Banango Lit

Dave Shaw can be found on Tumblr here. He also runs the website Lit Mixtapes.

By: Rachel Hyman

It’s funny that Dave Shaw’s newest chapbook, recently released through NAP, is called Less of Everything. It’s chock-full of images (the word kind), details, people, places, things.

Less of Everything centers around a character named Anxiety. I like this, this idea that Big Things like anxiety and 2008 and indifference, all characters in the chapbook, can be personified. Anxiety doesn’t actually seem so anxious or panicky. He takes action: plays a set, corresponds with a poet in Chicago, hooks up with girls. He reads books like the Canterbury Tales and the Pale King, he listens to music like Titus Andronicus and Pepper Rabbit. I had to actually look up that last one to make sure they were a real band. They are.

Anxiety seems like he has a life with a normal amount of anxiety. His panic is low-level. He worries about relationships, like the rest of us do. In fact, this chapbook seems specifically tailored towards the Internet generation, those denizens of a world where there’s an almost unbearable amount of stuff coming to pass every single second. A lot of this stuff happens in Anxiety’s life, to Anxiety, around Anxiety. But his movement’s all lateral. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading old Tao Lin reviews lately, but Shaw’s style seems very Lin-esque. It’s deadpan, but there is emotion.

One of the funny moments in Less of Everything is right at the beginning, when Anxiety is sitting next to a girl on a bench who is talking on her phone.

Anxiety considers grabbing the cellphone out of her hands and telling her to stop what she is doing because no matter what she does nothing will ever change.

He imagines the girl stabbing him to death with his a knife. Instead, he gets up, “collecting the muscles in his face into a polite smile. He wants to say something like ‘I’m ready’.”

He doesn’t, though. When Anxiety is in line later at Subway, a man tells the sandwich artist (that’s what they’re calling them now, right?) “I’ll think about it” when asked what kind of cheese he wants. Anxiety (who points out later that “everyone knows how Subway works; they’re not going to ask you anything you haven’t been asked before”) “turns to face the man and smiles.” His thought on the common knowledge of Subway mechanics is followed by him imagining himself “saying this at a comedy club doing a Jerry Seinfeld impression. ‘Subway isn’t going to throw any curve-balls at you; take comfort in this.’”

I love this, this politeness that completely masks Anxiety’s inner monologue. I imagine him smiling and taking a deep breath, about to say something then thinking better of it. I do this a lot too, and then think “never mind.” There’s a tension between these two spaces, the external and internal worlds, and Less of Everything constantly mediates between them. With this in mind, it makes perfect sense to have anxiety personified as the central character. Bringing my inner world into collision with the outside makes me anxious, too.