Not the Best Books of 2025

 My annual reading list. It’s pretty much my sole annual tradition, other than a few vague concepts – I do, for instance, like to watch Mr. Show’s “Monster Parties: Fact or Fiction?” at Halloween, but that’s hardly a necessity.

I’m not a literary critic. I’m not out here trying to say what I think the best books of 2025 were, and frankly I’m suspicious of anyone who can do so. Given the number of books released in each year, how can anyone take a serious glance at the literary scene as it stands in 2025, read the new releases closely enough to really understand them, and confidently come up with a list of favorites? Even if you deny yourself the pleasure of reading older books – a pleasure I can’t live without – you’re still not going to be able to read more than, say, 150 or so new volumes maximum and give them serious consideration. It’s not like movies (two hours at a time) or music (less than an hour while you’re doing something else). Books command attention and care and time. And for that reason I am happy to ignore literally all critics’ year-end lists. Fuck you guys. 

No, my favorite-book lists almost entirely consist of older work. These are just the books I read this year that I loved, for various reasons. If I pushed myself, I might be able to make year-end favorite lists for music and movies, but I just lack the passion there (although Ethel Cain’s Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You got me through a lot of dark moments in a year full of them, and frankly she’s a good enough songwriter she belongs on the list below). Books are different. I can listen to a crappy song or watch a crappy movie and it’s a non-issue. But a shitty book will put me in a genuinely bad mood. I don’t care to see barbarians storming my cathedral.

So here you go, you bastards, divided into three sections, with my own commentary as to why you should read each of these. 

Fiction and poetry and pretty things

Charles Baudelaire – Paris Spleen 

            Been reading excerpts of this for years, Paris as capital of modernity. Vintage Baudelaire.

Agustina Bazterrica – Tender Is the Flesh 

Cannibalism is as overdone now as zombies were in 2010. Bazterrica proves that it doesn’t need to be deployed as lamely as it is in most contexts.

Mircea Cartarescu – Solenoid 

Hey, it’s a 700-page Romanian novel with extended discussion of the Voynich Manuscript. Cut me a fat rail of this shit.

Jordan Castro – The Novelist 

It’s very strange to me that Kurt Vile got as close as he ever got to a hit with “Pretty Pimpin” given that the lyrics are pretty much a man going “duuuuuude.” This is a lot of duuuuuude. But very good all the same.

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle – The Fire Within 

Junkie books are normally boring, especially when they’re about hot junkies having hot sex with jutting ribcages and track marks. But somehow Drieu La Rochelle makes it work.

Nawal El Saadawi – Woman at Point Zero 

A straightforward novel about what it is to be a woman with a mind of her own in a society that does everything it can to punish that. A social realist novel in the old mode, something that’s not really done anymore.

John Fante – 1933 Was a Bad Year 

A story of born-loser working class life among Italian immigrants in the Great Depression. Straightforward and heartfelt and pure feels.

Damon Galgut – The Promise 

I was a bit miffed by some of the telegraphed punches here, but I think Galgut gets a place on this list all the same because of the ways in which this is an almost perfect encapsulation of life under an apartheid society, because even after apartheid ends, it’s not like everything turns out OK.

Jacqueline Harpman – I Who Have Never Known Men

Sounds like a shitty A24 movie, plays out like a top-tier A24 movie. Women in a prison deep underground, explanation minimal, vibes oppressive as hell.

Wolfgang Hilbig – The Females 

More explicitly violent and fucked up than a lot of Hilbig’s other work, which tends to allude to recent horror more, for which…

            – The Sleep of the Righteous 

Absolute top-tier eerie Central European bleakness. Not long after I read this, I came upon an unearthly DDR television mast emerging from the icy fogs over Saxony-Anhalt. Apropos.

Gert Jonke – Geometric Regional Novel 

Another member of the Vienna avant-garde as represented by Jelinek, Bernhard, etc., taking on the subject of a completely mathematically ordered town. Does anyone even write like this anymore?

Alfred Kubin – The Other Side 

Eldritch horrors, the German version, as narrated by a dorky German narrator who seems more concerned with minutiae than with the unbelievable weirdness of everything around him.

Benjamin Labatut – The Maniac 

            Essential reading for the AI age. I’ll leave it there.

Mary McCarthy – The Group 

No one reads Mary McCarthy anymore, which is a shame. She has a remarkable talent for channeling the voices of the most annoying people you meet, and actually making you feel bad for them.

Reza Negarestani – Cyclonopedia

Imagine if Deleuzean ideas weren’t used for fake philosophy, but as a tool for literary exploration, with Islamist terrorism and oil extraction regimes functioning as a rhizomatic object. That’d be cool, and Negarestani agrees.

Paul Nizan – Aden, Arabie 

            I will never get over my fetish for travel in a more romantic era.

Wilfrido Nolledo – But for the Lovers 

Totally forgotten Filipino writer, and his only novel. Manila is a Latin American city adrift in Asia, and this is some Garcia Marquez level insanity.

Fernando del Paso – Palinuro de Mexico

             If you were to do bibliomancy on a Spanish medical textbook.

Joseph Roth – The Radetzky March

A semi-forgotten novel of familial decadence and decline in the late 19th Century, standing firmly alongside Buddenbrooks and the rest. A chronicle of all that rot and chaos that came to a head with a gunshot at a parade in Sarajevo in 1914.

Masahiko Shimada – Death by Choice 

What would you do for the remaining few days if you planned to kill yourself? Shimada has a few ideas, and it goes much different than I had anticipated. Some real curveballs here, and they don’t seem like a deliberate attempt to subvert expectations so much as avenues I simply hadn’t thought of.

Adalbert Stifter – Motley Stones 

I’d read Rock Crystal before, but all of these geologically themed novellas are remarkably evocative of Alpine life in the olden days. Strange and haunting.

William Styron – The Confessions of Nat Turner 

            Problematic favesies.

John Waters – Carsick 

            It took me until he was hitchhiking with Patty Hearst to make me realize he was pulling my leg.

Read this to understand the world, because you’re an academized sicko

Zygmunt Bauman – Liquid Modernity

Of all the metaphors for modernity after modernity, this might be one of the creepiest and most effective.

Robert Caro – The Passage of Power

The story of how LBJ became LBJ – let’s pray Caro lives long enough to finish volume 5 of this absolute magnum opus, the greatest of all biographies.

Annie Ernaux – A Woman’s Story 

            How well do you know your parents?

Byung-Chul Han – The Burnout Society 

OK, this is absolutely THEEEEEORY, and I’m not sure how necessary it is as a text, but it’s fucking resonant. When we are told we can do anything, we realize we necessarily have to do less than everything, and we feel like nothing.

Ivan Illich – Tools for Conviviality 

            A book that explains why your iPhone makes you feel worse about yourself.

Karl Marx – The 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte 

The worst people are back, time to read about Napoleon III building big beautiful walls all over Paris.

Hans-Georg Moeller – You and Your Profile 

A remarkably incisive, compulsively readable story about the nature of authenticity, the nature of the social media profile, and the epistemological consequences.

Pasuk Phongpaichit & Chris Baker – Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand 

Sometimes people ask me to explain Thai politics, and then I have to patiently inform them that I’d have to explain a lot about the incongruity of the left-right spectrum before I even get into the policy-based meat and bones you want me to talk about. Pasuk and Baker do a better job than I ever could.

Corey Robin – The Enigma of Clarence Thomas 

Clarence Thomas, former black nationalist, current active participant in the destruction of civil rights. A kind of difficult to verify but fascinating idea of how these two things aren’t as incommensurate as you might think.

Quinn Slobodian – Crack-Up Capitalism 

Hey, Anglo-American liberals want to privatize your cities and turn you all into serfs, just like the conservatives.

Richard Wolin – The Seduction of Unreason 

What happens when you abandon universal concerns? Radical pluralism means that brute force, whether physically brute or capitalistically brute, charges in.

Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism 

            The most depressing, most prescient book I’ve read all year.

Nonfiction, but read more for the style and the feels and the memoiristic reverie than to get capital-I Information 

Shalom Auslander – Feh

A long and bitter kvetching by a highly uneven writer, but performing at top level here. There's also a story about an Indian bachelorette party and Shalom Auslander that was far too cringe for me to insert here.

Bill Buford – Among the Thugs

You think you’re a journalist, but you didn’t get beat up by Italian carabinieri as part of your in-depth reporting on lower middle-class criminal Brits, I’m guessing.

Owen Hatherley – Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances

            We’re doing a drunken Irish wake for modernism over here. 

Alfred Kazin – Starting Out in the Thirties

Mostly forgotten writer, totally forgotten book. But my god it’s a beautiful intellectual odyssey of New York back when Trotskyists and Stalinists debated in the CCNY lunchrooms.

Jarett Kobek – Do Every Thing Wrong! 

            It’s a book about XXXTentacion. And it’s amazing.

Michel Leiris – Manhood 

            Love letter to your dysfunctional penis.

Pankaj Mishra – The World After Gaza 

OK, it seems a bit too easy to write a Gaza book right now, but this is worth it. It’s a story about how the concept of Israel was corrupted over time, from an outsider’s perspective, and how, almost certainly, this genocide is just gonna keep going.

Jonas Mekas – I Had Nowhere to Go 

A couple years ago, I met Mekas’ son at a garden party in Brooklyn, and he was quiet, intense, curious, and humble. All things I see in his father’s memoir.

Douglas Murphy – The Architecture of Failure 

A really gorgeous series of architectural essays. I don’t mean to talk ill about Frank Gehry so shortly after he died, but Murphy sums up all the bad vibes I’ve always gotten off the guy’s work.

Harvey Pekar – Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me 

Not sure if this counts as nonfiction –  it is a comic book after all. But Pekar is as always a brilliant storyteller, and this is a great story about one Jewish man’s sundering with the Israel that his Holocaust survivor parents dreamed of.

Adolph Reed – The South 

A memoir that, for my money, conveyed the experience of living black in the Jim Crow South more powerfully than anything I’d read before.

*** 

Dear god, I did a listicle. Fuck the (twenty) five-o.

Die Vaterland Is Calling Me Back

Any American abroad has probably had this experience. You’re sitting at a bar on some foreign shore, and eventually you disclose where you’re from, if they haven’t figured it out already (and no faking you’re Canadian, that’s pussy shit and you know it). And eventually, they can’t help themselves, but say something along the lines of…

“Ha ha you Americans think cheese comes in cans, ha! Cheez Whiz ha! What you want to shoot your gun at me, Wild Bill Hickok?”

I mean, I enjoy dunking on my own country, and if they’re clever enough and interesting enough to talk to, I’ll join in on the jabs on the States, and make a few regarding their country too. After all, I’ve probably had Cheez Whiz less than five times in my life, so I’m perfectly happy incorporating other nations’ unfair stereotypes into the banter. Friendly ballbusting is one of the best forms of diplomacy.

And while I’ve had this conversation with people of many nations, Germans are by far the worst offenders. When I see the guy in the Birkenstocks with wool socks, I know he’s going to give me a talking to, and he probably won’t be nearly as funny as his Irish or Mexican equivalent.

But then I look around, as I sip my Riesling in a chilly autumn public square in the Bundesrepublik, at the apple cheeked and neckbearded young men in shapeless hoodies, at the icy slender blonde women with ponytails wearing jogging gear, at the jowly and thick-necked and beer-gutted old men in polyester, at the ladies pouring me the excellent wine – one with scraggly hair and eyeliner too thick in a pink fleece jacket, one with hair chopped short and square-framed glasses – all the faces I know from the golf courses and prayer breakfasts and dental offices of Des Moines.

But it’s not just the rubicund phenotype, which of course crossed the Atlantic from greater Germania to my native Middle West.

You have your image of German food, giant sausages and hunks of meat and heaps of potato salad and mash, washed down with great flagons of beer. It’s not at all bad, and can even be very good – but really how much difference is there between that and what you’d get at the average Wisconsin supper club? But just like in Middle America, that’s far less abundant than the takeout places where you can get a pizza or some fast food with origins from migrating brown people (tacos for us, kebabs for them). And whoever talks about the superiority of European groceries has never been to a Rewe supermarket in provincial Germany. At a cozy little tavern, they keep promoting something called “pizza salad.” I am not tempted. In a little town at the foot of the Harz Mountains, I see the fluorescent-lit Chinese place in the Aldi parking lot. There’s a special on orange chicken today.

Or consider the shops I pop into. Granted, the local wine they’re selling is a damn sight better than what you’d get in Ohio, but other than that? Shitty elevator music, kooky little tchotchkes with cutout wooden hearts, doilies with little jars of jam, disgusting fruity home scents. I might as well be at a welcome center on I-90.

Some ladies doth protest too much indeed.

Of course, I came for something more transcendent, and I found traces – I found it in the mist-wreathed schlossen high above the vineyards of the Mosel, where blue slate gravels give us wines of incomparable elegance, or in the spooky old East German transmitter tower emerging through the icy fog high up on the Brocken, from where the witches fly from on Walpurgisnacht, and from where a certain Austrian broadcast his commencement speech for the 1936 Olympic Games, but fuck his teetotaling and vegetarian ways, I had hot coffee enlivened with herbal bitters and a bowl of solyanka to beat back the chill. In the smoke-filled café lined with yellowed movie posters, covered in decades of graffiti, angular men behind the bar, Ian Curtis’ voice warbling through the speakers. In the skeletal industrial wastelands of the Saarland I know from the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, in the agonized faces of Albrecht Dürer and Matthias Grünewald, in the scarred heads of Christ and the Four Evangelists in the old basilica built by Emperor Constantine, its adornments ripped out in the Protestant Reformation, its heavy cedar roof destroyed by British bombs, and so all that was left of the old splendor were the chipped and cracked faces of a few old visionary Jews.

So I didn’t feel entirely like I was in Davenport. Entirely.

And Berlin, of course, is nothing like Davenport, but this isn’t to say it’s nothing like America, because it’s exactly like Brooklyn.

The hipstery parts of Berlin have remained relatively inexpensive compared to their NYC, SF, and London equivalents. Now, the lingua franca is just as likely to be English as it is to be German, the twitchy Anglos trying to stretch their money fill the streets. Yet there are still enough people who seem to be out doing the thing, some version of that old dream – move to the city, dive into your endeavors with like-minded freaks, hopefully attract the attention of the capital class. Even if many of the forms that now takes look cringe to my aging mind, some possibility still exists, and in that way it’s a bit of a time warp. I asked the bartenders for where to get late night eats, and they had an encyclopedic inventory of open-late immigrant takeout joints, got some kofte, strolled home through the autumn air, and in my morning shower, the perfume of the bar, cigarettes and Nag Champa incense, wafted off my skin and hair… I was 23 all over again.

OK, so it’s not some Berlin of the mind. Sure, I know it’s foolish for me to expect Sally Bowles and the city of stones, David Bowie and Nick Cave lost in the synthesizers and narcotics, commissars in leather coats and skulking dominatrices in leather thigh-highs, but of course I wanted to. But relatively little of those old Berlins remains. Not only because of the carpet air raids of a proud mustachioed Rhodesian who went by the moniker Bomber Harris (“no tears for jerries!”), but also the upheavals of the postwar years, with modernists on both sides of the Wall showing little regard for the past, especially since anything associated with that saber-rattling Prussian kultur was now automatically suspect. This in turn was followed by the giddy boom years after the reunification, so even that modernist optimism towards the future is now passe – the major structures built during the GDR era are torn down without a second thought, and nostalgists have been erecting neoclassical reconstructions of buildings destroyed during the war as if nothing had happened between now and then.

What is there now? Like I said, Brooklyn. There are still a few relics, proud old industrial canals and riverfronts, even if they’re no longer producing motorcycle parts but vegan brownies made with fair-trade chocolate, and there are still the dirty counters on old brick streets where I can get the specialty of the neighborhood (pastrami on rye and a Dr. Brown’s soda for Brooklyn, currywurst and light Berliner weisse beer topped with woodruff syrup for Berlin), there were the cool little galleries, the cocktail bars with skinny intense dudes pouring me a complimentary flight of different evergreen-infused spirits, all of them excellent.

But… along with all the other parts – the 5-over-1 condo buildings with cheeky blinking neon craft beer signs on the ground floor, the urban grit as branding, the largest chunk of the former Berlin Wall, along the River Spree, being dedicated to a bunch of largely really fucking fugly street art for people’s vacay snaps. The café-bar full of tech bros with fashion mullets doing their most horrifying unintentional Lex Fridman impressions. The café-bar full of vacuous talking points on the politics of the Anglosphere, with the coked-out girl castigating me for my moral failings as a yt, ironic given that she was extremely white-passing and far more stylish than me. The café-bar full of wealthy, thin-lipped, and poised xennial Germans in understated luxury apparel who expressed a visceral repulsion at me and looked like they were about to go do rites of Moloch. You tell me I’m in Europe, but I’m seeing fucking tip screens?

My suspicion is that part of what makes Berlin feel like Brooklyn is it has managed to achieve that ultimate dream of Enlightened Brooklyn, to be entirely outside the United States, in an imagined cross-national interzone, at both its best and its worst.

And if I’m going to make this strawman even bigger, the ultimate dream of liberal-minded Germans, it seemed, was to liberate themselves from any notion of complicity with the long shadow of the German past. The response I heard from the very charming, very kind Germans of a liberal cast that I met was that theirs was the land that empowered the WORST GUY EVER, making them by corollary the WORST PEOPLE EVER, as if by self-flagellating sufficiently, the guilt of the past will finally be expiated. Like all forms of self-proclaimed guilt, this is masochism, which is another German specialty, but that’s a tale for a different day. Strike dear mistress and cure his heart.

(see Hans-Georg Moeller on the topic for more and smarter)

And it’s unfortunately an attitude that often translates into self-righteousness. We feel the worst, and therefore we are the best. I have never been told not to do something by strangers more in my life. And we can freely sneer at the less enlightened.

I went to a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Gropius Bau, and Arbus is someone whose work I’ve always adored, but I always felt somewhat uneasy towards. When writers talk about her, they tend to fawn over the dignity and accord she gave to her outsider photographic subjects, but I always felt there to be something lurid about her work. At the exhibition, I looked at the catalog for the photos that really did seem to make their subjects look glamorous, and they were Mia Farrow, Norman Mailer, and various Warhol Superstars. Nudists, drag queens, carnival freaks, and snake handlers and just ordinary, not very attractive, not very poised people seemed almost like fish on display at the market, with the same dead-eyed stares of whole fresh trout on ice, 10 bucks a pound.

And seeing all the impeccably dressed Berliners gawking at the gawking just felt awkward, especially when I gawked back at them.

Arbus, I think, genuinely did want to find the common humanity in her subjects, and the more I learn about her life, she saw her outsiders as kindred spirits, troubled soul that she was. And her empathy is that of someone bearing the same wound, one which maybe we cannot admit we all have. She exposes us to an atavistic form of ourselves, stripped away, rendered vulnerable in all our odd thoughts, flabby, marked, disabled, re-gendered, somehow violated.

But were the gaunt faces of the masterworks of the German Renaissance that I had seen that much different?

And maybe through Arbus’ view of America, they were looking through their chic square glasses at something very familiar.

At the children’s park, the phrase “Sigma Boy,” which I believe is in reference to a TikTok slop content earworm by Russian children, is spraypainted across the slapdash plywood. Lord of the Flies by way of Andrew Tate.

For a long time after the war, the so-called “Rhenish model” did a lot to soften the contradictions of capitalism in West Germany, a social market economy with strong representation of labor in corporate decision-making, and strong bumpers in place to prevent more extreme beliefs on either the right or left, turbocharged by Marshall Plan money. Meanwhile, East Germany, for all its problems, did provide a basic standard of living for its citizens. But since then? The rise of austerity politics in the West, and shock therapy programs in the East – you’re on your own, bucko.

Karl Marx’s childhood home in Trier is now a dollar store.

Which conversely, makes the rise of the AfD, particularly throughout the Eastern regions, a horrifyingly logical likelihood, a black mark that’s increasingly impossible to ignore. Not that their economic position was equitable – they, like all right-populist parties at present, realize they just have to employ proletarian rhetoric without needing any substantive policy behind it. I had thought of them as just another gang of lummoxes, but when their platform includes banning the sale of kosher meat… But whoever their targets may be in 2025, let’s just say I can feel the nights getting a bit more crystalline.

“Ha ha you Americans, you voted for Trump.”

Yeah, well go to Thuringia motherfucker.

And born of rich Amerikaner loam, I only see a series of distorted mirror images. The world is burning. Die vaterland is calling me back. I have a plan…. Mein führer! I can walk!

We’ll meet again…

Introducing Cuck au Vin, the Food and Drink Division of Subject/Object

 I have slowly been migrating over to Substack (and that really is the best place to follow me, but for those of you who do still use Blogspot, I'd like to introduce my food and drink platform:

https://cuckauvin.substack.com/

Enjoy! 

We Good?

I can’t say I ever truly understood podcasts. Firstly, I don’t take in information well through auditory means, which is the main reason why lectures leave me impatient and I loathe phone calls. I get that you want something to listen to while you handle the mundane shit of day-to-day life, and that’s fair, and some few podcasts manage to scratch that itch, but now that the market is saturated, and now that random men tell me to listen to someone’s podcast on the regular, I can’t muster the enthusiasm. It just seems like more detritus.

However, that wasn’t always the case. Before all three turned into the worst kind of culture-war slop, and before I stopped listening entirely, This American Life and Radiolab and 99% Invisible were regular favorites. The first balanced beautiful human nuance with hilariously bitchy snark – Sedaris for the win – and the latter two were the best kind of popularization, taking complex and thorny ideas in science and design and presenting them in an informative but still rigorous way. But the early podcast bros never did it for me. Adam Carolla was far funnier when he was bottomfeeding on Comedy Central’s Man Show and lowering the discourse on MTV’s Loveline than he ever was on his own podcast (Dr. Drew telling listeners how important communication was, followed by Carolla asking if they’d done anal yet). And long before his right-wing turn, I found Joe Rogan to just be kinda annoying, even when he was interviewing people I found interesting and admirable. 

Yet I’m not sure quite why I stuck with Marc Maron, whose WTF podcast ends this week.

Before every comedian had an interview podcast, Maron had one. 

I remember so distinctly when I first listened to him, sometime in 2011 or 2012, while working on a technical writing gig in late summer in suburban Seattle. And while I don’t exactly remember how I found him, I do remember the angry, weird, self-loathing comic style that drew me in. This in particular stands out.

And the podcast had the same spirit. You got to see how he dealt with all the people he’d wronged in the past, making amends with all the people he had been an absolute shit to in the cocaine-and-bourbon haze of the ‘90s NYC alt-comedy world. My team at the time consisted of a cadre of overeducated, boozy quasi-fuckups with humanities degrees, heavily stamped passports, and strong opinions on David Foster Wallace. Listening to Marc Maron as I took screenshots and instructed users on how to get the most out of their Tapout-branded Android devices seemed a natural response to the circumstances in which I’d found myself. We’re all in this shit together. Let’s hash it out. 

And while his personality carried the tone of the interviews – the deeply wounded man trying to get good with the world – the guest list largely consisted of other loveable disasters, figuring their shit out with someone else figuring his shit out, as they all admitted they hadn’t behaved like upstanding citizens after snorting absolute alligator tails of primo Colombian. And they still weren’t completely alright. Sure, they had writing credits on well-regarded shows, they had husbands and wives who managed to deal with their foibles, but they were at the end of the day the sort of broken people who have no choice but to put themselves on stage and try to connect. These were their war stories. In a world of slick packaged bullshit, WTF seemed a beacon of honesty.

For years, I listened religiously. 

That being said, I did fall off some time ago. As Maron’s fame grew, his guest list consisted of fewer and fewer second-tier comics who never quite made it, and more and more genuine A-listers on the award-season campaign interview circuit. Maybe the famed Obama interview, an ugly sort of softball utterly lacking in substance, was the moment where he jumped the shark, but it seemed to me more of a slow decline. Rather than actually connecting to something deep and human, too many Maron interviews seemed to have the form of sincerity but not the substance, and consequently were little more than kitsch. His penultimate episode, a 40-minute monologue, ended with a compilation of some of his most legendary moments, set to the Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??” And it just felt manipulative.

He himself also got progressively more annoying. There was less and less cynical smirking counterpointed with genuine tears, and more whinging about the minor humiliations of Hollywood life and getting fat from craft services, as well as a fair bit of ignorant culture-war slop. And while I expected a certain misanthropy from him, it used to be barded with empathy. By now, his opening monologues have devolved into the groanings of a stereotypical wealthy California liberal who seems to genuinely despise and fear ordinary people, someone who seemingly hates them for their stupidity and just desires to wishcast them out of existence, while at the same time mewling about the importance of amplifying marginalized voices and listening to people’s trauma, assuming of course that they serve to assuage his sense of personal virtue. I came awfully close to smashing my phone when he harped about how people elected a fascist because they cared about the price of eggs. God forbid people, even if quite misguidedly, take their material conditions into consideration rather than their moral uprightness. Not all of us get infinite swag bags of vegan snacks, Marc. 

Furthermore, as other comics imitated the style of WTF, it seemed less like a unique representative of a certain world and more part of the background chorus. How unique is it when Bill Burr has a comedy podcast, and Conan O’Brien, and Shane Gillis, and Hannibal Buress, and Iliza Shlesinger, and Anthony Jeselnik… and… and I didn’t even know most of those people had comedy podcasts, but all I had to do was go to the Wikipedia pages of some comics I liked, and lo and behold. It’s almost a requirement now.

But even with all of that said, he never fully devolved into shit. He never got the neon podcast sign, he never sliced his interviews up into TikToks with starburst subtitles. For every utterly pointless interview with a focus-grouped favorite, there were interviews with the sorts of weirdos I like hearing from, and at its best it was still a clarion call to those of us, who try, quixotically, to still pursue creative endeavors in this benighted era. Consider this beauty, with filmmaker Kelly Reichardt (and go watch Old Joy and Meek’s Cutoff while you’re at it).

Yet just as I’m writing this, final episode dropped. It’s Obama, he’s back. Will I even listen? It’s frankly doubtful – I don’t need to spend another second of my life with that empty suit. Just fuck you. But maybe that’s a representative choice of our first-as-tragedy-second-as-farce era, trying to drink the Amanita muscaria urine until the heat death of the universe. 

Which is a sign that it really is time for the curtain to fall. I’m not sad to go because of Marc Maron himself, as he is now, who is someone I feel less identification with, or because of his podcast, as it is now, as something that I feel has lost much of its original value, but because of what he and it were to me at one time in my life. Our lives disappear piece by piece, and for every graceful dismount, there are a half-dozen stumbles.

The World You Were Born In...

You know the phrases. “Hold my beer.” “The perfect ___ does not exi…” You get the idea. The tired cliches plunged from the depths of the discourse, irredeemable mass-market quips. Some of them, to be fair, were once clever, before multiplying like anaerobic bacteria in the hogshit lagoons of 4chan, Reddit, etc., repeated by 14 year olds and bots until their mere invocation becomes repulsive. You can call them memes, but you could argue that all idioms, sayings, and turns of phrase were really just memes before we called them memes. However, these phrases are used more like memes – impervious to creativity and lacking defined by their repetition, they are a pure statement of one’s own social and discursive standing. Sometimes deployed sincerely, sometimes ironically, almost always repulsively.

But sometimes one actually makes an impact -- not much of one, perhaps, but enough to spark inquiry rather than a dismissive snarl. 

1970s grain, VHS font, doomed buildings. If it was in a gallery, it would get far higher praise.

A memory of years ago, right before I first stepped off American soil for a long period, for my first travel adventure in Asia. I sent out a Facebook message on blast to maybe 20 or so people one day, saying I’d be camped out at the Redwood on Howell and Belmont (RIP) that evening. And I drank dirt-cheap pints of PBR and read library books in the interim – I finished Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things and started Andrei Codrescu’s Wakefield if I remember correctly – and friends came by in ones and twos and threes, most of them not saying when or if they were swinging by, just coming and going, on their way to or from other loose hangout sessions, gigs, theatrical rehearsals, shifts at the bar or the café, while All the President’s Men played silently on the projector and someone put Guided by Voices on the jukebox.

It's hard to even imagine a world like that now.

But look a little bit further, and a certain hollowness emerges. The memelords, while they get the feels right, seem to lack that sort of long, telescopic view of their own past. They’re pretty young, and despite the aesthetic cribbing from other eras, they’re not talking about the longue durée of history, but like 2017. When you have fewer rings on your trunk, you think about time in more compressed terms. Remember those “Only ‘90s kids will remember this!” posts from back in the day, posted shockingly quickly after the ‘90s had themselves ended? That being said, the past decade or so in particular has been a motherfucker. COVID, of course, being the big thing, but many, many more things have happened in the interim – and it’s only natural for younger and youngish people to contrast the chaotic present with the more sedate if bovine world they associate with the ’90s and even ‘00s. 

Therefore, it’s unfortunate but unsurprising that the term in question has its origins and has had its greatest currency in the world of online “traditionalists,” a cadre that seems to mostly consist of alienated boys and men, mostly young, but with quite a few divorce dads and the like in there, who in their worse moments fancy themselves as Saxon warriors or Goldwater Republican picket-fence patriarchs deprived of their destiny. Men who believe that in a better world they would be slaying Saracens right now, or puffing their pipe in the study while wifey massages their shoulders and pours them another dry martini (although something tells me many of their taste buds are nowhere near mature enough to enjoy an actual dry martini). Plenty of ink has been dedicated to this kind of modern creature, but it’s hard to see how this could be anything other than the logical end result of a mirror maze of signifiers without signified, and every single moment of one’s life becoming a consumer choice, with minimal regard to what it is to be human. Their solutions are idiotic and often psychotic, but their instincts are not too far off. 

I would like to dance through the chaos, to take this Spinozist joy in the present, even amid the ugly world, but it’s tough to find the energy. Beer and peanuts and Paul Auster at a long-gone Seattle tavern. Did any of us know what was coming?