Don’t be a stranger!
touching, it almost made me
for only five pesos too, or if you put on your best smile and ask
Campanioni borrows from Mad Libs and text-based video games, achieving a surface that combines the mystical urbanism of Paul Blackburn with the Conceptual edge of Jackson Mac Low. In “50 First Dates (a Tinder Story),” he turns the premise of a 2004 romantic comedy into a seventeen-page story-film told in Twitter-length fragments that also delight and surprise:
Turtles, I say.
Why turtles?
Because turtles are the opposite of the Internet.
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There are no fixed subjects. Only dynamic relationships.
I try to keep reminding myself. I have it written on a post-it that’s slapped on my laptop.
Occasionally, we make eye contact.
As the book progresses, Campanioni remains in motion. He is in bars, on planes, on subways. He carries his Situationism between cities, between countries, between periods in his life without rest or regard for boundaries. Motion is the constant in this breathless book that dares the reader to keep up. The closest Campanioni gets to a resting pose are the poems that appear in each section, between the numerous prose performances that anchor the collection. The poems offer a different kind of performance. They are the book’s soliloquies, featuring Campanioni speaking directly into the camera. Such is the mood—and the emotional stakes—of “Can’t you tell”:
& on Sunday we rest & then I am Careful to make this Something I might Count later
Out loud even In private I suck The minutes dry Or try to fixing You in my gaze The poem registers as excerpted text messages that simulate the alienation of digital natives. Its appropriation is reminiscent of Krystal Languell (Gray Market, 1916 Press) and Ben Fama (Fantasy, Ugly Duckling Presse). Campanioni speaks sotto voce to give play to the idea that the words are the actual voice of the author, the one behind all the book’s nonstop antics. “Can’t you tell” succeeds—as do many of the poems—because it can be read both ways: as traditional poetic effusion, and as assemblage posing as traditional poetic effusion. Other poems, like “Overheard at a party,” play with the same duality while questioning why the authenticity of the words themselves shouldn't be sufficient:
Pressing problems Pressure problems Problems with being broke Or better than that, broken & by better I mean worse & by worse I mean haunted
You keep hanging on Or hanging around Never for a minute Asking what Really is the difference? Campanioni’s questioning pervades every performance. “So to begin” is a story that teases inquiry into the writer’s bilingual childhood. Miniaturized descriptions of character and place are interrupted by criticism of the proceedings as imagined films and stage performances. The criticism can seem forced, but its falsity frees the author to be vulnerable about the disjointed background that was the prequel to a disjointed adult life as fashion model, teacher, and writer: “We lived our days as if they were scenes in a musical; we danced & continued to sing. Sometimes in Spanish or English but most often in a language made up by my father.” Campanioni’s love of performative artifice accumulates throughout the book, giving the writing the glitchy surface of an early Ryan Trecartin video. While Campanioni’s work lacks the media artist’s love of lime-green face paint, it compensates with rapid cuts, odd camera angles, and an endless string of new selves—each holding a pair of scissors or other tool for deletion. He is at his most disruptive in “coming soon! (in three parts),” a poem whose thick, looping surface suggests a tagged-up 1980s NYC subway train:
sharks, kind people pay to see graffiti scrawled on the front of the fun
house backdrop the big drop, the hanging static bumper cars, horses held in place & sated
The disturbance often borders on instability, with the author’s rejection of stasis expressed in the book’s rejection of itself as object. Death of Art doubles as an experimental film with alternate endings, a transcription of performance pieces, the starting point of a book Campanioni expects the reader to create through erasure. “Death of Art,” the book’s titular piece, appears on the last page (before the supplemental “Deleted Scenes”)—as an in situ erasure of “Death of the Artist,” a poem from ten pages prior that is presented as a prompt for the reader to take on the role of Campanioni:
Photo: W. Lessard.
Death of Art offers an overstuffed, bravura alternative to the tight eighty pages of most contemporary collections. Campanioni is convincing as the hero whose performance brings surprise and joy back to Conceptual writing. He is even better when he fails. Failure doesn’t happen often, but when it does it gives Death of Art the warmth of shed blood. It reminds the reader that Campanioni isn’t playing at being clever; he is erasing himself to locate the sublime. As he writes of his first failure in “To Love and Die in L.A. (Cut It Out)”: “I was hoping for some revelation. Something I could use. Something that uses me.” - William Lessard https://brooklynrail.org/2017/03/books/Adventures-in-Self-Voyeurism
Chris Campanioni writes in the chapter entitled Notes Written In Margins, “I am interested in the intersection between all the public interaction we have in private & the paradoxes which exist because of this divide in logic & space.”
This one sentence perfectly summarizes Campanioni’s collection, Death of Art. I say “collection”, but what it actually is is a memoir. It is not a traditional memoir, however, as Campanioni writes about his life through poetry, experimental prose, vignettes, text messages, and some combination of all of the above. His focus is exactly that intersection between public/private interactions. In this century with reality television and social media constantly blurring the lines between what is real and what is produced, Campanioni’s writing appeals to readers today. He understands this relationship readers and viewers have with our reality television-saturated lives and his place in it as a teacher and a writer.
Throughout the text, Campanioni references popular culture from Beverly Hills, 90210 to the 1990s hit film, While You Were Sleeping, and shares his personal experiences with them through stories of his own, reminding us that we are all a part of a nesting egg of audience – participant – audience – participant. We are as much a part of Campanioni’s life merely by reading his words as he is a part of ours, and experiences are shared, privately as well as publicly.
Authentic experience has been replaced by fetishized experience; existence becomes object. And actual experience is surpassed by talking about it. But not just talking about it, re-distributing it to the whole world, stamped and packaged in a Facebook or Instagram post. A new skill learned on LinkedIn.
We are selling ourselves back to ourselves.
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 if someone forgets to charge their phone or leaves it in another room. Like many of us, he understands the necessity of the internet as well as harbors a cynicism and healthy distrust of it.
Every moment that exists exists to be recorded, dramatized, and sold to the public; how do we know what real drama is when it happens to us? And when confronted with something tragic or beautiful, something real, do we still have the language to express our feelings?
A wonderful collection, timely and relevant. It’s possible this will be a tad too timely, and after a few years have passed and social media morphs into some other new app, and someday in the future if Facebook no longer exists, readers may have a hard time accessing Campanioni’s point. Though looking again at the title of the memoir, Death of Art, it appears that’s exactly the point he wanted to make. - Elicia Parkinson
I’m drinking a glass of wine in a gallery and nothing means anything. There is work from 100 different artists up on the walls. The gallery is selling a recently published book of influential artists from North Brooklyn in full color. It’s going for $60 and it’s worth it. I’m in it. I don’t care. I’m getting another glass of wine now and scanning the room just to feel something. Just to make sure there’s nobody I missed saying hello to. This everyday anxiety of those of us trying to make it—almost making it—never really going to make it—is flawlessly illustrated in Chris Campanioni’s Death of Art, published by C&R Press. It’s not common that you read a collection of poetry or a novel that describes so well your soul and its search for significance. The soul that is sexy enough to be plastered across a billboard over the BQE, but smart enough to be published in The New Yorker. A soul so drenched in culture it doesn’t know what’s permanent or fleeting, just that it needs to be part of it. A soul that almost feels guilty for indulging and not getting creative work done on a Saturday night, and then subsequently regretful for staying in when you could have been out “making connections.” Campanioni, both a recipient of higher education and a prior soap opera star with perfectly defined muscles, fits the role and has lived the life to make such a novel come to fruition. It’s sexy. It’s smart. It’s dark. It’s real. The concept begins early on in the book and continues throughout like a punch to the face (or the gallery wall).
Get rich. Live life to the fullest. Set the world on fire.
Do everything, all the time. Which might also be my own personal motto, but not in 1995, because I was only nine years old then.
Infinite highways. Palm trees swaying toward tonight except tonight is always already happening. Tonight is eternal.
On the way to the F train, earlier, I’d passed one of those religious proselytizers, speaking in a megaphone and brandishing a sign that read
ARE YOU IN CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE?
I could never tell if these grand questions were rhetorical, or if they were actually meant to be answered and I thought about asking the woman with the megaphone, but I was too much in a hurry, and anyway, all she really wanted was my name on a list. My name, e-mail, telephone number. Hopefully, the three-digit code on my credit card.
I am thinking about all of this while cutting out my face and exchanging small talk about Los Angeles, New York City, the vague cumulus-clouded Midwest, where Erin grew up, and what it takes to make it as an artist. What it takes to make art.
The catharsis one feels moving through a life where we must reject pop culture to prove our originality and purity, but then absorb it to remain relevant enough to be relatable, lives within these pages. Overall, I’d say Death of Art is one of the best books I’ve read in years. It flawlessly combines the stream-of-consciousness irregularities that make poetry so heartfelt with the progressive narrative of fiction that gets people to finish a book. I recommend this title to anyone looking for a break from normalcy or needing to take a deep look in the mirror. - Dallas Athent https://www.nomadicpress.org/reviews/deathofartcampanioni
Death of Art, 31-year-old Chris Campanioni’s memoir, is an amalgam of prose, poetry, and text messages. His name might not be familiar to you, though he’s appeared in commercials, numerous print ads and occasional acting gigs. If you look for Campanioni’s photo at the end of the book you’ll be disappointed. But fear not, there are plenty of pictures of him on the internet. Among his writing credits, Campanioni’s 2014 novel Going Down won the International Latino Book Award for Best First Book, and a year earlier he won the Academy of American Poets Prize. He teaches literature and creative writing at Baruch College and Pace University, and interdisciplinary studies at John Jay. The majority of Death of Art centers on his adult life, but here’s a taste of his happy early years: We lived all of us together in a big room with a kitchen where my mother would cook & my brother & I would dance & chant, shaking a line around the table, waiting for my father to arrive & clapping when he did. [ . . . ] My mother wipes her hands on her smock & turns around to catch his gaze. The stove hums & the red rice cooker calls out to the black beans, the wooden spoon in the steel pot, the supper that awaits. We skip to adulthood in an expressive piece called “Self-Interested Glimpses”: I had thought that working as a model had transformed time into a circle, a cyclical exchange of repetition and recurrence. The only days that made any sense to me any longer were today and tomorrow. Everything else felt impossible to keep track of [ . . . ] But it wasn’t just my experience in the fashion industry that had changed time; it was also our culture, the technological processes we’d adopted. [ . . . ] Time as it is represented in the world of images—Selfies, Snapchats, Vines, and countless other self-interested glimpses—is instantaneous and fleeting. Quickly forgotten. He goes on to say that the “last decade of my life has been filmed, photographed, streamed, and sold back to mass culture. I get paid for it but it isn’t just me who’s doing the buying and selling. It is all of us; it is all of our lives. [ . . . ] We are selling ourselves back to ourselves.” The book carries a nice rhythm by interspersing poems among short essays. You could even read pages at random and not lose any of the effect. Campanioni explains the title of his book, saying it comes from “the blacked out title of a poem I’d just written called ‘Death of the Artist.’” The original poem begins: I want you now like a TV show It’s been so slow This pilot season Waiting for something good To come on the air Is full of eyes killing Time [ . . . ] The blacked out version is found after the Acknowledgements page, which normally closes off the book, but in Death of Art, additional writings follow the acknowledgements, and you don’t want to miss them. I found that Campanioni’s essays often contain poetic passages, as when he’s talking with his agent: “[ . . . ] I tell her about the memoir I’d like her to sell. [ . . . ] Everything’s a question for something else. Don’t sell yourself, I tell myself in silence. Don’t sell yourself short, my agent tells me, except she is speaking out loud.” And I’m unable to classify which genre several pages titled “50 First Dates (a Tinder story)” falls into, but it’s pretty amusing. Example: “My first questions usually involve music. And if they like Taylor Swift, I bury my head in the menu. And if they call her ‘T Swift,’ I go to the bathroom and never come back.” I was drawn to the essay titled “The Nose” because instead of riffing on Nikolay Gogol’s short story of the same name, it involves a woman he calls The Nose because she creates scents in the fragrance business. When I finished the book, I wondered how much I actually learned about Campanioni’s life. Bits and pieces stick in my mind, such as his girlfriend is named Lauren, he’s a big 90210 fan, he doesn’t shower very often, is well traveled, has a brother named John, and he gets recognized on the street a lot. I came away with mixed messages about his views on modeling and acting, but it’s pretty clear he likes teaching and loves to write. Death of Art can be read as sheer entertainment or, with more concentration, a summary of Campanioni’s life and thoughts so far. I think he’ll have a whole lot more to say in the future, so watch for more. - Valerie Wieland https://www.newpages.com/book-reviews/death-of-art
From the cover: “Death of Art dissects post-capitalist, post-Internet, post-death culture; our ability and affinity to be both disembodied and tethered to technology, allowing us to be in several places at once and nowhere at all.”
Cuban-American writer Chris Campanioni’s forthcoming book, Death of Art, is billed as non-fiction, but serves as much more. A dancey mashup of poetry and hybrid prose reminiscent of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Death of Art is a genre-bending glimpse into what feels like Campanioni’s private diary. We open on Campanioni cutting his face out of every fashion editorial bearing his likeness with the help of a stranger, and “stranger” is also the word I would use for the way the book progresses.
“The greatest characters I’ve invented are the ones I know by heart.” Identity, Tinder, family, celebrity, Brooklyn: nothing is off-limits in Campanioni’s essays as he talks about growing up with hurricanes (“Storm Season”), being told not to get too tan lest he look too Latino to get cast in something (“Self-Interested Glimpses”), and looking at modern life through the lens of someone who identifies as an “artist.” As Campanioni continually questions his own journey, so the reader questions their own. Campanioni is a meandering, unreliable narrator who facilitates the reader’s journey down the rabbit hole of his prose at breakneck, forgetting-to-breathe speed: you can’t wait to feel the ground under your feet again. He lets go of your hand before an unlit set of steps and lets you stumble as you feel inexplicably guilty about the Instagram notification that draws your attention away from the page. As Campanioni questions himself, it’s everything you don’t really want to hear. He takes the cliché of “Who am I?” and massages it into “Who am I pretending to be? Who am I as an artist in a world that seems to be waging a war on art? What even is art anymore? What is identity anymore?” “Who hasn’t ever asked themselves: Am I a monster? Who hasn’t ever asked themselves: Or is this what it feels like for everyone?” The collection is marked by Campanioni’s signature mastery of the line, shameless sensuality, and abiding love of 90210. By the end of Death of Art, you feel like you have read something terribly important. You can’t seem to pin down why it’s sitting so heavy in your belly, or even the specific words that so moved you, but you know you can’t continue to move through the world the way you have been; you know something has to change. - Catherine Chambers http://www.duendeliterary.org/duende-blog/2016/3/26/a-review-of-death-of-art-by-chris-campanioni Chris Campanioni, Tourist Trap,Black Rose Writing, 2015.
In suburban New Jersey, in the summer of 2006, a recent college graduate answers a Help Wanted ad from a travel agency seeking tourists for "direct sales distribution." It doesn't take him long to figure out the function of the company-issued camera. During an initial trip to London, he also discovers his real role: Terrorist. Instead of fleeing, he quickly finds himself swept up in a cast of characters from New York City's fashion and art world, the newsroom and the travel industry, government agencies and back alley dentists, all of them involved in the culture industry and its destruction of social and historical landmarks and signposts for money-and later, for something much greater than currency. From the south of France to Thailand and North Korea, the thread runs deeper, and as readers learn more about the culture industry, they also learn that no one is inculpable, and nothing is truly as it seems.
Chris Campanioni’s most recent novel, Tourist Trap (Or: How I Paid My Way Through Grad School), is bookended by a singular thought, a question: can we ever start anew? Invoking a kindred premise to the alt-rock act Wilco and their outstanding “Ashes of American Flags” in which they lament, “All my lies are always wishes / I know I would die if I could come back new,” Tourist Trap doesn’t simply bemoan the passage of time and the concessions that persist in the journey towards understanding, but also expounds upon how this desire to start over can manifest in finding a way to truly live. Because in order to break free from the systems that conjure complacency, we must be aware of them, and desire refinement. And this is Tourist Trap, a jaunt into the psyche of a contemporary man, befuddled by the changing times and the obviousness of the delinquency abounding.
Part comedy, part thriller, and part horror story, Tourist Trap is the third book in what Campanioni refers to as an out of order trilogy that has been re-arranged. The first book is the yet to be released, Fashion of the Seasons (King Shot Press, 2016), while its “follow-up” is 2013’s Going Down. In whole, this trilogy acts in the way of most of Chris’s writing, as an amplified snapshot of a time and a place, and Tourist Trap delicately captures the tactility and aura of the age of flip-phones through to the dawn of the internet where we were given the broad platform to crassly make fun of such expeditiously outdated technology. Tourist Trap commences in 2006 and works its way patiently towards the following year, while readers are swept off to exotic locales such as the south of France, Egypt and Thailand, and ushered into a world – our world – where materialism, consumption, and narcissism have run rampant.
Chris Campanioni, through the voices of the characters in the novel, speaks with the introspection of a narrated noir film; a detective, of life itself, narrating his findings with profound contemplation and touting the journey toward far-reaching awareness. These thoughtful moments of insight are scattered about the novel like buried chunks of treasure, unearthed on nearly every turn of the page. What’s unique about Tourist Trap is that each chapter could be enjoyed and analyzed on its own, an entirely succinct novel that can be digested piecemeal as there is power and poignancy in each passing section. But, like a great album, its beauty is best exposed in whole, when the larger picture comes into focus, where “cultural terrorism and terrorism are one in the same.”
Tourist Trap takes readers on a journey around the globe, and while that jaunt is indeed rewarding, it is the more personal moments found in all directions that linger. In a chapter titled, “Cost of Living,” readers are confronted with the decadence and demands of New York City, but also with it opportunity, a place that offers you the ability to lose yourself, and herein lies the fortuity, as losing oneself is “the first act through which we might find something greater. Losing it, giving it up.” And Tourist Trap is noble in its efforts to somehow find a way to hear what matters through all the noise, to see what’s important through the non-stop media attack on our senses. And to come to grips with what it means to be a human being at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Undoubtedly, the chapter that affected me the deepest is titled, “Something Catchy,” one which opens with a discussion about a human’s waning moments in life. Where while perched on death’s doorstep, “every passing moment is not more delicate than all the rest.” Where “you do not appreciate life more. Instead you hate everything about it.” And it is this realism blanketed in pessimism that only helps intensify the myriad of messages present in Tourist Trap. Because the numbness that so many of us feel in a world so full of the promise of sensation is the enduring hoax of modern life. A world where we are all too often forced from that one place that means the most – this very moment. “It’s such a horrible condition, isn’t it?” we are offered later in the chapter. “To be always thinking. To always be in one place with your mind in another.”
While constant stimuli and distractions come under the gun in Tourist Trap, an unlikely but notable threat comes to the forefront: boredom. Through the analyzation of the motives of nefarious terrorists and also civilians just trying to make their way in the world, searching for a measure of meaning, Campanioni suggests that possibly apathy and idle hands (“the bombs and the boredom”) are gravely responsible for so many of the ills in the world. That a sort of privileged despair is underlying far too much hurt, and that in an effort to craft a life out of the pallet of existence, and under the newfound demand of making that life consequential, attractive, and celebrated, clouded decisions are made that are self-centered and unrighteous. In the west, abundance and the comfort of the modern age have birthed the idea of “free time,” and with that a choice of how to fill in this newfound blank space. Unfortunately, far too few decisions are made with the greater good in mind.
Tourist Trap is the story of today, of a lifestyle born of the internet and the loss of physical “touch” that it is responsible for. But in this way, Tourist Trap is a call to action. Campanioni designed the tales within Tourist Trap for “maximum contact,” and ultimately offers up the idea that human connectivity is of the utmost importance. He even goes so far to say in the Artist’s Statement which concludes the novel that “phatic communication is the only revolutionary act.” In a world where so many ask so often, what can I do? – all too often the answer is as close as the person standing next to you.
Tourist Trap ultimately serves as an expose on the industries of culture, and the perversion of politics that threatens to divide us all on a very personal level. But Tourist Trap manages to do something astonishing within all the scathing commentary it offers – it hints that there is still time to change if we can, somehow, find a way to start anew. - Michael Shields
Our narrator is nameless, perhaps because he is an everyman, but more than likely, it is because names lack any usefulness these days. When a single person can have twenty Facebook profiles linked to twenty emails linked to twenty Twitter accounts, all with varying themes. When the most enduring friendships are often online, between people who have never met in person, why even use your real face let alone your real name? For that matter, what use is a past when your future is limitless, and therefore, tied to whatever happens today? This lack of identity is even afforded our antagonist, who goes not by a name but by a phrase—That Guy—one in a million, emerging from any crowd to spout off directions or claims or jokes in bad taste. That one in a million person who gives you an offer you can’t refuse because you don’t even understand what is being offered, and by the time you do it is too late, you have already committed. That Guy and the One Who Need Not be Named are the two roles 21st century society has placed on us. We are either taking charge or receiving orders, and our actions have become so incognito that the consequences of them are far off from any emotional connection. A town going up in flames is seen through a screen, and it might as well be a movie.
This is the world Chris Campanioni places the reader in, in his novel Tourist Trap, originally written in 2006 but published in 2015 and is more relevant than ever. It takes the topic of terrorism and strips it of personal terror so that we can observe it’s spectacle and ask ourselves—‘Why does this not bother me more?’ Sure, maybe you are disturbed, perhaps shocked, if the bomb blasts and gunfire happen in a place your mind does not associate with war zones, which is to say, in wealthy countries. You may go on your social media to change your profile picture to said country’s flag as though you are making a grand statement, but the only thing such an act does is help you judge those friends who did not do the same. You may retweet statements of loss from victims, pictures of human kindness, all to show just how compassionate you are, but do you really suffer for them? Is this tragedy truly life-changing for you? Or are you just going through the motions. What are twenty deaths, fifty deaths, a hundred deaths, when The Avengers probably caused far more battling Ultron and anyway, it’s not like you’ve ever been to that city personally, you might have wanted to, but it is a far off world on the other side of the planet as far as you are concerned. And you can’t bring yourself to even pay attention to the event for very long, after all, your favorite show is on tonight and life is just so busy yet, so boring.
Campanioni knows this sentiment and cloying morality and places it into the mind and heart of a narrator who embodies that pervading sense of busyness masking malaise, a life of pre-ordained decisions that matter very little but get him through the day, a life in search of meaning but too distracted to dedicate more than a fleeting thought to it, and takes him to the logical conclusion of such detached complacency by pushing him toward the profession of tourism. The job, after all, embodies the sort of distraction and leisure many a first world suburbanite was made for. Traversing countries and cities and waves of faces worthy of a United Colors of Benetton ad, making money for doing nothing, nothing that is, until buildings start blowing up and That Guy is pointing out that the ad was never for tourism at all, but rather, for terrorism.
And perhaps if the narrator had been paying attention to his life he would have known the difference. Perhaps if he had invested in developing his own sense of right and wrong rather than relying on others to tell him via the latest trends on TV and the internet, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself, yet, even after knowing the truth, he cannot stop because it just seems so unreal, so unlikely, so not like him, but who is ‘he’ anyway?
Is this not the story of our modern lives? We are bombarded with stimuli, most of which is negative. Bombarded with tragedy, mass death, mass extinctions, mass outrage, and while we would like to do something to put a stop to it, the chaos surrounding us seems so insurmountable, it is much easier to just reach for your phone and update your status and forget about the pain you would rather didn’t exist, either within you, or caused by you.
“You have to acknowledge the fact that God might be dead.”
“We’ve solved the death problem. It’s called the Internet.”
What is death anyway but yearning to feel something. When life is no more than dull repetition, death promises catharsis. That you don’t even know what that catharsis is from is beside the point, and anyway, it need not even mean true death, when your words live on in a digital loop in a digital world more real than reality. Death presents itself more as a new beginning than an end, and more than that, minus your physical presence, death offers the chance for your image to become myth, your words to become legendary, so that death creates not only a new life, but a better one.
But eventually you will have to acknowledge the reality you have been trying to avoid, and the pain that it brings, and the truth that death is ugliness minus glamour, and that fact haunts you, so much so that you delve deeper into denial and continue telling yourself you are a good person and this retweet will change the world, move the masses, make a difference because you care goddamnit. If only other people cared as much as you.
That Guy, the guys who see past the bullshit of these nameless masses, they will make you feel that pain, make you see that those bombs going off, those images of carnage, they aren’t movies, they aren’t TV, for the least fortunate of the world, the people you say you care so much about, it is realer than real, and there is nothing boring about life. In fact, life is terrifying.
And you, Campanioni makes clear in the final pages of his book, will soon know how terrifying life can become when all your barriers melt away and the world you’ve helped create comes looking for answers. And no goddamn Facebook flag graphic will fix any of it. - Jonathan Marcantoni
Chris Campanioni, Once in a Lifetime, Berkeley Press, 2014.
This is a joint publication of Floricanto and Berkeley Presses. Fifty poems and one day provide the footage for Chris Campanioni's Once in a Lifetime (a film in four acts). But even time gradually dissolves in this coming-of-age drama interlaced with pop music, the age of Internet and status updates, cinema and celebrity, memories of Cuba and Poland, and the passage to the United States. Runtime: 24 hours.
"Campanioni captures in revelatory verse and musings, the solemnity at the crossroads of desire and reality. He reveals, in the span of a day that stretches years, continents, and cultures, the weight of his immigrant parents' expectations for a better life wrestling with his own expectations of artistic transcendence. His story reveals a struggle for relevancy in the anonymous, endless streets of New York, a city whose immigrant past mirrors the author's own. This day in the life finds Campanioni striving, through his art, through his relationships, through his tri-lingual worldview, to be a worthy successor to the brave men and women who fought to make his life a reality. Instead of fighting his fragmented identity, Campanioni's Once in a Lifetime embraces and celebrates his role as a universal man." - Jonathan Marcantoni "Chris Campanioni takes you down the alleys and arteries and sugary retail aisles of your lifetime. He has captured a moment between our machine world and our humanity, telescoping the grandeur of existence into one finite day--like a moment that changed how you saw the world, or a good dream. Recommended."Mike Joyce
"I love Campanioni's poetry . . . reminiscent of the leading Chicano poet Luis Omar Salinas. Cheekiness and delicateness all in one." - John Smelcer
"In Once in a Lifetime, Campanioni brings the same rhythm to his poetry as he does to his fiction. Inspired by pop culture and a love of music, Campanioni's verse is coiled in urban tension, yet remains elegantly dreamlike. Throughout the chaos and calm, his visceral jabs of imagery will take a toll, leaving not wounds but rewards." - Gregg McQueen
"If readers looked no further than the wordplay and love of language and rhythm, they'd be delighted. But there is so much going on below the surface, which I guess is also one of the author's many points. Visceral and moving." - Michael Shields
"In his follow-up to the award-winning In Conversation, Campanioni doesn't just re-invent form, he tries to re-create language via a collision of cultures and pop referents. He doesn't rely on his formal tricks and the result is a poignancy and intimacy we haven't seen before. Once in a Lifetime is equal parts cut-up and confessional." - Giancarlo Lombardi
Chris Campanioni’s 2014 poetry collection, Once in a Lifetime (Berkeley Press), is a day-in-the-life narrative in poetic form. We have the immigrant parents, the lost son, the doomed romance, the painful realizations that accompany maturity, and the reinvention of self, played out over the course of 24 hours (and possibly including dreams as well). In narrative form, the American dream plotline would have seemed cliché or at the very least, common, but by putting this story in poetic form Campanioni has revitalized the genre by unearthing the universal yearning for home and the melancholy that informs such a desire. The story Campanioni is telling is his own, or better put, a variation on his perception of the world as he has lived it. In his other works, Campanioni’s characters share a remoteness from the societies they live in. The gap between perception and reality, between public and private masks, between intention and outcome are obsessions of his art, and here he turns his focus on his parents, who really are immigrants: a Cuban father and a Polish mother, both of whom fled to the U.S. to escape Communist governments. There is a sharp contrast throughout the book that portrays the roots of suffering his parents share and the mundanity of his own. While suffering brought his parents together and allowed them to forge a lasting partnership and strong family, Campanioni (or his character) can only share the small, seemingly insignificant details of life with another person. His acute awareness of the subtlest beauty and humor of the world, however, proves to be a barrier to intimacy. Without a grand narrative of his own, the Campanioni of the book must find another way to connect, and as mentioned in the above poem, that means going “home”, which is to say, it means finding a new way of connecting his parent’s narrative with his own. The story of Once in a Lifetime is not confined to the internal desire for home, but also to the physical surroundings that make that home. The morning and evening sections of the work are deliberately urban and tied to technology. The first poems are all ruminations on the vast cityscape and the sense of isolation one feels in the middle of a crowd. “Impossible to draw to scale Conversions or conversations Overhead musings, overheard Talk from the countertop Of a café you’ve never been to Before, or any place with people” – From Cold Open “Facing the empty And ornate room A chandelier A polished bar Two paintings Faces to freeze like that Remembering the whole time Something as soft As the quiche On my plate” – From Motionless at a red booth At all times, Campanioni is one step removed from these places and things, which inform where he is but not who he is. One of the most compelling aspects of the book, especially in comparison to Campanioni’s previous poetry collection, In Conversation, is that the first mention of technology is not as a barrier, not a continuation of the common social criticism that people nowadays would rather stare at their phones than have a conversation, but rather as a bonding experience between Campanioni and his parents: “My father learned English On the radio— Sing-song Santiago Spanish “Rocks Off,” The Rolling Stones Your mouth don’t move But I can hear you speak So many questions People want to know What makes me what I am I tell them way I was raised I tell them Ga-ga-BOOM Ga-ga-BOOM Music everywhere in the house” – From Talk Talk Technology is a unifier, a source of joy and nostalgia, and perhaps it is significant the tech being referred to is in the past. As though somewhere between childhood and adulthood, something has been lost, or perverted, to make this generation feel isolated by the very things that should have made connection easier than at any time in human history. What is largely absent in the beginning and ending sections is nature. The descriptions are focused on the man-made, whether they be buildings or other humans, it is only when the narrator sets off with a lover on a road trip down south, in the afternoon section, that the natural world encroaches on us. Urban life can be so all-encompassing as to make the world itself surreal. In Juan José Saer’s masterpiece El entenado, the book begins with the main character expressing his preference for the city over the countryside, “Más de una vez me sentí diminuto bajo ese azul dilatado: en la playa amarilla, éramos como hormigas en el centro de un desierto. Y si ahora que soy un viejo paso mis días en las ciudades, es porque en ellas la vida es horizontal, porque las ciudades disimulan el cielo” (More than once I felt diminutive beneath that expansive blue sky: on the yellow beaches, we were like ants in the middle of the desert. And now that I am an old man, if I spend my days in cities, it is because here life is horizontal, it is because cities shrink the sky). Campanioni’s narrator does seem to shrink in this section, the elements engulfing him, especially water. As he yearns for his lover’s embrace and the warmth he felt as a child, the waters rise, the waters reflect, the waters consume, but he is never able to give himself over. The relationship strains, his sense of space and time strain, and the woods and lakes of the Deep South grow in prominence until he drowns in his uncertainty. At this point, the book looks inward, and this brings us back to the narrator making his final journey home. To learn about life, not as he believed it should be, but as it is, a series of struggle and sacrifice, of remorse and forgiveness, of lacking and overflowing: of food, of material items, of options, of money, of love. Life is an ever-emptying shell, that is, like a hollow object at sea it is constantly filling with water, the bringer of life, and then emptying it out. In between is hollowness, which some may see as death; the shell remains, its existence continues as it awaits the next wave of activity. Every wave, in entering the shell, is informed by what came before, particulates of past surges, scars as well as smoothing of the frame, and as the water leaves it carries those experiences as it breathes new life to the shoreline, only to retreat. Life and death are always present simultaneously, triumph becomes suffering which becomes triumph once again. To place importance only on the suffering is to ignore the great beauty of success, and to only focus on success blinds one to the lessons of tragedy. This exchange occurs again and again, and this is the legacy of generations, the traces of our daily life. So we close with this mediation on time and what our perception of it says about us: “Time stretches like a rubber band It stops, it starts, it lengthens Each time a voice Track clicks in Hours pass A minute or two Goes by, unless I am Sitting here Surrounded and alone Making time Stop myself Making it assume An untangled ribbon Of hair, glancing At my phone, too Wondering when The moment will arrive A slight pause, not a full stop Not even A semicolon, more like An interruption or interference CAUTION To consumers This image is enlarged To show detail Blow-up Cortázar/Antonioni Another unsuspecting death Under red light In the dark room Now the city moves Like a map you are drawing A sinking feeling (I’ve been here before) Faulty reception, static Other people’s memories Images I only recognize On TV, old films, faces I’ve never seen A quick shift in the hips And you’re looking out Through someone else’s eyes It’s such a bore To be one person All the time” – From Fashion of the Seasons Campanioni’s Once in a Lifetime is a mirror that moves closer and closer to us, making us dissect the tiniest detail of ourselves through the author’s journey. In the end it asks, now that you know who you are, will you stare it in the face fearlessly, or will you blink? - Jonathan Marcantoni minorliteratures.com/2015/11/04/once-in-a-lifetime-by-chris-campanioni-jonathan-marcantoni/
Chris Campanioni seeks to blur boundaries. He is a first-generation American, the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland, a writer, teacher, and the editor of PANK, Tupelo Quarterly, and At Large Magazine. Campanioni’s debut novel, Going Down, was selected as Best First Book at the International Latino Book Awards in 2014. His poem “Transport (after ‘When Ecstasy is Inconvenient’)” was a finalist for the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize in 2015, awarded annually to the U.S. poet whose poem best evokes a connection to place. He was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013 for selected poetry and his hybrid prose piece This body’s long (& I’m still loading) was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. His non-fiction, poetry, fiction, and criticism has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, Poetry International, Los Angeles Review of Books, Star-Ledger, San Francisco Chronicle, Prelude, RHINO, Handsome, Ambit, Gorse, Quiddity, Notre Dame Review, and several other journals and anthologies, including Routledge’s Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, Sundress Publications’ Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities, and Dostoyevsky Wannabe’s Brooklyn Anthology.
