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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for being with us, guys and gals.

- Rhyme Henry Davis
- Daniel Gavilovski
- Jace Shugden

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Carbon Pages is out TODAY. On the last day of February and at the hopeful end of this long and miserable winter, we release ’s Carbon Pages into your hands.

Carbon Pages contains 3 plays. These works straddle many genres (horror, political thriller, sitcom) and periods (the 2020s, the 1950s, the 1970s and 90s), but all of it is clearly the product of a singular vision. Whether the characters are invading Kazakhstan, being eaten by monsters, or selling counterfeit art, every word, every character, and every stage direction is undeniably Daniel Gavilovski’s.

Daniel’s book has been a labor. For him, of course, as the author. For the artist (who is apparently quite famous), for the editors, for the formatters, for the marketers, for the beta readers. And now the work is out. No more teasing; it’s here, and we’re ALL about to read it. The reviews will come in, and they’ll be tremendous. Everyone will post little vanity shots on their social media “feeds”. The world will stop until we drop again.

carbonpages.ink

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Thank you, seriously, to everyone who preordered. We haven’t done a cycle like this before; it was very confusing and very expensive, and most of the time all we ever felt was impotent. But Daniel got to see the number 15 next to the thumbnail image of his book, and I believe that made him feel nice.

We at Unreal Press would like to also thank everyone for their participation in this ARG we’ve been running for the last 30 days, where we produce highly attractive and clickworthy articles about broadly interesting topics. Henceforth, Unreal will return to its regularly scheduled programming, which is no programming at all.

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Jace Shugden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BLUE SUIT: Too right.

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

BLUE SUIT: Do you know where you are?

YOUNG MAN: Yes.

BLUE SUIT: Where do you think you are?

YOUNG MAN: In the KGB.

BLUE SUIT: What is your name?

YOUNG MAN: Igor.

BLUE SUIT: Patronymic?

YOUNG MAN: Fyodorvich.

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

YOUNG MAN: No.

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

YOUNG MAN: No.

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

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

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

YOUNG MAN: Studying.

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

YOUNG MAN: I don’t know.

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

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

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

YOUNG MAN: Yes.

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

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

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

YOUNG MAN: No.

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

YOUNG MAN: No, I—

BLUE SUIT: You run this outfit.

YOUNG MAN: No I...don’t.

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

YOUNG MAN: Just fake it.

BLUE SUIT: The State Security Committee fakes nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

IGOR LETOV: Lady—

PUDGY NURSE: —Who, me?

IGOR LETOV: When—

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

IGOR LETOV: I didn’t mean—

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

IGOR LETOV: I’m sorry.

PUDGY NURSE: Have a seat.

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

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

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

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

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

There’s some sort of public service announcement playing:

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

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

VOICE: Hey.

IGOR LETOV: What?

VOICE: Can you lend a smoke?

IGOR LETOV: Me?

VOICE: You. What room are you in?

IGOR LETOV: Down there on the left.

VOICE: You’re with the chronic masturbator?

IGOR LETOV: I don’t know.

VOICE: What’s your name?

IGOR LETOV: Igor.

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

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

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

They sit by the windows.

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

IGOR LETOV: They have a library.

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

IGOR LETOV: How long have you been here?

ALEXANDER: I don’t count anymore.

IGOR LETOV: Why are you in?

ALEXANDER: On account of my insanity.

IGOR LETOV: I got nabbed for 8-tracks.

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

IGOR LETOV: Fuck them.

Alexander hoists up to sit on the window sill.

ALEXANDER: What is an 8-track?

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

ALEXANDER: They always are.

IGOR LETOV: Yeah?

ALEXANDER: They always will be.

IGOR LETOV: For sure.

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

IGOR LETOV: Maybe loafers that aren’t shit.

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

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

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

ALEXANDER: Yes, I’ve read their magazine.

IGOR LETOV: Want to hear a song?

ALEXANDER: From The Rolling Stones?

IGOR LETOV: No from me.

ALEXANDER: Okay.

IGOR LETOV: It’s a romance.

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

IGOR LETOV: Don’t need no guitar.

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

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

And he belts this ballad with a puffed chest:

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

My holy Motherland straightens her back
Our wrathful power moves mountains

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

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

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

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

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

ALEXANDER: The guards here are no fun.

IGOR LETOV: Are you scared?

ALEXANDER: Of what—this place?

IGOR LETOV: Yeah, of this place.

ALEXANDER: I think of it as a sanatorium.

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

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

ALEXANDER: Right.

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

ALEXANDER: Sure.

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

The nurse calls out for Dugin:

NURSE: Alexander Dugin? Your father is here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second thought;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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As of today, ’s Carbon Pages is available for pre-order in hardcover and eBook formats. It’s a fantastic work, and as you’ll soon read, it speaks for itself. Regardless, we put this very cool website together for your enjoyment. We think it transmits the vibe. Below is a short excerpt from COGNITOHAZARD. Enjoy!

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COGNITOHAZARD


Epigraph
COGNITOHAZARD, noun. an image, signal or idea that refuses to leave the mind and causes psychic harm upon being known.

As plays Lo Strano Vizio Della Signora Wardh–Seq. 8

A sparsely decorated post-war Italian bordello. In the foyer there is a till stand and seats and a Cupid sculpture.

With his legs crossed is a customer. The customer is a man in his mid-60s, wearing a clean three-piece. He’s waiting around, reading a newspaper. Playing faintly is Françoise Hardy’s Italian cover of J’suis D’accord. Being frank, it’s not very good.

A fat tabby cat brushes up sensuously against the client’s legs. For a moment he puts down his paper and strokes the fat cat’s spine.

Enters Madame Mandelstam. Mandelstam is in her 50s, tall, elegantly dressed and with class.

MANDELSTAM: Don’t touch that thing, Rico.

CUSTOMER: Mandie!

MANDELSTAM: Who knows where it’s been—it’s Lola’s stray.

CUSTOMER: Me and him have a lot in common.

MANDELSTAM: How are you, Rico?

CUSTOMER: My back’s aching, and my left leg is stiff as a doorpost, I must’ve fallen asleep on it.

MANDELSTAM: You should take better care of yourself, or you’ll end up like your brother.

CUSTOMER: You’re telling me.

Rico has a real bowler hat kind of accent.

MANDELSTAM: You’re not getting any younger!

CUSTOMER: Don’t I know it. You know what I read just now? Brother and sister beheaded by father in freak accident. They’d fallen asleep under a hay bale together. Then their father comes in with a pitchfork. A single fork ... and ...! (pause)... Think how they must’ve been lying for it to take one skewer.

MANDELSTAM: Lord, Rico.

CUSTOMER: In Abruzzo it happened!

MANDELSTAM: You really should cut down on reading the papers, you know that?

CUSTOMER: It would do you some good.

MANDELSTAM: Would it now?

CUSTOMER: (joking) You might be in them one of these days.

MANDELSTAM: (catching his drift) Really?

CUSTOMER: Have you heard about this business of shutting down the maisons?

MANDELSTAM: Have I heard of it? It’s all the girls ever talk about.

CUSTOMER: That bloody bitch. Some minister. Hives of disease and degeneracy she’s calling them.

MANDELSTAM: Oh stop it.

CUSTOMER: I’d like to show her some disease and degeneracy alright.

MANDELSTAM: Well ...

CUSTOMER: Not in that way.

MANDELSTAM: I worry about the girls, you know. Without this place, where will they go? Feels like forever they’ve been here—they’re ... family. Will they be on the streets, pushing punts neath the railway bridge?

CUSTOMER: They could get proper jobs. Work at a toll booth?

MANDELSTAM: No, they’re too dense for that.

Our client smirks.
Mandelstam doesn’t surrender.

MANDELSTAM: (dead serious) They couldn’t tie their shoes without me around.

CUSTOMER: (moving in closer, sophisticated) And what about you, my dear? What will you do if our dear minister gets her way? Will you move to Austria, or perhaps the sands of Argentina, where the oldest profession is given the respect it has so rightfully grown over the years like a gorgeous sunflower over the ash of a doomed Pompeii?

MANDELSTAM: I’d do what I always do, Rico. Add numbers and push pencils. I’d be in accounting.

CUSTOMER: (closer) Madame ...

Madame reciprocates. Cautiously.

MANDELSTAM: You know how long it’s been since I’ve had a night off, kicked off my shoes-watched the postman-had a glass of wine, how long since I’ve been caught in a thunderstorm and the warm rain soaking my clothes and sticking to my naked skin and me there not caring, how long since someone’s breath sent goosebumps running down my spine and up and around my legs, to my gullet ...

CUSTOMER: Time makes fools of us all, if only one were to recall just how we drank and danced when we were young. Sometimes I think it is only that which we commit to stories and anecdotes that are true and remembered, only the moments which we whisper in ears are real. Memories borne from nights neath cotton thunder clouds, when we are all hidden from God who is distracted and impotent and we make sweet music and tell deep secrets and sing and tell and sing again in the steaming August hay.

MANDELSTAM: (seductively) ...

CUSTOMER: (clueless) Did you hear about the dead lawyer they found hanging in Gabralzzi’s ...
The waiter didn’t report it. He thought it was a movie prop from the horror shoot that week.

Way to delete all sexual tension. Mandelstam puts some distance. Recalls why it didn’t work out.

MANDELSTAM: No, can’t say I did.

CUSTOMER: Oh I hope my Lola is ready for me, my dear.

MANDELSTAM: Go right ahead. (yelling upstairs) We have a gentleman!

CUSTOMER: Yes, thank you.

Rico paces about waiting. Mandelstam scribbles at her till. Sounds of footsteps running down a stairs.

CUSTOMER: (absent-mindedly) Lola. Ell-Oh-Ell-Ayy: LO-LA. Fire of my loins, love of my groin. My ELL-OH-ELL ... Eh?

Rico turns around and finds downstairs has come not his regular Lola, but some totally other prostitute.

CUSTOMER: You’re not Lola.

MANDELSTAM: Lola’s out. Meet Chichi.

CUSTOMER: (looking her up and down) Oh I can’t complain, can’t complain at all, yes. Have we really never met? But my dear is out is she? Is she feeling okay?

MANDELSTAM: She better not be.

CUSTOMER: Chichi is it?

Chichi says nothing. Only nods.

CUSTOMER: And ... how long have you been here, Chichi?

Silently she mimes SIX fingers.

CUSTOMER: What’s the matter? You’re not Siciliian are you?

MANDELSTAM: Save your breath, Rico, she’s mute.

CUSTOMER: Mute?

MANDELSTAM: Yes she doesn’t speak.

CUSTOMER: She doesn’t or can’t?

MANDELSTAM: I don’t know. We don’t talk much.

CUSTOMER: (to Chichi) Is that true, my dear?

She nods.

CUSTOMER: (to Mandelstam) So. How did that happen? Some kind of accident or ...?

MANDELSTAM: (deadpan) She got sick of silly questions. Now if you don’t mind...

CUSTOMER: Oh yes, yes. Well, I dare say be as quiet as you want. It’s not talking we’ll be doing. And if you’re as experienced as your friend was, it might even be a plus. Good chatting to you Mandie!

MANDELSTAM: Ciao, Rico.

Rico and Chichi “go upstairs” arm in arm.

Mandelstam is deflated, troubles herself with accounts. When the pair is gone, she crosses herself in jest.

Enter Lola, wrapped in a ratty fur coat. She’s frantic, runs in, glances over her shoulder.

MANDELSTAM: Lola! I have a question. Tell me what time it is.

LOLA: Miss-

MANDELSTAM: I’ve seen some things in my time. But THREE HOURS LATE? You know if you keep this up..!

LOLA: Miss, is Krystal in?

MANDELSTAM: Now hold on, young lady, and I don’t want your excuses. And what are you wearing? Get that thing off, you think I’m running a chapel?

LOLA: I’m sorry, Miss, I was just...

MANDELSTAM: Why are you jittery? Have you been drinking? Is it the drugs again?

LOLA: Miss, something really important came up. But I’m here now. Is Krystal in?

MANDELSTAM: You are on something aren’t you? Unlike you, Lola, Krystal has been working all day and filling in for you. We have Fabrizzio coming in today, so if you don’t get your ass upstairs right now and get into shape I’ll have you out on the streets faster than you can say hooplah. Now!

Lola runs upstairs.

Just about to leave the bedroom are Krystal and a client with a red beard.

The bedroom includes a few stools, a bed stand, classical paintings on the wall of nude women and, naturally, a bed. To the left is a door leading out the hall and downstairs. To the right a door into the powder room.

The two have just done the deed, both are giggly but the belle de nuit is clearly pretending for her victim. As they are about to leave enters Lola, almost colliding with the pair.

KRYSTAL: Lola!

LOLA: Krystal!

RED BEARD: Hosea! Are you joining us?

KRYSTAL: (cutesy-dutesy voice) She’s just leaving. Twelve, my sweet. Same time next week?

RED BEARD: You know I count the minutes. I have it marked on my calendar. Dentist appointment, it says. I’ve had thirty-two dentist appointments this year.

Money is exchanged and counted. Krystal’s demeanor switches at the drop of a hat to stern and no-nonsense.

KRYSTAL: A girl comes for you and you don’t tip?

RED BEARD: Oh, sorry. Um. Yes, sorry, Krystal.

He crumples out a note, all flustered, and hands it to her.

KRYSTAL: (back to cutesy) I’m missin’ you, love!

She blows a kiss and the customer leaves. They’re left alone.

KRYSTAL: What’s up with you? You look tired.

Lola locks the door behind her.

KRYSTAL: What are you doing that for, huh? You know I have another boy waiting. And where have you been all day? You know you really fucked over the other girls? You’re shaking—

LOLA: Listen to me! I need to ask you something.

KRYSTAL: I’m listening.

LOLA: You say I fucked over the other girls. Can you tell me their names?

KRYSTAL: What?

LOLA: The other girls working here at the House. Can you name them to me? One by one.

KRYSTAL: (realizing Lola is hopped up) Okay. You. Me. Topaz. And Chichi.

LOLA: That’s it?

KRYSTAL: That’s it. Minus the Miss.

LOLA: So how many girls is that?

KRYSTAL: Are you on the stuff again?

LOLA: Just tell me.

KRYSTAL: One, Two, Three ... Four.

LOLA: But that don’t make sense.

KRYSTAL: Why doesn’t it make sense.

LOLA: I must be going crazy or something. But ... Did you stay over at my place last night?

KRYSTAL: Say again?

LOLA: After work, did you go to my place and spend the night there?

KRYSTAL: If you’re asking whether we had a sleepover, then I’m telling you no.

LOLA: You’re sure?

KRYSTAL: Yes.

LOLA: Are you sure you’re sure? Maybe you’re not remembering right?

KRYSTAL: (insinuative...) I remember where I end up each night.

LOLA: Well tell me.

KRYSTAL: Tell you? My last client of the night was a sailor cripple. His cazzo was blown off so he just wanted me to whisper his ear with the lights turned off. After an hour of it he refused to pay, before finally admitting he hasn’t a penny.

I walked home. My left heel broke on the cobblestone on Via Mazzoni. At home I had some English gin and a vogue. Then I went to bed—alone. And in the morning I woke up—in my own bed—alone. Happy now?

LOLA: Then I don’t understand.

KRYSTAL: What don’t you understand? You hold us all up for three hours, barge in while I’m with a boy, you’re sweaty, pink, look like you haven’t slept all night. Then you start interrogating me.

Lola paces around the room. Heads in the bathroom.

LOLA: Maybe it was someone else. But why would I let anyone else in ... I can’t think. Can I close this window? It’s freezing.

KRYSTAL: (asserting) You think you slept with someone.

Lola closes the window.

LOLA: Not slept, exactly. But I just have a hunch ... that someone was in the place with me.

KRYSTAL: You probably took someone home. You drank too much. Wouldn’t be the first time. Now look, Lola, I have a boy waiting for me—

LOLA: I didn’t drink nothing. I didn’t have a single drink.

KRYSTAL: Then you took a digestif. Now please ...

Lola blocks the exit.

LOLA: I don’t take nothing. You know I don’t. And you’re wrong: I remember yesterday totally clearly. I remember some child stuck gum in the keyhole and when I put the key in it didn’t turn at first and I was scared I had taken a wrong key.

I remember the way my sink didn’t drip drip when I turned the tap for a second and I was sure the pipes were clogged again but then it went.

Lola has a tendency to speak in run-on sentences. One gets the impression she forgets her point halfway through any given sentence.

LOLA: I even remember that you didn’t break your left heel last night. Because you didn’t wear heels last night because Mandelstam gave you shit about your height so you’ve worn only flats since Tuesday.

KRYSTAL: (flustered) Okay ... No that’s right. (recalling) So I didn’t have heels. And your memory’s twenty-twenty. So what’s any of this to do with me?

LOLA: So I remember going to bed alone.

KRYSTAL: Okay and?

LOLA: So explain to me this:

From her handbag Lola unearths a clump of newspaper. She unwraps it revealing ...

KRYSTAL: A toothbrush.

LOLA: I found it right next to mine this morning. In its little cup holder thingy. Right next to the brush I always use. Krys, why would I have two toothbrushes?

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

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

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

Sound crazy? It’s not. It’s science.

Prerequisites:

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

Not Prerequisites:

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

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

With that out of the way:

An Interesting Character

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Title

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

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

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

Stuff happening

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compulsive Intent

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

The Exercise:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Plot

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Stop

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

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

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

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

It’s Been Six Months

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

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

Editing Your First Draft

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

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

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

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

Time for Critique

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

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

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

Publishing

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

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

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

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

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

But I digress…

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

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

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

by Jace Shugden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Books

Carbon Pages

Hi folks, we here at Unreal* Press1 are very excited to announce the Unreal* Submission Fee Scholarship. A semiannual competition to find the writer most deserving of having their submission fees covered by the press. This is a great opportunity for broke and/or trepid writers to take advantage of the frankly ludicrous amount of fee required contests offered by literary magazines and university presses.

As a writer myself, I hate submission fees. I go out of my way to never pay for the privilege of having my manuscript junked, or worse, paraded around as a comic anecdote2 . I’d rather blow the three to twenty dollars on scratch offs. But don’t both of these serve the same kind of purpose? For however long it takes for your results to come in3 you get to freely and honestly dream about everything you’ll do with the money/prestige. You trade those few bucks for the right to run away with yourself. But by the time you receive the “Dear submitter,” email, that hopium headrush from months ago barely seems to have even existed. At the end of it, you’ve donated 25 dollars to The Louisiana Review. There is only one way to avoid this awful refractory period; spend somebody else’s money.

If your piece of Flash Fiction, Flash Nonfiction, Fiction, or Creative Nonfiction is deemed the best thing we read, we will cover all of the submission fees accrued in the process of shopping that work around4. The submissions themselves are to be anonymized. Don’t include your name anywhere on the manuscript.

The process is very simple

Subscribe to this Substack

Subscribe now

Fill out this google form

Wait

We will announce the winner in 2-3 months. We’ll release your name, but otherwise keep the details of your submission private, in case publicizing them would violate the rules of whatever competitions you wish to participate in.

Our Books

Carbon Pages

Rhyme Henry Davis, EIC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carbonpages.ink

Carbon Pages is coming soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Authenticity Anchor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In response to

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

We shall do this in three stages:

1. The opposition of his conception of writing in general

2. The opposition of his conception of his own writing

3. The opposition of his conception of myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now to our second stage;

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

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

1. The point being the real

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

3. That the author even wants to write.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And in some level

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

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

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

Being full of shit!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘This is why Laos never colonised anywhere’

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

“Oh, I haven’t done Borneo yet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hai, ba, uống! (Two, three, drink!)

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

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

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

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

‘Buddha finally gets to be a dildo’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Fear and loathing everywhere, all at once’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more from Erie Mitchel at

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey I wonder why I keep mentioning him?

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

Literally his own book on the topic.

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

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

The following quote is from the republic.

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

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

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

There is not.

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

There is absolutely nothing of the kind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quite so.

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

Yes, he said.

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

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

In a word, this man is not your friend!

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

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

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

I will instead, consider your words here:

For the love of God, don’t ask me how I got here. I’ve been asking myself for the past hour. All night? Has it been a week here? Jesus, do you lose your sense of time when you don’t have a phone in your pocket to check. To think I laughed when the Algerian flexed his waterproof watch. The ocean. It’s always terrified me. Always filled my head with dread. Those vast swaths of empty darkness stretched across the abyss. My greatest and only fear before I realized how quickly death can swim up on you. What a moron I am, fearing the deep, trapping myself where else but the bottom of the ocean.

To be fair the surface can’t be that far away. But that’s part of the kicker. Doesn’t matter. Can’t see the surface from here. I’m worried I’ll never see it again. Just a matter of accepting this fate. Or picking which fate to go out on. Rescue though. Living a long fulfilling life. Hell, that wasn’t in the cards before I went on the Aramay.

It’s insane to think just a week ago I was writing my suicide note. Telling everyone it wasn’t their fault. Then redrafting it, blaming the world for making me feel so isolated. Ha! If I knew then what was in store for me. How deep the world really is. I’d just decided on no note all together, let the rotten world wonder for eight minutes before forgetting me, and then that damn text message popped up.

The name of my killer is Elijah DuPont. I knew him in college. Met the semester I took my science elective. Oceanography. Most students were bored out of their mind, you’d almost feel bad for the professor given he knew most of us weren’t going to remember a single piece of trivia from the course. Forgot the guy’s name. Kind of like how I wanted the world to forget me had I taken a swing in the attic. If only I got the chance. No. Just had to get the message from Elijah.

Oceanography taught me to truly fear the deep. People love Finding Nemo but it’s not all coral reef and Bikini Bottom down here. Did you know the majority of the ocean exists in total darkness? In space you’re guided by the stars. You’ve got nothing in the way of navigation down below. In space you can only wonder if there’s life out there. Down here in the dark you can’t see it but you know you’re not alone. Did we ever discover that…

I went into midterms with nightmares. Somehow the rich French student next to me adored the course so much he switched majors. Think he was a communication major before. Imagine what it takes to go from radio to Gyo. Forget switching majors. I should have switched schools. Switched names. Elijah remembered me and for that I’ve paid so terrible a price.

“I’m down for a swim. HBU??” The message came with an attachment. A sizable orange submarine in the harbor of Toulon. Elijah made some dumb joke about Paul McCarttney selling him the thing but he had to paint it from yellow to orange. I don’t remember. Can’t check my phone since that’s out in the water. Don’t think it was waterproof either. Will scientists of the future be able to uncover my life on that funny little device? See the photos of a man on vacation in Spain from another century. Read his final message to his parents, whining how he has a bad feeling, his ears won’t stop popping, and the food sucks. The messages never sent, mind you. Bad reception in the bowels of the ocean.

My sense of time is wrecked right now. Just like that damn submarine. Like I said, I think it was six days ago I was on the edge of taking my own life. But I thought, hey! Not every day a rich ancien régime playboy invites you aboard a multimillion euro party ship. I thought screw it. A call to adventure at my lowest point. People are always saying you need to put yourself out there. So I went ahead and put myself out there in the Atlantic. God. The ocean! I deserve this.

I thought I didn’t have anything to lose. For a man who wanted to die, I’m finding the prospect of death quite terrifying. My depression was rooted in loneliness. Often is, I imagine. It’s not a good feeling waiting for sleep alone at night. You think about how lonely you are. A kick to the head from Mr. Sandman like clockwork. Almost like drowning. The things you think alone in bed. People never shut up about putting yourself out there. You’ll meet a girl! It’ll come naturally!

What in the name of God Almighty is natural about any of this!? How desperate was I before! Oh, I’m not alone anymore, waiting for the sleep that won’t come. I’ve got a girl now. Only took surviving the sinking of a damn submarine. She’s looking at me now. Hasn’t blinked once since I’ve begun writing. My skin crawls. Can’t shake the shivers either. Those black eyes. She is an awful and wretched creature. Perhaps exactly what I feared out beyond the horizon of the unchanging water.

It’s strange to say but those eyes are just as beautiful as they are gut wrenching. I think back to times of emperors and men who claimed the status of gods. Surely they carried the presence of both terror and beauty. That’s what I see in those unblinking eyes. A time when fear and radiance were rolled up in the same package.

Losing focus. Losing my mind! It’s all I’ve got left. I need to explain what happened. Let her stare. Let her whisper. I’ll let you in on the secret of what happened to the Aramay, O scientist of the future.

Elijah DuPont acquired the Aramay, how I don’t know. Not McCarttney. I’m sure wikipedia already has a page on it by now. He wanted to explore the ocean and psychedelics at the same time. The Aramay was pretty damn big. Three floors (decks?). Have to wonder if it used to be military. It fit all his buddies from Toulouse. The Pink Whore as he called home. Elijah was pretty crass. There were some snobby Paris or Milan artists too. Big names I think, I don’t know, couldn’t understand them. The Algerian was multilingual. I spoke a lot with him. Just remembered he was telling me about his two year old daughter. Sad business.

I flew out to Gibraltar to meet up with the party. It’s funny. I was nervous about flying on the way over. You know, it really is the safest way to travel. Oh yeah, that’s right. There was this girl. Maria. South American, maybe Argentinian. She wanted to see the rock so he made that the meeting point. I think Elijah was sweet on her. I remember her being nice. Okay, whatever, I’ll admit it since I’ve got nothing holding me back. I thought she was pretty and I was a little sour seeing Elijah talking with her. I’ve got a girl that’s sweet on me now and I hate it.

We dined at the Rock on the Rock. Good enough food for me. The art snobs couldn’t shut up about how beneath them it was. I don’t speak French mind you but I know the tone of pretentious uppity jerks. After a night of drinking we gathered at the beach. My head was pounding as the early morning tourists swarmed in surprising numbers to get a look of the Aramay. A crowd of a hundred must have filmed our descent. Famous footage that’ll be. Meanwhile that sandy beach and the jagged, white rock overlooking it, behind the purple of the morning sky, is the last I suspect I’ll ever see of the landed world.

At the time I thought of this so-called adventure as an underwater cruise. An opportunity for the art snobs to arrive in New York City in the most obnoxious manner before bitching about the art there. I’ve never been to New York City. God, the places I’ll never visit, the things I’ll never try. All because the trip had to go and test the boundaries of mankind’s domain.

The first two nights were pleasant. Drinks and stories mostly. I actually didn’t mind the view from the dining hall. Such large and round windows into a turquoise world. Sea life brushing by. Sleeping my first time to the sound of whales. Honestly, the worst part was the food. Elijah lacked the foresight to hire a chef and nobody knew how to cook a proper meal. Inside one of Paris’ finest five star restaurants is a chef who doesn’t know how lucky he is.

Maria was quite the sailor as it turned out. It was a delight to hear of her sailing down the Paraná. The name of the river, as I understand it, comes from a native language. ‘Like the Ocean,’ as the translation goes. I disagree. A river isn’t at all like the ocean. So I was pleased for a time to hear of her family’s transport business.

Maria, I discovered also, was quite affluent thanks to this family business. Enough so I suspect she’ll have her own link on the Aramay’s wiki page. I must have the lowest net worth on that damned orange tin can. The poorest in luck too since I’m here and the rest had the good fortune of being fish food. I hate myself. There was a time in my jealous younger years when I would have wished this exact fate on my former compatriots of the Aramay. A time when I’d have cheered the tragic news no doubt dominating the networks until the next great tragedy affecting the elite. Scratch that. No one deserves this sort of end. I’m sorry, scientist of the future. I never said I was a good person.

There was plenty of time to snoop around after settling in. The halls might’ve been a bit cramped, utilizing much compartment space, but there were plenty of them to get lost in. While the others took to figuring out who had the spiked drinks in some ridiculous game far too close to the control deck, my curiosity took me elsewhere. I wanted to see just what kind of vessel it was that I swept myself up in. And so as the submarine sank lower and lower as I dreaded to think about, I likewise took to the stairs going down and down.

Given the sheer size of the Aramay I at first thought it might be a nuclear submarine. It is, of course, illegal for civilians to own such machines. Yet with enough money in your pocket and French in your blood I wondered if I might stumble upon a reactor. Though I am no engineer, I figured out the thing was powered by fuel cells. The bottom deck was lined up with the Aramay’s private arsenal of liquid oxygen tanks. Throw in a splash of hydrogen and I suddenly figured out where the fresh air was coming from. How thick were the walls though when I could hear the laughing upstairs? I remember chuckling at the idea of an underwater pitstop selling hydrogen tanks like propane. Sat alone for a while after that.

Come the third night at sea, I learned this was more than an extravagant outing. There was this cozy lounge I was prone to hoarding at the center of the vessel where there were no windows. I was reading, lost in pages, forgetting where I was. Around me on the curved walls was a small library. Books in French, English, Greek, Latin. None you would find at the airport bookstore either. Such gilded and fantastic covers, each of them. One must have been a month’s pay for me. I was reading a book on sirens from Greek mythology. Those wicked sea witches whose enchanting music lured sailors to their deaths about rocky, shallow shores. It would be accurate to say this entire voyage was one great lure by a siren’s call.

I recall the conversation when Elijah walked in, neon drink in hand. He was with the Algerian, said something in French, then turned to me and said, “Now that you can’t go back, how would you like to know why you’ve traveled five hundred meters beneath the surface of the Atlantic?” Not the best words to hear when you’re reading first hand accounts of ancient shipwrecks.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “I thought going under the water would be a breath of fresh air.” The two at least had the good humor to laugh.

“Funny man, as I remembered.” Elijah made himself comfortable at the other side of the circular sofa. The Algerian didn’t budge a muscle. “Well read too. Enjoying the library? It’s our friend here’s collection.”

“Makes sense. You never were much for books. I helped you study for midterms. And cheat, as I remembered.”

Elijah filled the Aramay with laughter. His pink face was quite the clue to his inebriated state. I wonder now if that’s why he came to tell me what he told me next. “This is the reason I invited you,” he slurred. “I owe you a life debt.” A debt he was keen on reaping I now see. “Contrary to what you might believe, I’ve done some reading. Or rather I’ve had people read for me and summarize the important parts.”

“That is my role in this,” said the Algerian. “I’m a researcher, you see.”

“I’ve spent quite a bit of money on this expedition. Make no mistake. This is no vacation. It is an expedition. There is something beneath the waves this way we delve.”

At first I thought a joke was being played on me. “You waited until now to tell me?” I remember then suddenly thinking of a soldier heading for the shores of Normandy, asking again what it was they were doing.

Elijah poured back the last of his drink. Over half the glass. “I’ve only told you. Not even Maria knows yet. We sail over great and old legends, my friend. Lost relics. Treasure. You were good to me. I wanted you to have your share.”

“My share of what?” I asked.

“Here are the important parts,” the Algerian pulled an indiscreet looking book off one of the shelves.

The book might’ve been a treasure itself. The contents I began to pore over hardly spoke of any otherwise. It was a study on lost Greek texts. Particularly the stuff that went up in smoke at Alexandria. The chapters they wanted me to read were bookmarked. The pages far more worn than the rest of the book wrapped around it.

That night I combed over the account of the sumbarmine’s secret namesake. Aramay. A great serpent said to surround the known world. Back when the known world was a mishmash of upper Africa, a deformed Europe, and a shrunken Asia. I was surprised by the tale told of this black scaled leviathan. Surprised and, of course, nerve wracked. The monster checked off every fear I had of the ocean’s unknown corners. A colossal wyrm of darkness, able to gobble up any seafaring vessel. But I’d never heard of this Aramay otherwise. I considered it strange given I dormed with history nerds and know-it-all philosophy majors alike.

Interestingly, the nasty sea creature appeared in only one record. A comedy of all things. It began with a duel between two captains. Or rather the greatest game of chicken I’ve ever read. Upon knocking the rival captain’s wife into the water at the harbor, he is challenged to sail as far into the endless ocean as possible. The first captain to turn back would be the loser. Amazing how immature man has always been. Of course, presently there was nothing comical about my own situation.

“Stop huddling in your corner. Poor thing. You look like you’re freezing,” she is telling me. I ignore her but she’s still going on. “Come to the water. Please. Once you join me you won’t be so cold.” It’s true that I am freezing but I will not go into the water. Not now. Not ever again. Dear God who has abandoned me, I can’t believe my final swim was for Maria’s sake.

Elijah briefed everyone. He didn’t go into the Comedy of Aramay but he did let slip that we were situated over what was believed to be a sunken island and maybe a lost city while we’re at it. Sounds familiar but we’re not anywhere close to where anyone expected Atlantis to be. Screw it. Maybe this is Atlantis. How disappointing. I bet it is now. It’s like how you’d expect Machu Picchu to be this fabulous ancient ruin but it’s just rubble sitting on top of prime real estate.

He did not elicit confidence in taking to the water. It was explained nobody ever came across this relatively shallow grave site of an island because the waters above were unusually choppy. We’re apparently not too far away from the coast of Africa. He also explained many ships during the height of the slave trade were forced to make detours around this area. And the fact he wanted to dive down to the bottom. I’m as bad as him for following him out here. If I’d stayed behind my fate would have been much quicker.

Good Lord, it was so dim out the window. There was the faintest tease of the light’s penetration, making the waters above glimmer in a dark naval color. Everything below flirted with darkness more and more. That turquoise world I once saw through the glass was gone. Yet he assured me the pressure outside of the ship wasn’t anything the human body couldn’t handle. He wanted a vanguard of divers to join him as he went below. I’d have refused but Maria, brave soul that she was, eagerly wanted to join him.

In the book I was provided, the captains discover an island ‘outside of the world.’ A bit vague, sure, but it resided in what was known as ‘the stretch.’ That being the domain of Aramay the serpent. To escape this monster, they sail on the remaining ship (Aramay devours one of them), and trick the beast into tying itself in a knot around the island. The island sinks with the serpent and the captains set aside their differences. In essence, it was as if Elijah DuPont wanted to dive down to the bottom of Crystal Lake and shake hands with Jason Vorhees. And of course I was fine to join him, because Maria was also going.

Alone in one of the corridors, I spilled my worries to the girl. “I studied public speaking in school, you know,” I told her. “A tip was that if you’re nervous, it’s helpful to simply admit you're nervous. Helps the crowd relate to you.”

Maria flashed that wonderful smile of hers. “Are you nervous?” I answered with a grim nod. “I’ve got good news for you. The crowd tonight is fish. Don’t worry if you embarrass yourself. I believe they have a short attention span.”

I laughed. My last laugh, I suppose. I told her, “This is my first time scuba diving. Kind of hitting the ground running. Or the water splashing, I should say.”

“Oh, it’s such a fun experience. I’ve never been this far out from land but I’ve done it a lot back home.” Not only had done it before, she was a pro. “Come on. I’ll help you suit up and I’ll go over the basics.” Such is the power of women, I reflect. I feared nothing more than the ocean, it was absurd for me to be on a submarine of all cursed things. But because of Maria, it was more akin to walking through a meadow of flowers, her hand cupped in mine. I wonder if I would have gone back to the rock if she hadn’t been there to lure me like a siren.

I still remember her last words to me. “One last bit of advice underwater. Remember to breathe!”

It’s called out to me again. “Talk to me,” it’s asking. “I want to hear your voice. Come to me. We’ll be able to speak in the water.” I should get to her next. It is about the time she showed up.

A lockout chamber is a room on a submarine able to fill with water and match the pressure outside. A way for divers to exit the vessel while below the surface. My impression is that it would also make an excellent execution device for sadistic thalassophiles. But I stood there in it with my suit, next to Elijah and more importantly Maria. With them I was able to tolerate this death box.

Then I was out in the water. How to describe it? It’s the clarity you might feel when driving a car off a mountain. The moment midair where you must realize, this is really happening. Well, was it ever happening then. My senses finally caught up with me. There I was! A novice first timer, out in the water, so deep the light barely reached me.

Like a child learning to ride a bike, I acclimated somewhat. I was still but a child speeding down Lombard Street but it wasn’t like the brakes were cut. It wasn’t that bad. No, in fact, despite the unsettling nature of the darkness–triumphing over the thin light of the sun and limited reaches of the Aramay–it was humbling to be out here. At first.

The mysterious island of legend was in view. One shade of black against another shade. Truly, it was as if Gibraltar caught up with us. Splashing down into the water to see how we were doing. All islands are just mountains grown out from the bedrock of the ocean floor. That’s what it appeared to be and even now I’d say that’s what I was looking at. No ruins like Elijah hyped up. Just a rock God forsook from heaven.

I found some bravery and put distance between Elijah and Maria. Didn’t want to be the duckling following its mother. I was fairly comfortable once the Algerian joined us in his small craft. The Aramay was equipped with two small shuttles to pilot. It was the Algerian’s intention to inspect further down this sunken mountain while the diving party probed the peak. Meanwhile, I’m sure, the artists were engaged with an orgy I wasn’t invited to. Yet I was past the point of pleasure in my life.

“You’re running out of space,” she says. “When you’re done and you’ve nothing left to do, come join me. I’m patient but I’m getting bored now.” That giggle. Such a monster shouldn’t make a sweet melody like that. She has a point though. Not much space now.

I keep going back to this like it was a car accident. Like I can call Triple A and have them send a tow to the ocean floor. I remember that first moment I saw something out of the ordinary. That final moment in a memory where you lose all control, the wheels skid, the breaks don’t work, and the crash. You see it coming. It came in the form of a silver string. Here is what happened, O scientist of the future. I stake my soul that what I tell you is the truth.

I didn’t have long to study this strand, though I was mesmerized. It was a tendril, gently waving amid the bubbles rising from below. Ah! I should have thought more of the bubbles before. But I was distracted. Looking at this glittery underwater hair. There were others. One more out in the open, between the mountain and the Aramay. Elijah and Maria paired up to examine one and they made the mistake of touching it.

Oh the bubbles then. You wouldn’t think bubbles could fill a man with fear but here we are. Such a burst of them. And then came the namesake.

What else could it have been but Aramay of unremembered legend? I was spinning, clutching to the rocks by a great force. Little time to see. Didn’t see the head. But I saw a long and black tube appear from the dark depths. As if it was an extension of the depths itself. It carried away the submarine like a dog holding a stick. The Algerian, I wish I remembered his name, he was spinning too. While everyone else was whisked away, off to God only knows where, the smaller submersible crashed into a lower formation. He was gone. Like a fly sucked out a window going a hundred miles per hour.

Oh God! How do you put into words seeing something your brain knows it isn’t supposed to see? Maybe I read that book too soon and I forced myself to think it was a serpent. Didn’t see it that long before I became too overwhelmed. But what else could it be? A black arm slithering into the unknown, going on and on. Never saw a tail or a backend. Just the devil feeding a black wire into the dismal blue. And then there was Maria and the man who brought us back to this time where man was fearful and superstitious in the wild. How I realized then this world we were in wasn’t ours.

It wasn’t Aramay who took them. A school of…something. It is quite something to suddenly realize you’re gazing upon the largest lifeform you’ve ever beheld. But to see a swarm of, I don’t know, elongated lobsters which were all joined by a single silver thread? I watched them dance and I watched them sink. I’m a coward but what I was to do with the leviathan still strolling by? And that’s when, from the expanse, I spotted her.

Those silver strands. I think of how man has spent millenia fishing on lakes and rivers. What if fish could throw their own casts back? What a lure I came across then. White blotch on the horizon. Stunned as I was by everything thus far, some deep and primal part of my brain told me to run. How out of place I was for that.

There was a cave. The answer to my undoing. I swam into it, lost myself in the dark, heart pounding so hard I thought it might explode and I’d be enveloped in a red mist. What do you know? I find an opening and a lightsource above my head. I swim up and I find myself here. My grave.

This is not a good place to die. This cave is mostly round, as is the watery pool at its center. Very uncommon by God’s design. Perhaps the answer to this is the symbols on the walls. Greek, I want to say. Atlantean perhaps. Unnatural should be the answer. For they emit a dim glow that I curse. For this weak light shows me just enough of her.

“You’re looking at me,” she says. I unfortunately am. She’s testing me again. Let me tell you how it began with her.

I was out of my mind, failing to process everything before I settled down and tried to put it into these words. That’s when she popped out of the pool like that first message from Elijah. Gave me one last final fright. She is what sailors would call a mermaid. I assure you, they are not as you imagine. My tormentor is much like a shark. Pale, slimy skin. Almost rubbery in texture. Sharp teeth, gills along her sides which make me nauseous. And the eyes. The terrible, black eyes. Far too large. Portals to a world I don’t wish to see.

“Don’t be afraid,” was her first lie to me. I recall oddly not being very shocked that she was speaking to me. Let’s be fair, she had a tough act to follow. “You’re like me, aren’t you?” She said with a hand up in reference to mine.

“Please, stay back,” I cried.

“We understand each other,” she mused. “It must be since I was like you once. Lost. And you are very lost, aren’t you?”

Somehow I composed myself and asked, “Where am I? What is this place?”

“A place of passage. It has rejected many but it has saved others as well. I came here, like you, lost. But I’ve found my way.” There was sadness in her dark eyes then. “You are hurting. Yes, I could sense from out in the water. This place has called out to you. Your pain. You feel as if you are sunken and belong in a deep and crushing world.”

I reflect only now that she was correct. But I stand by what I said, “Enough! Don’t tell me how I feel! I want to get out of here.”

“Where would you go? If you take to the water as you are, the serpent will put an end to you. That or some other nasty creature hiding, waiting for someone who doesn’t belong here. But I can help you! I was not of this place once. Come to the water. I can make you like me. You can be of this place.”

So went her promise. That she could change my body, my very form. The shivers of the prospect have yet to leave me. I rejected her offer at once but she hasn’t left me in peace! On she goes, saying she understands my pain, my predicament. What would that mean to return to the water? To forsake land and home forever? To make the ocean my respite?

Never! It’s mad to believe she has such a power to forge flesh but then again what swam off with the orange Aramay? I don’t know what became of the art snobs. Maybe they critiqued the snake sailing off with them. Maybe that orange ship filled with blue water and drowned them all. You know, I just remembered! There was a fish tank on the submarine. Sturdy and built into the wall. Most of the fish will starve but I bet that suckerfish will last a while. Feeding off scum and algae. Him and I are in the same boat. The same sunken boat surrounded by poison.

I dream of a world with sparkling, shallow oceans filled with fresh water. Beautiful white sand below crystal blue. It’s hardly up to your knees but you could lie down in it and float from one continent to the next…

What else left is there to do now but force my attention away from the witch in the pool? I can think of other parts of the world. There’s people going to work in cities unaware of my plight. Probably bored with their lives. Someone must be going through hell elsewhere in the world too. Lost in a desert dreaming of water. Somewhere below, I bet the Algerian’s waterproof watch is still ticking.

She’s back insisting I’ve no choice. That it’s a matter of time before I give in. It’s the damnedest thing. You know I don’t feel thirsty? I haven’t slept either. It’s as if there is a magic to this place. I don’t want to die anymore. Maybe she could make me like her…

No. I refuse! Still she insists when I tell her no. Oh she’s saying she feels for me. Wants to help me. But I know that this is what the song of a siren sounds like! Not through music but through muses. I can sing too! While she says she won’t go far and that she’ll wait for me, well! I can scream! Scream for help until somebody comes along but there’s no way in hell I’m going in the water!

Out of room now. But I can scream. Scream all night. Got a lot of air in me.

Letter from Hakim Mansour

Dear Mom and Dad,

I hope this letter finds you in good health and spirits. I am well and so is Uncle Karim. He has asked me to say hello on his behalf. We left the port in Morocco without incident and Uncle’s business continues to be prosperous. Some days there are so many passengers seeking passage down the coast I worry the boat will tip to one side and we’ll all spillover like one of father’s hauls in the market. So far there have not been any spills.

We arrived in Lagos the other day. It is the largest city I have ever seen! The buildings are like the broken pillars found at home only they dare to touch the heavens in size. That and they don’t appear to be crumbling anytime soon. It was a sight of wonder in the waterfront. It is like how Uncle describes the great city of Carthage. A beautiful lake inside the city on the shores of the ocean. I’ve attached a postcard of it but one day I hope you can see it with your own eyes.

Ever since I have set sail with Uncle I have realized there is so much wonder waiting to be found. It is as if the world has trouble containing it all. Truly, I feel as if I am the sailor Sinbad finding new adventures at every turn. I think I have fallen in love with the ocean like she were a woman. Next we are taking a smaller party to the island of St. Helena. I will be visiting Napoleon’s house next!

That reminds me. Do you remember the story of that French eccentric and his submarine that went missing years ago? Apparently Uncle knew the scientist as an old friend but he didn’t want to talk about the man much. Yet he had no issue taking us near the waters where the sub went mysteriously missing and telling us all a good ghost story.

Uncle told us that the DuPont man took so many friends with him out in the deep waters that we still don’t know exactly who they all were. But the souls lost in the depths are still out there and look for the light of the sun as a means to escape into the afterlife. Yet they delved too deep and now do not know how far they’ve gone or which way is up. On chilly nights, Uncle says you can still hear the screams of the lost crew.

I swear with all my love for you Mom and Dad, though it might have been Uncle spooking me, I heard muffled screams as I looked out on the water. But ghost stories are not enough to deter me. I think one day, after I work hard and raise enough money, I might like to come back to this spot with my own submarine. Who knows! Maybe I can find DuPont’s wreckage and put a few spirits to rest.

Time for me to go. Uncle needs me back on deck. It is true I am working hard already!

As the French say: Au revoir!

-Hakim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more from Gavilovski here:

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

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

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

Previously published in Aegeon #9 (April 2024)

Note from the chairman of Oceanus Incognitus:

Much has been written about the sinking of the research vessel Bright Aurora last July, but the recent partial recovery of the wreckage and the finding of a diary allegedly belonging to Project Director, Dr. Adrian Wood will unfortunately only lead to further speculation. The small, leather-bound diary was found on the beach of a low island about seventy miles east of the site where the Bright Aurora sank to the ocean floor. Dr. Wood had been overseeing an oceanographic and hydrographic survey of the vast uncharted oceans of the planet Thetis. The immense, mostly water-covered planet had been settled for less than four years at that time, and most of the oceans remained- as indeed they still do today- entirely unexplored.

The cause of the sinking, in clear and calm weather approximately six hundred miles from the port of departure, remains a mystery- unless Dr. Wood’s diary account is to be accepted. All that is known with certainty is that the vessel issued a distress signal on the night of 20^th July, and another early on the morning of the 21^st, after which nothing is known except for its eventual, inexplicable sinking. All of the thirty-eight individuals on board the ship are presumed dead, though not a single body has been recovered to date. At this time and until investigation into the matter is closed, Dr. Wood’s account must be met with strong skepticism due to the clearly deteriorating mental state of the author at the time of writing.

The proposed publication of Dr. Wood’s diary has been met with hostility in some circles, the most vehement of these being Thetis’ burgeoning Department of Tourism, but the society of Oceanus Incognitus has decided in favor of its general release with the aim of discouraging anyone from venturing too far from known waters until more facts come to light. Despite the overwhelming skepticism towards the veracity of the final entries of the diary, it should be noted that all previous entries have been corroborated wherever possible and the details confirmed as accurate. What is transcribed here is Dr. Wood’s account of the events that followed his arrival on Thetis and the disembarkation of the vessel Bright Aurora from the port of Novus Ostia. These final entries are given verbatim and without comment.

15^th, Month of the Divine Julius 2279-

Arrived on the sweltering planet of Thetis around midday. As my equipment was being unloaded, I arranged for it to be immediately transported to the Bright Aurora, which awaits us in the harbor of Novus Ostia. My driver was a young man, deeply tanned by the relentless Thetian sun. He talked incessantly, with an enthusiasm about the planet that was quite infectious. I have no doubt that Thetis will soon become the top holiday destination of the Federation. Even now, luxury hotels and sprawling villas are going up in prime locations from Memphis to the port towns of Poseidonia and Novus Ostia. Memphis, a bustling hub of commerce, is exotically beautiful. The wide streets are paved with crushed, pastel-coloured seashells and the throngs of pedestrians are shaded by mammoth palm trees.

My driver dropped me off at the Oasis Hotel, right in the heart of the thriving capital. The stately, four storey stone structure is only a year old and exquisitely decorated inside and out. The floors and pillars are of a striking local marble- soft purple veined with white. The ground floor is dotted with quaint little courtyards, and the central atrium is an impressively cultivated collection of native greenery with curious, flowering vines; slim, exotic fruit trees; blossom-laden urns; and a tasteful, silver-basined fountain at its core.

I am retiring early, as the spaceflight was an extraordinarily long one, by far the longest I’ve ever endured. It has left me utterly exhausted and I must be up at dawn. Tomorrow, in the spirit of Erikson, Cabot, Tasman, Cook, Amundsen, and all the other great explorers of old, I shall set sail on virgin seas.

16^th, Month of the Divine Julius 2279-

On the way to the docks, I bid my driver to take a brief detour to see the marvelous Fountain of Thetis, so recently finished, and about which I had heard a great deal during its construction. Designed by the worlds-renowned artist Giovanni Rovere, it stands in the middle of the Federal Plaza between the Temple of Neptune and the sprawling governor’s palace. In the centre of the fountain stands the planet’s beautiful namesake, Thetis, an infant Achilles in her arms. Looming above her and mounted on a hippocampus is Nereus, her regal father, a full twenty-six feet tall, not counting his immense steed. About their feet and spreading all throughout the fountain in a cascade are the other Nereids, along with an assortment of aquatic beasts both real and fantastic. The effect of the sun and spray on the almost translucent, blue-white stone makes the figures look as if they were sculpted from some mammoth block of ice, defiantly unmelting in spite of the tropical setting. It is a triumphant work that rivals the masterpieces of Bernini.

I met my team and the crew of the Bright Aurora at a seaside café. From our table on the patio we could see our glimmering ship awaiting us at anchor. Lunch was fresh fish and fruit- all of it excellent, and unlike any I had had before. The captain is a broad, red-bearded, jolly fellow of about sixty. A distinguished Navy veteran retired from active duty, he now accepts commissions from the Oceanus Incognitus on select assignments. Olsen, his first mate, is tall and blonde and much younger. He is as reserved as captain Hendricks is boisterous, but very polite. We met the rest of the crew, about twenty others in all, when we boarded our majestic vessel.

It was local solar noon when we set sail. I spent the first few hours on deck taking in the scenery before setting to work on the equipment. It is difficult to convey in capsule form any impression of this exotic, alien world. The closest comparison I could make would be to the Caribbean Sea on Earth, though the colours and aspect of the vegetation differ, sometimes wildly. There are monstrous, hibiscus-like flowers that grow profusely along the mangroves, and have a very deadly look to them. The waters are a vivid teal, clear and completely unmuddled. From stout overhanging branches on the trees of the tiny islets perch great pelican-like birds, the largest avian species I have ever seen, their feathers a brilliant lemon yellow. The sheer size of the creatures give them a pterodactyllic aspect, especially when they unfurl their great wings to fly low over the water in search of fish. Thetis will need its own Audubon to catalog all of the incredible species to found at every turn. Truly a planet of endless, breathtaking wonder.

17^th, Month of the Divine Julius 2279-

I believe that I am quickly growing accustomed to the tropical climate. In fact, I feel a renewed vigour that has long been lacking. This is in spite of the long hours I have spent under electric lights, setting up the research room on the ship’s lowest level. My top assistant, Hopkins has been indispensable in these endeavors, as many of the devices or their components are of his design. He’s a staggering genius, and already quite accomplished for a man still a few years shy of thirty. It was a long process, but it went smoothly, and I made a point to take frequent breaks for fresh air on deck. The heat is quite fierce, though, even out here on the open sea. The thermometer near the pilot house reached 109 degrees today. I imagine the temperatures far in on the great continents at this latitude must be utterly unbearable.

I have also spent a great deal of time analyzing the rough charts made by my tepid predecessors and correcting errors, though I was surprised to find how accurate the initial calculations were for the work of amateurs. Of course, the further out we have gone the less accurate these charts became, and I have now discarded them altogether. By nightfall of the first day we were beyond the lanes known to the local fishermen. This morning found us in largely uncharted waters. I have mapped every islet we have come across, no matter how insignificant. In addition, much of my focus has been bathymetry- using multibeam sonar signals to chart the ocean floor. Only recently have we passed into truly deep waters, with all landmasses left far behind in our wake. The nearest land now, aside from that which stretches in eternal darkness some three miles below the ship, is entirely unknown to us. The final reading of the day showed that we are approaching an immense trench that may well prove to be deeper than the great Mariana Trench on Earth.

I spent the evening with my team and most of the crew on the forward deck watching the sunset. A simple dinner was served as the low cumulus clouds were set aglow with gorgeous shades of purple, crimson, and gold. The seascape around me is strangely hypnotizing, and I frequently catch myself daydreaming of the most incredible images and senses that a mind could possibly conjure. As if under the influence of some powerful opiate, I find myself set adrift amidst forms and impressions seemingly without relevance to anything familiar.

I was aroused out of one of these stupors by a shout from Olsen, the first mate, who claimed to see a very large, dark shape briefly surface in the last minutes before twilight. He excitedly rushed below deck to see if the instruments had captured a reading. The fishermen of Novus Ostia have reportedly hauled in some sizable fish specimens, but nothing like a whale- as Olsen’s description would indicate- or indeed any marine mammal has yet been recorded. Alas, the first mate returned disappointed, for the alleged creature evidently escaped detection, and we turned in for the night.

18^th, Month of the Divine Julius 2279-

Awoke from the most incredibly intense dream last night, drenched in sweat. It was so strange and vivid that it has remained etched on my mind all day. In it I knew unnameable pleasures, yet the dream had an undercurrent brimming with sinister suggestion. It was terrifying and alluring and- well, I’d rather forget it forever than record the details for posterity. I have ascribed this episode to the fantastic scenery of the planet stirring my imagination, but the heat could just as easily be to blame.

My memories of the morning’s events after I rose seem oddly disjointed, but it was certainly past midday when I finally made my way down to the research room. I found the team very animated, and they rushed me to the instruments. It appears that the trench we are over continues to deepen. The last reading I observed registered the ocean floor at approximately 6.24 miles below us, and we expect that number to steadily increase overnight. Occasionally, the instruments will show us passing over plateaus, or high mountainous ridges submerged beneath us, but generally the floor continues to fall away into further abysses.

We had another sunset dinner on deck, this time with the entire crew, including captain Hendricks. Olsen had been reclusive all day and, when he finally appeared, looked as if he hadn’t slept at all last night. The captain was in the middle of a harrowing tale from his distinguished past when- completely unprompted- Olsen kicked over his chair and began heaving items from the table overboard, screaming all the while. Cocktail glasses, plates, even his deck chair were pitched into the sea before the cook and a deckhand succeeded in restraining him. It was the most baffling occurrence. Olsen was screaming the most inane gibberish, and it seemed to me that his throws overboard were aimed at something- something apparently only he could see. I found the episode unnerving, especially with last night’s dream still haunting me. Dr. Stevens blamed the heat, and Olsen was carried down to his room, accompanied by the physician for a thorough examination.

After twilight had dissipated and full dark had set in, I stretched out alone on a long deck chair to study the stars. It was while looking at these strange constellations that I truly felt the light-years of distance from everything I have ever known. I fell into one of those trance-like states again, and I thought I could hear singing emanating from somewhere far-off. It was akin to the most rapturous choir, but otherworldly, genuinely indescribable. I was again enveloped in that opium ecstasy. The singing drew nearer, and I swear I heard faint splashes only a little distance away. These were apart from the rhythmic sound of the waves gently lapping against the ship. Then another sound crept in, tearing me out of my stupor- a soft weeping from somewhere below deck. Olsen, no doubt. The divine singing died away at once. I waited awhile for it to return, but the irritating cries of our mad first mate persisted, and I gave up and retired to my room.

19^th, Month of the Divine Julius 2279-

I awoke in the early hours from the same fervent dream as the previous night, but it was somehow more intense, more real than before. It was screaming that woke me, coming from down the hall. There was a lot of commotion, everyone spilling out into the corridor. I followed the half-dressed crowd to Olsen’s cabin where I beheld several men attempting to restrain him on the bed, where he thrashed and shrieked. He was given a heavy sedative which soon rendered him unconscious. I consulted with the captain, Dr. Stevens, and Garrett the navigation officer. Stevens, though a medical doctor and not a psychologist, had much to say about Olsen’s mental state. We soon agreed to confine Olsen to his room indefinitely under the supervision of Dr. Stevens.

There was a marked decline in the general mood and atmosphere today. Everyone I talked to seemed to be in foul spirits. No doubt Olsen’s breakdown has contributed, but I can’t help but feel there is more to it than that. It’s as if there is a heavy cloud of expectation hanging over us, expectation of some unknown calamity. Captain Hendricks has been drinking at all hours, and every member of my team acts inexplicably despondent, some verging on the point of despair. I cornered my data expert Pierce, the most moribund of them all, near the companionway. He admitted to suffering from extremely lucid dreams at night, and has even been found above deck, sleepwalking. This revelation alarmed me, and I pressed him for details of the dreams, but I must have been too forceful, for he shut down and slipped away to his room.

Later, I spoke again with Garrett, the navigation officer. He’s a tough, military-looking man with a no-nonsense attitude and, I believe, sound judgment. I told him of my worries, and what Pierce had said to me earlier. To my extreme unease, he responded by saying that he too was experiencing the same nighttime symptoms. Garrett was a bit more forthcoming about the details of his dreams, but only due to my insistent prodding. He described the same beautiful women I had dreamt of, and the same underwater caverns dimly lit by some kind of bioluminescent algae. He would go no further, nor did he need to. Clearly, there is some strange phenomenon plaguing us. Both Garrett and I fear what may result if these symptoms worsen. Tomorrow, we shall discuss with the captain the possibility of turning back to port.

The lack of restful sleep is beginning to take its toll on me, yet the thought of going to bed is daunting. I want nothing more than a long night of dreamless oblivion.

20^th, July 2279-

Things so strange happening that I must do my best to record them as accurately as possible. My work has been halted indefinitely. The captain remains perpetually drunk and has locked himself in his cabin. Meanwhile, Olsen remains confined to his room, where he continues his endless ravings and threats. Garrett is fed up with both of them. He has taken the liberty of issuing a distress signal, for he believes, as I do, that captain Hendricks is unfit for his position of authority.

A knock at the door- I am urgently needed…

Later-

I was called away to Olsen’s room where I found Garrett and some of the deckhands. On the bed lay not the first mate, but an unconscious Dr. Stevens, head newly wrapped in bandages. Garrett informed me that he had been in the pilothouse when he took notice of a prolonged silence. Olsen’s endless screaming and pounding and weeping had ceased. This racket had been going on for so long that its cessation made him feel perturbed. Upon investigation, he found Olsen missing, and Dr. Stevens bleeding and unconscious from a brutal blow to the head. Garrett dispatched a team of men to find him, and to summon me. We waited for their return for about ten minutes before deciding to assist in the search, but before we so much as exited the room one of the men returned. He reported finding Olsen above deck near the fore mast. These, if I remember correctly, are his exact words:

“I saw him leaning against the rail looking out at the water. I called his name several times, but he didn’t acknowledge me in the slightest. He just watched the water intently as if there was something of interest, though I saw nothing but waves. I walked over to him, very cautiously, calling ‘Olsen! Olsen, you alright?’ but he never broke his gaze from the sea. I was almost to him when without the slightest warning, he jumped overboard. He did it calmly, with purpose. I looked out to see if he would surface so I could throw him a buoy, but he never came back up. He just sank like a stone.”

Garrett and I went immediately to captain Hendricks to inform him of the incident, but he refused to open the door of his cabin. I shouted the news about Olsen through the closed door, and there was a long silence, then came his slurred reply: “Saw the sirens, did he? I’ve heard their song, but I haven’t seen ‘em yet, except in my dreams.”

A wheezing cough followed, then the heavy thud of a liquor bottle slammed-down onto a nightstand. The door creaked inward an inch or two and the captain’s red face appeared in the opening. He smiled a big drunken smile, but his eyes were without any trace of mirth.

“He ain’t dead, you know. They took him down there inside themselves. They’ll feed him oxygen to keep him alive, and the body will insulate him from the pressure that would otherwise crush his organs into mash. Well, I won’t be joining him. Won’t be tempted to follow him overboard if I stay in here!” He rasped out a laugh, then slammed the door in our faces. There was a clang as he threw the bolt lock in place. Despite our continued knocks and curses, we received no further reply.

Garrett has assumed control of the ship and turned our course back to port. Captain Hendricks will undoubtedly be charged for his dereliction of duty upon our return. Personally, I hope he is hanged.

Still later-

I, and all of my team are confined to our rooms until further notice. The ship is under attack.

After leaving the captain to his whiskey, I was called down to the research room. Only Hopkins was present, looking agitated and sleep-deprived. He informed me that our ship now floated an impossible eight miles above the ocean floor. “But,” he said, “that’s not why I called you down.” He then pointed a trembling finger towards the viewing monitor. What I saw on the screen, which showed the waters directly below the Bright Aurora- perhaps a few hundred yards down before the illumination was snuffed out by the deep abyss- was tenebrous and brief. The thing’s shape was irregular, asymmetrical, reminding me of an amoeba as seen through a microscope. It was very dark in colour, and judging by its distance from the ship, about the size of an orca, but the grainy video quality made discerning its features impossible. I would think for a moment that I could ascertain eyes, a mouth, both vaguely anthropomorphic, only to doubt that I was even examining the head of the creature. Others of its kind could be seen further in the distance, but I cannot say how many despite the powerful searchlight. They moved, jellyfish-like, in bursts in and out of view.

It was then that a single shot echoed deafeningly through the corridors. I left Hopkins to watch the monitor and rushed back the way I had come. I found Garrett and some of the others also attempting to find the source of the report. Apparently, Garrett and I feared the same thing, for we exchanged a knowing look and ran with haste back to the captain’s quarters. After a particularly stout deckhand successfully kicked in the door, we found captain Hendricks in a heap on the floor, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the temple.

We gave the captain an expedited burial at sea, as per the customs of his fraternal order, with fewer than half of the men on board attending. Turner, the deckhand who had earlier witnessed Olsen’s plunge overboard, commented on how the body of Hendricks floated, unlike that of our late first mate. I couldn’t help but find the possible implication of the seemingly off-hand remark disturbing.

Afterwards, as Hopkins and I led Garrett down to the research room to show him our recently obtained footage, the ship heaved tremendously. There was a sound of crunching metal, and the ship briefly lost power. Garrett quickly sent men to check the hull. These found water pouring in through great fissures on the port side near the engine room. In a matter of minutes the lower level was completely flooded, including my research room and all its contents. Sixteen crewmembers immediately began work to seal it off. Whether or not they were successful remains unclear, for not a single one has returned. Dinghies are being prepared in case we must abandon ship. The situation hangs on a knife-edge. Writing obstructs insane, intrusive thoughts, and keeps me from panic as I await any news.

I know now that my coming to this planet was a mistake. Thetis- it is not deserving of the name- is not meant to be seeded by the blood of Rome. For these are not skies blessed by Jove; these waves do not belong to mighty Neptune. Nor were these creatures that seek us moulded by the wholesome clay of the Divine. What horrors lay in the unknown depths beneath us? Are these seemingly universal dreams, in reality, visions of our ultimate fate? Who are the beautiful women that await us down there? One thing I can say with certainty is that in those dreams, I saw every occupant of this ship with me in those watery caverns- everyone except for captain Hendricks. He, and only he, was never there. Perhaps he chose the only escape route from what is our inevitable doom.

That’s the emergency alarm…

24rd or 25^th July, 2279-

I am writing this in the relative comfort of the shade of a luxuriant tree. Relative only in that I have finally escaped the relentless scorching sun which had nearly driven me to madness. My skin is burned and blistered so badly that I am in constant pain. This island I found is small enough that I have already explored it thoroughly, and found no trace of potable water. A few meager drops of morning dew not yet evaporated is all I was able to obtain. Any stream or pool that did not originate from the ocean is a reeking soup that I dare not drink no matter how desperate I become.

The events that led to where I am now passed by in a blur of panic, confusion, and terror, but I shall record what I remember to the best of my ability.

The emergency alarm signaled the resumption of the creature’s onslaught. The Bright Aurora began to sink rapidly. I grabbed a few things in haste- my canteen (mercifully full), a rucksack with some clothes and a compass, and this diary. Everyone hastily piled in to the dinghies and we paddled with all our strength, trying to put as much distance between ourselves and the descending ship. I prayed that the creatures would remain occupied with the main vessel, that we would escape unnoticed, but it was in vain. A dark cloud passed underneath the dinghy behind us, one overloaded with seven or eight of the ship’s crew. In an instant it was sucked down below the waves. The force of this caused a swell that nearly overturned our little vessel. I managed to hang on by slipping the shaft of the paddle into our dinghy’s handrail, but my companions, Hopkins and Thompson went overboard, never to surface. I resumed paddling furiously, now the furthest away from the sinking ship, as one by one the other dinghies were violently pulled down behind me.

I waited, expecting my turn to come at any moment, but the waters began to calm, and in the distance, the last vestiges of the Bright Aurora disappeared into the sea. Somehow, I must have gone unnoticed. I had escaped.

Though I retained my compass, I found its only real use to be in keeping me from inadvertently circling back in the direction of the sunken ship. I struck eastward with the current into the further unknown, eventually ceasing to paddle when my strength began to wane. I floated for several days, trying as best I could to conserve the little water I had. Nevertheless, my canteen was dry by the end of the second day. After that, I lost track of time and slept for long intervals. I guess it was the morning of the fourth day when I spotted this lonely island from afar.

The captain was right to put a bullet in his brain before they could take him. I am convinced that these creatures are somehow able to telepathically tap in to our minds. They can conjure our fantasies and temptations in the form of an illusion to be used as a lure, as a snapping turtle dances his tongue in the water like a worm to attract fish. Or the orchid mantis, an insect that mimics pink orchid blossoms to an uncanny exactitude, draws its nectar-seeking prey right into its lethal embrace.

They were broadcasting these visions directly into our brains through dreams or right in front of our waking eyes. They showed us their intentions, or more likely, a version they wanted us to see. I don’t know why they want us, but I’m not sure it is for simple sustenance, for why must they take us alive? They weren’t interested in the captain’s corpse. The things successfully lured in Olsen, but the bait wasn’t working quickly enough on the rest of us- it was simply driving us mad. Their attempts were imperfect and they grew impatient, so they attacked the ship to drag us down by force. Now I’m the only one left, and I have seen them- seen their true appearance- and therefore seen through their trick. I know that the sirens are only a screen, a tempting camouflage. Somehow, captain Hendricks knew as well. He knew the trap for what it was.

Later-

The creatures have tracked me here. I have now seen them in their veiled glory with my own eyes, appearing exactly as they did in my dreams- pale, nude, voluptuous, beckoning to me just beyond the breakers. They’ve begun singing as they did that night aboard the ship. I can’t believe I am writing this, but even though I know it is an illusion, I feel a very real desire to swim out to them. There is something in the song, a hypnotic power that draws me in despite every instinct of self-preservation screaming in protest.

Next morning-

Merciful gods! I must have passed out for a considerable amount of time, for I awoke to dawn blooming out over the blue horizon, and to my horror I found myself at the water’s edge. The song must have compelled me as I slept. They were waiting at the breakers, faces full of a lustful mirth. When I realized my peril, I hurriedly backed away. They became wrathful, and for a brief second the veneer of their appearance flickered like a loose lightbulb, revealing the true, hideous form beneath. I scurried back up the beach to a safe distance, whereupon they resumed singing.

I cannot think clearly. Whether it be from the sirens’ song or the effects of heat and dehydration, I’m not sure. I trust neither my eyes nor my mind. The most unhinged, aberrant thoughts come to me unbidden. I catch myself contemplating absurd scenarios. I must hasten my end somehow. I want nothing more than to go down to the shore and drink as much salt water as my stomach can hold, but I cannot bring myself to do it. I know they would snatch me in the attempt. The thought of being taken by those things to a prolonged, unknowable fate is too much to bear. I’ll die of thirst and exposure before I’ll give them any opportunity.

Later-

My time is almost up. It is becoming difficult to even summon the energy to write. What’s more, my pen is showing signs of running out of ink. I’m not sure what will dry up first- the ink in my pen or the strength in my body.

Around midmorning, I found the singing had ceased and the sirens nowhere in sight. Working up my courage, I cautiously crept down to the shore to drink the seawater and put an end to it. But before I reached the water’s edge they reappeared, ensnaring my gaze with their beautiful forms and angelic voices. I found myself frozen on the beach, just watching them out there in the rolling waves. The gorgeous nymphs smiled at me, beckoned to me, never pausing their singing. I stood rapt, forgetting my thirst, my wish to die. My eyes drank in their wondrous glory, and I wanted nothing more than to swim out to them, whatever the consequence.

It took all of my will to break away from the trance. The thought that I’m becoming increasingly susceptible to what my brain knows is an illusion terrifies me. I have even considered severing my Achilles tendons with a sharp rock to prevent what seems to be an inevitable act. But would that be enough? Would I simply crawl unconsciously to them in one of these hypnotic states?

The sirens continue their song. May the Gods have pity on me. May they let me die before I give in and allow the things to take me.

Still later-

A question runs unceasingly through my mind: what if Hendricks was mistaken, and Olsen in fact chose the wiser option? Perhaps Olsen, Hopkins, Pierce, Garrett- all of them are down there now, alive, experiencing untold pleasures whilst I die of thirst underneath this wretched sun. Down through rifts in the ocean floor wherein sprawl those immense weedy caverns of fantasy, my companions may have achieved the apotheosis of those auspicious dreams. What did Hendricks know? That old drunk. He was a drunk and a coward, hardly a sage beacon of wisdom. He never saw them with his own eyes, only ever heard their song. He never saw how beautiful they are, how innocuous.

What of those dark shapes that pulled my shipmates under? Perhaps they were merely benevolent servants of the sirens, sent to fetch us to their awaiting embraces. The more I watch those gentle figures splashing in the shallows, the more plausible this scenario seems. They wanted us alive, or not at all. Even Hendricks agreed on that.

Evening-

The sun sets once again over the endless sea, painting the waves a vivid red. A calmness has fallen on the water, and on my mind. It must be the serenity that comes when one has truly reached the end. The seductresses are out there of course, splashing in the shallows and calling to me, coaxing me, enticing me. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. A comforting death. Maybe I’d be a fool not to go to them. What other choice do I have? It is either certain death within the hour, or to see what awaits me down in that realm of nebulous wonder.

I’m not sure I have the strength to get up.

Gods forgive me.