It Was the Best of Reads, It Was the Worst of Reads

There is a very good chance that if you’re reading this right now, it’s because you followed a link from my Goodreads profile. That’s not a bad thing – I put the link there for a reason, and I also regularly post reviews to Goodreads for a reason. Which makes the rest of what I’m about to say sound a bit contradictory. 

So to get it out of the way, I do like the fact that there is a space where I can write up my dorky little blurbs about books I’ve recently read, and compare them to what others write about them if so inclined. I’m not an active user, per se. I don’t ever check my feed or seek out connections. Mostly, I just twitch in place like a whirligig.

Maybe that’s loyalty – after all, I joined very early on, one of the only circumstances where I’ve ever been an “early adopter” of anything, and that was thanks to an invite from my then-roommate’s then-girlfriend. Nearly 20 years ago, Jesus. But thanks for that push all the same, Amelia. I have diligently read and responded since, more for my own purposes than any sense of community. That being said, if someone reaches out to me, I try to respond, because if someone is paying me the courtesy of interacting with my thoughts on things, I owe them the courtesy of, at the very least, a thank you.

It was thus that I, against my own intentions, became a person who projects influence (not gonna use that word…). At present, I am the most followed user in the Kingdom of Thailand. For what it’s fucking worth.

Of course, this has led to strange interactions, both good and bad. I have gotten weird DMs from clearly autistic people who melt down when I fail to engage with their special interest in the same way they have (RIP DMs). I have gotten some horny responses to my 29 year old twinkself in my profile pic from men, women, and everything in between. And this is to say nothing of the trolls, whom I collect and delight in. According to the commentariat of Goodreads, I am a crypto-fascist right-wing troll myself, I am a godless communist hellbent and dismantling these blessed United States, I am a Trotskyist LARPer who fails to properly appreciate the Actually Existing Socialism of the USSR and PRC, I am shedding white tears, I am a typical performative reader performative male lit-bro, I have polluted my mind with postmodern neo-Marxism, I’m doing a problematic ableism, I have strayed from the One True Church of Rome (OK, that one’s pretty much true).

But as I said, I didn’t engage in the community, and so I don’t know if it was always shit, or whether it’s become shit, but I know that, at least for the past several years, Goodreads writ large has absolutely been shit.

That being said, I do like my own self-selecting land of the Sebald- and Duras- and Deleuze-reading lotus eaters. As with any large platform, Goodreads is divided into regions, and there’s no reason why I would wander over into the section of spicy romance readers, or vice versa. Yet it’s the spicy romance readers that set the tone, by and large, and on the rare occasion that I read a fairly well-known piece of contemporary fiction, I’m forced to see what the broader community has to say.

Thus it was after finishing Mariel Franklin’s Bonding, hardly the best novel, but also hardly the worst, but a book which I rather admired for its desire to capture the present moment (something so few literary novels seem willing to do in any serious sense), even as I regretted how poorly it would age. But let’s look at the literal top review on Goodreads…

“If coming across Zionist propaganda 15% in wasn't enough for me to dnf…”

It almost goes without saying that this person clearly has no idea what Zionist propaganda is, because I combed over the first few chapters to find anything remotely Zionist, and it also almost goes without saying that this person’s favorite books are all young adult, and that they’re currently reading is all queer romantasy. They’re still in their early 20s, so I’ll grant them some grace, but I get the feeling that she picked up Bonding noting its themes of queer romance and late capitalism, and reacted in much the same way a child fed on Count Chocula might respond to actual adult food.

I was going to give you a few examples of other top reviews that strike me as profoundly foolish, but I’ll pick out one representative example in particular. Again, let me emphasize that this is from the top fucking review of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, a powerful roman-a-clef about the legendary slave rebellion:

“Does this really seem like the way a psychopathic uneducated slave would talk? Not to me it doesn't. What it sounds like is an overeducated middle-class 20th-century writer.”

Because maybe, just maybe, Styron was trying to convey the historical Nat Turner’s ferocious intelligence and clandestine education, and introducing a magical realist device to help us understand his common humanity with the presumedly educated readership, especially when counterpointed with the slave owners who have the same highfalutin rhetoric while committing barbarous crimes against their fellow man.

But if that’s what they fail to understand, what do they like?

Well, for the spooky season, they’ve got a massive (102 book long!) recommend list of witchy reads, including both fiction or nonfiction. So before looking, I thought of witchy reads from my perspective… but surprise, surprise, no The Witches of Eastwick, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Famished
Road, or The Master and Margarita. Hell, even the quality children’s fiction of Lloyd Alexander, Ray Bradbury, or Philip Pullman has no place here, my god, even the delightful Kiki’s Delivery Service (a rare example of a manga I genuinely adore) is deemed unworthy. The only book that I thought of that actually made it in was Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour, which would be hard to leave out, given Anne Rice’s prominent position in the Goth-girl canon, and that is an awful lot of their userbase (more on that later).

 

Really, very few of the books they mention have even crossed my radar. Of the few that does, one of the most prominent is Madeline Miller’s Circe, a book I have no desire to read because… I mean, that’s fanfic, really. Mostly, I get splashy covers, retellings of historical characters, starry-eyed YA, yass-queen witches who totally kick the patriarchy’s ass, nonfiction about how historical witches all were total yass queens who would totally kick the patriarchy’s ass, and frequent, frequent promises of prose you can rub your snatch to. I know – what the fuck do I expect from a list having to do with witches? – but I don’t think it’s unreasonable, in those 102 books, to expect some crossover with the serious literary canon. I was pretty surprised that Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead didn’t make the list, even though it would seem a natural fit.

But that’s the thing – there are plenty of analogous things that I would be fine with. There’s great historical fiction, there’s great YA fiction, there’s great feminist prose, both fiction and nonfiction, hell there’s even great erotica. But what makes them great is that they engage the reader rather than feeding them a pre-packaged message. Shirley Jackson is far too actually spooky and actually weird for this list.

And given how much effort is put into diversity in these sectors, this list seems remarkably un-diverse to me. Most writers about witches are women, as I would expect, and many seem to be in some way LGBTQ or women of color, but they are overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly from the English-speaking world. I haven’t combed through, but I don’t think there’s a single translation in here, actually. And to be quite frank, the experience of an upper middle-class daughter of a diaspora at a private school in California, for example, has far more in common with that of a white girl at the same private school than it does with that of a girl her own age in the land of her ancestors. Which is a shame, because there are so many witchy tales from Asia, Latin America, Eastern and Southern Europe, and Africa that are worth telling, and I’m sure are being told, and in fact I know are being told. Let’s expand a little bit beyond the witch category. These readers claim to want writers of color, but how many of them could stomach Eldridge Cleaver, Tayeb Salih, Sayaka Murata, or Young-Ha Kim? Queer writers please, but it’s not like they’re asking for Jean Genet, Gary Indiana, Kate Bornstein, or Camille Paglia.

But that’s not comfy content, now is it?

And in this way, most of Goodreads seems to want one thing, above all else: to escape into another world in which all of their assumptions and the totality of their worldview assuaged, and as long as a book does so with enough aplomb, it is a Good Read. While most of these readers would recoil at being cast as conservative in any way, shape, or form, they are remarkably Victorian in their worldview. Good art reflects good morals, and vice versa. Aesthetic expression ought reflect virtue.

I had some trouble finding recent, concrete data about the userbase of Goodreads, but from what I can surmise, it’s about what I would expect – overwhelmingly female, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly found in the Anglosphere, mostly in the 25-40 age bracket, and despite my demographic commonality with most of those characteristics, it’s so, so, so not for me.

It’s not that it’s actively hostile at all, most of the women in kooky statement eyeglasses on there are actually pretty friendly. But the rose gold and corporate-Memphis illustrations quietly tell me that this isn’t exactly a space designed for me (is this what it’s like to look at Barstool if you’re a woman?). Even the explicitly conservative sections mostly seem to consist of tradwives with Regency illustrations as their avis, highlighting their favorite devotionals and bemoaning novels that don’t retread Jane Austen.

But let me temper any claims of misogyny with some very active misandry. Since the birth of the Western tradition of the novel as such in the 18th Century, fiction has been misogynistically denigrated as the realm of female fantasy. Real men read classical epic poetry and serious theology don’t you see, leaving the imagination to the weak feminine mind. And we’ve returned to that point, just in inverse. I’m amazed by the number of men who tell me, with a straight face, “I don’t read books.” They engage in fiction, but the fiction they engage in is anime, superhero movies, video games, and porn. And while there’s nothing 100 percent wrong with any of those things, there’s also nothing 100 percent wrong with Butterfinger bars. When you have a pile of them for dinner, we have a problem.

So why do I care? No one’s making me read their bullshit, right?

First, because I am a reader, and it makes me terribly sad that this is what the supposed vanguard of readership is, and it explains why I so rarely read contemporary fiction. Because I can’t stomach this shit. And secondly, because I am a writer, and it reminds me how few people will give a fuck about the sort of things I write.

I’m already hearing another objection… “well, it’s always been that way.” And to a certain degree, the strawman I’ve erected has a point. Go look at any list of Pulitzer winners over the decades, or New York Times bestseller lists from any decade, and you’ll see an absolute ocean of mediocrities, long since lost to history. These were the people Dwight MacDonald mocked in Masscult and Midcult 70 years ago, and his satire fails to land now because no one remembers who the fuck James Gould Cozzens is. But even if the majority of writing has always been dreck, there was always at least space for more sophisticated work. Go watch old Dick Cavett interviews – he was on the air for ages, and he actually brought on serious, literary writers. There was big-name prose in Playboy. John Barth’s fucked up, experimental, violent, satirical, freewheelingly postmodernist Giles Goat-Boy made the NYT bestseller list for 12 straight weeks in 1966 – unthinkable now.

So then on to the final objection: then why stick around? Firstly, it’s been a great place for me to track my own reading for my own sake, and second, I have gotten some real insight from my tiny niche community – once again, I see you guys, what up! And third, it’s to bear witness. I think it’s telling that my most liked review is of Mishima’s Sun and Steel (speaking of queer writers of color who are unlikely to be featured…), and that says to me that there are people on Goodreads who care about something more. And a lot of them have reached out to me. They are, like the average Goodreads user, mostly women, mostly about my age or a bit younger (from what I can tell), but there the paths begin to diverge. They’re definitely not overwhelmingly white or from the Anglosphere. And beyond the demographics, they are people who have drank from the same wells, and who have experienced the same frustrations. And for that I love them with all brotherly affection I can muster.

And so I’ll close with the same mantra I always say to those around me in dire times, with dire circumstances all around, and I’m saying it to myself just as much as to you, the reader…

You are not crazy. You are not alone.

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.

Stop Recommending Me Books, Mindy Kaling

While it is about the most convivial consumer electronic there is, I can’t say I’m terribly fond of having to use a Kindle much of the time. But with the volume I read, and the limited access to the books I’m looking for in physical form, it’s something of a necessity, and so I have come to adapt, even as someone who has always preferred the analogue to the digital, the textured and material to the slick and digital.

For years, it was fine enough. Sure, it was another screen, but I had library access to quite a few books, and it wasn’t hard to download the others (if I’m paying for a book, I’d better be able to put it on my shelf). But then, after an upgrade a few years ago, I started getting advertisements – nothing too invasive or obnoxious at first, just the cover of a book that, for some algorithmic reason, our overlords in Belltown Seattle thought I would care for.

Then one day I pulled my device out of my bag, ready to enjoy my life, and was greeted with “Mindy Kaling’s favorites,” complete with hideously splashy corporate-Memphis covers with presumably polychrome starbursts and spills – a spiritual pink slime.

 

I tried to look up what the list actually entailed so I could further investigate, but I couldn’t – instead I found numerous other Mindy Kaling-approved reading lists, many of which seemed to be on AI-generated sites, so I couldn’t tell what was being recommended by her herself or by the bots, but I will say that these lists included, among the aforementioned pink slime, two Gwyneth Paltrow books (two!), Lean In (of course), and for some reason photographs of Lady Gaga by noted sex pest Terry Richardson – doing some great championing of diverse voices there – and Bossypants, which is fine. I liked Bossypants.

Perhaps I can hear some protestations – “actually if you tweak your algorithmic settings…” – I’ll stop you right there buddy, the problem is the nature of the beast not its shape, and do you think I’d like to assist a machine with its machine learning? And I can hear another protestation from certain corners – “sounds like misogyny” – to which I say that Joe Rogan’s favorite books would probably be even shittier. It’s just that at this stage, men are a bit post-literate, so it’s easier to market books – especially within the Kindle-reading demographic – with a deliberately feminine vibe. Note that I did not say feminist.

A fork in the road – do I bitterly muse about the Collen Hoover-ization of the American publishing world, or do I bitterly muse about the ubiquity of advertising. Fuck it, Option B, let’s go babes.

That being said, at this point there’s not much novel I can say about said ubiquity at the present moment that hasn’t been said by both those more rhetorically articulate and academically correct. So I won’t go over the obvious. The in-app ad is a tulpa of corrupted souls, dependent on the grand Jenga game known as “brand awareness.”

(Part of me wonders if writing like this will get me eternally blacklisted from copywriting jobs. The most bitter and pathetic of lulz from me if that is the case.)

And yet there’s an aesthetic double bind here – regardless of my obvious loathing for the ubiquity of the device, the screens incongruously placed in taxis and on gas pumps, I can’t say the same about the grand cynosures of mid-century Times Square or contemporary Shibuya, for example. Instead what I feel is something akin to rapture.

My first instinct would be to say that remoteness is a reason why, the pink haze of nostalgia, for example – after all, most of us didn’t have the opportunity to see the Marlboro Man blow real cigarette rings in the flesh, most of us only got to experience this world through Edward Hopper and Don Draper – but that isn’t completely the case.

Because I could say the same thing about places I have spent so much time in, the flicker and sparkle of neon-lit Tokyo, the ominous Ridley Scott glow of video billboards through the monsoon rain in Bangkok. And for that matter plenty of people were saying that about New York at the peak of its mid-century grandeur, including those who may have shared my same anti-capitalist sentiments:

“There is no need to search for the surreal here, for one stumbles over it at every step.”

That’s what Gretel Adorno said in her letter to Walter Benjamin about the joys of life in New York, after the Frankfurt School had been closed on the grounds of Jewish cultural bolshevism, not long after she and her husband Theodor had packed up for an uncertain life in the United States. And before Benjamin faced the fact, not long after, that he would never be walking along the Hudson with Gretel after all, not long before that ship on which he was supposed to sail left Spain for the New World without him.

Of course, the old deliria of Manhattan were, in the years of the “urban decline” after 1950, abandoned by the genteel classes for any number of reasons too long to discuss here and again much analyzed by academics brighter than I, leaving much of New York proper to go to seed. They abandoned the city for the leafy enclaves in the Hudson Valley where any intrusion of the vulgarity of mass advertisement could be addressed with highway beautification campaigns led by the local ladies’ auxiliary. By the time that Travis Bickle’s taxi skulked down 42nd Street, what were left was the detritus of commercial society – the flickering signs for Seagram’s and Swisher Sweets flashed over the sign for the live sex show.

And when Godfrey Reggio shot Koyaanisqatsi, he chose to focus so many of his most dramatic and heartbreaking shots on this world.

 

But as a teen, when I watched Koyaanisqatsi, as with so many of the time lapses of Fordist industrial production, it seemed almost nostalgic – much as this was a time in which they actually made things in America, this was a time when you could walk on the wild side that Lou Reed sang about.

Similarly, when Reggio made Powaqqatsi a few years later, covering the arrival of commercial culture in the Global South, there is the exact same giddy delight at the cityscapes, at the stream of lights in Geylang in Singapore, on Nathan Road in Hong Kong, even among the horror of the some of the most exploitative and environmentally destructive production systems the world has ever known. 

 

So what distinguishes the grand commercial spectacles of the world’s urban centers from the vulgar swarm of pop-up ads?

Really, it’s just that it’s so fucking chintzy.

No stumbling over the surreal in the grand city where one can escape the strictures of old worlds and small towns, none of the pleasure of glitz and fever and contradiction that occurs in a real physical space. No delirious New York, as the severe and hangdog Dutch architect put it. No Times Square red, or Times Square blue, per a thoughtful and thick-bearded science fiction novelist with a passion for backroom gay sex. No real smoke rings. Just a push notification on your fucking device and some ugly-ass infographic visuals.

This is an attempt to squeeze every last bit of the toothpaste out of the tube. The toothpaste being your money, the tube being you. I’ll leave discussion of “falling rates of profit” to those with a more subtle economic understanding.

Which was less offensive on already-imbecilic social media sites and in the sort of freemium downloadable Tetris-ish games you play while you’re in line at the grocery store. After all, it’s already slop, so what’s more slop? And besides – in much the same way those mid-century New Yorkers had the capital to flee to the tony suburbs, the digital spaces that will be most insulated from the vulgarity of advertisement will be those that require a buy-in. Most of us hoi polloi will inhabit the wasteland, with frequent reminders for special one-time only introductory interruption-free offerings on premium services.

But the wasteland has been expanding in size, until it has reached my personal respite, the world of literature.

Get the fuck out.

Walking With Sebald

When I read Carole Angier's recent biography of W.G. Sebald, Speak, Silence, which, while much-feted, is really quite a pointless tome, the one thing that I kept coming back to is the degree to which Sebald the writer is absent from Sebald's novels, despite the fact that, “he,” W.G. Sebald is the main character of all of them, morosely wandering through Antwerp and the East Anglian marshes. We don't get much of Sebald – sure, we get a few biographical descriptions, but even when he talks about himself, he never talks about himself as he is now, but about his childhood on the southern fringe of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and the sense of dislocation from that particular time and place. Really, it's the time and the place that take center stage.

Perhaps this seems a heresy in which an age in which, given the relative anonymity and disconnectedness of digital interactions, one's existence boils down to one's identity markers. How many comments have you seen prefaced with “As a...” online? Despite the fact that all of Sebald's novels are ostensibly rooted in personal experience, he refuses to categorize himself, and lets the absences do the talking – absence of family and close friends, absence of nation, absences of language, memory, sight, thought.

It seemed inevitable, given my trajectory through Borges and Calvino, that I would inevitably arrive at Sebald, but it was only when I was 20 or so that a copy of The Rings of Saturn was lent to me by the woman who had once been the girl down the block.

The plot, such as it is, is impossibly simple – Sebald attempts to walk the length of Suffolk. As he explores landscape, he meditates on the many ways in which his experience is coded in geography, biology, anthropology, and history, particularly the history of the many violences that constitute the story of human civilization.

Which made perfect sense for a grumpypuss like me. And so as I expanded my own horizons, Sebald's ghost became more apparent.

Consider:

Late last year I was walking outside the old Bohemian town of Aussig (Usti nad Lobem since 1945), in one of those anonymous stretches of European semi-countryside, with steel I-beams littering the marginal ways and 1960s panelak apartments abutting the rye fields, an occasional beer sign referencing the peasant idyll, a soft autumn rain falling along the Elbe.

And yet as I approached the star fortress at the end of the road, I felt a sudden spasm in my right leg, as if the very ground beneath me was bound to give out, and despite the pain, I persisted forward through the vacant streets of the garrison, its sides lined with brick ramparts, the homes once occupied by Jews in their last ghetto before deportation to points north and east now occupied by Czechs with dented Volkswagen hatchbacks, waves of pain radiating through my shin muscles as I traced the brick-lined tunnels of the fortress.

I stumbled back into the town square, my leg in agony, to find a little shop with the word “coffee” written out in little red light bulbs, to get a desultory brown Americano and some little pastries spread with jam made from aronia berries, a small and peculiar berry with a deep and astringent taste reminiscent of ruby port, native to the Eastern woodlands of North America and yet transplanted and more popular here in the Slavic forests, yet recently introduced into commercial agriculture in the boggy lands of Northern Iowa, the vicinity in which Antonin Dvorak, himself a son of the nearby Melnik District, composed his New World Symphony – another of the many ways in which the route of the Cedar River mirrors that of the Moldau.

This would be a Sebaldian moment regardless. What I had forogtten was that Sebald's Jacques Austerlitz had walked this same path, on his way to the garrison town of Theriesenstadt, built by Empress Maria Theresa in the 18^th Century around a star fortress, a specialty of Austerlitz's, and he had walked this road twice, first as a child and then as a man retracing his own paths. And yet I had somehow forgotten the location of this critical journey, despite my having remembered the character of Jacques Austerlitz as an expert in the history of the star fortress, his childhood during the ghettoization processes, and his visit to the spa town of Marienbad, his ice cream stiffened with potato starch remaining unmelted. The reason for this lapse in memory remained uncertain – I didn't even think about it until later that night in my hotel room in Prague.

And that moment, the sudden spasms of agony in my leg. It seemed remarkable to me that Sebald's other novels are marked by moments of intense physical distress, the hospital stay in The Rings of Saturn, the sudden attack of blindness in Vertigo. Is it Sebald's ghost? Or is it some unspoken universal pattern of physical pain and psychic gloom, the transformation of oneself into a lens?

So what can I say about the artist who called me the other day from the cliffsides of Nice, asking me what I knew about star fortresses?

Reference Desk

I've frequently heard – both as a neutral comment and as an active complaint – that my writing is overstuffed with references. A forgotten European battle here, a disco single there, a torrent of names and places and times.

I sometimes wonder why this is. Is it laziness? A failure to develop the subtleties of narrative? Is it a symptom of late-stage capitalism, a cheap Bret Easton Ellis (there I go again...) move in which name brands are substituted for humanity?

No, at least I don't think so. Because so many of the artists and thinkers I love build on references, and it's not because they are lazy, or because they are passive victims of the “postmodern condition,” forced to rely on “intertextual” technique. And in fact we should ask where the line is drawn, or if any line can be drawn between “reference” and mundane metaphor and analogy.

I'm sure there are linguists, philosophers, and others more competent and qualified than myself having this discussion right now. I'll leave well-enough alone for the time being, mere mook that I am.

But whatever it is – reference, metaphor, analogy – has always been an endless fascination. The histories and geographies of the objects of our daily life, the encoded sign systems we barely notice. And I've always been drawn to those who see the world in a similar light.

We'll start with W.G. Sebald in Austerlitz...

 “If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleared up and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who had been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, and avenue or a bridge.”

Gorgeous, no? Bonus points if you get the reference...

“Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new
houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, whose work I tried in my own way to reference before I ever read Austerlitz, before I realized that Sebald way-more-than-one-upped me

But it's not just a figurine in the galette des rois, waiting to be found. At it's best it's an invitation into a world. And so it was I looked for those artists and thinkers who seemed, in their odd way, to be writing such letters requesting your presence in their worlds.

When I was 15 or 16 and I read Joan Didion for the time, I understood damn near nothing. I couldn't understand the objects lingered over – the plumeria blossoms and stray pieces of tulle and Bob Dylan 7” singles, the bourbon flasks and white lipstick. I didn't know anything about the tabloid headlines of the day, anything about ritualized screaming in Synanon or the '64 Goldwater campaign or the coded references to events that occurred on Cielo Drive. And yet somehow... they cohered.

There is always the risk that when a references fails to resonate with the reader, that the reader is alienated. And yet somehow – and maybe this is my adolescent lack of confidence speaking – I was drawn in. It didn't seem unknowable. Rather, it seemed like a skeleton key to a lost world, the sort of world where you might spend the early evening among wealthy Republicans who still saw heavy silken drapes as good taste of the sort that had been lost during the French Revolution, and the late evening splitting an eight-ball with Lindsey Buckingham.

But this has been such a repeated pattern in what I find appealing. And furthermore, the world I discovered inside the text bleeds over into the outside world.

Which is why I walk around, seeing the Tom Waits rain falling into a brand of shoes American-made until 1983, hearing the Mark Fisher bass rhythm in an after-hours club. Having a Robert Coover fever dream at 2:30 in the morning, imagining I am hearing Walter Benjamin sigh on a gray autumn day.

But this is where the breadcrumb trail leads. The city of streets and squares, nooks and crannies outside my window, the plumerias in bloom across the pool.

The Klosterman Memos

The books that, without a doubt, make me think the most are not the ones I adore, nor the ones I hate, nor the ones that I have neutral feelings towards (obvs). They are the ones where I understand the perspective, but something is just... off. Like the gloomy, bug-eyed pianist Theodor Adorno said, the splinter in your eye is the sharpest magnifying glass.

So it was when I recently read Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself in Order to Live, his... travelogue, I guess?... about driving around America to places where various rockstars had met their makers, Duane Allman in a motorcycle crash in Macon, Jeff Buckley on an ill-advised swim in Memphis, half of Lynyrd Skynyrd falling to earth in the Mississippi woods, Kurt Cobain by suicide... OR WAS IT?!... on Lake Washington Boulevard in Seattle, and the rest.

The deaths are incidental -- in fact, it's pretty fucking shoddy as a framing narrative for a ramble about his cultural obsessions and his fading youth and a series of very self-consciously ill-advised relationships with women he puts on pedestals.

When I was in college, Chuck Klosterman's star was much higher. Back in the halcyon days of warbly, Bush-era new sincerity, as the slacker generation failed to reckon with the fanged horrors of the dawning 21st Century (see attached documents: the film The Station Agent, the discography of Death Cab for Cutie), his self-described "low-culture manifesto" and landmark essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs was a major cultural set-piece, to the point where if I was a filmmaker setting a movie in 2002, I would use a copy of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs as a linchpin in the male and female leads' meet-cute.

So what is it? Aside from being the most goddamn Gen-X a title as one can imagine (and while we're talking about Gen-X markers, he is of the youngest possible age to still call weed "pot"), it is a series of essays about Star Wars, the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, The Sims, and shit like that. In other words, it's the same cultural perspective as the aimless conversations in Clerks. This style reached its most refined and mind-expanding form in the essays of David Foster Wallace, and its most egregious and twee form in the oeuvre of Dave Eggers. The Cocoa Puffs book is somewhere in between. In fact, I remember being charmed at points as a 20 year old, even if I did kind of envision Klosterman giggling to himself through his oblong black plastic glasses as he typed out his missives in the cold glow of his laptop.

And so it was when I read Killing Yourself in Order to Live, although the moments of charmedness were far sparser. The more I read, the more annoyed I became at someone who was very aware of the fact that he was being called "self-indulgent" or "masturbatory," and who would inevitably address the self-indulgence of his own self-indulgence and metaphorical or literal masturbation in an infinite series of recursive backflips, all ending in some elaborate analogy to the cover art for Appetite for Destruction or the always-a-bridesmaid status of the Jim Kelly-era Buffalo Bills. 

Perhaps this is a difference of age. Perhaps it's the fact that when I first read Klosterman, I was in my early 20s, and far more easily wowed by pyrotechnical meta-melanges than I am now. After all, I was doing a lot of questioning of grand narratives back then, and metashit seemed to be at least an honest answer for how to create art in the era of late-stage capitalism. And while Klosterman seemed to be... well, a dork... he at least had a wit about him and the sort of goofy charm that I always associate with people raised in the painfully earnest Upper Midwest.

Perhaps it's that I am now, at 34, the aimless metropolitan fast approaching middle age that Klosterman embodied. Remember what I said a few paragraphs ago about fading youth and ill-advised relationships? Yep. That was once a lifestyle I looked up to. Now that I seem to be in that whirlwind, I have little use for a guy who seems to be even worse at navigating that than I am. And maybe it's the fact that I didn't grow up an end-of-history Gen-X'er, but retreating into an infinite mirror maze of self-reference, repetition, and simulacrum doesn't seem a valid option anymore (nor does any kind of mealymouthed sincerity, but that's a conversation for a different day).

But here's the weird thing, and one that remarkably few people seem aware of -- Klosterman is capable of so much more. I would strongly advise picking up his debut novel, Downtown Owl, the story of a few people living in a small North Dakota town in the early '80s, which is nothing like his essays. Sure, there are plenty of pop culture references, and I'm remembering the Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup providing a major plot point, but they are by no means front and center. Instead, it's a chilly, sparse novel of human yearning, centered around the intersecting lives of a high school football player, an old curmudgeon at the diner, and a recently transplanted schoolteacher, with more in common with the dead-dream landscapes of The Last Picture Show or the stories of Sherwood Anderson or Raymond Carver than the Tarantinized ennui of the man's nonfiction.

So is there hope for his work?

He's since gone on to publish sets of cards in black Helvetica on a white background, making them look an awful lot like Cards Against Humanity, the funny-the-first-time-you-play game which bills itself as the "card game for awful people" but which is in reality the "card game for giggly pudgy edgelords."

The use of Helvetica is telling -- it would have been a standard choice a decade or so ago, and it made its appearance on every sign on Seattle's Capitol Hill when I traipsed her streets in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but has since ceased to be the typography of choice for the literary caste.

And so I'm convinced that Klosterman's essays slot in along with the first two Shins albums -- a reminder of a time and place, not without its charms, but something I can comfortably move on from.

Amanda Gorman's Shitty Poetry: An Intervention

Generally speaking, I despise culture-war issues, and consider them to be a needless distraction. If you actually care about a potato-headed toy losing its gendering, you are quite likely an idiot.

But sometimes when something hits near and dear to my heart -- in this case questions of poetry, translation, and meaning -- I feel the need to intervene.

It was reported in the Guardian, among other sources, that the Catalan translator of Amanda Gorman's debut book of poetry "The Hill We Climb" was being removed from his assignment on the grounds that he was not a young, black woman -- remarkably, the second such row over the translation of this one book in Europe. Oh dear.

Even if you accept the shaky-at-best premises of standpoint epistemology, what connection is there between the experience of a black Catalan, likely a first- or second-generation Subsaharan African, and a black American, beyond being subject to systemic racism, when even the systemic racisms they experience are pretty fucking different? Does this very presupposition -- that the translator of a work needs to share a similar set of demographic characteristics as the author -- negate the very idea that a work is translatable, understandable, or communicable across societies, and if you carry the idea to its logical extreme, even between individuals? Doesn't this reduce the nature of an artistic work to the author, in complete ignorance of every lesson and every intellectual debate of literary theory in the 20th Century, from the New Criticism movement and the Frankfurt School on through thinkers as diverse as Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, and Harold Bloom?

All of that being said, I'm not surprised. Ever since I saw the clip of her reading her poem at the Biden inauguration, her work was, fully and completely, reduced to her personhood. The quality of the poem didn't matter -- it was the media image of a young black woman with a Harvard education reading a poem, something that, in the American liberal imagination, functioned as a negation of the state-sponsored racism and crass vulgarity of Trump and Co.

I had vaguely remembered the video, and that I'd watched it and not been impressed. But I figured, what the hell, let me look at it as I would any other poem.

It fucking sucked.

To be fair, so does inauguration poetry in general, all the way back to John F. Kennedy having middlebrow fave Robert Frost give a reading. I get it, it was shared widely on social media, and largely by people who would consider themselves educated. If you look at the text, its substance is no more sophisticated than a motivational poster ("We've braved the belly of the beast / We've learned that quiet isn't always peace" -- pretty sure I heard a pimply white kid read that at a slam poetry night freshman year). But here's the thing -- it sounds poetic, in that it sounds like the idea of poetry in a world in which poetry has been all but expunged from the public sphere.

It's a point I belabor a lot. A lot of the "intellectual discourse" in the contemporary English-speaking world is really an illusion of discourse. People are drawn to Ben Shapiro because he sounds like he's debating, when he's really just yelling and invoking the concept of logic rather than actually deploying it. People are drawn to Jordan Peterson because he invokes a near-astrological conception of personality and uses it to provide fatherly advice, and this seems like psychology. People are drawn to Robin D'Angelo because white liberals prefer to engage in performative, self-flagellating mea culpas rather than admitting the ways in which capitalism props up the white supremacist order.

All of that being said, I can't blame individuals -- I really, really try not to -- because people really are deprived of a humanities education, given the way that testable metrics have become the focus of the American educational system and the system itself is largely taken over by disaster capitalists (see the near-complete dismantling of the public school system in New Orleans), leaving little room for the subtleties of perception and interpretation.

In an era in which information is so omnipresent in our lives, to the point where it's overwhelming, it would seem obvious to me that it's these perception and interpretation skills that are necessary for sorting it out -- failing that, you are likely to get a bad case of Joe Rogan brain.

For those of us who put great stock in the humanities, it's a massive fucking bummer.

But when you find contemporary cultural products that still resonate -- recent works by Jarett Kobek, Ben Lerner, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Celeste Ng coming to mind, as do the media-studies texts of Evgeny Morozov, as did David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" -- it's a revelation. Those are the moments when, staring at the page, there is a hand on your shoulder. You are not crazy. You are not alone.

T.S. Eliot on the Subway

Sunset. The rainy season, Bangkok, walking through the crowds of masked commuters. A rope is lifted, and a certain number are let through the electronic gates and onto the subway platform. As we board, the announcement is polite and almost cooing in Thai, stilted in English “Please refrain from talking.”

It's a line that has haunted me since I first read it, and I had to look it up again.

    “Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

     And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

    And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

    Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.”

I was around 12 or 13 when I first read that, an early winter twilight falling over the prairie states, around the time I truly internalized how tawdry and depressing the world around me could be. T.S. Eliot wrote those lines from East Coker in 1939, fully aware of the much greater darkness the world was settling into once again.

I didn't know that then. I knew it from context. Paul Theroux was quoting it in a bit from The Old Patagonian Express, using it to describe the New York subway of the pre-Giuliani days – and even that, I only knew from transmitted experience, from reruns of The Equalizer and from cable viewings of the Death Wish movies, that showed New York as an ongoing turf war between gangs which somehow admitted both black-nationalist kids in leather jackets and sunglasses and white punks with pink mohawks.

I didn't know anything about T.S. Eliot's life, and nothing of his poetry other than bits of The Hollow Men and The Waste Land that I'd found in my parents' books. I didn't know that he'd written East Coker to expound upon his belief that science and material progress and art had failed to make people happier in any fundamental way. He was the scion of industrial wealth, his family owning a Saint Louis firm with the gloriously Victorian-positivist name of the “Hydraulic-Press Brick Company,” affiliated with the sunny, inclusive, progress-affirming Unitarian Church. And none of that really seemed to matter after 1,000,000 men got vaporized at the Somme. I didn't know about his stuttering attempts to turn himself into an English country gentleman, I didn't know about his bomb-dropping effect on literature in the English language, his fully-formed modernism signaling the rise of a new literary idiom.

I did know, though, that it resonated. Hard.

And it's a line that I think about in my darker moments, when the things that sustain me – whether that's art, travel, experience, hedonistic abandon – fail to suffice. When I am forced to confront my own atomization.

And I reflect on this line in particular because it seems so absolutely of the moment – the faces on the train, the growing terror of nothing to think about, the fear of not being entertained. All the new Netflix series look like garbage. You're scrolling through your phone when you're taking a shit.

It's an easy out to look back to a time -- around Eliot's own time -- when people often presume things were simpler, less alienated. But Eliot was looking back much further, to a time before the Industrial Revolution, when all reasoning was analogy, every moment was imbued with symbolism, and the notion of physical laws separate from the watchful eye of God verged on the inconceivable. To the time of the Medieval passion play and the charivari and the tales of the fisher king, when the sun rose and set through divine will.

It was a path already trodden by people like Henry Adams and D.H. Lawrence. Like H.P. Lovecraft, like Aldous Huxley, like Ezra Pound he saw the malaise of the present, mass destruction and new forms of totalitarianism, but lacked the confidence to move forward into the future, and instead fetishized the mythic past.

Lovecraft died, forgotten, a miserable incel avant la lettre a little before East Coker was published. Huxley quickly became a weird sort of proto-hippie, writing dull panegyrics to Hinduism and LSD. Pound disappeared down the rabbit hole of Mussolini worship and mental illness.

I read the full text of East Coker several years later as a college student, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Eliot's portent-laden avant-garde babblings suited the worldview.

But rereading the thing, I don't know how I missed the point. Eliot, having spent the interwar years saying fuck it all, seeing the rising tide of fascism, finally realized the world he lived in was worth fighting for, and he closes the text with uncharacteristic hope – I got the uncertainty of it, the dissociation, the clutching at straws. But then I read the last line as the train left the Sirikit Center station.

    “We must be still and still moving

    Into another intensity

    For a further union, a deep communion

    Through the dark cold and the empty desolation

    The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

    Of the petrel and the porpoise. The end is my beginning.”

A flower in a bomb crater, as it were.

I emerge from the subway at Asok, the electronic billboards leering, rain spitting. I shut my eyes, and I can almost hear the crash of waves all around me.

The American Political Book

All books have a half-life, but political books seem to have the shortest half-lives.

I reached this conclusion upon deciding not to read grand magister of American journalism Bob Woodward's latest installment in the "Why Trump Sucks" book series (reports on which have been dominating my news feed for the past year or so), Fear. Part of this is simply that I need no reminder that the current commander-in-chief is an illiterate, reactive oaf. This is pretty fucking self-evident. And part of the reason that I don't pay attention to my news feed anymore is that I need no further reminders of this, nor do I have much patience for the various encomia to only marginally less repulsive figures (looking at you, Comey).

But political books have, by and large, always been awful, given that they are usually designed to either rouse up the base or address hyper-specific moments rather than engage in the sort of deep, long-term analysis and study of historical, cultural, social, economic, environmental, and indeed political trends that make up any kind of real look at the world in which we live. They seem to come into two types.

- Type 1: The Airport Bookstore Version

This version seemed to be omnipresent in the Bush years, both in its liberal versions (such as those by well-meaning amphibian Michael Moore) and its conservative versions (by Sean Hannity or any other American flag lapel-pinned slug-humans who blather on about freedom while happily taking it in the ass from whatever loathsome authoritarian comes their way). You know the type, with the picture of the smiling pundit on the glossy cover and the supposedly incendiary title, jeremiad prose, and lots of floating-block insets of text with glib asides that make the whole damn thing look like “Talking Points for Dummies,” ideal for the sort of reader who buys books not because they enjoy reading but because it was written by their favorite cable news talking head.

- Type 2: The Insider's Approach

These books usually have a plain-ish cover and a tasteful font, I guess to indicate that these are Real Books, and quite often have forewords by US senators. Extensively footnoted and decorated with fleurons at the beginning of each chapter, these are longer-form versions of the sorts of articles that appear in the Atlantic or National Review that address specific policy issues, and extrapolate to reach the conclusion that resolving this one particular issue will, in some way, fix everything. The authors are largely DC types for whom the lanyard is the equivalent of a teardrop tattooed under the eye, and who spend a lot of time talking about “healing America's political divide,” whatever that means.

What connects the two, other than the subject matter, is their intellectual myopia. By failing to examine the breadth of history or ask the necessary and uncomfortable deep questions about the nature of the discourse which we conduct, what we are left with are the hollow cheers and boos of the political class at one very specific moment in time, and they are painfully out of date within months of their release.

But this is to be expected, given the denigrated nature of the public sphere (although “denigrated” makes it sound like there was a golden age, which there wasn't, and if you don't believe me, read Dwight MacDonald's “Masscult and Midcult,” a thorough skewering of the middlebrow faves of the 1950s). Blowhards and Ted-talkers like Jordan Peterson, Thomas Friedman, or David Brooks have the right appearance of authority (elderly white men in suits, frequently bespectacled) and the right jargon to be anointed as serious intellectuals by a public that has, by and large, never bothered to understand the humanities and social sciences in any meaningful way. Sure, there's a lot of very justified frustration nowadays with the rise of Internet conspiracy theories and clickbait journalism, but so many of the same people who get in a tizzy about these things are just as likely to be taken in by these fucking hucksters.

For a long time, I felt the need to keep up with these things in the spirit of being an informed citizen. But then again, I don't go to Marvel movies because, no matter how big a part they are of the dialogue at large, I don't care about how the magic man feels sad even though he's magic. And likewise, I don't care to read some commentator's painfully oversincere takes on the past week and what it means for America.

But when I read a book by David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon or Joan Didion, then everything becomes crystalline, and it does so because, while very much of a time, it is ruthless in its analysis. Or if I do want to read something explicitly political, I'll have a look at any article in the Jacobin, which in one issue contains more wisdom, insight, and analysis than the complete oeuvre of a mediocrity like Chris Hedges or Bill Maher.

And therein, I think, layeth the path to liberation. Not in any political sense, mind you, but psychically. To be both more able to comprehend the world around me more clearly and to engage in a more meaningful dialogue, I have to turn off the white noise, and while the world is not necessarily any prettier, it is freer of artifice. And damn, the clouds are nice this afternoon.