With the release of Unreal’s latest book concluded, many are asking: what’s next for this indie press? You might have seen around our polemic on the L.A and New York alt-lit scene. Or the Frater-Daniel debates. Or Phil Rot’s satirical ‘how-to’ on what you should absolutely (not) do if you want to write a book. You might even know us from our Tales of the Unreal series, a pocket magazine for sci-fi and horror short fiction in the tradition of Weird Tales (we’re still accepting submissions by the way).

Long story short, we’ve decided we like it here on Substack. So much in fact, that we will now be running non-fiction articles on a more frequent basis. Daniel Gavilovski, author of Carbon Pages and longtime contributor, is joining the Press as co-editor with Jace Shugden and Rhyme Henry Davis.

What are we looking for? Unreal Press was born on 4chan’s /lit/ and though it’s changed over the years, we carry it in our hearts to this day. In the spirit of internet underground, we want your most interesting takes, pieces you wouldn’t dare send to more refined publications. We like the weird. Want to pitch us a ten thousand multi-piece ethnography of Isidore Ducasse? Why not. An argument that the state should restrict ownership of pets to licenced aristocrats? Or a review of Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (published 1896, out of print 1921)? Now, we’re not easily shocked, so don’t bother peacocking. What impresses us is a sharpness of style, voice, and uniqueness of character. Show us that and we shall publish. We have few strict thematic restrictions, but we like art and literature (duh) and if you send us a piece on AI or emerging technologies it will be in our inbox for eight months before anyone reads it.

If this sounds like you reach us at unrealpressandpodcast@proton.me

We also want to start paying contributors. They deserve it and, frankly, it makes for more interesting writings when the author knows that his or her time is valued. But in order to do this we need a nest egg. Because we’re, like, poor. Basically. Two of our zoomer editors are NEETs. We’d like to make an uncomfortable solicitation and that’s to consider a paid subscription. It’s 8 dollars a month for what will be some terrific content from the most interesting voices on the internet. As of writing this we have exactly zero paid subscribers. Not for nothing, we haven’t exactly advertised or offered perks. But from now on patrons will receive exclusive articles.

Thanks for being with us, guys and gals.

- Rhyme Henry Davis
- Daniel Gavilovski
- Jace Shugden

Jace Shugden

There’s a lot of talk these days about the “burgeoning”1 alt-lit scene on the west coast of the United States of America. Traditionally, in the 20th century, the United States was the manufacturer of much great literature. One such famous writer who came from “America,” for example, was Ernest Hemingway. Now, Rolling Stone magazine writes of the ‘Anti-Woke’ Literary Scene in L.A, and parties in Echo Park bring in attractive gals looking to snag themselves a real-life writer for bragging rights on their socials.

New York, a city in the midst of the rise of philistinism, mental laziness and consensus addiction is too grasping at some kind of good old days of erudition. Fran Lebowitz once said that in the 70s the audiences were erudite. So erudite that during a usual rendition if a ballerina pointed a pinkie this way instead of that way you could hear a wave of disgust wash through the auditorium. AIDs by the way, so she says, did away with this level of cultural discernment. All the artists who fucked a lot (see: the most interesting) kicked the bucket. Then followed the audience. For all their parties and flirtations and think pieces, LA and New York in 2026 seem to lack one thing that actually makes for a virile literary scene: good books. All these releases — Digital Exhaust, My First Book, Stop All The Clocks — burn bright for about a week, at best a month or two, while it’s trendy to pretend you’ve read it or will read it in order to temporarily Platinum Boost your viability in the sexual flea market. And this seems enough for the writers of Prospects Heights, Echo Park, Chinatown NY, and Koreatown LA!

To them it’s simply a status game. I have not met a single coastal writer in all this time who likes reading books more than they like scrolling X. Who truly cares about perfecting the written word, sharpening character, story, qualia. Let’s be real for a second, if it wasn’t books, it would be almost anything else. So where do we look to? The heartland? Appalachia? The Great Lakes? No, this is still all Rome, characterized by its negation of the coasts. Then abroad? Canada? The Australian outback? I’ve been hearing about this Jack Norman character? Lewis Woolston is Australian right? Warmer, but we must go further still — smaller, more obscure. We must reach the atomic level, where fame and status are not even blips on the horizon, where writing is art pour l’art. Undiluted by contaminants like fame, women, or hopes of any sort. You know, I often think of Sam Kahn, whose brilliant Republic of Letters functions as an agora of discussion and critique. Do you think he takes the L train through the Cranberry tunnel like Ross Barkan of the Metropolitan Review? A little off the mark. Sam operates from Kyrgyzstan

I’ve been thinking recently of Latvia. Yes, Latvia. The first and final dream of Oscar Wilde. It’s this humble Baltic country in the north of eastern Europe, in fact, from where hails the author of Carbon Pages, a debut collection of three very different stories. “Okay…Latvia isn’t that bad, I guess. I hear Riga has nice architecture”. I’m not talking about Riga! This author lives in a tiny provincial city, with no cultural scene, a population that is overwhelmingly over 50s (the young people have died or immigrated to Germany), and not a single incentive for a young man to choose writing as a vocation, none that is except obsession (not love, not respect, OBSESSION) with the artform.

This is a place that supposedly receives three days of sunshine a year, has no jobs, alcoholism is the only past time, and eviscerated Soviet era buildings bookend concrete khrushevkas. The population here is overwhelmingly Russian, and they pray each day for a Russian invasion. It might improve things. Daugavpils is not exactly the centre of the Roman Empire. But maybe the centre, in this epoch we find ourselves in, cannot hold. Instead of “burgeoning” “scenes” that are “growing”, we need artists from interesting places who have something new to say. Anyway, here’s an excerpt from this author from his book Carbon Pages

I say unto thee it was the summer of plump behinds and florets in the sun on the air of titanium railways. It was the summer of tanktops. It was the summer of water rills shining in the sand under the volleyball nets. It was the summer of detours and tag. It was the summer of pretty girls who crossed their legs on the curb. In those days I’d run with them on the sand and when I’d get tired I’d lay and stringy grass would print gravings on my skin.

BLUE SUIT: Would you prefer we speak en vi or skip straight to ti? It’s your choice.

YOUNG MAN: I don’t speak ti with strangers.

BLUE SUIT: Too right.

The man in the blue suit unfurls some files and papers on his desk. He almost looks as if he’s about to ask a question, looks up, and then decides against it, and pretends to autograph some papers. Finally he looks up:

BLUE SUIT: Do you know where you are?

YOUNG MAN: Yes.

BLUE SUIT: Where do you think you are?

YOUNG MAN: In the KGB.

BLUE SUIT: What is your name?

YOUNG MAN: Igor.

BLUE SUIT: Patronymic?

YOUNG MAN: Fyodorvich.

BLUE SUIT: Okay, Igor Fyodorvich. My name is Aleksei. Now that we’re no longer strangers would it be preferable on your part that we skip to ti?

YOUNG MAN: No.

BLUE SUIT: Do you think you have reason to be in the KGB, as you say?

YOUNG MAN: No.

BLUE SUIT: Well you’re almost correct, Igor Fyodorvich Letov. Almost, in that the KGB as such does not exist. What exists is the State Security Committee. Correct, in that you are in it.

The officer in the blue suit takes a look at his file.

BLUE SUIT: So you’re from Omsk originally. What are you doing in Moscow?

YOUNG MAN: Studying.

BLUE SUIT: Yet you’ve been occupying your time otherwise, haven’t you?

YOUNG MAN: I don’t know.

BLUE SUIT: I get the impression you’re a clever young man, Igor. You wouldn’t want to lose your spot in the Young Leninist League would you?

YOUNG MAN: I’m not in the komsomol. I was kicked out a year ago.

BLUE SUIT: But you’re a Soviet Man aren’t you?

YOUNG MAN: Yes.

BLUE SUIT: Then you want to help your fellow citizen?

YOUNG MAN: I want to get out of here. My mother will be worried.

BLUE SUIT: That’s alright—your mother knows you’re with us. Are you engaged in the smuggling of contraband into Soviet territory?

YOUNG MAN: No.

BLUE SUIT: Did you willfuly intercept a cache of audio devices on April the 28th?

YOUNG MAN: No, I—

BLUE SUIT: You run this outfit.

YOUNG MAN: No I...don’t.

BLUE SUIT: Who runs this outfit? And before you answer I must say that I already know absolutely everything in detail. Your statement is only needed for my paperwork.

YOUNG MAN: Just fake it.

BLUE SUIT: The State Security Committee fakes nothing.

YOUNG MAN: I don’t know who runs it. I don’t know a single thing, you filth.

BLUE SUIT: If the only thing differentiating your statement is namecalling that won’t reflect so well on you, Igor!

Igor locks eyes with the officer and disengages his bladder as the warm smell of urine fills the interrogation room. That night he’s taken underground, where four soldiers lock him in a cell and beat him half way to ischemia.

Before he knows it, the young man Igor is in a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Moscow, being led down a white corridor by a lanky four-eyed doctor behind and a middle aged pudgy babushka in front. Some years ago she was a thin starlet.

PUDGY NURSE: This is where you and your comrades can watch the television. They’re watching Fanfan la Tulipe. Have a seat.

Fanfan La Tulipe followed a swashbuckling swordsman in his romances and fights with duplicitous monarchs. It was an old adventure film, imported from France.

IGOR LETOV: Lady—

PUDGY NURSE: —Who, me?

IGOR LETOV: When—

PUDGY NURSE: I wouldn’t consider myself lady exactly, Igor. I may be old but I’m not that old.

IGOR LETOV: I didn’t mean—

PUDGY NURSE: Do you always call young women lady? Do you call your sister lady?

IGOR LETOV: I’m sorry.

PUDGY NURSE: Have a seat.

IGOR LETOV: Please. When will I get out of here?

PUDGY NURSE: You’ll get out when you’re feeling better. It’s prisons that have sentences.

IGOR LETOV: But I think I’m all well now. I just had a lapse of reason. My mother will be worried about me.

PUDGY NURSE: If you’re well then I’m sure the doctor will share the same prognosis next week.

It’s a spacious room with windows barred in the shape of sunrays, and in one corner there’s a caged television watched by patients. I’m watching too but personally I always prefer the spectacle of people. Igor has a seat next to a lardass in the centre row. Letov must be the youngest man in the building.

There’s some sort of public service announcement playing:

TELLY: Parents! Expert research tells us that to limit mental fatigue and to ensure the proper intellectual development of the mind one must limit a child’s exposure to advertising media. You wouldn’t let your child smoke! A day of commercials does to your child’s brain what a cigarette does to their body!

There is no ward for juveniles, nor is there separation between the delinquents from the truly deranged. Suddenly a voice beckons the kid from way behind.

VOICE: Hey.

IGOR LETOV: What?

VOICE: Can you lend a smoke?

IGOR LETOV: Me?

VOICE: You. What room are you in?

IGOR LETOV: Down there on the left.

VOICE: You’re with the chronic masturbator?

IGOR LETOV: I don’t know.

VOICE: What’s your name?

IGOR LETOV: Igor.

VOICE: I’m Alexander. Good to meet you.

He’s a skinny young boy, maybe the same age as him, with a shaved head. They shake hands.

ALEXANDER: Let’s go over here. I can’t hear myself think.

They sit by the windows.

ALEXANDER: Every day they beam some shit. But they won’t allow a single book request.

IGOR LETOV: They have a library.

ALEXANDER: Not those kinds of books... You really have to wonder how stupid someone has to be to enjoy the rot they put on. But y’know, in a way, I sympathize—our neighbours are subhuman. The realities of the world as-is would make them cross-eyed so they have to distract themselves with shadows on the wall.

IGOR LETOV: How long have you been here?

ALEXANDER: I don’t count anymore.

IGOR LETOV: Why are you in?

ALEXANDER: On account of my insanity.

IGOR LETOV: I got nabbed for 8-tracks.

ALEXANDER: Don’t confess to me. I could be KGB.

IGOR LETOV: Fuck them.

Alexander hoists up to sit on the window sill.

ALEXANDER: What is an 8-track?

IGOR LETOV: It plays songs. Like cassettes. The westerners are so much more advanced in this stuff.

ALEXANDER: They always are.

IGOR LETOV: Yeah?

ALEXANDER: They always will be.

IGOR LETOV: For sure.

ALEXANDER: It’s all our guys do is chase fads like a dog with a tail. Who knows what we’ll adopt in a hundred years.

IGOR LETOV: Maybe loafers that aren’t shit.

ALEXANDER: Right yes. Ha, maybe loafers that aren’t shit. Exactly. Or music. Personally I’ve always found The Beatles quite evocative.

IGOR LETOV: Everyone likes The Beatles. It’s old news. Ever hear of The Rolling Stones?

Dugin is a bit taken aback that Letov effectively called his taste old, but he doesn’t show it and, anyway, he quite likes that this kid has brains of his own.

ALEXANDER: Yes, I’ve read their magazine.

IGOR LETOV: Want to hear a song?

ALEXANDER: From The Rolling Stones?

IGOR LETOV: No from me.

ALEXANDER: Okay.

IGOR LETOV: It’s a romance.

ALEXANDER: I’m sorry to say you need a guitar to play a romance, and here guitars are considered demagogic.

IGOR LETOV: Don’t need no guitar.

He picks up a violin and places it on his lap like you’d do a guitar and then he starts plucking it like a six-string.

IGOR LETOV: Okay. Let’s see...one two three...

And he belts this ballad with a puffed chest:

IGOR LETOV: I see her rise from her knees—my Motherland!
I see her rise from her ashes—oh my Motherland!
I hear her sing—oh my splendid Motherland!

My holy Motherland straightens her back
Our wrathful power moves mountains

The sun’s tattoo
In this deadliest cold, in this nadir of night.

Both the young boys are grinning ear to ear at each other and Igor continues:

IGOR LETOV: I see her rise from her knees—my Motherland!
I see her rise from her ashes—my Motherland!
Scolding does she burn in me—my Motherland!
I hear her sing—oh my wonderful beautiful Soviet Motherland!

Dugin laughs and applauds the bard, and there’s even some claps from the other patients who turned their head to see.

NURSE: Boys—quit making fools of yourself. Give that instrument the respect it deserves or put it down.

ALEXANDER: The guards here are no fun.

IGOR LETOV: Are you scared?

ALEXANDER: Of what—this place?

IGOR LETOV: Yeah, of this place.

ALEXANDER: I think of it as a sanatorium.

Igor considers this for a moment. Then he considers if Alexander is really insane like he says, and decides that he’s not. So he says:

IGOR LETOV: Listen. I’ve been eyeing the bars on my window. They’re steel but the sill is chipped.

ALEXANDER: Right.

IGOR LETOV: I think we can break it but I need your help. We need to find something steel and sharp. Are you with me?

ALEXANDER: Sure.

IGOR LETOV: First step is we start collecting towels. We have to figure out how often the laundry—

The nurse calls out for Dugin:

NURSE: Alexander Dugin? Your father is here.

A towering grey man enters the psychiatric room. Alexander’s father wears a pristine navy suit with war medals adorning the lapels. Uttering no words and wearing an expression of grief and pity, he takes his son away and out the door of the psychiatric hospital. But before he does this, the boy turns and says to his ex-cellmate:

ALEXANDER: Listen. Once you’re out of here why don’t we share a drink? I live on Nevskaya Street. Third podyest, third floor.

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I appreciate my human ability to adapt to any environment. But each adaptation is an exchange. My body has traded certain functions in order to adapt to Gainesville, Florida. I no longer sweat through my clothes within five minutes of being outside, I no longer need to moisturize with thick lotion, the Florida sun no longer leaves long black scars on my face and arms, those scary melasmas I thought were cancer. But when I return to North Carolina I feel like a creature that’s become too used to life in captivity. Here I am in a colder, drier climate. Without a fingertip deep layer of Aquaphor my lips split open and bleed, the skin on my face flakes. It is winter so the cold drops my body temperature and I spend weeks coughing up heavy yellow lumps of coal. And the people? I am seeing the people as if through a VR headset. They speak different, they’re nicer, they have little dialogue trees I have to click through before I can leave the store/shop/restaurant. I sense during my visits that I am quickly becoming a rootless man, that I can call no place mine.

Drastic things. I do drastic things to cure my boredom. I guess it is a privilege. A week ago they held a town council in my neighborhood. Hosted by something called the Another Chance Foundation, an organization that helps Formerly Incarcerated Persons reintegrate into society. Here is, by the way, the third space. A tonic for the atomization people say is forced upon them. Genuine community participation is easy, free, and abundant.

The meeting, which is a chapter launch for Another Chance Foundation, takes place in the same Activity Center I used to work in. Down the street from where I grew up. One of the attendees is a city councilman, who tells us that he built this auditorium many decades ago. It’s impressive from the outside; this massive brick and mortar addition, one of the newer buildings in the city despite being thirty years old. But inside, it is cheap activity tables, a leaky ceiling, ten boxes of chicken and biscuits cooling on a cheap white table.

Another Chance is managed by felons, it is staffed with lawyers who were formerly incarcerated, politicians who’ve been inside. It’s inspiring, it makes me feel like there’s no rock bottom a man cannot crawl up from.

And these men and women have found every kind of rock bottom. There is a boy so young1 that until he spoke I thought he must be somebody’s son. He’s currently staying at the shelter. What could he have done to be so young without a home, does he not have a mother? It’s like I’ve forgotten what I know about life. That most people lack that firm foundation which gives them a home anywhere. That many young adults are pushed out of their parent’s homes without having a felony, and most American parents can’t afford to put their kid up in an apartment half a state away. His circumstance is not difficult to understand, and worst of all it is replicable. There must be a hundred thousand of him.

The man from the Another Chance Foundation is white, and he apologizes for that misfortune of his birth. See, he did an armed robbery with two other guys, both black. He got 6 months with three months time served, and his accomplices got 5 and 7 years. Whether his feelings are genuine or he’s simply using a rhetorical technique to break down defensive walls in a room full of blacks, I knew then that I was not going to be able to have a clean experience here.

There is a man come down from Boston, arrested a dozen times, a victim he says of a wrathful and vindictive person. Never convicted but the arrests are enough, he has come half a country and still found no place to be. One of the leaders of the gathering is a former crack addict who gave birth to twins while incarcerated. Everyone’s in the denouement of a tragic arc and they hope it’s over, that this is the last one.

Sure these things should break my heart, but as I sat there I only had two thoughts.

First;

In this attempt to humanize the formerly incarcerated, these people have staged a morality play whose message is that you are allowed to hate the formerly incarcerated. The Formerly Incarcerated are selfish, they are egotistical, they are entitled. These are qualities shared by most if not all people, but my readers may be upset to know these fundamental defects in personality have not been wrung from them. Americans believe that once you have been dressed in DOC browns you forfeit the right to think very highly of yourself. To carry yourself like normal people do is to commit the worst of all faux pas, to be uppity. The Formerly Incarcerated buck against this expectation more than anything.

There is a man with knuckle tats who has a table to himself before I take a seat next to him; he is the only white person at this meeting2. During introductions he stands himself on his cane and says he’s new to the area (most people here are) and that he’s tired of “everybody looking at him and talking to him like he ain’t nothing.” Well isn’t that the root of all pain. But I’m thinking, mind saturated with that liberal indoctrination, is he’s the only person to vocalize such a thought because for everyone else here it is an ambient feeling. The feeling that people don’t think you’re nothing is one that preceded their incarceration, the only real change is that some people who used to treat them like people now look at them as if they’re some kind of off leash pitbull. However, he’s a country white person. I know a great deal of these people, and they all have this preoccupation with not getting the respect they deserve. It’s a black preoccupation but it is also a Southern preoccupation. An Appalachian preoccupation. So what’s changed for him? And what are those tattoos hidden by his shirtsleeve? Were there segregated cars where he did time? What’s brought this stranger to my neighborhood to commiserate with all these black felons? What’s new?

For one, he has lost the ability to solicit sympathy from his fellow whites with such a phrase. Well son, you shouldn’t have shot that guy. Don’t act like a nigger and society won’t treat you like one. He has moved to a new state and let loose his history and found that even here he is a dog because of one or six mistakes he made when he lived another life. One or six mistakes he’s sure to make again if this new place keeps him at arm’s length like his old place did.

And why shouldn’t it? This is not a rhetorical question. The most passionate of all people here, a man, squat, bald, dressed in Izod and ECKO like a living SLAM Magazine cover, exposits his many efforts to speak with the local district attorney. He’s got a good cause; he wants to bring certain reentry programs to our city, programs that have worked very well elsewhere and will give felons an honest chance at rehabilitation. But he’s been stonewalled. And he’s been stonewalled because the DA holds an opinion that most Americans will be sympathetic to; she won’t work with violent or sexual offenders. But, says Mr. SLAM, didn’t Moses kill a man? Didn’t Paul persecute Christians? God uses all kinds. But his pleas run up against that same obstinance anyway.

You might think it’s easy to truck with these old church people, as long as you’ve got decent knowledge of the Bible. A sin is a sin before God. You are either God, or you are not Good. Whether you’ve killed a man or had premarital sex, you are equally unclean. But oftentimes that Christian dogma dies in front of people’s reflexive disgust. They’re disgusted at the prospect of dedicating funds and manpower to enrich people who’ve committed crimes. Every man can be cleansed by the blood of Jesus. But Christian Dogma dies in front of people’s desire to do what they want. What they want is to punish felons forever. There are people who believe fully in Christ’s message of forgiveness, but they are not in the DA’s office.

That’s why this meeting becomes almost immediately an airing of grievances. A chance to commiserate. Because what’s the purpose of all this pretty rhetoric if you know it will be swept easily aside ? What’s the point of campaigning for record expungements and legal debt forgiveness, if out on the street you will always be that dog off a leash.

At the end of the party I revert to my base form, kind of a beggar. Can I have a job? Hey, can I have a job? Hey, I’m so so passionate about that organization you mentioned, are they hiring? At some earlier point I was caught up in that swell of emotions. But I am free now. This is a gathering of 23 of society’s worst off, led by a trio of insincere social climbers who wish to wield the mass of our country’s Formerly Incarcerated as a club. Out of one side of their mouths they preach class consciousness, out the other they admonish people who can’t spare eight hours on a Saturday for unpaid training. They point at racial awareness but quickly pave over the reality of our City’s leadership being majority black, including the conservative DA’s office that won’t help them. They brought Bojangles that was cold by the time people arrived. They speak in a pantomime of MLK’s cadence. They are in fact speaking over each other, saying different things, pushing different stories. Their standout achievements are from fifteen years and three administrations ago. And these people aren’t even from here. Setting up a colony in this dying city to extract its last bit of political capital.

But maybe I don’t believe any of that. When the woman speaks of giving birth in jail, of being chained to the floor while in labor, she has been sincerely affected by that experience. She has built her life around ensuring it never happens to anyone again. This woman is not a liar, but can she do anything here? By the end of the night half the people are just waiting for her to finish talking.

Second thought;

God. I should go to prison. No this isn’t a new idea. But it resurfaced while we were introducing ourselves and I was the least of all people. I was simply a man3 from the neighborhood. I am not a felon, nor am I some community leader like the Pastors and City Councilmen who are otherwise gathered here. I told an organizer, the apologetic one, that I am a soldier, just a soldier, point me in a direction. But really I am a voyeur.

This is not my first experience with the formerly incarcerated. It could not be, given where I am from. Years ago I was a park manager. Renting out shelters, sweeping up litter, slotting in at the pool. During the summer we get loiterers. The idea that you can loiter in a public park seems distinctly American, but we were told to keep an eye on people who hung around without paying for something. One kid was there every day during work hours, Facetiming different women.

Armed robbery. He was 17 when he went in and 22 when he got out. He had nothing; no job, no money, no car. He hung around my building to leech wifi and beg snacks. We let him, even when he came on strong with female customers. Why? For me I was happy to do easy charity. With a six pack of oreos, a bag of doritos, and a bottle of water, I could give alms at no cost to me. I can do my acts of forgiveness when this man, who has already drained so much pity from me, comes back with a domestic violence charge. Well, it wasn’t me he strangled. It isn’t my sister he’s calling a bitch. So here’s a bag of takis.

Association with this man makes me feel like a realer person. On the 4th of July we host a cookout for the workers. He shows up for the food. Tells the Pool Manager when to turn the chicken breasts. I try to be cool, I offer him a pill. He doesn’t take it. I take it and an hour later I climb a tree and fall out of it onto my ass. He asks me if I have autism or if this is just how country people are. There is a woman at the cookout with an eye like a burst grape. The skin around it is swollen, green where most of her is high yellow. Of the four men here with me, eating, talking, chaining Parliaments, I am the only one without a record. I am clearly not like these men, even intoxicated I feel that. What they have that I do not are hard limits on their lives. They grow within these bounds, weeds through concrete.

Where then is my arc? The man who only got 6 months for armed robbery said I could be useful despite my lack, because an organization like this one needs the weight of people who genuinely care for the Formerly Incarcerated. Those sympathetic to the cause. Isn’t that the perfect role? I am sympathetic to so many causes. So many tragedies I can do little more than sit and watch. Show up to outreach events. Speak when they open the floor for public comments. Yet this does not feel like action. This does not feel like structure, this does not feel like blowing up the world. Am I any more an agent of change, a man of action, than I am when sitting at home, watching people die everywhere? Is this, my home, any more like to react to me than the worlds that exist in my computer and on my television?

I do not believe people who say they want a more connected world yet sit at home on their screens, and I do not believe people who post Pew Research charts; look at how few people go out, look at how little sex they have, look at how little they drink and party and live. I believe you people are wrapping yourselves in infographics to validate and valorize doing what you are naturally inclined to do, which is nothing. And so I go out into the street, I peel away a few anecdotes from the provinces. I would like to help but I do not think I can. This is like being a haint.

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I’m Phil Rot, a famous author. In this business, you rub elbows with a lot of aspiring novelists. The sad truth is that most of them have yet to finish a first draft. They’re still plotting things out, or “building the lore,” or creating outrageously extensive character profiles.

Maybe you’ve tried before but gave up halfway. Or perhaps you wrote it, but nobody’s read it. I get it, it’s hard to finish stuff, and it sucks when, after years of hard work, nobody reads it anyway.

Do you find yourself in one of these predicaments? This article is for you. I, Phil Rot, author of The Raft and The Moon is Gay, am going to give you all the tools you need to crank out something spectacular within the next six months to a year, TOPS, something you will love and something other people will love to read.

Sound crazy? It’s not. It’s science.

Prerequisites:

A good novel contains four ingredients: an interesting character, a good title, stuff happening, and compulsive intent. I’ll get into what I mean by this shortly.

Not Prerequisites:

Good writing, fleshed out characters, proper punctuation, or a college education. Whatever you think about what is considered “good” literature, toss it in the trash. You are not Hemingway, and why would you want to be? He’s only required reading because he was Fed.

Cormac, F. Scott, Salinger, Orwell, all spooks and spies, compromised in some way, likely sexually. Don’t fall for the “prestige” trap. Unless you’re a pawn in some intelligence agency’s zany scheme, you will never be honored in the halls of academia.

With that out of the way:

An Interesting Character

You’re going to need ONE interesting character. What is an interesting character? It’s the type of person you meet once at a party in High School, never again, and still remember to this day.

A best friend, a worst enemy, some weird motherfucker you can’t seem to forget, the shitty ex-boyfriend you still can’t get over, that heroin addicted girl you almost made out with at a noise show, and you still cyberstalk to this day (you can still save her). THAT’S your main character.

Do it right now, think of someone who got stuck in your brain. Don’t worry so much about the supporting characters; you just need one captivating personality.

In my latest novel, The Moon is Gay, I made myself the main character. That’s sometimes the best option, and requires very little imagination.

Whatever you do, DO NOT try to create interesting people out of thin air. They should be from your REAL LIFE. Or at least exist in real life. Just change their name, or don’t and defame them! I recommend the latter option.

I know what I’m talking about here. Read Confederacy of Dunces, it’s just 400 pages of one interesting character.

Book Title

Come up with an arresting title. It will come to you at some point in the week. Some combination of words that fucks with you all day.

The best titles are the kind that make you go, “What the fuck is this?” Mickey Arnold Mouse. That’s a good one. Or, Throat Animals in Paradise. How about Deformity Orgy?

So many authors make the mistake of choosing a bland or generic title, stuff like Sparrow’s Wing, or Wind of Roses. Not you. You will come up with a unique title that makes people want to know what the fuck it is.

Stuff happening

Stuff has to happen. Writing pretty sentences about nothing happening is a surefire way to ensure that NO ONE finishes your book.

There should be stuff happening in EVERY CHAPTER. If you’re writing a scene and you find yourself getting bored, ABANDON SHIP. Think of something that will fuck EVERYTHING UP immediately.

Modern writers often mistake atmospheric observations for plot. Not you, you’re not trying to impress MFA dorks, you’re authentic, base, inconsiderate, real. That’s why we love you.

Don’t overthink it, DONT get clever. Just pick the first thing that comes to mind. It could be as banal as snooping through a lover’s Twitter DMs while they’re in the shower, or watching a family member get beheaded by the Korean mafia.

Every once in a while, you can give your main character a break, but all the while, there should be a storm brewing in the back of their head.

Also, no matter what kind of world you want your character to exist in, never let the world overshadow the stuff happening. Treat it as a backdrop only. Avoid exposition like the plague.

Compulsive Intent

You need this novel to do something selfish, forceful, furious. What is your compulsive intent? It’s time to imbue the novel with divine will!

The Exercise:

1. Define Your Demand: Write down, in a single, raw sentence, one selfish, furious thing you demand this novel to accomplish. This is your core intent.

2. Strip the Vowels: Remove all vowels (A, E, I, O, U) from this sentence.

3. Purge the Repeats: Remove every letter that appears more than once. The remaining letters are the pure, energetic core of your intent.

4. Forge the Sigil: Turn the remaining letters into a single, abstract graphic—a magic sigil. It must be simple, sharp, and forceful.

5. Charge the Intent: Write that sigil on a piece of paper. Stare at it. Masturbate. Focus all your resentment, desire, and mania into the drawing until you cum…

6. Sever and Commit: Crumple the paper, seal it in a jar, bury it, or burn it. Forget the sigil’s purpose immediately. Your subconscious has the blueprint now. Your novel is no longer yours; it is a servitor executing a command.

This is a very vibey aspect of the process, but crucial. Whatever it is, your main character will be the conduit. Let your shadow, the you that you hide from the world, drive the bus.

The Process

Every day, for AT LEAST thirty minutes, you’re going to open up Google Docs and write. You will use the Heading option to separate your chapters. If your novel doesn’t have chapters, then it better be really fucking interesting.

At the bottom of your document, insert a heading titled “Characters and Stuff.” Here, each time you introduce a new character or something, you will write down their name and a brief description. This way, you won’t lose track of your cast.

How long should your chapters be? Short. Very short. Generally. It should only be as long as the stuff happening. Some stuff happens longer than other stuff. Try to keep it brief.

Keep this in mind: people feel a sense of accomplishment every time they finish a chapter. Don’t make them wait. Get in, and get out before things get stale.

As for style, the simpler, the better. Make sure, first and foremost, that people know what the fuck is going on. Metaphors and similes are alright, but often not worth the effort.

Pro tip: If you struggle to find the right word for something, just make one up.

The Plot

The plot is inconsequential. Every story has been told. What people want is a main character that holds their attention–and more importantly, it should hold YOUR attention.

Does the character enthrall you? Are you compelled to make horrible/beautiful/terrifying things happen to them, or through them?

Let the story unfold. Don’t plot it out too much. Think about it while you’re scrubbing toilets or salting the fries. The best ideas come in the middle of something exhaustingly monotonous.

Don’t ever shy away from drawing material from real life. Base the stuff on your parents’ divorce, or some humiliation you suffered in elementary school, or a betrayal, or a romantic weekend in Stockton, or a toxic relationship, or the loss of a loved one. This is the stuff that stuff happening is made of.

A good imagination is unnecessary when you have real life right in front of you to pull from.

You’ll instinctively sense when you’ve made it to the end of the story. Don’t try to make it clever. End it abruptly, who gives a shit? Have it end with two dogs stuck together.

Don’t Stop

You will always have at least half an hour to carve out of your day, maybe more. You will begin to enjoy it, even look forward to it. If you don’t, you need a more interesting character.

Don’t think about what the reader will want. This is a very common mistake. It has to be what you want, end of story.

Vomit it out, all the pain, desire, hatred, love, resentment, fear, all of it, let it come out like a spray of hot shit.

As much as you can, avoid the temptation to read your story from the beginning. Don’t read it at all. Just GO! GO! GO!

It’s Been Six Months

You should be getting close to the finish line, if not already past it. Great job. Oh, it’s only 27,000 words? Who gives a shit?

Anything with chapters is a book. Some people will tell you otherwise, but they’re not going to buy your book anyway, so fuck ‘em.

Editing Your First Draft

It’s time to edit your book. This part might seem like it sucks, but once you start, it can actually be super addicting–some authors get lost in it forever, so be careful.

The best way to do this is to have it read to you by Speechify or another text-to-speech program. As you read along, listen for clunky sentences; these are the things that make you go, “hmmm, that sounds kinda dumb.”

Every time you hit a bump in the road, pause your novel and mess around with the sentence until it sounds right to you. Sometimes saving a sentence or paragraph is more trouble than it’s worth; just delete it.

Repeat this process two or three more times. If you’ve written a shorter novel, congratulations, you just made your job ten times easier. Aren’t you glad you wrote a snappy 35k-word novel?

Time for Critique

You’ve polished it off like one of those smooth, Japanese dorodango balls. You’d rather kill yourself than have to revise it again. It’s finally time for some feedback.

I know it’s scary, but you gotta get some other people’s eyes on this thing. Pro tip: give it to someone who you KNOW will like it. This is your target audience after all, people who will like it.

Ask them what worked and what didn’t. Nothing more. If you agree with some part of their critique, make the necessary changes. If not, tell them you aren’t their friend anymore.

Publishing

Now that you’re satisfied with everything (or tired of editing), you have a few options, but I’d suggest you just publish it yourself. You’ll get all the money, and no one can tell you what to do. If you’ve followed my advice thus far, your manuscript is too cool to be accepted by a traditional publisher anyway.

Learn how to put it out yourself, or pay someone on Fiverr to do it for you. There’s a great breakdown by Worst Boyfriend Ever on the topic.

Just remember: Titles and blurbs sell books. Not Imprints. Not craft. Not prestige.

“Jerry resells dirty needles to high schoolers. Jenny is sexually blackmailing the president. It’s a love story.”

“A boy who vomits frogs. A dog with guns for legs. Civilization collapsing. This is Palestine, 2036.”

But I digress…

Way to go! You’ve accomplished something. You’re a published author, and there are a bunch of people buying your YA dystopian Anthromance novella! I’m legitimately proud of you. You did what only 1% of all writers ever hope to accomplish.

Now spam it relentlessly, send copies to everyone, never stop shilling! If there’s anyone else as fucked up as you are, make sure they know about your book. It works. It really works.

Phil Rot is a novelist and essayist whose work explores obsession, decay, and the social rituals people invent to avoid meaning. He is the author of The Raft and The Moon Is Gay.

by Jace Shugden

“Not even I know if this I that I’m disclosing to you, in these meandering pages, actually exists or is but a fictitious, aesthetic concept I’ve made of myself. Yes, that’s right. I live aesthetically as someone else. I’ve sculpted my life like a statue made of matter that’s foreign to my being. Having employed my self-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, I sometimes no longer recognise myself. Who am I behind this unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone. And if I avoid living, acting and feeling, then believe me, it’s so as not to tamper with the contours of my invented personality. I want to be exactly like what I wanted to be and am not.”

All of us, in one area or another of our lives, employ artifice—I’ll be doing so in the composing of this document—not primarily with a mind to the external, though that is indeed also a concern of great significance, but rather the satisfaction of an idea of ourselves, a certain quale, that is totally and unchangeably individual; the origins of which we tend to remain oblivious to, them being so disparate and numerous both that a full cataloguing may be a complete impossibility for the human mind, and similarly with regard to the value in such satisfaction hypothetically achieved. Indeed, it may not be in the interest of our health to look too deeply into these matters, it can certainly be a source of anxiety; yet, the pull towards self-reflection is there, a possible resultant of this very same unease compelling us to both superficially comport ourselves in the peculiar ways we do and arrange our inner lives as well.

If there is anyone about whom it could be said a truly painstaking self-analysis of this nature was attempted, it would be Fernando Pessoa; the Portuguese writer and poet, broadly more well-known for his prose in the English-speaking world—almost all of which is collated into the anti-novel/ factless autobiography The Book of Disquiet: a posthumously published collection unfortunately left incomplete by Pessoa himself. Though maybe it never could have been. Above all else however, the man is associated with the use of a literary device of sorts, that being the authoring of the vast majority of his work both published and private under various and variegated false names with entirely fleshed-out identities and imagined lives behind them. The term he used for these manufactured identities was heterónimos, or heteronyms in English (in which he was also fluent, indeed worked as a translator between English and his native Portuguese, as well as writing and publishing in both languages), which understandably may appear little more than a gimmick at first impression, but with enough time upon the matter dwelt maybe something more will come to light.

It has been difficult searching for an attempt made at justification for this new phrase coined, particularly from the man himself. Plenty have opined. Richard Zenith, producer of the seemingly most esteemed English translation of The Book of Disquiet, as well as much of his verse and a biography—for those only seeking to read the Book once I would be inclined to recommend the Margaret Jull Costa translation myself, making for a more pleasurable read in its prioritising the rendering an abridgement of the work in smooth and more familiar English prose over the transliteration of every idea, which in a sense misses the point—makes the case that what distinguishes the heteronym from a mere pseudonym is the complexity of the fictional life behind it, as presented. It’s the best explanation I can find yet it feels lacking, frankly. The focus is too exterior, it concerns itself with presentation alone. I am of the opinion now that there is no simple definition.

Not everything Pessoa wrote was attributed to one of these so-called heteronyms, nor does it seem to be the case that they were a shield or something to hide behind, rather it seems that he made of himself—though such phrasing comes with problems—the binding between the heteronymic identities. That is, the name Fernando Pessoa was used in the publishing of his collections of poetry and indeed would also have been for the Book of Disquiet; the persona of the curator or enthusiast being one he was comfortable with as he was for a time involved in the running of some literary magazines, but the overwhelming majority of his actual literary output from the age of six until his death at age 47 came through these heteronyms. Accepting some room for error, as scholars are partially working with scraps of writing on the backs of napkins and so forth, there seem to be identified 72 distinct voices which might be considered the heteronyms of Pessoa. Some very prominent, who lived and died, who had not just distinct styles of writing but styles which evolved as their lives went on, who interacted with one another and formed clubs and broke apart; and some whose entire existence was restricted to a single sentence.

The Book of Disquiet features primarily the work of Bernardo Soares, whom Pessoa introduces to the world as a figure whose entire being, quite unlike all the other heteronyms, resembles Pessoa intimately in all but the superficialities. Soares writes little about his life however, for such a thing can barely be said to exist; rather, as reader, we receive everything else in the world but. Expatiations upon all the subjects that might interest the recluse of the age, theology, Modernist literature, nationalism, the occult, etc. then returned to in violent contradiction upon another night; interspersed with abandoned novel openings, observations of colleagues, snatches of self-criticism, innumerable descriptions of the sun rising and setting over Lisbon, nostalgia, doubt, hypnagogia, and an initially subtle but ever intensifying anxiety. The contradictory statements and drastic shifts in emotional texture, though melancholy does predominate, in sharing so clearly an origin in one mind serve to illustrate the disparate whole of identity.

My own earliest memory of this particular feeling—that anxiety proceeding from a consciousness of identity awakened by being somehow or other made aware of the internal incongruity of it all—was brought to mind when reading Pessoa on more than one occasion. It was a birthday party, I was about to turn either seven or eight, I don’t quite remember which, and invited were both my “friends from school” and my “non-school friends”. It sounds silly, but on the morning of the day itself as I awaited their coming a feeling of unease that was quite foreign hit me rather suddenly. In thinking about who I “was” when with my friends at school and then the other group, I was suddenly made aware of so many differences in how I behaved and thought when with one or another of the groups. It was terrible, I felt somehow a fraud and that I would be found out that day. Which didn’t happen of course, in point of fact the day went well; what happened, an experience I am sure isn’t unfamiliar to many, is that a new dynamic arose from the coming together of these groups which drew my personality’s expression toward a facet until then unexplored.

Each instance of this particular sort or category of human experience is, I would argue, a heteronym in gestation. A heteronym seems to me an embellishment upon a very real experience of self: extracted, analysed and lastly—and most importantly—made other through the giving of a new name and some trivial details of characterisation. It is perhaps wrong to call it a literary device after all; more so an introspective tool. Not unlike those sculptors of small wooden statues of the Buddha—shaving away first the mass of a wood block to get to a basic shape, then more finely to clarify the basic features, and last of all the tiniest motions made in smoothing any blemishes and bringing out the details—Pessoa was carving away everything he perceived as extraneous to his being; much like the sculptor’s shavings, some of the heteronyms were quite substantial while others miniscule.

I have tried to look for the germ of some of the more prominent heteronyms, but in all but the one case I believe that such an analysis is impossible after deliberating upon the matter awhile. It must, if my theory holds, be the case that they originate from some moment of internal dissonance like mine own provided above; the issue is that said moment could be so insignificant to all but the experiencer of the feeling, it being memorable as a moment of internality. The finalised heteronym needs only a tenuous link to the event of its conception as the externalising of this identified aspect of self is the point. Many have asked themselves “Who am I?”, the phrase “Know thyself” is familiar to people—supposedly, according to some forgotten translator, first inscribed above the entranceway to the Oracle at Delphi. My understanding then is that the heteronym is the process which Pessoa believed, upon the event of sufficient repetitions being completed, would allow him to answer this question for himself.

The reality is that his introspection took him to the point of near-catatonia. Such an obsession as prompts a lifelong search as that which Pessoa undertook displays already a certain neuroticism, but the search itself most certainly seems to have heightened it. First there is a drawing in, which is explored in the Zenith biography and can be caught refracted through certain passages in The Book of Disquiet: early into adulthood he seemed eager to share his work and involve himself in the literary scene in Lisbon, but as time went on he became more and more of a hermit. He had no friends, he went unmarried his entire life, he was distant with his family and so forth. Then, beyond that point, towards the end of his life he seems to freeze up internally, he continued to write but more and more infrequently, as well as repeat himself in his writing. Then of course he died, at the age of 47; rather young.

A heteronym is an elaboration upon a singular core aspect of one’s personality, the essential anxiety being the ever present sense that personality as such is external to one’s true being. The brilliance and tragedy to be found in Pessoa, or in The Book of Disquiet specifically, is that Bernardo Soares’ core is that very impulse. Bernardo Soares is the essential anxiety given voice and in so being needs must have been also the final heteronym; the idea being, again, that a heteronym’s purpose is exorcism of its essential quality from the creator. With Soares, Pessoa at last aimed to complete the process. What then, came after Soares? Did Pessoa, free of the false prison that we call “personality”, at last achieve sought self-knowing? Were the symptoms of his anxieties dissipated immediately in a flash of light? Of course not. The identifying of the very urge to strip what is perceived as extraneous away as itself an element in this extraneous mesh, instead of freeing Pessoa from the guiding anxiety that was uniquely strong in him—but I believe is present to some extent in everyone—is the very thing that trapped him permanently in its void.

We won’t ever be able to say with certainty whether Bernardo Soares was “finished”, as I am sure the suggestion of his not being so could be thrown my way to counter, but we don’t need one case or the other to be true to realise the silliness of it all by simply stepping back. The clear pattern that can be seen is that the more Pessoa gave way to the urges prompted by his anxiety, the more powerful his anxiety became and the greater the rift between himself and the rest of humanity grew. In feeding this beast it and its power over him only continued to grow; what madness to think that in giving in to it more than anyone may have done before, the thing would be destroyed rather than consume him entirely as it seems to have done. More than this, the opposite could be argued: that certain moments in The Book of Disquiet (such as quoted at the start—above) though ostensibly still providing the perspective of Soares actually give us a glimpse of the chaos beyond, wherein the last tenuous connection to normal social reality is lost.

The Book of Disquiet draws those of an anxious disposition to it because they feel they can relate to the anxiety expressed within—at least this was my experience as well as some others I’ve spoken to, I can’t with certainty say such experience is universal—they are in a sense seeking community, which impulse in turn is ultimately the seeking of unity. This impulse however, is very much interlinked with the anxiety. The discomfort we all feel, those pangs of unease which have the potential to blossom into the enthralling madness found in The Book of Disquiet, I believe relate to feelings of disquiet arising from a sense that the personas we inhabit are artificial somehow, as stated in my opening paragraph. We desire to remove them because anything artificial we assume is getting between ourselves and others, contributing to feelings of separateness.

Upon reflection then, despite the comfort Pessoa’s writing has provided for me and others and the beauty to be found there, I would say the greatest value his writing has would be to stand as an example of how not to respond to anxieties of this nature. To return to my memory of the birthday party, obsessing over how I performed the character of myself differently in different contexts only furthered the distance between myself and others, while being able to let that not-entirely conscious process play itself out allowed for greater closeness with other people. I don’t understand why, for me and many others, there is an identification of this natural process of acclimatisation to different social environments as an adopting of something foreign rather than a genuine expression brought out by the environment but this instinct must be questioned.

It is possible Pessoa developed some awareness of this. There’s another quote from him in the introduction to the Zenith translation, from later in his life, where he describes Soares as a mutilated version of himself, which serves well my attempt with this piece to define what a heteronym really is—there being so far no compelling definition. All the heteronyms are mutilations, but in this statement there appears to me some recognition that what the Soares heteronym was fashioned to remove from Pessoa, that aspect of persona, was not in fact something foreign or other which was disguising his true self but itself very much him. That the mutilations were not a removing of alien matter but in fact a carving off of pieces of himself. At which point in his own life however, it was too late to undo what he had done to himself.

Our Books

Carbon Pages

Rhyme Henry Davis, EIC

Unreal has never been spoiled for choice; as a publishing company we’ve always been pretty strapped for ‘creative assets’. Of our three projects to gain traction, two (the Podcast and the Unreal Anthology) were stretched far beyond their natural life expectancies and have since been subjected to endless half-assed revival efforts. Tales of the Unreal has become a passionless potboiler, a bop, passed from editor to editor until landing finally with betabucks Ogden Nesmer who shined it up into a quarterly magazine of some repute. But that has nothing to do with Unrealies at this point, an Unrealie hasn’t seen the inside of a Tales in three years. Started in 2019, Unreal Press was rapidly developing that seven-year itch; the love had gone. We needed something new to shill, new fuel for mania.

Therefore, I could not have been happier to receive a proposal from . This guy is always good for attention grabbing works of fiction and nonfiction, and also the only member of the press who can be considered productive 1.

I was also pleased because this would be Unreal’s second standalone prose release. The first was Silkworm, a novella which has yet to reach the audience I dreamed for it, and whose release I feel I bungled. To be trusted with another author’s work is always an honor. The Carbon Pages proposed by Daniel suggested a return to the original Unreal mission; avante garde literature that rejects easy interpretation and consumption, what the Unreal Magazines were before I “ruined everything” by starting Tales of the Unreal. Also, I know Daniel better than I knew Ogden during Silkworm’s production, so I thought the awkwardness of that production2 was sure to be avoided. Obviously, I was wrong.

Daniel Gavilovski is not a serious person. I don’t know what he wants out of things. It’s easy to look at a modern young man and think; this is a person who wears irony like a safety blanket, he is unserious because it hurts less when his ambitions shrivel up and die. That makes things like the Unreal Black Party sensible.

Yes, it seems obvious that Daniel had no serious hope of a random summer party in Dagvupolis, Latvia being well attended. But he did buy party supplies, and he did decorate his apartment, and he did buy hundreds of dollars worth of booze, and he was actually blind drunk during that twitter meltdown at 4am his time. Still, he’s insulated. Imagine how much more it would have hurt if instead he did a book signing in Ireland, like a normal person, and nobody showed.

So is the man what, a joke? A norwooded little jester? Is he simply another internet manchild whose only skill is stealing your time? Well, no, because he’s outside. He’s really doing this dumb shit to his real life. He really dropped out of college because he read Tropic of Cancer and wanted to be a Parisian cook(and whoremonger). Then he abandoned that to dig up graves in Germany. He’s in Daugwopalis right now because the man has run out of road. Turns out things cost money, and he’s spent it all. Once you hit triple zeros in that bank account, all of this Adventure LARPing has to come to an end, that is, unless you can find a benefactor. A sugar daddy. A sucker. There am I, waving at you, standing on my mark.

Modern writers have a linked consciousness. This is a secret I wasn’t supposed to tell you. Modern writers have a linked consciousness, that’s why nobody does things like this anymore. That’s why we all say things like “real writers write before they go to work, they find time for their art around and within their daily routine” and,“if you’re really meant to be a writer, you’ll find a way(a way that involves being a wagie and a wifeguy and an all around normgroid)”, we say this stuff because when the collective experience of all writers is piled together we realize that this ain’t real life. Unless you consciously make your life out of this writing stuff it’s hardly there. There are so many lame quotes about writing (how much metaphorical gore can the practice of tip tapping into a word processor sustain) but it’s evident how minor all this is even to the people making it. Nothing would happen to you or anybody else if you just gave up.

So, I don’t know, Daniel Gavilovski coming to me with this huge vision for his collection of plays, a vision that involved buying adspace on porn bookshelves, faking his death, flying multiple people out to Spain; it was novel to see such naive ambition. Empowering, even. Here is a man who, if he is not always stimulated by some kind of writerly key jangling, will demolish himself. Me the only, yes, the ONLY thing stopping Daniel Gavilovski from locking himself out of his Dogwopolis apartment, throwing the keys down the drain, and living off rats and melted snow. Me and my life savings. It’s like bumfights. He’ll do whatever for this dollar.

But then came his list of demands, no longer cute ideas, but expectations an author has of his publisher. These demands were ultimately reasonable, but costly. Really costly. Illustrations? For an adult stage play collection (I’m sorry ‘closet play’). I tell him, politely, that classic authors such as Charles Dickens did their own sketches and while they weren’t professional quality they were charming and revealed a lot about how the author saw their characters. Wasted breath. He didn’t even respond, ghosted me for a week. He never compromised on a single one of his desires. That’s fine for him, he gets to play the role of punk rocker, unflinching, unwilling to have his artistic vision herded by the stiff collared, unartistic manager whose money he needs.

But I’m not a wealthy man. Until very recently my checking account was more likely to have zero dollars in it than any other amount. But this has had the inverse effect of the cliche of poverty; I am a spendthrift (I’m using it correctly) money don’t mean a thing. I literally cannot conceptualize anything meaningful resulting from either a surplus or total lack of money. There’s always mom’s house, there’s always the backseat of my car (it folds down). So, here’s 1500 for your illustrations. Yeah, let’s sell bookshelf fillers for porn sets, let’s do that. Here’s a tip to your favorite tiktokker who’s hardly wearing clothes, enough of these and sure she’ll hold Carbon Pages all coquettish over her breasts.

Unfortunately, this was letting Hitler have the Sudetenland. He was emboldened to ask for all kinds of ridiculous things. ‘There’s a woman I like at the theatre, make me a website so I can convince her I’m a big stage director in Ireland’ ‘I have a great idea for getting engagement, by the way I will insult everybody in the scene and they’ll stop responding to your emails’. I’m saying it’s his fault, but what am I, hostage to nothing? I had everything except his book, and yet I let him this coercive power, letting go of thousands in expenses, letting go of our dignity, letting go of my time. Why? Is the book that good?

The first couple of drafts were good, but if I’m going to blow what I used to make in 2 months on the production of a work, I want it to be stellar, unforgettable stuff. The center piece of the book, and what Daniel himself would describe as his crowning achievement, is No Weapon Formed Against You. An unauthorized history of Alexander Dugin, Eduard Limonov, Igor Letov, and The Nazbol Party. A sketch of Soviet Collapse. This is a great work. Once I read the first draft of this I no longer cared. The money was never a concern, but after this I no longer cared about the book. I did not care about getting Daniel on podcast interviews, I did not care about Goodreads reviews, I did not care about missed emails from other substackers. Who could care about the tinny content mill that erstwhile comprised contemporary fiction, when we’re in the making of art. Here’s a food analogy; you make crazy fall off the bone ribs, you’ve worked magic on the smoker, transmuted meat into silk, and now after achieving that some marketing expert is browbeating you about menu design. Be serious. Who could care.

Ah, you would do anything for these people. I’m half like to die anytime, my body is always failing, who cares right? Spend my last hundred on some dynamite, wrap the sticks like an Indian headdress around my enormous skull, blow me to the moon… I mean seriously what else was I gonna do with it?

Carbonpages.ink

Carbon Pages is coming soon.

Be angry, and do not sin, says the Psalmist. The first part is easy, and the second part is impossible. What does this mean for the writer, who as an artist has the surety of history on his side, but meets the degradation of the present everyday upon the field? The field is greatly degraded as well, to suit the players. Who would maintain it? And why?

One must have self-respect. And a first step is to never relent in your hatred of every small-minded, weak, pseudo-libidinal, limp, antivirile, overly virile, sentimental, temporally contingent, chemically induced, monkey-brained, MFA-in-exile which one finds too easily scrolling. And you should stop scrolling as well.

It’s important to remember as well that nobody cares. Most writers mistake pre-frontal cortex failure for genuine admiration and concern. The volume of undifferentiated, exhibitionist confessional material vomited out by each supposed special soul should, in an artist with a conscience and the requisite portion of narcissism necessary for the trade, produce enough revulsion that the operation of writing would become impossible, at least for a few days. But these people, 99% of them anyway, are not artists, they are chemical addicts, and if you are not careful, you too will become a chemical addict in your consumption of their work. The average Substacker is the literary equivalent of a fent dealer. Salacious and severely retarded. In the worst cases they are not merely salacious but seeking to recreate The Paris Review “in the aggregate” by assembling a never-ending catalogue of reviews of books that nobody has or will ever hear of outside of one boring essay, which I am ashamed to admit, I have often been tricked into reading until the very end.

There is the very real temptation to post this sort of material as a means to an end, to generate a following for the “real” work, the quality stuff that takes a long time to write and rewards readers with healthy brains (who are, by the way, EXTINCT!), but there have been zero cases of this approach ending in success – that is, the serious and good taken seriously and thought good. The lie of independent literature has never been so shameless as it is now. We have entire magazines that you can follow and they do not show up in your feed because Substack’s algorithm rewards boomer memes anyway, and the search function is broken. And, as I have mentioned before, nobody cares.

And I mean that, nobody cares. The sort of reading which is done on Substack is half reading by those who are interrupted by texts and phone calls and notification banners, those who cannot find it in themselves to stop thinking about their own work while reading somebody else’s and the engagement is the exact same kind of engagement one finds in the academy: cannibalistic, ouroborosian, sycophantic, and self-aggrandizing to the engager. We be reading others books so others be reading our books and writing reviews on their books so they be writing reviews on our books. And then we expect that not one tomato be thrown. Truthfully, tomatoes are not thrown because the upside of humiliating a Substack writer is nothing against the value of a tomato. And in any case the act itself is about as intelligible as trying to humiliate a horseshoe crab. The critter cannot understand, and neither can the myriad fat, sunburned onlookers.

Nothing new or lasting will be created here, for several discrete reasons.

1. As I have mentioned, it is impossible to mentally retain digital material in general. University students who fangirl about JSTOR and their PDF collections know this. So do the editors of the Metropolitan Review. Both deny reality, and their hearts.

2. Substack abandoned them within 5 years of its conception by its pivot to become yet another endless-scroll-audiovisual-eyeball-retention media application. This is the meta in this horrible, horrible economy. Every drop of free time must be stolen and then wasted. Most hours spent on the app are spent inexplicably seeing the deepest recesses of some content creator’s personal forum, or gawking in horror at AI-generated art about Israel or AI-generated renditions of a “special second edition of my self-published book that only my mom and a couple of her friends bought.” The hours are not spent reading yet another retrospective on László Krasznahorkai. It’s hard to say, and I mean this, if this last is really much better than the former. Most of the material reads in the same way as in-game text in the Elder Scrolls. Contextually, those documents exist to fill out the world. The Krasznahorkai pieces exist to fill out this world: a video game for book lovers! The game SUCKS!

3. The only meaningful platform to generate engagement off of Substack shadowbanned links to Substack, meaning growth can only happen within this ecosystem. Essentially, Substack will never have any mass-cultural phenomena attributed to it, unlike Twitter or Facebook, which are themselves dying owing to similar causes: low user quality, and low content quality. Curtis Yarvin posted here for five years and nobody remembers or cares about anything he said in that time, besides the bait-post about Hobbits and Dark Elves, which as he likes to say, is an exception that proves the rule. Very little makes it out of this walled landfill. Thankfully, I suppose.

4. The spirit of the age is Nothing. Chaos. Nothing. The most entertaining media is rote and technical. Some variation of “How to Get Better at [Task] and Make More Money. Hardly anyone can afford leisure time. Cortisol spikes when one reads because wages against cost of living are at record lows. Reading must be paired with access to short form entertainment to take the edge off of it. It’s very nearly a waste of time outside of the greats, and of course, my friends.

5. My friends, who are very talented, get no motion on here. I could understand if they sucked. But they don’t. The worst excesses of mainstream publishing – ethnic narcissism, sexual exhibitionism, and worst of all: tedium! – are revealed to have been reigned in by the distracted and senile gatekeepers at Penguin Random House. Now, however, there is no editorial oversight, and the same sorts of people are successful on the independent platforms.

The astute reader, if he exists (or she, I guess, that’s probably more likely) will notice up to this point this invective has no reflexivity whatsoever and is thus disqualified as a critique. Maybe we should improve society somewhat. etc. The proper response would be to delete my account. Collect my works elsewhere. I lay accusation on top of accusation, pointing one finger while four point back at myself. I have a Substack. I am making inflammatory remarks. I am reaching out and pricking people. It’s true. I am what I am criticizing, to some degree (note: however, the lack of any lurid sex scenes. I am not creative enough for that.) My response is simple. I want people to read it. I want them to read it, because I want them to hate and be angry. Maybe then they will write.

Writing has a long tail. Given enough time, the situation will improve. The spirit of the age will metamorphosize into something worth the effort of the artists living beneath its shadow. Until then, they should toil in darkness and perfect themselves and their art. One day, the land will shake and its foundations will crack.

Everything I have just said is true. But one day someone will write something worth remembering and caring about. It will not be on this platform.

is a writer, critic, and musician. He is the author of Fedbook (2023) and a forthcoming novel. Follow his Substack for regular updates and excerpts.

Jack Norman (), author of the forthcoming collection Sleep Capricorn(pre-order now!) brings us a keen analysis in the pursuit of answering a question we’ve all asked, perhaps subconsciously: what, exactly, makes a story worth caring about? And when, exactly, does it lose us?

The Authenticity Anchor

Allow me to summarise and explain what ((( David Herod))) and ((())) of (more accurately a YouTube channel) failed to elucidate during their recent "Slop Kings" episode. The free-form "slop" series—formally titled "Slop Kings"—and perfectly topical at the time of its first episode (before the idea was thoroughly raped to hell by the usual click merchants)—attempts to dissect the quality, nature, value, and overall relevance of popular media as it is regurgitated to us again and again on every platform we are captured by.

I won't start by saying the series has run out of steam. You know we have all been distracted at one time or another. Only that David and Gabriel have spoken past the issue in this case. And failed in their line of inquiry. No, it is not enough to debate the merits of the Star Wars prequels—and are they "Lucas" enough or "Lucas" at all?—and suggest you have presented any description of what is "Authentic" fiction and what is not. Or solved for its "anchor points," as they refer to throughout the episode. No, I am afraid the question was left wanting and half on the edge of something more.

What is Authenticity as it presents in a work of art or fiction? How do we experience it? How does it lack when it lacks? What is it, exactly, we are missing when we feel that a story has gone begging? And where, as the Tooky's hosts have asked, are the various "anchors" or touchpoints throughout various and individual settings that bestow a thing's sense of Authenticity? I will refer, mostly, to "casual," genre media—"pulp," if you like—in the spirit of the "Slop Kings" series and its wide, sloppy scope. I should be up front and state that I have accused the hosts of "Slop Kings" of basically digressing for the full length of an episode, and yet they began and ended with the notion of the "platonic ideal," which will serve us here as the correct answer, and is to the their credit (as savvy as ever in their old age, however fattened, hunted by the sharks of Subverted Subversions, Futurist Letters, and the returning Unreal Press Podcast).

In an older interview, which I can't now find, but did not imagine, George R. R. Martin describes the nature of adapting his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy book series into HBO's A Game of Thrones television series. They are, of course, two very distinct entities, and yet for much of the television series' lifespan, it did not merely "adapt" the source material in a direct enough fashion via the screen, but it faithfully retained the vision, spirit, and soul of the original series in tangible and intangible ways. Martin, whose own television writing career began during the 1980s, points out that where any change is made a story for logistical or cinematic reasons, viewers will find that one detail gradually effects another, and writers may be hard put to it if they continue to pursue the "authentic," 1:1 plot threads fans have been conditioned to demand. But this is merely a case of mediums. This is a technical task for writers and showrunners. And it does not alone, or even at all, have intrinsic effects for a work's Authenticity.

Martin makes the example of a particular controversy he recalls amongst his fanbase which developed some time during the middle run of the series. A character known as "Grenn"—a shaggy lowborn, and close friend of the show's protagonist—is killed in the HBO series during a siege of the large, fantastical stronghold the series spends much of its time exploring. It seemed many fans were distressed by this deviation from Martin's source material, where they remembered the occasion was meant to serve as the dramatic, sacrificial death of a fan-favourite "Boba Fett" type character—a one-armed, blacksmith with limited stage time, formerly in service of the King, and equipped with many of the series' most prescient statements regarding the nature of various characters.

Of course, in the scheme of things, the change was very minor. Martin attested to it himself. But he went on to the explain the following, his reasoning, for those who were chafed at the television show for violating the series' canon: the original character ("Donal Noye," in case it comes up), as he appeared in the source material, was one of a cast of hundreds. This would be no surprise to anyone familiar with the literature or the television series. And yet as much as HBO tried to honour Martin's expansive setting, inevitably, and quite a given from the outset, not all of the source material's characters would be able to serve the story in the same ways they had in the novels. Indeed, many would be omitted altogether... And so where and when—with the broader plot structure still in tact, episodes mapping roughly to certain sets of characters and events—an heroic death was required to punctuate the breaching of one important gate, it was figured as more Authentic to the story to kill a different character in "Donal's" stead, one who occupied a similar cult status, and archetype, even where the source material could be hastily established in an opening act for the purpose of one episode.

All of which is merely to say: that as an "authenticity anchor:" a merely painstaking replica of a story, brought over with all its parts, does not serve. Nor are the facts, in the first instance, much of a requisite either. We understand that there are larger notions of the "thing" than just the story, its characters, the sequence of events, individual scenes, carefully attributed dialogue, and so on. We understand that Authentic stories are settings, worlds, universes, credible fantasies! We ascribe to them carefully curated "canons" managed by lawyers, fans, volunteers, or only ever the author, as it depends on the intellectual property (another useful term, where our missing anchors are concerned) and its culture. It is the conceived, or equally unconscious, identity of a fictional story which bleeds through the page. I'll jump ahead and make a claim: a key anchor, or the key to making them, is the creator's sincere Effort, Willingness, and ability to explore their own work. It is, as Gabriel Sinclair put it, something that will eventually form, either in its sequels, iterations, adaptations, or so and however—so long as a desire to create remains reasonably pure and central—until it produces A Song of Ice and Fire as it resonates with all of us—tricks us into talking certain ways—figuring that the figments of the world existed at one time or another, had secrets, motives, and could have done things differently.

Peter Dinklage is "Tyrion Lannister." This is now incontrovertible. Sean Bean is "Eddard Stark." Mark Addy is "Robert Baratheon." These characters exist before and after themselves. The most irrelevant thing about them is their description in the Martin's novels. They have ascended this way because the setting has remained remarkably Authentic—and, like Stars Wars, The Hobbit, Amazon's Rings of Power—as David and Gabriel reference them—the backlash to its final seasons (episodes, instalments, etc.) was the lashing out of an audience confronted by the uncanny valley which had formed between the carefully resonant world, lavishly depicted via detailed sets, wide shots, passive worldbuilding, extemporaneous scenes between characters totally original from, and yet now forever married to, the source material; and the lazy, character centric, scene-after-scene-after-scene, over-the-shoulder, lingering shots of its sad, aging actors in its final seasons that resembled little of the world, and all of its lack of Care.

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So, yes, it's an Effort issue. That is the one and main thing that produces the artefacts of a world's internal consistency. And that is one thing you will already understand. Where we have all known the tedious feeling of reviewing a peer's work and finding it, within seconds, lacking in quality, insight, oversight, theme, intent, intrigue, interest, consistency, direction, prose, characters, or Authenticity!—"the perfect, eternal, and unchanging form of something that exists in a realm beyond our physical world!"—the instructions are right there, have been there for as long as we've known—where the act is in the name, aspiring writers or creators, must try to create! How can we seriously argue over the merits of the Star Wars prequels? In the context of Authenticity! Is that really what we are going to do? It's not a matter of the soundtrack, the choreography, the details of the galaxy as laid down in any one film, later controverted, and reorganised for the opera, it's no matter of CGI, "political" themes, clumsy dialogue, or what on earth, or what else. This kind of analysis is too granular, it wades into the territory of technical review and bogs the investigation down in scene-by-scene discussions of the film’s classical merits, instead of examining the Authenticity of the world it addends. The real question is does it bleed? Was it made out of actual stuff, instead of just being put on the page? Obviously it was. The world of the prequels is as real as any you have known. If it's "Goblin Town" versus "Orc City," and where and how that's clear to anyone, then it's "Chancellor Palpatine" versus "Supreme Leader Snoke." One asserts itself with organic confidence, the other is fake, overly exerted, and its intentions are too obvious to the audience. The conversation almost ends there. Because you know it when you see it. And everyone hates the sequels.

Nomenclature. This is a serious “authenticity anchor.” For several reasons. In its effect it disarms the audience’s reservations. Where it is executed properly, and barely more than once, we are willing to submit totally to a world’s illusion. It is the clearest example of a carefully devised world that has manifested itself to its creator in another realm, who has conceived of its contents in their platonic form, and named them aptly, easily—concepts which have been Created for us, and not merely written down. I can’t speak to its technical aspects. There is no one process for creating veracity in a world. But that to say there is no work that is anchored by this factor that has not been created without a monumental, explorative Effort. Nothing real, nothing Authentic, comes cynically, half-hearted. Whether you find it enjoyable in the end or not.

I am sorry to say, for the implications it might have, the writers it may pertain to, that Authenticity is Effort of the very first, most earnest kind. It is not enough to maintain a "writing schedule." Even if that is every day. If you are sitting down at your computer, typing, hoping, taping some idea together, one arcane name for a hero, a fictional world you have not put your semen into, then you are not establishing any sort of realm that could gain an inch towards the "beyond." You are recording a set of pithy, worldly letters that agonises anyone who reads them. That is why you are not captured by the thing either. Because they are no more than words on a page. I suppose the reason I belabour this point, and harshly, is because most creators are oblivious to the degree of Effort that is required to obtain that most Authentic quality—even talented ones.

Where a work lacks, it's because the creator fell short of the task, and it's usually their fault. There is, I think, something to be said for the wanting of an idea without the Willingness to get it. And the subsequent, aborted worlds that populate our store fronts. William Gaddis can be quoted a thousand times on the matter: “I think often there's a confusion—and this is not just kids in colleges but it's in writing conferences, which I've gone to three or four of—and it's less wanting to write than it is wanting terribly to be a writer. This is a fuzzy number that one has got to get through very quickly because there is a difference.” But I am not, here and now, militant towards anyone's performative instincts, or in figuring if their motives for writing are correct—we are all guilty of our truer, shallower desires—that is not exactly the problem, as I see it—only that we all have drastically underestimated the drudgery of the task of Creation, the necessary length and fatigue of our investigations, and it shows!

You know it when you see it. But you should know when you're failing to produce it. And that's mostly all of us who want to have our cake and to eat it too. And where our own stories fall short gives some insight into how and where others achieve their Authenticity.

P.S. I recently urged a friend of mine to edit a novella which had been rejected by various publishers, because it seemed to me that it was clearly rough around the edges, incomplete as far as its Wholeness was concerned. The man shrugged and told me he was more after an audience that was into that sort of thing. You might call it "Lo-Fi." And where its edges were rough, he could probably convince people that was the point. Well, I say this with love, but that's case in point, you doofus. Pore over that manuscript some more!

In response to

In this reply, on account of showing myself more capable of point by point dealing with any argument you muster, now instead I will turn sharply to his deeper held conceptions.

We shall do this in three stages:

1. The opposition of his conception of writing in general

2. The opposition of his conception of his own writing

3. The opposition of his conception of myself

From most abstract to particular; he claims that the workman produced, technically proficient work, despite having these qualities, still lacks an elan vital, and that this elan vital coincides with vague conceptions of “interest” “the profound” or to summarize, a vulgar bukowskification of the William Carlos Williams formula established in Paterson; to paraphrase and summarize; “the particular boring profane object or experience when seen as sublimely profound makes the whole vast universal spirit as graspable and knowable as the must common place items.” When he speaks of this elan vital and profound or something, he is really saying, he doesn’t feel a link to an extremely particular live experience by which he can expand his mind to an infinity.

I am not giving you a stickman, I am giving the reader the unconscious interior of the bulk of modern-influenced and experience fixated writers, they do not actually know that the lifeblood and soul of their writing is their self obsession and the wish to expand their ego into the place of a universal godhead, the pseudo confessionist does not realize they want to make their daily lives a gospel, and their mundane routine the acts of Christ deserving of endless commentaries.

The belief that your writing needs to be profound, to be a life or world changer, is both a delusion and a-historical. Because what does the profound actually entail? That you are some educator for another? That you have extracted some mysterious fluid from the facts of life and now, you, are capable of telling it how it is? You, writer-reader, are not a philosopher, your goal is not to expand the conscious, you are a maker of fictions and pleasures of sound and sense. And if you are a philosopher, do you honestly believe your years of hard study of numerous thinkers throughout history is justified by your fictional work or by any rhetorical game you can devise? If so, then answer me this, do you consider the reader who reads all of your fictional works and conceits to be your equal in philosophical knowledge? No? Why not? Because you couldn’t actually give the depth of your knowledge. If you did actually write a systematic philosophy or at least a proper book of aphorisms, or even a platonic style dialogue like the many men before you, surely you can say “yes the man who has studied all of my works equals my philosophic knowledge”

But dear writer-reader, remember the common man comes to you for the passing of an hour, the excitement of his mind in trivial stories and the delight of a well-spoken friend. Do you seek to be more than the entertainment of another, do you seek to be more than the evening guest of the stranger? Why? Do you honestly approach your favorite writers that you read often any different?

And on this point of you, reader, can you say in the sum of your consumption of writing, film, tv, manga, YouTube videos, video games or the like, that the bulk of your pleasure comes from

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These vague profound-profane admixture formulae, that is, your preference for entertainment is the tangy sweat of the boring nuances of peoples real lived experience?

If you answer yes, where are you people? Because all I see when I look around are endless discussions of people marathoning Baxter, gene Wolfe, Tolkien, Rowling, Akira toriyama, George RR Martin, call them slop all you want, you probably read and enjoy these types far more than the proclaimed “literary” works so idolized.

Why? You enjoy one and not the other. Pleasure and pleasure in a good made craft are the actual determinants on whether you’ll spend your hour with the stranger-guest of an author, not wisdom. I admit you may claim an author for posture, but you most likely shall not suffer what you consider doldrum just because you have an idea that strangers think it’s smart. Doesn’t material if it’s Dostoevsky or Kyōka Izumi, if you’re bored you’re most likely not gonna read the body of any of these men, if you’re entertained, you probably will.

I say, the writer-reader should write according to what he likes to read the most, or at least consciously formulate why he wants to write in the first place. For me, I like to write things I enjoy for my own pleasure and the hope it exposes me to new writing, I also am a lover of the critical experience, whether it’s giving criticism or receiving it. If one doesn’t know why they write, how can they know if they achieve success in writing?

Perhaps in your own self analysis, you come to the conclusion that the profound experience of particular life is really your bedrock, but if that’s the case, ask the hard question; are you really best served by writing, or was writing just the easy thing? Would you not be better serving your own interest by being a journalist, or a full change and becoming a documentarian? Even a YouTube Vlog overwhelms us with a stark hard reality far greater than the most worshipped realist authors in terms of immediacy.

Now to our second stage;

Let us pick a typical specimen: we shall ignore his tactic of attention seeking by neither going for his newest piece nor the piece he claims is the most well-received, we shall instead investigate “man-cooking” which is the actual most by the numbers successful story on substack of his of any recent memory (therefore, will have the highest likelihood of the readers actually having familiarity with it.)

And with it we shall dispel (for brevities sake) 3 delusions of the author;

1. The point being the real

2. That the author has a grasp of an elan vital

3. That the author even wants to write.

The first point is dissolved when we analyze the stories basic premise, an underpaid cook (yes he reused the experience, surely that won’t get tedious!) finds himself trapped in a twilight zone set-piece, wherein he cannot leave the room, and when he does, what is there routinely resets. Immediately we find the little sinew of a female relationship and individual persona he gives the main character is nothing more than an emotional hook into the real star of the show; the twilight zone set piece of a kitchen, the simple metaphor of the dullness of daily repetition as an excuse, and the actual personal delight he takes in being vindictive and plainly mean towards his doll-character, giving him false hope, placing some pseudo transcendental momentary resolutions for him, and in all and throughout, giving him unnecessary harm for the sole delight of enjoying the strange harm inflicted from the estranged perspective of reality. That’s right! The actual appeal to his sadism is that it is a cold, mentally isolated, detached from reality experiment.

And As for an elan vital? He has no conception of Bergson in any depth with it, if he did he’d relate it to reflex, actual muscularity, and having to do with the evolving throes and inertia of the times, again where can one find any of this in this imitation twilight-zone? A cursory study shows only the moth-eaten pages of depressed slavic writers and the screenplays of very American writers from the 2000s, i challenge the reader, read this or his other works and feel how hamfisted the introduction of ai or other technologies feels, or better yet, if you can find in man-cooking anything timely, fresh and new.

On the final note, let’s turn to the text itself to see if it wants to be read or watched. Forgive us dear reader for having to expose you to an excerpt.

This is not simply imagistic, this is beyond the dialogue fixation of his screenplay ideal, this is no different from the directions and style typical in any given film. I bring you a mental section to show you even in his most cerebral, you’re not going to get much more depth than a “damn” or what amounts to a little back and forth. Look to any of his listed favorites and give a cursory examination of their prose style, can you say this is their writing style? No, then what does this resemble? You’ll find a thousand times the similarity in the writing of burnt starring Bradley cooper over any similarities in the lines of Henry miller.

With that out of the way, let’s turn to the little nuances; that is, his opinion on my work.

For the third stage let me immediately dispel the thoughts on biography and approach; it is claimed I inject jewels and jewelry into my writing because I am a jeweler, no it is the opposite in fact, my study of religion, and philosophy led to my deep contemplation of gemstones (such as Robert Chester’s occult anthology lover’s martyrs where he, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and others go at length on the mystical symbol of the phoenix while describing a variety of plant and gemstone lore, likewise the text “A Lapidary of Sacred Stones: by Claude Lecouteux” or even Agrippa especially in the behennian description. There is no shortage of literature.) and then I picked up writing poetry, AND THEN, after this, I became a jeweler, you can find the same fixation upon jewels in the mahakavya poetry, decadent poetry and Elizabethan poetry which influences my writing or upon my pre-jeweler poetry all the same. Besides, my work is significantly high-end, you won’t find bust-down Rolexes and royal oak aps in my verses, nor shall you find Byzantine chains or the like. You will find only images selected for beauty.

Further, he claims my opposition to seeking wide-spread readership is born out of being an author whose failed to grab attention himself, this is a view born of only seeing others as your own mirror, if I have began writing only after a long process of philosophical and theological inquiry and choose as my subjects by and large very esoteric forms, modes, treatments and topics; why would I possibly expect any wide readership? No, it is as I say in the first post I made upon this platform, I am here to analyze, critique, partake of the literary sphere and gain some part of the writer-community here. I have had some small successes in this endeavor by reading the works of and interacting with these gentlemen:

And in some level

And, surprisingly, the previously mentioned (in prior essays) ! Whose Palisade (a kind of corporate modernity-occultism affair with splashes of Edmund jabes style pathos for the people-of-antiquity-among-the-modern-ruins) I read and he with considerable dignity took my unapologetic critiques and actually considered them.

Why do I summon this cloud of people and mention all of this? Because it means one thing; I am successful by my metric of success. Very successful. And I hope to be further successful even by the writing of this piece, I hope to encounter more writers who both despise what I write and write similarity, whose works are a pleasure or pain, to who critiquing is mutually beneficial.

And as for self-pleasure, joke as you want about the dadrock! I enjoy dadrock, new-wave, disco, hiphop, soul, the whole gamut which I employ in that AI-album, and I semi regularly blast the album for myself. I can confidently say whether it’s song or written verse or prose, I regularly return to my writings and enjoy just consuming them, if that’s plumbing, then I rather my writing have good plumbing, rather than your alternative;

Being full of shit!

What else should I call fixation on sentiment, wound, the mundanities of low wage labor idolized and all of this sort? We know the simple truth, what’s interesting is what’s entertaining and what’s interesting has something of the uncommon within it, whether it’s the story, the people in the story, how they speak or how you write it, your ideal is that be interesting, it be interesting by being different and weird, and that is to say, for it to partake in the literary Unreal. If it’s not Unreal quality, it’s full of shit!

Now, to speak directly, mister Daniel Gavilovski, knowing you are incapable of reading at-length and couldn’t handle an actual point by point substantial discussion, I have significantly reduced this essay to just the major concepts and points, and having seen your essay has 2243 words; i would hope your zeal for writing equals your zeal for reading so you can read and interact fully with this essay composed with modern stylings and, yes, equaling exact

World traveller and extremely talented writer brings us a sharply written and excising piece on tourism, travel bloggers, and the estrangement locals feel as millions make their homes into weekend getaways. This is technically our first solicited piece, a long time in the making.

After a thousand years of praying, fasting and endless incarnations, Buddha finally gets to be a dildo. To Buddha's unending delight, he's generously endowed with enough to pleasure even the most enlightened. Now that Nirvana is within reach, grasp it wisely, firmly, and with intent, rub his belly. Rub it again, meditatively.

Last time I was in Vietnam, I cycled through Tam Cốc, a village nestled among the limestone outcrops of Ninh Binh province. It’s an area recognised by UNESCO for having Outstanding Universal Value. Karst cones and towers erupt from a rice-green delta. Kingfishers dance and shimmer in turquoise and blue. Small boats pootle along subterranean waterways linking communities of subsistence farmers.

People have lived in caves there, high up in the cliffs, for 30,000 years. And every travel blogger from Bali to Bucharest has been. It is “captivating” and “stunning” and “Ha Long Bay on land” and, apparently, a “hidden gem”. In Tam Cốc there is a street lined with pubs selling tankards of draught beer for the equivalent of 25p a glass, which means you can get about two-thirds pissed for the price of a cup of tea back home.

In a homestay on the edge of the village I met Peter, a geologist from New Zealand. He had long white hair and a straight nose, and jowls that moved when he laughed. The years had been kind to him. He was curious, chipper and involved. His wife, Susan, was a homeopath with a friendly smile. They met well into adulthood and were both around 70. For the past decade or so, they had been coming through Vietnam for two or three months at a time. They had retirement savings and pensions and were familiar with the man who ran our homestay.

They had been here in 2020, when most of the tourists hadn’t. They were able to enjoy the Trang An Landscape Complex, which is the protected area of Ninh Binh province, at its most peaceful and serene. Without, you know, more people like them, or me, milling around.

But they were honest, and appreciated the irony of loving a place for its emptiness. For not being blighted by paradise-hungry foreigners, while they themselves were blighting it. Nor were they too cut up about the throngs who were now swimming over the area’s karst mountains, drunk on cheap lager and the thought of hooking up while travelling. They rose above it, sort of. Passers-through, staying longer than most, watching the crowds flow in and out.

Hanging out in Tam Cốc worked for them. They’d come across it organically: by wandering more or less aimlessly from place to place until they found themselves wanting to stop. It’s ironic that most of us – ‘people who travel’ – only know where we want to go because other people have been there. And if we have access to such information, everyone else surely does. We only know Ninh Binh exists because of its popularity as a tourism destination. If a place is attractive to us, it follows that it will be attractive to other people. Any resentment we might feel towards the presence of other visitors is ironic because it should also be directed towards ourselves.

Peter and Susan were savvy to this. They admitted self-deprecatingly that their spoken Vietnamese amounted to a handful of phrases. They spoke lovingly, although generally, about Vietnamese people, and appreciated the inevitability of a place they’d been coming to for years becoming increasingly popular with young people.

The Internet means you no longer have to go to a place to find out where to go once you’re there. Bloggers have already done the work for you, while selling your attention to advertisers. But Peter and Susan went further, and this is what struck me.

“They’ll judge us for what we do,” Peter told me one afternoon, looking wistfully out across the paddy. Imagine it in a husky New Zealand drawl, jowls jiggling. “In the future, I mean. In the same way we look back on the colonisers of the past with incredulity. What were they thinking? The people of the future will judge us.”

‘This is why Laos never colonised anywhere’

Tourists can be real wankers. I have a list of gripes that starts with the way people talk about ‘doing’ countries.

“Oh, I haven’t done Borneo yet.”

“Last year I did Thailand and Cambodia. This year I’m doing Vietnam and Laos.”

Things you can ‘do’ include homework and laundry. They exclude nation states. Related is when people don’t refer to what they’re doing as holidaying or visiting but insist on calling it ‘travelling’, which, though technically sort of correct, doesn’t account for the fact that most of the time, when they’re actually in transit, they’re either asleep, watching videos on their phone, or complaining about some facet of the journey. The roads are too bumpy. The bus driver operates a parcel delivery service as well as a human delivery service. The slow boat is too slow. We would “definitely be there by now” if we hadn’t made all those stops for other people to get on. The engine is loud. It’s too hot in this tropical country. The driver doesn’t speak English. “Oh, I love travelling. I’ve been travelling for five months. Which countries have you done this year?”

One (gripe) has to do with the entitlement of men, often white men, and very often white men from rich western nations, who expect people in other countries to fawn over them, such as those who cycle into China, choose to forgo buying a local SIM card, neglect to learn basic Chinese, and bemoan the unhelpfulness of Chinese people when they don’t fall over themselves with offers of hospitality.

There are those who make terrible jokes, like the Dutch man who, during a delayed start to a boat ride on the Nam Ou River, quipped to a group of French tourists that “this is why Laos never colonised anywhere”.

Then there is the woman who, angry with the Lao minibus driver for making stops to deliver packages to people en route, yells at him, “No, no, no, no, no!” as he digs around in the boot, leaving him noticeably rankled and the rest of us afraid that he might rush the rest of the journey on the country’s narrow winding roads. The Internet had told her the journey would take three hours. The Internet had told her.

There is the Welsh woman on the boat to Luang Prabang who refers to the Lao nationals hoping to board the ferry as a “herd”, and the Italian man claiming the North Vietnamese police are “corrupt” when they fine foreign tourists for not having the correct documentation. They are, in fact, enforcing the law.

Meanwhile, on Reddit, there are tourists thinking they can drive motorbikes in the mountainous Hà Giang region without motorcycling experience or an International Driving Permit during the “rainiest and busiest time of the year”, wallets brandished and “ready to bribe”, who witness their friends rolling off cliff-edges only to be “saved by tree roots” and blame the “crazy truck drivers” who have spent years plying these same roads.

‘Do not forgive them, for they know just what they do’

In June 2023, the New Yorker published an essay by the philosopher Agnes Callard titled, ‘The Case Against Travel’. Callard was born in Budapest and grew up there, then in Rome, then in New York. Her grandparents survived the Holocaust.

In her essay, she builds a case against people who “pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so”. She quotes G. K. Chesterton (“Travel narrows the mind”), Ralph Waldo Emerson (Travel is “a fool’s paradise”) and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (“Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel”), and notes that Socrates and Immanuel Kant rarely left Athens and Königsberg, respectively. They voted with their feet.

The “traveller’s delusion,” Callard writes, is that it “turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best”. Meanwhile, she says, the single most important fact about tourism is that it doesn’t change the tourist. It is preparation for death.

There are points on which I agree and some on which I don’t. On many, I find myself getting bogged down in arguments about semantics. There are so many phrases relating to travel that all mean different things to different people.

Backpackers like to say they are “going travelling”, but you can also call them “tourists” or “holidaymakers”. Some backpackers travel with suitcases and some tourists use rucksacks. If Neil works from a laptop and spends three months per year in Chiang Mai, is he a tourist? An expat? An immigrant? How much depends on the colour of his skin, whether he rents long-term or via Airbnb, or where he goes next? Are Peter and Susan emigres or migrants, homeless, “long-term travellers” or, dare I say it, “nomads”?

Callard makes a distinction between “going abroad” to, for example, fight in war (as Socrates did) or when “duties” demand it and, say, going somewhere of one’s own volition in order to experience “change”. The sort of travel she’s denigrating is that which is done by choice, and not “for the purpose of art, of study, and benevolence”. Obviously, we can’t pretend to know for what reason X or Y person has decided to visit this or that country, or to travel within their own. It can be fun to parse the semantics but that’s not really the point.

The simplest critique of Callard’s essay is to point out that its headline is clickbait. ‘The Case Against Travel’. It is ridiculous to make the case against travel. Her case is against tourism, but the article is only worth promoting to people’s Facebook feeds if its heading elicits an emotional reaction. That, too, is beside the point.

Callard’s appraisal of the act of travelling (slash tourism) misses something fundamental, which is the experiential knowledge one can inadvertently gain from simply being in another place. I’ll give three examples.

The New Yorker published her essay in June 2023 but I read it, when the publication promoted it to my social media feed, in early 2024, around the time I was cycling into Laos. I crossed the border at Na Meo and, after a few chilly hours on Laos’ dusty, winding roads, I rolled into Vieng Xai.

Vieng Xai is famous for its vast network of caves. There are 480 or so, some much bigger than others. This is where the Pathet Lao, also called the Lao People’s Liberation Army, sheltered from the United States’ merciless nine-year bombardment of Laos during the Second Indochina War. The US Air Force dropped 2 million tons of explosives on Laos between 1964 and 1973 in a covert, CIA-led military campaign now known as the Secret War. There are statistics: two tons per person; one planeload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years; 80 million cluster submunitions that failed to explode on impact, leaving nearly a third of Lao soil contaminated with unexploded ordnance (UXO).

But statistics can only illustrate so much. Walking through the caves, accompanied by an audio tour, you hear accounts of American atrocities never taught in British schools, and certainly not in American ones. You stand in the dark of the maternity ward cave imagining women give birth in forced silence and hear about how all the villagers had to stop wearing colourful clothing to avoid being spotted by airmen trawling the skies. How a captured pilot revealed his orders were to look out for and bomb livestock, because humans might be nearby. How they farmed only at night. How most Lao people had barely heard of America, and had no idea why the US war machine was targeting them.

A year or two earlier, I was detained for five hours at Tel Aviv airport for, as far as I can tell, having recently been to Lebanon. When they let us go, I interacted with the nation of Israel and the nation of Palestine. We drove through Palestinian land on fenced-off roads accessible only to cars with Israeli number plates, visited the wall built by Israel in order to prevent Palestinian freedom of movement, and listened to accounts of IDF raids on Palestinian homes.

In 2017, I lived in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, China, for half a year. I ate well everyday on a monthly stipend of £200. I posed for photos with excitable Tibetans. I spent a lot of time in a building called the Poly Center, a residential tower block that housed two very good clubs on the 19th and 21st floors (techno/house and disco/hiphop respectively!), where you could buy laughing gas in the corridors, exit at five in the morning, eat perfect fried noodles at Barbecue Land, hire an Ofo bicycle for 20p and cycle the wide boulevards home.

Shortly before Christmas 2024, I went back to China, crossing from Kazakhstan to Xinjiang Province, which is famous for the stories western media outlets tell about it. I ate at Uighur restaurants in the provincial capital, Ürümqi, in Beijing and Shanghai, and in Hainan, an island province off the south coast. Wide cycle lanes, electric vehicles, clean air, chipper hospitality, decent and affordable public transport, the best food in the world, and restaurateurs who don’t bat an eyelid when you say, “我们不吃肉” (wǒ men bù chī ròu, or, “we don’t eat meat”). China was as I remembered it: a breath of fresh air.

My point is that my understanding of the context of Israel’s war on Gaza is informed by my experiences of visiting both countries. My understanding of US imperialism and its insatiable appetite for blood is informed by visiting the caves of Vieng Xai. And my appreciation of China is informed by my experiences of living, and visiting, there.

I hadn’t heard of Vieng Xai before I visited Laos. I expected to receive comparable hospitality in Israel and the West Bank. Before I went to China and experienced life there, I did what lots of people do, which is to read news headlines – about Xinjiang and social credit scores and state propaganda – and believe them. My point is that I needed to be in these places to learn these things, and that I never set out to learn them. Being in places with an open mind has inadvertently shaped my worldview.

Incidentally, it has shaped my worldview in a way that runs contrary to the interests of the United States government – and, you might say, of its allies. Let’s not forget that UK governments blue and red have called China a “threat to our way of life” and supported Israel’s right to “defend itself”. I actively appreciate and support many of the countries that the US has made its enemy: Laos, Vietnam, Palestine, China. There are other examples. And I find it quite shocking – though maybe I shouldn’t – that the New Yorker would discourage people from gaining new perspectives on history and geopolitics by visiting other places.

Perhaps it’s because doing so might lead them to oppose US foreign policy. Who knows?!

https://x.com/ProperMag/status/915937500761399296

‘A supposedly fun thing I accept I am snobby about’

The more experience you have of a thing, the harder it is to make generalisations about it. So when people ask me what English people are like, I lose myself in all the possible answers. The variation among the identifiable demographics and the instinct to provide an answer that’s neither generic nor wrong leave me stumped. Now I just say they’re “sort of like me” and wait for the expectant smile of my interlocutor to fade.

Say the same of tourists. Not that they’re like me, necessarily, but that they’re more diverse than any generalisation would allow.

Even among the demographic of British tourists in their twenties visiting Ninh Binh in the year 2024, there is so much unseen diversity. There are groups of friends on gap years, students in search of volunteering opportunities and high-school sweethearts on their first big holiday. Kids in search of themselves and kids in search of other people. This girl who’s going through her first big breakup and this boy who’s just found out his dad’s got early-onset dementia and he doesn’t know whether to fly home or hang out and, is there anyone else here who’s been through what he’s going through? Families with kids and kids with their parents. Some who want to make friends and some who don’t. This guy’s taking field recordings of buffaloes sniffing around in hedgerows for a documentary score. This woman just found work as a message-writer for a popular American OnlyFans model but doesn’t know whether or not to tell her friends. From the outside looking in, we’re all basically alike. But as soon as you’re part of a group you see that it’s made up of lots of smaller ones.

In northeast Vietnam there’s a town called Hà Giang (pronounced ha-ZANG). It’s on the Lô River and is visited by foreign tourists almost exclusively for the purpose of exploring, via organised tour, the hilly region to the northeast. This is called “doing the Hà Giang Loop”, and it is a “MUST-DO” when in Vietnam. This is how the travel bloggers write about doing the Hà Gang Loop:

Listen - in my lifetime I’ve gotten the chance to do lots of amazing things. Bathe elephants in a river in Thailand, scuba dive through shipwrecks, explore royal palaces in Korea, and even camp in the Sahara Desert. But up until October of 2022, if you asked me what my favorite experience I’ve ever had would be, I would’ve felt like I was picking between my children - it was simply impossible.

Then, during the (incredibly small amount of) research I did for my 3 month Southeast Asia trip, I happened across something called the Ha Giang Loop - a 3-5 day motorcycle route that winds through the northernmost mountains of Vietnam.

The Hà Giang Loop is not something you “happen across”. It is among the most raved, blogged and talked about experiences available to those passing through Vietnam.

Most people book the (unique! bespoke!) tour offered by wherever they’re staying in Hanoi, and are shipped overnight to arrive at the same Hà Giang sorting office as everyone else on the day they’ll begin. By my estimations, several hundred people start the loop every morning. This means that on any given day, since there are 2-, 3- and 4-day tours available, there are upwards of a thousand motorbikes criss-crossing the mountainous landscape around Hà Giang, most carrying rider + passenger. There are also tourist cars and tourist buses, and a small amount of local traffic.

The various tours wend their way up and round spectacular scenery, stopping at viewpoints to drink coffee and eat Vinamilk ice lollies. At some viewpoints, a hundred or more bikes might be gathered at once, parked in higgledy lines on the side of the road. Lunches are hearty and shared. The eateries the tour companies have deals with dish out industrial quantities of fried chicken, beef stew, cucumber salad, egg noodles, spring rolls and sliced watermelon. We, the passengers, wolf it down as if we’ve been working hard all day.

Towards the end of the first evening meal, groups are introduced to one of the defining rituals of the Loop: shouting a lot about drinking Happy Water (and then drinking Happy Water). It goes like this.

The group leader will divvy out small porcelain cups of corn wine decanted from a jerrycan into a branded bottle. Corn wine is produced en masse, and culturally important to the various ethnicities that populate the area. But the ritual of drinking it seems to be more about volume (as in decibels, but also L) than observing tradition. Maybe that’s the point. Anyway, the leader passes round the cups and bids everyone repeat after him, then asks if you’re ready. Yes. Are you ready?! Yes! ARE YOU READY!? And you scream back, yes, we’re ready. Then:

Một, hai, ba, dzô! (One, two, three, go!)
Hai, ba, dzô! (Two, three, go!)

Hai, ba, dzô dzô dzô! (Two, three, go go go!)

Hai, ba, uống! (Two, three, drink!)

Each line is louder than the last, and over the course of an evening meal there could be half a dozen rounds. On the third night, still feeling the residual combined hangover from the first and second nights, you ask them not to include you, but they insist on pouring more liquor into your cup. They shout your name, you’re standing up, leading the ritual yourself, throat hoarse from straining, beaming into the eyes of your fellow passengers as you screech, một, hai, ba, dzô, drink, drink, drink, red in the face, beer to wash it down, same again, into the mouth and down the throat. Cảm ơn. At least everyone leaves knowing five words of Vietnamese.

One thing I found difficult about riding the so-called Hà Giang Loop was the unshakable and unnerving sense I had that the H’mong people – the largest ethnic group in Hà Giang – basically didn’t want us there. And not in a casual oh you rabble rousers kind of way. We were a complex nuisance.

We made the roads less usable for local traffic. The noise we produced disturbed peaceful village life and turned quiet back roads into overrun thoroughfares. We gathered like insects around coffee kiosks built on viewpoints, funnelling our tourist money into the pockets of just a few shrewd businesspeople, rather than into local communities. Breakfast, lunch and tea were included in the tour price, which meant we had almost no reason to distribute our cash anywhere else. In Hà Giang city, people of various ages greeted us with smiles and affection. On the tour, however, only very small children greeted us by waving, as if by the time they reach the age of, say, five years old, they have already grown tired of the seemingly endless streams of motorbikes. Everyone else seemed to look through us with a lack of interest I found disarming. As passengers, we don’t bring anything to the region. We are not exciting visitors – we don’t interact. We only observe, eat, and drink Happy Water in high-octane rituals and episodes of devotion to drunkenness.

A few days later, an old friend from university suggested I was being snobby for looking down on Hà Giang Loop tours as a way of interacting with the region. I guess I gave the impression that, deep down, I think my preferred mode of travel – by bicycle, and independent – is better. For what it’s worth, at the time, I agreed.

‘Buddha finally gets to be a dildo’

Acharavadee Wongsakorn was born in Bangkok in 1965, and grew up in a middle-class family. She worked in mass media, then in jewellery, and soon found herself brushing shoulders with the sort of people who would casually mention winning a million baht (£23,000 or so) at the casino. She began to resent how much money her peers were making. Life, she said, was like a “jewel waiting to be polished”.

So she got her head down. Opened her own business and started crafting her own designs. Became an expert on diamonds. By the mid 2000s, she found the success she’d been craving. She won accolades, and was named by Thailand’s Tatler magazine as one of the country’s 500 leading people five years in a row. Money, fame, influence. All of it in spades.

Still, she felt like she was chasing her own shadow. She was quick to anger, and scolded her subordinates with undue harshness. She would drive to see the revered monk Luang Phor Charan Thitathammo – who died in 2016 at the age of 87 – simply to ask for his blessing and boost her wealth. Even while she was visiting him at the Dhamma centre, her mind would be elsewhere, planning her next collection or working through business arrangements. Later, she realised that her fashion and jewellery shows were designed to stir up desire by making people feel like they lacked something. They “stirred people’s minds,” she says, making them confused. Confused desire can develop into sin, and she knew that she was exploiting people. “Life was spinning,” she admits. In an interview with MGR Online, she said that for years, all she thought about was work, and all she sought was money.

You know how this story goes. Acharavadee took up meditation to help cope with the stresses of business and celebrity. It led her to reevaluate her life, and she realised she’d got it all wrong. She sold her company and founded the School of Life Foundation, becoming a full-time Dhamma teacher in 2009. A few years earlier, on a business trip to France, she had stumbled across a Parisian bar bedecked with novelty Buddhas. There was a huge Buddha statue in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by disco balls, cigarette smoke and alcohol. It was “heartbreaking,” she says, and eventually inspired her, in 2012, to set up the Knowing Buddha Foundation with a view to de-commercialise Buddhist imagery and return the movement to its roots.

In early 2013, a supporter of the movement sent Acharavadee a picture of a toilet decorated with Buddha’s face, from a French hotel bathroom. The organisation was already running a campaign in the Netherlands against toilets branded with the Buddha’s image. It’s more common than you’d think. Or, at least, it was until Acharavadee donned her marigolds and tackled the problem head on. “The Buddha image in the toilet is a hard hit to Buddhists,” she has said. They wrote to the French Embassy in Bangkok and to the hotel Moulin de Broaille, which had installed the toilet seat in its “pure Zen bathroom”. Then to the product’s manufacturer, which agreed to discontinue production.

One of Knowing Buddha’s more ambitious campaigns was against a Disney character – a dog – called Buddha.

In the Air Buddies film series, Buddha is a golden retriever puppy. He enjoys extended periods of yoga and meditation. He wears a traditional Buddhist collar. And he ends his sentences with “Namaste,” Sanskrit for “I bow to you”. He doesn’t eat meat.

Acharavadee asked her supporters, and Buddhists around the world, to boycott the Buddies movies. When Acharavadee reached out to the company, asking them to stop using the name Buddha for one of its characters, a man called Eric replied that they were “unable to assist [her] with [her] inquiry”. Too bad.

Other examples of inappropriate usage of Buddha’s image and/or name include: Happy Buddha panties; a Popcorn Buddha promising “a moment of bliss in every kernel”; and an 8-inch silicone dildo called “Buddha’s Delight,” available for $59 in Oakland, California.

After a thousand years of praying, fasting and endless incarnations, Buddha finally gets to be a dildo. To Buddha's unending delight, he's generously endowed with enough to pleasure even the most enlightened. Now that Nirvana is within reach, grasp it wisely, firmly, and with intent, rub his belly. Rub it again, meditatively.

Acharawadee insists that Buddha's image has been “used disrespectfully for too many years”. While some desecrate it “without knowing” what is appropriate, “many do it intentionally”. They wouldn’t treat images of Mohammed or Jesus in the same way, let alone Judaism’s G-d. If they do, they know “they’ll be in deep trouble,” she adds. “But if they touch Buddhism, the Buddhists hardly have a voice to stop them. People think they can do anything they want.”

They certainly do. But what is an appropriate amount of moral outrage to feel or show when confronted with this kind of information? Do we continue to desecrate the Buddha by shitting on him, or do we support a campaign by a religious organisation to cease production of novelty toilet seats?

‘Fear and loathing everywhere, all at once’

Before setting off on my second or third long distance bicycle trip, my friend Tanya suggested I write a book about it. I kept notes, wrote bits. Worked on a structure and thought about how it might all fit together. That was in 2016. Then, in 2018, I went on a bigger trip, and the whole idea for the book changed from wanderlust travel lit in the style of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning to something more credulous. More about meditation, more Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The way of the wheel, the endlessness of roads. Wind and silence.

Then, in 2023, I came across a hard copy of With Our Own Hands at a homestay in Khorog, Tajikistan.

It’s a collaboratively written book about Pamiri cuisine compiled by a Swedish resilience researcher and a Dutch ethno-botanist, inspired by an elderly Tajik grandmother’s tales of her childhood. It brings to life an oral tradition of highly localised culinary wisdom, and presents recipes alongside stories and photos, all in three languages (Dari in Arabic script, Tajik in Cyrillic, and English). It struck me that no ‘travel book’, or book about travel, could do more for a place than With Our Own Hands had done for the Pamiri people. I began to think differently about how I chose to document my journeys, and since then, I can’t help but approach mass tourism more critically.

Tourism is steeped in irony and hypocrisy. We grope around in unfamiliar places, on the hunt for just the right amount of newness, one foot firmly planted in our comfort zone. Either hoping to come across other foreigners, at the very least someone who speaks our language, because we’re a bit fed up with limiting our vocabulary so that we can be understood. Or rankled by them for also searching for the same tranquil, cultural, unique and meaningful experience in the same place we are looking. For spoiling the view and clogging up the footpaths and making too much noise in the temples, while we do the same. Those of us who document – from live streamers to feature writers – jostle and clamour for hot takes and original forms of expression. Or simply hits. But every path has been trodden, and there’s a ticket booth on every corner.

We get from place to place on buses operated by companies set up to track and cater to tourist interests. We know where to go because other people have already been there. We have read the Google reviews. There are 5,000 hashtags for this place on TikTok. People have described its beauty. They went there at sunrise and snagged a pretty picture on their iPhone, which takes better photos than our old DSLRs. Google Chrome automatically translates the ticketing aggregator’s website into English. It even shows us the price in GBP, USD or EUR. Nine out of ten people on the bus are tourists hoping for a once-in-a-lifetime experience perfectly balancing authenticity and convenience, replete with vegetarian options, English-speaking staff, and the “most adorable Asian babies”. When we get there, we want everyone else to disappear because that’s when destinations are at their most beautiful. No, we want everyone like us––except us to disappear.

But the mechanisms of tourism and information-sharing mean we will only visit places that are visited by other people. So Agnes Callard rails against tourists for being uninteresting, and pro-travel travel writers rail against Agnes Callard for being ignorant while railing against tourists for doing Borneo. And the sun shines on the kingfishers dancing over the waterways of Vietnam’s Trang An Landscape Complex. Peter’s jowls wobbles delightedly and motorbikes scurry and blurt over the hills of Hà Giang. And the French smoke cigarettes, and shit on images of the Buddha.

by . this is a response to this which was a response to this which was a response to this

I’ll begin by saying what I find redeemable about Frater. Frater is well read. I have no problem in admitting that he is more well-read than I am by a massive margin. He is so erudite that I have it on good authority you can ask him for recommendations on any topic, and I don’t just mean Bloom’s canon but genuine esoterica like Mesopotamian paragones or occult grimoires, and he’ll provide a detailed reading list. You can see this attention and love of esoterica in his own writings which fuses the Decadents with Greco-Jewish and Hindu aesthetic modes. Frater is resolute. By this I mean he views new ideas and artistic forms as what is called in Russian a vizov. That is, a challenge or provocation as to a duel. If he encounters some new idea or medium that he hasn’t yet mastered, he’ll approach it processually in order to beyond a shadow of a doubt master that idea or form and by doing so usually debunk it. Sometimes this leads to a kind of tunnel vision which makes him focus for months on end, autistically, at a replication of something which he might not even respect or like. These are qualities which I find admirable and, if I’m being frank, lacking in myself. I wish I could approach literature with the kind of workman-like processuality that he does, and I’ve often asked him for feedback on a piece here or there because of his characteristic objectivity.

That same workman like quality is also Frater’s bane and it’s why ultimately Frater is an uninteresting writer and will never be able to produce anything with either mass appeal or aesthetic pleasure. I suspect this is the reason why he harps on about my supposed obsession “with wide spread acclaim” in the realm of “sales” and “propaganda” over pleasure or aesthetic holism. Because to him mass enjoyment and aesthetic unity are mutually exclusive. It’s the typical cry of every failed, repugnant writer. Everyone knows at least one. If all my efforts have failed to make me people like me, then it’s because I’m better than them. Anyway, my wide spread acclaim is an accidental byproduct of my love of prose fiction, not a deliberate one. Anyone who is familiar with my weird fiction story The Collapse of HMS Mariana, generally considered to be the best work of horror fiction of the last few years, knows that I’ve been writing long before I had any semblance of being printed. Unlike anything Frater has ever written, this is a story that enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, both mass acclaim and an aesthetic unity.

Your response is technically a rebuttal. It has all the outline of an intellectual polemic. And yet it is so impossible to read that I would be astonished if anyone has actually gotten to the end of it. Clearly the editor hasn’t, because it’s so pimpled with spelling errors, punctuation mistakes and accidental repetition that they’re more rule than exception. The piece serves as a sort of optical illusion where by looking at it from afar it seems like an incontrovertable wall of refutation, of what I don’t know since it doesn’t actually engage with our debate, but a refutation nonetheless. It’s not until you actually try to parse the words that you realize it’s reams and reams of undiluted, unedited, and thoughtless shadow boxing. Here’s another optical illusion; in the middle of reading your latest post I went to take a piss and the matrix of text was imprinted over my stream in the toilet bowl. I consider it an improvement.

I mentioned LLMs in my previous response Here’s Why If You Want To Be a Writer, Study isn’t Enough. You Must Live. Well, today I’m reminded of it again because your post reminds me of when you insert a prompt and it doesn’t take into account the prompt or context that came before it. You do realize that you wrote an original essay, right Frater? Look at this:

Okay? Do you have some hitherto undiscovered cranial wasting disease? Am I speaking with a miracle of medical science? I never claimed in my response that Defoe, or indeed the other journalist-litterateurs who I mentioned alongside Defoe such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Twain, I never claimed that these writers1 relied solely on autofiction or that they never did “textual study”. That would be a ridiculous claim. Never have I said that you can be a great writer without immersing yourself in past literature. In fact I claimed the exact opposite right here:

And here:

Clearly, if that talent does not come ONLY from the study of books, then naturally SOME of it must come from books. It was YOU who claimed that experience means for nothing because the best literature does not derive from reality but from study. I replied offering a cornucopia of examples showing talented litterateurs who indeed draw from reality. Then you tell me “well yes but actually they also wrote these right here emulations”. I addressed your argument, and then you move the goal posts to my side of the pitch – well done, indeed. Confused, but, yes, well done.

At this point in your essay it seems like your logical faculties buckle and leave the building, for fear of further embarrassment. Where did you come up with this? It’s certainly nothing I’ve argued.

You say I use the play as a substitute for screenwriting. I actually do have a respect for the play as a fully formed medium, not as an appendage of film or the screenplay but as a beautiful and very unfortunately overlooked artform, today waved about by the likes of Gasda, Kautzman and a handful of petty national writers like a shit-stained white flag on a stick. I have a love for both the closet play and the live theatre experience as epitomized by the likes of Andre De Lorde and the Grand Guignol tradition. The fact is, the closet play can do things which neither a screenplay nor the play as manual can do. For evidence of this you can look at my as-of-yet-unreleased Boring and Broke in Buenos Aires, a very fine story which synthesizes prose with dialogue to an extent that no screenplay has done or is expected to do. This same play, incidentally, is inspired by real events and real people in the alt lit scene while at the same time drawing from historical characters, memoirs, and writings of interwar Europe. Notice, Frater, how I stay consistent with my philosophy and also am not irrationally extremist?

I have been writing stories since I was at least 8 years old. Probably younger, but that is where my memory of my tvorchistva cuts off. They weren’t brilliant but I can say fairly confidently that these stories were substantially better than anything that most children who start writing at this age produce. My first professional writing job was after leaving secondary school when a schoolfriend contacted me and asked me to help him write a video game. He would come up with the lore and the world-building, and I’d do the nitty gritty writing. That was the division of labour. The game was a mix of Skyrim and Pokemon, and without veering this essay totally off-track, I’ll say that I worked on it for a very long time. In the end I was paid 250 euro for a script amounting to 40 thousand words. In the time it took to write this script I was faced by the most intellectually vacuous, mind numbing back-and-forths of my professional life. All the time my co-writer, who really was more of the Ideas Guy, would bring to me half baked ideas which I was forced to implement. One day he decides he wants to rewrite the main evil dragon’s lore. Another day he’s just played Fallout: New Vegas, so he wants me to write a whole region, in this medieval fantasy setting mind you, where people play Texas Hold Em Up and wear 10-gallon hats. I say, isn’t it dissonant to have gambling in a fantasy setting? Why not, is his reply, people gambled in the middle ages! Another day he reads the TvTropes.com page for so and so trope and comes back to me saying I just gotta use this trope for a scene or character.

I’m aware of what you say about TvTropes being a metafictional aggregate. But however high your ideals may be, this is what narrow information accumulation looks like in the real world, in practice, and it’s pretty damn miserable. That is the memory I retain of writer as couch potato.

A few years later, in fact while I was still in contact with this co-writer, I started a job as a sous chef in the south of France – in the alps, in fact. How I got this job is another article entirely, but it was a massive change. I had never cooked in a professional kitchen before, and here I was being the second-in-command making new meals for dozens of people every night. There were a lot of tribulations. I cut myself, had pots thrown at me. For a week or so I suffered from a terrible stomach bug which all but immobilized me but, since the restaurant could not function without me, I came to work anyway. The consolation was the beauty of the alpine country, the smell of dust kicked up by rain, the salmon-tipped mountain peaks in the setting sun. This experience resulted in the aforementioned HMS Mariana which also follows a cookboy, and though I supplemented my own experience with historical material, it is an absolute reflection of this period of my life. Years later again, after numerous jobs of a vagabond nature, I established myself as a journeyman archaeologist and then wrote Some Recollections of a Grave Robber, an auto-ethnography about my time excavating the largest mass grave uncovered in Europe printed only recently in The Republic of Letters and in, my opinion, the finest work I’ve produced yet.

Anyway, I’m tired of this dialogue. My original reply may have deigned a nine-thousand-word tome. Yours does not. So I’ll wrap this up. But I’d just like to say that for all your polemicizing your writing is still the same intolerable garbage as it always has been. I’ve no doubt that you follow your own philosophy that the whole range of writing is nothing more than a question of conscious ability to write well and the conscious mastery of the techniques. I’m sure you can and have achieved mastery, or close to it, over the concepts and genres and forms in which you write, notwithstanding that there’s always something more to read. But still, your writing lacks some kind of essential élan vital.2

Maybe readers of our dialogue are not aware that one of your main outputs, apart from esoteric poetry, is an AI album. Yes, an AI album. Composed of real lyrics set to computer generated music, HAIR (or: Harmonious Artificial Intelligence Rhythms) was not a harebrained end of the weekend beer shitpost, but one of those tunnel vision projects that sucked you in for the better part of a year.

PLEASE EDITOR INSERT THE PICTURE OF HAIR ALBUM COVER HERE.3

Now I could say a lot of things, but I think I’d rather let you hang yourself with your own rope by allowing the reader to listen to your “work” here:

This is what Art as Plumbing eventually leads to: a technically accomplished(?) but ugly, inane, vapid collection of electrodes that only fits the definition of art by legal technicality. But worst of all: it is terribly boring. It reminds me of something a boomer uncle would make.

And what’s this? Polycrystalline?4 Onyx? Could this inexplicable and hamfisted infusion of gems and rocks into pop lyrics have anything to do with your dayjob as a professional jewel hocker? Why yes, of course it does! In fact, rocks are shoved down the throat of almost all your poems, regardless of subject matter or thematic relevance. So not only is your piece de resistance miserably boring, but also you cannot even abide by your own philosophy without infusing into your work obtuse assemblages of rocks and crystals stemming from your observable reality. I thought the best art is a series of conscious techniques derived from bookish study only? I guess even you don’t believe the shit you spew. Now I see why your book interior has pictures of feces smeared against a wall. It must be a metaphor for your intellectual process.

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Returning to the first Mission: Impossible movie in 2025 is an interesting experience. Nowadays when you think Mission: Impossible you think death defying stunts with a pioneer spirit, boldly going where no action movie dares to go. Tom Cruise has clung to the side of a plane, scaled the world’s tallest building, and trained to hold his breath for over six minutes, all to chase the dragon of complete immersion in the spectacle, testing the limits of the human body with only the most essential of safety precautions taken, for the entertainment pleasure of millions.

1996’s Mission: Impossible, when viewed from this lens, reads as somewhat muted, operating far below the kinetic bar Cruise himself has raised across the decades. This is a spy movie that foregrounds spycraft, or a Hollywood version of it. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt tracks moles and deciphers Biblical references, chugging along to director Brian de Palma’s well-honed thriller beats. There is a proper action sequence with explosions and everything at the end, but it’s a bit of a weak point and upon rewatch felt out of place, a somewhat goofy ending to the tightly wound mystery that was set up.

The set piece everyone remembers, arguably the most iconic of the franchise, features Cruise suspended inches above the floor in CIA’s headquarters while trying to hack the mainframe and steal a list. There’s no death-defying heights and not a single explosion, not even a little one. As it’s a break in the thieves cannot make a sound without triggering the CIA’s advanced alarm system, so the entire set piece is conducted in silence. Yet it endures by sheer technical wizardry, ratcheting up the tension to where individual drops of sweat are used to great effect. It transcends the sides of a screen and becomes pure art, with the trappings of a heist sequence as its canvas.

If, having seen Mission: Impossible, you were told that Tom Cruise injured himself in a stunt and asked what stunt, the vault scene or the train/helicopter clash at the end would be your guess. But neither would be correct. On the Paramount studio lot, Tom Cruise badly injured his ankle when the giant restaurant fish tank exploded. This didn’t involve any vehicles or aerial suspension, it was staged in a soundstage, and not only was he injured but there was concern that he might also drown.

At the time of Mission: Impossible’s filming, the name Tom Cruise meant something very different to the average moviegoer. He had been a Scientologist since 1986 but this was less discussed, with no viral videos of him defending the religion or messy divorces that brought certain aspects of his worldview to light. Mission: Impossible arguably wasn’t even his biggest movie of the year; he would receive an Oscar nomination for Jerry Maguire, playing a sports agent. This was a typical Cruise role around this time, he was the Rain Man guy who played lawyers and appeared in Scorcese movies. There was definitely some action, with Days of Thunder and Top Gun, but while he insisted on doing his own stunts even in Top Gun, he was confined to the inside of a plane he wasn’t allowed to pilot, with no real acrobatics to center outside of a memorable volleyball sequence.

Somewhere along the line, things took a turn. The Tom Cruise of today is the “President of movies”, “Hollywood’s last true star”. At time of writing, Mission: Impossible is the 17th highest grossing movie franchise of all time, what has turned into his personal stunt sandbox is between Pirates of the Caribbean and Shrek for all time gross and could surpass the former by the end of The Final Reckoning’s run.

Before my showing of The Final Reckoning, a video of Cruise played where he thanked everyone for experiencing the movie in the cinema, and for continuing to support the cinematic experience in 2025. What follows is a hundred and sixty minute-long feature film adaptation of this video. The Entity—an immensely powerful artificial intelligence model represented by a swirling blue cloud echoing mid 2010s Marvel designs—has infiltrated the world’s governments and telecommunication networks, deepfaking videos and distorting the truth at will while whittling away at nuclear safeguards.

The audience doesn’t see this dystopia through anyone’s eyes. We don’t follow Ethan Hunt on the ground, infiltrating an AI-led splinter group that wants to bring the world under the Entity’s control. Deepfake videos aren’t actually used to trick anyone on screen, which could have been a clever twist on the classic Mission: Impossible mask reveal. And none of what I’m saying is even a spoiler because this movie doesn’t play out in the Entity’s reality; the first minute or so of the movie is a laborious voiceover that tells us the global state of affairs (and in an AI monotone that feels weirdly inspired by sissy hypno. If you don’t know what that means, don’t look it up.)

Oh the Entity is everywhere in this movie, but again we know that because every ten minutes or so someone has to grit their teeth and go “we live in the Entity’s reality”, often Nick Offerman’s straightlaced general who in situation room meetings acts as a mouthpiece for the American military industrial complex while talking to the wartime president, played here by Angela Bassett. For the life of me I can’t remember what these characters are called and luckily you don’t have to, by this point in the franchise they might as well be named Angela Bassett and Nick Offerman and Mark Gatiss.

And unlike previous installments, far less effort is taken to maintain the spy movie scaffolding that surrounds these discussions. This movie was originally titled Dead Reckoning Part 2, and even as Part 1 introduces the Entity and sets the stage for the inevitable man versus machine climax, it still feels like a Mission: Impossible movie. Cruise is disavowed, there’s an early sequence where everyone is following everyone and MacGuffins come into play, a car chase in the middle, with everything culminating in a big action set piece that shows off Cruise’s latest childhood wish fulfillment. Along the way nothing matters except the mission and the lovable IMF team, and when push comes to shove Cruise always risks it all to save his friends.

The poster for The Final Reckoning doesn’t have any helicopters in it. It doesn’t have motorcycle chases through winding mountain passes or leaping from low-flying airplanes. It’s Cruise looking straight at the viewer with some dirt on his face, clearly having been through a fight but still hanging in there, still a figurehead, a symbol of the limits of what one person can achieve.

That basically sets the tone for how subtle this movie’s political messaging is. Characters basically vlog themselves talking directly to the audience about the dangers of AI and how everything has led up to this mission, this audacious globe-trotting reckoning. There are no quiet moments, no turning up the pressure. Every event is the most important and most dramatic event in human history. The score becomes a wall of sound, you feel like you just hit legs and arms and back and still have to run a couple miles to cool down.

If you’re tired of hearing about how AI is everywhere and it’s going to take your jobs and sleep with your wife and you just want a big popcorn action movie, while this is a big popcorn action movie, it bides its time for the big popcorn action to hit. The first hour is mostly conversations in neon lit rooms or hallways about how the Entity is sleeping with our collective wife, told in a blunt, Hollywood way that if it’s heard of subtlety, thinks it’s some weird European fad.

Tom Cruise was in Europe, London to be precise, in 2017. He was filming a scene for Mission: Impossible - Fallout where he runs for some time (a first for a Cruise action scene) before leaping between buildings. Because it’s Cruise he did it himself, and everything was going smoothly until he had to leap to the other building, at which point he broke his ankle. This forced production to halt for several months as he recovered and he was still in recovery while he shot some talky scenes, leaning on a table while talking to Secretary Alec Baldwin. If you saw Fallout and thought the impact from that jump looked realistic, they used the take where the actual injury took place.

Across the Mission: Impossibles, the role of a Hollywood movie and the sway it can have over an audience has changed considerably. For decades the absolute peak of immersive art was a big budget action movie, with climatic fights that made your hair stand up and propulsive scores that kept everything ticking over, punctuated by big orchestral swells during a twist or a particularly large explosion. To a viewing public without the internet, or even one with YouTube videos that buffered on their dial-up internet plans, this was the pinnacle of entertainment, a family would pay for tickets for Mom and Dad and the kids and get a large popcorn or two to share without a second thought because that, for art available to the masses, was it. Cinemas got louder, they added 3D, IMAX aspect ratios for maximum available action, and seat-rattling sound systems to match.

In 2025, according to the National Restaurant Association, 75% of all orders from restaurants are for takeout. Not many goods have gotten cheaper over the last 10-15 years, but TVs have, and now more people than ever have massive screens to watch the latest Netflix show on. Or not watch it, as Netflix themselves have directed screenwriters to have characters essentially announce the plot out loud so those looking at their phones can keep up.

These days, immersion is a world of screens that tell you exactly what you want to hear while you eat food from wherever you want, all in the comfort of your home. Hollywood no longer has a psychic monopoly on our attention; there’s still a lot of money involved and a lot of people saw The Final Reckoning during its opening week and even more saw Lilo and Stitch but the medium of cinema, an hour and a half long motion picture made by trained actors over several years that you see by paying for a ticket in a theater, is getting old. Increasingly the tricks that made movies successful—and they are tricks, this is the business of show where lights and sounds are arranged to place the audience under a spell—are being outmoded by an endless elevator of reels and shorts and TikToks, an overpowering flood of entertainment and information increasingly generated by AI that is increasingly being trained on content it created.

Cruise’s speech before The Final Reckoning, and the frankly desperate energy throughout, all exist in response to this status quo. The President of Movies recording the equivalent of an apology video essentially thanking each person for coming to see his movie in the cinema feels an awful lot like Jeb Bush asking individual people for votes, a human touch crushed under the inevitable deluge of data we swim through every day. This is perhaps the most go-for-broke Mission: Impossible yet, with perhaps the most impressive stunts in the franchise. What Cruise does on the side of an airplane in this makes his previous plane hanging effort in Rogue Nation look tame, to say nothing of the submarine sequence with its spinning walls and constantly changing water level. It’s several minutes of pure thrills pressed onto a screen with a rolling pin. Yet Cruise can’t just show these sequences to us and let them speak for themselves. He has to do the one thing he’s pushed away his whole career: be the flesh and blood person named Tom Cruise and sell himself, no tricks. No personas, no Ethan Hunt or Jack Reacher or Maverick.

In the TikTok era, authenticity is worth its weight in gold. The humble YouTube vlog has had a total cultural victory, reality is now someone in their room staring into the camera while they advertise themselves, or advertise a product to help them advertise themselves. You may be reading this on Substack, a platform designed to echo the personal blog of the 2000s, but venture into the Notes page (or God forbid, the Reels) and the race for algorithmic engagement bait is identical to X or Instagram or especially LinkedIn. People selling themselves, or selling ways to sell themselves. The Final Reckoning, downstream of all of this, acts as a three hundred million dollar video interview for the concept of cinema. In doing so, it takes its eye off the ball, and for long stretches forgets that it does have to be a movie that entertains on its own terms. The end supplies the thrills, but it does so while not 100% sure you aren’t looking at your phone while they’re happening.

While the setpieces in The Final Reckoning are obviously a total risk to life and limb, maybe the most nakedly unconcerned with personal safety Cruise has been during the franchise actually occurred in 1999, while filming the second Mission: Impossible movie (actually typing out its title requires far too many colons, I simply won’t do it). The credits roll over him appearing to free climb at dizzying heights on a Utah mountain, and while he did wear a safety harness he also did all the jumps with his bare hands. Production for this was as rocky as the faces he climbed: powerful winds whipped at him while, as revealed later, he already had a broken foot, and tore his shoulder on one particular jump, all the while pushing to do take after take to get it right as even action maestro John Woo thought it was all a bit much.

There’s been a lot of “final” franchise movies lately, either in the form of legacy sequels where aging actors return for one last ride (the recent Halloween movies, Blade Runner: 2049, The Matrix Resurrections) or movies like The Final Reckoning or No Time to Die which bids goodbye to the audience for the foreseeable future. For decades, Hollywood has kicked the can down the road by increasingly relying on franchises and big-budget adaptations of existing media to appeal to audiences with increasingly more entertainment options, in the process hopping on a number of different trends. Spy movies gave way to space operas, in the 80s everything had to be Die Hard, in the 2000s we saw the early glow of the superhero inferno, along with a larger push for nostalgic properties in movies that saw franchises based on children’s toys like Transformers rake in billions. A number of breadwinners have come and gone, yet more seem to be going than coming these days. The last new franchise to really gain traction has been Dune, which while financially successful isn’t exactly Star Wars. Speaking of Star Wars, after waiting a decade for a new one there were five movies in five years, with poorly received entries like Rise of Skywalker torching any goodwill built up along the way. There hasn’t been a new Star Wars movie since then, despite entire trilogies being announced and then dropped, because nobody can make one that’s a guaranteed hit. Once the biggest certainty in cinema, it now languishes on Disney+, churning out increasingly intertwined and convoluted shows with one hit for every two to three released. Lord of the Rings is a show now as well, this time on Amazon Prime. Critics and audiences aren’t the biggest fans, but Amazon has to keep going because it cost a billion dollars to make. Marvel lurches towards the next two Avengers movies, with each installment more financially disappointing than the last.

Hollywood is still making hits, but they rarely hit the billion dollar mark, and in general are far less predictable than, say, before the pandemic. The works of individual directors like Barbenheimer can smash and an adaptation can strike the right chord like A Minecraft Movie, but these are one offs, and more importantly are somewhat gimmicky. People saw A Minecraft Movie because it’s a movie adaptation of Minecraft, the thing they have actual nostalgia for. Showings went viral as people threw popcorn and screamed and did everything possible to disrupt the sanctity of the movie theater that has been the foundation of Hollywood for a century, and the studio responded by encouraging all of that because it’s what actually got people to turn up. As the franchises dry up, expect more desperate swings for a moment as that has a chance to go viral and actually reach an audience.

Mission: Impossible, like other franchises, is ending, at least for now, at least this team. As I watched it, I couldn’t help but compare it to No Time to Die, the equivalent swan song from the other dominant spy franchise of this century. Both send off the lead characters, and the teams and worlds they helped create, yet they take radically different approaches to the final adventure. No Time to Die feels like a Bond movie, just with an air of finality around it. There’s a villain with a private island and a facial deformity, there’s an elusive woman, he trots around the globe using gadgets to defeat henchmen. AI hadn’t really taken off and warped all discussion, especially as No Time to Die was filmed before the pandemic, prior to being delayed to 2021. The Bond franchise is as prestigious a property as cinema has ever produced, and the weight of that history carried the movie to its final moments. Some emotional stakes were added, but ultimately this was one more outing for the venerable 007. The Final Reckoning, by contrast, feels warped beyond recognition by current events, entertaining for stretches yet often gets in its own way by forcing callbacks to previous movies, often in the form of clunky retcons that sometimes gets too goofy even for Mission: Impossible. Bond has the advantage of a cavalcade of iconic images: the Aston Martin DB5, M’s office, the villain’s lair. It can play through the hits and tweak its story to give them a sendoff. The Final Reckoning has to not only fight for its own relevance, but for everything Cruise has built up across thirty years.

The day before I saw The Final Reckoning, I caught Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted at my local arthouse theater. I’ve spent a lot of this piece criticizing The Final Reckoning, but I didn’t hate it, there’s enough there where if you’re a fan of the franchise it’s absolutely worth seeing. There are absolutely no qualifiers in my opinion of Swamp Dogg, it instantly became one of my favorites of the year and if you can catch it in theaters or at home, drop whatever you’re doing and check it out. Ostensibly a documentary about an iconic underground musician, it becomes somewhat of a hangout movie in the process, cutting between old interviews and performances to the present day where Swamp Dogg shows off his house and his lovably eccentric roommates that make music there. There are animated sections and a cooking show, and generally it’s as full of life and artistic spirit as any movie I’ve ever seen.

Yet as I saw them back to back, I couldn’t help but see both as career bookends. In the movie, Swamp Dogg celebrates his eightieth birthday, and it’s a joy to see everyone celebrate life around the eponymous pool, yet all the present day segments have this tinge of sadness to them. Swamp Dogg and Guitar Shorty and Moogstar seem to mostly hang out and swap stories about old times, and while they do create new art it’s obvious that, more than in previous decades, it’s for them, to keep them busy and creative, to give their life meaning. An interviewer asks “Are you enjoying being a legend?” to which Swamp Dogg replies “What else can I do? Can’t figure out how to get out of this thing.” His vibrancy shines through the screen but he’s also eighty years old, he’s not touring and recording at Atlantic Records anymore. His life has become repetitive, procedural.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with procedural. The appeal of Mission: Impossible is that it’s essentially a big budget Law and Order or The Blacklist, going through well-worn plot motions with central characters who exist to elicit predictable audience reactions and move the plot along. Benji’s character is that he’s the hacker who often cracks jokes. Luther also is the hacker that cracks jokes but he’s more jaded and more loyal to Ethan than the IMF. Jeremy Renner basically plays himself. It’s essentially a Hollywood version of the SVU talking their cases into existence, catching the bad guy, prosecuting, rinse, repeat. The bomb never reaches zero, the world survives, Ethan defeats the villain. The entertainment is in the procedure, the act of fighting the henchmen to free the hostage or swinging off the building to break into the vault. Cruise has built his career as an action star off predictability, reliability, and procedure.

Tom Cruise was in London with his family in early July 2024 when he turned 62. He has ridden motorcycles and flown planes and ran towards danger for almost forty years, but he is still human, and no matter how much time he spends recovering from broken bones or work he gets done on his movie star face, he’s getting old. Franchises are ending nowadays, but Cruise’s position as President of Movies doesn’t seem to have a term limit. Through sheer dedication to cinema and the old ways of entertainment, he’s cemented his superstar legacy, now the man to represent our species in the climactic final fight with the machines. David Ellison, the billionaire son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, recently acquired Paramount and has been a producer on Mission: Impossible movies since Ghost Protocol. He seems to be a massive action fan and has the means to keep pumping out Cruise vehicles until the Sun goes out.

The real reason there has to be a Final Reckoning is simply that Cruise can’t run forever. His life has been filled with premieres and helicopter flights and increasingly younger wives for decades, but soon it'll all be over. His star will burn for a very long time, he has enough stories to fill a thousand interviews and documentaries, especially if he ever turns on the Church of Scientology. Yet in the day to day, his life will functionally consist of sitting around a pool, swapping stories of old times.

I won’t say how The Final Reckoning ends, only that I’m not the biggest fan, after over two and a half hours of pure dramatic spectacle it’s a bit of a squib. But if you think of the movie as the end of a chapter for Cruise, who was always bigger than the franchise and had his hand in every creative aspect, it adds the necessary pathos to ground it and is ultimately more than worth seeing. Go for the thrills, stay for Cruise walking towards, as Luther puts it “a light we cannot see.”

Read more from Erie Mitchel at

Deep breaths. Frater Asemlen responds to ’s response to his original article.

Apologies for the long delay in reply, it was May of course. But I won’t bore the reader with Niceties, let’s begin immediately.

Don’t pretend to NOT be an attention-hound, you wouldn’t use the voice register and style nor talking to the crowd if the ideal was really making public a private communication. As to “lackadaisical philosophy” all that I said is consistent with my axioms, this is in contrast to your loose appeals to a variety of gentlemen which often don’t actually agree with you.

No not at all, it’s clear by your choice of language “success” “evoking emotions” that you haven’t actually consciously dealt with what I’ve written, success to you is clearly tinged not with the implication of “formal success, a good writing “ but with wide spread acclaim, with sales, a silly ideal in the days of tiktok, YouTube, film and tv, but you know this which is why you don’t really have a dedication to writing and see play/screenwriting as the actual ideal, because the point is not the art of writing to you, it is success and to be a propagandist, but propagandist of what? A peddler of the common opium of modernism onwards, your uninteresting individual persona, a propagandist of auto fictions, transient political positions and paradoxical moral qualms.

When you bring up that the point is to evoke emotions, you betray these things, as we have spoken at length I will reiterate my opinion which we’ve already spoken of, that, there are a diversity of arts and ideals in art, and that, one of the lowest ugliest variants is the evocation of emotion through the faculties of sentiment and for the purpose of emotion itself, reducing the art of writing down to emotion removes both its lowest and highest parts, its simplistic pleasure in musicality, image, pretty conceit and intriguing time-passer are its low elements. When you say it’s about emotion you say the music is meaningless, you say the image if it is not for your emotion it is nothing, there can be no delight in brilliant conceit nor the simple passing of an hour, unless am i to believe you are on this constant roller coaster, crying, screaming, shitting, pissing, laughing and rolling around with each page you read? No, you sit there for the bulk of your writing experience in utter stillness and ataraxia, to paraphrase the words of MP shiel, in the moment of reading the multitude of pleasurable literature, you are struck-dumb stuck from the verbiage as a horse, mouth-chewing, glass-eyed mouth-fulled with herbage and laid there made a dullard.

Such a paradoxical condition is well known, that as the mind extends the mind also in effect is loose and dull to the sensations and emotions, thus the erudite like Thomas Aquinas being called “the Dumb Ox of Sicily” in reality neither internally nor externally are you stirred to emotions save the more complex or simplistic aesthetic sensibilities defineable as Rasas, these occurring in the suspended fluid of intellect whereby they are otherized and in the good pieces, not assumed to be subjectively shared but viewed as an object for some purpose or another, never for themselves. That is, the sad man or woman of the book is not to produce sadness in us, it is towards a greater aesthetic end, when not, it is trite, when not, it is the experience of reading a teenaged diary.

Your first and foremost job is not to be a journalist, your first and foremost duty is to “write well” that means the evocation of qualia may not even be the point, purely musicality, imagery, pretty conceit and many others have been the point of writing since the dawn of writing and have been popularly and widely consumed and accepted as acceptable ends, the “observation of reality” which you claim is the author’s own has never actually been the primary import, no one went to Homer for accuracy, they went to him because of stateliness, yes dramatic capacity, rhythm, memorability of lines and intriguing conceit, that, first and foremost he is an entertainment. If basis in reality were the ultimate goal, then we would not have the fantastical pastoralism of Theocritus, we would not have the chimeric monstrosities of men like Nonnus and Ovid, we would not have the highly formalized Callimachus and the Callimachianism so influential, we would not have the carnivalesque’s of Lucian true story or the golden ass, of the Elizabethan and restoration era what can be said save that they constructed a world apart from this one? Where is the world of Keats in Keats? Where is the world of Tennyson in Tennyson? Where in hudibras or gulliver’s travels is the observation of the common Lebenswelt?

It is said, “a rose by any other name” but I tell you the truth, this is a falsehood. The common object to the aesthetician is not the common object in his work, it is simply a bridge, it is simply a ladder to the higher mental implication and impression embedded in the bundle of nuances that is any particular word. The common rose is nothing but a bundle of petals and spike, the Rosicrucian rose holds the weight of the whole spirit of God, thus, the “Rose” is not simply a distillation of a rose, the “rose” is a door into the realm of “play” which Schiller describes, which is the place of the resting still-churning intellect in its many powers, that is, the rose is not the entrance to your experience of the rose, the rose is the entrance of any meaning and implication and zone you desire, which, chiefly, is marked not by its squeezing from the real world, but by its addition to the material world, that is, to remove ourselves from the refuse of substack tier literary critiques (of X is a Y and here’s why!) and instead taking ourselves to the high plateaus of Anandavardhana or Walter pater, the aesthetical is mind-born, being harmonious exotic modulations of the consciousness under various hallucinations which radically alter the relationship of the reader to his own perceptions in novel ways, you do not actually give them yourself, you simply give them a link to the field of impressions (which are simultaneously Supra-emotional and sub-emotional, being our conception of concepts themselves, and the highly subtle feelings underneath.) so then, the petty generation of emotion and the ideal of the journalist are really nothing more than pathos rhetoric, on account that the chief purpose of the aesthetical is to dwell in the aesthetical, which properly understood is really the world of intellect under a sort of interpenetrative self-oscillation, whereby each element the mind can partake and generate undergoes all permutations when interlaced with the others, such is the beauty and harmony and delight of the mind. an approximate idea to this is deleuze’s “virtual plane” when crossed with his conception of the baroque “fold” whereby he defines the baroque as the aesthetical becoming conscious of itself within the design, by this I mean to say, that any aesthetical work when delighted in, creates an inward folding of consciousness in the simultaneous act of being conscious of the aesthetical subject, being self conscious and being conscious of the self’s relative dissolution in the absorption of the aesthetical object, thus the aesthetical plane as a whole is the sum of the possible relations of knowledge (in the sense of datum of all sorts whether they be sensory or eidetic) intermingling in all varieties.

This is not simply delivering emotion nor reformulating the material into other material, it is an access point beyond the material.

Whether you find it distasteful or not is not a real problem to us when the topic is truth, what you’re really opposing and what you’re really avoiding in this is the question of, “what is intellect, what is reasoning” and the Andes to this is calculation and reformulation, you yourself cannot escape the language of reformulation, it’s why you say it’s about reformulating the elements of life, in reality the mind takes datum, immediately categorizes it and immediately by the process of storing and adding it to its stock-pile, re-invents its entire network of knowledge-points and conception by the introduction of the new point into the whole, thus the web of associations shifts with each individual new knowledge point, therefore, every singular object of perception is in the moment of apprehension reformulated, this is sensible both phenomenologically, and inarguable if we do consider the rote-nature of neurons and their production of one’s neuropsychological relation to knowledge and perception and intelligence. A fabulous study which demonstrates how truly calculative and reformulative according to mechanical stimuli and via mechanical transfers of data in the Brain is the Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga split-brain studies, wherein as a treatment to epilepsy they did split the right hemisphere from the left hemisphere in living patients and tested them, such as showing one eye an object and asking them to verbalize what it was, or asking them a written question visible to one eye to which, upon answering, they cannot explain why they answered. The brain truly is a system which calculates and re-formulates its data and if any of these processes are disrupted the consequences are empirically known. Your intelligence IS rote and your combination of elements is based on the rote ingestion and combination within the aforementioned virtual-plane.

Spoken like one with no respect for the plumber nor the electrician’s art, these things take no less abstraction capacity than the carpenter and take no less formulation of parts, this is a demonstration of your appraisal being born of taste-sentiments not any will to truly interact with the nature of these.

Absolutely I do, whether we speak of the “best” porn as the most appealing and grabbing, the sex and sexuality which hooks people the most has the least to do with reality, such is the case with the doujin writer who is himself often not having casual sex if any sex at all, and with the hentai and furry pornographer, all of which routinely are extracting far greater attention span from their groups of people, but even if we go to the pop pornographers selling their Mia khalifa’s and so forth, what is the biggest selling points according to the metrics given by Pornhub aggregating nations? Most often, it is impossible utterly unrealistic sex, thus the extreme popularly of incest and sister incest even among those without sisters, thus the global hold of hentai, thus the fantasy of the aforementioned khalifa as the taboo of the good Muslim girl, thus the world wide boom that is the soft-core e-girl, whose entire appeal is that she is a rarified experience unlike to the normal human girl but akin to the video-animated world, such is likewise the fixation had with tomboys and goths, an upper stylized ether further and further away from the mundane commonalities, but if we are to speak of REFINED pornologists, I reckon the finest of the bunch are the highly awarded and celebrated Pierre Louÿs, whose works as a straight men consist of forgeries of Ancient Greek lesbian erotic verse, a little lesbian school-girls erotic-social manual, “Trois Filles de leur mère “ which consists of a gentleman absolutely having his way with not only a mother, but her three daughters of variable age ranging from teenage to child in one long decadent miasma, likewise to this we have Apollinaire’s “eleven thousand cocks/eleven thousand virgins” who, following the lead of another leading man in the field, de-Sade, produces a phantasmagoria of depravity pushing it to an H.R. Giger-esque of complex-filth. What else holds the laurels of Porneia? Why, “the way of a man with a maid” being an extensive violent fantasy of impossible domination and mansions and powers, but what of the contemporary world? Why, agony in pink the power rangers fanfic clearly stands with its head held high, but is it as high as the vampire-based fanfic master of the universe which was later renamed 50 shades of grey? The point is evident, the best pornography is, empirically, impossible super-stimulus. Two links on the topic.

Bah this is just bias talking, everyone has life experience and everyone has difficulty, every life has extremes and every life does produce wisdoms, your preference for certain life-styles as “life experience “ generates is really just showing your hand, you don’t actually value the lived experience, you, like everyone, enjoys something exceptional and entertaining, what you call “life-experience” you really mean to say “writing interesting contents” and with that, do you really think any 80 year old who still has their mind cannot give you various interesting contents? No no, what we’re discussing is not style and not ability to write, what we’re discussing is whether you personally find what they write about interesting, the problem is of course, that no mundane life is as fascinating as the extent of fantasies and imagination, whether it be mundane fantasies like your Dostoevsky or Jane austen’s, or extreme fantasies such as your Lewis Carroll’s, or, even the bar-room story teller within his circle embellishing details to make the story finer, in all cases we prefer the play of the mind. Of course the “life-experience” of a soldier is more interesting, because the life-experience isn’t the point, a story about “a teenaged lesbian having relationship issues “ inherently is not gonna be as gripping upon first its first adumbration as hearing “a soldier from the trenches” is this because he’s lived more? No of course not, to live and not to live is a simplistic yes or no, now is the quality of one life better than another? Perhaps, but, do you really believe there are no soldier stories less entertaining to read than any relationship drama? As there are surely some petty relationship dramas of more interest than soldier stories, we must conclude that what makes one story better than another is how well it is written, following this logic line, can we say that every soldier story written by a soldier is always better than one written by a Gentleman who has not known war? No it’s impossible to say this, we may say one is more true or true to life, but we cannot say that the one is always inherently the better of the other, on account of this we must then admit, if the story contents do not make the story’s ultimate value, and the proximity to reality and lived experience do not better the soldier’s soldier story to the non soldier’s soldier’s story, then the answer of what makes the better story is apparent, that one is written better than the other. How did these certain superior non/soldier soldier stories get better than these “real” ones? They’re all published, they’re all grammatical, they’re all solid in the basics, so the question has to be answered by the simplest answer, that they were written better using the tools of writing, namely, narrative control, dramatic control, rhythm of dialogue and rhythm in general, composition of scene, imagery selected, and rhetorical modes and styles selected having been executed with efficacy.

Can you deny that you have ever preferred a work about a subject or field written born purely of one’s fantasy over one written purely in one’s real experience? How can you? Who’d lie to themselves like this?

These sources offer nothing that is formally relevant in writing though, these principles are tailored to other mediums as a consumer at best, what great knowledge accumulation to the form of writing can you speak of together vs when I go back 200 years ago, where everyone knew how to actually produce rhythm (not in a vague sense, in the sense of actually producing a scansion in their prose, for which reason Cicero who was the handbook of good prose for the bulk of western history after his death gave various recommendations for various rhythms to end your sentence on) when was the last time these people cracked open Quintilian or Erasmus, which of these sites and gurus teaches even the basics of oratory such as “repetition produces impact and musicality “ ( http://philomel.com/musical_illusions/pages.php?i=1020 and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4310215/ ) which has been documented since Sumer? These groups do not actually tell you a lick about writing, they tell you about meta-fictional concepts. Thus why something like TV tropes will have examples from literature as a tiny category, next to anime, cartoons, comics, film, drawings! Music videos! Oral mythology! Etc. these things then are not of writing, but of the broader category of anthropology concerned with describing common narrative-character elements, it is precisely my argument that this accumulation doesn’t matter, because this is not the accumulation OF formal writing knowledge.

“Could specific person write this specific work if he was the precise specific person?” Down to the tiniest iota? Such is a ridiculous ask, but could he write a work of equivalent literary value on the same images, same or superior philosophy with equivalent or greater aesthetic pleasure, entertainment and so forth? Of course he could have. All records as far as normal documents show Shakespeare was a home-body, was his courtly and foreign excursions in his verse any less literary of value? What about the fantastical pantagruel of Rabelais? Was he a giant monster? Did he see mercury chop peoples heads off for throwing axes into the sea? Did Francesco Colonna see the hyper-pyramids he so extols? Is Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda less entertaining, just because Cervantes he was never an incestual prince? Because he was never a wild man on an island among barbarians willing to sacrifice a virgin? Or do you want to say those who extol Cervantes or lope de vega are wrong? Why? Because they entertain you less than the millions upon millions who have been most entertained? Then if it’s not entertainment, is it wisdom? Do you reckon Walden has more wisdom than the cultivated wisdom of any serious philosopher? Put in your hands a work of Longchenpa, of Plotinus, of iamblichus, or, I challenge you and do not just speak rhetorically, pick up and read the work of Secundus the Silent, whose inverse riddles will overwhelm you with an extreme of wisdom. If entertainment is not the ultimate ideal, and great pwisdom cannot be achieved to the height of these writer gentlemen, what exactly are you arguing this life-experience offers? The truth is this, the arts are vanities and whoever crafts the loveliest illusion of the vanities is the finest writer.

“Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. A myriad of excellent writers have taken this philosophy and, by deliberately affecting the course of their life into strange, unexplored or dangerous territories, produced exceptional fiction, like Thompson, Orwell, and Jack London.”

What is your litany against mine, having Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, having Dryden and Alexander pope, John ford and Samuel Johnson, Thomas Middleton and robert browning, Robert Burton and Roger bacon, Montague Summers and William Blake, mallarme, Verlaine, banville and Isidore ducasse, I’ll end the boring litany thus: for every one interesting or good author of any tradition or style you can cite, we can just as easily find 10 equal or better authors who were boring homebodies who did nothing but sit and read all day. And even that, coupled with the normal social expectations of the times! In my Bible the songs of asaph are next to the songs of king David, Solomon and Moses. If I ask the Greek pagans why was Virgil a prophet? Because of skill, why was Aesop so well? The blessing of the gods and nothing of his experience or power, likewise Pindar the finest of them by their own estimate? Blessed by the sting of a holy bee to speak with honeyed words his muscular lyrics.

>Textual study cannot teach you that which has not been written.

I will demonstrate how a chat bot could approach your exact words and replicate them.

Prompt: machine, using the quote “divesting yourself, Frater, of the one thing which differentiates you, as far as your art is concerned, from an LLM chatbot. If you see the raising of an eyebrow this evening on your commute, you may write about it because it is real and you saw it. An LLM may only write about it as a document.” “ produce a sensory description of an event, use both the exact words and words inspired by the requested words quoted.

Output: I step onto the rattling train just as dusk drapes its lavender haze across the windows. The air tastes faintly of petrichor carried on a draft that stirs the collar of my coat. Beneath my fingers, the cold metal pole hums with the low-frequency thrum of electricity, a heartbeat pulsing through the carriage. Around me, murmured conversations fold into the warm hiss of brakes and the scuff of boots on linoleum.

And then—there it is—a single, imperceptible twitch: the raising of an eyebrow this evening on my commute. I see it in the reflection of my dirty window, a silent question etched above a pair of tired eyes. My pulse quickens; this quiet gesture, this small fissure in the monotony, becomes an ember of wonder. “If you see the raising of an eyebrow this evening on your commute, you may write about it because it is real and you saw it.” I say to myself. I lean forward, inhaling the faint scent of spilled espresso and musk, capturing every nuance. Her eyebrow arches the tired lashes, she is a living apostrophe in the gray narrative of routine.”

Why, quite opposed to my taste, but sensory? Yes, as or more sensory than your image-diversion? Why I do think so! Why do you mock “a document “ when, forgive my drop in register, EL EM AY OH, all writing is simply the construction of documents, the moment you write a TEXT it becomes a TEXT, if you oppose texts as textual documents, you shouldn’t be in the art concerned with MAKING TEXTS. To get to the heart of the problem, you are Like a man who looking at the body of the scientific disinclines and says “studying all of this and practicing in according with the tradition of the giants that we stand upon is incredibly less important than re-approaching the fundamentals” the scientist would not detach from his sure gigantic foundation, neither would the architect, yet you desire to reinvent the wheel by denying the material literature gives you. You yourself show your opinion of literature is that it is a profane valueless thing almost, if you really believed that life experience can be translated to literature and that this is the primary commodity to the great writing, does it not serve, that, by the study of such a work you would have gamed the system and have integrated the life experience at an accelerated rate without having to do so yourself? And having accrued such, could you not then refine it further despite never experiencing the things it speaks of? (As surely many people have done, like the d’avenant tempest which for most of history was considered superior to the Shakespeare original, the shadwell Timon, the Nahum Lear, etc. all examples of men taking material they have no lived experience relating to, and refining it by art to great esteem.) no instead you do not actually believe that the writing can transfer life experience so you do not count it.

Defoe has on record 198 proven pseudonyms according to commonly accepted literary history, all of which demonstrate intensely different styles and biography claims and on many differing topics all Of which have nothing to do with his life as a merchant or a spy, and if we are to speak of crusoe, what of “Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World” has to do with his real life?

What in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde can be attributed to his lived experience and not the swelling of interests of the times in still-popular figures like Eugene Aram the by-day goodly scholar poet, and by-night murderer? What can’t be attributed to the already substantial body of literature on him and similar gentlemen which Stevenson doubtlessly read?

As for Twain? The biggest part of him is not lived experience, the biggest part of him is not even literary quality, he is a creature of Witt, his stories are about demonstrating Witt, his pages Witt, is there 2 pages of Twain without a Witt display? Where? Thus the point of Twain is likewise dispelled because one can cultivate Witt without doing anything but sitting in a corner contemplating, one can cultivate it by studying, or one can simply be born with a lot of Witt.

Oh I’d love to! Because I see them as all examples of your same flaws!

What’s the commonality of these eh? Think it over real deeply, it’s that none of them enjoy reading for itself, the bulk of these gentlemen are fixated on literature as a status symbol, literature as a soapbox, a propaganda tool, a self extension or in cases of men like Cairo smith, (and possibly yourself) a cheap replacement to scratch their cosmopolitan itch to create indie films that nobody would want to watch either.

Oh but they do have many many contemporary models, you just didn’t name them. They are named film, for like yourself they idealize film over writing, they are named tv shows, anime, cartoon, even video games! These are the actual mental masters of the bulk of these men and are the bedrock of their style and ideas of aesthetic and methodology: the anonymous multitude of instagram psuedo confessional poets and slam poets also take a substantial share, of course when you imitate horrible slop that ISN’T EVEN designed for writing the result will just be sloppy writing.

Why would they when, as you say, their basis is a pop novelist who they Like for ideas of edgy ruggedness and film adaption, imitation of one movie genre, imitation of another genre predominantly through its film adaptations, and, what’s that, a tv series? But you don’t divide these from studying how to actually write because, just like them, you see writing as just an inferior screen-writing, you see the play and the film and tv show as the ideal and literature, really, something anyone can do if they’re classified by you as interesting, why have that interesting category? Because who is the most important and interesting person to the man impacted by in the modernist condition? Why, himself, so of course you want to consider personal valuation of an interesting life as the be-all end all!

“They proudly call themselves derivative, brush their hands, and go tend to their middle-class spouse or remote job. Maybe they’ll schedule a tweet before bed. That’s to say nothing of the fantasy genre as it exists both in samizdat and tradpub.”

Study trash and you produce trash, but I am not so hard on the fantasy genre as you, I don’t hate our mutual friend James Krake or the like, why, because I know the ideal you’re harping on about is the lie of the great-history-changing novel which is an a-historical conception. Edward Bulwer-Lytton had no interest but to entertain us with his skill, the same to Walter Scott, what these pulp fantasy slop publishers do is ultimately of a similar type. They simply are not interested in the form of writing as anything but utility just as you, but unlike you they do not see play or film the superior art, their ideal art is the world building in itself, the wiki-conception, the data point summary, this is what they have adapted from Tolkien and his sons directly, and they enjoy it. They deeply enjoy reading each other for its own sake. I oppose their style but I don’t oppose their work ethic nor their writers, they do not write for why I enjoy writing, but to say they fail at their aim, entertainment and artistry in world building, is simply sticking your nose in the air and ignoring the earnest work so many people are performing.

Simple, that these are going to typically be far more enjoyable than the generic literary autofiction piece born of self experience whether the writer is a self obsessed Congolese transsexual or a dasha-obsessed Celine wannabe murdoch-murdoch right wing pseudo incel. And also, again, lmao none of these have a lick to do with actually studying the forms of writing and learning how to write properly and building off of the actual giants.

He need not study his genre, he can study writing in general in any form, but sure, if he did actually study the likes of sterling or dunsany or smith he’d certainly be better.

Halt, if he has already successfully emulated them, then that means he has produced material he reckons entertaining and pleasurable in forms he enjoys, he has achieved success ALREADY.

I am tired of saying lmao but I will again, no, the pleasure of fantasy is not the clash of mundane reality vs speculative realism, the pleasure of fantasy is imagination reformulating as many sensual elements according to the taste of the author as possible. There is nothing lost in your ability to imagine by studying dunsany nor how he writes just as nothing is lost if you study starbuck Mayo or Murray gilchrist or what have you, if I think of a gentleman like Keats he says no author of any value writes concerning his time period, and there are a legion of authors who say the true writer doesn’t write for his time period but for eternity, being always fresh, but focusing on just fantasy, do you really believe that reading more books you enjoy and studying them deeper would somehow isolate you from the ability to make fantasy? And make it enjoyable? How ?

Enticing to who? Is this still a popularity contest? If it’s a popularity contest, Ursula Guinn, Borges, Tolkien, Umberto Eco, Arturo Pérez-Reverte and many others show that erudition in the modern day does not harm readability nor potential range if that is your desire, but again why is this about popularity and wide sales if the ultimate question is aesthetic beauty? If you want the most eyes TikTok and YouTube are the answers, go, make some political video, go lift some weights and sell creatine, go take on an anime avatar and become the new gawr gura, these are all things that’ll give you 100 to 10000 times more popularity and influence than writing any literature will in terms of sheer readership and human-mind space you’ll take in this lifetime (assuming you won’t be lost in the sea of time in the future.)

The one we spoke of earlier who is genuinely the best pornographer, yes! I do! Your funhouse mirror perversion ideal has no weight, you use the word simulacrum while speaking of enticing crowds, do you not find it ironic! The entire point In baudrillard is that these simulacrum being generated off of bundled associations becoming signs signifying signs, by their invisibility to the real, by their all-present nature to the eidetic structures we hold, are impossibly MORE powerful than the real, can pack MORE DESIRE, because they can generate by fiat non existent desires (thus the endless horde of internet obsessives!) the simulacrum in itself is the star and ruler of the popular of the current “civilizational Milieu” therefore your complaint is actually ridiculous for your stated aim, can we verify this? Yes! Which books are read the most? The genre slop (whether Romance, fantasy, detective, light novel variants, etc) and the renown “classics” “best books” if you really wanted to maximize your enticement then, and your desire doesn’t boil down to wanting to be on opera’s best list for your biography about having smoked crack between bisexual affairs, then guess what! The highly simulacra based genre-slop is your best friend.

Like who? It’s all completely well known that the Elizabethans and restoration era would take their time, group read, group rewrite and so forth, such is the common practice of the romantics, the Victorians, Georgians and basically anyone having produced good. In every moment we find extreme stylists and very fine works whose reputation is having taken a lifetime or endless pouring over every single hour, whether it’s Yeats and co admitting such is the case with modernism, Flaubert putting a lifetime into st Anthony or any other movement you can point to.

Did Blavatsky, the woman renown for creating the most derivative horrible broth of fourth hand occultism, get her model from beint horribly derivative? Endless calculation no, horribly derivative? Absolutely yes. I do not know why you bring up such an awful system with such obviously false roots (are you a theosophist to believe in this lodger which is not chronologically sensible?) but regardless, no, her model is just a hodge-podge born of not studying anything in depth. No Buddhist Tibetan or otherwise whose studied her works earnestly considers her of their rank, I can give you recommendations on Buddhist literature if you desire. Same to her horrible corruptions of hermeticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, etc, if you really desire it in private or public here I will give you reading lists.

All neither here nor there, Cameron didn’t invent the transformers, the films are loved for the mixture of their franchise with Michael bay’s vulgar auteur style, likewise Cameron’s work is nothing but technical displays, no one comes away from the avatar films with anything but praise for technology.

But regardless, terminator, what is this born of his lived experience? This is precisely the mind-born mind play with nothing to do with reality, his dream was of a phantasmal metal torso, should we consider all flights of fantasy, dream and reading of strange events to be lived-experience? If so, then your complaints against reading and calculation are again foolish, because these are AGAIN in that paradigm, just the maximally efficient way to accrue these life experiences in refined superior further distilled forms. Not a fan of jacob’s ladder I’m not a film guy, but of silent hill, I know enough of it to know it’s based on numerous writers and graphic artists, various streets in the game are even named after writers who influenced the games.

Hey I wonder why I keep mentioning him?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition

Literally his own book on the topic.

Nah the aesthetic was already entirely existent prior, the reason walpope uses the term gothic, is because he was influenced by what? Sleeping in a gothic building and being influenced by the highly refined non-lived-experience born other art that is the gothic building, but you know, he’s neither the one to popularize the genre nor invent it, all of it exists already in Macbeth, in othello, in revenger’s tragedy, in paradise lost, in Spenser, in the graveyard poets, in the death-ode of John Hopkins, the number of poems and novels using all of the elements of gothic before the becoming of a simulacra is numerous (becoming a simulacra is what it is, the gothic genre as genre upon taking the label) you are just praising the creation of simulacra now.

Don’t get ahead of yourself, this divine madness is not something owned or acquired by the poet even in the platonic material, your life experience yields nothing here, for which plato writes (after saying homer himself but imitates And makes nothing real or new, for remember, Plato was against the artists.)

The following quote is from the republic.

“Then, I said, we must put a question to Homer; not about medicine, or any of the arts to which his poems only incidentally refer: we are not going to ask him, or any other poet, whether he has cured patients like Asclepius, or left behind him a school of medicine such as the Asclepiads were, or whether he only talks about medicine and other arts at second- hand; but we have a right to know respecting military tactics, politics, education, which are the chiefest and noblest subjects of his poems, and we may fairly ask him about them. 'Friend Homer, then we say to him, 'if you are only in the second remove from truth in what you say of virtue, and not in the third-not an image maker or imitator-and if you are able to discern what pursuits make men better or worse in private or public life, tell us what State was ever better governed by your help? The good order of Lacedaemon is due to Lycurgus, and many other cities great and small have been similarly benefited by others; but who says that you have been a good legislator to them and have done them any good? Italy and Sicily boast of Charondas, and there is Solon who is renowned among us; but what city has anything to say about you?' Is there any city which he might name?

I think not, said Glaucon; not even the Homerids themselves pretend that he was a legislator.

Well, but is there any war on record which was carried on successfully by him, or aided by his counsels, when he was alive?

There is not.

Or is there any invention of his, applicable to the arts or to human life, such as Thales the Milesian or Anacharsis the Scythian, and other ingenious men have conceived, which is attributed to him?

There is absolutely nothing of the kind.

But, if Homer never did any public service, was he privately a guide or teacher of any? Had he in his lifetime friends who loved to associate with him, and who handed down to posterity an Homeric way of life, such as was established by Pythagoras who was so greatly beloved for his wisdom, and whose followers

are to this day quite celebrated for the order which was named after him?

Nothing of the kind is recorded of him. For surely, Socrates, Creophylus, the companion of Homer, that child of flesh, whose name always makes us laugh, might be more justly ridiculed for his stupidity, if, as is said, Homer was greatly neglected by him and others in his own day when he was alive?

Yes, I replied, that is the tradition. But can you imagine, Glaucon, that if Homer had really been able to educate and improve mankind-if he had possessed knowledge and not been a mere imitator-can you imagine, I say, that he would not have had many followers, and been honoured and loved by them? Protagoras of Abdera, and Prodicus of Ceos, and a host of others, have only to whisper to their contemporaries: You will never be able to manage either your own house or your own State until you appoint us to be your ministers of education'-and this ingenious device of theirs has such an effect in making men love them that their companions all but carry them about on their shoulders.

And is it conceivable that the contemporaries of Homer, or again of Hesiod, would have allowed either of them to go about as rhapsodists, if they had really been able to make mankind virtuous? Would they not have been as unwilling to part with them as with gold, and have compelled them to stay at home with them? Or, if the master would not stay, then the disciples would have followed him about everywhere, until they had got education enough?

Yes, Socrates, that, I think, is quite true.

Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with Ho-mer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach? The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and figures.

Quite so.

In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colours of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in metre and harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well-such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have. And I think that you must have observed again and again what a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.

Yes, he said.

They are like faces which were never really beautiful, but only blooming; and now the bloom of youth has passed away from them”

Plato continues at length explaining how all arts of all kinds are nothing but imitation even in their best, and how this is actually why the production of art is effectively evil.

In a word, this man is not your friend!

No this is just some embarrassment over the collective belief, you do believe that the suffering imparts skill because you have already said you believe suffering for life-experiences generates them because you soldiered for them which automatically generates superior writing. Thus you do believe that simply living in poverty and suffering would increase your talent, since it is a question of life experience ultimately.

So? A gentleman who writes well decided to tramp around and write a book, 1984 or Animal Farm gains what from this? Besides be honest, everyone likes him as an idea-man, do you even idolize his style? Would you enjoy the work less if another man read his book and re wrote it to be better without experiencing it?

Except Joyce, Rabelais, Thoreau, Celine, Dostoevsky, Whitman and Emerson all in calculation mixed in a broth, you mean?

I will instead, consider your words here:

returns with a response to ’s essay. Upon reading Frater’s claim that lived experience doesn’t really matter when it comes to writing great literature, he immediately let us know that a response would be forthcoming. At the time, he seemed incensed. Having read the essay below, I can say that the interceding weeks have not cooled him off.

This essay is going to be fairly different from others that I’ve written. As it stands, it wasn’t in my plans at all, but having read this post I couldn’t stop from writing a piece giving my own take on things. So, forgive me if parts seem messy or rushed, because the truth is they are. Were it up to me, I’d keep this as private correspondence, but since readers of the Unreal Press Substack have taken time to read and respond to Frater’s admittedly lackadaisical philosophy, I think it only makes sense that this “response” is public as well.

Frater, your argument hinges on the idea that the key to being a successful writer is the study and imitation of past authors. In order to become better at evoking the emotions one desires in his writing, the writer is obligated first and foremost to study and deconstruct his literary antecedents. This by itself is perfectly understandable. If a writer of, say, a gangster book wants to become the foremost gangster writer he of course should familiarize himself with The Godfather and Wiseguy, to refine and improve on them where necessary. My problem with your argument, Frater, is that you seem so intent on proving this point that you totally neglect the importance that life has on the substance of one’s writing. In fact, life is indispensable. By this I don’t just mean the ability to suck air and go through the non-negotiables of bodily processes. I mean that, as a writer, it is your duty to observe reality around you and to transform this into an evocation of sensorial qualia, feeling, thought, or the myriad of states that the best writing is able to convey.

You say the whole range of writing is nothing more than a question of conscious ability to write well and the conscious mastery of the techniques. I take issue with this. Taken to its logical conclusion what you’re arguing for is art as rote ingestion and reformulation which frankly I find unappealing.

Fiction writing has some elements in common with carpentry it’s true, but what you describe is more artist as plumber or artist as electrician, as if great art is nothing more than the summation of one’s study, to be consciously analyzed through textbooks and manuals and rejigged when needed in the case of a gummed up fuse or offset cornice. Yes, a writer must study the greats who came before him: that’s non-negotiable. But do you really believe, for example, that the best pornographer can ever be one who has not experienced sex? It’s obviously ridiculous, and yet that’s essentially what you’re arguing for. Great fiction draws from the reality of the writer’s life.

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You say “if it was simply life experience, each old man would be an utterly idiosyncratic stylistic master”. Incorrect. You neglect that not every old man dies having lived with “life experience” and that seeking it out is as much a soldierly pursuit as is the study of the canon. It is a vocation. One must pay attention to that which is happening around him, because only by keeping his eyes open can a writer tabulate unique insights or unique sensations. This is the only way to create a literary tradition that is alive and beautiful and it’s one of the great embarrassments of modern writers, who idolize information accumulation in the form of TvTropes.com and screenwriting guru principles. If one can accrue talent from the analysis of texts, then is there any reason for you to say that one cannot accrue talent from the study of actuality? I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are being provocative.

Yes, Thoreau was a lover of Homer, Milton, and the Bible. But could he have ever come to Walden through reading alone? It’s an impossibility. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. A myriad of excellent writers have taken this philosophy and, by deliberately affecting the course of their life into strange, unexplored or dangerous territories, produced exceptional fiction, like Thompson, Orwell, and Jack London.

Textual study cannot teach you that which has not been written. By ceding yourself from reality and towards information accumulation, you are effectively divesting yourself, Frater, of the one thing which differentiates you, as far as your art is concerned, from an LLM chatbot. If you see the raising of an eyebrow this evening on your commute, you may write about it because it is real and you saw it. An LLM may only write about it as a document.

In this same vein you are negligently and obtusely shooing away the entire tradition of journalism as literature. Twain. Daniel Defoe. Robert Louis Stevenson. These are all writers who made their bones writing about true experiences.

Perhaps the best argument against rote study and for life experience is – take a single look at the state of the self-publishing scene which you yourself occupy. Look at the state of the dissident right as headed by the likes of Lomez of Passage Press, Cairo Smith, Raw Egg Nationalist, even your very own Unreal Press and see what stories are being printed. Here are writers who have every opportunity like no generation before them and no contemporary besides to study and analyze and refine previous traditions into epochal masterpieces. What do we see instead? Cormac McCarthy knock-offs, post-apocalyptic movie pastiches, Cyberpunk-noir, and the old reliable True Detective Season 1 homage. This short list encapsulates about 70 to 85 percent of dissident right publishing. Surely someone would have emerged from this (notoriously chronically online) scene with a book that truly exemplifies the genius of the studied craftsman? No one? Not one? What all these writers have in common is that they take as the basis for their art past masterpieces, just as you say. They proudly call themselves derivative, brush their hands, and go tend to their middle-class spouse or remote job. Maybe they’ll schedule a tweet before bed. That’s to say nothing of the fantasy genre as it exists both in samizdat and tradpub. This is the most abundant genre of fiction we have. It fills KDP printers like a fat berg fills a sewage pipe. And it is totally and absolutely derived from Tolkien and Tolkien derivatives in MMORPGS, games, comix, cartoons etc. There is no devotion to reality here. Frater, what would you say when faced with this glut? Would you say it's excellent literature? I’ve known you long enough to know how high your standards are, so no you wouldn't. You'd say it's shit. You might say, as per your philosophy, that the foil of the modern fantasy writer is that he has not studied his own genre extensively enough.

But do we really think there's any truth to this? Okay. The fantasy writer accepts the gauntlet, and he begins to study his predecessors rigorously. He makes it his full time vocation. He quits his day job. He reads the whole lineage of modern fantasy, maps out the genealogy of his teachers and their teachers too. He might emulate their sentence structure, their forms, and ideas.

Once he completes studying the usuals he moves to the adjacents of his immediate literary antecedents. Rather than Tolkien, Lewis, and Howard he begins to study Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, and Lord Dunsany. Eventually and suddenly, our fantasy writer is struck by a torrential terror. He realizes that the deeper he goes into the past, into Dunsany, into the Decadent movement etc, the further he strays from what makes fantasy primally enticing, which is the civilizationally archetypal in fusion with the actuality of the reader's milieu. Our subject’s rubric has failed to make his writing any more enticing except as an academic curiosity. The fact remains, Frater: the stranger the concept the writer operates in, the more necessary it is for him to draw from the marginalia of his surroundings. You mention Leonardo Da Vinci, but it’s Da Vinci who would haunt passersby with physiognomies he deemed unique, and do so until they allowed the artist to sketch their faces1.

Writing informed wholly by your predecessors will inevitably be an unconvincing simulacrum, a fun house mirror. Recall the pornographer who's never had sex?

What separates the artist from the carpenter is that the very best works of writing are often conceived spontaneously.

Now, this is admittedly something of a pet notion of mine, but it seems to me that many of the greatest strands of fiction, and of artistic endeavor generally, can be traced back to an unconscious conception. I like to call this the Original Nightmare. The “nightmare” itself is loose – it can refer to any sort of dream, hallucination, vision, pitch, or momentary din in consciousness. Throughout history, such states have given rise to passable derivatives. Did, for example, Helena Blavatsky, the progenitor of the Sword and Sorcery genre as we know it today2, arrive at the tenets of Theosophy through endless calculation, contemplation, and pastiche? You know as well as I do that she did not! Her philosophy was by her own admission delivered to her by a second consciousness or a “lodger” of which she acted as a transcriber. Blavatsky’s philosophy eventually was consciously refined into western occultism, psychoanalysis, and esoteric Nazism. In short, the most powerful symbological systems of the modern world. I must clarify here for a moment: I am certainly not trying to argue that Blavatsky's epiphanies were imparted on her by a Prime Mover. That she is a Receiver of supernatural theia mania is certainly a respectable position like any other, but it's my personal belief that this genius is the culmination of the totality of her experiences up until that point. The travelled and adventurous life which Blavatsky had led up to that point finally gave rise to epiphanies which could no longer be ignored.

In any case, we see this “trickle-down” even in pop arenas. A food poisoning induced fever dream had by one James Cameron spawned not only the Terminator franchise but a slew of imitators, knock-offs, parodies, and, yes, refinements. When Bruce Joel Rubin began scribbling down the screenplay for Jacob’s Ladder in the middle of the night, it was prompted by a nightmare of “terrible despair”. That same brilliant picture would spawn the Silent Hill and Resident Evil games.

I find it endlessly curious that you mention Edgar Allen Poe as being representative of genius only being arrived at by a “replication in finer and finer procession”. How do you feel, Frater, that the entirety of the Gothic vein, in which Poe wrote, as we know it can be traced to a nightmare suffered by Horace Walpope one night in 1764, which inspired the very first Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto.

I’m not the only one who thinks that the greatest talent cannot be arrived at deliberately. Speaking through the character of Socrates, Plato argued: Ion’s talent as an interpreter cannot be an art, a definable body of knowledge or an ordered system of skills," but instead must come from the divine inspiration of the Muses. Poetry, he argued, is the art of divine madness.

With all that said, Frater, I think Plato goes a touch too far for the both of us. The fact is, ninety-nine percent of artists do require diligence and hard work to make something of themselves, no matter how naturally talented they may be. But that talent does not come from only the study of books.

I also find your commentary on poverty confused. You say that “the first conceit is that the starving artist dedicates the bulk of his time to his art, in reality…”

Wrong. That’s not the conceit. The conceit of the starving artist is of one whose time is dedicated to fighting hunger, cold, and crime. For evidence of this, look at Knut Hamsun’s Hunger which follows the protagonist’s life of material penury in early 20^th century Oslo. Notice how the book very deliberately excludes moments of relief and material comfort, and instead ends a given vignette right when the hero receives whatever payment or lifeline he’s managed to scrounge. The book also obliquely ignores any instances of writing. What this illustrates is that poverty is valuable because it exposes one to situations which, to put it crudely, make for good stories, not because, as you suggest, it imparts some nebulous and implacable virtue on the writer which magically increases their writing ability. However salient your example of King Solomon may be, the fact is that many otherwise financially well-off individuals deliberately left a comfortable life to live “Spartan-like” as Thoreau said. George Orwell, for example, was the son of an imperial agent in the Indian Civil Service and famously rejected a cushy job as an officer in order to “tramp”, as documented in the wonderful Down and Out in Paris and London. Henry Miller, too, left the “air-conditioned nightmare” for the bed-bug infested slums of Paris and the result was Tropic of Cancer, a great novel with a prose style that has no immediate predecessors. They did this not because they were duped by a pernicious modern mythology, but because, as you yourself say, destitution has very real and observable consequences for its victims, consequences which are fertile ground for observations on the nature of humanity and the society in which it resides.

It's a shame Unreal Press felt the need to publish your post, Frater. It’s full of inconsistencies, leaps in logic, and uninteresting and transparent trolling. There’s no reason you shouldn’t troll on your own time. It’s the right of all men to whittle a stick or hum a tune, but as you yourself once said, exposing yourself publicly and calling it poetry makes you no better than the man on the street corner handing out burned CDs.

Read more from Gavilovski here:

Stop! Don’t Use That Pen Name | Essay published in Futurist Letters

Man Cooking: A Pagan Story | A play published in two parts

The Holy Martyrdom of Albinus of Isaac Abbey| Story published in minimag 55

Guy Hayes is a writer, artist, and programmer. He is the author of Maggot on The Broccoli, printed in Tales of the Unreal 1, and was the lead artist and designer for Silkworm, as well as Volumes 1 and 3 of Tales. You can visit if you would like to read more of his writing.

When I consume weed, I don't feel the pain of obligations. I can hand wash the dishes without becoming irate and smashing a crusty plate against the wall. Hell, I even started going to bed and getting up early. But funerals? Those are different. When my wife told me her Uncle Edmund died, I simply said, “Aw, Fuck.”

In my default state, I navel gaze and mostly ignore the world around me until my wife rolls a joint or she gets randy. After the high hits, my perception changes. I no longer think about myself, but the mysteries of the universe, how big God really is and how everyone puts Him in a little box based on the latest business trends, how weird it is that everyone has their own consciousness, and the psyches of those who happen to be around me.

Now observing people is an art of subtlety. I wouldn't recommend staring someone down. I've found people don't like that very much, and some of them will actually say something to you. Then you're left embarrassed. And if you're faded, you might feel that embarrassment too intensely. But most people will simply flit their attention to something else. I know I do, and I usually focus on something extremely mundane like a box of plastic cutlery. Then that leads into thoughts about the artist who designed the box. Did they do it in Photoshop? Were they sitting in a cubicle in an office somewhere in California? Or was he commissioned, a stay-at-home dad whose wife made a deal with him that she'll work for the next five years while he tries to get his hobby to take off and gain monetary value? After those five years though, he'll have to get a regular job and his dreams will be dead.

This happens a lot, especially when I'm trying to navigate gatherings.

I loathe social events.

And I married into a big family. Every week it seems there's a birthday, or holiday, or a cookout. This also means more people around me drop like flies. Uncle Edmund was the third funeral within a year. Each death reminds me of how little I know these people, how I'm connected to them only through my wife.

My wife made a batch of cookies the night before. As we were getting ready for bed, she said, "We're going tomorrow, aren't we?"

"Do we have to?" I asked, hoping she’d be the first to bail.

She nodded, then grinned. "We can go stoned, though."

God, I love this woman. She gets it. She knows exactly how my brain short-circuits around her family, how I disappear into my head when the anxiety kicks in.

I ate the cookie about an hour and a half before we had to leave. We arrived at the church and parked in its gravel lot. I was beginning to second guess the cookie. Is it working? Maybe I got a dud. Maybe I didn't eat enough, and another cookie is required. Damn, I knew we shouldn't have wasted six grams on that stupid butter.

We walked up the porch and entered through the back door into the kitchen. The smell hit me first – fried chicken and potato salad and grief.

Uncle Bob was proselytizing to Cousin Cynth while chowing down on the best fried chicken in the world (from Kroger). "Read it! The whole book. It's worth your while."

"I will," Cynth told him with toothless contortion. "First Corinthians, right." She was high on something. She inched back toward the side door we just came in.

As soon as Uncle Bob's focus shifted to us, Cynth was gone, a vapor sucked out the door.

Uncle Bob's eyes, wide behind his black frames, locked me into a conversation.

We used to go to church with Uncle Bob and Aunt Bernice. Then we figured out the whole operation was basically a cult. The preacher would say the most fucked up shit from the pulpit—stuff about people going to hell for smoking cigarettes while he himself was a glutton, belly hanging over his belt, survivor of one heart attack already. Plus Aunt Bernice kept passing pills out to people after service like some kind of generous and holy drug dealer, and the pastor wouldn't say a word about it. We hated sitting by her too because she wouldn't shut up during the sermon, whispering judgments about everyone's clothes and hair and "lifestyle choices." So we quit going. I couldn’t take the hypocrisy. It's been awkward between us and Uncle Bob and Aunt Bernice since. They carry disappointment like the bible Uncle Bob keeps tucked beneath his armpit.

Now here I was trying to concentrate on the words coming out of Uncle Bob's face, just realizing that I'm faded all of a sudden.

Shit, he's gonna see that my eyes are bloodshot, and I'm going to have to tell him that I'm just tired. Or worse, no one will say anything about it at all and leave me guessing.

Uncle Bob looked at me funny. "I'm glad you came," he said, surprising me. He patted my shoulder and moved on.

I spaced out, looking out the window beside the refrigerator. Children frolicked in the new green grass around the swingset.

New grass. New human life. The polar opposite of a funeral. Yeah, a funeral. I forgot we were at a funeral.

Freebird by Lynyrd Skynyrd blasted from down the hall from the sanctuary. It was after that I treaded the social waters out the door behind my wife and onto the porch, where we lit our cigarettes and talked to Cousin America. America was dating a guy who'd, years ago, worked for my parents. Joker. Joker had a big mouth and a form of smugness I could only guess was caused by some disease. He was a skinny, tall dickhead who always walked around shirtless, showing off a torso so tan and bony it looked like a half-assembled Halloween decoration. But man, the way he strutted around, you'd think he was God's gift. Thought he was the cock of the walk, swaggering through town like he owned it when he couldn't even afford his own pack of smokes.

He was a cigarette bum too. Every hour, on the hour, while working for my family, Joker would show up in my room and absolutely rape my cigarette cache. Always with some bullshit excuse about leaving his pack in his other pants or how his girlfriend just left in the car and took his smokes. Meanwhile, my carton would disappear one coffin nail at a time.

The worst part was when he stole from my dad. He walked off with a drill and a pneumatic nail gun. High-dollar tools. Joker vanished with them, probably pawning them off to score some pills. This was the first time I’d seen him since.

But this guy with Cousin America wasn't the same old Joker. Apparently, at some point after his disappearing act, someone had shot Joker in the back of the head.

And he survived.

He's what they call "non-verbal," and so now he walks with a cane and keeps his shirt on.

The spirit must have been flowing that day, that day of mourning, that day of death because I couldn't hold a grudge against Joker anymore. Looking at him, struggling to communicate with Cousin America through nods and hand squeezes.

What the fuck? Is this real? I love Joker now!

I took a look around and saw–felt–how everyone connected. There was a wave made of particles, invisible to the naked eye, flowing through all people, all things. A breathing. All life connected somehow.

My wife found me and slipped her arm through mine. "You doing okay?" she whispered.

"Better than okay," I said, and meant it.

I ended up in the nursery, where my sister-in-law and our nephew were hanging out in little chairs with Cousin Cynth.

I sat in a little chair. On the wall in front of me were the words, painted on printer paper:

GOD IS LIGHT
IN HIM
THERE IS NO
DARKNESS

I guess it meant something. I don't know. But it felt about right.

We never saw the body. Never entered the sanctuary. We saw no darkness.

As I came down the other side of Magic Mountain, I found myself between Uncle Bob and Aunt Bernice, walking them to their car. They had a couple of platefuls in each hand, wrapped up to take home to eat later. (It was good chicken.) Not once did they shame us, or bring our not going to church up.

Yes, there was no darkness there.

Only love

and magic…

That night I slept well.

Oh, Magic Cookie, you let my love shine. You took the gray away, and took me down a peg.

Cannabis is medicinal. I believe this wholeheartedly. But as with any medicine, it shouldn't be taken on a perpetual basis. It's good, for a time, to deal with some trauma, work out some shit deep in your soul, but eventually you gotta come off of it.

But on days like this, when the world asks too much of you, when families gather to mourn–or judge–maybe a little magic helps you see what matters. Not the awkwardness or the social anxiety or even the religious differences, but the connections. The light without darkness.

I’m left to conclude that the Devil does not tend a lettuce patch. (He probably runs a meth lab.)

Weed is slowly becoming legal across the United States, with a consensus that it's safer than alcohol and nowhere near as addictive as cigarettes. So before you tell me I'm going to burn in hell for imbibing a cookie made with love from my dear wife, mild psychoactives, and semi-sweet chocolate chips, please kindly go tell it to someone else.

I've seen how it works. Unlike the stereotypical wild college parties with their sloppy drunkenness, when a person consumes the magic that is contained within these pungent flowers known as marijuana, weed, ganja, Mary Jane, pot, et al., the outcome tends to be peaceful and reflective. Like at Uncle Edmund's funeral—where I could finally feel the connections between us all, where I could forgive Joker, where I could stand between Uncle Bob and Aunt Bernice without judgment.

It beats that time, years ago, that I was on Prozac and became a psychopath. But that’s a story for another time.

The goals of this essay are as follows;

1 = the support of writing as equivalent and not unique against the broader arts in the question of ability accumulation.

2 = the opposition of the cult of the natural genius, which is a perversion of the spiritual genius accessible to all men, and a privation of skill to a nebulous abstract mundane aggregation called life experience.

3 = to exorcise the conjured shade of the starving artist as the archetypical ruler of the great-art maker, on account that literary quality achieved in poverty is in spite of poverty, not owed to it.

To justify our first premise, to draw a swift litany of gentlemen who all echo my opinion would serve for an opening.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus is the father of the rhetoricians and his work “on imitation” is a whole book arguing for the imitation of other authors in the view of their works as models, as the only way to further the art on account that all of the basic elements of composition (that is to say, word order choices, rhythms and basic practical ornamentation ) have already been found, agreeing with these sentiments we find no less than Cicero the great, whose works are consciously in imitation of Demosthenes, isocrates and Aristotelian dialogue, further enhancing the Roman cloud we have Quintilian whose influence extends all the ways into Neo-Latin, being the germ from which Erasmian Latin takes root, likewise if we look at the Greek stylists themselves they all held to various schools and masters to imitate, for which they call Homer the father of their styles and greatest source to imitate, turnt to the poets themselves we need only ask Virgil his debt to Homer and the neoteric poets + Theocritus, or Homer his debt to the collections of idioms and expressions of which scholars say he had sown together to create the Greek epic literary texture, or among the English we may ask Shakespeare his debt to Ovid and Marlowe, or Milton his debts to Virgil and Marco Girolamo Vida (and numerous others, 10 lines nearly never pass without Milton flipping or reworking or translating or inverting another poet’s lines.) likewise ask Dante his debt to Virgil and Statius and Bernard of clairvaux, ask Edmund Spenser concerning Petrarch and the Pléiadean poets, Dryden and d’avenant concerning Roscommon and Shakespeare, herrick of Ben Jonson, and onwards we can trace out these multitudes of clear pastiche and sons through the high experimentations of browning all the way too the completion of the modernist engine of mechanism and gears of styles in the current scion of poetry (James Fenton.) and study is not harmed by turning to the east, the fabulous antiquity of the book of odes itself just being a crystallization of the finest folk song build up of variable layers, of which, abstracted, became the basis of the sophisticated analysis of the Chinese poets, but beyond this, even the august gǔwén yùndòng movements prose masters, by no means would the illustrious Han-Yu be considered an innovator and not a refiner, even the esoterica of Li-He (so influential to the ghost genre even to the late yuan writers like Yang Weizhen) is nothing but the refinement of qu yuan’s Chuci style, whether it’s the early glories of the tang, or the late manchu-led propagandist-revivalist styles of the Qing, for all three of the jiangdong masters were simply revivalists, or even the modern state communist casual verse, pastiche and imitation is the common element. I need not repeat myself with but a switching of names concerning the extreme influence of kalidasa or the Vedas over Bharat as a whole.

Beyond this litany let me clarify further, that, a gentleman seeking to become a better painter studies both books on painting, and his favorite paintings, yes he studied the real life vision for examples of modes and pretty particulars of arrangements, but his primary substance is the painting, drawing and architecture and theories of other men, for “nani gigantum humeris insidentes” we dwarfs must stand upon the shoulders of giants, even the seemingly most idiosyncratic talents in painting, carving, architecture and music are soon to give you a similar litany of great influencers and geniuses by which their work would be impossible in its current state if not for the ingestion of their elements, thus this is the common state of the arts, da Vinci without the workshop of Andrea del Verrochio IS NOT da Vinci, and to demonstrate a real example of practical rhetorician gaining ability, not by some inborn genius but by the grueling endeavor of practice, let us look to the recommendations of Benjamin Franklin quoted at length.

“I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand.”

“Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them”

“I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again.”

“I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts.”

“By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer.”

And what is this?! But the wildling away at wood, but the slow process of looking over the works of another’s hands and trying your best with numerous failures to replicate their craft in finer and finer procession, what is this but the study of a manual and the replication of the parts into the order devised by the erudite, if we turn to Nietzsche he gives glory and honor and praise to Emerson (as does Whitman) if we turn to Melville he thanks the French and the Elizabethans alike, if we turn to starbuck Mayo or Keats or Blake or Poe, we find similar pastiches in their letters and prose and verse glorying in their predecessors for being their continual teachers. Where then is genius?

Swinburne in his essays divides the great writers into two categories, the Olympian vision and the Titaniac strength, those Olympian poets are those who have mastered the manners of their predecessors and by the natural ebbs of time have unified their voices with the idiosyncrasies of their own modern character, thus John Lucas Tupper’s genius preemptively attains the modernist-strain over 150 years prior to its creation, this is not simply because he was born with the ability, he was a magnificent scholar and performed the calculative dialectic internally by comparing the various stylistic modes already available. Genius is not simply given to you, intellect is given to you by God perhaps, capacity as a whole, but unlike Aesop given the boon of isis, or Pindar’s tongue stung by the bee, we cannot count on being blessed with any ability save an ever regenerating endurance which, if traded, may build an edifice of capacity equal to any idolic glory of any writer fabled to receive their boon.

By this same logic, let us turn the dagger of reason against the fable of the starving artist and the value of suffering to art, the first conceit is that the starving artist dedicates the bulk of his time to his art, in reality actual poverty not sustained by the wealth and help of patrons results in a deficit of time dedicated to the basic necessities of living, that is, not the higher life, but the worry over the most mundane (not even lowest) elements of life. Such was not the situation that bred Virgil or Horace, such was not the situation of king David and Solomon, such was not the situation of king siddharta, how many great writers prose stylists poets and rhetoricians have had the title statesman? Success in art despite poverty is a modern conceit abstracted over the sad failures of a few gentlemen, who, themselves, despised their circumstance. Poe and Melville and Clark Ashton smith, while perhaps never trading their castles of dreams for wealth, would surely all prefer the castle dunsany over their own dilapidated hobbles, one need only look to these three’s works to show no sympathies for poverty as a glory, by no means I do not intend to say that the base elements of an artists construction have no influence over the quality of his works, a man who makes a statuette out of gold begins with a glorious substance, a man who makes a statuette out of dung begins with a lamentable substance, to these two statements we must consider two proverbs, “all that glitters isn’t gold” and “you cannot polish a turd” all that seems to be of fine poetic rigor as a substance does not always yield to always being so, the intrinsic deficits will always yield themselves, the lack in the prose style of Dostoevsky is recognized by Russian critics, and the latter Tolstoy repents his early works mundane tedium, a man of skill like Maxwell Bodenheim never shakes the oppression of his choice of materials, whereas the child fantasies of ER Eddison need no refinement in their substance, it is the child’s undiluted and unrefined palette which secures it against the delusion that the taste of dung is fashionable and the taste of meats and sugars are not, where the child’s taste lacks is depth and nuance, it is imperative we do not confuse a depth of thought with simplistic mundane sufferings, or a nuanced conception or mode of speak or experience, with simplistic pathological depression and hatred of the self and others. How then do we uncover these depths, these nuances of style, peculiarities in voices of character? Why the answer is simple, if it was simply life experience, each old man would be an utterly idiosyncratic stylistic master, no rather, turn the focus to the actual masters of many styles, Robert bridges whose published numerous studies ranging from his friend Hopkins, to the most complete analysis of Milton, to the most diverse treatment of Virgil translations, to endless attempts at pastiche of multitudes of modes, for example his improvement of Blake’s style demonstrated by his pastiche in this stanza.

“Now, while the west-wind slumbereth on the lake,

Silently dost thou with delicate shimmer

O'erbloom the frowning front of awful

Night to a glance of unearthly silver.“

It is by the combination of modes, voices and multitudes of past treatments with each other that we experience escalations in the Vision and Voice, this is the chief value of parody and decadence, the allowance of the voices to grow a self-exaggeration until they gain new euphonies and new cacophonies, consider for example the oddity of witter bynner’s combinations of Chinese verse with western modernist modes in the manner of Jeffers and Whitman, likewise consider the artificial folk songs of the isle of white, clearly constructed with Walter Scott and even Milton in mind, or even just the exaggerated Poeism of MP-shiel, a man who may as well be the son of Eureka, yes certain gentlemen have advanced their style by a conscious integration of their inherent neuroticism, chief among these Robert Murray Gilchrist, Guy de Maupassant and to some degree, Kafka, but a cursory study of any of these gentlemen will demonstrate a laborious Flaubertian perfectionism to this integration that is not simply born of them having it, but of them desiring to magnify voices which already have them, this is most evident in the cryptic statements of Kafka’s proverbs, this again is no simple benefit of constitution, but the conscious move of calculated creation, in the same way no one will attribute the painter Francis bacon’s style to simply having asthma or being a homosexual, by no means can we attribute their styles to these elements of their character, no more so than we can contribute the high learned style of Dali to him simply being a quirky man, instead of his conscious imitations of Velasquez, Miro, Picasso, Salvador Rosa and numerous medieval fabulists and contemporary surrealists.

Now that these delusions have been dispelled, let us speak briefly on the proper mannerism, among the stylists we will find numerous terms “maintain the strain” “higher voice” “the poetic vein” “the poetic daimon” “the blessing of the muses” “the flow “ all of these terms speak to the proper craftsman perspective of poetry, where, having hit the “vein” of what the greater artistic modes sounds like, you demonstrate you can repeatedly maintain the voice, you can as a river, continue the outpouring, just as you’d expect any common city in England or Germany to have a gentleman whose wood working talent could craft a fine and lovely statue by sure fire methods, so also, should you expect to be able to go to an irrelevant place, like say, Eyam England and find at least a few gentlemen such as Richard Furness at any time, who, being studied, may match (and due to the benefit of the inertia of time and the gift of gradual refinement) overwhelm the quality of someone like Milton, just as you’d expect your local woodworker to be able to match his predecessors but with the benefits of modern materials, Dryden says this in his praise of Congreve

“The present age of wit obscures the past:

Strong were our sires; and as they fought they writ,

Conqu'ring with force of arms, and dint of wit;

Theirs was the giant race, before the Flood;

And thus, when Charles return'd, our empire stood.

Like Janus he the stubborn soil manur'd,

With rules of husbandry the rankness cur'd:

Tam'd us to manners, when the stage was rude;

And boisterous English wit, with art endu'd.

Our age was cultivated thus at length;

But what we gained in skill we lost in strength.”

That, despite the lacking of originality of strength, the lacking in modifications in the spirit of the time, the lack of new-vision, their pure ability regardless now excels their ancestors; fletcher, Jonson and laurel-crowned Shakespeare, and, on account of there being in Congreve the same strength as Shakespeare, he has of course, matched the sheer strength of him but matched it with finer skill.

How then do we differentiate the skill and the strength? Simple, strength is the Olympian vision, skill the sheer elemental ability to craft finer words, for which the restoration critics and Victorians, the best minds from John lambe to Swinburne, begrudgingly admit Middleton has the same if not superior elemental strength than Shakespeare;

“As Eden in choice flowers: thine honours such

As all the world may strive to imitate.

Be master of thy wishes: only this,

When the sad nurse, to still the wrangling babe,

Shall sing the careful story of my death,

Give me a sigh from thy heart's purest breath

And so farewell”

And this is born of simplistic mastery of voicing and manner, not even an Olympian vision of personas and moments, likewise William jaggard successful fooled the Elizabethan public by muddling the works of the great Thomas heywood (called by lambe the prosaic-Shakespeare ) with Shakespeare’s verse, therefore, if even the greatest respect stylist in English is able to be matched by the craftsman workers(of which he is but one) , with the only discernible difference be in the accidents of character and temporal construction, surely, the whole range of writing is nothing more than a question of conscious ability to write well and the conscious mastery of the techniques OF writing well.

It is up to us, craftsmen, in our demiurgy of the logos to differentiate between Tintinnabulation and the ringing of the bells, when either is appropriate, for in this subtle but fully rational art is the entirety of the breathing life and beauty into our fabricated clay golems of art, it is not the writing of the truth upon the golem’s head, it is the characters in Hebrew that must be placed upon it for it to live and die, likewise the specific conscious characteristic of our works determine their life and death. This arcana is not to be learned idly, for this is the highest degree of conscious solidification, as Wagner says, “man is nature made conscious of itself, and art is man conscious of himself” likewise, Dante calls art the grandson of god, for it is the child of man, thus it must be born of will and treated with the creative mastery befitting it.

For further reading, see Poe’s philosophy of composition, where he dispels the notion that any of his work is not pre-planned, by taking us step by step through the process whereby he created (the world famous) “the Raven” through pure calculation of his ideals and selection of sensual materia for such.

In July of 2013 I hallucinated for the first time. Like many zillenial narcissists, I spend much of the quiet hours looking for the nexus point of my current neuroses. I have not narrowed it down. In fact it seems frequent reflection on the past only adds dimension to my origin, creates more inciting incidents. For the purposes of a story though, I’ll try to ride a line between the mundane and the maudlin. You can’t open a conversation or an essay with the worst day of your life, but neither can you try to weave an engaging personal narrative from the million little maladaptive responses stretched over years which ultimately serve as the sediment layer for psychosis.

So I’ll start here: a now dead media company called Rooster Teeth had just released their second trailer for the now dead web series called “RWBY”. For whatever reason I latched onto this “White” trailer. The trailer was one giant action set piece scored with the beautiful crooning of a girl who was unbelievably only a few years older than myself. I watched it for hours. It might’ve locked me in a kind of hypnagogic state. My father found me semicatatonic on the floor, entranced in front of my laptop and, questioning the future of his bloodline, sent me to bed. Maybe it was the sudden change in environment, going from bright anime girls fighting giant androids to the quiet black of my damp bedroom, and my brain fill in the gaps in sensation. I can’t know. But I heard that song floating into my room from the hallway. As a kid you’re scared of shit all of the time but that feeling, the freezing of the guts and total sensory blindness which came on me that night, was real terror. I know it’s what I will feel if I’m ever faced with my execution. The song repeated a few times, softer, until it finally reduced to a hum. That night was also the first time I was faced with insomnia.

I was not surprised to be crazy. My adolescence came with a warning. My dad said “If we’re gonna go crazy, we typically do it around this time.” In my head I saw a hundred versions of myself locked in a cell, screaming. But diseases of the mind, at least those endemic to my bloodline, rarely progress like that. You weather a thousand psychic injuries until the last one bursts you and you’re just a lunatic now. Up until then you’d been alright, in fact you’d been a model citizen so those who love you are slow to recognize that your mind is gone. You have to do something. And then they’ll call it a sudden break when really the lights have been off for years.

I am desperate to keep the hereditary lunacy off of me. In the last few years I’ve seen members of my father’s family fall to this and it is terrifying. What I wouldn’t do for one of these people to instead develop a dope habit and sling slurs at passersby. Once the sickness has set in, their life is given over to narcissistic schemes that I’m not even sure they know they’re operating. I have seen two clans demolished entirely by this blood sickness. The entire process is Freudian.I’ve seen 50 and 60-year-olds, lifelong professionals, engineers, politicians, reduced to vindictive little sandbox terrorists. I’ve often said I would rather die of cancer than psychosis.

In the weeks following that first episode, I learned what schizophrenia was, diagnosed myself with it, then cleared myself of it. It’s a cycle I would undergo yearly until after I’d finished college, each time the insomnia worsening, the hypochondria becoming more like paranoid fits, the mind becoming more frail, less able to “snap back” and function like it used to. In 2020, having been failed by doctor prescribed SSRIs and antipsychotics, I discovered Nootropics.

Nootropics. 5 years ago I think this hobby was almost mainstream. Creators like MorePlateMoreDates had the dumbest men alive talking about efficacious doses. Throwing dubiously sourced vasodilators into preworkout shakes. India’s supply of Cialis halved all so a 19yo can get the veiniest pumps. I personally felt like a fin de siècle mad scientist. Haunting forums like Nootropics reddit and Bluelight, sharing my own recipes. L-citrulline and Taurine to master physical and mental anxiety, Snow Fungus for perfect skin, Turkey Tail and Red Reishi to obliterate cancers. I really thought I could save a loved one’s life if only I could convince them to take 6 grams of this mushroom supplement.

I am not God’s only idiot. People with brains similarly beleaguered by neurosis jump into the world of research chemicals and n=1 and SWIMposting and in a few months you’ll see them on LionsManeRecovery because Lion’s Mane, which has become for the miracle seeking depressive an “antipanacea”, stole from them the ability to feel joy and the ability to get hard and the ability to see the color red. If you speak to these people you’ll find they’ve never spoken to a professional of any kind.

Teenagers and Twenty-somethings hit the forums with questions like will Amanita Muscaria fix my rumination? can I microdose Prozac? will a threshold dose of MDMA help me focus? Ketamine for Kratom recovery, Kratom for anxiety, anxiety because they feel their heartbeat in their fingers when they’re trying to sleep.

I tell you, any sort of power you exert over yourself in these times is intoxicating. I understand teenage girls who slit their wrists. Whenever I find a problem with myself and then fix it with drugs I feel like I’m fording new rivers. The first good night’s sleep after finding Ganoderma Lucidum produced a euphoria in me that I have never again experienced. I fixed breakfast the next morning feeling for the first time like a man who had mastered something. And I don’t think anything can be as mentally satisfying, not for someone who has been estranged from himself. How ridiculous is it that dominion over your own body should often be so far beyond reach?

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A friend of mine has compared our social group to a kind of pirate ship. I’ve always claimed the role of doctor in this allegory. And why shouldn’t I? I know a lot. And sometimes I’ve really helped people. I’ve counciled women on antipsychotics, prescribed the synergistic herbs and nootropics. I can source (almost) any drug anyone’s ever needed. There’s essentially no substance that I’m not intimately familiar with. However, there’s essentially no substance that I’m not intimately familiar with. Someone will post an article about some drug and of course I know about it, I used to inject it into my thigh but I don’t anymore because it might have caused varicose veins.

I’d like to write a theory of mind for the zoomer who pops pills like their parents did but instead of having fun they microdose LSD to write code faster. But ultimately, I would just create another lens through which to view my own psychology. So why bother with the framing device? I would like to be in a Beat novel maybe, I would like to wander, I would like to put the first boot prints on new land. But all the YMCAs are closed, there are no ten cent lockers and 25 dollar hotels. Or maybe I want to be a wise elder, a pillar of the community, and so I scramble for any kind of territory? Guy who knows which powders give you better erections. Maybe I’m wiling away the hours until I crack or I die.

And perhaps the crack is near; this hobby invites so many private crises into your life. How can I tell anyone that the reason I’m panicking is the FDA has moved on imports of a research chemical I have been using since last October to lower my pulse and blood pressure, and should I suddenly discontinue this substance my heart will most definitely explode? It’s so embarrassing. But what am I supposed to do, die? Explain my predicament to a doctor, beg him for a blister of Clonidine? No, too far. I say I’ve earned a healthy mistrust of doctors, but to say this is to say the inverse: I’ve earned a healthy trust of myself. But this isn’t true. In fact, I have made so many disastrous missteps in my journey of “self-healing”. I mixed an herbal MAOI with a prescription SSRI and fainted on the way home from the gym. I mixed about 3 different stimulants with a nicotine habit and gave myself afib. I spent two years so desperate to be rid of insomnia, I intentionally dosed myself with a mushroom whose effects on the mind can only be likened to a neurotoxin. When I ditched Red Reishi I related suddenly to the protagonist of Flowers for Algernon. For so long I had been trying to live my life with a heavy stone sitting on my brain. And for what reason? Months on, I can’t justify it. I've spent 6 years inflicting my own psychic wounds and I cannot tell you why. Is this a conclusion?

I understand now that I have all the risk factors for developing schizophrenia and every manner of psychosis. I also understand that somehow I have remained on the cusp of total psychosis for over ten years without breaking through. I say “somehow” instead of “through the power of thousands and thousands of dollars spent on nootropics, stimulants, supplements, and injections” because I no longer know if I believe in any of it. I don’t know if the months and sometimes years of lucidity I’ve managed is due to substances or just the power of good vibes, and the force of true belief in a thing, anything, to have an extraordinary and profound effect on me.

John Henry Davis is a writer, editor, and educator. He was the lead editor for Tales of the Unreal volumes 1 and 3, cohosted The Unreal Press Podcast, and is currently Editor in Chief for Unreal: The Magazine.

Presenting In this fifth issue of Unreal: The Magazine, Alex Beyman on the up-then-down of dating an eccentric.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of going on about a dozen dates with an autistic woman who will not be named herein. I had chased her on and off for three years up to that point, and was quite excited that she’d begun to reciprocate. Being autistic myself I thought we would be effortlessly compatible. Instead it was like seeing myself from the outside, something I cannot do unaided, for the first time in my life.

At once, many mysteries of my interpersonal life were solved. Before, I understood I had some qualities people commonly find mildly unpleasant (Outward coldness, insensitivity, difficulty giving comfort). Little stuff that’s not enough of a problem in itself to comment on, until the constant low level irritation builds to a breaking point. Which, from my perspective, seems to come out of nowhere.

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What I didn’t understand until then is what it’s subjectively like to be on the receiving end of those behaviors, or why anybody sticks around in my life in spite of that. At last, it made sense. This lovely young woman was, and is, a bright shining star, unlike any other in the night sky. Creatively brilliant in a way she could only be, because she is a deeply insular autist. Any outside influence on her ideas would only make them less unique.

The inside of her mind, insofar as she let me glimpse it, was intoxicating. A new, different, refreshing, yet deeply proprietary mini-universe. As if she’s inwardly a nation unto herself, with its own language, currency and history. A walking, living, breathing ‘bottle world’, or wainscot society, which she is both the creator and queen of.

Though I’m told I share this quality, I quickly came to understand why that fascination is not enough to keep women in my life in a romantic capacity. Not that I left the young lady in question of my own accord. She’s on to bigger and better things now, making no bones about the fact that while she liked many things I could offer her, romantic commitment was off the table. I was thus spared the conundrum this article is about because there was never any danger she would catch feels and be changed by my departure.

She is now just the same as she was before we met. Evergreen, always new, yet paradoxically unchanging in that aspect. Steadfast in being exactly herself, unquestionably, incomparably and unshakably. But I was not so lucky as her, in past relationships. It has been the work of many years to understand why the same pattern seemed to replay over and over, as usually my exes would not clearly explain why they were leaving.

It’s quite like the dynamic between Enid and Seymour from the film “Ghost World”. First, she becomes enamored. “What a fascinating, beautifully strange person I’ve discovered!” She notices some disagreeable idiosyncrasies, but ignores them. Still in the honeymoon phase, believing they’re not a show stopping problem. Then over time,She grows disillusioned, and increasingly distant. Then comes the talk about seeing other people. I promise to change, to which she says she doesn’t want me to. A very confusing response, until recently!

The seeming inevitability of this cycle is so frustrating because of how hard it was, as an autistic man, to overcome my social deficits. Painstakingly building myself into someone who satisfies all the criteria needed to even make it to the point of having a romantic relationship. Fool that I was, I thought that was the finish line, when instead it’s where the really hard work begins.

I apparently had what it took to attract some of the women I was after, and indeed though I am plain I have dated some inexplicable stunners. I wondered for some years if I was hypnotizing them, not understanding what I was doing to bring them in, or why it worked.

But I could also tell I needed something else to make them stay, which I didn’t possess or understand. What I kept coming back to was their insistence that I not change. That they wanted me to stay myself, just…not with them anymore. Not that they want for me to be alone, exactly. Rather, happy with someone else who is not them, that they might hand off the hot potato and be done with their turn.

I imagine it’s something like dating Willy Wonka, hence the title of this piece. He’s just this deeply fascinating, weird, quixotic little man. He lives in his own micro-world entirely of his design. You cherish the rare opportunity, like Charlie and the other visitors, to step into his world.

At first, it’s magical. A privileged feeling, to be let into someplace so insular and secret. Everything is so different from anything you knew before. It’s refreshing. There’s an intoxicating invigoration, and with it, the illusion that you’ll never tire of this bizarre micro world, or its eccentric creator.

Fast forward a year. You’re living full time in the factory. It’s fully demystified, you’ve seen every room top to bottom. You drank from the chocolate river even though the fat German kid drowned in it. You tasted all the fruits on the wallpaper. You turned into a blueberry, and back. You tasted every mushroom, flower, fern, boulder in the indoor park where everything is made of candy.

It’s all still made of candy a year later, and will be the next year. You’re quite tired of candy by now, but you put on a show for Willy, who never tires of it. He’s always delighted when he finds you in that room. “Everything is candy!” he remarks with sincere wonder every time, as if it ever wasn’t. “Hehe, yep. It’s aaaalllll candy.” you tepidly reply.

He doesn’t want to discuss anything not candy related. He does that performative doddering old man routine followed by the acrobatic somersault every time you or anybody else meets with him. It was never an act, per se. He genuinely can’t not be that way.

Besides this, with the honeymoon phase over, many of the red flags you ignored at the start become harder and harder to ignore. He let a kid drown in chocolate to make a point about greed. Oompa Loompas are live-in slaves with Stockholm syndrome and he doesn’t see anything wrong with that arrangement.

He possesses a flying elevator capable of rapid free travel anywhere on Earth, and he uses it to impress a kid and his grandpa rather than saving lives. Like how Doc Brown invented a time machine, and proceeded to use it to ensure his buddy’s life turns out well, rather than preventing the holocaust.

This world has many men like that in it. Often with small armies of dazzled followers ready to make excuses for their deficit of humanity, because they’re brilliant. If they don’t wish to reflect, to critically self examine, nothing in their life forces them to. More voices in their ear tell them they’re always right, to ignore the haters, etc. than tell them the opposite. It’s easy as pie to believe the voices telling you what you prefer are the correct, truthful ones.

I suppose I should be thankful I don’t have that luxury. When I fail, there is no safety net of sycophants to cushion my fall. It hurts every time. Pain is nothing but a lesson, yet it also changes you in ways you don’t control and maybe don’t want. That change is what my exes were afraid of and why they wouldn’t tell me what they didn’t like about me.

Because who I am is as much the qualities they dislike as the ones they liked. To allow me to change myself into whom I would need to be for them to stay, would be to destroy the beautifully strange little man who once captivated them so. Likewise with our poor heartsick hypothetical lover, Willy Wonka. He is the subatomic particle one cannot learn the attributes of, without also changing those attributes by the act of measurement.

Willy and you want very different things by this point. Above all, Willy wants to make things work. He’s willing and eager to change, to fix whatever you dislike. But if you tell him what to fix, he’ll stop being Willy Wonka. Humanity would then lose one of the rare and many splendored gems from its crown.

You need to live outside the factory though. Need, not want. You need to have a life that does not revolve around candy. You need to date someone who doesn’t react to a drowning by having his slaves sing a rhyming song about how it was the victim’s fault.

But more than anything else, you need to ensure that the pain of losing you doesn’t destroy his whimsy, that others who come after you may still enjoy it. After all, there still needs to be a Willy Wonka in the world after you’ve gone.

Alex Beyman is a twice tradpubbed, award winning author of horror and weird fiction. Recombinant homunculus made from the DNA of Lovecraft, Ligotti, & Philip K Dick. MDRS mock-astronaut, psychoaquanautic pioneer, tripping beneath the waves in a surface-supplied diving helmet of my own design. Hobbyist engineer of functional scale model underwater habitats for hamsters. Gives 110% even when begged not to by all present.

Folding Ideas

Written by Gálvez Caballero

“For a thousand men who can speak, there is only one who can think; for a thousand men who can think, there is only one who can see.”

-anonymous

Two years ago, I came across a thread in /po/(4chan’s Papercraft and Origami board), centered sharing their figures with others. It was a pretty broad question in a very old thread, /po/ being one of 4chan’s slowest boards, and so anons had come out in the hundreds to answer this question. In that thread, anons recounted their experiences sharing their creations with others, the ways they’d gone about transmitting their bringing a hobby shrouded in Oriental Mysticism to, for lack of a better term, the masses. As your typical atomized youth, it was this promise of communal exchange that sparked my interest in Origami. Japanese Papercraft is the practice of folding paper in extremely fine and precise ways, and I had to teach myself this art via a multitude of pirated magazines (like the Spanish magazine cuatro esquinas). It was transformative, I think, for the better. 

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That Origami became my is no coincidence; it follows from the four things I seek most in art and life: beauty, honor, community, and prosperity. It was the papercraft community that first awakened this love in me, and in order to bring this thing I love before others, I feel that it’s necessary to extend the marvelous art to all who would come and hear me. 

In terms of beauty, Origami wants for nothing. One needs only to see the harmony in symmetry of the axis, the patterns on the folds, and appreciate how every step, every single fold neatly begets the other. Admire the final work, stroke each ear of your rabbit. Once you’ve finished, see how this process has given birth to a precious figure, an original work, made with your own hands. 

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You don’t have to scry to see the honorable aspects in Folding Paper; not only in the work of the Origamist, but often also in the technique of the one making the folds. See the pride that each folder takes in his work. Whoever undergoes the work of folding paper, taking these “four corners” and creating art of the blank page, sees that his work gives fruit, and also comes to have a hobby (based in reality: this is, that brings the digital world of the anonymous forum to the real world) with a high skill ceiling. An honorable vibe exists in such abundance that it begins to approach divinity. I’m not unique in feeling this, the allure of mathematics is evinced by the scores of Engineers and Mathematicians that pursue the craft. As Masons derive their theses from working the stones, you can summon Order from Chaos through papercraft, a trait man shares with God, an ability kept even from the Angels. 

As a bulwark against alienation, Origami allows you to find legions of quiet and productive people. For every man or woman who is a paying Member of National Associations and frequently attends conventions in real life, there is a shadow community of ten times as many in servers, anonymous messaging boards, and oriental channels where they share PDFs that may or may not be illegally acquired. We become all of us teachers, encouraging novices to take up this hobby trade.

There’s also a great, personal joy to be found in origami, a joy that can arrive only after a time spent raging. It’s real work, work with your hands, work that is intricate and asks a lot from you, in ways that you are unaccustomed to if you don’t use your fine motor skills often. This isn’t a flimsy, digital thing in a word processor. Ted Kaczynski was right, A real hobby, a concrete practice, trumps over a more abstract one. 

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And what is a hobby that cannot enrich the hobbyist? A cynical thought, but even for cynics, Origami can open many doors. Once you’ve rendered that thing in your head 1:1 with your folding paper, it can become a gift, an item for sale, you are the little God-King of your paper horses and cranes. 

So, how can one began in the art of Papercraft? Simple, do a bit of everything. Include all life and thing on existence, everything can be replicated, simulated. This is, of course, not a distillation of the entire essence of Origami, because to me Origami is self-complete. Papercrafts are representations that place into doubt which is the real thing, and what is only an image, it is an art of suggestion, of subtlety. 

Special Interest is a new series of guest-written essays that focus on the intersection of art, culture, and the self. If you would like to contribute to Special Interest, email the editors, or reach out to us on Twitter. Horror of Humanity was originally printed by Ginger Nuts of Horror.

The Horror of Humanity

by Ogden Nesmer

You are hiking. Imagine it: it is hot; you’re sweating under the scattered shade of towering redwoods. Insects buzz about in the sunlight, the tang of pollen and pine needles circulates through your lungs. Every few minutes you stop to catch your breath, squatting among ferns, or leaning against a ponderous and lichen-speckled boulder to take your pack’s weight off your shoulders. You are patient. It’s all very beautiful, but these scenes are not the prize. Somewhere in the unknown are other living things. Whether with gopher or marmot or bobcat or elk, you want contact. You stay as quiet as possible, your eyes darting about in a hopeless search.

The sight of a wild animal in the flesh would give you pause.

The perfect opportunity for ruminative hesitation, inciting your reflections on the very nature of humanity, togetherness, beauty, and fear. Fear, of course, because there’s only one possible option for the animal spotted in its wild domain: run. While you stand there holding your breath– remaining still but not predator-about-to-pounce still– the animal has already started running back through the brush. You are not surprised; you aren’t naive. What could be more threatening to an animal than a larger animal? It’s not the beast’s fault it has no understanding of your innocent, reverent intentions. The fear of animals is simple and universal. Essential to incipient actualization, the progenitor of consciousness.

The animal understands such negative stimuli– and its foil, the positive– before it understands the self. You, the human observer, are reminded by this brief encounter of the immense gray area that exists between these two categories. But, the more you reason, the gray is not so much a perfect blend, but a translucent black abyss. In your complex faculties exists far more conceptual receptors of pain, trauma, misery, and hopelessness. And the invisible structure that links all of these to each other and the mother of them all (death) is our ancestral master, fear.

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Humans don’t fear predators, they fear predation; they don’t fear death, they fear dying.

Ideas only appreciable to the human mind are iterated and rediscovered without the need for stimuli: you are having an unforeseen panic attack; an infant sobbing uncontrollably sends you back to your painful childhood; two people are speaking to each other behind a panel of glass and you can’t shake the feeling that they’re commiserating over their shared hatred of you. You think about the nightmares you had as a child; rarely did they make any practical sense. An unsettling look from an imagined face or the stark absence of other people in an endless fabricated abyss could be felt on your skin, and you wake up screaming. Bugs, surgery, inverted eyelids, the smell of rust, your mother’s face when she bursts somnambulant into your bedroom an unfamiliar and accusatory expression; you are a tightly wound knot of unexplainable trauma.

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Fear is woven into your flesh and blossoms into ripe, unknowable zits.

You find a surprise bruise: cancer, anemia, gangrene, necrosis, bubonic, microscopic parasites with razor sharp villi. You remember your dying grandfather’s sunken eyes, the way the hospital smelled like fresh shit and bleach, someone down the hall was blubbering, lost and scared and dying. Animals can look at their dead infant and only wonder if there’s enough meat on it for a meal. You remember seeing two cows stand next to each other, farmer kills the one on the right with a bolt pistol and the left one doesn’t even stop chewing its cud. To be so blessed, you think. To fear nothing but clear, annunciated death. Thank heaven for the predator, because nothing’s more twisted than being killed by fellow prey. At least you can see death coming. 

You are now me, and we are ten years old.

We are sick; feverish, scratchy throat, dizzy. But the worst part is the dreams: every night we can manage only to sleep for about ten minutes at a time, before an explosion of terror summons us back to waking life to start puking from the pure fear convulsing down our spine. Like an overfilled sieve, terror bleeds out of our amygdala and enters our blood stream as thick as heroin. We can’t cry, our face muscles are too constricted. Our voice has long since shattered. Our pain is muted, but for the sounds of retching and vomiting. Why? What has made us this way? What happened in the dream?

We don’t remember. Four seconds awake and we can’t fully articulate what set this all off. There is something about a rocking chair, a dead fish, objects being two sizes at the same time. It’s useless to explain, we don’t understand it ourselves, plus we’re busy looking for blood in our vomit. The explanation is there is no explanation. There is no standard stimulus for fear, no one thing we can agree is the one thing we need to always run from. What could be scarier than that?

Ogden Nesmer is the author of 3 novels, including the recently released Silkworm. Follow the author on Twitter and support his work!

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