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Alt Lit Weekly: Tao Lin disciple Jordan Castro finds his own way in the 21st century

Jordan Castro is what is known in the alt lit community as “Internet famous” due to the prominence of his online writings dating from 2009.

Jordan Castro

(Photo courtesy of Jordan Castro)


Jordan Castro is an alternative literature writer living in Ohio who has about 2,000 followers on Twitter.

Castro is what is known in the alt lit community as “Internet famous” due to the prominence of his online writings which date from 2009. He has been featured on Tao Lin’s online publishing house, muumuu.

Castro completed a brief stint in rehab about a year ago. Drugs sometimes play an important part in Castro’s writing, as they do for many writers today, both in alt lit and outside of it. It would be a mistake to dismiss Castro as a junkie because his writing often deals with deeper human issues.

In fact, Castro has an extensive catalog of writing online. He operates a personal webpage where his fiction, poems, essays and non-print books are linked and can be read.

His 2011 short story, "James Franco," is both one of his longest stories and the most structurally sound. It's a story about members of the alt lit community traveling to Los Angeles to film the movie adaption of Tao Lin’s novella, "Shoplifting from American Apparel."

When reading "James Franco," Castro’s early style is made apparent throughout the story. He's a direct writer and does not try to disguise his words with elaborate diction and overly-fancy design. In this, he shares the aesthetic of many alt lit writers who view writing as the blatant recordings of sense. Castro at heart is a very intrinsic person and much of his description tends to reflect his own feelings as an outsider.

Alienation is a main theme of "James Franco." I feel like many people are misled by Castro’s style, which some critics describe as minimalist.  His descriptions are plain and without much elaboration, but his writing is deeply symbolic. 

Castro writes, "I looked at the sky and the park. I took pictures and texted people. I called Mallory Whitten, left her a voicemail. I saw broken beer bottles and cigarette butts on the ground." 

A surface reading of this line yields little to the reader’s attention. You think, “Cool, this guy is like me, I don’t need to read this.  I can just go do this stuff in real life."  But that would be dismissing Castro early, my friend.  If you look deeper, you'll realize Castro is a poet.

The way he places images together in the above sentence are not accidental. Rather, he does so to display a certain mood. Everyone probably has had a time in their life when they have called their girlfriend and the phone continues to ring, the answering machine leaves you with a feeling that is not at all satisfying. 

The cigarette butts and broken beer bottles are images and symbols.  They turn these everyday vices into objects of significance. These symbols lift Castro from just an observer to a visionary.

Instead of simply stating that he was sad after leaving Mallory a voicemail, Castro gives the reader more of an image with the cigarettes and bottles to represent how he felt.  

For this reason, Castro cannot be dismissed as just another imitator of Lin’s school. The sentence shows Castro’s creative pen at work.  He can construct the art and for that reason is a writer of note.

Stay tuned — next week, I tackle alt lit superpower Tao Lin.

Follow Jordan on twitter @jordan_castro, follow the writer on twitter @looooogaaan.

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