Ander Monson Lost in the Menagerie of Solipsism

To be an American alive today is to be lost in a field of Me, hundreds of millions of Is standing up and waving to where we think the hidden camera is. It's okay, I want to tell me, when I got back from the Phoenix Renaissance Faire this last March. Sure, we're defined by what we buy and what costumes we make from scratch or rent from the linguistically problematic Ye Olde Costume Shoppe. It's okay, I say when I navigate all my friends' Myspace or Facebook social networking pages, the battling memes and list of interests and likes and dislikes, the tiny virtual gifts they give each other, the time they spend cultivating their digital gardens. I'm a me, just like you. I have a webpage, just like you. I even have a twitter account just like you. I am working on a memoir or a novel, just like 41% of surveyed Americans. I use statistics to backup my claims, like an estimated 80% of dentists who personally use 4% of all the domestically available toothpaste every year. I harvest as much information as I can from Wikipedia without telling people that is where I'm getting my information from. Most of this book is composed of Wikipedia snippets. I also contribute to the making of meaning. I edit Wikipedia pages when I can. I watch the lists of to-be-deleted pages and the daily fights over notability there.

Ander Monson is known informally as Anger Monsoon, which is also his wrestling name.

He is I, and I am he sometimes.

Ander Monson is also available via an arty and high quality publicity photo by Joshua Blake: [high-res jpeg].

Also known as the author of this website, a decoder wheel, a handful of chapbooks, some books (Other Electricities, fiction, Sarabande Books, 2005; Vacationland, poems, Tupelo Press, 2005; Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, nonfiction, Graywolf Press, 2007; The Available World, poems, Sarabande Books, 2010; and Vanishing Point, nonfiction, Graywolf Press, 2010). Originating from Michigan, he is known to be local to Tucson, Arizona, where he edits the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press, and teaches at the University of Arizona.

Also available: self-portrait with eroded owl from Mr. Whatever's Depressing Children's Storytime Garden at the Worst Arboretum I have ever visited, which is in Flagstaff, Arizona:

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Also available, self-portrait, shorn, sad, too-prominent forehead, looking chumpy in Medieval Times (go Green Knight!) crown:

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Also available, self-portrait as Deflated Christmas Decorations of which there are many:

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Also available, self-portrait as mediocre Burger King Flame Broiled (It Tastes Like a Cooking Method) Tato-Skins-like chips from the Inventure Group:

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Also available, self-portrait as flattened, empty Doritos bag circa 1970:

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Also available, self-portrait as Doritos inscrutable Toasted Corn chips (see also "artificially"):

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Also available, self-portrait as painted thing in wall in bathroom:

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Also available, self-portrait as sad bear in Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW!) airport:

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Also available, self-portrait as Michigan snow collected and carried in a climate controlled metal case to Arizona at which point I re-deployed it last January in order to remind myself of whom I used to be and how it felt to be that cold that often in order to think again:

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Also available, self-portrait as disturbing rabbit during Day of the Dead 2008:

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Also available, self-portrait as evil light-up JFK that haunts my dreams as the thing that stalks all memoirists and eventually takes them down at night, as seen in Tucson bar:

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Also available, self-portrait as reading with no audience, seen oftentimes in dreams:

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Also available, self-portrait as Oak & Mope, non-Photoshopped, o ye doubters:

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Also available, self-portrait in cloudy Biosphere 2 aquarium that is really the worst part of the tour by a long, long way:

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Also available, self-portrait in abandoned but continually lined and emptied and apparently entirely unreflective trash can for commencement wands at the University of Arizona:

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Also available, self-portrait as Depressed Brain Coral:

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Also available: self-portrait as Series of Terrifying Nutcrackers (and Almost All Are):

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