My response to the poet Frater Asemlen and his ongoing lapse of reason. Again.

by

Daniel Gavilovski

. 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:

>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.

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:

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.

And here:

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. Editor’s Note: writer doesn’t understand how parentheticals work

2. A telling story: I once asked, rhetorically, how does one replicate the heartbreak and nostalgia invoked by pop artist Mitski’s music in the chorus of Heaven. Frater replies as follows: Beatles variant of quaintness plus one part confessional element. Combine Thwaite and Whitman and you’ll achieve your result. I think this reply is self-evidently absurd enough to anyone who knows either Mitski or Whitman, but there you go. It’s not uncharacteristic

3. EN: nah

4. EN: writer spelled polycrystalline with an i