In traditional Marnell news, Page Six broke the story. For a more personal look into the acquisition, Beautyshambles is still where it’s at, to date the only newsletter I have a paid subscription to.

Turns out her resolution for 2024, to “get a novel into fifth draft by 2025”, has paid off. I mostly followed her other one: “more sex, less stress”, my forever resolution.

Marnell’s the kind of writer that you have a blast reading no matter the subject, the kind that inspires you even though you couldn’t be more different. Her missive 4 AMAZING THINGS I DID IN LONDON is prime example. The PJ version: 2 HOT GUYS I DID IN PARIS.

Reading her Vice missives, I never expected her to organise writers retreats on Thessaloniki’s backdoor. Now an annual excursion for Marnell, they’re held in Sithonia, the middle ‘leg’ of the Halkidiki peninsula that’s full of seaside villages and resort towns, where I used to sneak off to as a teen slut. I remember thinking, I wonder if Cat Marnell will visit all the beaches I had sex at.

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We spent the day wrestling in the sea and wrestling on the sand, tickling each other to the floor. We disappeared into the distance, where I could no longer stand up and had to remain attached to him, arms wrapped around him, floating like jellyfish.

He held me up above water, one hand on my back, the other intruding in my swim shorts to feel the beginnings of my erection.

Years later I could still feel his touch as some demonic possession. The way he ripped off my t-shirt when we were in the woods, how he pulled my underwear down. I can still feel his palms imprinted on my thighs, his lips, his tongue running down from my chest, my skin layered with sea salt.

The next day I was back home in my own bed. I imagined him doing push ups naked on his bedroom floor as he was prone to, sweating out, his entire frame heavy with wetness, his skin glittering in his room, reflecting the light seeping through the shutters. I imagined him doing jumping jacks, dick swinging wildly till semi-hard. I imagined him checking himself out in his mirror, sweat dripping. I imagined his smell. I imagined him sniffing in my underwear he insisted on keeping, the smell of my erection rubbed into the fabric, his muscles pumping as he exploded.

The previous night, in his bed, he kneeled in front me. He told me to hold on, to not let go too soon. He wanted to see my head tilt back as I got close, to feel my legs tense up, toes pointing south. He said he wanted to hear my breath intensify in harmony with the crescendo of Get Mine, Get Yours, so that Christina Aguilera and I could come together.

My voice trembled. I tilted my head back as he wanted and felt my face go numb.

Rob Doyle’s third novel (and fifth book overall) Cameo is out on 22 January by Hachette’s W&N. The Bookseller broke the story: Cameo by Rob Doyle goes to W&N in three-way auction. Frankly, all I read was Rob Doyle threeway.

In previous summers, I held versions of this book in my hands but only got to read it in August, when I received the final proof. It’s a wilder, even more batshit vision than Autobibliography and Threshold that pushes the concept of what a novel is to new levels, a world of novels within a single one, dazzling and dizzying with mixed literary modes, confessional, descriptive, poetic, direct and dreamlike all at once. Much like its two predecessors, it feels like climbing ropes at gym class, the same sudden suspension where you don’t know exactly where you are or where you’ll land when you fall, the same sensation too, strenuous and libidinal. Like riding the carousel for hours…

In addition to sending Rob super slutty sex letters, I also spent a lot of time tweeting about him before I deleted the entirety of my archive. Some highlights:

I’m rereading how to murder your life and honestly Cat and Rob Doyle are my highlights of the 10s.

Had a dream Rob Doyle stole my modelling gig.

Reporting from Rob Doyle’s bedroom (soz to all haters affected).

32 until Rob Doyle chokes me in KitKat [in response to the below possible novel plots list. Mine was, naturally, gay chaos]

We were at his place smoking in bed when she called, socks, shorts, t-shirts piled up on top of our running shoes. They spoke for three cigarettes, during which the sweat dried on our skin. I was bored, got off the bed to look at his CD collection. His wood floor creaked with every move even though I was walking on the tip of my toes. He only listened to hip hop, American imports we were all familiar with. My gaze fell on Redman’s Malpractice because that had been the soundtrack to most of our time together.

The door to his balcony was wide open. He had removed the netting, a display of bravado to his neighbours showing he didn’t care if they peered right in when he slept, when was naked, when he wasn’t alone. That afternoon, they could see us in our white trunks, him sitting in bed and talking on the phone, me tiptoeing to grab a book at the top of his shelves that extended to the ceiling.

I heard an abrupt change in his voice, the urgency. He was making up another excuse as to why he couldn't see her again that night. His skills at lying were deteriorating rapidly. I felt him wrapping an arm around my neck, as he was saying goodbye. He turned me around for a kiss, moved a hand down my spine and inside my trunks and slammed the balcony door shut with the other.

At the end of the night, his neighbours could see the rivers running down both of our faces, our knees reddened when we each stood back up.

His phone lit up, buzzed. It was the girlfriend again. He threw it back on the bed, grabbed me by the wrist and led me to the shower.

…a month later, she creeps up behind me at a bar and rips out strands of hair off the back of my head that to this day have not grown back as they once were. Later that evening, I fell asleep in his bed, sending his arm asleep under me.

In the spring, everyone wanted to know my thoughts on The White Lotus incest handjob.

I love an edgelord screenwriter as much as the next guy, but I defer to Aimee Lou Wood’s character and say that there is no drug in the world to make me get with my brother [and just like Chelsea, I would 100% die for love]. Outside PJ classics The Dreamers / The Holy Innocents / Les Enfants terribles, the only other incest depiction I recall is The River by Tsai Ming-liang. Soz, it isn’t about a pair of young bros hot for each other and the push and pull between them.

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I was in Nice for a long weekend when I found out Stéphane Bouquet had died. I was looking through Le Monde when I spotted the name, one I hadn’t thought about in a long time. He was a poet although I only ever knew his scripts. He had a recurring collaboration with director Sébastien Lifshitz, creating films about sex and discovery, a sort of natural, grungier progression from Wild Reeds, one of the films I watched the most throughout the 2000s. The three films he wrote that I watched growing up, Les corps ouverts, Prisque Rien, Wild Side, were fundamental to the stories I’ve been interested in ever since. Human sexuality, experimental and dangerous behaviour.

I realised I no longer count as a young person when I remembered I watched the first of the three when I was 15 — a full two decades ago. I realised I’m not young because allegedly young people don’t have sex these days and the realisation came to me when I was at Le 7, a gay sex club in Nice, with Norman and a French man I met there. Les corps ouverts is a short(ish) film about Remi, a young French Arab who’s as fluid as teenagers used to be in the 2000s, before labels trapped everyone in suffocating Barbie doll boxes, a slice of life of being pretty poor, pretty homo, and definitely DTF. The actor, Yasmine Belmadi, returned in Wild Side to play an Algerian hustler, a meta-progression of his first role almost, who along with a deserter Russian soldier follow a trans sex worker from Paris to a small town, an early form of a throuple.

I didn’t encounter throuples until I was an adult but in fairness by the end of our high school careers, we had all become so interchangeable in each other’s beds and other furniture that we lost track of who was what to whom.

Belmadi died in a road accident in Paris in 2009, losing control of his scooter while disposing a cigarette. That was my last summer riding at the back of a bike too. I’ve long forgotten if I flipped cigarettes off while he sped up across the pier, but I remember the guy I was riding with. He was Greek rather than French Algerian. He had a large nose and palms too big for his thin frame. We didn’t watch any films together.

In Presque Rien, the more mainstream of the three, a summer romance disintegrates over a year and a half. The more balletic sex scenes of the other two become acrobatic in it, from delicate twists in bed and caressing in the bathtub to roughhousing on the sand dunes.

The waves lift me, carry me to the shore, all six of us sun-kissed, skin chipped and tasting of salt, our feet sinking into the sand as we stand up. Stefan’s usual trick of standing on his head, hair full of sand. I see the older women sitting with their kids gazing us, husbands checked-out. They know they shouldn’t, but it’s too late, they’ve already thought of it. They’ll be thinking of our faces, the veins on our hands, prominent from playing volleyball all morning, the indents on our backs, the elastic of our shorts. How Stefan, Andreas and Billy carried Phillip, Alex and I to our umbrella. Our smell has drawn them in, they can’t escape. We run back to the sea and jump in, swim to each other and exchange kisses underwater.

Phillip and I would fall quiet on the way back. He’d fall asleep on my shoulder, while Alex and Andreas would carry on talking in the front of the car. When we were approaching his house, Alex would reach back with one hand, the other on the wheel, and pinch Phillip awake. I’d usually be the last one dropped off. He’d say, gimme me a kiss. He’d look to the road ahead when I did and say nothing when I’d get off.

It’s a big year for Irish books (although that’s every year at House Johnathan): Djamel White’s debut novel All of Them Dogs is out on 26/03 by Hachette’s John Murray Press, Lucy Caldwell’s (Best Short Story Writer Alive?) collection Devotion in April by Faber, and Roisin Kiberd’s The Most Normal Woman by Tramp Press in August. My most anticipated book of the year belongs to a non-Irish, Elizabeth Aldrich’s Speedheart, a major collection featuring both published and unpublished work by the late author, which will be published by Expat Press.

Elizabeth was a beautiful writer — Lana Del Rey thrown out of the country club for not fitting in, I wrote back in 2021 — who ran out of time and didn’t get a fair shot at her literary ambitions. I hope Speedheart changes that. And Ruthless Little Things is still in print and a great place to start.

It’s odd to mourn the death of artists you didn’t know, or didn’t know well enough, but the last few years have seen no shortage of loss. Edmund White, Gary Indiana, Julian McMahon, my forever demon boyfriend, Terence Stamp, one of our most haunting actors, who should really be remembered the way Philippa Snow contextualised him in The White Review: “Everyone is in agreement that the act of fucking Terence Stamp is utterly transformative, and that having the opportunity to continue to fuck him taken from them is enough to ensure madness in.” Edna O’Brien, the Irish who started it all, D.M. Thomas (The White Hotel is one of the sexiest books ever), Stephen Vizinczey (the original Hungarian-Canadian lad of an author), Wakefield Poole, Robert Wilson, whose work I only got to in recent years, including Mary Said What She Said, an Isabelle Huppert play about Mary Queen of Scots that had me crying about a dead royal (?!), Gossip Girl’s baddest bitch Michelle Trachtenberg, Sylvère Lotringer, Brigitte Bardot and David Lynch. Such was his impact, that the BFI announced a major season of David Lynch shortly after his death, which is now ongoing throughout this month. Philippa Snow delivered the most moving homage to him — and her own mother — for ArtReview. I was hoping my diary would shed light on when I watched his films and what was happening in my life, but it doesn’t look like he’s been mentioned once. I presume my subscription to the Philippa Fan Club is revoked effective immediately.

Last summer, Christina Newland was writing about hooking up in cinemas, so I volunteered to share my experiences.

In 2005, two of my friends and I were in a sort of threesome relationship that was always on and off, although I only see it in these terms in retrospect. We were terrible for each other except for sex. We were in our mid-to-late teens and always had to find elaborate places where we could fuck, whenever our bedrooms were out of the question. Thessaloniki has a long history of hook-up cinemas, so we decamped to one of these often that summer. Mostly we would make out and jack each other off in one of the back rows.

Somehow I forgot to get back to Christina with the list of films we watched in said theatre: Lords of Dogtown, Last Days (for Michael Pitt, obsessed after The Dreamers), Time to Leave (also obsessed with Ozon), Cursed (for Christina Ricci), Sin City (for Alexis Bledel), Anatomy of Hell (for Rocco, obvs), Jarhead (for Gyllenhaal’s ass), The Raspberry Reich, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Innocence, Red Eye.

The first film I watched this year was Jean-Pierre Melville’s black-and-white story about a lapsed Catholic in Occupied France, who rediscovers her love for the faith. Mostly because the town priest is a twenty-something Jean-Paul Belmondo who’s really into books and philosophical discussions, but sadly, rejects her advances and edges her on by virtue of existing without ever delivering. Based on Béatrix Beck’s The Passionate Heart, it’s a collision of desire and moral strength. In November, I watched Antonia Bird’s Priest, in which a Roman Catholic priest gives in to his homosexual desires. Mostly the result of the then twink god Robert Carlyle. Things fall apart when he becomes nationwide news after they’re arrested for fucking in a car.

Why is it that only the Catholics have hot priests? Is it the intimacy of the confessional? Or the never-ending sex scandals?

A selection of the most interesting texts I ever received.

2009: “I want to quit my job, move back to Thessaloniki, get a summer gig at a bar and suck off dads in the toilets who are bored of their wives but can’t look me in the eye while they’re fucking me.” - Alex

2019: “You were just as slut-shamed as Cassie, but tbh you sort of deserved it.” - Anna

2026: “Haha yes go for it you slag.” - Rob

The most interesting thing I said this week [oddly, about Thumbelina]: “I remember watching it as a kid. I wanted to be Prince Cornelius, but I also wanted to be in Prince Cornelius.”

I’m sitting in bed naked as I write you, cock throbbing in between my legs. I’m not, but that would have been the dream set up based on what you asked for (“make it gay Henry Miller – NO censoring.”).

I’ve been enjoying the summer, which is why this letter is over a month late. I’d feel bad about keeping you waiting, edging you with this delay, then again it is you I’m writing to and I think you’d agree that if sex is on the table fuck writing, right? I’m writing this in Nice, but by the time I finish I’ll likely be back in London.

In mid-July I went to a small town on the Catalan coast, about half an hour’s drive south of Barcelona. Part of the reason for this trip is to let loose and by let loose I’m talking about being surrounded by Spanish men.

The first three days I take it easy. Sleeping in every morning, going to sleep early every night. Days at the beach, absorbing the summer sun. In between reading books, I jump in the sea and float on the water, arms and legs stretched out, eyes closed, all my feelings falling away like the tide. By the time I leave a week later, sand will have found its way into every inch of me – every single one – it will have invaded every item I’ve brought home. An unexpected keepsake.

The town isn’t all that exciting, although during this trip I found out that it is home to one of the most important horror film festivals in the world, held every year in October – the true end of the summer for those living on the Mediterranean coast. I naturally thought of you, and I say naturally because there is a quality of horror to you, like you’re some sort of esoteric figure from Irish folklore that has tricked everyone into believing you’re a man posing as an author in the second and third decades of the new millennium. An idea for a film came to me on the second day at the beach – a fictional, vampiric Rob Doyle arrives at the height of winter, following this letter, and under the cloaking of the short days’ darkness and the sea’s harsh waves, he roams and throws the town into despair and death.

But we’re in mid-July now, sea and sand and SO MUCH SEX. It all starts on Saturday, when three days after we arrive and have sufficiently recovered from the horrors of our jobs, we decide it’s time to go thrill-seeking – the thrill being a historic nude beach an hour’s walk away from the town and accessible only by hiking. Did I mention it’s a gay beach? Because it’s kind of important.

We take a cab from our hotel to the edge of town, driving up the mountain past expensive villas to arrive at a clearing at a high elevation. At the sound of the beach’s name – Playa del Muerto – the taxi driver knows we’re homos looking to suck and fuck. “Ah, Playa del Muerto,” he says, like he’s in on some secret.

Backpacks on, we set off into the forest and follow the path illuminated by Google Maps (and painted stones positioned across the path to help strapping young men find their way). We hike up and we hike down and soon enough we see the deep blue of the Mediterranean. The trees around us are tall and green despite the temperature (33 degrees, I believe), shading us from the sun. We carry on down, down, down until, as promised by guides we found online, we reach a set of train tracks.

How did lads find this beach pre-internet? If you were from a nowhere town at the recesses of Greece or Ireland, would you just never hear about it? Was it written about in books or magazines? Did willing lads tear out the pages and carry them in their back pockets?

We reach the train tracks, big smiles on our faces as we’re sun-kissed. We walk over them to the other side, then walk straight on till we see a beach and steps that can take us down to it. This isn’t the one. We keep walking, the view of the sea disappears as we walk past the leftovers of a mountain wall on which the word GAY ZONE has been painted in bold, black capital letters. A warning to anyone happening to walk past and not in the mood for a sword fight. A few steps forward and we see the sea again and the famed beach.

The sun is burning. My skin feels hot to the touch, I’m soaked in that glow of the summer where your hair sticks to your skin, you’re glittering and seem fresh, new again. We descend to the beach and every step feels heavier than the last, a strange blend of excitement and comprehension crushing over me in a way I haven’t felt in decades.

We settle on the left side of the beach and so begins a day of seeing and being seen. It’s a small patch of sand but by the end of the day hundreds will have passed through, some staying past 8 pm, which is when we leave, while others spend an hour or two before heading off. The day is a daze. I had a weird sensation of something impending, something about to happen – and that I should let it. Something rattling inside me. It was a real sexual odyssey, you really had to be there.

In the afternoon we head back up, jump on the other side of the train tracks and enter the forest. Some men are heading in the same direction, others the opposite, heading back to the beach. As we walk around, more and more eyes land on me. I can feel them piercing me with their gaze, following me around the woods as I step in and out of shafts of sunlight like an actor on stage moving in and out of the spotlight in a deranged performance. Two walk not that far behind me and H, then three. We come to new spots in the forest with every few steps, walk past human presence visible in discarded beer cans, cigarette buds.

I’m sober but I can feel the trees greeting me, their overgrown roots giving me a heads up (don’t trip, look down), their twigs too (look up, don’t knock into us). I can feel the leaves, their calming shade, I can feel the sunlight (don’t stay under me too long, I’m too hot), I can feel the soil, hear the birds. I can feel the breeze, a strange effect when it passes me by like it’s coming from another world. And in the end, all I see is muscle, muscle, muscle, skin, hair, moustaches, eyebrows, eyes, eyes, eyes too many to count. I have stopped in the middle of the forest, but I forgot how or why I stopped. My shorts and my speedos are at my thighs and H kneeling in front of me has made all seven inches of me disappear in his mouth. By the time this scene is done every single pair of eyes has moved close enough for me to feel their breath.

They’re breathing on me, my skin is glowing, my arms, my hands, my palms are all strong. You can see my veins running on my biceps, my sex lines somehow more visible even though I haven’t been hitting the gym in recent months. My hands are clasped at the back of H’s head, keeping him immobile. I’m thrusting into him, into the back of his throat. I can hear him gagging and I can hear their breaths, the sound of their hands rubbing the front of their shorts, black and blue and orange. After a while, colour no longer exists. I can hear the squelching escaping from their palms, their hearts pumping blood. I can hear myself, my breath – my breath 20 years ago in another forest, another town, another country, when we were kids. I remember my breaths throughout time and I see them – I see every man I’ve gazed down on, their eyes looking up at me, faces planted into my crotch. I see the guy with the huge muscles wearing his bucket hat low on his face. I see men entranced jerking off behind H, I look back and I see more behind me. I am in two places, then three, then countless places. I am reliving every oral-induced orgasm again and I explode in one, two, three blows, four, five, six. There is so much love spilling out of me. I can see them all looking at me, their faces standing so close to me and H, their mouths hanging ajar, their eyes fixed like they’ve been frozen in time by a magic spell. I feel the forest itself shake with me, seven, eight. Nine. I look down to see Harvey’s face, rivers of me graffitied on him and the forest floor.

One by one they walk off. I exit the forest, go for another dip in the sea. I spend the rest of the afternoon in the nude. I gotta get the pull-ups, push-ups in. Everyone from my audience returns to the beach, they each take a turn cracking a smile at me when they spot me. As the sun retreats, there is an urgency spreading across the beach, like the one I felt in the forest. They’ve been naked all day, but with the sun announcing his imminent exit stage left their lost time has caught up with them and now they want to make the most of it. Cocks at half mast, some hold each other as they hold conversations. A tall lad my age in black Adidas speedos, who has spent some time sitting on his knees and chatting to two Spaniards, suddenly topples over on his stomach. He buries his face in one of the lads’ laps, while the third pulls down his speedos to reveal a round, toned ass that disappears from my view, replaced by the back of a head. I’ve never eaten ass on the beach, I think to myself, my competitive instincts kicking in as always. Another threesome standing up and getting dressed can’t decide whether they’ll leave or stay. Their swimsuits are only halfway up. They’re deep in conversation, occasionally reaching out to stroke each other into a hard-on. Bucket hat glances me, nods. Before I can respond, we decide it’s time we head back.

Back by the train tracks, we walk straight on and hike on a new path that will lead us back to town. The air is light, carrying the scent and taste of the sea. An older lad I’ve been having eye sex with all day walks behind us till he eventually overtakes us. He looks back and smiles.

“He’s waiting for you to make the first move,” H says.

“Tomorrow,” I reply, guided by the forest.

Up and down and up and down again and we’re eventually at the town’s edge. We cross a small but deep patch of the sea on foot and I almost lose my balance and fall in. We’ll do this again tomorrow and the day after too.

That night I have vivid dreams that shake me out of sleep. I sink back in seconds later. I don’t remember them when I wake up, but I remember this notion of falling.

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On Sunday the beach is overflowing with naked men, everyone hiking over to enjoy the last of the weekend. There’s so many of us that the sand has disappeared beneath us. We’re so close to each other, we can smell each other’s armpits. Legs and hands and toned muscle everywhere, old and young, it’s like every dream I had at 15 has come true – an endless supply of men lined up.

I walk to the forest to scope out the talent. I walk around, come across new spots far deeper in the forest. I come up at a clearing where I stumble on a tall, Spanish-Asian lad wearing all black – black shorts, black sleeveless tee, black cap on backwards. He smiles, bends down for a kiss. I’m wearing a pair of blue shorts, a black cap and shades. Easy access. He caresses the front of my shorts and pulls back to look me in the eyes (well, shades), caught off guard. Smiles and down he goes on his knees, unwraps me and with a surprised grin he takes me in his mouth. I notice the indents on his back, I want to run my tongue across them, fall into them. He gets back up when he spots a group of men looking at us, not a fan of acting as entertainment.

I follow him through the woods until we reach a high elevation shielded by giant trees (the Rob Doyles of trees, you could say). We kiss and he sinks with his back against a tree trunk. I pull his top off and he steps out of his shorts with the grace of a ballerino. He turns around, forearms stretched on the tree, back arched, a perfect view. Imagine Pamela Anderson in this position in front of you and you’ll understand my excitement. He tastes like a combination perfumers would kill for – the after-effect of the sea water, blended with his sweat. My tongue extends inside him with such force that I can barely breathe. Sweating, I think, as always, that I’ll end up bruising my nose from eating ass too enthusiastically.

“Ready to fuck?” I utter as I stand back up behind him.

“Si,” he replies, “slow please, slow.”

Then begins an ordeal I wasn’t anticipating, how to fuck a dude in the forest standing up without lube, both of you covered in sea salt. Have you ever tried to put on a condom when your cock has been in the sea? Believe me, it isn’t easy. Almost killed my hard on sticking it on. We take turns spitting on it, I spit in my palm, run it across my length, then I spit on his hole, one last lick and I try to enter. He’s so tight. He arches even more, spreads his legs apart (again, I’m sure I had this dream before) and I try again. I try different angles. I stand closer to him, then step away, I stand to his left, then to his right, I push his torso down until his face is by his feet, but I can’t enter him, not fully, nor properly. He’s so tight, which makes me even harder. I yank the condom off and try to see if I can loosen him up without one first, using my fingers. Breakthrough. We try again and I’m close to disappearing inside him, then boom! His hole rejects me again.

“It’s not gonna happen,” I say, “you’re so fucking tight.”

He’s devastated.

“I’m just not ready. Do you live here? Maybe we can meet later.”

We get dressed and I go on my separate path, cock throbbing in my shorts and so visible a blind man could sense my erection if he stood close. I come across various men, ignore their attempts. The hunter instinct. I come back to the main clearing as you walk into the forest. A French lad I spotted on the beach earlier is getting pounded by a (grand)daddy. When I say pounded, I mean no passion, just pure jack rabbit sex. A few lads are taking in the view. I too stop momentarily. A tall, Spanish bear comes up to me and says something in Catalan. He grabs my erection, looks me right in the shades with his huge eyes.

“GRANDE,” he utters loudly. I walk away.

I see movement in between the trees to the left of me. There are seven of them standing tall and leafy, an assortment of plants grown by their roots obstructing passersby views. I enter and instantly breathe in the sex. One lad is bent over. Others are flowing in and out. I haven’t been in for more than a few minutes and I’ve disappeared in various mouths until this Spanish Arab arrives. We magnetise each other. Silky smooth skin, thick eyebrows and hair. His mouth is wide, his jaw strong. He’s the best head I had all week. Just one problem.

“I’m not clean, I can’t,” he says, with me still pulsating in his palm.

“Damn,” he continues, “so fucking big. I want it.”

But he has to head back and get the train to Barcelona.

I go back down to the beach and dip in the sea to cool off. I lose my sunglasses in the spindrift. Later, I will also lose my cap, which I’ve had since university. It belonged to my friend Frankie, a lad I was close to, one of my best friends. One of the two keepsakes I have from him – the other being a grey jumper – swallowed by the sea. I choose to believe the items I lost were offerings and in return she’ll give me something else, grant me what I want.

H has been swimming around the corner from the beach, where a small cave has become house to a 20, 30-man strong orgy. Cocks out, cumming one after the other, faces full of cum, jumping back into the water to wash it off. I’m not the strongest swimmer (embarrassing for a Greek, I know) and the sea today has been rough, so I’ve opted for the forest. I’m more at home here than a cave smashed by the waves. That I have been reading The Bacchae may also have something to do with it.

I head back up, become the rider for various lads. I enter the tree fortress again, more lads than before. Is it because I’m the new arrival and word has gotten out or is there something else in me that leads them all to take turns sucking me? I can feel their tongues, their lips. I can hear their grunts, their shallow breaths, but I’ve sort of stopped looking. I’m thrusting in deeper and deeper and I can hear gagging, I can feel heads pulling away, I can hear coughing. I’m as solid as the boulders, my body’s rock hard, stomach flat and ready to take a punch. The last of them, he’s had enough. He turns around and guides me inside him. I grasp him by his sides and, Rob, I fuck him so hard, I don’t recall the l last time I fucked like this, like I’ve lost contact with reality. I’m fucking him with an ever-increasing rhythm, like I’m moving on Duracell batteries. Sweat is dripping down all over me, the centre of my back, two lines down from my blades, three on my chest, my pits, my neck, I’m so fucking wet! I’m slipping inside him. His moans are beginning to echo and gather a crowd. I hear words of encouragement, like I needed them. Yes, fuck yes, fuck him deeper, yes, like that, go on, fuck that ass. Like the day before, I slip in and out of consciousness. I’m present, but I’m also in other places. I’m in a hotel room in Geneva fucking Xavier, a 40-year-old bloke. I’m in London fucking an Irish lad called Paul on the Queen’s Jubilee Weekend. We have the same name, which is vocally comical. We melt into each other perfectly. I’m in Paris, where I’ve taken the Eurostar to spend the weekend with a couple I met on Instagram and where over two nights I will take turns fucking them – a weekend long fuckfest by the end of which all three of us struggle to walk. I left it all on the playing field that weekend, nothing in me by the end. I’m in Greece, I’m in Spain, I’m in Italy. I’m fucking every single man and woman I’ve ever fucked. I’m fucking this Spanish lad in front of me, who’s moaning so loud I feel I will carry the sound inside me forever. I’m Paul, I’m Pavlos, Pablo, Paolo, I’ve peeled back every experience and I am someone else. I’m fucking all my conquests over the years and then one. I’m cumming. Two, three. His moans get so loud, they shake the leaves on the trees. Four, five, six, seven.

“Yes, get me pregnant,” he says in a broken accent.

I keep shooting ropes inside him until I am empty. I pull my shorts back on, cock still dripping, and walk out without pleasantries. Most of the men gathered follow me back down to the beach. Were they hoping to take their turn? Or did my exit signal the end of the day in the forest?

Earlier that day during my first foray in the forest I saw the man from the day before, the one that kept smiling at me on our walk back.

“I’ve been looking for you,” I tell him, as I didn’t see him on the beach that morning.

“I’ve been in here,” he says grinning in a French accent.

“Damn, I was hoping I’d fuck you today.”

“Activ?”

I nod.

“Ahhhhhhh, me too.”

I pull him close one hand around his waist and then we kiss. He’s the sort of man that loves to use the fullness of his tongue when he’s kissing.

We go down to the side, just out of view, and he goes down on me. I wanna fuck him so bad, I’d sell my body and my soul if it’s what it took. You ever felt that way about someone, Rob?

He says he wants to eat my ass. If he can’t fuck me, he wants to taste me. And so, I turn over. I can bend better than the rest of them, better than the greatest power bottom, Rob. Maybe one day you’ll see?

He wants to swallow me, he’s like me, he does everything with utter enthusiasm, with the full force of his life. He reaches around with one hand, jacks me off, faces still buried inside me, before he motions me to turn around.

I clasp my hands at the back of his head. He’s a sensational sucker, dizzies me with his tongue. I feel like a film still out of End of the Century, which is set in Barcelona. The main character in it, a tall, gorgeous Argentine, goes cruising in the forest and is so enraptured getting sucked that you can see him cracking. He def got wood filming it. The director, Lucio Castro, has two films on the festival circuit this year that I really want to see. I’ll watch anything by anyone who understands men’s sex drive. Fucking and still not getting enough. I remember watching that film and wanting to get lost in the woods. My new French friend and I kiss. I tell him we should go down to the beach and maybe later we can split a third.

At the end of the day we hike back to the hotel again, shirtless, cock still swollen in my shorts. H jacks me off in bed, I still have so much to give. I splash everywhere. We shower, head out for dinner.

Our last day at the gay beach falls on a Monday so the weekend crowd, those boys who took a train here to fuck in the woods, or for those who chose the cave, as one annoying Brit put it, “risked their lives for a sandy blowjob”, were back at work. Some new faces, some familiar ones, endless opportunities.

I was reading Euripides these three days, partly because I was in a vengeful mood and Dionysus is really good at revenge. Do you remember when I said, I will have my revenge? I suppose that’s my toxic masculinity showing through. Some call it toxicity, I call it creativity. I thought of two writers during my stay. You, mostly because I thought you’d be interested in the details of how many holes I scored, and Henry Miller, because being in nature and having sex in the open reminded me of two passages:

“Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.”

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”

No, I wasn’t thinking about books while I was fucking. But hiking for hookups reminded me I love nature. I love dirt, I’d love nothing more than to tackle another man to the ground and to fuck in the dirt! Let it rain, let’s fuck in the rain and then be in bed with a fever for two days. It reminded me I need to escape into the wild every now and again and if I could go hiking in the forest every weekend I would. It’d help if scoring ass was also a part of it. Perhaps I’ll hang out at Hampstead Heath from now on.

Back to Catalonia…

I’m climbing up again, crossing the train tracks to enter the forest. Are you bored of reading about butt sex yet? Remember, it’s a part of my culture…I’m not just fucking, I’m embracing my ancestral traditions. Maybe next time I’ll wear one of those pro cameras on my head like my beloved bike riders do when they’re on the open road and just send the film to you instead.

As I walk by the spot where I left it all yesterday, I see my French friend again. He’s got a lad bent over, his body glistening in the shade of the trees. He lifts a hand and motions for me to join. I walk in and stand right behind him, my face in his neck, I take in his scent. We kiss while he carries on fucking. I walk on in search of new adventures.

I meet an Irish guy in a pink speedo. We don’t bother stepping out of view, he drops down and brings my shorts to my thighs and I’m in his mouth. I’m shocked at the depth of his throat. He can almost take my balls in too.

I walk deeper in the forest. I go down on this tall and shredded runner, fluffy, dirty blonde hair, cock so salty my mouth’s on fire.

I’m stopped multiple times. Someone wants to kiss me, someone else to suck me, another to smell me, to “worship” me. I lost count again.

In the end, I find myself back with my French friend, still inside that lad. The fucker’s got stamina! If I can’t fuck him, I think, I can at least fuck with him. If he can’t fuck me, he can at least drape an arm over my shoulder and kiss me as I’m getting my dick sucked.

Head to hips, we’ve got this lad horizontal between us. I’m fucking his face, while French is fucking him in the ass. We’re like a pair of secret lovers, the entire time locking eyes as if the third person wasn’t there at all, just the two of us, in a world where I can fuck him and in a world where he can fuck me all at once. It is his lips locked around my cock, my smooth-like-silk ass welcoming his throbbing dick. We lock fingers and smile. I pull him by the back of the neck in for a kiss and we make out like teenagers, sloppily, hungrily, tonguing each other in the mouth and in the face.

Our bottom tries to switch and have me fuck him, but I push him back in his original position and carry on kissing over him. I don’t know how long we stayed in lip lock, but I knew moments before he did that French was getting close. The breathing gives us all away. His breath quickened, his hands closed around our bottom’s sides, his torso tensed as his hips began swinging back and forth at a superman pace. His face reddened, his mouth opened wide, eyes still locked on me when he shot his load inside the other lad. I couldn’t contain my smile, I had witnessed the most beautiful of scenes, I imagined in the moment, this is what normal lads feel at their best friend’s wedding. It was me he imagined he was getting pregnant as he was shooting inside the other lad.

He immediately pulled out and came over and stood next to me. He kissed me again and I put my arm around him pulling him closer. We were both so wet with sweat. He smelled my left armpit, kissed me, licked me on the chest. As if ordered, the third guy dropped to his knees in front of me and took my cock back in his mouth. We were both so slippery I felt I couldn’t slip it in him without it causing too much pain. He was the eldest, but he felt subservient to me now, his hands travelling across my body, his tongue swirling around my mouth, one hand at the back of the other lad’s head, motioning him, his eyes on me, full and waiting for my release. He kept taking in my smell, nostrils expanding with his inhale, eyes dropping shut in pleasure. I kissed him on the neck, pulled him even closer with one arm, felt his still wet cock with the other. I took in his scent, my face buried in his neck until it was all that I could sense. I fell into a void where the world around me fell silent, went black, and all my senses abandoned me, only his scent guiding me, reminding me I’m alive. I can’t explain what happened to me very well yet. Maybe I’ll just jack off and let the cum scent this letter. I’m just messing with you. Maybe in a few years, when I’ve had a chance to think about it from a critical distance, I’ll be able to explain what happened. It was a death of some sort…for some seconds I wasn’t on earth, or if I was, I wasn’t on our current plane, the one I’m inhabiting right now and the one in which you’ll receive and read this letter, but somewhere else, maybe a divine realm, having attained communion with the gods. I left behind the forest and everyone inside it, I left behind my life and everyone in it, and I saw myself outside my body back in the forest getting blown. All that was guiding me was the sweat, the scent on the neck of my French lover. In the void, I felt this tidal wave of strength, like my body was reconstituted, reassembled with new life. I felt virile. Seconds later, I was back and let it all go. Rob, there was so much. Like three of me had orgasmed. If it was Dionysus I was in communion with, then he really is the god who comes. My body was shaking, my joints were in so much pain and then in pure relief. My body had been emptied. I sweated so much I was dripping wet even in the face. We got dressed in silence, exchanged another kiss and ran our hands through each other’s hair before walking back.

I haven’t stopped thinking about those woods since we left. My death and rebirth, this new chapter that opened up that afternoon, the next chapter of my life (yet another one where I am guided by my cock!).

Maybe I’ve been summoned by Dionysus. Maybe like Harvey has said before, I am an intense reader, so intense that I call things into existence. Something I’ve read that really captured me, I will find ways to bring it to life. Is that the path to the divine, Rob?

What happened to me in that Catalan forest?

Been sad not to see you in Berlin this summer. I need to hear about your adventures.

Best,
Pavlos

PS. I received a copy of Cameo from your publisher and I am super excited to read it at last! Imagine. I had iterations of this book in my hands TWICE and I didn’t steal it. I’m an angel. My copy is slightly salted, the result of me carrying it with me to another nude beach, in Nice this time. The beach sucked but Nice has a sexual underbelly beneath its Piedmontese beauty that is straight out of a French novel, or 2000s indie film. Perhaps I’ll tell you all about it in another letter…

“If you want,” one of us would whisper at random points throughout the film, “I won’t charge you,” the other would follow.

Stefan stood up and began mimicking Marcel in his first scene. Hand on his loosened belt, one heavy and assured step at a time. He stood in front of me: “Let’s get to it.”

I smiled then turned my gaze back to the screen and Pierre Clementi’s teeth.

Phillip carried on, progressively shaving one of Anna’s pencils into extinction. Lines and lines and lines and in the end he somehow brought them together to mirror me, writing my name under the figure he drew. Caught in a moment of rest, when I’ve trailed off somewhere far away in my mind, imagining the future and the past. I was lying on the sofa, one foot on the floor, the other raised and tilted on the cushions.

Minutes to go before the film is over, Andreas has his turn to break the silence.

“Do you think Jesus Christ was pissed off dying without fucking first?”

Baby Pierre Clementi wasn’t what I had in mind when I signed up for Christina Newland’s Visconti season. This might be the longest I’ve ever spent at the BFI outside the LFF. Films I’ve watched: Ossessione, La Terra Trema, Rocco and his Brothers, The Leopard, The Damned, and Ludwig. A young Pierre Clementi appears in Visconti’s adaptation of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s only novel as Francesco Paolo, one of the Prince’s sons, all cheekbone beauty and a playful demeanour foreshadowing roles to come. Every Visconti film is an endurance test, almost by default two and a half hours long at a minimum. In his films, men are agents of desire - walking erections frankly - capturing male transgression and sex hunger while reflecting the effects of a shifting world.

So, Clementi back on the brain.

I remember three years ago MoMA showed the films he directed to coincide with the English language publication of his memoir, A Few Personal Messages. His films are diaristic, capturing life around him, and poetic, fever dream experiments. I remember working long days for frieze week and heading to the BFI at night for a very forgettable edition of the festival, bar Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning, which Norman and I could not stop talking about.

I remember fifteen years ago there was a Clementi retrospective at Anthology Film Archives. I was back home, straight out of my first year at university and bored out of my mind. I had long lost contact with everyone I had first watched Belle de Jour with. I asked Mark, who was in the year above me in high school and whom I’d occasionally hang with when we were young and both out of other options, for a ride to the amphitheatre to have beers after sunset overseeing the town. Two cans in, we disappeared behind the pine trees. I watched Wheel of Ashes, then fell asleep watching The Diary of an Innocent Boy later that night, the start of an aborted personal film festival. I didn’t finish that film until 2023 in a double bill with Belle de Jour I watched with Norman.

He played Christ and The Devil, innocent and deviant, charming and dangerous, the outlaw, the rebel, the rock-n-roll star. He’s the personification of the 60s, retroactively referred to as an embodiment of the sacred and the profane, like he’s been dreamed up into existence by Pasolini. The 60s ended and in 1972 Clementi was arrested on charges of drug possession and spent seventeen months behind bars in Italy. What came out of his experience in prison was the memoir. I remember I haven’t read it. I do not remember why.

Philip spent half an hour trying to show me how to blow smoke rings, but it all came out as a puff of air.

“Draw your tongue at the back of your mouth…No, no, no, stick your lips out into an ‘O’…You gotta go faster, pick up the pace…You’re hopeless!”

We were sitting on his bike, in matching socks, shorts and t-shirts of blue, black and blue again. It was still too cold for our attire but we were ready to get rid of winter at the first sight of sun. We were sat facing each other, my legs over his thighs and dangling on both sides.

“Is it just me or is the earth calling out for our feet, anticipating we’ll slide off and crash off to one side?”

He double checks the packet between us for a last cigarette and crunches it in his fist.

“I’ve no idea what you’re on about.”

He pulled me closer a moment later when I felt a shiver on my spine and draped me with his denim jacket.

We hadn’t seen each other in almost three months, typical start to the year. The days are too short, it is too cold and school’s on so by the time he’d ride over he’d need to head straight back.

“It was mad! He sported a raging boner in front of the crowd…I’m not kidding, he was hard as steel in his speedos when he dived in.”

He was telling me everything I missed over the last three months and kept returning to the subject of Andreas taking part in the epiphany in January.

“He said he’ll blend with the riff raff to show them at last what a real man should look like.”

He put on a pair of white speedos to show off and dove right in the sea as soon as the priest threw the cross in the water.

Philip and the lads all drove there together and Andreas changed in his speedos in the car, prepped behind the blinds for his big appearance.

He was angry at just how out of shape most of the men were.

“What’s the point of doing this if you’re 55 and fugly?”

I didn’t think he needed an answer, so I looked into the distance, spotting multiple rooftops I recognised across town. It was mostly all the places I had had sex in. That’s S’s place. That’s K’s. A and K live in that one there. I thought of pointing them out to him, something more to share since last time we saw each other, then realised he doesn’t know any of these people and their names would be meaningless to him.

“Why don’t we go knock on all their doors and I can see who they are,” I imagined him responding, “then I can judge if they’re fit or not and whether we can all fuck together.”

I exhaled as if I had just taken a puff in.

“But how did he stay hard? Wasn’t it freezing?”

“To be fair, he lost it as soon as he went in the water, but he was still at half mast when he rose out of the water. He followed through on what he said last year.”

Andreas was a good swimmer, so the entire event was over in under three minutes. He emerged out of the water like a sea god in his white speedos, kissed the cross and climbed out. The lads gathered around him, hard pats on the back and slaps and kisses on the head.

“It was talk of the town immediately, everyone was pushing to get to the front, to see the dude with the huge cock that retrieved the cross.”

Philip said that Andreas was surprised at how light it was to retrieve, imagined the material would be heavy to warrant a genuine competition and genuine bragging rights.

The clergy weren’t impressed. Neither were the bunch that clutched their non-existent pearls. “You know, the people who haven’t had sex in the missionary position while looking away from each other during the junta.”

Towel wrapped around his shoulders, Andreas hopped in his trousers and they were off to his place.

“You missed out on a dissolute day!”

Somehow, the best parties were always the ones I missed out on.

Fifteen years later, I can’t look away from Karl Glusman in Please Baby Please, I too want to lose control. He’s one of the few actors working today making interesting choices, from Gaspar Noe’s Love to The Bikeriders. His take on a greaser and gang leader is a queered up one, played somewhere between Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski and a Tom of Finland character. That he is billed in the trailer as “The Irresistible Karl Glusman” is a wink of sorts from the director letting prospective viewers know that she’s in on the fact that he’s drop dead gorgeous.

Please Baby Please is a take on the B movie, a take on the musical, and a take on the experimental films you see at film festivals. Its internal compass is unclear. It’s about bisexuality and about the confines of heterosexuality and marriage and how we all, no matter how normie we might be, need an element of danger. Or rather, how we’re all willing to give into danger when he has the face and body of Karl Glusman, choosing to either be him or be with him.

So, I’ve been thinking about the leather jacket-clad Karl Glusman in his Johnny Strabler cap, and I’ve been thinking about greasers and bikeriders and how we just don’t have much a bike riding culture in London even though the lads riding said bikes have allegedly become the #1 crush for people who are really into books.

I’ve been thinking about Karl Glusman and I remember me and Phillip climbing on the back of Andreas and Alex’s motorbikes. I remember the wind on my skin, the smell of petrol and the exhaustion fumes, I remember us not wearing helmets, I remember Alex speeding, I remember my arms wrapped around his waist, I remember his scent, Jean Paul Gaultier, which was what we all wore, blended with our own unique signature of sweat and teen hormones. I remember our boxer shorts frothing over our trousers.

I’ve been thinking about Karl Glusman in his skintight white mesh tee and I remember Anna: “I want a man that will hit me then fuck me like his life depends on it…and me.” I remember her saying she masturbated to the poster of Marlon Brando in The Wild One she had plastered opposite her bed. I remember texting her at the beginning of my final year in high school, the first time Mark and I went out for beers: “I sat on his motorbike and instantly got turned on.”

That day Philip and I had sex three times. Our small abs, just about beginning to show if we flexed hard, were glued together. Our lips were chapped from going down on each other. We forgot our socks on and had our caps on backwards, hair sticking with sweat underneath. I ran out of condoms, so we decided to go out. We put on each other’s trunks. Both our t-shirts were dirty from roughhousing out and about on his bike.

We split the largest popcorn at the cinema and only then realised we hadn’t eaten all day. At intermission, we decided we can’t be bothered to go back. We stepped on our cigarette buds and went home and watched The Dreamers again. We wanted to see Eva Green dangle a cigarette at the edge of her mouth and that scene where Louis Garrel sits at the kitchen table wearing only his green jacket. Stefan was so obsessed with Theo, he had been on a mission to find a jacket like it, showing sales assistants at every store a printed still from the film but turned empty handed each time. We left the film playing at a low volume and had sex again but couldn’t finish.

The week after we met up at track and fucked until our legs ached and we had to ask Alex and Andreas to pick us up on the mopeds.

January is the month I focus on my body and collect bruises like medals, a garden variety attempt at a stronger physique. So I’m jumping boxes and lifting barbells and once again trying - and failing - to maintain the perfect posture for every exercise. I’m pushing and pulling and running on treadmills and I think of the most exhilarating cigarettes I’ve ever had and all the beds and beaches I smoked them at. I’m sweating at an underground room full of other men perspiring and I’m thinking of this year’s annual New Year’s Day expedition to the RA and the sculpted figures on show by Michelangelo, the muscles on their backs and their thighs which look like they’d tear open the threads of any modern day pair of trousers. I’m thinking about the RA and their choice to put on a dick measuring contest between Michelangelo and Leonardo (and Raphael, sort of) from c. 1504, but somehow produced a substandard exhibition. I’m thinking about nudity; nudity in film and how the intimacy coordinator lot where unhappy with Anora and won’t rest until there is no sexy films in the world and I’m thinking about nudity in books and how I’ve bought so many books (full of sex scenes, if my research hasn’t failed me) in December I still haven’t read.

Andreas’ comment came back to me when earlier this month I spent an afternoon with The Escaped Cock, a novel by D.H. Lawrence that along with some of his lesser known books, like Mornings In Mexico, I found in secondhand shops but never got around to reading till now. It’s a story only someone as horny as Lawrence would dare write, in which he narrates what happened to Jesus Christ after his death and resurrection. The answer could only ever be rejecting the role he had in life and discovering the joys of sex:

“He felt the braze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent.”

“The shock of desire went through him, shock after shock, so that he wondered if it were another sort of death: but full of magnificence.”

“His death and his passion of sacrifice were all as nothing to him now.”

The Escaped Cock was the author’s preferred title for the story (usually published as The Man Who Died). I remember reading in a Lawrence biography that said Lawrence insisted the title wasn’t a pun for Christ’s sexual awakening. I remember being told trying to decipher authorial intent - especially once the author is dead - is pointless. My interpretation is that Lawrence was a walking erection himself and thought the resurrection would unavoidably see Christ discovering his own: “I am risen!”

We’re five years away from the centenary of his death, which I foresee will be celebrated not dissimilarly to Franz Kafka’s in 2024 (that is if Brits choose to fund literature for a change).

READ IT BEFORE THE FILM ADAPTATION DROPS: “…the blind, frightened frenzy of a boy's first passion. Quick and frenzied his young body quivered naked on hers, blind, for a minute. Then it lay quite still, as if dead. - D.H. Lawrence, The Escaped Cock

A very serious discussion at quarter to 11 the night after Epiphany:

“Can you filter Mubi films by length?…of dick?”

“Now that’s a metric I can get behind.”

Most of my hot or not predictions for 2024 failed: I didn’t watch a single Verhoeven film (with the lads or solo), I didn’t meet any sailors and I didn’t read any works of fiction about motorbikes and the men who ride them.

I didn’t see enough ballet, I missed both of The Erotic Review parties and I didn’t have sex in the shower. Neither did anyone else I know (ok fine, everyone said that third-base action at the gym showers carried on as always but that’s such a standard it’s almost boring).

Philippa Snow is still in Norwich - but her first full-length non-fiction work on fame and the price women pay for it is coming out in time to become the book of the summer. Rob Doyle didn’t publish a single book, let alone two, but the wait is over: his fifth book, Cameo, has an official release date for Thursday 6 November 2025. It is his first with his new publisher W&N Books, following a decade of publishing and three books with Bloomsbury. 

2025 is a major year for Irish writing, with Eimear McBride, Oisín Fagan and Seán Hewitt all returning with new releases, and John Patrick McHugh and Róisín Lanigan putting out their debut novels.

Sky Ferreira is out of the Capitol chains and a free agent. Edmund White is coming back with more tales of his sexual adventures. My favourite film genre, Younger Man/Older Woman, is now mainstream, thanks to Nicole Kidman’s new film Babygirl. I watched a few films in this genre this year, including White Palace (hot) and Queen of Hearts (disturbing). I reread Tampa (hilarious for its oversexed, impossible villain) and Seventeen, a lacklustre new addition to the canon that could have been the most important book on the topic but failed by talking down to its own audience.

There was a depressing study about the decline of sex scenes in film, something about teens preferring friendship over fucking (?!). Hell bent to prove otherwise, Bruce LaBruce is hosting a porn cinema at an undisclosed location in London to mark the release of his film The Visitor, a loose reworking of Teorema. The event aims to revive cruising cinema culture. When I DM’d him to ask whether that will include the audience having sex in the cinema itself - aka viewers fucking in their seats while the film is playing - he answered yes, followed by an AI-generated Luigi Mangione sticker. I replied I’ll be there, forgetting I’m out of town that weekend - a PJ classic, always missing things.

There’s no equivalent of a report of this kind for books and Dennis Cooper might have the answer as to why: “Nobody gives a shit about books anymore!”

Serpent’s Tail began reissuing his five-book George Miles cycle as a classic in 2023. In his interview with The Guardian, Cooper talks about the renaissance of American independent publishing, name checking Apocalypse Party. For a more personal look into the cycle - and a no-shame confession by moi - you can read my interview with him in Buffalo Zine’s 20th issue.

More from Dennis Cooper X Paul Johnathan here.

Two years ago Diesel dropped 200,000 condoms on its runway, a call to action of sorts to suit up. (I cannot remember a single scene in any book about condoms. Has no-one written about this or were they just referred to in passing?). Paris handed out 300,000 condoms in the Olympic village, although all my slutty friends in France said these (allegedly) weren’t used, with lots of athletes going raw. Obviously, any self-respecting Parisian who was stuck in the city during the Olympics tried to fuck an athlete. Or, in one case, multiple members of one European Olympic team.

Now halfway through the decade - called the whoring 2020s in this newsletter - it seems my prediction has come true: we’re having reckless sex, or at the very least, more reckless sex, that is according to The Face.

Is any of this a sign that we’re moving in a new, more sexual, direction as a culture?

It’s New Year’s Day and as part of my annual tradition I’m at the Royal Academy, this time seeing the Marina Abramović retrospective. The main attraction — whether people have the guts to admit it or not — is walking through the threshold created by two naked performers, standing in such close proximity that there’s no way through without some contact. Writer Norman Night is posing the real questions before we cross over.  “Is he excused for five minutes?”

I remember a conversation from months ago Norman and I had. “I’d eat Matthew Barney’s ass for as long as The Cremaster Cycle lasted,” I said, although the context escapes me. Does it matter? Intent, to me, is everything — and in this statement the intent couldn’t be clearer. I love Barney’s work so much that the only conclusion I can come to is to have sex with him (the only conclusion, really, is to have sex with artists whose work you admire, that art and sex are entangled).

The last time I watched The Cremaster Cycle was at Hackney Picturehouse in August 2021. I’ve since found a new reason to obsess over him: his football-inspired video installation, titled Secondary. A former quarterback, Barney makes the sort of art that’s defined by critics as masculine, which is art speak for focusing on men.

Why am I writing about this? Much has been written about men – their cultural decline or disappearance, their perceived fragility, their perceived power. Somewhere in this conversation, however, we forgot that men, well… we’re fun. In my last missive, December 2022, I quoted Barry Pierce on the state of publishing: “We need more fun and frivolous books from young men,” he wrote. A year later, I can’t think of a single book published in this time that fills this gap (but please enlighten me, I famously forgot to book tickets to Barney’s show at the Southbank, so I presume there’s a book out there I am in the dark about.)

Save me fun and frivolous book written by a young male novelist, save me.

If men appear to have lost favour in publishing, they — or more accurately their bodies — have captured the public imagination. Instagram and X alone are overloaded with images and videos of young men in various states of undress that in a different era would be confined to porn or fashion shoots looking to stir controversy (then again, they’re hyper-personalised, so maybe they’re just showing me what I want to see). And there’s an air of the homosocial to it all. Caked or not caked, a trend I can’t wait to try out myself, sees groups of men at the gym testing how big their asses are — by lying on the floor face down and having one of their friends roll barbells over them; if it stops in its track at your butt, you’re caked, if it passes over your frame unencumbered, you’re not caked. Is it a coincidence the New York Post called 2024 the year of the big butt for men? 

Footballers have been stripping down to their underwear as fans ask to have their t-shirts and shorts straight off the pitch. Where will they stop? And what does it say about spectators effectively snatching the sweat-soaked gear off athletes’ backs? Are we fan-crazed or is our culture shifting in the direction of expecting — or rather demanding more male nudity?

Sadler’s Wells’ Romeo + Juliet by Matthew Bourne had a similar impact. Men in the audience, dragged there by their girlfriends, couldn’t stop commenting on the strength of the performers — that is, the male performers; describing their physiques during intermission with almost lyrical admiration.

The BFI has also joined in on the action, programming a season of films shown at Scala — the legendary smut cinema at Kings Cross back when the neighbourhood smelled of sex — featuring an impressive amount of on-screen male nudity from the 70s. Meanwhile, romps like Rotting in the Sun and small screen slutfests like Euphoria continue the work of auteurs long gone and are taking male nudity mainstream. 

“Men are hot,” a friend said recently when we discussed these loosely-connected thoughts, “straight men have finally realised and they now play along for the attention.” What does this mean? Extra short shorts, running shirtless in the park, progressively undressing during group sports and something I’ve been spotting all over the city: men changing in the streets (literally undressing and putting on a new outfit in public).

If men are happy to change in public post-workout, if footballers strip down to their briefs after a match, if Marina can convince a conservative institution to platform the irl version of posting pole, while men now post slutty selfies all night long, then why can’t we have more fun and frivolous books by men?

If we’re returning to a more public male sexuality, maybe we’re ready for an element of danger in literature, too.

DELETED SCENES LIVE IS BACK AND AT A NEW LOCATION:
Trisha’s, Thursday 25 January 7pm

Bringing the best in sex and art by Rose Cleary, Róisín Lanigan, Oisín McKenna and Hannah Regel. Entry is free and always will be, just like the newsletter.

The Erotic Review relaunch

“I’d eat Matthew Barney’s ass for as long as the Cremaster Cycle lasted” sort of statements.

Sex scenes (in film, books, and frankly everywhere)

Elizabeth Aldrich

Mourning

Philippa Snow in London

Loose interpretations of novels in film (see The Beast by Bertrand Bonello)

Rob Doyle publishing two books concurrently

Rob Doyle walking for YSL or Celine

Ultraviolence at 10

Smoking cigarettes

Shower sex

Secrets / secrecy

Looking like a Greek rent boy at Sadler’s Wells (esoteric, I know)

Motorbikes

Riders as main characters in fiction

Watching Paul Verhoeven films with the lads

Madrid

A&F jock look

Glass dildos

Gyms as social forums

Jonah Almost

The Diaries of Anais Nin

Erotic fiction

Porn in cinemas (see Le Beau Mec)

Buenos Aires

Underground / DIY / indie theatre (New York only)

Cervantes Theatre’s The House of Bernarda Alba

Ballet where you can practically smell the dancers’ pheromones from the last row

Locker room crushes

Male friendships with fucked up dynamics in books

Sailors

Fiction about the search for immortality

Sky Ferreira gigs

Generosity

“Men who have sex with other men”

90s/00s sex themed fashion / shoots

Seeing dick / naked performers at the Royal Academy (thanks Marina)

And whatever this is:

NOT

The Modern Review (what happened to the relaunch?)

Books about books / writing / trying and/or failing to become a published author

Big book advances

Book launches at bookstore basements

Philippa Snow in Norwich

Woke theatre productions of Shakespeare or other classics

The National Theatre’s The House of Bernarda Alba (soz, don’t fuck with Lorca)

The BFI website

Selfies

Celebrity (except Isabelle Huppert, Isabelle Adjani, Lea Seydoux, Eva Green, etc. literally any French actor)

“Heartfelt exploration of modern masculinity” books or films

Straightforward book to film adaptations

Trauma / trauma plots

Sauna action

Himbos / bimbos

Consolidation in film or book publishing

Author / book merch

Poetry about sex

Netflix

Films produced by fashion houses

IP as film / film franchises

“INSERT NUMBER HERE books we’re excited about” lists

Lists, including this one

Picking lesser known or unknown authors from your backlist and republishing them as unjustly neglected geniuses

The 80s

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time

Porn

Paris (during the Olympics)

The Olympics

Puritanism

“Identity-driven novels”

The young men enjoyed the remnants of summer, elevating skating into spectator sport and performance art, eyes shuttered to the world beyond the park’s railings. Refusing to look yet enjoying the eroticism inherent to being observed. I too could feel the wetness and warmth of the breeze, the fading sunlight, thrilled to disappear for the weekend after the relentlessness of overstimulation and overexposure and stay in bed with a book. It is in this context that I read Aesthetica, Allie Rowbottom’s debut novel concerned with image, the excruciating horrors we deploy on ourselves to maintain and curate it and what happens when we’ve objectified it (and by extension ourselves) to the extent that it has ceased to be a shadow of its subject and has usurped it.

In his review of Blonde, a fictional take on Marilyn Monroe, the critic Sam Kriss examined the detrimental, if not downright fatal impact image can have on the person it depicts. Rowbottom’s novel follows a young woman, a blonde herself, whose image overpowers her until it collapses under the weight of its own ambition. Billed as literary fiction, it feels more comparable to a 21st century reimagining and revision of the gothic novel, where the ghosts are digital apparitions that can haunt the real, tangible world with far-reaching consequences. In a unique blend of literary styles, it also flirts with ideas that permeate speculative fiction: in the not-so-distant future of 2032, Instagram is cultural detritus of yesterday and, should the protagonist’s mission be taken as a sign of the cultural landscape she inhabits, the obsession with image seems to have ended.

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Aesthetica is split in two timelines: the first follows Anna, a 19-year-old who runs off to Los Angeles in search of stardom of the social media variety and goes to extreme lengths to embody what Instagram has convinced her is idealised beauty through a series of plastic surgeries; the second finds Anna, fifteen years later, preparing to undergo an experimental procedure, the aesthetica of the title, which promises to reverse the effects of all previous procedures and give her the image she would have aged into had she never gone through with them to begin with.

When I interviewed Allie Rowbottom last October, I couldn’t stop thinking about the novel’s two voices — the intertwining of the two narratives, seamlessly flashing back and forth in time, which augmented the novel’s haunting atmosphere, so much so that it is difficult to pinpoint who’s haunting whom. Is past Anna haunting her future self? Or is future Anna haunting the original that’s battling somewhere deep inside her to break out? In her review for Astra Magazine, Philippa Snow notes the novel’s tone is one of mourning, the protagonist in grief for her pre-Instagram self. Rowbottom’s authorial power lies in interconnecting this with Anna’s youthful ambition and naïveté. “Those feelings of wanting to be seen in comparison to someone else [perceived as more beautiful], those were feelings that I had when I was a young person growing up and looking at magazines. Writing this book, I dramatised them, imagining what that would feel like augmented by social media,” Rowbottom says.

The author made the deepest incisions into Instagram and peeled back every single layer to reveal the truth at the very core of influencers — an obsession with instant fame (sentences like I was deserving of DMs from Instagram scouts, brand offers to “collab” made me feel sicker than Damien Ark’s Fucked Up), unmasking in the process the banality of their ambitions. A contemporary variant of more traditional tales of desire, her protagonist is the byproduct (rather than the cause) of a culture in decline. Rowbottom considers this compulsion among young crowds as a natural progression of the girl-goes-to-Hollywood-to-become-famous trope. “The stardom is different,” she says, but the desire to join this rank of fame is tied to “young people’s desire to be seen, to make something of themselves.” They don’t want to create anything at all, so instead turn themselves into commodities. “Rather than honing a craft as an artist, or an actor,” she continues, “they want to get rich quick by self-objectifying and profiting off of their image. They want to be paid to be themselves.”

Aesthetica is hardly condoning these desires, but Rowbottom isn’t interested in criticising influencers either. She sees influencers as the inevitable succession of a generation that grew up in the shadow of hers: “We lived through 9/11 and graduated into a recession. There was a lot of struggle to make it and I could see those coming up behind us being disinterested in following traditional paths.”

This feels like an apt way of describing her trajectory too. Her generation of writers weren’t the Bret Easton Ellis type, smashing through the industry straight out of college. She’s one of a handful of American authors jettisoning to fame as fully formed adults, bringing in fresh perspectives and stories with the dawn of a new decade. Aesthetica is a sort of breakthrough in this regard. How many novels have you read that tackle plastic surgery or the effects of social media on impressionable minds? I previously described her as a possible successor to Joan Didion. Having seen the response to her debut, my speculation seems to have come true.

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When we speak over Zoom, she has an air of NY cool about her, even though she lives in Los Angeles. She’s wearing a black sweater, her impossibly sun-kissed blonde hair counterbalancing it, understated yet assured in her confidence of her own work and its place in the culture at large. She’s less interested in cultivating mystique, opting for transparency, which she sees not as demystifying but captivating in its sincerity. “JELL-O Girls was a learning curve for me,” she says about the experience of publishing her memoir in 2018. “This time, I was proactive in being my own advocate. The material wasn’t as inherently dark as my memoir, which was about my mother’s life and death, so with this book I want to enjoy it and celebrate because that’s the stuff that carries you when you’re in the weeds with the next thing. With JELL-O Girls, I wanted to hide.” Aesthetica has in turn given her the confidence to step into the spotlight. From Vanity Fair to The New York Review of Books and from The Cut to The Observer, the book’s reception has been overwhelmingly positive, signalling the arrival of an author ready to claim her spot on the pantheon of American letters. That she had an injector offer Botox at her launch party shows not only her hyperawareness of PR stunts, but also that she’s happy to play the game and add a performance element to her public persona. Her appearance on Interview Magazine alongside Tea Hacic-Vlahovic is an indication that literary celebrity is on its way back in, while her spot on Forever Magazine’s inaugural 30 Pushing 30 list has given her the stamp of approval from the flourishing New York scene.

All this, she suggests when we speak, is inevitable work you undertake as an author, though her intentions lie outside the scope of publicity. “I think my role is to get into these questions that I can’t say I have the answers to, but have taken on the questioning regardless, and sometimes real lived pain, and made something out of it. Maybe other people can look at it and resonate with it, or hate it. They might agree or disagree, but that’s all I want people to do, to think.”

Reading this novel, I thought of a particular point in my life, when much like the protagonist I self-objectified in the hope of getting something and an interest in wrestling turned into a performance of self that verged on the pornographic. That it played out in private is a big difference. Rowbottom’s protagonist exists in the vacuum of online degradation, at the collision of the beauty industry and the social media complexes, meaning the image of herself she creates becomes larger than she is and consumes her. The futuristic procedure the author invented then becomes the ultimate reset button — a way to return to an authentic sense of self, a rebirth into the real person untouched by the damage brought on by the image. I see stardom, what I chose, what became of me, and everything I missed, Anna says in the novel. Her regret feels drawn from something real, but the author’s power lies in observation. She has tapped into the desire that a lot of us experienced throughout the lockdowns of the last three years to rebuild or un-build our lives in search of the one we feel we missed out on or were derailed from. Rowbottom is resolute in this regard. “The best thing for me,” she says, “is to make good art and feel fulfilled in a culture that’s built to brainwash.” Aesthetica has become her first step towards realising that ambition — for herself and her readers.

He believes he hasn’t found “bohemia” but at the risk of reducing this newsletter to a Twitter format rambling, perhaps bohemia (his devotion to searching for visionary artists and artistic freedom and the psychedelic trip they can take him on, to the precipice of the abyss where the entirety of his experience and perception can be dissolved into nothingness) was the journey and the memories of that journey he made along the way.

“Where are all the weirdos? I do believe culture was more interesting when it was made by weirdos, when artists and writers were ostracized by society, rather than celebrated, rather than seen as having an important role in upholding its standards and norms.”

The reason I’ve remained hooked on Kissick’s column (and BARF fangirled when he turned up to one of my Venice events in April) is because I perceived early on he was asking the sort of questions I was looking answers for too and was, like me, in search of the kinds of people that seemed to no longer exist. In June, when I met Rob Doyle, it felt like whatever journey I had created for myself entered a new dimension (first glimpsed when I first read Threshold and Autobibliography, then experienced at super speed upon meeting him). I’m still working through it all half a year later.

Kissick’s Spike swan song is a reliving of the last six years, a ride from the “grand narratives collapse in 2016 to what he perceives is “the end of performative outrage as the major driving of culture.” He’s optimistic about the new future, looking ahead past his spiral at the possibilities of joy, beauty, and a “sense of renewal of purpose.”

Also hitting the six year mark, Ana Kinsella’s London Review of Looks has come to an end as its author will soon leave London for good. In her final missive, she rewinds the clock to her arrival in London in the early days of the 2010s and reflects on her decade+ tenure in the capital, where she attained what Proust referred to as having new eyes: “instead of the comfort of the familiar, I keep finding newness,” she writes. In a recent piece for Dirt, she agreed with Diana Vreeland that “the eye has to travel.” I can only hope wherever hers land once she relocates to Ireland, she’ll share her new vision with the rest of us.

The year hasn’t ended on the brightest note for writing and writers. Bookforum announced its demise, following the acquisition of sister publication Artforum by Penske Media Corporation, a conglomerate which has over the years made strategic acquisitions in the arts space, including ARTnews and Art in America. Bookforum’s closure is the latest example of the precarity of literary journalism in the age of consolidation. Only days before, Astra Magazine, not yet a yearlong operation, also bit the dust (axing its third issue in the process), a business decision from Thinkingdom Media Group, another media conglomerate that set up the magazine as a “prestige vehicle” for Astra Publishing House, the conglomerate’s US operation. The ever-shrinking literary landscape is nonetheless experiencing somewhat of a rebirth. As the NYT noted, a crop of new indie outfits have recently sprung up, including The Drift and Forever Magazine. These nimbler enterprises couldn’t have arrived at a better time, with Berfrois also pulling the plug, following in the footsteps of its sister publication Queen Mob’s, which shuttered earlier in the year.

Where will the writers that were given room to grow through these publications turn to now?

Patrick Nathan sees this as only half a question. In his newsletter, he sees literature — from book publishing to newspapers and magazines — as facing an existential threat, as part of which it is being dismantled as a public art form, strangled as an aspiration. “The shuttering of one magazine after another,” he says, “as well as the decline in editorial expertise, curiosity, and patience in those that have remained, has all but destroyed the forum in which literature’s professional audience once existed.” The decline of literary criticism has created a vicious cycle of dumbing down literary culture — dumb publications create dumb audiences who demand dumb stuff to read and therefore guarantee the creation and continuation of a dumb culture.

I see these endings collectively marking (inevitably) the beginning of something new — new things to look forward to from the various writers and editors who have called the aforementioned projects quits in addition to new voices entering the frame. One such example is Adam Coleman (another Irish man, charmed I’m sure), a contributor to Dublin Review of Books, who I can only describe as a philosopher-in-training, deploying missives through his eponymous Substack (adamcoleman.substack.com). My entry point into his project, titled Disjecta Membra, was a love letter to PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, after which I devoured the rest of his back catalogue. The fav, to date, is a recent three part essay (of “a book that hasn’t worked out”), covering the Irish literary landscape from Finnegan’s Wake to Sally Rooney, continental philosophers (I’m still thinking through his Kierkegaard musings), neoliberalism and capitalism and their effects on the Irish state.

The Drunken Canal announced the encore to its two-year reign as the supreme DIY project, but the city’s art and art adjacent milieu is likely to regroup around Downtown Critic, a “semi-anonymous, non-topical newspaper” also occupied with the LES. I forgot how I came across it in late December, but my introduction to it was an anonymised text the author of which takes a self-reflective approach to considering two works on show at a gallery. “Did I waste the prime of my youth?” he asks, reviewing the present state of his sex life — or rather the disappearance of whatever sex life he had at one point in the past — before continuing, “is this why I still fall for straight men?”

Another fella asking big questions is Blake Smith. “‘Do I have to think about this shit to have a career?” he asks in his latest, remembering a time not so long ago when he found himself perplexed by other writers’ intricate knowledge of the “literary production” complex [he’s not wrong, whoever he’s referring to comes across more as a PR than a writer, perhaps the line between the two is increasingly blurring]. “I have no idea what’s going on, who anyone is,” he says. He’s the sort of critic who may LOVE an essay, a book, or any kind of writing for that matter, but will still find something in it to take a stab at; that is my fav kind of critic. In this piece, he turns his attention to the work of Ann Manov contrasting her triumph for The Paris Review and an earlier work on Joan Didion for Unherd. He thinks highly of the former but not so much of the latter; the newsletter then is a negotiation of what that means:

“Only in retrospect was there a problem of how to unite these different impressions, or doubts about the validity of my judgments in both cases (that the Didion piece was crap and its author a glib scribbler; that the fur piece was great and its author an interesting new talent).”

Is it possible to be utterly objective? To not be influenced by any other factors other than what’s on the page, divorced from anything you may have previously heard or read about the author? Smith thinks so and sees that as the work of becoming a true reader: “Tear down the rood screen of everything I’ve already heard about the author, and encounter each essay for the first time.”

Finally, central to this idea of something new is (even if he has been writing for a while) the incendiary Barry Pierce, who recently returned to Dazed for round two of his twitter-melting essay on the decline of young male novelists in the UK. “We need more fun and frivolous books from young men,” he writes in his latest. The few that succeed in breaking through the publishing industrial complex are reduced to publishing idpol garbage around concepts of masculinity and identity that have infected the book market for far too long. “Every book by young men now must be a portrait of modern masculinity,” Pierce continues, signifying that no real progress has been attained since the original missive. Still, in an uncharacteristically hopeful note, he sees 2023 as a possible turning point. 

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The New York Times declared Marseille the new artistic haven, so you know it is in irreversible decline already (locals partly credit its appeal to its Greek past, so I guess I can’t be all that mad about it). Always one step ahead of the mainstream, Ed Luker visited the city where “everyone smokes cigarettes, all the time” to work on a novel, which turned out to be elusive. The trip inspired his signature ethereal style, lyrical thoughts on disconnecting from routines, breaking habits and enjoying the freedom of…well, being free to do nothing. Luker has something of the chanteuse in him. Reading his work, I involuntarily imagine Lana Del Rey narrating. “The work of disentangling takes a period of concentration and rest,” he said of his time out of London, the latest of his musings that seems straight out of Lana’s famous/infamous monologue for Ride.

READ IT BEFORE THE SCREEN ADAPTATION DROPS: “After 13 hours unpacking art and storing crates I meet up with a writer around 11pm who drives me to Nathan’s, a kind of Hell’s Kitchen-lite gay bar in Miami Beach…We walk with our drinks to the beach…When we reach a shack they strip and sprint into the ocean. I follow.” Paul McAdory got down and Dirt-y (soz) at Art Basel (Miami, not Basel Basel).

Fitzcarraldo published its 100th book. Annie Ernaux, one of its principal authors, won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, meaning the prevalence of romanticising one’s own life might be entering its latest era of decline. Sex Inevitably Sells: The Drift published a blockbuster essay on Ernaux’s Getting Lost and knock-off contemporary novels portraying millennial desire by Noor Qasim. Christian Lorentzen reminisced about his stint at The London Review of Books and promised an upsurge of writing in his newsletter. Rachel Connolly has had enough of pronouncements of emotional intensity. Patrick Sproull is flat out bored of Hollywood’s obsession with ‘eat the rich’ flicks.

“I’ve always tried to create a body of work, where things can…piss on each other.”

In his interview on Forever Magazine, Scott McClanahan revealed he’s working on two books, poetically coinciding with the end of Sarah, The Berliner Ensemble’s London production of his most famous book. I caught the one-man play on closing night, exiting transfixed at the directness of the performance (although no actor will ever be as hot as Scott, soz).

Best of the Month that was? https://usreview.blog/2022/10/23/on-the-calvin-klein-billboard-off-broadway-lafayette-st/ 

Mirroring Bailey Slater’s thoughts on how celebrity has ushered in the death of fashion that I wrote about in this newsletter’s previous missive, FF. Felix (no idea who this person is, please enlighten me if you know) sees the present state of Calvin Klein ad campaigns, and particularly the giant billboards in downtown New York, as void of sex, a total and utter elimination of sexuality and “a castration of the actual act of sex,” but “just a celebration of the idea of celebrity itself.” Felix paints a picture of a New York that has been extinguished, the New York of VFILES and GHE20G0TH1K, of Elias Tezapsidis and his brilliant modern epic [HARDCORE OSCAR], paying tribute to the brand’s “porn star casting couch inspired” ad campaign and its progenitor Glenn O’Brien. 

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The Chad Molly Bloom vs The Virgin Stephen Dedalus

Sally Rooney considers Ulysses feminist literature in The Paris Review, peering into the novel’s sexual culture: “With a lover, or with her husband, or with her recollections and fantasies of other men, Molly is always in bed with someone; just as Stephen, no matter much time he spends in brothels, never is.” That is the author’s own understanding of Joyce, which she believes cannot be taken as objective truth, inviting everyone to produce their response to what she perceives as the book that started the “death of the novel” debacle.

The essay’s only faux pas, if it has one, is that Rooney was far too measured when she referenced Virginia Woolf instead of calling her out for being the elitist, classist, hibernophobic bitch troll she was.

Rooney’s approach, that of personal interpretation, is one I imagine Patrick Nathan to be in support of. In Connectivity Error, he uses the now done-to-death ranking of cultural artefacts and/or moments as a jumping off point to critique the perceived inaccessibility of art, a byproduct of social media that he considers as intrinsically malevolent. Focusing on film, Nathan puts the ever-enlarging Disney on blast for creating vapid filler that passes for art and as a consequence creating an audience allergic to interpretation, a 

shockingly passive, distressingly unengaged audience—an audience that no longer wonders, that no longer thinks, but merely reacts

that can only ever have one conclusion: “to extinguish the imagination itself” and see the audience “disinvited from their own inner lives.” This is hardly a new topic for Nathan. Image Control, his first work of non-fiction and second overall, occupied similar terrain. A week prior to this missive, he noted that anyone you love can be replaced by the vacancy of “entertainment values.” Where Rooney sees this interpretation as particularly important for writers, Nathan finds it imperative for audiences.

A difficult film is a sensitive film: it asks you about yourself and invites you to ask questions of your own. It wants you to walk away changed, and if you’re lucky, you will. There’s nothing elitist in this at all. There’s nothing inaccessible either. There’s no bar, no gate, no password, just as there’s nothing physically stopping a person who reads tweets to sit down and read Ulysses. A difficult film or book wants to give you something; a connective product wants to use you as walking ad space. Tell me which sounds more elitist, more inaccessible.

Over the last two months, I’ve been reading and thinking about Paris, ballet, how hot Pierre Clementi was (as Marcel and Benjamin in Belle de Jour and The Diary of an Innocent Boy respectively), how hot Pascal Greggory is, diaries and Anais Nin (shock); I’ve been thinking about immortality, exemplified by a peculiar play by Czech writer Karel Capek that I came across by accident called The Makropoulos Secret; and I’ve been thinking about something Dan Fox wrote recently on the legacy or the artistic scenes of Dublin and New York. “Someone always gets more credit than they deserve, someone else is always unjustly forgotten.” 

As the end of 2022 marks the conclusion of so much and the opening of so many possibilities, I wonder what we’ll keep in our minds as we leap ahead and what will fade into oblivion.

In this newsletter’s beginnings, I was obsessed with this idea that post-lockdown society would go off the rails in a hedonistic blowout never seen before (I can’t call it till 2024). Are young people then drawn to this book only for its aesthetics (elitist schools, etc.) or are they magnetised by the darker impulses the characters display? Are we at the end of a dark romanticism (if, for nothing else, reading habits)? Barry Pierce, quoted in Lanigan’s essay, isn’t impressed by the younger generations’ fascination regardless of what it might signify: “There are people out there reading The Secret History and thinking those kids are models for how they should dress and act and what they should read… when those kids are deranged! They should all be shot!”

Reissues and reevaluations abound in publishing, so the new attention to Tartt’s debut isn’t surprising. I expect more books from the 90s to receive the audience hype treatment (my money for 2023 is on Girl, Interrupted).

Speaking of old writers you should be sinking your teeth in, Terry Nguyen introduced me to the work of Katherine Dunn through the posthumous publication of The Resident Poet, a short story about the impermanence of agency: “I could never be a professional whore. Not for long. It would be such hard work.” Obvs I’m obsessed, much like the New Yorker forever searching for tutor-pupil f***fests (will anyone ever top Alissa Nutting? Why won’t anyone else dare tread that ground?). Part of it is that at 32 I’ll never experience that particular brand of fucked up dynamic because I’m unlikely to ever be a student again. Perhaps I’ll return to Blok for boxing with Declan to approximate the push and pull of going too far and not far enough with someone who’s off limits and for whom you are in turn untouchable (well…ish. Dunn’s story doesn’t disintegrate into the bullshit moralising having its heyday at the mo, so don’t go hating on me either).

Dunn’s Toad has skyrocketed to No 1 on my list similar only to Cookie’s collected writing in the summer (2022 has been a bust for new books, soz). Dirt’s principal book pusher also got me to look into Constance DeJong. Her debut, Modern Love, is an autofiction project about identity and transformation. Guess I’ll give anything described as an orgy a shot.

From books to music, it’s been a month of anniversaries, with Xtina and Stripped, her record of reinvention, marking its 20th birthday. W Magazine published an oral history on the album, interviewing a variety of contributors who brought it to life. Baller move on Aguilera’s part to not participate. She eventually lifted her silence on Rolling Stone but somehow skipped Cruz, Soar and Get Mine, Get Yours, which together with Dirrty form the album’s wildest sequence.

In his public diary, Matthew Gasda says that “no single experience is transformative” but listening to Stripped for the first time certainly was, eclipsed twelve years later by Night Time, My Time and Ultraviolence. Or was it the collective experiences tied in my memory to that album that I have come to consider as a transformation?

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Elizabeth Wurtzel’s papers and unpublished manuscripts remain without a home three years after her death, according to New York Magazine. Institutions US-wide may finally be kicked out of inaction following Choire Sicha’s missive on the online auction of the late author’s personal belongings. It isn’t surprising that the entire affair was in bad taste. Reading about it after the fact isn’t a joyride either, the people behind it looking to pull the author to pieces and auction her off for parts.

Is it possible to not romanticise Wurtzel (she “used scent…to aggressive assert her presence”)? How quickly can that dissolve into animosity? The piece takes an aggressive turn in its second half (almost an afterschool special at one point, warning against Wurtzel’s excesses), describing the writer as “putting on all the best disasters.” (In fairness, Wurtzel would have, in all probability, loved that line).

Thomas Chatterton Williams profiled Rachel Cusk, who somehow manages to come across both out of touch and at the precipice of an artistic breakthrough (you too can have one once you’ve published fifteen books which, it turns out, is how much it costs to move to Paris and buy an apartment in Le Marais). “To change artistically,” she says, “does require some breaking down of your personality and breaking down deep sediments of your identity.” She expresses disillusionment with British literary culture, the banality of events she’s had to attend to promote her books. Uprooting to France, where writers still possess cultural capital, then makes sense regardless of political fallouts.

Paul Mescal also got the profile treatment by the NYT, his PR doing it like no one else in the game. Pegged to his latest flick Aftersun, the profile offers almost no insight into the actor beyond some mere facts: he’s prioritising films by people he admires; he’s left London; he’s been to therapy. The newspaper of record seems to believe Mescal wasn’t in on it with the rugby-inspired photos shot at Clapton that melted the internet during the first lockdown, coinciding with his breakout role in Normal People. He felt “objectified” by the level and intensity of attention he received, he tells the NYT.

The Fence is bonkers for books. Isabelle Huppert’s going horror mode this spring with Dario Argento. Roisin Kiberd is writing fiction. Patrick Nathan has signed with Counterpoint Press for his sophomore novel The Future was Color, billed as a blend of Gods and Monsters and Eve Babitz: a gay Hungarian immigrant, sex scenes set in corners of working-class New York, behind the scenes shots of the Hollywood studio system. He’s now working (or rather reworking) his third (and feels “a little more in control.”).

The Standard hosted a poppers party, as reported on The Face. Corporate coopting and flattening of subcultures and cultural artefacts is unsurprising, but the fact that everyone’s willing to go along for the joyless ride still is. Breath it in, but don’t worry about the part that poppers were made for, which is fucking. Everything is an experience, but one that exists to scandalise milquetoast bored executives looking for something transgressive albeit in the safety and security of a curated event (in this instance by Bompas & Parr with proceeds going to Tom of Finland). If magazines like The Face were to be taken as an example, there seems to be no Dionysian energy circulating in London at all, everything remains almost Puritan clean.

Digging through the Vanity Fair Archives, I came across an essay published over a century ago, in which British poet Arthur Symons compared and contrasted the experience of opium and hashish. Conversely, In our so-called “privileged era”, The Face published a criticism-free event promo “to find out what the fuss was about.” Obviously the event was a dull affair, but it’s disappointing that no one even thought of a novel way of writing about the product at hand (is it really worth shelling out £100 for poppers? Do they feel different from your garden variety available for much less? Should The Standard splash out on a bottle per room? Is The Standard breathing new life into the sterilised environment of Kings Cross? STANDARD GANG BANG: I TRIED THE NEW POPPERS AND THE MOST ACROBATIC POSITIONS AND YOU SHOULD TOO). We’ve fallen far not only from Symons’ essay but from Belle de Jour’s Secret Diary and Cat Marnell snorting bath salts at work.

WORST WORDS OF THE YEAR?

“I see people on the Interview Instagram writing “This is fashion?” It’s like, fuck yeah, this is fucking fashion. What the fuck did you think was fashion? This is great. It’s incredible. Ugh, it’s so good.”

Mel Ottenberg “got into the mud at Balenciaga,” turning possibly the worst writing of 2022, surface-deep personal babbling that passes for reporting. “It’s just tea,” he writes on Demna’s SS23 show, stringing together a series of loosely connected sentences that resemble tweets and “Oh My Gods” to conclude with nothing but “it’s just what’s up.”

What’s frustrating is that Ottenberg analysed the show and identified its underpinning inspirations (McCarthy’s The Road, Fight Club, the work of Ryan Trecartin) but, much like a lot of the writing circulating now, tossed them around without building a coherent critique; everything is an experience but the experience is flat af, the conversation boring and sexless.

I don’t know what anyone who keeps insisting fashion reporting is having its moment is reading…the bar couldn’t be lower.

One exception is Bailey Slater, Editor in Chief of the fabulously named Fag Mag, who recently argued that it’s time for celebrities to be booted out of fashion on Hunger. Slater connects the induction of celebrities into fashion and the flattening impact of social media, which in combination have led to a disappearance of risk and experimentation.

In The Art of Dying, which I’ve returned to frequently over the last three years, Peter Schjeldahl says he’s never kept a diary or a journal “because I get spooked by addressing no one. When I write, it’s to connect.” An unlikely fav for me then. Gasda, in his diary again, says that “the only real wisdom I’ve ever gained has come through the exercising of my own stupidity…over and over,” and that lost time “is also time wasted, lost track of.” This strikes me as reflecting my own worst qualities. Wasting time on a diary encouraging me to record the totality of my stupidity.

Schjeldahl again: “A gay friend I approached would have nothing to do with me in that way. Well! I hooked up with a bisexual friend, but too much to drink made whatever happened a blur. So I seduced a straight friend. It was interesting. Nice, but obvious.” More time wasted, more stupidity, but isn’t this what leads to clarity? Perhaps I should take a leaf out of Cusk’s work: “One needs to have a very, very good reason for imposing ones writings and thoughts on the world…Pretty much everyone should shut up.”

FLESH, WITH TORRENTS OF BLOOD

Becca Schuh reviewed the theatre adaption of A Little Life for Dirt, finding it even more miserable than the book, robbed of the latter’s intimacy and “how friendship can, if not save a life, make it bearable and offer innumerable joys.” Ivo Van Hove’s four hour long attempt is, to Schuh, pure violence for entertainment, reducing the narrative to trauma porn, so much so that blood should receive separate billing if this review is anything to go by (I recently booked tickets to the West End version so I’ll be revisiting this in 2023).

Violence and death as entertainment have been recurring themes this month. In Numb at the Lodge, Sam Kriss turned the only interesting review of Blonde (they felt psychotic, similar to the reception of Tarantino’s treatment of Sharon Tate in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood). The crux of his argument is that the vast majority of critics built their takedowns on false premises. The film isn’t about Norman Jeane Baker but Marilyn Monroe. “There is only the character,” he says.

Kriss considers Monroe’s realm, the entertainment industry, as a fundamental (maybe even foundational) part of her nation. “The American empire entertains,” he writes, fashioned on the Roman model to keep vast populations controlled and neutralised. Everything is a performance put on for the population’s amusement. American entertainment stems from the camera and the screen, which double as weapons capable of killing the human beings they depict and capture and replacing them with someone else - an image, a mere reflection of the real person. Much like the entertainment in Rome died for audiences’ amusement, Marilyn was vanquished on Hollywood’s altar to entertain. “America is where the beautiful women die.” His review reminded me of something Philippa Snow wrote about the book the film is based on years ago: “This is the beauty of famous women — they are all too easily consumed.” Kriss is in agreement. Norma Jeane Baker was consumed by the camera, by the very image of herself, Marilyn Monroe. He considers this to be the great American epic.

If this was the price of fame reserved for the select few back in the day, Kriss is suggesting that now, through social media, we all partake in the grotesque spectacle. We all create images of ourselves “out of your own corpse” for an audience that will inevitably become larger, realer than we are and will consume us (Jeremy Fragrance is just one example).

Snow, as always, is prescient. She ends the above-mentioned review by admitting that “only once the poor, doomed girl had died did I feel myself able to put down the novel and live.”

Perhaps that’s how we should consider works of this calibre, such as A Little Life and Blonde, as glitches in the relentless entertainment machine that force us out of our amusement, propelling us to go out and live, forget the images we’re building or have built, reject their reflections and just live.

If smoking in film made breath more expressive, what has been lost in literature? Should writers just spark up?

Holly Connolly, quoted in Pierce’s piece, suggests the thrones of Didion and Babitz will remain empty until writers reclaim a part in the wider artistic milieu, become a part of communities beyond the written word and the reign of the “recluse” out of touch writer is over. In the same missive, Kaitlin Philipps holds the book world’s puritanism responsible. Writers in our (online) generation, if her n+1 days are any indication, don’t have the freedom afforded to their predecessors. In his public diary, playwright Matthew Gasda wrote something that rings true here: “So much morality functions to isolate us…Thus a sleepy, automated, de-eroticized world invents a series of judgements for anything or anyone that’s too alive, too spontaneous or messy.” So should a writer or socialite that fit the chic bill appear, how likely are they to succeed in this culture of moral bashing and self-righteousness, as Philipps suggested?

(Everything Irish is chic to me.)

NYU announced they’ll be desecrating Lana Del Rey’s vision.

Publicity around Sky Ferreira’s return to music intensified this month (four months after her return gig in London’s Southbank Centre), hinting that Masochism isn’t that far away now. From Dazed to Evening Standard, everyone seems obsessed with pointing out the gap in between her debut and sophomore records. Almost a decade in the making, almost coinciding with her 30th birthday, Masochism has come to signify much more than a record in the collective imagination. Rob Doyle and Cat Marnell both turned 40 this month, which to me means a new era in their work, so I guess I’m just as much a part of the problem? To quote that Vanity Fair Didion/Babitz writer, if intense fascination with someone is love, then I guess I love them both.

Geoff Dyer dispelled rumours of leaving the lit biz on Tank. Mirroring Ferreira’s devotion to Masochism, the ex-Londoner says he sustained his drive to write by virtue of feeling “finished as a writer” for most of his time as a published author together with his impulse to quit. Quizzed by Matthew Janney, Dyer talks at length about his latest, The Last Days of Roger Federer, how over the years he outgrew the excess lyricism of his earliest work and how he can’t hold his drink having traded in London for California. Next, he’s working on “an extended version of the legend of the fundamentally uninteresting period of my life up to when I was about 18,” where among else he’ll spill on the places he had sex.

Best of the Month that was: Jesse Ball tells Sebastian Castillo just how fast he is (at writing books, calm down!) and bares all about Autoportrait for Full Stop.

Owen Vince thinks “it’s the season for watching films” as if this isn’t his default mode. Christian Lorentzen teased the possibility of a Dimes Square sequel. Leo Robson joined Substack with Taproot. Lauren Lauterhahn returned fresh off doing The Artists Way again after a yearlong absence.  TOLKA Journal is returning with its fourth issue on 12 November featuring work from Colin Barrett and Eimear McBride. Ed Luker's ready to dress like Vincent Cassell again (that is, he's ready to layer up for autumn, or in his words, falling in love with fits again). If you missed his performance at beasy, you can read his piece on below deck.

I’m taking over beasy again next week, this time terrorising and causing chaos with Chloe Ashby, Barry Pierce, Huda Awan and Oliver Zarandi. Doors open at 7 pm on 27 October.

READ IT BEFORE THE SCREEN ADAPTATION DROPS: “As I blow him I can tell there are two faces looking through the bars of the dick-height window between our cabin and theirs. I like an audience…Outside a hundred cadets wait, bound to the gun carriage, their muscles ready to haul the state, crown, sceptre, orb and all to the royal vault. I’m pinned against the wall of the cubicle and his hands push my triceps to the wall. His hands grip them, I tense them, he runs his fingers along my shoulders and cups my face gently to kiss me.” Huw Lemmey delivers contenders for sex scenes of the year mourning the passing of a monarch by sucking and fucking at a local sauna.

Quinn Roberts landed his first cover with Exhibition Magazine.

Is Dirt book pilled?

Everyone’s favourite newsletter/more than a newsletter recruited Alana May Johnson to pair books with perfumes (dying to know what book(s) she’d associate with Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male, my go-to for life).

In Booksmart, Terry Nguyễn considers the transformation of authors into influencers and (god have mercy) influencers into authors. Books, in the age of the influencer, have become aesthetic objects, mere accessories to round off the image influencers want to project to the rest of the world. 

Nguyễn is insightful but I needed to know more so I slid in her DMs. What I mainly wanted to find out was if, in her view, people still look for meaning in books. If a book as an object can convey a desired meaning for the consumer, do they ever need to be readers at all? “Obviously not,” she replied. “There’s this running joke about people who read the Wikipedia summary instead of the actual book, so this tendency is not exclusive to influencers.” The influencer class then is an expression and byproduct of a wider cultural malaise rather than the cause. “I’m suspicious of everyone — myself, even,” Nguyễn said. “I have to actively expose myself to books that don’t “align” with my interests and assumed identity.” To her, it isn’t isolated to the reader either. “Authors aren’t immune from these categorizations, now that books are increasingly marketed along moral, cultural, and ideological lines.”

The publishing industrial complex has created a reality for authors, where writing a book is just part of the struggle. Then comes the call for authors to willingly or unwillingly engage in a “performance of intellect” to boost the book’s promotional campaign, partaking in producing content that can surface the book and establish it in consumers’ minds in well defined categories. Terminally offline writers do not exactly fare all that better, still reduced to signifiers publicity teams ascribe to them (look no further than Ottessa Moshfegh, who two books down the line, is still heralded as queen of the sad girls for My Year of Rest and Relaxation [I’d argue the narrator is more of a narcissist than sad, but that’s a different story]).

It would be easy to write this off as a trend, but the impact that book as aesthetic signifier has had on the industry already, makes it more of a permanent feature. Penguin Random House will be capitalising on the action through a partnership with TikTok on a “discovery feature” because as Christian Lorentzen pointed out everything now comes down to recommendation and passive consumption. Nguyễn had a lot to say on the topic. “I see the PRH partnership coinciding with this greater media trend towards books coverage. The obvious goal is to get more people to care about books and ideally buy them; whether they actually read is irrelevant.” 

Books, then, have been reduced to objects, mere products to be purchased. No wonder influencers want in on the action, a book seen as the pinnacle of their power (though I suspect should they be successful in saturating the market, they’ll move on to film next). Will influencers supplant authors? “Influencer book deals aim to tap into a very specific audience, but followers don’t always translate to sales,” Nguyễn said. “The PRH BookTok strategy, though, depends on an ecosystem of consistent (and perhaps uncritical) readers, who are seeking out titles that resemble books they’ve previously read or that they can relate to. That might be more successful in “creating” readers, so long as they cater to specific tastes.”

The increased attention on “books coverage” is likely to demand even more out of authors, following in the footsteps of other mediums. “I’d be interested to see whether publishing houses will follow what some record labels have done and ask writers to get on TikTok to drum up interest in their book,” Nguyễn said. She never responded to my question on how authors can fight back against these possible demands because in my work overload state of mind I forgot to ask her.

And finally, if you ever needed proof that Venice is the superior film festival…

(Swear down I was in London.)

For those of you in London or London-bound on September 28, come down to beasy on Greek Street to see Holly Connolly, Ed Luker, Sofia Paulikovics and Jago Rackham be subjected to my total chaos recreate Three Month Fever live.

Manhattan’s elite can have a little ultraviolence, as a treat

Philippa Snow got down and Dirt-y and salvaged a 00’s cultural relic from obscurity. In Blair Waldorf, Patrick Bateman, she reviews Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer, the gory reimagining of the teen pop culture phenomenon, in which warring high school queen bees Serena and Blair are redrawn from overambitious, ruthless brats to full blown murderers. Is it too hard to picture Blair choking one of her endless adversaries with their own necklace in a moment of rage? Or any of the teen characters populating the series for that matter taking their obsession with social capital to savage extremes never entertained before? If Penn Badgley’s character in You is the inevitable meta-progression of his role in Gossip Girl, it stands that the belligerent teens of the series ready to enact social takedowns against their ilk wouldn’t be that far off from opting for a more permanent end to their perceived competition. Snow notes that teens giving into their bloodlust is nothing new in fiction, with Clockwork Orange a standout. The prose, she says, hasn’t been altered all that much. Gossip Girl’s prolific references to fashion now just come with a hefty dose of blood. In this instalment, the series sheds its young adult ambience, reading like an Expat Press novel “à la the late, great Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich’s Ruthless Little Things.” An apt comparison to say the least, Aldrich being underground literature’s queen bee.

READ IT BEFORE THE SCREEN ADAPTATION DROPS: “In the deepest reaches of a closet was a stack of boxes packed by Eve’s mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside: journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, and letters. No, inside a lost world.” Joan Didion as “predator who passes herself off as prey,” Eve Babitz a symbol of overindulgence, there to “inspire, inspire being code for fuck.”

The Guardian reports on a new app that aims to connect strangers who like the same books to “deliver real value to communities…in geographical proximity.” That the term “community” is thrown around with no inherent meaning is nothing new. References to community now mostly signify a fortification against any and all who stray even faintly from a particular belief. Circle jerks sans orgasms.

The relentless obsession with total safety and security and complete erosion of uncertainty and ambivalence has become status quo in publishing, an industry poisoned by bourgeois morality. The average reader consumer then becomes a perfect vessel for tech virgins to play out their ambitions for control. What this app seeks to achieve is to flatten the possibilities born from books even further, creating digital bridges and strengthening ideological ghettos, guaranteeing disenchantment and alienation. Why waste time on someone else if your taste in books isn’t perfectly aligned? Why bother ever discovering anything beyond what you are familiar and comfortable with?

I love John Waters but his assertion that you shouldn’t fuck someone if they don’t own books is wrong. You can always gift them a book you feel they’ll enjoy. It may set them on a literary path all their own. Rachel Tashjian’s advice on adopting “a rabbit hole mentality, a passeggiata of the mind” springs to mind. Everyone, she recommends, should “stroll through ideas, culture, and art,” allowing one experience to lead to another in an unbreakable chain of discovery. Aren’t books - all art for that matter - an opportunity to widen your worldview and bring different people into your orbit? And mostly, isn’t it time to fight back against these passive-aggressive sexless losers and bring libido back in the world of books? Not everything you come across will be a masterpiece, but isn’t that part of a life committed to beauty? We could all stand to add an element of danger into our lives. In the words of Emily Reynolds (on her way to a date that seemed dodgy af), “what, you want every one of your experiences to be good? You need some bad ones too.”

The founder insists his is not a hook-up app, an apt observation as the sort of people it is bound to attract will collectively have the sexual appeal of a jellyfish. He comments that party-goers (in opposition to his intended audience, those with so-called “academic” interests) find it easier to socialise, conveniently overlooking that night club and bar closures everywhere continue to rob us of meeting points where true community can be built, even if fleetingly, accidentally revealing he has no connection to party kids (they tend to read a lot from my experience once the party is over). “Readers are hungry for discussion,” he says, but instead of giving people something real, he’s seeking to confine them even deeper into their screens. If people are truly hungry for connection over books, shouldn’t they be seeking to meet others in the real world? If you can’t access readings, you can always create one yourself. You’ll be surprised by how many people show up (and how many are down to fuck).

Ed Luker is done living in fear. He’s no longer holding himself back. In Exercises, he credits the pandemic with his rebirth as a writer. With the world at a standstill, he committed to it with a greater sense of purpose than ever before. Writing about writing is more often than not boring, but Luker makes interesting use of parentheses to disclose (foreshadow?) pieces of a life, at once confessional but unwilling to drill into the details of experiences or feelings past.

…which got me thinking, which books make good use of parentheses? Lolita obvs comes to mind with its striking “I am writing under observation,” which in turn reminds me I still haven’t found heart-shaped sunglasses like in Kubrick’s film, and whatever happened to the British lad who wrote Lolito? That was my nickname too in certain circles back in 2006 (07?) and at the time I was obsessed with reading everything Alberto Moravia had written but couldn’t find any of his books so I watched the Bertolucci film but no Bertolucci film will ever be better than The Dreamers. I remember the summer I watched it multiple times I was smoking Lucky Strikes and my signature outfit was a pair of dark blue denim cutoffs worn with multiple short-sleeved / sleeveless tops and honestly no one has done layers better than Andrew Mackenzie in 2019/2020.

But really, what novels make extensive use of parentheses?

Luker went Del Rey with his rumination on summer and strangers at the pond on below deck. “The men want to listen to the other men, and be near the men, swim close to the men,” he writes, noting the successive heatwaves have sent an almost erotic ripple through the city, witching everyone into a “crazed, sexual” frenzy to surrounding themselves with other people following the protracted periods of isolation of the last three years. Who knew you could write about bodies of water and about men without building up to a sex scene? Perhaps he left out the parentheses on this one.

The Guardian also got me thinking about music. If I am still captivated enough by music to seek out new songs, new experiences. Once you enter your 30s, goes the writer, you lose the part of yourself that gives music an ecstatic dimension in your life. It isn’t a lack of curiosity, that remains and is even strengthened elsewhere. But if the ease and accessibility of streaming is keeping people from opting for physical spaces where music can take on a communal experience, isn’t it in effect curtailing the process of discovery?

A hook up bar I visited in Madrid this spring led me to Karol G’s El Makinon. I spent the morning listening to her third studio album KG0516, going through the highest highs and lowest lows not dissimilar to the first time experiencing Motomami. I’m infatuated with Spanish again. Rosalia, Nathy Peluso, Guitarricadelafuente’s La Cantera. Quien encendio la luz and La Bien Querida’s Permanentemente lullabied me through stressful periods of work when the world felt shrunken small and suffocating.

The music I listen to now bares little resemblance to anything I’ve ever been in love with prior - Lana, Sky, Courtney Love (the list is too long). If Daniel Dylan Wray is to be taken for his word, does that mean my identity is still in flux? Is he onto something or just surrounded by people happy to trade in their “enthusiasm” in favour of comfort? Do people opt for nostalgia as a sedative against uncertainty? If it’s the culprit in the death of discovery, how do we safeguard against nostalgia and avoid a culture producing citizens confined to their screens, severed from experiences they would have made on a night out? Is it just time for new friends?

Best of the Month that was: Gwendoline Riley is an Ozon girl!

Rachel Connolly, famous for burning up the internet at the end of 2020 with a Hazlitt piece on gossip, profiled Gwendoline Riley for New York Magazine. The scene is Tate Modern, the reason the publication of the author’s latest two books in the US by NYRB. There’s talk of art, there’s wine, and Riley’s signature elusive guardedness. London hotties Houman Barekat and Luke Brown weigh in, with the latter framing Riley as having led the artist’s life in a way far more committed than he ever has. Connolly gives insight into Riley’s own thoughts on her books First Love and My Phantoms. Riley views the latter retrospectively as a reflection of how void life without writing would be. “Too frightening to think about,” she says. During their excursion to Southbank, Riley speaks about various works of art, including Lolita, the work of Jozef Czapski, the lover of Sergey Nabokov, Vladimir’s brother, and Francois Ozon’s 5x2 (which led this writer to wonder if she too has had sex to A Summer Dress!). She rarely publishes beyond her books, save for a few reviews on the TLS, but I’d pay good money to read her thoughts on Water Drops (also on Romain in Time to Leave).

August was an intense month for Christian Lorentzen readers, with the critic publishing no less than eight missives in his Diary.

Letter To A Young Critic found him in his Xtina F.U.S.S. era, taking a swipe at New York’s most determined social climber. “It’s a bad idea to be high when you’re attending a show you’re going to review,” he writes, before outlining vices he perceives the emerging critic to be guilty of: “gratuitous self-dramatization, moralizing, name-calling, unnecessary and distorting personal contact with your [sic] subjects, self-pity,” crimes that the fictional Carrie Bradshaw committed almost on every episode of Sex & The City. True, she was a sex columnist, not an art or literary critic, but could the show’s ubiquitousness, with its idealised projection of a writer’s life in New York, be responsible for the self-centredness of critics writing today?

In Skull Football, he says he’s been mainlining Patrick Melrose. I’ve been getting a daily dose of Barbara Payton and Cookie Mueller throughout August, but I realise I’m now self-dramatising, so I’ll defer to Ana Kinsella to express any thoughts on Edward St. Aubyn.

He once again grappled with the question of what a book review is and isn’t (in short, scrutiny.) It’s a question not dissimilar to the one Chris Hayes asks in Weak Thesis: “how much do critics really produce thinking around art anymore?” Lorentzen also notes the role of the publicist is to “serve the literary community by highlighting worthy writing that is obscure” to which I say I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE LITERARY COMMUNITY, I JUST WANT EVERYONE TO HAVE THE OPTION TO READ GOOD BOOKS but that’s a topic for another kind of piece). Lorentzen previously threw a grenade at editorial desks via a Harper’s missive, analysing the demise of critical assessment in the literary sphere and dumbing down of book pages in favour of vapid pieces that pass for book reviews, and, worse, a never-ending stream of content whose only function is that of recommendation, recreating literary journalism into “a form of higher publicity.” To confuse that as cultural capital on the role of publicists would be a mistake. No one benefits from this model (not long enough) and a culture that only deals with things superficially contributes to their demise. Central to this downfall of critical writing was social media, with literary journalism an outlier in the arts according to Lorentzen, having held out the longest (visual arts and film are jointly singled out as having sold out long ago, following the market’s logic).

Lorentzen calls the media’s bluff and refuses to back down on his stand against what he terms the “fantastic fictional character - the casual reader who disdains literary books.” The reading public, in other words, aren’t idiots, nor did they ever ask for things to be dumbed down to their level, to say, a place of “intellectual pointlessness”, precisely because it is not their level. Which raises the question, who are the true brainless idiots here? I’d put my money on whoever’s responsible for not renewing Lorentzen’s contract at New York magazine, and no, before anyone asks over email, I am not his PR. But seeing the continuous decimation of places where his talents (or those of Barry Piece and Tomiwa Owolade) can shine [and serve the literary community better than a publicist ever could] is disheartening. What will it take for this to be reversed?

Then there was High Kampf, his review of Knausgaard’s swan song to My Struggle, originally published in TLS. Reading it this time round I couldn’t stop thinking of a particular sentence: “Writers too dour, too weird, or too difficult never quite qualify for this sort of fame.” He offers Clarice Lispector as one of three examples. I’d add Anais Nin to this mix but once again this isn’t about me.

“I was often in this place where I just felt I was in a kind of freefall.” - Paul Dalla Rosa, Bad Artist Statement

The 8/22/22 entry in Matthew Gasda’s Writer’s Diary has been on my mind for weeks, possibly because it raises questions I don’t know how to respond to.

“Despite the proliferation of confessional writing online,” he writes, “I get very little sense of confession. People seem to be gossiping about themselves—which is something very different.” What are the most unhinged things from my past I can bring forth on this page? Would there ever be a point to it beyond shock value (or self-dramatisation, to return once again to Lorentzen)? Is confession something different than the deliberate unveiling of things that have happened previously undisclosed?

“When the present feels stale, as it does now to me, it is better to go backwards, because the value you’re getting is known, rather than speculate on the future, which is intangible and unknown.” I’ve been reading Barbara Payton’s I Am Not Ashamed and Cookie Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water In A Pool Painted Black [it took a trip to Clapton to buy the LAST copy at Pages of Hackney. Bookstores in central hadn’t received the portion for weeks, something about supply chain fuck ups.]. I haven’t read either of these before but I’m aware of how their respective stories play out. Am I nostalgic for a past not my known and if so what am I retreating in this nostalgia for exactly? What is it that I am not getting in the present?

“A useful thing for a critic to do is tell us that something is a waste of time.” I could tell you not to read Philippe Besson’s Lie with Me, an utter waste of a book (I’m not a critic, so don’t be mad at me Christian Lorentzen, here I am NOT recommending a book!), but I sort of want everyone to feel the agony of going through its dull narration and uninspired dialogue just to get as angry as I did for wasting time. You got to read some bad ones to truly appreciate the good ones.

The white vest got the trend treatment by The Face, attributing its reemergence to the long hot summer that has just ended. Hardly the most imaginative take on all time classic (referred to as “the ultimate thot top and a symbol of unfettered male sexuality” in a previous iteration of this Substack by Berlin it boy Max Grob), the piece references the usual suspects (James Hartford, Marlon Brando) in its attempt to trace the wifebeater’s historic links to working class men (led by what can only be described as a condescending notion of “sleazy, greased-up mechanics”). Straight men, the piece suggests, are coopting homoeroticism (and are aware of it) by virtue of wearing white vests, “reappropriating it through a queer lens.” Or maybe the summer was just too hot for sleeves.

An appearance of the maligned gear in a manuscript I still need to edit:

“He’d text me new fantasies or dreams he had about us and we’d agree we’d act them out once I could go to his again. Few weeks later here we were in our trademark three-striped shorts and wifebeaters, perspiring and feeling faint, in our black caps and beaten up converses, strolling around the city with a can of coke each, smoking cigarettes and having sex in random buildings, hoping no one would come down to the basement or hear the sounds of our bodies colliding.”

In a month of hits and misses, The Face published a guide for sex party rookies that had less sexual energy than a middle school sex ed class. The topic is corny, but what’s baffling is the absence of personal experience. Is it a sex column if there’s no immersion into the subject matter at hand? Always remember, the only sex parties worth attending are free.

Dazed Daniel went nuclear on fashion’s downward spiral, investigating, via Alexander McQueen and Highland Rape, whether fashion will ever have the power to break taboos again. The answer is a resounding no as far as Judith Watt, who authored a biography on the Scottish designer and is quoted extensively in Rodgers essay, is concerned. That is, not fashion produced by the industry. Whereas Highland Rape, the designer’s high concept 1996 collection, was an emblem of fashion’s artistic power, collections today have been reduced to nothing but sloganeering as plain as the white tees said slogan have been printed on. For Rodgers, this is tied to fashion’s now seemingly built-in inability for ambiguity. Whereas the likes of McQueen tapped into their own demons to create “works of art” that addressed some of the most difficult topics of conversation, today’s designers have been utterly neutralised. Nowhere else is this more strongly reflected than in fashion’s relationship with sex. Rodgers explains that although the ubiquitousness of nudity and sex is fun, there’s something missing, an element of subversiveness, of the perverse, a “libidinal charge.” He continues: “fashion’s relationship with sex has never been so plain.” Dull, uninspiring, expected. Look on further than brand collaborations (Ludovico de saint Sernin x PornHub; J.W. Anderson x Tom of Finland Foundation), production of sex toys by luxury houses and celebrities alike (the list is far too long) and you can see that “sex has converged with entertainment” yet another cultural flatlining, nuanced conversations through provocation long gone.  There’s an almost political stance at play here. Rodgers comes across Nagle-like in his thinking: “In a society where almost everything is permitted – particularly sexually,” he says, fashion has lost its shock-inducing factor, therefore the power to trade in taboos; or as Watt’s put it, “the purpose of taboo is shock-busting. It’s a talking point.” So by losing this, fashion has also lost all transgressive qualities, the power to challenge the status quo.

Alex Vadukul eulogised Manhattan’s last hourly rate hotel, briefly reminiscing on his first significant romance. Dan Fox has a brand new newsletter, titled Keep All Your Friends, where he has to date dealt with writer César Aira and film director María Álvarez. In the former, pegged to the publication of The Famous Magician, he explores one of the themes central to Aira’s trajectory - whether a life devoted to the creation of art is a life well-lived. In the latter, pegged to the film director’s documentary Les temps perdu opening, he explores the persistent fashion of “raw Prousting”, noting that “most of life is humdrum, unremarkable.” Liam Cagney interviewed three Irish DJs who frequent the Berlin scene for Holy Show’s fourth issue. [Holy Show apparently stands for “ridiculous sight” as in “don’t be making a holy show of yourself.” Example: When I went to Berlin, I made a holy show of myself. I did ketamine with Rob Doyle on an empty stomach and ended up throwing up three times.] Interspersed with these interviews are two clubbing diary entries by Cagney, narrating his nights out at ://about blank and Berghain. I spent the month of August obsessed with runways and paying attention (more so than usual) to people’s style, so Cagney’s choice of “flimsy” shorts and blue fishnet vest are the details that have stayed with me.

Air Mail should be banned from writing about Greece ever again. Someone needs to tell the New York Times that art collectors throwing  money on art that will gather dust in lofts or storage facilities isn’t “resurrecting the forgotten art of the AIDS era.” Just how forgotten are Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz and Paul Thek? Reading Nick Haramis’ ode to collector money, I couldn’t help but think of James Greig’s The future of gay sex essay on Dazed, where he examines how gay men of a certain socio-economic background have not only coalesced into the established order, but really only ever desired full assimilation to enjoy the rewards of capitalism to begin with: MONEY, POWER, IMAGE. This sentiment feels prescient in Haramis’ article: “The very act of buying this work [of gay artists, created during the height of the epidemic] is an expression of love,” he writes, reflecting the various collectors’ hunger for accumulation disguised as taste (or worse, solidarity). The artists referenced as the next generation similarly signify the market’s stamp of approval: Doron Langberg (whose work, full disclosure, I love) and Kyle Dunn are on the Art Basel/Frieze trail and have received glossy write-ups in everything from NYT to W Magazine. Lorentzen, as always, stands corrected.

Burberry aimed to bring a biker sensibility to the runway to horrific results. Raeburn aced Copenhagen Fashion Week (I tuned in from my PR job in London before the livestream went dead half way through). In his signature now move, Christopher Raeburn and co deconstructed parachutes and reconstructed them into an array of sweatpants, jackets, shorts, hoodies and protective vests. The colour palette feels counterintuitive to summer, whites, greys and blacks. The greys in particular gave off an almost metallic look mirroring the choice of venue - a basement with similarly muted colours, all concrete with pieces of fabric hanging in between columns. It’s easy to tie the austere feel of this collection to Raeburn’s background in the Royal Air Force, but there’s something inherently hot to his functional fits and materials.

Ditto for underwear if you ask me, in light of Louis Wise’s rave on boxer shorts. HTSI’s (more on this in a future column) resident hottie had an awakening at a Uniqlo in Angel (of the sartorial variety that is). “Inappropriate as it felt,” he writes, “I reached out to touch.” One wasn’t enough, he decided then and there, spellbound by the feel. He’s referring to boxers, specifically “loose, old-school boxers”, so get your mind out of the gutter. He explains that over the years he opted exclusively for the tightness of boxer briefs, briefs and trunks forgoing the looser, more comfortable fit of boxer shorts. With the dominance of skin tight jeans at a definite end, he sees things differently. Part of the issue stems from the fashion industry. There’s been an imbalanced preference on skin-tight underwear in advertising campaigns meaning boxer shorts lost their sexual appeal (Wise mentions the Levi’s laundrette ad starring Nick Kamen as an exception and I can’t think of another myself.). Briefs and trunks were his go-to due to his single status (get in before he’s snapped up lads!), he says, assuming the choice of underwear would influence his prospects of scoring. The skaters who have inexplicably signed up to this newsletter may find this bizarre. But Wise, to my knowledge, isn’t a skater. He considers this change as partly emblematic of his age as he approaches the big 4-0, although judging by how hot - aka hotter than ever before - Rob Doyle and Cat Marnell both look, having recently entered their 40s, I don’t see why he has to worry.

Since that Cat Marnell review, I have continued to be spellbound by Snow’s power of bringing together different books, or films, or art, or people. In 2019, for example, she wrote about early promise and adult disaster by pairing Lindsay Lohan and Elizabeth Wurtzel in The White Review. Two years later, she explored the dehumanisation of Britney Spears, comparing it to that of Bess McNeill in Breaking the Waves for LARB.

Philippa Snow is one of our most prolific writers. She’s also a hot mess. A self-proclaimed Lindsay Lohan scholar, she has spent thirteen years writing about virtually every aspect of culture. Dazed, AnOther, GARAGE and The Face are just some of the magazines she’s appear in to date (listing every single outlet she’s contributed her mind to would have taken a paragraph). Her i-D column, TMZ Theory, saw her take on cultural figures that most would have dismissed, giving them the most thoughtful interrogation, including Paris Hilton and Naomi Campbell. I had missed the memo on the supermodel’s brief(est) literary career and, more importantly, her side-splitting “I just did not have the time to sit down and write a book.” I still haven’t read Swan (I know, I should be booted off the island on charges of high treason), but that’s besides the point. I can get the copy if I’m ever feeling inclined, thanks to Snow. I’ve learned a lot through her. On The Baffler, for example, she introduced me to Ana Kavan. On Apollo to Cindy Sherman’s only film. A sometimes publisher, she brought forth Oliver Zarandi and his brilliant Soft Fruit in the Sun.

There are hundreds of versions of this introduction I could have written precisely because of how prolific she is and how easily she escapes categorisation, than say, someone with a Substack, who’s so transparent even his interview subjects can’t help but point out his fixation on a particular writer of Irish stock. Her film reviews appear in The New Statesman and ArtReview, while over at The New Republic she gets into TV. She’s the sort of writer you can count on to have impeccable taste but can always chat to about Gossip Girl (original only, soz), not least because of her incredible take on the series for The Point. The possibilities here were endless.

So, where did it all begin? Maybe it was with that Cat Marnell review. How To Murder Your Life is a funny book but also a violent book, two modes that Snow captures like no one else, especially given her terrain is criticism. “In cinema, the term for a foot fetishist,” she writes in an Artforum review of The Piano Teacher, “is Quentin Tarantino.” Violence is a constant thread throughout most of her writing. It might be violence on screen (she’s a Lynch fan), or the violence of life, or how even the love and attention of the public can go sour and ultimately turn into violence for those who suffer it, like Britney Spears or Anna Nicole Smith. It makes total sense then that she zeroed in on a particular kind of violence for her debut book.

The genesis of Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment is as obscure and impossible to define with certainty as Philippa herself (did she arrive in this world a fully-fledged super vixen ready to take readers on journeys they never imagined? Or was that a total accident, as she refers to the creation of art in the book?). A proposal for the book won her a spot on the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize shortlist in 2020, before being snapped up by Repeater Books. I would have read it regardless (she’s one of the VERY few writers I would follow anywhere, having not so much as missed a single article since Marnell), but my anticipation skyrocketed when I found out she’ll be including British lads hit each other with chair in it. Much like Marnell’s memoir, this video is one of my favourite artefacts from the previous decade. Plus I’m always gagging to get the Snow touch on things I like. I keep two notes on my iPhone baring her name, one for things she’s recently published that I haven’t read yet and one with ideas of topics I’d like her to cover. No. 1 on this list at the moment is an essay in her signature style on the lives and art of Anais Nin and Pam Anderson. Also on this list: “Philippa Snow + Tea Hacic-Vlahovic on coke, me in Margiela at Silencio” taken down on my last night in Paris. I’ve read so much of Snow’s work, I’ve even had access to an unpublished piece on Melancholia. If I ever make a career move into editing magazines, as has been recently suggested to me, let’s just say that Ms Snow will have even less free time. Her book has only been out for a few days but when I interviewed her, I found out her next project is already underway: a book of essays about the on and offscreen personas of famous women, including Pam Anderson, Marilyn More, Anna Nicole Smith, Pam Grier and Lindsay Lohan. LiLo is hardly a surprise when Snow is involved. The mere mention of her name however made me flash back to the aforementioned White Review essay: “not all great art is made on the back of others’ suffering,” Snow wrote. “For the artist, it is usually better to be diligent, self-sacrificing.” This line in and of itself could summarise Which As You Know Means Violence, a book looking at artists who are most definitely self-sacrificing and which dissects their methods of working with the most delicate attention.

In Which As You Know Means Violence, you suggest performance artists engage in self-annihilation as an expression of anger and dissatisfaction, but also out of restlessness. Is this attraction to pain and injury as performance immaturity? Where does the drive for self-inflicted violence as performance come from?

I think in writing the book, I certainly gravitated towards some of the more startling examples of bodily self-harm in art and in entertainment, and as such, there is often at least a faint suggestion of anger or perversion in the work I’m citing—it’s difficult to look at someone agreeing to be shot, as Chris Burden did, or agreeing to even risk being shot, as Marina Abramovic did, and not perceive some kind of very intense emotional drive at work, a desire to be seen doing something fundamentally antisocial or psychologically counterintuitive. I am an ageing millennial from the Rotten.com generation, and as such I suppose I was hard-wired to have an interest in extremity more or less from the first screech of my parents’ dial-up modem. (Your man Rob Doyle, lest we forget, wrote a very keenly observed novel about this generational tendency.) There are other motivations beside the more bombastic ones to do with anger, as I go into in the opening section: sometimes shamanic, sometimes for the purpose of exposing the oppressive qualities of another group, sometimes cathartic. Where the drive comes from is a complicated question, and I think it’s probably usually a combination of some innate tendency, and the pressure of external factors, whether those factors are historical, cultural, familial, religious, sexual, or whatever else.

What can audience participation in this kind of work tell us about society at large? Do we look on because we’re sadists, or to exorcise our own masochistic desires, or for some other reason?

It’s interesting, the critic Nikki Shaner-Bradford wrote a forensic and ultimately very kind review of the book in Bookforum, and one of the things she suggested she’d like to see more of, perhaps in a follow-up volume, was a discussion of the role the audience plays in this kind of work. As I’m finding is the case with people applying rigorous analysis to the book, this ended up clarifying something for me that I hadn’t yet realised for myself—that I think perhaps I’ve left the audience largely out of the equation because the audience, fundamentally, is me, and I am resistant to including myself directly in my writing, and to analysing my own interest in the things I am obsessed with. Being reviewed is sort of hell, incidentally, but it’s also like therapy, and it’s an honour to have people take you seriously enough that they want to reach into your brain at all, even if the sensation of them rooting around in there isn’t always pleasant. So the question about what is in it for the audience becomes really, doesn’t it, what was in it for me? What motivated me to choose this as a subject in the first place? And I’m not certain that I have an answer. I can’t stress enough that I am not an academic, and so my “specialisms,” such as they are, are all chosen in accordance with gut instinct rather than because of things like, say, “exhaustive library research,” “years of academic dedication,” or “intimate knowledge of the subject.” Admitting this might, in itself, be a form of self-harm, because it makes me sound like an uneducated chaos agent, but then again—if the shoe fits.

You describe a performance art event that saw the audience become violent themselves. Why do you think it happened in that particular instance?

This would be Marina Abramovic’s performance of Rhythm 0 in 1974, I’m guessing, where the audience started fighting with each other. It’s difficult to know, but I think it has something to do with the fact that Marina Abramovic was a beautiful woman who was offering herself up to potential harm without any obvious defence, and that vulnerability had a kind of deranging effect on some of the attendees. Interestingly, the critic who recorded this said that some of the audience seemed to mean harm, and some of them had a sort of paternalistic interest in protecting her, so this is what led them into combat with each other. You see two opposing reactions to the presentation of an unprotected woman, there, and each of them is equally fascinating. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Abramovic has quite an effect on her public—and on men especially—in general, although having only seen her from a distance, I can neither confirm nor deny.

Why did you include the British lads hit each other with chair video?

I think for the same reason everyone else on the internet was so bewitched by it, which is its unusual combination of machismo and extremely tender, shirtless kissing. It’s a curious artefact because you struggle to understand where it’s come from, exactly, but then the disbelief surrounding it is the thing that makes it interesting—it reveals a certain inbuilt prejudice, an unwillingness to believe that manly men can be platonically loving with each other. That same tension is one of the most compelling things about Jackass, as well. Sex and violence never fail to be a winning combination vis-à-vis grabbing attention, as a great deal of art and popular culture demonstrates, and because here the sexual element is somewhat undefined—is it queer, or is it not?—there is an added frisson, another layer of mystery.

Is this video taking this particular brand of performance art—although I can’t imagine these guys seeing themselves as such—in a different direction? Is the almost porn-like aesthetic inherent to such a performance?

I’m sensing a special interest in British lads hit each other with chair, on your part, Paul—presumably because of its artistic merit, which of course is why we all love it and why we have all watched it at least twenty times. I think the porniness of its visual style—and it does have the air of an amateur porn clip, at least at the beginning—is definitely part of what makes it so striking. To be honest, I thought I’d already overanalysed it to the point of insanity, and here I am thinking about it again. As a found object it has the vibe of something that Jon Rafman would have used for a video artwork about incel masculinity in about 2014, and in that sense it feels entirely plausible that you could see it in a gallery setting. Whether stuff like this is taking performance art as a medium in a new direction in and of itself, though, presumably hinges on whether or not you think something made for YouTube can be art, which again turns on whether you think intent is what makes something an artwork, or whether art is something that can be arrived at accidentally.

How would you react if the lads of said video turned up to your book launch at Claire de Rouen?

I would absolutely welcome it, as it would give the audience something more dynamic and compelling than me to look at—aside, of course, from the lovely Stephanie LaCava. I presume a lot of the people attending will know me, and as such will already be aware that I am a terrible public speaker; the rest can look forward to being thoroughly disappointed on the night. That’s my sales pitch, which goes some way to explaining why—unlike many of the writers I know—I have never succeeded in making additional money doing copywriting or working in advertising. 

Do you agree with Johnny Knoxville’s assertion that performance artists are intellectualising everything they do? Can his performances be seen as a reaction to the status quo?

As I suggest in the book, I think Johnny Knoxville is an obviously intelligent man, and I suspect that some of his resistance to performance artists as a group is to do with a resistance to pretension—if I remember correctly, in the full quotation he says he has no problem with performance art itself as a medium. This is, after all, a guy who went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on a full scholarship, who at one point wanted to be a novelist, who is friends with John Waters, etc. etc. You could make a case, as I suppose I have, for his being one of the most significant practitioners of extreme body art of the last few decades. Honestly, I hope that if he ever reads the book, he sees it as the tribute it was intended to be—I’m not all that kind about the narrative films he’s appeared in, but I don’t think you can fault his work as a stunt artist or as a performer, and I think if he had been less charismatic as a screen presence Jackass might have been confined to the fringes of alternative culture rather than becoming a mainstream hit. In the same way Dolly Parton said it took a lot of money to look that cheap, I think it takes a lot of smarts for Johnny Knoxville to play that dumb. I think whether he’s meant to or not, he has contradicted the status quo in a lot of ways. The Jackass boys were every bit as unafraid of a little homoeroticism as those British lads with their chair.

Is great art only possible through suffering?

Absolutely not! Can suffering help to produce great art? Undoubtedly, but I also think that the origin of this idea has something to do with the convenience, on the part of the establishment, of continuing to peddle the idea that artists work better when they are poor, or oppressed, or miserable, or operating as outsiders. Look at someone like Ron Athey: yes, his work involves self-injury, and yes, he’s using it to exorcise his demons, but there’s a joy there, too, a confidence and an assertiveness that makes it clear he’s taking up space as exactly the person he is meant to be. Ditto Bob Flanagan, who used S&M to extend his life, or Nina Arsenault, whose pain was bound up in her transition, and thus was a positive force. A lot of the practitioners included in the book are—to use a horrible bit of self-help jargon—self-actualising at the same time as self-harming. There is a lot of violence in it, a lot of gore, a lot of genital torture and S&M and so on, admittedly, but fundamentally, I think of it as quite a positive book—a book about the beauty and resilience of, as Hunter S. might say, freak power.

Which As You Know Means Violence is out now from Repeater Books

Philippa Snow will be reading from Violence along with guest Stephanie LaCava at Claire de Rouen in Bethnal Green this Saturday, 17 September. I’m told the event is sold out, but turn up anyway, book launches should always come with an element of chaos).

It started the typical way. I had too much work on at the beginning of the year and no time to write. Euphoria returned and the parallels between me and Cassie intensified to the point of receiving stills from the show from people I haven’t seen since school asking if the character is based on me. “I keep making mistakes and not learning from them,” she says at the beginning of the season before spiralling into a depressive episode.

In February, I got to work with Anton Alvarez, one of my favourite artists, almost a decade after first discovering his work. The next month, I burned out and took some time off to go to Paris (not to have a threesome this time), where I fell in love with a bunch of Rodin statues again. La Rosalia returned with MOTOMAMI which has since become a sort of personal soundtrack accompanying my highest highs and lowest lows as I derailed Cassie-like into spring. I guess I’ve been posting about the album a fair bit if Anton’s perception is any indication: “You only post about partying and Rosalia,” he said last week, when I went to Stockholm to see his new show at Millesgarden. A month prior, I was at the Venice Biennale, where I spent most of the week with three French PRs, all four of us having a collective existential crisis and where my Cassiefication was complete and I almost torpedoed my life. My advice to art PRs: do not get wasted and make grand statements of how you’ll turn someone into the greatest artist Sweden and Chile have ever seen. People remember and expect you to follow through, so I guess that’s what I’ll be working on over the next few years.

Around this time I started writing again primarily things not for public consumption. Sheila Heti alphabetised her diary for NYT (thoughts on this soon). The literary crowd lost their fucking minds over FUCCBOI, projecting all sorts of vitriol towards Sean Thor Conroe for making money out of it. I lost mine over the writings of Lily Hackett and Gabriel Smith, London’s only hopes for literary relevance in this generation. The Believer is back, but Queen Mob’s is definitely dead. Elle Nash moved to Glasgow, so I guess Scotland is hot again. Elias Tezapsidis is back on Twitter. New York returned to the theatre first for Matthew Gasda’s Dimes Square and now for Roman D'Ambrosio’s Homemade Dynamite, where according to one source actor Kyle Dunn goes for the analogue version of posting pole.

Throughout the mayhem of the last four months I talked at length about Rob Doyle to anyone who would listen, resorting to my now go-to: “He’s my Henry Miller,” which explains why I DM’d him “you can choke me at KitKat” at one point (I’ll be in Berlin next week, perhaps I’ll get my wish?).

This month, I went teen European corny blasting my eardrums to Tove Lo’s comeback No One Dies From Love, diving into recent memories that felt mesmerising to me that I haven’t been able to step out of yet. Before Stockholm, I went to Madrid and since no one would play Rosalia in Chueca (wtf is that about?) I resorted to dancing in the streets, Chicken Teriyaki playing on a battered iPhone. Almost ten years ago I took too many pills and ended up crawling across the Waterloo Bridge with Sky Ferreira’s Everything is Embarrassing blasting on a different iPhone. By the time myself and my friends had made it to the south of the river our kneecaps were bloodied, our shins covered in dirt. Almost a decade later not so much has changed. I haven’t learned from my mistakes, but I’m ten years older.

Sky Ferreira is done keeping her mouth shut.

A major departure from the haunting, string-laden Downhill Lullaby, her new song Don’t Forget finds her shedding the eerie vocals and cinematic scope of its predecessor. In her new anthem, heralding hot boy summer, she blasts out of the “rotten world” of the entertainment industry, setting it ablaze. “Nobody here’s a friend of mine,” she sings, before breaking into a chorus that sees her releasing herself from the constrictions placed on her over the years. In her newfound freedom, she delivers apocalyptic lyrics about fire and burning shit down, stepping out of Lullaby’s darkness with the serenity of having true perspective on her experiences. She’s back and she’s taken back control.

Perhaps learning from your mistakes isn’t impossible after all.

Mariah Kreutter entered her Back to Basics era for Gawker and paid tribute to Jean Rhys, the author who “laid it down and paved the way” for contemporary writing “about pain and abjection” by women. Kreutter believes Rhys, although solidly safe in academic circles due to Wide Sargasso Sea, has been marginalised in the culture and sets to settle society’s debt to the author. She invokes Rhys’ four autobiographical novels (Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight) which she sees as precursors to today’s Ottessas and Sallys. “If they had been published today,” she says of the four novels, “they might be called autofiction,” borrowing generously from Rhys’s life. Her writing would be described as “sharp”, an effectively universal blanket term applied to women writing in this tradition since at least Melissa P. Rhys’ contemporary critics weren’t better exactly: one, Kreutter notes, believed her to be “enamoured of gloom to an incredible degree.” If you were to step out of the realm of fiction (or autofiction), Rhys then becomes the precursor to women artists in other mediums. “To be enamoured by gloom,” Kreutter says in her defence of Rhys, “is to dare to find your own suffering romantic.” In this sense, Rhys becomes the precursor to Lana Del Rey too. Original sad girl. Back to books, the frankness in Rhys’s writing is now reflected in the prose of Moshfegh, Rooney and Raven Leilani to name a few. The abjection, the sex. Kreutter takes issue with the fact that Rhys’s impact isn’t recognised when discussing the works of these writers. “They are rarely compared to anyone but each other,” she writes, perceiving the criticism industrial complex to be lacking in historicity and suffering from cultural memory loss. She snaps when her contemporaries hold myopic views about women finally being able to write about sex, as if Anais Nin never existed. Along with this literary amnesia, Kreutter observes something else Rhysian has been lost somewhat, and that’s cruelty, which she attributes to the cultural obsession with “ethical performance.” Women, she says, write about craving and receiving pain, but they seldom inflict it themselves. “Is that only for men?” she asks. Perhaps a true successor to Rhys will present herself soon to give us the answer.

New York City interrupted L’Officiel’s centennial celebrations by hitting them with a lawsuit for not paying writers, editors, photographers, videographers, graphic designers and illustrators propping up the enterprise with their creative labour. The City triggered the “Freelance Isn’t Free” Act on the behalf of two dozen workers, according to NYT, with Dean Kissick and Natasha Stagg among them. A year ago freelancers were already dragging the fashion rag to court in France, now it’s an international affair. L’Officiel’s US edition has systematically failed to both pay freelancers and to respond to written notices forming part of the Act since 2018, only one year after publishing its first issue. The total stood at $45,000 before the lockdown. Now the lawsuit is asking for double that and civil penalties to NYC, in addition to a court monitor being installed to ensure L’Officiel has learned its lesson. How long before they call it quits and fold? And what magazines are next?

In a blockbuster essay for The Point, Brian Patrick Eha relays his story of seeking “kindred bodies” in literary circles and their inherent reservation towards “physical culture”. Then he discovered Yukio Mishima. Conceived as a way to rectify the fact that the fiftieth anniversary of Mishima’s death largely went by unnoticed, the essay traces the author’s transformation from a “decadent romantic” to a kamikaze of beauty. Literary stardom, which he attained early on, wasn’t enough and he soon found himself desiring something else, shifting from conquering the mind to conquering the body. The ending is known to anyone who knows of the author. Eha notes, “time and again in his work, the desire for beauty and the attainment of classical perfection lead inexorably to their destruction.” In recent years, he’s witnessed a revival afforded to the most select few of writers. “He has a way of getting inside you,” says Eha, “enlisting you…in his aesthetic program, his reality hunger, his world-destruction.” What is Mishima then if not the male Didion?

The techno scene in Berlin is determined to not allow the club cycle prevalent everywhere else to threaten its current and future existence. DJs and music fans are bidding to secure UNESCO world heritage status for the capital’s techno scene as part of which venues Tresor and Berghain would become cultural landmarks and be granted protections from the ever extending claws of gentrification. Berlin’s clubbing kids learned the lessons no one anywhere else wised up to soon enough to act. Around 100 clubs have closed for good over the last decade [nothing compared to the utter obliteration of London’s nights] and back at the beginning of December existing venues were dealt another blow when the City banned dancing [“What’s next, no fucking in bars?”]. The Unesco stamp of approval would enable techno to be protected, meaning property developers and city planners could no longer price clubs out of existence.

THE SCENES

The Russian Proust, Yuri Felsen, will receive a second lease on life this spring, with translator to the hottest authors you’ve never encountered before Bryan Karetnyk bringing the author’s debut novel Deceit to English audiences for the first time, The Guardian reports. Karetnyk previously wrote about Yuri for LA Review of Books when he discovered him in the writings of another emigre he salvaged from obscurity, Gaito Gazdanov. Yuri’s first novel, Karetnyk said in 2018, would become the first instalment in a “great literary project” encompassing almost everything the author would come to write, known as The Recurrence of Things Past or A Romance with an Author. In his LARB blast, Karetnyk noted the “mysterious disappearance” of the author’s archive. Fast forward to December 2021 and both Karetnyk and Alison Flood believe it was destroyed by the Nazis following his arrest. Karetnyk previewed Felsen’s writing in a translation of his short story Extras for LARB in 2020, which beyond the setting, couldn’t have been written anywhere else other than Paris, a modernist piece recalling not only Proust but also Radiguet. The Guardian summary of the upcoming publication seems straight out of several Paris-based writers in the first half of the 20th c. from Nin to Gide: “Written in the form of a diary, and set in Paris between the wars, it sees the unnamed narrator tell of his fraught relationship with his love interest and muse, Lyolya.” Karetnyk sees him as another precursor to the current trend of autofiction, so perhaps today’s writers have someone dead to battle too now.

John Merrick went Edouard Louis for Soft Punk. Anyone who grew up in a small town will find themselves nodding along to Merrick’s desire to break out of Crewe. The city became an emblem of possibility, allowing him to become lost in the crowd, to become someone else, to re-contextualise himself. Crucially, it was an escape from the chokehold of a community that is not only watching your every move but criticising it and may even come to use it as a weapon against you, ready to claw you down for the slightest indiscretion. “It was this that came to define my relation not just to the town but also to those around me,” he writes. Precipitated by a personal and professional undoing in 2019, he found himself wishing for a sense of belonging in his past. Upon returning, he understood that unlike others, including his parents, he can enter and exit at will, with his hometown being a “waystation.” This freedom, characterised here as an escape, also doubles as a rejection of his origins and comes with a sense of loss. Via Didier Eribon, Merrick describes feelings of alienation and an unavoidable reckoning with these when he return to Crewe. No one can ever be free of their working class background, he seems to suggest, but he sets out to interrogate what he calls the “impossibility of working class achievement.” Specifically focusing on literature, he asks how a working class person can write about the experience of being working class. To narrate it, he posits, includes by default an element of distance - it can only be narrated retroactively once the writer has propelled themselves beyond their origins and has become something else: “To write about the working class today, though, it is nearly impossible to be of the working class. To find the time and outlet to be able to firstly write and then to navigate the publishing system, requires a level of cultural capital that suggests that one is no longer within the class of which one speaks.” He terms these works as novels of escape, began by D.H. Lawrence and continuing through to the 1950s with the so-called angry young men. There can ever be two kinds of escape novels, he says: one that idealises the past from the remove - and possibly alienation - of the present and the literary poverty porn enshrining a narrator-author for escaping the fate of becoming trapped in their origins like Merrick’s parents.

“Don’t leave Rob [Doyle] with a cannon for long.”

Roisin Kiberd told Otherppl she’s a few thousand words from finishing the draft of her second book, a novel about paranoia and doppelgängers. She went on the pod to discuss The Disconnect and the emotional disintegration she hit prior to writing it: “We all have ways of bringing our lives to the point of catastrophe, so that we can change them,” she says nonchalantly about her overdose. She described her debut as a journey from isolation and alienation to consciously departing that frame of mind to gain some perspective. She was diagnosed with emotional instability, now her life’s mission is to manage her emotions. “I just know now what I’m not,” she added. She wrote a book about the dangers presented by social media, discussed here centred around the question of how these platforms shape our reality off the screen (we never evolve, for one, always trapped by digital doppelgängers that reflect back at us a vision of our future based on our past). It’s hardly a dark episode. Kiberd is funny, especially when a discussion of the sartorial choices of Silicon Valley evolves into one of how Irish writers present themselves, which she finds austere at best, a not so subtle dig at some of the blockbuster authors that have come out of the island in recent years. “I want drama,” she says, “I look at pictures of Truman Capote and Joan Didion and I’m like…that’s it!” As for life beyond the internet-induced breakdown and the happy ending at the end of her book, it’s worth quoting her in full:

“I’m really taken with the most old school approach of writing an essay which is to try, to go in knowing nothing and curious and exhaust that curiosity and take it as far as you can. Be honest with yourself, with the world around you and with your reader and see where that can take you. If you are honest, then you don’t have to worry, you have nothing to hide, even if you don’t find an answer by the end, which is almost certainly what will happen. You’ll still know that you did the job as best you could and you furthered some kind of alternate reality of the written word. Literature will outlast us all and it has this sort of sense of time all its own and if you’re sincere and you interrogate and you don’t just try to meet some trend or impress people then you will have contributed to tradition and what comes next will be altered by you in some tiny way.”

Drew Zeiba interviewed Dennis Cooper for frieze to mark the author’s return to novels following a ten year absence. “I forgot how much I like writing novels,” Cooper is quoted, mentioning that after the publication of The Marbled Swarm in 2011 he felt he was done with writing. I Wished, in which he revisits the famed George Miles, was originally written in the mid-2010s and abandoned in favour of making films and creating GIF novels, an experience which has had a transformational impact on how he develops his ideas, no longer opting for novels by default. Paramount to this was his collaboration with Zac Farley, as he knew early on he was “not good” at making films. “I think I’ll probably keep writing novels,” he adds and clarifies his interest and commitment to adolescence as a theme in his work. What emerges out of his conversation with Zeiba is just how committed he has always been to his vocation: “I decided to be a serious writer when I was 15 and I was terrible for a long time. I didn’t publish my first novel until I was in my thirties.” This devotion to adolescence as a subject for his work then is not only down to its “transitional” qualities but the author’s reaction to not finding publishing success from the onset. He had to wait till adulthood to publish things he had first attempted to think through by writing about them as a teenager. In spending so much time in this frame of mind, the subject seeped so deep inside him he could never rid himself of it. “I don’t like being an adult,” he says, “it doesn’t interest me.” Is I Wished then a bit of a break away from his previous work at least in intention? The author seems to suggest so: “I was really trying to negotiate my emotions…how do I articulate this and what distance do I take? How do I find a certain distance from what I’m feeling?” Maybe he’s ready to leave the transitional phase of adolescence for the next.

PRESS CLIPPINGS

Cat Marnell teased the return of Amphetamine Logic but with Vice no longer at the height of its cultural preeminence, where would her column be best at home [hi Dirt!]? The Observer set the stage for Ottessa’s sixth release. Colin Barrett has begun the promotion cycle of his upcoming sophomore collection Homesickness. Tolka Journal returned with its second issue, featuring Roisin Kiberd, Liam Cagney and an interview with Claire-Louise Bennett. NYT’s Mariah Kreutter is reviewing films for Cultured.

Tag yourselves I’m Balkan depression (Is Greece part of the Balkans again? I can never keep up.)

In her review of Marlowe Granado’s Happy Hour, Philippa Snow considers the narrator as a performance artist. Adam Cook contextualises Benedetta within Verhoeven’s career to date. Daisy Alioto believes the promise of film is forgetting in her review of The Hand of God. On Harper’s, Rebecca Panovka says that “death is not always the worst option” [in the world of Hanya Yanagihara’s fiction].

People were angry at Anne Imhof again for spending a lot of money on her stylised performances, this time Natures Mortes at Palais de Tokyo, as if collapsing theatre, opera, dance, music, industrial design and fashion isn’t what makes her a great artist. After Sex, all I can say is that you can understand her work only if you’re present when she unveils it in front of your eyes, mesmerising you into partaking yourself [and almost getting kicked out of the Tate in the process].

Paul Dalla Rosa bagged an interview with Dean Kissick (perhaps the most name-dropped person in NYC, according to Mak) for the fourth edition of Bad Artist Statement. In his recent visit to Italy, Kissick had many “small epiphanies” precipitated by his visits to Rome’s art spaces. He attributes the absence of an ecstatic experience during his sojourn to his [subconscious] resolution to force one. Whether this is one of the epiphanies he enjoyed through his art marathon isn’t clear, but what’s certain in this interview is Kissick’s desire for the next stage in his life: to be married and have kids.

Kissick intentionally created a packed schedule for himself, seeing as much as possible in as short a period of time, mirroring how he experiences a large scale event, an art fair or a biennale. In this latest marathon, he kept himself caffeinated, writing at cafes in between seeing things, which he describes as the best way to live [whether this is specific to Rome isn’t clear]. His interest in novels seems to outshine even that of art. He considers the novel to be the highest form of art, but believes certain of its qualities, described here as a “transcendental ambition or magical urge”, have been lost. He tells Dalla Rosa he’s “always working on a novel,” has been for the past half decade. “That’s what I’d like to do with my life, write a good novel.”

Marie Calloway got her LONG, FAR TOO LONG overdue reevaluation (and retribution, somewhat) without even getting involved. Reese Witherspoon would butcher her vision, but I have to agree with Scott McClanahan’s idea that her work should be let loose on the moms of America.

Ed Luker read Beautiful World, Where are You and found its sex scenes mundane in the first of a two-part essay-cum-memoir on below deck. Luker isn’t impressed, but he believes the novel to be “honest” as it embraces the first person narration of how fame isn’t all that good as it turns out and hasn’t brought the protagonist self-enlightenment or whatever she thought she’d get with it. “Shatter all the exhausting lies,” is how he presents it - and he’s exhausted. In the second part, he references an idea he had for an essay in the first half of the 2010s that he never wrote and contextualises his Substack as an attempt to not let go of ideas, to not let them “haunt the graveyard of my imagination.”

John Phipps is splitting his focus from books to also consider paintings. “We are gonna try some stupid stuff at some point too,” he promises in his latest, reviewing Constable at the RA, which had him thinking of the inevitable ending of all things, the past and how it is pondered on by the present, as well as the present and how it might be pondered on by the future.

Rob Doyle (one of the few writers published by a major press worth reading according to Adam Lehrer) was interviewed by Berlin’s Shakespeare and Sons describing Autobibliography as his pop book. In typical fashion, this interview doesn’t seem to go anywhere. “Let’s start from the beginning,” the interviewer says, but the question isn’t about how he lost his virginity? Doyle lists his fav spots in Berlin - KitKatClub, Berghain and “grimy dive bars scattered around the city” - but no one thought to push further, to get him to talk about just what it is that makes them so special and what he’s gotten up to in these places over the three years he spent in Berlin, what “chemicals” best go with an one nighter and which ones are better if you’re partnered up but planning to fuck in the back rooms of Berghain. “Existence alone has never been enough,” he says in a Lana-esque moment, “I’ve always been compelled to search - in high and low and sometimes very frightening places - for a meaning.” What those places are is never discussed. When interviews could be used to push the subject of a book further, get the author to spill even more than they did in the book itself, everyone seems to be playing it so safe leading this reader to ask - what was even the point of it? Doyle is off to Asia at the beginning of the new year, so at the very least there’s a new book to look forward to when he returns and has metabolised the experience.

Barry Pierce got a lot of heat when he pointed out the lack of young male novelists in contemporary publishing.

Ever the enfant terrible of criticism, he ended up writing on the subject for Dazed further expanding his mission to making books and writing about books cool again [unwavering in his belief that to do so book criticism needs to move from the stuffy environs of broadsheets to glossier outlets].

Pierce is hardly the first to explore the territory. In fact, his piece can be read as the final part of a trilogy that began back in 2020 with Luke Brown’s Emasculated: The Problem of Men Writing about Sex and continued earlier this year with Johanna Thomas-Corr’s How women conquered the world of fiction [out of the three writers Thomas Corr, it should be noted, received the grandest level of vitriol online precisely because she is a woman and in writing on the subject was effectively branded a “gender traitor”].

Pierce’s piece doesn’t pretend to have the solutions. As he points out, “you find yourself going in circles” when attempting to figure out the reasons behind this. His distinction, however, is an important one: it is *young* male writers that are the endangered species. In an Elephant write-up on Marlowe Granados’ debut Happy Hour, Eloise Hendy proves Pierce’s point by only referencing male artists who are either long dead or 100, as evidence of an unfair imbalance of who gets to engage in hedonism [in writing]. Eliza Clark agrees with Pierce: “If we wish to truly champion diversity, we must include men.” Megan Nolan went a step further: “It seems fairly unbelievable to me that there is such a drought of weird, brilliant, dynamic, shocking novels about men by men being written at the moment.” Pierce believes the issue to lie at an industry level. Men are writing, but they’re not getting published. Alex Allison was dropped when his sophomore attempt, a Premier League football gay bash, did not agree with his agent. Looking outside the scope of *young* male novelists, the overall state of affairs isn’t faring that far better. Patrick McCabe, author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto, will be publishing his next book with Unbound (?!), effectively resorting to crowdfunding its release.

Part of Pierce’s polemic, he says that writing novels isn’t “chic” anymore. The sentiment he expresses can partly also be reflected in an essay by John Merrick in Soft Punk: “Culture may be for everyone, but clearly not everyone wants the kind of culture they are given.” Merrick interrogates the publishing industry with a class focus, but arrives at a similar conclusion: “Books are less central to the overall shape of culture than they once were.” Pierce traces this issue in the bizarre fixation with privacy, resulting in a lack of libidinal energy in the book world. Still, he believes the voices of young men are important, especially during “our current politically and culturally fraught times.”

Is 2022 the year male writers get their balls back?

Launched in September 2019, the duo produced over 100 episodes, earning a host of foes in the process. Styled in the tradition of Red Scare, they dissected an impressive array of topics, including Russian men’s gymnastics, the hysteria around age gaps and the sex industry in Central Europe, not to mention the infamous case of the Hungarian MEP getting caught at a gay gang bang during lockdown. The pod’s accompanying website, which offered a platform to a host of young contributors, had already been inactive since March. Twink Rev served as an anchor for a number of other pods, the hosts of which guest starred at various points in its two year trajectory. Aside from the Red Scare girls, guests included Angie Speaks, Jack from The Perfume Nationalist, the Thot Topics boys, as well as Twink Rev contributor River Page, who has survived countless character assassination attempts and has since entered the Substack frenzy with Chain Smoking to Babylon, and Zach Langley Chi Chi, a rare voice in cultural criticism, who has founded his own podcast I’m So Popular. The Revolution might be over, but its insurgent idea(l)s survive in these projects that may just be the underground beginnings of something greater.

Repeater Books has clawed Zer0 Books back in indie publishing’s latest development, regaining access to the back catalogue seven years after being forced out. Following six years of seemingly never-ending turbulence, despite a well received second act, The Believer has also come to an end. The Black Mountain Institute announced it will be closing its flagship magazine, the February/March 2022 issue filling in as its swan song, citing the financial impact of COVID-19 alongside the usual media statement around the challenges of running a print publication as culprits. The Las Vegas magazine never enjoyed the crossover appeal of its more prestigious siblings (i.e. Harper’s, NYRB), but had a central part in 21st c. literary history [and on a personal level as it introduced me to Sheila Heti via this Didion interview]. What may happen to this history and the magazine’s archives is anyone’s guess.

Speaking of lit history and you-should-have-been-there-soz-if-you-weren’t moments, November marked the second anniversary of Rachel Rabbit White’s Porn Carnival, the last great party prior to everything shutting down that has gained mythic proportions since, in part down to Kaitlin Phillips’ subsequent reporting for The Cut. Cat Marnell went to a(nother) sex party with Rabbit White and took photos.

The Drunken Canal turned one. Everyone’s fav pod Our Struggle has made it to Book #2 of Karl Ove’s odyssey. INQUE published its first issue but went pretty unnoticed. Dirt hosted a party but no one thought to report on how drunk Daisy Alioto got.

Ottessa Moshfegh, fresh off landing the Vogue Italia cover, has signed with Midland Agency.

No information has been released as to whether the novelist will be walking at fashion week, or if the contract is strictly limited to editorial (what happens after the Vogue cover has happened?). Will other novelists follow suit? Has fashion found a new kind of cultural icon to capitalise on? And can the publishing industry make anything out of this other than a total mess? A London-based fashion PR I reached out to responded with this:

“I don’t think this is the news you think it is. No one cares.”

Fashion might be checked out of the literary world, but art’s blue chips are gagging to align with Moshfegh and other writers of the glam variety in a bid to gain a touch of cultural legitimacy as evidenced by Emma Cline’s collab with Gagosian.

Soho Press snapped AESTHETICA, Allie Rowbottom’s debut novel about an “Instagram model’s rise to fame and spiral into plastic surgery addiction.” Vogue published the most comprehensive oral history of Marie Antoinette, the 00s most fun film. Daddy Houellebecq is publishing a 736-page long novel in January.

Dennis Cooper christened Derek Jarman the true successor to Pasolini. Christina Newland spoke with Mike Leigh ahead of his BFI Southbank and Home Manchester retrospective, finding him as unapologetic and uncompromising as ever. The conversation inevitably centres on Naked [a haunting af fav], with the director responding to the question on the necessity of sex scenes [Newland is truly leading the film criticism Renaissance this side of the Atlantic] as unavoidable when depicting life on screen. “What happened to softcore, to porno-chic, to erotic thrillers?” she asks as in a separate piece. Continental Europe is in a much more better position than the UK and the US, she believes, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta acting as a proof point. To those who insist sex scenes are unnecessary as they do not move the plot along, she points out that sex is “an inherent part of our lives” and therefore by default an inherent part of film. So, “to deny sex and sexuality in the cinema is to deny our own fully-fledged humanity.” Perhaps Europeans aren’t ready to give up theirs yet. Over at The Independent, Adam White paid homage to the great Katrin Cartlidge, her understated performances and her unwillingness to sell out, opting for a capital A Acting career, albeit one cut abruptly and tragically short, most would kill for. Naked wouldn’t occupy its current place in film history if it wasn’t for her.

Thomas Chatterton Williams has left Harper’s, his legacy at the mag now overshadowed by that famous/infamous open letter [begging for no more letters or opinions just old fashioned punch ups from 2022]. London heartthrob Owen Vince has traded bricks for flicks, rebooting his newsletter, previously known as awful mass and focusing on architecture, as awful screen where he now casts his attention to film. A natural progression of his role as one half of film criticism outfit MuubTube, in his inaugural blast he looks at Jancsó’s take on the Greek myth of Electra,  “an orgy of the collective,” continuing his obsession with Eastern/Central Europe (apart from architecture and film, his criticism oeuvre has also included literature and even fashion). Electra, My Love is too socialist realist to be erotic, he tells us. “Eventually, the dress slips off the shoulder,” he says of Jancso’s later films. “The bodies would fuck and be fucked.” Eventually, Jancso would go in the direction of Borowczyk and Brass [so, hot].

The Annual In And Out trend report from poster @shit_queen returned with its seventh edition.

And as far as forecasting is concerned the end of the pandemic is predicted to mark the end of every loser we’ve suffered since the crash.

All I want for Xmas is a Margiela cum rag, the Gosha x Adidas shoes I never bought [stupidly chose to buy myself books that winter], a leopard print shirt for skating in the summer [went French for Wasted Paris] and anything in these ERL shades.

Plus, the Teorema poster where Terence Stamp’s gaze is like sex incarnate, since I don’t see myself outgrowing wanting to decorate the walls of my bedroom [kudos if you know a decent collage artist that can really reflect your mood, which in my case is this apparently]. For books, I’d recommend Tea Hacic-Vlahovic’s Life of the Party and Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich’s Ruthless Little Things (and anything from the back catalogue of Didion and Babitz, RIP).

You also can’t go wrong with the classics: Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male, CK and Lacoste underwear (I prefer these trunks), white cotton socks [now obsessed with Dickies], or these three stripe shorts [yes, they’re for swimming, but fuck it they’re perfect for running/lounging/hanging out with the lads].

Below some of the people whose taste I respect offer their reccs

Philippa Snow believes the Melissa Anderson book about Inland Empire would make “a perfect gift both for anyone who is already obsessed with Inland Empire and for anyone who surely ought to be obsessed with Inland Empire.” That’s “anyone else with sense” if it wasn’t clear. She recommends the artist CCA Stone who does “incredible paintings” of movie crime scenes. As a collector of vintage motorcycle t-shirts “in various sizes and various levels of poor taste” she permanently has these on her personal wish list [originally she shared two links illustrating the sort of t-shirts she’s obsessed with, both of which have since been taken down from the reseller’s website, shout out to me for taking forever to post this!]. She also recommends Oliver Zarandi's Soft Fruit in the Sun. [Snow’s own book about pain, out from Repeater Books, is on my list for 2022.]

Interviewer of the avant garde Daniel Clemens recommends bidding on something from Julien's Auctions. “I can’t imagine more personalised, diligent gift-giving. Alissa Bennet has an Instagram devoted to highlights from Julien's, and I would die for something like Montgomery Clift's handwritten love letter to William LeMassena (which was a part of fellow faggy Golden Ager Farley Granger's collection). I'm mad that my boyfriend didn't win me this Chevron gas station receipt signed by River Phoenix.“ Though not for him, he pointed out that there are over 700 pairs of Amy Winehouse’s bloodied ballet slippers.

A certified film lover, he suggests browsing arthouse and repertory movie theaters web stores, “like NYC-based Screen Slate, where you'll find this incredible Gwenyth Paltrow in Sliding Doors t-shirt and pair of Rainer Warner Fassbinder shorts (and condoms); the somewhat annoying A24/Intramural Shop store, which has already completely sold out, but did include this hot Basketball Diaries jersey and Reality Bites beach towel; the Metrograph Book Store, curated in part by Nick Pinkerton, is also opening soon. Le Cinéma Club's book club picks from last year are still worth a look as well.”

Dirt’s Daisy Alioto says anOrdain is “the best watch brand you've never heard of.” Straight out of Glasgow, the team behind it “has a proprietary process for enamel dials that sparkle,” she adds, “in a masc way.”

Geoffrey Mak [whose essay collection Mean Boys I’ll be smashing the pre-order button for as soon as Bloomsbury has it listed on the website] wants leather gloves. I forgot to chase him for clarification [always a chaotic whore].

Zsofia Paulikovics thinks luxury novelty tights are the way to go. “I think they make a great gift because spending that much money on something you’ll almost certainly rip is silly and luxurious. I like Fabian Kis-Juhász, Lauren Perrin, Ashley Williams and Maison Soksi (what a stupid name lol, I love it). This Wolford one is gorgeous, but I’m simply too Slav to ever pay that much for tights.”

[Another Slav in my life echoed P’s sentiment by responding with this: “Everyone’s so obsessed with gifts during Christmas, it’s not what it’s about…Also I thought your newsletter was about books, no? I’d buy you the largest bottle of Stoli or Russian Standard or just ask what you want and buy that.”]

Paulikovics further suggests a natal chart reading. “I got one last year and it was fantastic, almost entirely inaccurate with regards to my year but it made me feel busy. I won't recommend an astrologer as mine has started to consort with a bad crowd (bad here meaning people I dislike) which has called their credibility into question, but there are lots on the internet.”

I’m dying to know who the people she dislikes are but that’s an off the record convo, so off to her last one, reserved for the lads: “If you’re my boyfriend or anyone’s boyfriend, what you should do is go to this flat sale by the coolest girls in London this weekend, and just let them pick out something pretty and pay whatever price they tell you to. Your girlfriend will love it and you can’t put a price on THAT, can you?” [Keep an eye out for these in the future boys!]

Daniel Penny suggested these loafers. I’ll always have time for the writer who described the Swedish-Chilean artist Anton Alvarez as “a thin man who favors oversized T-shirts,” (for the New Yorker no less!).

Dennis Cooper biographer and Cambridge hottie Diarmuid Hester wants Attaquer le Soleil by independent Parisian perfume house État Libre D’Orange. Or, how he described it: “All I want for Christmas is to smell like a church that’s recently been the site of a sweaty orgy, where someone has desecrated the sanctity of the space even further by shitting on the altar. For this scent, which came out a few years ago, perfumer Quentin Bisch took inspiration from the Marquis de Sade (and as I recall collaborated with one of Sade’s descendants), submitting to the pleasure and the pain of Labdanum. For the debauched libertine in your life.”

Huda Awan, who’s “terrible at buying gifts”, compiled a list of things she wants and things she’s been gifted in the past:

• Annual membership for Close Up Film Centre: I think it's maybe the coolest place I've been to in London. It's smart (a library and arthouse cinema under one roof) and sexy (the interior is all black). Members get half off screening tickets and can borrow up to three films and/or books from their truly incredible collection at a time. Plus, there's a cafe that rather resolutely goes "against the grain of current coffee trends" and serves "a traditional European fine blend of coffee.”

• Comme Des Garcon Super Fluo wallet: I bought this for an ex-boyfriend as a surprise after he lamented that men's wallets are, by and large, boring and ugly. He ended up leaving it on a bus one afternoon.

• Aesop Reverence Hand Balm: It feels and smells absolutely divine and that's all that matters.

• Jo Malone Poppy and Barley Cologne: I recently gifted this to my sister for her graduation. My mother gifted it first to me a couple of years ago. It has become my favourite scent, because it manages to be floral but warm and musky at the same time.

Awan added that her espresso machine is the best gift she’s ever received: “I think the best gifts are things that people wouldn't mind having in their lives, but would never think to buy for themselves and an espresso machine is exactly that. I lived in Berlin for a year before I moved to London and spent my first two months there living with a roommate who had an espresso machine and kindly encouraged me to use it. I raved about it so much that my parents gifted me one for my birthday after I moved out and I shipped it to London when I left Berlin. I have at least one cup of coffee every day, and have saved IMMENSE amounts of money by being able to make my morning flat whites at home.”

London babe Gabriel Smith (whose as of yet unpublished manuscript publishers would do well to snatch up) recommends an exorcism in true Gabriel Smith fashion. “Make an evening of it: invite some friends round, have a few drinks, rid yourself of malevolent presences. Everyone's welcome at the exorcism! The power of Christmas compels you.”

Paul Dalla Rosa, who’s working on his debut collection, wants an “obscenely expensive” Amiri robe from SSENSE. He insists he doesn’t like Amiri all that much, but would like to do “everyday things in it. Smoking, drinking, reclining.”

Berlin’s thinspiration Max(imilian) Grob says “there’s maybe three good outfits that men can wear if they want to be broadly sexually appealing: single breasted suits, grey joggers with paint-splattered T-shirt, and fitted tank top with jeans. The latter is a real sweet spot for me because the white tank top is the ultimate thot top and a symbol of unfettered – and occasionally explosive – male sexuality.”

“Film has embedded the white tank as a uniform for its most enshrined homme fatales. See Tony Ward as sex worker Monti in Hustler White (rolled up to above the nips with a gold chain), Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (toxic masculinity, but make it hot), Leonardo DiCaprio in The Basketball Diaries (e-boy prototype), and most recently Felix Maritaud in Sauvage. There’s something really on-the-nose about a white tank top that lays a man’s vulnerability – such as his desire to be perceived as strong – completely bare.”

Maxim suggests either of the following four takes on the white tank top to “gift the charming larrikin in your life. You may just revive an abated joie d’vivre in them. Best worn with Levi 501s or leather pants.”

• Swarovski crystals with your side of 2000s nostalgia, sir?

• Just waiting for them to revive the SS04 tank tops that every Instagram-based brand is imitating now, but in the meantime…

• I’m not like other tank tops, I’m interlocking

Failing these high-end choices, UNIQLO have got your back with this ribbed cotton tank that fits perfectly.

Sophie “Hedonism is the sole object of human desire” Dempsey didn’t recommend anything [I forgot to ask her to contribute, fuck me in the eye!], but I guess she’d recommend Pat McGrath Full Panic, which she received as a birthday present earlier in the year and which she considers “very glamorous.”

Critic Daniel Felsenthal, who should really be known for his fiction [such as this piece which I have reread relentlessly over the various lockdowns], recommends an Eggplant emoji water pipe:

I see a lot of marijuanaware around the East Village of NYC. The eggplant, though, caught my eye, showing like a bulge among the several dozen other “water pipes” on the shelves of an e-cigarette-lotto-sandwich-coffee-soda store. Such an ersatz aubergine is miles away from the corn cobs smoked by tweedy academics of yore, and it doesn’t slot in either with the colorful, Pink-Floyd-at-the-planetarium bowls that have been teenagers’ de facto pipe of choice for a few too many decades. Phenomenally unsubtle in its reflection of our shameless age, this glass vegetable has the relationship with a real eggplant that, say, a Claes Oldenburg statue of a profiterole has with a pastry. Pot-smoking paraphernalia has become legion in the US. Now, it can embrace an utter lack of utility, similar to those comically oversized iPhone cases shaped like cupcakes or bananas.

At 7.5 inches, the bulbous eggplant emoji water pipe isn’t your best choice for a quickie before you step into a backroom bar or avant-jazz concert— whatever your stoner activity of choice may be. Its glass spout is about as tough as a breadstick, so you’ll have to be careful to avoid jostles on the subway and the street. “But,” you think, “How will it look on my mantel? Exquisite! De clase! And when I begin to crumble the old bitter herb into its mushroom (but not!) head, everyone will think I’m practical, too.” Wrong. If you tend to share a smoke with lovers, they’ll think you’re a walking embodiment of one of the more hackneyed clichés one could scrape from online dating. If you smoke with friends, they’ll wonder why you’re posturing about your hearty schlong. Hasn’t this joke gotten old? Does getting high mean we have to act like teenagers in all ways? For all my solo smokers out there, do you really want to mess up that glossy purple exterior? Like a piece of modernist ceramic, this pipe just doesn’t intend to function. And that’s why I had to have it in my life.

So I returned to the bodega ready to shell out the most useless $23 I’ve spent since I saw Dune in theaters, only to find a heart-shaped patch of shelf where the phallic piece of glass used to be. Its neighbor to the left, a perfectly nice beaker bong that had been desecrated with copyright-infringing images of Eric Cartman, was still there. So was its neighbor to the right, a whole carton of poppers, which struck me as probably very weak — you know it when you see it. If you know someone with a paraphernalia collection, this will make a perfect addition — particularly because they’ll probably never have an occasion to get it dirty by actually smoking from it.

Also, I saw three novels I love on top of a garbage can on Avenue C and East 10th Street the other day: A House and Its Head by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Erasure by Percival Everett, and Suite For Barbara Loden by Nathalie Lèger. I’m not all about regifting what the universe has offered me, but any of these books might make a pretty cool present too.

From the terminally offline crew: March (“Do not use my last name cos there’s only one March [REDACTED]”) wants a carton of Gauloises, a cigarette case “like the one you have, glam af” and a pair of black boots, “don’t care what brand as long as they look cool but don’t kill my feet.” Cody wants underwear: “briefs, boxers, everything. I want $1,000 worth of underwear.” And a guy I used to go blackout drinking with who works in finance and asked to remain anonymous said girlfriends should opt for colognes. He recommends Paco Rabanne 1 Million.

Harvey Day wants ‘Bather’ by Doron Langberg. “The actual painting, not just a print.” I guess anyone keen on pulling a Victoria Miro heist, hit him up [or if you got money, slide in his DMs]? He recommends Sex Skateboards, having recently been gifted the new black hoodie and black tee and gifting himself the knitted jumper and shirt [I’d add that you can never go wrong with the brand’s classics].

“Today’s descendants of Beckett, if there were any, would be deemed irresponsible for failing to state explicitly enough their commitment to antiracism.” - Justin E.H. Smith, Covid Is Boring

Roisin Kiberd is too neurotic for meditation. She’s back in therapy. She’s also writing a novel. She’s back in therapy partly because she’s writing this novel and partly because she felt like it. This according to her appearance in The Earthly Delights Podcast. She woke up feeling angry on the day of recording, the last day of summer, but in the hour and a half she spent on the pod, she comes across as a highly energetic, friendly sprite, touching on everything from her debut The Disconnect and the mayhem of social media to Tao Lin’s Warhol era and Kanye West’s DONDA. Berlin was a game changer for Kiberd. It took off the financial pressure that contributed to the breakdown she describes in her debut. “I wasn’t always feeling like a thwarted, overgrown teen unable to afford anywhere to live.” She’s since switched Germany for Ireland again, where she’s about to move in to new digs with Rob Doyle. “The self is always a work in progress,” she says near the beginning of the episode, expressing ideas about the internet and its interconnection to selfhood. “Social media is a tool to manufacturing self,” she continues, although she doesn’t think this is by default bad. Drawing on renaissance literature as another example, she sees the darker underbelly of social media as rooted in the medium’s commercial nature, one that’s unprecedented in history. Kiberd discovered a lot about herself by writing her debut. She’s into doppelgängers now, foreshadowing what her novel may entail.

Does he have nothing better to do?

Babe Bennett Madison revealed himself as a fake Dear Prudence letter writer. You gotta hand it to him. In addition to impeccable hair, he has the audacity to come out with this, consequences be damned. Part of it, if his Gawker confessional is any indication, comes down to him being done with his young adult past. He preempts the inevitable why by saying he found it “creatively fulfilling”: “I could follow the most demented threads of my imagination,” without being tied to the condemnations that have come to define the genre in recent years. If his crisis in his writing in 2018 says anything it’s that Madison has been in mid-metamorphosis since. Back when he was still in school, he dreamed up quite the scene involving writing such letters. “I imagined dormitories full of muscular undergrads lounging around in their undies and collaborating on phony scenarios before hitting the showers together to celebrate their labor,” he writes. “It was with this dream in mind that I approached my task.” It all comes down to sex then. He eventually called it quits when his final letter (out of 25!) made it on Fox News. Now that he’s come clean, maybe he can at long last take that energy and graduate to more adult books - same demented threads of imagination, more sex.

Barry Pierce spoke with Dennis Cooper for AnOther about his most personal book to date I Wished. Cooper describes it as a novel about the real George Miles [as opposed to the fictionalised version of the George Miles cycle] although it isn’t “completely factual.” What becomes clear during the course of the interview is that Cooper may never be done with George as far as writing is concerned, dismissing ideas of finality and a sense of an ending. It was an arduous project emotionally: “I want to find a way where I could write a book where I could just explode my feelings and emotions out.”

Elsewhere, the novelist notes that small presses have been leading transgressive literature in recent years but “you really have to hunt them down.” He sees the rise of queer pop culture as culprit. Back in the days of the George Miles cycle, books were it, but since then films, TV and music have lured audiences away from reading. Pierce ends the interview by asking Cooper’s opinion on the linguistic evolution of rimming to eating ass. Respect to anyone who gets a literary legend to say “Destroy my hole!” in an interview.

In his discussion with Troy James Weaver for Southwest Review, Cooper is more philosophical: “Is love stronger when the person you love is no longer there to interfere with it,” he asks, “or is love in that case just an act of exploitation and self-indulgence?” He doesn’t offer a definite response. He discarded an earlier version of the manuscript, which sounds more aligned to a straightforward autobiographical narrative. Unsatisfied with its chronological “inert and private and tiresome” scenes, he opted for a “chaotic” approach in his second attempt. Cooper isn’t interested in himself after all. “I just want to be his mouthpiece,” he tells Weaver of the real George. The conversation shifts to the author’s other endeavours, including his films and his blog. Always a supporter of young talent, he further platforms small presses (including Inside the Castle, Expat and Amphetamine Sulphate among others) as spaces where good writing is available. “I think of them more like exploding bright lights,” he says of young writers he likes.

Paul McAdory took a stand against “weepy disclosure and self-serious sentimentality” in gay fiction for Gawker by charting the trajectory of two poets into fiction writing in recent years. He ponders the “aesthetically and morally” flatlined writing in these works and seems to long for the Coopers and Genets of the world. Barry Pierce seems to agree:

Down with sentimentality, down with traumageddon, down with narratives of gay oppression and/or self-oppression. “Might we not celebrate instead a more horizontal outlay of sincerity, mania, irony, horror, meanness, humor, etc., one in which we do not take poetic earnestness to be primary to the other affective modes?” McAdory asks. Everything is embarrassing and it might as well be. What could be more pleasurable for the reader than that? Dismiss the misery, embrace chaos.

Three Month Fever, everyone’s new fav stack, had a whirlwind of an autumn so far. Some highlights:

• Ashley Clarke introduced readers to the only lifestyle worth aspiring to, which is to be on a burnout, signed off work due to stress but still getting paid. Clarke, on the other hand, who’s in London while “everybody else is in Greece” is still working, typing emails in his head instead of sleeping and devising replies he’ll send when people inevitably email him back. (On A Summer Burnout)

• Ana Kinsella submitted her book, now lost as to what to do with her free time. She makes stracciatella ice cream for herself and her friends, reads DeLillo at a North London pub garden. She gives herself over to running, five miles near Hampstead Heath and ten laps at a track. “If I had any thoughts in my brain before I started,” she says, “they have all evaporated by the time I finish.” (Today I Think I Am Happy)

• Zsofia Paulikovics spent the summer figuring out if her boyfriend is a good person or not. That is in between dodging recounting her true dreams to his therapist mother, petting dogs at parties and falling down at wedding receptions. (And that’s how dad ended up shooting the Panasonic)

On the last day of summer, Ed Luker witnessed “a shirtless multiracial rebellion” at Hampstead Heath under the clouds of skunk smoke blended with the scent of poppers, prosecco and cheap alcohol. The scene report in his newsletter below deck, offers a glimpse at what the new 20s may be, where “the perennially underemployed and the hedonistically listless” enjoy a day in North London’s oasis free from the constrictions of jobs, bosses, rent and other pressures. Luker skipped the poetry reading in order to go swimming (don’t tell Barren Magazine, he’d be executed for treason). He wonders whether the last day of summer with its serenity and air of freedom could have been “the summer London could have had all the way.”

Cat Marnell is writing for New York Magazine, for which she had to fly out to London and stay at Hackney Central(?), tagging the city from Shoreditch to Soho and from St. Pancras to Stockwell with her boyfriend, before flying off to Paris for their mutual birthday celebrations.

In Paragraphs, Oscar Schwartz reminisced about selling Tao Lin weed when he visited Melbourne in 2013. Schwartz sees the focal conflict of Lin’s relentlessly covered Leave Society as one between the author and his avatar and central character Li. In Leave Society, Li aims to evolve beyond his tried and tested style of writing, that of “existential autofiction,” which he perceives as emblematic of “Dominator Society”; in writing Leave Society however, Lin has applied the blueprint of autofiction to his avatar, asphyxiating him with the chokehold of commodification. “Autofiction,” Schwartz says, “can swallow anything, even sincere attempts at revolutionary recovery.” Li may be ready to dispel the alienation of his writing thus far, but to Schwartz he is “ the most alienated of all of Tao Lin's fictional avatars.”

Paul Dalla Rosa doesn’t care what other people think of Sally Rooney. That is according to his fist interview for Bad Artist Statements with Chelsea Hodson. The duo, who originally met at Hodson’s Mors Tua Vita Mea workshop in Italy, talked about first books, second books and the internet. Hodson agrees with Rosa’s stance. She’s reading Knausgaard at last, now that the tidal waves of fanfare surrounding his work have flatlined (do not tell Our Struggle!), although being only half way through the Norwegian saga, she’s not ready to share her thoughts on Karl’s outpouring. She believes artists should avoid anything that’s as overhyped as a way of safeguarding their mind from pop ephemera that’s inevitably bad and may taint their own art.

Mariah Kreutter wrote a blockbuster review of the book of the season, Beautiful World, Where Are You for Soft Punk. She wears her heart on her sleeve, but her engagement with the text is thorough and her criticisms of the author’s choices are explored in great depth, resulting in one of the very few voices that haven’t been warped by the incredible hype that has washed over everything with the book’s publication. Taking a leaf out of Hodson’s book, I won’t be reading Rooney any time soon. Kreutter believes the sex scenes in it to be good, so I guess I have that to look forward to.

Jade Angeles Fitton took The Fence to fashion week of yesteryear with Club Couture. David Klion offered a class analysis of The O.C. and Gossip Girl (OG and trash) for The Drift. And on Bookforum, Lauren Oyler posited that Elena Ferrante is a man.

“Beware of evoking childhood in close proximity to a blowjob.”

Ben Hamilton is the rediscovery of the year. In his newsletter, No stars, no thumbs, he dissects AA Gill’s debut novel 25 years after its initial publication. “A half-forgotten embarrassment,” Sap Rising freed Gill from the constrictions of editors from his day job to embrace “his filthiest daydreams.” If you thought Jackie Collins was bad, Hamilton shows Gill’s drive to gross readers out while tarnishing writing sex. It is about sex, but also a sexual exorcism of sorts, the expression of sex becoming Gill’s purge of his reserves of unwritten sex he had built up over the years. Not that Hamilton is about to give him a free pass: “The novel exists as an overflow pipe for Gill’s worst tendencies,” he concludes. It’s interesting only because it is a disaster.

Nothing sticks for Adam Lehrer. In a two-part Safety Propaganda essay, he interrogates his inability to form attachments to the art of our contemporary moment, contrasted to that of his youth (using the films of David Lynch and the books of Norman Mailer to illustrate his point). The sheer volume of cultural products, he believes, together with the instant and fast way they’re disseminated, have neutered audiences excitement. “We are too depressed, too alienated, and too enraged to even engage with” art, he continues. He identifies two works, which he refers to as “cultural events”, that, though not the respective artist’s finest hour, do rise above the rest and succeed at enabling participation in audiences - a prerequisite to something being art, he says. These are Kanye West’s DONDA and Leos Carax Annette. West and Carax, he believes, “managed to disrupt the spectacle and demand the attention of masses of people.”

Morbid Books’ Lev Parker landed an interview with HERO Magazine to discuss the publication of My Week Without Gerard by Ivan Boris (it’s a pseudonym). The novel concerns a young freelance reporter, Lester Langway, who’s sent to Paris in search of a famous French philosopher (spoiler: it’s based on Bernard-Henri Levy). Among its characters are Jean-Luc Godard, Andre Breton, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Rick Owens, with the action taking place in the present but also featuring “scenes where it leaps back to Edmond Bailly’s bookshop in the 1890s, the 1920s and the birth of Surrealism and at others he’s in a 1960s New Wave film.”

Devin Kelly hasn’t written a poem in months. In Ordinary Plots, he reminisces (via Adam Zagajewski) about the intensity of writing when he was young(er). “I am trying to be open now, but I miss living in the almost-ness of the about-to-be-begun poem.” He has questions. What happens “when It feels your art has abandoned you?” When happens when creating art becomes the catalyst for loneliness and alienation? What happens when that loneliness is all that’s left? He tries to disentangle creating art from the artist’s role as labourer and the mere idea of success, to move beyond the idea that the artist has to constantly create art. “I want to allow myself stillness,” he says, “to remove expectations that feel stifling, borrowed from oppressive structures.”

P.S. Max Steele will be reading with Edmund White this Saturday as part of the Segue Reading Series.

P.P.S. How can The Fence afford a place in Soho?

In an interview with 3:AM Magazine he said that “there is no such thing as good writers or bad writers - only writers you want to sleep with.” I was planning on playing rapid fire with him, fuck or not fuck edition, to see which authors he’d bang and which he wouldn’t but got too carried away during our discussion that I forgot about it. In the same interview, he pulled a Lindsay Lohan by stating, “I’m not a writer, I’m just Scott McClanahan.” He remains as down to earth as ever but now comes with a significant amount of environmental concerns, betraying a sense of worry for the future. He’s also overflowing with romanticism.

He has a calm demeanour and an infectious laugh. We spoke about The Sarah Book, a true 21st century masterpiece, over Zoom. He spent the entire interview asking if he answered the question. He was also floored to find out that gay guys find him hot. If I’d had a shot every time he said “my wife” I’d be more wasted than the time I thought it a good idea to crawl across the Waterloo Bridge.

Scott McClanahan is a hot mess. He ordered a book based on my recommendation: “I love your Substack. I love anyone who loves Geoff Dyer. I love that it’s a mix and match where you’re talking about new stuff that’s out there. There's a writer you keep mentioning too that I haven't read yet. Rob Doyle? I put some of his books on my list because of your Substack…Threshold’s one of the ones I have in there, so I’ll get that.”

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Sarah Book follows the narrator, Scott McClanahan, as he fails to accept the disintegration of his marriage and the imminence of his divorce. Book Scott says he would have been different had he known how things would have turned out and that after the divorce, “there’s no new path, no revelation.” He also wishes people would “stop turning the page.” It doesn’t however sink in regret or nostalgia. Do you think those can be bad for fiction?

That book went through a lot of changes, a lot of different drafts. Gian and I lied about that book so much over the years that it’s hard to figure out or look back on it. I haven’t read it in years. The way that we frame stories today feels so false to me. So many novels that I read now feel like the author’s pitching for a TV show and you can immediately understand the motivation. The character oftentimes tells you what they want within the first couple of pages. Then you get to Chapter 2 and that’s the flashback, then you meet the narrator at the present in Chapter 3. In a long way of not answering your question, I think nostalgia and regret are important. They’re what our lives are swirling around. So, I was aware of that. And I think it was Tyrant Books’ trepidation in trying to publish The Sarah Book. Who wants to read this? This is stupid, right?

How deliberate were those choices?

Completely deliberate. That book was raked. That’s my editing process. I have this big manuscript and I start raking away and keep pulling back as much as I can. If you pull back from things as much as you can those emotions will still be there. The reader will still understand. Even the regret thing. He [Book Scott] is watching Tokyo Story. He’s miserable, drunk, watching foreign films by himself. The truth is, that’s not the way you would behave. Your wife dies, you’re only feeling that way because she’s gone. If she was back again, you’d be back to being human and finding new things to complain about and new things to disappoint you.

You mentioned the book went through several stages of editing. Have you ever read the final version from start to finish?

I did. I did the audiobook myself. So, I read it all the way through then and then I read it again a few years ago. I was having a little existential crisis in 2019, so I read all my work and I was like yeah I’m good!

Writers always say oh it could have been better. This is what I’d change. I was like no, these things are perfect. But all writers are different. I’m different. I always spend the last year [before finalising a manuscript] reading the book from start to finish. I go through it and I edit as I go along. When I get to the end I go through it again, reading it out loud, changing things. My wife just finished up a short story collection. She said, I’m at the end where I’m changing a couple of words here and there, then I’m changing them back the next day. I could do that for years. That’s not my endpoint. But maybe it would cause me a lot less pain and sorrow if it was my endpoint. You charge this language object with yourself, your spirit. It sounds new age-y but that’s the reason why great books are great books. Not that my book is, but that’s the reason why a Tolstoy or Proust [is a great book]. Those fucking things are charged with them. You can tell at the end that it was an extension of themselves. They may even have believed that the extension of themselves was more real than what they were and the flesh earth-suit they were inhabiting.

What brought on the existential crisis you referred to earlier?

A new book. It’s a similar process to marriages and divorces and breakups. I’m sure you’ve had breakups. Being a writer is like that every two years. You have to break up with that last book and talk a lot of shit about that last book, so you can move on to the next one, to the new one that’s exciting at that point. I was feeling stuck. Most writing questions are spiritual questions. They’re about your soul, about how you view the world, so that was what I was facing. I spent all these years trying to create this first person voice. The Sarah Book taught me that by the end Scott’s no longer Scott. He’s putting on another person’s clothes, putting on make up. He’s someone else. I can barely read first person fiction now. It used to be the opposite.

Are you over them because there’s been a massive explosion of these books in recent years?

Maybe. I think first person is difficult. When I was starting out it was the third person stuff that was hard. You’d see contemporaries who had written quality literary fiction with a capital L oh, they’re putting out a first person book that appears to be about their personal experiences. I’ve just always been out of time. I’m always coming into things backwards. Or sideways. That was what I was attempting in 2007 or 2008. Now the landscape is that and I haven’t been interested in it for years.

It might be the first person voice. I’ve got less Maoist in my reading. I had parameters, a way for me to burn half of a library down without having to worry about it. I could just concentrate on these particular books. I think I was a better reader when I was 22-23 than I was at 32-33 and writing the books I ended up writing. In the last two years, I feel like I’ve become young again. I don’t really read my contemporaries anymore. I still read friends’ books when they send them my way.

I went through a period about three years ago where I read Icelandic sagas. Their third person narrators are incredibly limited, they’re just describing the action of a character rather than entering into the character’s psychology. It almost feels like somebody’s listing down the events of a family or genealogy. I found the idea of why this is moving me on an emotional level rather than a first person narrator fascinating. It’s so easy to manipulate people [with a first person narrator] if you know how to do it. If you have a little bit of the con man. But it’s so difficult to do, it can go astray quickly.

I remember at the time the book was first published it was referred to as a ‘divorce book’. I’d describe it as a book about love and loss and being resilient as you go through the motions of loss. Sarah believes one thing, Scott believes something else. She has moved on, whereas he hasn’t. Do you think the reason Scott fails to move on is because he has failed to dream up a new story for himself?

Yes, exactly. Love and loss. But also storytelling. The way we narrate stories. Even within that book you have those weird third person sections that exist before Scott shows up. There’s this line from Proust, I think it’s from the first or the second book of In Search of Lost Time, where he says, all personality is social construction. It’s a phrase he has after a semicolon embedded within a sentence. I was fascinated by that idea when I was writing that book. We understand ourselves through others. If you remove that person that you understood yourself through, who are you? That was the tension I was interested in with that book. Oftentimes the way we construct our personalities is by telling stories about ourselves. I’ve told stories about Scott. It’s just a story that I created and latched onto rather than having any sort of reality to deal with. Scott was probably much more miserable, much more depressed. He probably wasn’t as manic. But there’s very few ways to make somebody who’s depressed interesting to a reader and to make it pop off the page and that’s someone who’s denying how depressed they are. That’s what I did with Scott.

As with the rest of your fiction, The Sarah Book is set in your home state West Virginia. How do you feel about it? Is this where you draw the surrealistic elements of your work from?

It’s been incredibly important to me, but places are only important because people are there. There’s a Michelangelo Antonioni quote, where he’s driving down an Italian road and there’s all these beautiful mountains. He’s with his beautiful wife or whoever and she’s like look at how beautiful the mountains are. He’s like they’re ugly and points to these abandoned factories and says they’re beautiful because people were there. I’ve always felt that way about West Virginia. The things that are happening in the rest of the world right now, such as environmental decline, West Virginia has been dealing with that for 100 years. There’s the George Bernard Shaw joke, where do you want to be when the world ends to which he responded Ireland, because we’re always 50 years behind the times. I’ve felt that way about West Virginia to an extent, but I’ve also felt this sort of foreshadowing of what’s to come for everyone else. People are now trapped in their little workspaces feeling incredibly claustrophobic. If you were working in the coal mines 100 years ago you knew that feeling.

Things still happen here, but I don’t know if I recognise them. It’s important that you have someone who recognises them. We came home a couple weekends ago and somebody had shot a bullet through our back window. It went through this room, which is where I write, past the bathroom over there and lodged in the doorframe. Something unusual is always happening. I called the cops and filed a police report. They were like yeah, somebody shot a bullet in your house. I’m thinking, what are you gonna do about it? He’s like, I don’t know, so I told him, the first thing I would do is follow the trajectory of the bullet. Go over to those houses and see if anybody shot a gun. We were gone Friday and Saturday night, that’s your timeframe. Things like that are always happening and I’m always aware of them. I’ve been worried though as I’m getting older about my capacity for stories. Sometimes I worry that I can’t even tell a story like I used to and I wonder, am I noticing things in the way that I once did? I believe I still am, but it’s one of my worries that I will lose that ability to recognise a story. I love the place. But I hate it too.

You’ve actually stuck with it too. You’re still there.

I am still there. I don’t know how long that will last. I always make the joke, it’s the dream for writers to just go off somewhere, win an award, get a better life. I don’t know. Could you imagine William Faulkner out of Mississippi? He decides he’ll move to New York. That’s so stupid, who would do that? He has all this universe surrounding him. There’s the story about Faulkner being invited to the White House. They called him in Mississippi, the President has invited you to the White House for dinner. Can we expect you? Faulkner just said no. I’m not gonna go all that distance just to have dinner with somebody. That’s how I feel about the rest of the world.

The book is punctured with photographs that have a disorienting effect. They slow down the narrative. Why did you choose to include these and why did you choose these sections of the book to include photographs in?

I don't know. This is the problem with writers. They try to sound intelligent about things that they weren't even thinking about. So much of this is instinctual.

I’ve always loved books with pictures. We have a long tradition of the novel that was illustrated. Would Charles Dickens be Charles Dickens without the illustrations? Probably not. And then there’s the Sebaldian idea and this newer tradition of putting pictures in books, which I love, like Ben Lerner. But now that you ask that question, yeah it’s fucking weird that those were the pictures I chose. There's the picture of me, where I'm doing, I think it's described as a double thumbs up, but in the picture it’s a single thumbs up. It’s not even connected to what’s being told to you in the text!

I had to fight for those pictures. There were a few more. The way that Gian and I worked was always, write something, get in a fight, don’t talk for a while, then get back to talking and then some parts would get trimmed and some would stay. He would allow something to happen for my sake and I would allow something to happen for his. I think he hated the pictures right up until the book’s publication. Because they were grainy. You can still see it though. It’s a bit blurry, so you have to look a bit closer, but the amateurishness of the photograph has a particular point within the book itself. I have all that Grover stuff at the end. I thought it was neat to turn this into a children’s book. So, you’re this little child and I’m reading to you in a way.

It's kind of fun to think back to those battles with the photographs. It’s what I feel being a music producer is like. We can play it this way and people will still accept it. You just have to trust yourself because it is your work. That’s what’s so shocking to me about the editing process with writers. I didn’t want to do this, but they said that I should do it. Your name’s on the book! It’s your ass out there on the line. Most fiction feels so fucking fake. It doesn’t feel like the person cares about it, it feels like the book contract is more important than the imaginative effect.

The book at times reads as a monologue to be performed in front of an audience. How much of that was based on your readings from back in the day?

I haven’t done readings for a long time, even before COVID. I was fucked up when I would do those readings and it wouldn’t be just the day of. I would be fucked up for a month before. I’d buy toy rings and marry the audience. One time I went around and put rings on everyone’s fingers and I did my magic trick that I got from a Jim Carroll book.

You start out with no one on your side. You just love these books, you love writing. That was how I could differentiate myself from every other person. I could stand in front of somebody because I believed in it an it was real to me. The stories from The Collected Works or even Crapalachia that was my routines or my acts. It was a performance. Weird. Me in front of an audience at some dumb poetry reading. I wanted the reader to have all these emotions. In a lot of fiction, you can close your eyes for a paragraph or two and it doesn’t matter. You’ll still pick up the story. With my stuff, if you miss a paragraph or two you can’t carry on.

The Berliner Ensemble are premiering Sarah Saturday night at the Bertold Brecht theatre. I’ll write something for them in 2022. It’s been strange working with Germans. My books have done well over there, which is strange. I’ve had books translated before, but nothing has ever been successful. For some reason though my work has done well in Germany.

Maybe it's the German search for a soul.

Maybe.

The Sarah Book doesn’t demonise Sarah but crucially it doesn’t romanticise her either. You couldn’t be accused of not writing women well. Among my favourite sentences is, “They went to parties and did mushrooms and fucked boys who had cars and boys who had jobs and they looked up into the sky together and talked about the boyfriends’ beautiful cocks, big beautiful cocks, and Sarah reached up and picked the stars and put them in her pocket still high on mushrooms.” You balanced the narrative between giving Sarah a voice, seeing things from her perspective, and prose through which readers can access how the narrator perceives her. How did you choose which scenes would fall under the former and which under the latter?

In some ways that was just chronology. It was gonna be a lot more of the third person stuff. It’s weird how books work because what I’m doing now with my mom book, it was the plan that I had for The Sarah Book. I begun writing it before we were divorced, so the first person story started to eat the third person story. Pre-Scott were the third person sections, the sections Scott didn’t have access to. Sarah would come home and tell me the craziest stories I’d ever heard in my life. That was just her daily life working as a nurse. I was dealing with the present divorce stuff but also reaching back to the past and had to try and balance those. The narrative had momentum cos I could always come back to that crazy Scott character.

I haven’t thought about that sentence. I married Julia as I was finishing the book. We were hanging out with her friends one night, walking around in New York, and those girls were talking about the beautiful cocks of their lives. They’re talking, I’m listening and observing like I typically do. I just found that fascinating, so I inserted it into The Sarah Book. So much of the Sarah stuff is from other relationships.

I don’t know if you know Emmanuel Carrère, but I read his book The Adversary and an interview with him from The Paris Review, where he was talking about the first person being more ethically true, that we all live these subjective realities. So, it is incredibly dishonest for Truman Capote to enter into the mind of Perry in In Cold Blood, it wouldn’t have been much truer if you got the story from his first person perspective. Of course. Emmanuel wrote a book about a serial killer from a first person perspective, so he’s built this philosophy in order to support his book. I was also thinking, I’m a huge James Boswell fan, huge Life of Samuel Johnson fan, that’s my Shakespeare. Was Samuel Johnson interesting? He seems like a bore after a few hours. Boswell is interesting. The little suck up, fame seeker, gossip monger, that’s who’s fascinating. He presents an autobiography of himself through this biography of another. So I was interested in that as an idea as I was working on the book.

You also balance the dramatic and the comedic in equal measure. One of the funniest scenes in the book is when Sarah mentions that people have all sorts of hallucinations but they’re always God or the devil, never a clerk at the local store. I thought that was brilliant. She also makes an observation on how the world is a hospital and everyone is trapped inside this hospital. How do we break out?

I don't think you do. I think we all leave the hospital in one way. One way that we have for momentary escape is stories. It's literature. It's to inspire. I don't mean necessarily to do good, the moral sort of concept for novels. But to have other people’s stories come out of a story. That’s how I think literature develops. Out of a reaction to a story. When I was 17-18 years old, I wanted to be a writer and I’d read about Ezra Pound or whoever and that was always the dream that you’re going to influence someone in the same way that you’ve been influenced and you’ll be forgotten eventually. 99% of writers are. But then someone else will be influenced and the story of the world will carry on. For our physical bodies, we’re only leaving the hospital in one way. Or maybe we won’t even make it to the hospital. Maybe the rising tides and the drought will get us. We’ll have this conversation in 2040 and see how we’re doing.

In Sarah, you mention that “we're only broken mirrors for one another” and that “we only exist in the stories of others,” but…

…I think it will be the very thing that we’ll do here in a few minutes when we got off this call. I’ll think, was this ok? Did I answer his questions right? Did he like me? You’ll do the same, I imagine. That’s the way that human beings interact. I’ll be going to sleep tonight and I’ll think to myself, fuck, why did I say that, I should have said this. Do you do that at all in your life?

All the time.

Exactly, I don't know if everyone does that though.

One of your questions that I want to get to…sometimes when I start talking about books I contextualise and I hate that, but when you asked about the movie he cries to…this is showing you how drunk I was. My friend and I went and saw Lincoln.

That's what you cried to?

I started crying in the first 30 minutes. It’s awful, right? I love Tony Kushner as a writer, but that's awful. Why did it get to me? Maybe it's all the drunk people that have helped Steven Spielberg to success. My friend stopped going to the movies with me because I would bring my little water bottle of gin and I would cry through Lincoln at all of Daniel Day Lewis’s speeches.

I haven't seen that movie, but that's not what I was expecting at all.

That's the movies we get in West Virgina. Killing Them Softly also got to me. There was something about the James Gandolfini character that made me weep. We saw two movies before he’d had enough and said no more. It was Lincoln on that Night of Apocalypse.

Early on in the book Scott and Sarah have a fight over his porn watching habits and there's a list of very impressive titles. How many of these have you been on yourself?

Probably not as many as on the list because I remember having to do a Google search to find all of these various websites. That was the time when websites existed, instead of the collective websites we’ve got now where all the videos are uploaded to. I was a big porn watcher. I don’t know if I am as much anymore.

I think people should go back to buying dirty magazines. That's more romantic.

Yeah and I can remember the reason why I put it in the book. I just found that fascinating, the sexual morays of 2012, where the person saying this is totally fine, this is totally normal that you enjoy these things, but I'm going to make you feel bad about the fact that you’re watching them. And of course, now, sexual shame is social media’s main business.

New age of Puritanism.

You would have never thought that would have happened in 2012, or that we would have come to this point collectively as a culture. My wife and I oftentimes talk about it. If I think back to my childhood, my teenage years, the things that were accepted as the realities of life…certain individuals would have never even made it to the point in time in which they could have been cancelled in today’s culture. We’re even a little past cancellation concepts. It’s weird the way that the culture changes within a few years.

Book Scott mentions that the students he teaches aren’t interested in literature in a real way. They just want to “talk about whether the characters were good people or bad people or whether the writer was a good person or a bad person.” Were the culture wars a reality on your campus when you were writing this?

That's the Scott of 2016 revising and placing the culture in his students. I sort of felt like literature’s ending, culture’s ending, it’s being replaced by something new and that this might be the last book and the last chance where an honest narrator is going to have an opportunity to perform in front of a readership. In reality, I think I’m starting to see my students catch up to that stuff now. They’re behind the time, which is what happens in West Virginia. All the fads, all the stuff that’s popular, you get them five years later. So that was me putting the social comment into my students’ lives. It was also a critique. What was the hippest thing in 2016? The Great Gatsby’s evil or whatever. Those people don’t care. You can’t even get them to have any sort of emotion towards a text.

We’re having this conversation, we think of this as antiseptic and modern, but these computers are attached to a hard drive somewhere which is attached to a network plugged in somewhere running off fossil fuels. Our cell phones that we’ve been emailing one another on have screens made out of a particular element that is mined, probably by children somewhere in Africa. I don’t know if we can grapple with those things anymore. It seems like the culture’s had a nervous breakdown over the reality of modern life.

You've been part of the indie scene. Your readings from back in the day have become mythic. You've influenced all sorts of writers. You've been profiled in the Rolling Stone. You've been called voice of your generation. You've got a huge gay fan base. How do you feel about it all?

Oh good, that's what I've always dreamed of to be honest with you. The people who make culture!

Someone I know described you as a sex icon.

I’ve gotten older though. I’m aging out of that unfortunately. Most of the pictures online reach up to about 2018.

It's so strange. You want all of these things and you feel like they’ll do something for you. I still feel as awful as I did when I was 28 or 18 or 11. I still feel as anxious. I'm a better person now and I've worked really hard on that. I'm a good husband now and I’m a good father and it took a long time because I was dealing with mental health stuff that I just didn't know about. You don't want to be that person where it's like oh, a Rolling Stone profile will make me feel great about myself. But I was that person to an extent. By the point in time when those things started happening, it was no longer as important to me as it once was. It’s like human being 101, you’ll continually be disappointed by whatever occurs. If you had told the 18 year old Scott who felt so alone and isolated, he’s discovering John Genet, but doesn’t have anybody who he can talk to about Genet or whomever, if you had told him the things that you just told me, it would have blown his fucking mind. And he wouldn't have believed it was true.

Now as an adult, I have these books translated in Germany. But I don’t know if they get it. I don’t know if they’re really seeing what I was trying to do. Never treasures on Earth, always treasures in heaven. Your heaven is the person sitting next to you or the person sitting in front of you and how you treat that person and how much you try to entertain that person with the stories that you tell. When you're a writer, and you probably know this too, you have to take a sword to that stuff and you have to keep trying to change and be different or you’ll get trapped. You have to shut the door on those things. That’s what The Sarah Book’s about. It's people projecting onto something that probably wasn't all that real to begin with or it was much smaller than you could imagine.

In 2012, when Tyrant Books and I were trying to put these books out, nobody cared. Thank you for saying those things that make me feel really good on a Friday afternoon.

We were hanging out with some of our friends, Megan Boyle and Jordan Castro, a few weeks ago and we were talking about how much we love to drink water. How disappointing must that be to a kid in NYC or somewhere else. They’re sitting around talking about drinking water? What has happened? It's like Wordsworth, the person who's gonna tear everything down. What does he wind up? He winds up a Conservative at the end of his life, receiving medals for poetry that he wrote when he was radical, when he was a younger person. That's the story of life and it's probably the story that has happened to me too.

Nico Walker was super kind with Cherry. Ocean Vuong has done me a world of good by saying that Crapalachia was an important book for him. Readerships are these little lanes and you're always trying to get into other lanes so that you can get more readers. Writers are nothing without readers, so it's been wonderful for me. You want your book to bounce up against these other books. So yeah, it means a lot to me. I love those writers. There’s nothing better than a young writer who emails you. You say thank you and they send another email with a story they’ve written. And no matter what you say, they’ll always be disappointed. Fuck you Scott McClanahan! I remember sending stories to poet Maggie Estep. She’s since passed away. I sent stories to JT Leroy before we found out who JT Leroy was and Laura was super kind. I’ve been on that same boat. You gotta get that shit out there, people need to read it. And that’s one of the ways that you do it. The history of literature is just a history of friends and other people who meet one another and say hey, check this out.

Does your agent know you agreed to an interview that will be titled Scott Mcclanahan is a hot mess?

Yeah, she wouldn’t care. But that’s because I don’t care.

Next up on Hot Mess: Gabriel Smith

Expat Press’ ethicist Scott Litts was alone in keeping it cool as the Sean Thor Conroe / Sam Pink disaster erupted, resulting in the only considered and sober analysis of the situation so far. 

Pink’s blast, landing mid-month on Neutral Spaces, sought to set the record straight on the issue of Conroe’s authenticity, or more appropriately lack thereof. I cannot comment on how authentic Fuccboi is as I haven’t read it, but both Pink’s ridiculously long statement and Conroe’s excerpted emails in it, which give off an air of guilt, suggest there is high probability of significant stylistic similarities across both of their work and that there’s an interesting conversation to be had on the question of authenticity. Litts’ essay covers this terrain and does so with eloquence and a degree of neutrality that even seasoned critics struggle with.

Would we be having this conversation at all if a $200k advance from Little, Brown wasn’t in this mix? I’m guessing no [though I love to be proven wrong!], so the conversation naturally progresses to questions of power, privilege and money [also the insincere sentiment of “not doing it for the money” but that’s a conversation in and of itself]. Who’s granted access to the high circles of publishing and lands advances that can enable greater freedom, artistically but most of all materially? We all know the game is rigged. The publishing world is embarrassingly middle class and by default excludes certain stories and styles. This isn’t news, but perhaps more writers waiting in the wings for their turn under the spotlight should be angry.

The aggression on Pink’s part however betrays a juvenile jealousy at someone else’s success, even if that success isn’t deserved, even if it is perceived to have been won at someone else’s expense. Perhaps Conroe isn’t as authentic (is it the prose that’s inauthentic or the writer himself? Is his crime engaging with ideas and styles that do not reflect his reality [I have no idea what Fuccboi is about and Pink’s blast hasn’t clarified frankly]? Or that he’s creating an autobiographical narrative/persona that’s factually incorrect?). Perhaps Fuccboi isn’t good. That will be determined upon publication. But if it is bad, why go through with this takedown at all?

“Everything is a broken reflection of what came before it,” I recently said to a new friend when we spoke about the controversy, not because I felt I had to stand up for Conroe, but because if we were to take the purity of authenticity to its ultimate, extreme conclusion there’d be no books to publish. Do I really need to write a book about sex when the Henry Millers of the world did it? Do I really need to write about my life when Anais Nin did it? Why am I as a Greek man writing at all? My distant ancestors wrote beautiful words whose shadow I will never be able to step out of. Maybe we should all just quit writing and work in finance. Then the issue of money at the very least would be resolved.

Kyle Beachy, in his interview with The Rumpus, feels relevant here: “One difficulty of writing is that it’s tempting to see ourselves as always potentially failing. Way too often the matter of failure or success is something we subcontract out to a third party—workshop, agent, publishing house—who pass judgment based on tastes and interests that are usually different and sometimes directly opposed to our own. This, at a basic level, is stupid and confusing and alienating.”

Success and failure are central preoccupations in Pink’s missive, as is fame. “Sean has always wanted to be a famous writer,” he writes, but was unwilling to do the work, opting instead to copy someone else. He writes about wanting to be famous in Fuccboi, in which according to Pink, he even tries to leverage a romantic relationship to land a deal. In Pink’s blast, Conroe’s presented as an ambitious schemer who’ll stop at nothing and will exploit everything and everyone to guarantee success and fame. Perhaps that’s true.

But a $200k advance doesn’t make a career. Years of publishing work and having a direct influence on young writers do. You could choose to be angry, or you could choose to be flattered. Perhaps Pink is, secretly or subconsciously, and this is him grappling with it all, almost as if he’s grappling with his newfound fame by proxy without relinquishing his indie authenticity.

So, the real question is, is it plagiarism? Or a more ethereal stylistic thievery, a vibe steal of sorts? If it’s the latter, do we need better methods of safeguarding art against future offenders?

I believe that Sam Pink believes Conroe has ripped off his style. I believe Conroe believes it too. But these are just beliefs, not absolutes. Perhaps I’ll find out once the book comes out. My point is, authentic or not, keep writing, then let the works speak for themselves.

Sally Rooney wants the conversation to circle back to books. “I want to live in a culture where people are making art,” she said in one of two profiles this month (kudos to the PR who bypassed the exclusive), “even as everything else falls apart.” It’s a beautiful sentiment in two otherwise next level dull pieces decrying living in the aftermath of crossover success and stratospheric fame, reserved for only a small number of writers in any one generation. Not to say that she seems insincere when expressing that fame has been “hell.” She comes across unrehearsed, genuine. She doesn’t believe it is graceless to complain about fame. “People who intentionally become famous – I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it – are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill,” she writes in her new book. I hate that I agree.

The Museum of Literature Ireland launched its Writer Presents podcast with Claire-Louise Bennett, whose Checkout 19 arrived the day I began writing this column. Holly Connolly and Zsofia Paulikovics are bringing writers’ diaries to the public with Three Month Fever (no one has written about having sex yet). The chicest of all, bad bitch Philippa Snow obviously makes an appearance, her contribution making it crystal clear how prolific she is in her engagement with the highest forms of art all the way down to posts on IG [which reminds me I haven’t seen The Young Pope yet, wtf]. She stands firm on her assessment of the new Gossip Girl and reflects on the new Paris Hilton adventure, which she also wrote about for ArtReview [performance art, darling!]. Elsewhere, a French film leads her to vouch that she has never been propositioned by an artist in exchange for coverage, citing “it is possible that I have not been going to the right gallery openings.” Paris is calling!

Books by Penguin Random House, outfits by Prada

Emma Cline and Ottessa Moshfegh (shot by total babe Jordan Wolfson no less) landed the Vogue Italia cover, injecting some needed fun into this whole business of books. You’d expect me to have something incendiary to say, but they look hot, soz.

Adam Cook of Long Voyage Home reviewed Leos Carax’s return with Annette, a tale of “narcissism, insecurity, and self hatred, expressing anxieties around partnerships, creation, success, and fatherhood, as well as the role of art and the artist in our contemporary culture.” What place exists for the artist in a world that’s been radically commodified and utterly corrupted? “Whatever connections to the sacred that existed are severed,” states Cook, analysing the film by considering its grappling with ideas of beauty and abjection and their interconnection. Bonus points for mentioning we got a scene of Marion Cotillard getting head to look forward to. 10/10

Paul Dalla Rosa announced his foray into Substack with Bad Artist Statements, promising “disembodied” interviews with writers and artists from Melbourne and across the world. He was wasted for the first one, so this will be fun. Jared Richards filed his review of The Scary Of Sixty-First, which he sees as sharing Red Scare’s aesthetic and artistic pulse, describing it as “a grab bag of references,” echoing other reviews about the film’s mixed influences. Gabriel Smith forced the Gawker editor in chief to issue a disclaimer that he isn’t fiction editor at the sewer fest.

n+1 reviewed the contemporary book review (slightly psychotic). Document Journal was just embarrassing. i-D did right by Dirty Magazine, christening it “New York's horny new fashion publication.” Co-founders Ripley Soprano and Magdalena Galen were interviewed about their print-only mag that took root as an idea at hooker laureate Rachel Rabbit White’s sex/book parties and took off in the aftermath of the plague. The first Dirty party was, it turns out, the one Cat Marnell referred to in The Drunken Canal. Soprano and Galen mention to i-D that since then “every party has gotten bigger and wilder.” A subscription to the mag comes with VIP invites to just these events along with access to an encrypted Signal chat room. And as for the publication’s future, the duo are dreaming big: “a hotel with a porn theatre in the basement.” Filling in the cigarette boy job application.

In her interview with The Creative Independent, Elle Nash (who just landed a UK publisher) professes her fascination with all elements of sexuality and the psychology of violence. Sex, to Nash, acts as a catalyst to structuring a human life. Writing about sex then becomes an exercise in understanding human motivation. She’s unafraid of the jarring experiences she writes about, which is perhaps why she sees books as the domain of the obscene. You couldn’t pull off some things with film, but books? They’re the domain of artistic freedom, less chained to limitations imposed by morality. [Is this indirectly unconsciously suggesting that film is the medium that’s popular and therefore needs to conform more to what a majority considers decent? Whereas books are esoteric and therefore the medium that can be perverted to the author’s content? Are books a truer reflection of the human psyche then? “What does it take for a person to begin to break so many boundaries that they then find it completely morally okay to hurt another person?”].

On Thick Skin, Blake Butler reflects on his reviewers and a decade of “don’t get it.” Readers, he believes, come to books predetermined, full of conceptions, so when they inevitably place their own principles on someone else’s work, it’s over [for the hoe who wrote the book]. It’s even more pressing with his work, which is dependent on the reader’s consciousness [he doesn’t elaborate on what books he perceives to be free of this rule]. He considers every interpretation of art as truthful, but defends incoherence, seemingly the criticism levelled at his work. “Do people not read poetry? Do we really need to imagine that everything must be spelled out somewhere to contain truth?” Can Britney save us? Can we be saved? Elsewhere, he thinks back to his days at an MFA, where he “craved someone ripping me apart, challenging my ideas so I could see what they really meant to me.”

Boris Johnson won’t be happy when he finds out Oliver Zarandi went on Left the Hose On. “You got the movie version, we got the straight-to-DVD version of Donald Trump,” he says of the British PM. He recollects about running Funhouse, one of the few cool UK websites of the previous decade and how it bridged him with writers he’s since become friends with in the US. Unsurprising then that he considers Jon Lindsey’s Body High as “so fucking good,” joining the ever increasing harmony of writers taking a stand against MFA writing, far more prevalent stateside: “Give me something disgraceful.” Zarandi’s ready to get back out to the world, so I guess look out for pics of me and him looking dishevelled at a Clapton bar.

Huw Lemmey reminisced about a crush on Utopian Drivel, scenes of riding a moped, the sacred communion before the act. “We could barely speak to each other, and so we fucked, and I imagined what he was saying and I dare say he did the same.” Interspersed between the fragmented recollection is an exploration of the gay male realist and his evolution to confessional autofiction. Lemmey thinks of a crush as a “fictionalisation of yourself” the you you’d wanna fuck, “an autofiction of self-desire.” Was autofiction nothing but a drive to create a version of yourself you perceive as more fuckable?

Dean Kissick escaped New York for the first time in a year and a half and took inventory of what happened in between for Spike. He believes writing has flourished, citing The Drift, Heavy Traffic and Manhattan Art Review among other projects that launched or took off during this time, along with the renaissance of blogging via Substack. “It’s hard to overstate how many of us don’t like going to work,” he reflects and considers Leave Society as “a bigger cultural event than any recent exhibition.”

Kanye West dropped Donda (no thoughts, head empty, haven’t listened yet) sending everyone into a frenzy I haven’t observed over a music release before.

Azealia Banks ripped Webster Hall apart, while others like me and Suki Waterhouse watched the videos as they were fed through on IG wishing we were there.