High on teenage rebellion and endless gallons of sweet Thunderbird wine, the Hogs of Entropy (HOE) released over 1,000 textfiles – an electronic version of paper zines – and inadvertently proved that the brain capacity of the average US teenager is on par with Neanderthal man.

To a soundtrack of Guns ’n’ Roses, Wu Tang Clan and The Misfits, Kobek practiced a Whitman-by-way-of-Kathy Acker-esque shamanistic exorcism of American culture, using the web as source material for sampled stupidity and adolescent angst, hitting a crescendo with HOE #999: The Madcap Laughs – an obscene overview of a fin-de-siècle world filtered through the pre-9/11 dotcom techno-babble of Rudy Giuliani’s New York.

In HOE #999: Decennial Appreciation and Celebratory Analysis, Kobek attempts a tripped out, high grade alchemical transformation of his adolescent texts. Outsourcing all critical meditation to a Subcontinental Asian essay farm and interweaving this work-for-hire meta-text alongside editorial dialogue and excerpts from the original, he reloads and jacks up his anti-authorial intent for a newer, even stupider millennium. A full decade after its initial appearance HOE #999 continues to infect and fracture, disrupting its surroundings, and shatter any sense of cultural hierarchy. It tells everything the reader needs to know about the outsourcing economy and the terrible state of being twenty-one years of age.

Jarett Kobek was raised in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and graduated from New York University. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Los Angeles.

Published as part of Book Works’ Semina series (No.6). Edited by Stewart Home.