Why subscribe? Why not!
First things first, my writing has a few fans already…
Jonathan Lethem, New York Times Bestselling author of Motherless Brooklyn, “Here are the real goods—syntactical wit and energy, allusive reach, brilliance, all the hallmarks of something both formidable and fun.”
Matthew Specktor, Founding Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, “This scratches the sweet spot for an Xer like me... This is good shit.”
Maura Speigel, Senior Lecturer of Literature at Columbia University, “It blew me away, reminded me of my first encounter with Gravity’s Rainbow, and that is saying a lot – a whole lot. It is heir to the great postmodern encyclopedic novels, stuffed with humor and style and fun, and with paradigm-shifting ideas that I joyfully went off to read more about. I teach a lot of young writers; this manuscript hit me in a whole different way. There’s genius in it.”
Genius? That’s about my fiction, which you’re sure to get a smattering of here at Barney’s Rubble. As for the bulk of what you’ll get? Well. Despite the advent of alternative medias like Substack itself, it still strikes me that there remain invisible people and “impossible” positions as far as popular Western thought is concerned. There are simply needles that don’t thread anymore. Is it possible, for instance, to decry both human rights abuses in Palestine and the Hamas-skirting of the American Palestinian Solidarity Movement? Hold both unsung Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh and accused Islamaphobe Michel Houellebecq in equal literary esteem? I once spent 40 days and 40 nights in the West Bank reporting internationally on human rights abuses, and I’m going to show you why that answer is yes, and must be yes (and why more contemporary plights need that level of nuance.)
I’m going to talk about Hemingway in light of his new, shall we say, gender confusions. I’m going to introduce you to the utterly ignored anti-Federalists, the true “founding fathers” of America and the ancestors to both the modern Progressive and Libertarian party. If you stick around you’ll see the ultimate red herring captured: a synthesis of Marxism and Libertarianism, and how blockchain economies could achieve that in a real polity. I’m even going to tell you whether Jim Morrison was a good poet or not. And I’m going to do it all, God willing, with a panache I think has gone out of mainstream American letters—or have American letters gone out of the mainstream?
Plus it’s free, so what the hell!
