A few months after I started LOSER* magazine, Conor Hultman started his own magazine called Loser. I got so fucking mad and texted everyone that I was so mad. Then he got reposted by Tao Lin, and I got even more mad because I was like, that should be me. Then when I was at a bar talking to someone from Archipelago books and was like “I started a magazine called LOSER,” she goes “Are you Conor?” and i go “No, fuck that guy, if I saw him in real life ima kill him.”
She said he was really nice.
I couldn’t let this slide. I found his substack and Dm’d him, “yo we got the same magazine name, haha crazy!” He said yeah and I said it would be funny to do an interview but really I had a plan. Me and the loser boy and boy and girl thought up a list of pranks to do to him during the interview like ask him for money, or show him a song I’m working on and ask if he likes it. Here’s the list if you wanna see.
I told him to pull up to the bar that no one likes where they treat us well. He said yes and I wide smiled cus i got his ass.
On the day of the interview it was pouring outside. After I set my shit up, I went to one of the regulars and told him I was gonna interview some guy I wanted to make look foolish, and if he could, in like forty five minutes, come ask us for money and he obliged. I waited nervously cus I hadn’t slept and didn’t feel funny and thought it was kind of retarded to do something like this. LOSER* kinda sucks, maybe. I wanted to get this over with and stop feeling stupid. A disheveled guy with no umbrella I figured was Conor came to the door near my seat and rattled the knob, but the door was locked. Idiot! Wrong door, I said, pointing, helping him, which was not the plan.
I greeted him at the bar and he ordered two beers, both for him. I thought it was nuts cus it was 4 PM. I also thought it was considerate cus he wouldn’t have to get up mid interview if he wanted a second. We chilled for a bit in a friendly way. Since I dm’d him he’d been reposting and liking all our shit, even the not funny stuff and got more people to like it. He low key made us feel like we could really do this shit, this magazine, and I felt like damn as I pressed record.
DAVID: I got to confess something. I low key knew you stole the name months ago. And I told someone that if I saw you in real life, I would kill you. I feel really guilty about that.
CONOR: I’d do the same thing. I didn’t even mean to do it. When I was making Loser, I was like it’s just gonna be called Loser. I’m not even gonna think about it. I didn’t expect there would be another Loser, something still alive.
DAVID: I mean, LOSER* was low-key dead. I got mad depressed and stopped doing it for a bit. I didn’t really know what I wanted LOSER* to be and what I was doing didn’t seem to be working. But recently I realized clout is powerful and a magazine is a clout pyramid I sit at the top of.
CONOR: It’s good that you brought it back at this time, because I feel like we could be kind of symbiotically useful to each other, because my magazine’s whole thing is that it’s only print; there’s no socials and nothing is online. I have people asking me “Where can I find out about this? What’s your website?” And now I can just kind of let them assume that we’re connected.
DAVID: I feel like we’re negotiating territory. Bloods n Crips. Are you saying you want the physical media and I can have online?
CONOR: I wouldn’t be so controlling if you made a print magazine.
DAVID: Thank you. I came here kind of aggressive, trying to win, and you’ve been nothing but gracious and nice.
CONOR: It’s funny, when I saw your website, I was like, “Oh wow, this is actually a real thing; the style’s good, and the writing’s good, and this guy’s in New York, he might come kick my ass.”
DAVID: Thank you. How would you describe your Loser?
CONOR: I’ll start off by saying that the way you can differentiate my Loser from David’s LOSER* MAGAZINE is that I never call Loser a magazine or a journal, and we don’t call them issues or volumes. It’ll just be Loser I, Loser II,or Loser VII, with Roman numerals, like Led Zeppelin albums. The concept is that when a submission call opens, any text that’s submitted to the email is accepted. No rejections. After it hits 200 pages, we close submissions and send it off to Lulu.com, this print-on-demand publisher, to print it. After I get my proof copy people can buy it for $12, and any time a new “loser” comes out, the previous one becomes permanently unavailable and the submission calls open for the next one.
DAVID: Why do u fuck with impermanence?
CONOR: Loser wasn’t an artistic quest or to make a role for myself, I just wanted to make a magazine that I could read. If you edited your magazine, you would know everything, you’ve already read it, so there’s no point in reading it.
DAVID: You’re totally ignorant of the content?
CONOR: I’ll skim through to make sure there’s not images and sometimes I’ll stop and read something by someone I know, but I don’t completely read each one.
DAVID: Do you actually publish everything? Is there a line you won’t cross?
CONOR: Try and guess.
DAVID: Slurs?
CONOR: That’s fine. Overt racism, also fine. Anything in the magazine isn’t necessarily something I agree with, because I didn’t solicit it, but I’ll publish it.
DAVID: What about someone’s home address, or personal info?
CONOR: That’s the line. Sometimes people aren’t clear about where their submission ends and their cover letter begins, they’ll put an email or phone number and it clips into the actual piece. One guy sent a story about a gardener with an address at the very end, like an auto-fiction thing, and I wasn’t sure if it was real. I talked to Mabel and we decided not to put it in, because we don’t respond to emails on the loser account, it’s a one-shot thing. What you submit is what you submit and you can’t take it back. Consider the submission like throwing something into a well, you can’t jump in and pull it back out. But yeah, I won’t consciously dox anyone, and I’d change it if that ever happened.
DAVID: Will you tell me where you live?
CONOR: I live near here, on Mulberry and Canal.I think the Chinese people would kill anyone that try to kill me.
DAVID: Do you like your magazine?
CONNOR: I like being surprised. It’s mostly been good stuff, but that’s probably because I’m friends with a lot of good writers online. I get the bad stuff too, because you don’t usually seek out bad writing. Sometimes someone with no followers sends in a 5,000-word story and it’s bad, but it’s fascinating to read. Where else would you get that?
DAVID: Do you write for your magazine?
CONOR: No, but I have a small haiku book that just came out.
DAVID: We should do a read from it.
CONOR: I’ll read one of these poems, it’s called “Pound Sign 1CBC14.”
David: Okay.
CONOR: “Rare bottle I calls. Fathom. Have science down. Love, window, gentle.”
DAVID: Maybe a different one.
CONOR: This one’s called “Pound Sign FFFFFFFFFF.” “Time, fortune, etc. Journey my romantic life.”
DAVID: Hm… Why do you write haikus, is it low-key easy?
CONOR: The book was easy to manufacture because I didn’t really write it. I used this item called Haiku’s that they sell at the bookstore I work at. It’s like a die, there’s 30 dice in the box and each side has a different word with different syllable counts. It’s supposed to inspire you to write your own original haiku, but instead I just made rules to use the dice to forcibly generate them. A lot of the background for both my books and Loser is this conceptual writing stuff, which is kind of born out of conceptual visual art, but the writing element of it has been prominent since the 1980s. Yeah, some of these writers, like Kenneth Goldsmith and Rob Fitterman and Vanessa Place, et cetera.
DAVID: Top three authors, off the top of your head. Go.
CONOR: Favorite poet, Apollinaire. Recently, honestly, Tao Lin. The current working writer that I’m most excited about is this guy, Calvin Westra.
DAVID: I love Tao Lin. I bought a white plastic macbook to write just like him. MUMBLECORE is one of my favorite movies. Have you seen it?
CONOR: I actually don’t watch movies.
DAVID: Damn.
CONNOR: I hate movies, except for the ones I like. It’s complicated.
DAVID: Same, I think movies are bad because the writing is bad. What movies do you like?
CONOR: My taste is really cringe. I like the original Blade Runner, Taxi Driver, Cannibal Holocaust, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The last movie I saw that felt genius and unappreciated was Skinamarink. Have you seen it?
DAVID: No.
CONOR: It’s this creepypasta, found-footage looking movie, made for like a million dollars or less. It’s mostly shots of the corners of rooms, these kids are trapped in a house, this entity killed their parents. You barely see a human, maybe two or three shots of a face in the whole thing, so when you do it freaks you out. Brilliant movie. I show it to people and they say it’s boring and gay.
DAVID: So you fuck with horror movies and sensitive young men.
CONOR: I like transgressive, violent stuff, but only when it’s elevated past shock value into something intelligent. Another one, The Piano Teacher.
DAVID: I love that movie.
CONOR: Isn’t it brilliant?
DAVID: The way you feel about violence, I feel about sex and erotic stuff.
CONOR: They’re interconnected. Cannibal Holocaust is disgusting gore and cruelty, not erotic to me personally, but they’re related somewhere in the middle. A lot of guys are into blood and horror, and some artistic women are into that too. Most women say it’s evil, how can you call this art, and then they love The Piano Teacher.
DAVID: I’m low-key a woman, bro. I’m so scared of blood and gore. I hate it. It’s so base. Love is mad noble.
CONOR: I see it differently, the base is always intertwined with the noble.
DAVID: Nevermind. I think you’re right. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
CONOR: I never know how to answer that. I can tell you a bad thing I did the other day. Two nights ago I’m at this reading at the River Bar. I’m sitting down before it starts, and this guy next to me points at my feet. Under the table leg is a bag of coke. I grab it, put it in my pocket, and he says “be careful with that, what you stole.” I don’t have test strips, I don’t know if it’s coke or meth or what. After intermission this little guy comes to the table and says “has anyone seen a bag of coke, I dropped it on my way out.” I said “what bag.” I was so glad he came back so I could say thank you for confirming it’s actually coke.
DAVID: Did you keep it?
CONOR: Yeah, I’ve been doing coke four days straight now, I feel like shit.
DAVID: You can atone. Would you give it back if he asked?
CONOR: If this guy hears this and recognizes himself, he can have it back.
DAVID: How much is even left?
CONOR: I already finished it.
DAVID: But if he likes and restacks this he can get a new one right?
CONOR: Yeah. Like and restack this and I’ll buy you another one.
DAVID: I’ll go half. I got you. You know I also stole. I stole the name LOSER MAGAZINE from my friends, who started another magazine. I love loser shit. I really like people’s desperate attempts at getting love and attention, and wanted to make something around that. I hope one day people will send me really embarrassing stuff. I love surprises like that.
CONOR: I love the surprises too, like this thing that happened in the upcoming issue, it ends with someone who sent an email from “Conor Hultman at gmail.com,” and the body was a message written in my voice, telling everyone to take the magazine, show a few pages to friends, keep showing it to them until one of them says no, then rip up and destroy those pages, and go find every copy anywhere and destroy those pages too, until Loser is really destroyed. I was like, what the fuck is this, I love this.
DAVID: Do you have any advice for LOSER to get more lit?
CONOR: Um, I would say what few boons I’ve had, like, the few things that I’ve done that have rewarded my personal creative endeavors, it’s been to just go to a lot of stuff and talk to people, go to readings and talk to people, and put in the unrewarded work of writing book reviews for people.
DAVID: I don’t know, I’ve, like, walked out of every single reading I’ve been to.
CONOR: Really? Yeah, I go to every reading and I stay for the whole time.
DAVID: Most of the time I’d rather be playing basketball12. I’m addicted to chilling.
CONOR: I’m not even gonna lie, I think it’s a way healthier impulse, both for a normal person and for an artist, to be like, “I think I’d rather do drugs or play basketball than reading.” I think I’m autistic in a way that I’m interested in these communities so thoroughly that I just go to readings. I don’t hang out with people, I just go to read.
DAVID: Loser shit.
CONOR: I agree completely. That’s why I was attracted to this too, being invested in the literary community. Everyone’s a loser eventually, you live because you die, you should be humble.
DAVID: How much money do you have?
CONOR: Right now like forty bucks.
DAVID: Wait lemme see your ID… you’re from Mississippi? What’s that like?
CONOR: Mississippi’s naturalistically beautiful. I’ve spent the most time in the northern part which is sometimes hilly and closer socially to Tennessee. Then we have the delta, which is like rolling banks of clay and stuff. Lush, fertile soil.
DAVID: Is it, like, gun world? Have you shot a gun before?
CONOR: Yeah, I’ve shot pistols and 12-gauges, with my uncle, who’s a gun nut. I probably could have shot a lot more if my mom wasn’t so super liberal.
DAVID: Nice, I think guns are super cool. I don’t want to lie, I shot a gun for the first time two years ago and I was so scared because I never had the power to make things disappear by just pointing at them. I think shooting guns is good cus you should know how you react to power.
CONOR: Exactly, I like the fear that someone else could do that to me. That’s why it’s almost better that my uncle is a gun nut, he bought starter rifles for his kids and has a range on his property and trained them to shoot young. But that’s what people used to do for hundreds of years; you’re showing them it’s a tool for hunting and recreation, teaching them to handle it safely so they’re not irrationally afraid of it, because there are tools that can kill you everywhere, like cars. Cars scare me more.
DAVID: Okay final question. Do you think you’re a loser?
CONOR: Yeah, I think we’re all losers. Everyone has to die, and I wish there was a way around that, but it’s a relief too, the supreme schadenfreude that everyone dies. So if anyone does better than me, they’re worm food eventually too.
DAVID: True. Plug your shit.
CONOR: Loser and LOSER* MAGAZINE are closely related, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
DAVID: You can find Conor Hultman’s Loser on his X profile, @conorhultman, and his Substack, and his co-editor Mai Bell is on Instagram at @barley_clown.
CONOR: Find David’s Loser Magazine @imaloseronline, Twitter, Substack. Follow everybody.
Devin: david doesn’t actually play basketball. When he played with me he got crossed up by a woman and the teens at seward park laughed at me.
Liam: at East River Park I once dribbled the ball through David’s legs twice before scoring a left-handed layup and laughing in his face. And then he left the park to go break up with his girlfriend. So he does play sometimes.