Two interpretations of the Taco Bell Quarterly (and its hate boner for The Paris Review)

If you're halfheartedly a part of literary Twitter like I am, you've probably come across The Taco Bell Quarterly at some point in the last few months. If you haven't, your first instinct might be to think it's a joke. Which it isn't, as much as it might disguise itself as one. It's definitely hard to explain exactly what TBQ is; even the magazine's founder, M.M. Carrigan, has offered differing and possibly contradictory explanations for the journal's raison d'etre, mostly through pithy and provocative Tweets. Although Carrigan is witty, the one thing TBQ is not is a joke. At 26,400 followers on Twitter and growing, they may not yet have made good on their boast to be "more relevant than The Paris Review" (which has a million followers), but they're certainly not a joke. Their following has grown to the size of a decent literary journal, and I've seen approving re-tweets from some very hip authors, if not yet many establishment darlings. 

There are two more assertions I can make with certainty about what TBQ isn't. The first is that it's not establishment. It's set up to poke and prod at the literary establishment, frequently taunting The Paris Review in particular. TBQ's Venmo/PayPal is @ParisReview, for example. The second is that it's unaffiliated--unaffiliated with Taco Bell, unaffiliated with The Paris Review, unaffiliated with everything. (At one point, Carrigan joked about asking Taco Bell for a million dollar literary grant, the result of which was that Taco Bell "continues not to sue" TBQ.) 

So that's what it's not, but what is it? TQB offers some explanations of its own, both in the journal itself and also through Carrigan's barrage of hilarious, come-and-get-me Tweets. I'd like to examine two different ways of looking at TBQ and its meaning--both what it hopes to signify as a literary artifact and also what it means as a product of its literary and economic time and place.  

I imagine Taco Bell isn't suing because it's realized that it has more to lose in public perception than it has to gain in suing the journal. It also isn't hurting Taco Bell to be associated with something hip and counter-culture, because that makes Taco Bell seem hip by association. Kind of like why Arby's changed its mind about suing Nihilist Arby's. 

But first, the meaning of TBQ in its own words

Here is how TBQ describes itself on its website: 

Taco Bell Quarterly is the literary magazine for the Taco Bell Arts and Letters. We’re a reaction against everything. The gatekeepers. The taste-makers. The hipsters. Health food. Artists Who Wear Cute Scarves. Bitch-ass Wendy’s. We seek to demystify what it means to be literary, artistic, important, and elite. We welcome writers and artists of all merit, whether you’re published in The Paris Review, rejected from The Paris Review, or DGAF what The Paris Review is. 

First and foremost, TBQ is about great writing. It’s about provoking and existing among the white noise of capitalism. We embrace the spectrum of trash to brilliance. Taco Bell Quarterly has tens of thousands of readers. We’ve been interviewed or mentioned in Vox, Salon, Food and Wine Magazine, Mental Floss, Yahoo, The Guardian, The New York Post, Publisher’s Weekly, Literary Hub, Bon Appetit and dozens more.

Is this real? A joke? A literary psy-op? We don’t fully know. We just decided to write about Taco Bell. We are absolutely not affiliated with Taco Bell and make no profits. We can’t even get extra sauce in the drive-thru. Employees treat that shit like unicorn blood.

That part-facetious, part-rebellious self-explanation holds within it all the seeds of the varied ways of looking at the magazine, both as a literary product and a social phenomenon. 

Meaning one: it's an outlet and a meeting place for the rejected

One unusual characteristic of the literary fiction community is that a significant percentage of its members frequently face rejection from the most powerful members of their own community. It's well known that a good percentage of the people who read literary magazines are those who hope to one day be published in them. Major literary conferences are largely attended by dreamers hoping to make connections with or soak up wisdom from the few who've made it. Most aspiring writers have found their way blocked by "gatekeepers" (who are often themselves just other struggling writers volunteering their time). Faced with rejection, there are three possible reactions: revolt, persistence, or giving up. TBQ represents a little of all three. 

The constant jabbing at The Paris Review is the revolt, of course. TBQ isn't the only journal to have been founded partly by people who were tired of being rejected by other journals, but it is one of the best at making its feelings about rejection known. The existence of a journal named for a fast-food restaurant perhaps best known to most people for being cheap and for being a great late-night post-drinking option also represents a kind of resignation. It's sort of like getting kicked out of a fancy, high-society restaurant for being underdressed, and rather than going home to get a coat and tie and going back to try again, you decide to just go to Taco Bell in your tank top and shorts, because who needs those snobs, anyhow? Carrigan once ran a string of Tweets about appearing at a literary conference with a trash can into which attendees were encouraged to throw their literary works, as if to say that at some point, continuing to struggle to "make it" is futile. 

Some examples of the revolt:

Revolt

Revolt

A Tweet very much on the fringe between giving up and persistence

There's plenty of anger in the revolt and the giving up. At times, TBQ accuses the establishment of not just being snobs, but fascists who hold onto authority and prevent the emergence of minority voices. Even when it's at its angriest, though, there's sometimes a note of sweetness mixed in and a call to persistence. A pinned Tweet that's been re-Tweeted nearly 7,000 times catches this vibe:

Not all of the Twitter followers of TBQ are the literary rejected, but nearly all of its followers are intimately familiar with rejection. TBQ lives in a world in which powers--some corporate, some of the elite cultural gatekeeper variety--are blocking the masses from publication and recognition as writers. Not just recognition, but money. TBQ recognizes our capitalistic backdrop and the need all artists have to make a living to sustain themselves. Which is what drives the second interpretation of TBQ.

Meaning Two: It's both a reaction against and a concession to art's commodification by capitalism

Taco Bell restaurants are faux southwestern missionary-style buildings with fake adobe exteriors. The cuisine is an unholy mix of Midwestern crockpot cuisine with other influences we might, if we take a wide view of things, call "Mexican." It's gauche and Philistine, like any culture is when it's dictated by commercial logic.

Naming the journal after a symbol of crassness is a call to storm the bell tower and take back real art. TBQ isn't about loving Taco Bell; it's about Taco Bell as a symbol of the ugliness of art run by gatekeepers in thrall to power. It's an aesthetic descendant of Dadaism, answering nonsense with nonsense.

Or so I thought. But while that might be lingering in the background, there is too much actual love for Taco Bell being professed by the journal for it all to be ironic or for Taco Bell to be purely a symbol of ugliness in art. In fact, much of the journal's actual literary output is more about how Taco Bell played a positive role in the lives of narrators than about how Taco Bell is a symbol of a dying and decaying society. Or perhaps the narrators do acknowledge that Taco Bell is a symbol of a sick society but still find room for elegies to that society's dying beauty. 

In "Un Espinella to a White Friend," J. Villanueva writes of a Mexican narrator talking about Taco Bell with an over-eager white friend. The white friend, perhaps motivated by wanting to show off to his Mexican friend how much he knows about "real" Mexican culture, has questioned why anyone would want to eat at Taco Bell when it's "not Mexican." The narrator responds that, "I know what's served at Taco Bell."  For the narrator, though, while he is well aware that Taco Bell isn't "real" like the Mexican food that is part of his "cultura," it's still "food for (him)." The poem seems to argue that if it tastes good, it is good, an argument that the millions of people who eat at Taco Bell would agree with. It's also a very democratic aesthetic when applied to art, like Duke Ellington's "if it sounds good, it is good." 

This hint of justification or apology for Taco Bell is all over editions four and five of the magazine (the two most recent). "Spondylolisthesis, or why I eat Taco Bell" has a narrator who finds comfort after an abusive relationship in the Crunchwrap Supreme, discovering "decency" in a meal that comes with napkins and straws. The short story "Crazy, Stupid, Tacos" features a protagonist who remains unhappy as long as she resists the crassness of a Taco Bell-themed hotel where she has gone unwillingly for a destination wedding. The character only finds happiness when she stops fighting the crassness and learns to make peace with it. 

The directions for writers submitting to TBQ are pretty much this: "Put Taco Bell in it somewhere." Carrigan advises that this can be as simple as "shoehorning a chalupa" in there somewhere. Most of the published works in TBQ 4 and 5, though, go the other route, highlighting Taco Bell front and center, either as a setting or as a symbol. About half make the connection to Taco Bell right in the title of the work. Rather than rejecting Taco Bell as a symbol of all that's bad in society and therefore art and therefore writing, most writers are celebrating it. 

The relationship to capitalism of TBQ, in fact, seems to be less, "It's all bad, let's burn it all down" than, "Okay, it's bad, but we can't change that, so let's at least try to get ours, too." No work demonstrates this more than Catherine Weiss's "Everyone at the KFC-Taco Bell drive-thru is on their way to the pro wrestling show." The narrator is watching fans of a garish, kayfabe, staged but still violent "sport" eat at a garish, fake establishment built on industrial violence toward animals. The narrator, who seems to have either decided not to have children or been unable to have children because of a disability, looks at all this absurdity and wonders if she, too, wants in. She wonders if she also wants to "order some small human a taco" and what her wrestling persona would have been. The narrator is, like so many rejected authors, looking at those who've managed to gain something she's hasn't, and rather than throw scorn on all of it, she decides to change herself slightly:

are there leagues for disabled people?
at 35      i have almost decided i will be happy

by staying happy i have almost decided      the sound
of a body percussing the mat would be enough

Many poems look on the surface like they take the whole TBQ project as a joke, offering comically mock-grandiose titles such as "Saturn Devouring His Crunchwrap Supreme" or "Six Modern Haiku for a Taco Bell Drive-thru" or "An Ode to the Taco Party Pack." While these begin as facetious, they often end up falling back into a tone that's mostly earnest. That's TBQ in general: a joke that seems to have become serious. 

There are some works in which Taco Bell holds negative connotations. In "Happy Birthday from Taco Bell," the restaurant is a continuing reminder for a young woman of the place where she was raped. No work, though, seems to confront the conflicting meanings of Taco Bell as a symbol and of a literary journal named for the restaurant as much as Cynthia Arrieu-King's "TBQH." 

The title itself is a reference both to the name of the journal itself and an introduction to the speaker's voice. Anyone not familiar with the abbreviation gets it immediately spelled out in the opening line, "To be quite honest." It is followed by an assertion that when art and capitalism mingle, art withers:

To be quite honest

If we want to make art, yet look for money to spring up in its place

Who will have extra lettuce but the bombers, artillery manufacturers, oat milk saboteurs?

Poems will have to remain garlands and garnish, the older ones our menu

Unlike most of the works in TBQ, "TBQH" never makes its peace with Taco Bell. It launches into a series of "Taco Bell questions," which are really questions about the sustainability and viability of society itself. It arrives, ultimately, at a "the party's nearly over and someone will have to be paid" attitude toward our society's unquestioning consumption. The narrator and an interlocutor pull up to the drive-thru window, the moment when, in most of the works in TBQ, a narrator would make peace with Taco Bell and enjoy what corrupt enjoyment is available to us. But "TBQH" is too honest for that. Instead, it keeps questioning right up to the very end, asking, ominously, whether the window they're approaching is the window for picking up their order or the window for paying. 

Unironic kitsch

Most of the work in TBQ, though, is much more forgiving of Taco Bell than that. Maybe that's because for most of us, Taco Bell is the kind of restaurant we've spent more of our lives in than fancy, high-brow restaurants. For most writers, the journals that have published us are more like Taco Bell than the five-star Paris Review. Taco Bell is a more realistic setting and symbol of our lives than other places. Nearly all of us have eaten there, have memories there. Most of the work in TBQ is nostalgic about Taco Bell, because most of us, when it comes down to it, are nostalgic about our lives, even though our lives are as far away from the high art we hoped they'd be as Taco Bell is from real Mexican food. 

TBQ is about surviving in the reality of an ugly, corporate-driven world where not even art is free from the ugliness. There are a number of ways to enact that survival. For TBQ, it means eating the Crunchwrap Supreme of capitalism with both hands, selling merch (I really like the "I survived the poetry discourse" coffee mug) and constantly hustling for donations. TBQ is a statement that if we live in a world with Taco Bells in every town, then an artist has a right to find a way to thrive in that world, even if it means embracing the madness. Embracing the madness that is itself an enemy of art can become an act of beauty in itself. 

I don't know how long TBQ is going to keep growing. One problem it's already running into is that its own success means the the journal that partly sprang up as a reaction against rejection is now having to reject an awful lot of writers seeking to be published by it. Carrigan recently Tweeted that less than half of a percent of people submitting would be published, but writers should "live más" anyway. The journal is perhaps less counter-literary-establishment than one would expect. It reads like a lot of other queer-focused literary journals might read, with the exception that every volume is a themed volume about Taco Bell. There are limits to how revolutionary a literary journal can be and still be a literary journal, just like there are limits to how anti-capitalist anyone can be and still survive in a capitalist society. 

TBQ doesn't ignore or deny these limitations, though. They're there, but that's not a reason to give up. The journal is always on the edge of saying fuck it, let's give up. It's always a breath away from becoming Nihilist Arby's, but it never quite goes there. TBQ may have adopted Taco Bell's "Live Más" slogan as part of the joke, but somewhere along the way, both its staff and its contributors have somehow mostly imbibed the message for real. If a term had to be applied to the journal and the Twitter community growing around it as a movement, the term might be unironic kitsch. It's an aesthetic of trying to make real art and real sentiment out of garishness, because garishness is the only raw material the world offers us to work with.