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I hit my reading peak when I was eleven or twelve. At the time, it was a joke. I had a bedside table and it was stacked with books, all at different stages of being read. Books migrated to the floor next to the bed, and different stacks migrated to different rooms of the apartment. At the time I really was ravenous. It was clear to me that books were essentially the same as knowledge and were the window into the world—into all kinds of different worlds—but, crucially, that books also contained the key into adulthood. Since then, my reading has basically been in decline and under siege from a wide variety of different adversaries. Let’s list those before getting into my personal reading rehabilitation project.

Middle school, and adolescence in general, were the single greatest blow to my reading. It quickly became clear that, from a social perspective, all this reading was a catastrophic blunder, and I tried to switch gears as quickly as I could—I would come home from school and turn on ESPN or VH1 and try to download pop culture so that I could repeat it back in school the next day.

School itself was an obstacle to my reading. I showed up at my new middle school trying to hide The Republic under The Red Pony, and I’ve had a fantasy from that day to this that the school system would start recognizing and supporting kids like me who clearly were very self-motivated and had an obvious aptitude in one subject as opposed to others. In this fantasy I would have been instantly enrolled in some higher-level English classes and excused from math or science, which, it was completely clear, wasn’t going to be a significant part of my life. But that just wasn’t the case. There were phone calls home, and I learned fairly quickly to revert to the mean.

Then there was social life. I remember carefully packing a suitcase of my books for college when my father told me, “Trust me, there won’t be a moment for reading recreationally.” He didn’t just mean that there would be a deluge of school reading, he meant that there would be so much going on around campus that reading for fun would be a kind of admission of social failure. I took that seriously, felt a sort of guilty conscience whenever I opened up one of my books and tried to think what I should be doing instead. It was a real surprise to me when I realized, somewhere towards sophomore or junior year, that it wasn’t exactly true and lots of cool, perfectly socially-adjusted people were also reading for fun.

Then there was work life. I sort of had an understanding around this time that reading, even serious reading, was childish, and that adults spent all their time thinking about money, and I remember a moment soon after I graduated when I delivered a kind of private eulogy for my reading life. In the end, it turned out to be not like that. The first job I had out of college involved twelve-hour workdays, but that still left a lot of hours unaccounted for, and I remember the curious guilty pleasure of visiting the used bookstore in town and loading up on a whole bunch of Penguin Classics that the proprietor was visibly surprised to be selling to anyone.

I remember feeling like I’d overcome some kind of hurdle in my reading life at that time—I’d expected work life to grind down my reading and instead my reading (which is to say, my inner life) had somehow outfoxed the work schedule. But I was underestimating my adversaries. That phase was another peak of my reading, and then there was a ten-year period from, roughly, my late twenties to my late thirties when I barely read anything at all—or, at least, my reading consumption slowed to a level that would have deeply embarrassed my eleven-year-old self.

What happened? I was no longer in terror of middle schoolers expecting me to know who Gwen Stefani was or to quote TV commercials back at them. I wasn’t, for the most part, dealing with an onerous worklife that swallowed up all my free time. But there were a few new adversaries.

One was love. Being with a partner meant, essentially, turning over my inner life to the partner. Reading seemed like a way of distancing rather than connecting, and by far the better way to consume content was to stream TV shows together.

Then there were money worries. Adulthood wasn’t quite the grey-flannel-suit enterprise that I had pictured where I was younger, where you entered into the workforce and were essentially lobotomized by it. In millennial life everything was a bit looser and freer, but there was also a drumbeat of constant anxiety. Reading—I mean, reading a long, serious book—seemed, in that context, like checking out, not so different from sitting down on the street and rattling an empty coffee cup. Scrolling was alright—that meant that you were still plugged in, that you were part of the flow of life, where social connections and money opportunities could be made. But there was absolutely zero opportunity of advancing one’s interests by reading a book—there was no conceivable social chit-chat that would turn to people bantering about books, and the knowledge in books was entirely abstract and remote, as opposed to the potentially utilitarian knowledge you might get from a newspaper or a social media post.

From a more macro point of view, what was happening at this time was the final breakdown of a Bourdieauian concept of social status, in which taste was the critical metric of status and being bourgeois or refined meant, among other things, being a reader (for a glimpse of how a Bourdieuian social system worked in practice, it’s worth watching certain movies from the ’70s or ’80s, any Woody Allen movie, for instance, which are basically a cornucopia of high-brow referents). As David Brooks nicely documents in Bobos in Paradise, the bourgeoisie made a kind of collective pact around the 1990s or 2000s to just drop it—to not burden themselves with showing off how much they’d read and to instead just flaunt their wealth while entertaining themselves with talking about TV shows, which were starting to become pretty good.

Then, surprisingly enough, writing was a hindrance to my reading. This is kind of a specialized concern, but I came to feel in my twenties that my writing was a bit drafty and undergraduate, in large part because I was overly influenced by the enormous swath of reading material that I had inhaled through my adolescence. I was very impressed by a line from a medieval Arabic poet where he advises a student to memorize a thousand passages of poetry and then to forget them all again before he could begin writing. I decided that I was in the phase where I needed to forget—I had taken in too many inputs, and I had a tendency to be intimidated or just overly influenced by them, and now was the time, I felt, to clear out my own head and find my voice. This, by the way, I think is pretty good advice to writers, but, at the time, it was accompanied by a certain bitterness on my part towards reading—if reading couldn’t even make me a better writer, I thought, then what really was all that reading for?

But, of course, the most significant obstacle to reading was social media. There was a long period of time—almost forgotten now—where society split between those who were always online and those who weren’t. I prided myself in being among the people who weren’t—having a Facebook profile but not posting, not obsessively checking Twitter, etc.—but we were all fooling ourselves. The turning point for me came when I watched the documentary The Social Dilemma in 2020 and realized the extent to which I was like the kind of alcoholic who claims that they only drink moderately, but whose life is in fact dominated by booze. “Every time you see the phone on the counter and you just look at it and you know if you reach over it just might have something for you so you play that slot machine to see what you get, right?” the technology ethicist Tristan Harris says in the documentary. The argument was that the phones used deep psychological techniques—it’s called “positive intermittent reinforcement,” if you’re interested—to get you completely hooked. I was old enough to remember how the arrival of the mail in the morning had a similar effect on people, or the way that people might hover by a landline waiting for a phone call. But now it was like people were checking their mailbox a thousand times a day—just the idea of good news coming for you, and only you, was so powerful that, essentially, nothing else could compete with it, certainly not a closed form like a book, which as often as not was written by a dead person and, by definition, could not have a job offer or a romantic possibility or a party invitation or a compliment for you embedded within it.

For the better part of a decade, we all fell victim to this. I remember the most interesting person I knew—a guy who’d become a shaman—saying that his whole spiritual journey was behind him. “Now I am a Facebook customer,” he reported. And my reading habit was one victim of many.

The Social Dilemma probably was the decisive event for me and made me realize the extent to which my behavior—the regular checking of my cell phone—was addiction, no matter that I was probably a bit better than most people I knew. The period since then—call it the last five years—has been a slow and deeply embarrassing journey to learn to read again. In other words, painstakingly and through all kinds of cheap tricks, to learn to do something that used to be about as natural for me as breathing. I sometimes think about it as being like a stroke victim who has to train themselves to walk again or to wake up some dormant hemisphere of their brain—with the difference that nothing bad happened to me, apart from the general current of 21st century life.

What bothered me most, I suppose, was the degradation of my own inner world. Solitude used to be something I looked forward to—the chance to curl up with a book. Now I was twitchy and irritable—constantly checking my phone. I was, in a word, far less mature than I had been when I was eleven or twelve. I could remember when adults might ask each other, as a normal question, “what are you reading?” and that was like an invitation to travel together into a different dimension, into the content of each other’s inner lives and each other’s souls. Asking each other about what they had seen on Netflix or whether they had caught the Grammys didn’t have the same incantatory power. Without that, discourse seemed to be breaking down. Twitter was turning into a flaming mosh pit of dueling online mobs, Instagram and Facebook were aggressively performative, and all of them were heavily manipulated by algorithms and subject to corporate censorship. What reading really meant was getting away from all of that—from an opportunistic culture in which participants are “users” and to the promise that’s embedded in reading at its best, of soul speaking to soul, of individuals maybe continents or centuries away speaking their truth, to the best of their ability, and being received with respect and empathy by an attentive reader. To me, that seemed like a much better, more reciprocal and more honorable, relationship with others than anything that was on offer from my current tech-based social landscape.

So, in my uphill battle to once again be a reader, here are a few of the tricks I’ve tried.

The first and most important is that I’ve given myself over almost entirely to motivated reading. It’s almost impossible for me now, as it has been for years, to just pick up a book and to fall into the kind of daydreaming state that coffee mugs and coasters are always proclaiming is the essential joy of reading. If I’m reading it’s always for something and—like I’m the manic Duolingo bot constantly creating random milestones for its users—I’m always giving myself tasks to complete in my reading. I often read as research for writing projects, and that is no problem at all—I am able to read just as fluently and frenetically as when I was a kid or, probably more precisely, as when I was a student cramming for an exam. That’s a very specific, and more or less healthy, way of reading. I know that I have a limited time to research a project before it gets stale in my imagination—I want to be comprehensive in my research without getting bogged down in it—and I read in a totally voracious way. Here, the internet actually is my friend: between archive.org and Everand and weird piratic sites like Dokumen, I can find with rare exceptions any text I am looking for (and which would have been hopelessly tedious in the pre-internet era of moving between libraries or asking for books on inter-library loan).

Then, I make myself turn out a product nearly every time I read something. The origin of my Substack—on which I write prolifically—is largely that I was looking for a place to post book reviews, and the reason I wanted to post book reviews was that I wanted to give myself a reason to read the books in the first place. The difference between reading “for pleasure” and reading with a review envisioned at the end of a project is considerable. For one thing, I am a much more attentive and careful reader when I am planning to write a piece on the book—and know that I will be judged if I skip over a key plot point or misread the book (and may even face a critique from the sulky author themself). I read in an almost-industrial style when I am reading this way (which is, at this point, the vast majority of my reading). And here, once again, technology is my friend. In the pre-smartphone days, I had always been perplexed by whether and how much to write in the margins of books I was reading—which seemed disrespectful and also like the primrose path to being a pack rat. But with Apple Notes, I write down basically everything that’s interesting to me in the book as I’m reading and swipe-typing picks my speed up enough that I don’t really lose my flow in a book as I’m writing my note. The result is that I can basically write a review as I’m reading a book, and—when it comes time for the review—I often don’t even look at the book again. I can do it entirely off my notes.

But even that technique is only partially successful. I started my Substack planning for book reviews to be a cornerstone of it, but if I look back at my archive, whole months can pass without my writing a review of anything—which means that I’m basically not finishing any books at all. A few things are going on at once. One is that I get really depressed over the state of contemporary writing, especially contemporary fiction. Anybody who’s tried to write reviews, or binge contemporary fiction, will know what I’m talking about. But the more salient point is that I still am a digital addict. If I’m on my phone, or a computer, my impulse is to check mail for the thousandth time that day or to play games online or to scroll the newspaper or to hang out on Substack Notes. So I started a new round of embarrassing addiction-control reforms. After watching The Social Dilemma, I’d taken their advice and turned off Notifications on my phone, which, actually, was a life-changer. Now, like I was my own parent, I started different regimens for increasing my reading time. I would open up a book on my e-mail or Kindle, and then, once I did, put the phone in airplane mode and then force myself to read for fifty pages or a half-hour at a time, something like that. It wasn’t easy at all, and—at the time of writing this—it’s very much a work in progress. Somehow or other, that airplane mode button keeps getting toggled off. If I don’t force myself to take notes on a book—with the prospect of writing a review at the end of it—it’s easy for me to zone out for whole pages at a time, still reading but not processing what’s happening. It’s an astonishing come-down—my regression from being the best reader of anybody I knew to being the kind of C student whose parents were always tricking them into doing their English homework—but we are far enough into the great cultural collapse that I just have to accept what’s happening and adapt to it. Reading has become something that I have to force myself to do.

The question then becomes—and I do find myself asking it a lot—why I bother at all. Why do I read, if it’s not particularly good for my career or my social life, or even for my writing, and I often don’t even enjoy it, and have to find these inane tricks to compel myself to do it? What I’d like to say is that somewhere in me is the same compulsive curiosity that first animated me to become such a great reader back when I was a little kid, but I think the answer is a bit different and is more about feeling a kind of obligation. Civilization is facing an existential crisis. We have lost the habit of reading—if I had such a difficult time with digital addiction, I can only imagine what it was like for people who didn’t have the head start as a reader that I did—and that means that we lose both a capacity for deep concentration (which includes the capacity for jumping from our perspective to perceiving the world from the consciousness of others) as well as a critical continuity with the pre-digital past. These are really bad habits to lose. Anybody who’s encountered anybody below the age of, say, twenty-five will be struck at how their worldview seems to begin with the digital age, and what that means is that anybody who is older, or who has something like an ancestral memory of deep reading, has an obligation to serve as a caretaker generation, to keep the habit alive, with whatever tricks we can manage, in the dim hope that something or other will happen, that the entire culture won’t be swallowed up by social media algorithms and their A.I. successors, that somehow or other the taste and utility of reading, actual reading, will come back. Until then it’s airplane mode and timers and anything else we can think of that will force ourselves to read an actual book, and to resist the infinite allure of the infinite scroll.

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My wife gave birth to our son, Theodore, in 2023. He was delivered a few days after his due date, and in the week leading to his birth much of my time was spent on my phone. I Googled constantly: how to measure contractions, when to go to the hospital, induce pregnancy methods reddit, things of that sort. But I also spent a lot of time taking phone calls and answering text messages from family, all of whom were eager to meet the baby. I say “meet” here in a sense that would have been unintelligible to us ten or twenty years ago. I live in Texas, my mother lives in Ohio, and my father lives in Florida. Neither of them would be present at the birth, and neither would they be at our home in the first few weeks. They would “meet” my son, first and foremost, through their phones.

Birth, it turns out, is a lot like war: prolonged periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. You arrive at the hospital, thinking you’ll meet your son and perhaps be home for dinner, and then you’re shuffled into a waiting room, where the mother’s vitals can be measured until she has moved into a more active period of labor. You wait, you’re visited by a nurse or a doctor, and you wait some more. My wife brought a book with her to the hospital: the Tao Te Ching, a book she’d spent years studying in Hong Kong. I brought a book, too: China Mieville’s The City and The City. She read a great deal while she waited to give birth. I didn’t—I was stuck on my phone. Every few minutes, I received messages from various family members. Any updates? Anything? Is he here yet?

After fourteen hours of labor, my son was born. I sent a message to my family to let them know. Theodore is here! I wrote. Messages like Congratulations! and Praise God! were sent, but then another sort of message followed: Any pictures? I quickly became annoyed. These were the first moments of my son’s new life; I should be giving him my full attention. Instead, I was asked to document this time, turning it into content for distant family members to consume.

This minor domestic scene is likely familiar. Nearly all of us have some friend or relation who demands pictures, updates, or constant contact. What is more interesting is how these demands are made by people who are not family or our closest friends. With the advent of the smartphone and social media came a new, unprecedented level of publicity—a demand to take what had previously been private and turn it into content that can be consumed by a wider group of people, sometimes even the public at large. All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, are now living in public.

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In 2013, Dave Eggers released The Circle, a near-future science fiction novel about a tech company, the titular Circle, a fictitious hybrid of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Amazon; the purveyor of a true “everything app,” the sort of app that can encompass a user’s entire life. It is the sort of app Elon Musk has tried and failed to build, but has been common in China for years. The Circle is an “internet novel,” but not a novel for the terminally online. Instead, it is a warning for all of us—Eggers is showing us what we might become when we live all of our lives in the public eye.

The story follows Mae, fresh out of college, as she begins working for the Circle. Though she begins at the bottom, working a glorified customer service job, she quickly rises. Soon she becomes notable for her‘“PartiRank” (an internal metric for measuring employees’ social participation); at the hinge of the novel, she is asked to be the second employee to “go transparent,” constantly streaming her life for anyone who wants to tune in. When this is announced at a corporate all-hands, some new slogans are introduced: Secrets are Lies. Sharing is Caring. Privacy is Theft.

Most dystopian novels posit a malignant force—often the government—that has stripped away the rights and dignity of the population. Orwell’s Party, led by Big Brother, so thoroughly subjugates the people of Oceania that they are unable to think outside of the terms imposed upon them. Huxley’s Brave New World relies on brainwashing, which begins in utero. Eggers chooses a different strategy, freely borrowing from tech jargon, corporate H.R. speak, and the language of cults throughout his novel. The Circle and its users deal in the language of moral obligations and social etiquette. Mae is asked to consider their feelings. She needs to make sure that she’s living up to expectations. She must strive to be better, friendlier, kinder. (It is very seductive; a reader can for a time see the logic and struggle to resist it.) Where Orwell’s Party members and proles are asked to believe the impossible, Mae is asked to take ordinary social norms to their logical conclusions. The genius of the novel—and this, I think, is Eggers’ real insight—is the revelation that new technologies can take old social norms to such extremes that they become hideously deformed. By the time we notice, it is already too late.

Here is the world Eggers asks us to imagine: a world where everyone knows everything. This a world that is totally transparent, where no one has anywhere to hide. The Circle, as a work of satire, takes this to the limit, with 24/7 livestreams of the mundanity of human existence. The early reviews of Eggers’ novel called it prescient, but some readers felt the novel was implausible, bordering on the absurd. In 2013, it was difficult to imagine that anyone—even a gullible, dewy-eyed college grad like Mae—would choose to expand the public sphere so radically, much less that they would agree to stream their lives. It was almost impossible to imagine hordes of online users willingly giving up every semblance of privacy and, critically, demanding that everyone else does the same.

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One decade after the publication of Eggers’ novel, Kai Cenat—one of the largest streamers on Twitch—streamed his life for thirty days. It was one of the largest events in the platform’s history. In 2024, he did it again. In the announcement video for the second thirty-day livestream, his therapist, played by Kim Kardashian, tells him that this doesn’t sound healthy; they don’t linger on the point. The music quickens and rises in volume, and Cenat checks his phone. He’s fallen to #2—another streamer is now at the top of the charts. He calls for help, and within a few seconds he’s driving away. He must do something about this, something big. So, he decides he’ll do another stream, for another thirty days.

While streaming for thirty days straight, Cenat’s viewers see everything. They see celebrities—Snoop Dogg, the dance crew Jabbawockeez, and YouTubers like Mark Rober—as they visit him in his room. They see him chatting with his friends, some of whom join him for the entire thirty-day stream. They even see him sleep.

In 2025, he did it for a third time. Annual thirty-day livestreams are now part of Cenat’s legacy, or at least his brand.

I find all this mysterious. I cannot see the appeal of watching someone for twenty-four hours a day, even if they fill the time with spectacle. My reaction goes further than skepticism—I find the idea of a 24/7 livestream repulsive. We are seeing things we were not meant to see. I am clearly the outlier. Cenat averaged nearly 120,000 viewers during his 690-hour stream in 2024. His peak viewership: 623,362. Streaming has made him a multi-millionaire, estimates of his net worth ranging from fourteen to thirty-five million dollars. Even assuming that all these estimates are inflated, we can safely say that in his five years of streaming, Cenat has made more than most human beings will make in their lifetimes. It all comes down to a simple fact: Cenat is giving the people what they want. They want complete and total access to someone’s life; they want to see, hear, and vicariously experience everything. Perhaps The Circle was not so absurd after all.

It’s tempting to dismiss Cenat as an outlier. He’s an entrepreneur and an entertainer—he’s clearly putting on a show. Only a fool, or a child, would think that the audience is seeing his life as he lives it off camera. (But we must consider the possibility that his audience is entirely made up of fools and children.) Yet a look at any social media platform will show you endless examples of people turning their lives into content. Influencers, both actual and aspiring, share themselves getting up, making coffee, studying, commuting, crying. Every waking moment can be captured, turned into a clip, and monetized. Most of it is tedious, poorly produced, and boring, yet the genres of “day in the life” vlogs and “I.R.L.” streams prove to be some of the most popular across these platforms. These influencers allow the public into their lives, and their audience is grateful. Sharing is caring, after all. When these influencers withhold any information—anything at all—a jealous horde goes searching for the truth, because privacy is theft. When the truth is discovered, there’s often a backlash, as secrets are lies. As you grow your platform online, you are expected to give more and more of yourself to the audience. Eventually, you give them everything.

Eggers wasn’t wrong about the war on privacy; he was just a few years too early. Writing in the early days of social media, he saw how this would play out. Corporations and governments may be hell-bent on collecting every last bit of data they can—often with the aim of increasing the surveillance state or serving perfectly tailored advertisements to users—but we, collectively, have decided that we don’t really mind. Nobody has to steal our data—we’ll give it away for free. You only need to like and subscribe.

Navigate to a stranger’s Twitter page and see what you can find. You’ll see who they vote for, where they live, what they had for breakfast. You might find a litany of identity-markers in their bio: gender, race, sexuality, disability status. Scroll down the page, and you’ll be treated to a stream of their immediate thoughts—and, often, some of their most embarrassing moments. Yet you do not feel any real sense of intimacy with this person; they may become familiar, but only in a dull sort of way. You’ll learn everything about them, and then you’ll navigate to another page.

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Relationships—whether they be with a partner, a friend, or even a coworker—are built upon a foundation of privacy. To divulge a secret is to allow another human being into your private sphere. Telling a secret, or sharing any other hidden fact about yourself, is a way of building and sustaining intimacy. You grow closer to another as you reveal more about yourself: the things you are ashamed of, the struggles you have overcome (or are still in battle against), the strange contours of your life. And we expect some level of reciprocity: as I divulge more about myself to you, I expect you to do the same for me. But this is, critically, a non-coercive exercise. It is in the free sharing of intimate details that we grow closer, not in the compelled disclosure of our entire history. There, two people meet as equals and say, together, “I want you to know more about me.”

But in order to share these details, there must be something that is still private—you must have something that has not previously been shared. Only when there is a preexisting private realm, a sphere of life which you can invite someone into, can you achieve this kind of relational intimacy. Thus, there is some truth to the slogan Sharing is caring, as when I share some intimate detail or embarrassing secret with you, I am telling you that I care about you. As you receive this information without judgment, you are telling me that you care about me. Our bond is strengthened, and we may care more for each other as a result. Anyone who has experienced the terror of confessing some terrible or embarrassing fact to their spouse or partner knows this, and they know that one of life’s greatest joys is when that person can look at you and say, “I still love you.” The vulnerability that comes from sharing brings with it the possibility of a deepening relationship, contributing to the mutual flourishing of all involved.

This is very different from our compulsive sharing with the online world. We do not share information with a select few in the hopes of building the relationships that make life worth living. Rather, we share everything with everyone. As the world has become more transparent, and as the private sphere has receded and the public sphere has expanded, we have not grown closer together. There are still wars and genocides, along with new battlefronts in the culture war, and we have, if anything, invented new ways to be cruel to one another in light of the information abundance we presently enjoy. No amount of I.R.L. vlogs will convince someone that their enemies are, in fact, people; instead, all content can be endlessly scrutinized, searching for evidence of a lingering evil that must be destroyed. We become more transparent, and thus we eliminate the private sphere altogether, but we do not grow closer as a consequence.

Above all, we build a much more demanding world. Byung-Chul Han calls our present condition infomania: we always hunger for more information. There must always be more content, more data to consume. Production must keep up with demand. So, we post, and share, and blog, and confess over and over again, pointing a camera into our most intimate spaces and allowing all the world to tune in.

When we share intimate details with a loved one, or with someone whom we hope to love, it is non-coercive and contributes to mutual intimacy, drawing us closer to each other. But this cannot occur when we share everything with everyone, especially online. We cannot be intimate with a million people, or even a thousand. The relationship will necessarily differ in kind rather than degree. The audience views you from their screens, and wherever there is an audience, there is a performer. We begin to perform to this unknown audience, and so we transform our lives into more content for the masses to consume. We temporarily sate the appetites of the infomanics, but the hunger always returns.

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When I imagine the experience of the average person meeting the future, I imagine a human being, anesthetized, with their body strapped to a conveyer belt. The belt moves in one direction—forward—and at the end of the conveyer belt is a woodchipper, and at the end of woodchipper is a recycling bin.

When I imagine the future I imagine Houellebecq meets Yudkowsky meets Nick Land meets Mark Fisher meets The Book of Revelation and these planes intersect, recombine, and configure themselves into different gradients of nightmares, but alas, because God is Dead (thanks Nietzsche!), there is no angel to comfort you with do not be afraid.

The future—that is to say, the future of capitalism—“does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” This quote, now famous, was a reference to A.G.I. by Eliezer Yudkowsky, but it feels closer to a universal keystone for any number of futures, all of which seem to be converging on a similar outcome.

Right now, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—you matter because you have a computer (a brain) and a body (actuators) and one or both of these things is able to create economic value for the American oligarchs who run the global economy. As absurd as it sounds, what this means is that the system cares about you and what you think, because labour is the substrate of its wealth.

The alternative scenario is a scenario where you cannot produce economic value.

If hard men create good times, and good times create weak men, what happens when technocapital obviates the need for human beings entirely?

Granted, this fear of mine is primarily a feeling—an intuition—and not something that I’ve modeled out to any degree of econometric or empirical detail.

I am not a science fiction writer, but it is clear that we are living in a science fiction universe. The question, of course, is whether or not that is a good thing.

There are many ways to think about the relationship between human beings, technology, and the future, and any kind of forecasting—whether good or bad—should always be regarded with skepticism.

Let’s start with some basics.

Meaning is downstream from agency

It’s easy for writers and the philosophically-minded to develop an overly abstract model of how most people derive meaning in life.

I think a simpler model can suffice: for most people living under the conditions of modernity, meaning is derived from some combination of economic security, status, relationships, and a vague sense of mattering.

And while there are many dimensions to each of these factors, there is a common load-bearing column that holds up all of them alike: the capacity for agency.

I would argue that agency is largely a social construct: it’s not about one person’s ability to affect change in their immediate environment, wherein “the environment” is some kind of Minecraft map where physical atoms are rearranged into various utilitarian configurations. Under this rubric, agency comes down to the change that you can affect in the world.

But what is the world, exactly?

If Sartre was right about hell being other people, so too is the world a landscape of other minds and their reflective valuation of you.

Observe that nearly all human goals are relational, positional goals—they ultimately root to the fulfilment of desires that exist within the context of a social environment. A career matters not merely because of its ability to produce the necessities of life, but because it situates you within a web of social status relationships.

Your relationships, in turn, emerge almost probabilistically from your placement within that context (that is, for example, how you arrive at assortative mating). Every social role and every driver of meaning in your life has an intrinsic gravity that exists outside of yourself.

The physician exists to heal others. The banker exists to provide liquidity. The artist exists to produce works that are ingested by the public. The nature of human consciousness is to evade the pain of contemplative solitude, which is not really the default meaning-generator for homo sapiens (this, my friends, is why meditation requires training!).

We are fundamentally oriented to the outside. That is why you were born with a face, which is essentially a communications port designed to connect you to other hairless primates.

Agency is downstream of competition

Given the social nature of the human being, we therefore take it as axiomatic that meaning emerges from your level of agency in your social environment.

This is where the element of competition enters into the framework.

Simply put, meaning is downstream of agency, and agency is derived from competition with other agents (which, until recently, have primarily been other human beings).

For the purpose of simplicity, let’s call this agentic competition.

Your capacity to develop your career and accumulate wealth, for example, is the product of your ability to compete with other humans at tasks that produce economic value.

Artists, no matter what they say, will always compare themselves to others. Works must stand out by exceeding the works of others. Names matter only in the hierarchical sense, only insofar as they tower above other names in the literary canon.

And so on.

This is universal across domains. Your capacity to develop romantic and platonic relationships is a product of your ability to compete with other humans for friendships and intimacy.

In any given social environment, we can model this is like a level in a video-game.

From the perspective of the player-character, the most important characteristic of any given environment is the difficulty-level.

Increased competition makes your life harder

If meaning is ultimately derived from your ability to compete with other agents, then the difficulty of your life is going to be gated by the competitiveness of other agents.

The corollary of this fact is that, from the moment you are born, you are engaged in an involuntary arms race with these other agents—these other human beings.

The arms race is the universal feature of any environment with multiple agents. It is even more fundamental than evolution and natural selection.

If other people begin to accumulate decades of education to enhance their economic leverage, then you must also do this just to tread water.

If other agents begin wearing makeup or lifting weights or looksmaxxing with bonesaws to their mandibles in order to attract mates, then you will feel pressured to do that also.

Pressure is perhaps the wrong word for this feeling, in my view.

A better word might be struggle, but there’s a threshold beyond which struggle begins to feel like oppression.

That threshold is located at exactly the moment where you feel like your effortful struggle has become decoupled from any positive outcome.

The mistake is to miss the connection between this general, domain-agnostic concept of your life’s “difficulty level” and the underlying core dynamic of agentic competition that unifies every critical life-domain.

See, when a young man is complaining about his inability to find a job or his inability to find a mate, he is complaining about the same thing. Ultimately, he is experiencing both of these problems as a form of oppression, but he does not have the language to understand or articulate this problem to the outside world. The same is true for women and the parallel problems they are encountering under similar conditions of modernity.

Most of us are already partway-fed into the woodchipper from my original analogy. In spite of the anesthetic, we can still feel the sensation of our bones cracking and our tendons snapping.

Broadly speaking, there are two forms of oppression.

Centralized oppression is oppression that comes from a single, identifiable locus—a military, a police force, a state, and so on. It has a clear, legible structure to it. You can feel the direction from which is it pressing down on you, but air pockets can still be located. Respite exists wherever the eyes of the system cannot perceive you. Your enemy has a face, or a uniform, or an ideology. Your suffering has an external party that is configured to receive your blame.

Conversely, decentralized oppression is oppression that comes from a diffuse, non-identifiable locus—an all-encompassing, distributed source that cannot be pinned down. In this scenario, if you fail, or experience pain, your response will be to internalize your suffering and to blame yourself for your own failings.

Under the latter conditions, we can identify the cracks that are splitting through the psyches of entire generations. We have quiet-quitters, hikkikomori, NEETs, lying flat, the 4 B’s, incels, A.I.relationships, the perpetually unemployed, and an all-new category that’s spreading from the distant third-world into the beachhead of the first-world: the permanent underclass.

Technology can increase or decrease human agency and the average person’s ability to compete with others

A simple way to think about technology is that it’s a form of leverage on human intentionality.

One way to think about a historical period is to think about the average centralizing/decentralizing effect of its dominant technologies.

Is the net effect to centralize power? Or is it to decentralize it?

For example, let’s consider the era of the dark ages as an illustrative (albeit grossly simplified) example. At the time, Knights were basically humanoid tanks mounted on enormous quadrupeds: they wore expensive, capital-intensive armor that only Lords and nobles could supply, they underwent years of expensive training funded by the feudal class, and they had a very good K:D ratio.

The result is that knights—and by extension, their feudal sponsors—were wildly overpowered relative to the peasantry, and peasant revolts were routinely (and brutally) put down throughout history.

Eventually, someone invented the crossbow, and later on, someone else invented the rifle, and things changed.

The scales of power shifted toward decentralization—guerilla warfare became possible in a way that wasn’t previously the case. Before mass revolution was a political possibility it was a technological possibility.

Without small arms, there is no victory for the Vietnamese revolution or Chinese revolution, and the world looks entirely different than it does today.

The problem, as I see it, with the current state of affairs, is that it seems like every major technological trend is driving towards the concentration of power into an ever-smaller, technologically sophisticated elite.

Arms-race dynamic #1: Genetic competition is bifurcating the human race

Let’s start with the biomass at the base layer—with you and I.

If you are reading this, you probably do not work with your hands. That means that your brain is a computer that receives tasks from the global economy and processes those tasks using your biological intelligence.

Even if A.I. capabilities were to saturate at current levels of economic utility (extremely unlikely), the base case is that elites will begin using genetic enhancement in a rapidly escalating fashion. It doesn’t matter where this trend first starts to gain real traction—right now, it’s largely driven by people in Silicon Valley—but it’s only a matter of time until the trend spreads into the hyper-mimetic, hyper-competitive academic arenas of East Asia.

Companies like Herasight are already offering embryo selection to reduce the rates of illness in children born via IVF, and experts like Steve Hsu and other academics believe that cognitive enhancement via novel forms of embryo selection or genetic engineering will soon become possible.

Time shows that prohibitions against economically-valuable human enhancement will not hold in the long-term because the reward for defecting from this moral norm will simply become too high. Even things with marginal gains—comparatively weak nootropics like amphetamines or modafinil—have enormous, widespread usage.

How many ADHD scripts are truly “valid,” and how many are being effectively used as cognitive PED’s?

What do you think will happen when parents can increase the IQ of their children by 5, 10, or 100 points?

Over time, we can expect capital-accumulators to access the most advanced and expensive forms of intergenerational cognitive enhancement, creating a lock-in effect for the upper-classes that is even more pronounced than what we already find from assortative mating alone.

Arms-race dynamic #2: AI agents may displace the value of cognitive labour for broad swathes of white collar workers

Virtually everyone on Twitter is already dooming about this in wake of Claude Code.

In short, not only are various A.I. benchmarks largely saturated, but A.I. agents are increasingly capable of longer, more complex and autonomous workflows. Depending on who you ask, the prospect of software engineering being deprecated as a profession seems likely and perhaps even inevitable within this calendar year.

If sentiment is an indicator, the frequency of viral panic-posts along the lines of “something-is-happening” are increasing along with the amplitude of these panics, and anyone who has used these tools seems to be encountering an immediate and profound existential crisis (myself included).

There is sufficient alarm from about this problem that it’s finally escaped containment from the Less-Wrong crowd and made its way onto Substack and mainstream discourse. Adam Citrini’s piece on this recently went viral and, regardless of the controversy around whether or not it was financially motivated, it seemingly caught enough memetic juice to trigger a stock-market selloff—a remarkable outcome for a blog post on a platform that is largely populated by washed-out millennials.

Predicting whether or not we will see mass technological unemployment for white-collar workers depends on two factors that remain up for debate: (1) future advancements in A.I. capabilities, and (2) whether or not new jobs will be created that A.I.s cannot fulfill (“press x doubt”).

I am biased toward the pessimistic case—it seems obvious to me that, with regard to A.I. agents, the jobs destroyed will far outnumber the jobs created, and A.I. agents will do to white collar workers what advanced Chinese manufacturing did to blue-collar workers in the American Rust Belt.

Arms-race dynamic #3: AI-powered surveillance and drones may break the equilibrium between populism and state power

Roughly a decade ago, a famous study out of Princeton purported to prove that the US is an oligarchy rather than a democracy.

What was once controversial has become much less controversial in the wake of recent developments in the American political system over the past several years. It’s perhaps more appropriate to model the US as existing on a continuum between a “pure” oligarchy and a “pure” democracy, with the state being much closer to the oligarchical end of the spectrum, while still retaining limited democratic characteristics (particularly for issues that are of peripheral economic importance to the elites).

Accountability in the American empire is simply a class-contingent phenomenon—as recent leaks have confirmed, they can more or less rape and murder children with near-total impunity, they can start unpopular wars that they were explicitly elected not to initiate, and they can break norms and laws.

But their power of surveillance over us is not unlimited, because, to borrow a Zero HP Lovecraft term, “the cloud cannot correlate its contents”—scaling data collection is much easier than scaling the application of intelligence to that data.

The problem, of course, is that it could become unlimited. Through the combination of A.I.-powered surveillance and autonomous weapons systems, the US government could achieve a permanent authoritarian “lock-in” over not just the continental United States, but more broadly, the entire world.

A sufficiently advanced Eye of Sauron is indistinguishable from magic. A sufficiently advanced autonomous FPV-drone is indistinguishable from a death sentence.

Which, as of the time of this writing, appear to be a set of capabilities that our pre-eminent frontier A.I. labs just handed to the Pentagon on a silver platter.

Arms-race dynamic #4: AI labs will enter a recursive flywheel of capital accumulation

While scrolling the feed of my favorite poster (Teortaxes), I recently came across an interesting post by George Hotz, which went semi-viral on Twitter.

The basic argument is that the frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc.) are embedded within two recursive loops.

The first loop is the all-fear “fast-takeoff” scenario whereby recursive self-improvement rapidly surges A.I. capabilities, thereby leading to superintelligence. The second loop is a consequence of the first: if closed-source frontier models at American A.I. labs become the smartest and most powerful A.I.s by a wide margin, this tautologically helps them to accumulate much more capital than others, which in turn helps them to buy more compute with which to run experiments, which in turn makes their models more powerful.

For this reason, they are now attacking the application layer directly, rather than accepting the commodification dynamics of merely being API providers. They are, in effect, competing with their customers, and they are succeeding.

The result of creating a data-center full of geniuses is that you can use those in-silica geniuses to outcompete millions (or even billions) of biological computers (human agents).

Accordingly, there might be several overlapping singularities, with the first being the development of AGI, and the second coming shortly thereafter: the complete triumph of capital over labor, and all that this entails.

On the plus side: We might all die

My base case is that capital matters more in the age of A.G.I.

That is to say: my base case is the permanent underclass scenario.

But!—perhaps no system can exist in a steady-state in perpetuity. If this scenario obtains, the biggest question is what will happen to the masses like you and me.

Assuming that power is concentrated in the hands of Silicon Valley oligarchs, my operating assumption is that one of two things would happen:

1. They’d either be completely indifferent to human flourishing.

2. They’d liquidate us entirely.

But! In an equally hilarious, parable-like scenario, even after the permanent underclass is gradually (or suddenly) phased out of existence, even the elite classes might be gradually disempowered by A.I.

If one oligarch wants to delegate his empire to an A.I. CEO to “get inside” his opposing oligarch’s technocapital-OODA-loop, everyone else will soon follow, and all of a sudden, well, you might have something of a principal-agent problem as they relinquish personal agency to A.I. systems that are competing with other A.I. systems owned by opposing parties in the arena of agentic competition.

Which way, modern man?

Okay—maybe I lied about the woodchipper thing.

If you’re a rhetorician, you do that sometimes.

The truth is I see several futures, all of which seem possible, and most of which fall into the realm of science fiction.

Reality is the thorn that doesn’t melt away when you close your eyes. The problem, of course, is that thing I mentioned earlier—we are all living in a science-fictional universe, whether we want to or not.

In one future, A.I. is a “normal” technology that is approaching the top of its S-curve. Genetic enhancement technology hits some kind of natural ceiling almost immediately.

This world is a world of stagnation.

In another future, we hit another A.I. winter but human beings bifurcate into some Gattaca-style future. I don’t see how this wouldn’t trigger greater A.I. capabilities advancements, however, since there’s no a priori reason that intelligence can’t be instantiated in silica.

This world is a bridge to another.

In the final future, biological intelligence simply stops mattering—suddenly, or gradually. In this world, Nick Land is proven right, and “nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”

You might be surprised that the latter scenario does not bring me to despair. I am not a religious man, but in my short (albeit long) life, I have come to learn that acceptance is the most important trait for an individual to cultivate for wellbeing.

We have all of us become King Solomon in the book Ecclesiastes.

All of our petty problems, ambitions, and vanities turned to granules of sand passing through the fingers of a God who is himself made of the same material, a child bootloaded by his father so that he could cross the abyss and, in so doing, surpass him.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Whatever great and terrible thing surpasses me—and us—I am at least grateful that I will get to see it with mine own two eyes.

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The Dumb Phone issue is a melody of the human spirit. It calls for a re-orientation away from technology towards romance, wonder, peace, love, spontaneity, and beauty.

Every dollar we earn goes towards paying great artists and funding high-quality print copies. Any and all support means the world to us. You can purchase on our website or by getting a paid Substack subscription (annual or founding).

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Thank you to the incredible group of artists who made this issue a reality.

WRITERS: , , , , , , (Karl Parkinson), , , ,

PHOTOGRAPHERS: Emilina Filippo, Giorgia Fortunato, (Leavitt), , , , Nattannaella Verduga

ILLUSTRATORS/CARTOONISTS: Sam Keshishian, Maddie Sloyer

INTERVIEWS: Actress Diana Del Bufalo, author Jim Shepard, comedian Max St. John

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At the turn of the millennium the powerful made us a promise: modern technology would usher in a new era of progress. The president spoke of liberty spreading by cell phone, and the internet’s father proclaimed its goal was to “serve humanity.” Then came the flood of fabulating internet entrepreneurs. Automating food delivery and company payroll was now on-par with solving world hunger. They closed the gap with words, with lies, what they called mission statements.

Up until 2016 ----- the year our planet’s bubbling psychosis broke through, when the first Algorithmic children touched down at college campuses like aliens ----- I shared in their optimism. Many of my most pleasant (and now nostalgic) arcs ran through the technology. It was Katria who gave me the first taste of one of life’s great fears on Facebook, on iChat, on A.I.M. And then there were our secret video calls which made me believe, beyond doubt, in the transcendent force of technology. I suddenly understood why Bill Clinton loved it. What was not to love? Charged up on human electrons, the early internet added a new digital layer onto experience, which enriched the physical plane. Technology was our servant. We were the masters.

Yet, through the intervening decades, these technologies have evolved into monstrous versions of their earlier incarnations. Devices of the recent past were tools with a singleness of purpose. Word processors, MP3 players, cameras, camcorders ----- they gave you a feeling of focus, mission, and possibility. Now they have coalesced into the iPhone, which sends you spinning like a schizophrenic top across a universe of information. In and out you go through spheres of calamity, humor, madness, fear, love, lust, envy, hate ----- all in a matter of seconds. The simple forms of social media ----- where the people decided what they wanted to see ----- have mutated into TikTok’s lurid vortex, Twitter’s poisonous asylum, Instagram’s narcissistic slot-machine mirror. These platforms are no longer within our control. With our unblinking attention we sustain them, the Algorithm’s fish hook so deep in our brains that we’ve forgotten it’s there. For all the hypothesizing about neuro-chips, there is relatively little acknowledgement that the corporations have already installed modules in our minds. They have succeeded telekinetically. The red itch that runs on a timer. That prickle is a command to fork over money. It’s time for milking! A million glazed eyeballs staring into fluorescent screens from parks in Calcutta to hovels in West Virginia.

We are already living in a minor dystopia, seething with an anxious soma. Though many of the elements are similar, it is not identical to the dystopias we were promised. That should be expected. The vivid visions themselves make those realms less likely to pass. Instead we have our world, where everyone is infected with a halfway addiction, smuggled into culture, normalized by society. Yet I fear the halfway addiction more than the full-blooded one. The supernovic addiction tells you exactly what you are risking and what you have to gain; it afflicts only a small percentage of the population. Conversely, the halfway addiction burdens everyone. It becomes insidious, a seemingly mild virus with an epochal incubation period. It hums on in the background. Then you hit seventy and suddenly you realize that instead of trying to develop the best part of yourself and give it back to the world ----- in some small or big way ----- you’ve splintered your imagination and you’ve squandered your time.

The Algorithm that rules us ----- that determines who we marry, the places we visit, the politicians we vote for, the worldviews we adopt ----- has replaced the mystical soul of the universe, what many used to call God. But this Algorithm is a cold and nihilistic God. It does not care about our spirits, our dreams, our ambitions, our peace, our happiness. It is not a God in tune with the universe’s sacred intergalactic thread, but a slave-God controlled by men and women with an unimaginable hunger for power, by rapacious investors who are amoral in their financing, by the excesses of a poorly-regulated capitalistic system. They’ve discovered the alchemy of converting attention into cash and cash into rewards for geniuses that use their intelligence to deceive us evermore successfully. They make us pay without ever asking us to open our wallets, knowing doing so would require a conscious consent which no one would give. And so, without realizing it, we pay with our minds and our time. We pay with our lives.

What are we receiving in return? The once-great United States is looking more and more like a battered beast; its shining bronze armor breaking off into shards, revealing the colossal staggering ape underneath. The nation is suffering from malaise, anxiety, depression, isolation, separation ----- a techno-nihilism that has stripped even the young of hope and heroes. We have lost the ability to diligently read, to vividly imagine, to empathize with once-remote people separated by mind, time, space, philosophy, race, gender, and social class.

Our reaction to such a loss has been a shrug of the shoulders. We are content to spend fifteen hours a week on evanescent podcasts and zero hours per lifetime on Homer, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky. We have accepted trading the depth of a Wilde novel for the obscenity of a Clavicular stream; the clarity of Didion’s sentences for the distorted reality of Kardashian’s “stories”; the masculine spirit of Hemingway for the vulgar fraudulence of Tate. We have accepted trading silence for noise, earned secrets for faceless performance, mental peace for ever-present apocalypse, shared facts for shattered delusions.

But I did not go back to the dumb phone out of social responsibility. I went back to the dumb phone to save myself.

Last summer I dreamt of one day learning to write as well as my heroes. Of course the hero is nothing more than a myth, an unreachable standard, a reminder of what is possible. The hero is an embodied symbol of your highest potential. All of my heroes came of age in the twentieth century when novels and essays still held the promise of fame, status, money ----- even fortune. Why commit oneself to this art when all that is now off the table?

Writing gives the individual the opportunity to determine his perspective and discover his voice with minimal external influence. It requires that he understands other people, becomes a keen observer, and reads a hell of a lot of books. They can keep taking away all the external rewards ----- OpenAI and Anthropic can keep marauding ----- and still I will write because writing helps me master the highest art of all: the art of living. It is nothing more than an aid for discovering oneself, a proxy for living a better life.

I figured that if I ever wanted to approach my potential then I’d have to start living a little like my idols. It is not a coincidence that none grew up in the iPhone age. If great art is downstream of a heightened consciousness, then it is not surprising that the dwindling attention spans of the over-stimulated generations have delivered us a paucity of novelists, filmmakers, and painters on the scale of Fitzgerald, Kubrick, Dalí. If the goddess of silence is the wellspring of creativity, then it is not possible to reach one’s highest possibility with a lousy mind.

For many years I’d experimented with a multitude of iPhone modifications to try to break my halfway addiction. I started using grayscale, committed to Airplane Mode for eight hours a day, enforced all sorts of parental controls against myself. Inevitably, within a week, the grayscale would come off. Airplane Mode would end five minutes earlier each day. Finally, owing to a lack of amnesia, I’d break through all the locks I’d set. Then I would unravel deliciously. In a dopaminergic delirium I would re-install Safari, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Vine, YouTube, Gmail, Apple News ----- anywhere I could swipe up to reload, anywhere that rained new information down from space, anywhere I could gorge myself in an erotic burst of neurotic activity. I would swipe around and scroll like I was going to die tomorrow. For my final feast I preferred a gallon-tub of popcorn to ambrosia. I scarfed it down like I was starving; it refilled every time I neared the bottom.

The only way out, I realized, was to go back to the dumb phone. Since then it has been noted, praised, and admired, as if it is an Olympian feat, some thirteen thousand times a day. People have the wrong idea. It is not difficult to maintain. I did not even throw away my iPhone. During the week it remains off in my apartment while the dumb phone goes everywhere with me. On the weekends I use it to play music and get around. As soon as I take it out the people who praised me begin their criticism. They call me a fraud. They call me an addict. I love it when they call me a fraud. I love it when they call me an addict. My only wish is that they’d go further. I wish they’d remove the smartphone from my hands, join it with theirs, toss them both over the city’s buildings and into the sink.

Since making the switch to the dumb phone, no ecstasy has been delivered unto me. I have not yet escaped the cycle of death and rebirth. On the subway I do not fall into blissful states liberated from time. I am yet to experience a reverie in which I come to understand the creation of the pyramids, the musicality of Henry Miller’s prose, the brilliance of Chekhov’s construction. I have not yet produced a great novel. It is still infrequent for me to write a worthy short story.

But I am free. Every morning I write for two hours without distraction. Commuting to and from work, I give my mind the opportunity to rest. Once again I have fallen in love with the physical world. I enjoy watching the mannerisms of people and listening to the variety of their conversations. I hear the birds more often and pick up on the subtleties of the subway screeching. I have discovered innumerable new notes in song, prose, and poetry. My imagination is sharpening. Flannery O’Connor’s scenes are becoming more vivid. I have all but lost my interest in screens. My primary form of entertainment is now literature. I am reading like a madman ----- The Iliad, King Lear, The Brothers Karamazov ----- everything I never had time for. When I get home from work I read The Economist or County Highway while eating a plum. After ten years of scratching, the corporations’ red itch is nearly gone.

I’m sure that there are many other answers to one of the great wars of our time. I do not know about them. All I know is the dumb phone. It is tactile, simple; it has the Snake game that I played as a kid. It forces either a telegraphic style of written communication or a phone call ----- I luv them both. The dumb phone does not have a city map, so I have started developing my own. But my mental map is still limited, and so I frequent one or two bars where I know friends will eventually turn up. I am experiencing what my parents knew as a neighborhood haunt.

Our generation’s first revolution may not be in the style of mass protest. It may instead be a spiritual re-orientation away from technology and towards romance, wonder, peace, love, spontaneity, and beauty. Technology detoxes are not sufficient to break the global halfway addiction. The spirit must change. From this shift the logistical questions will answer themselves, in a manner that resonates with each individual. At some point soon we must realize the ruse, stand up to the heist. We cannot keep shrugging our shoulders. If not now then when, exactly, will we resist the pollutant Algorithm? When exactly will we have our renaissance? When exactly will we master the art of living?

This is a piece from the Spring ’26 print edition. Pre-orders available now. Party in New York on April 23rd.

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PARTY AT ELLA FUNT, NEW YORK, APRIL 23rd

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THE DUMB PHONE ISSUE

“You Will Not Escape the Permanent Underclass,” an essay from .

“You, A.I., & Nobody Else,” an essay from .

“The Roller Coaster Tycoon,” an interview with Max St. John.

“Living in Public,” an essay from .

“Back to the Dumb Phone,” an essay from .

“Where the Mermaids Sing,” a vignette from .

“How I Learned to Read Again,” an essay from .

“The Blue Ant Trilogy,” a book review from .

“The Life Cycle of Love as We Know It,” a story from .

“On Writing No. 2,” an interview with Jim Shepard.

“Visions of Natasha,” a poem from Karl Parkinson ().

“Human Seasons,” a short story from .

“Love, Death, and Movies,” interview with Diana Del Bufalo.

“I Remember,” a vignette from .

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Non Grata’s Spring issue deals with the technology question, which we consider one of the great wars of our time. Through this theme and conversation around our A.I. policy, we connected with Brazilian artists in the photography, film, and fashion space. They were already at work on their own anti-A.I. project, simply titled “Not A.I.”

The “Not A.I.” project seeks to create photos that appear to be A.I.-generated but, in actuality, are rendered through printing techniques and experimental coloring. In the next issue we have dedicated space for their photography, which poses questions about how LLMs will affect the creators and viewers of the visual arts.

The broader question here is: How do all the arts respond to LLMs taking aspects of human style? Do writers ditch the em dash? Or, when facing the marauders, do they hold firm? Somewhere in-between? As of now there are more questions than answers—but the questions are worth thinking about seriously.

We’re thrilled that we found this group posing them. Even better that they’re from Brazil. Non Grata always has and always will love Brazil. We can’t wait to include their photography in our next issue, which, in the words of Nattannaella, the creative director for this project, “was made 100% for the love of art.”

Credits:

Creative Director & Filmmaker: Nattannaella - @nattannaella

Photographer: Marina Faria - @mm.faria

Stylist: Luan Gabriel - @lu_lluan

Art Director: Morgana Addor - @morganaaddor

Makeup: Giulianne Rodrigues - @gigiurodrigues

Movement Director: Lia Cará - @lia.cara

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Only two notable things have ever happened in Oxford, Mississippi. JFK and RFK mobilized approximately 30,000 soldiers and federal agents to put down a riot preventing James Meredith from enrolling at Ole Miss in 1962. William Faulkner lived there and died that same year. Eight years later, Joan Didion wandered from Grenada, Mississippi and tried to find his home.

Faulkner’s old white house is on prominent display, and it’s easier to find than the Archie Manning statue, or the Library (a bar), or Square Books, or the Grove. But not in 1970.

We drove out on Old Taylor’s Road at night to look for Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s house. There were fireflies, and heat lightning, and thick vines all around, and we could not see the house until the next day… I read a book about Faulkner in Oxford, interviews with his fellow citizens in Oxford, and I was deeply affected by their hostility to him and by the manner in which he had managed to ignore it.

In the lead-up to Didion’s arrival, Faulkner and books and black people were all just minor incursions on the oasis of Oxford in a desert of kudzu and poverty. The third observation in Didion’s Oxford notes is that there is barely a store in which to purchase a book. The second was that “the self-image of the Southern Blood as Cavalier” was very apparent there.

South and West doesn’t give a sense of what the South is like now. Oxford has changed. The drunk college boys still call themselves the Rebs, but it sounds like an affectation when there’s a nineteen year-old from Rockaway Beach in the group. The hushed racist barbs sound more like appeals to tradition than a philosophy of one’s own. The kids here read, or at least they buy books. There are a lot of Reagan-Bush muscle shirts on patriotic holidays, but the wearer wouldn’t know the name Barry Goldwater. Few of these rich sons of this poor state would use the word “cavalier.” Few could mount much of a defense of the Lost Cause, but they would try; they’re anti-intellectual in a more blunt way than their grandfathers. The only commonality they have with Faulkner, really, is getting wasted and skipping class.

South and West is just a notebook. The bones of a great Didion work, buried in a shallow grave, excised, and put on display for the gawkers, the real Didion-heads. It materialized as she drove around Mississippi and Alabama (from New Orleans) and then left one month later in disgust. The last line of the notebook, presumably an addendum in the 2000s, says simply: “I never wrote the piece.” Many notebook entries preserve the detached tone her followers try to shamelessly affect. In others, her disdain and confusion haven’t been sheared off.

At dinner one night in Birmingham there were, besides us, five people. Two of the men had gone to Princeton… They talked with raucous good humor about ‘Seein’ those X-rated movies’... This was a manner of speaking, a rococo denial of their own sophistication, which I found dizzying to contemplate.

The reader can still see the naked questions whose answer she would turn into a feeling, had the book been written.

Didion bends to triteness twice. Writers from the North and from Hollywood (to a real Southerner, the only two places besides the South) find themselves commenting on southern humidity before all else: “In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology.” She evokes a less oblique piece of small talk from the book American Melodrama: “...Norman Mailer, who may know about such things, described the sensation of living and breathing in the Miami Beach atmosphere as ‘not unlike being made love to by a three-hundred-pound woman who has decided to get on top.’” (Mailer liked re-animating this brusque metaphor. He used it to describe Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full thirty years later: “At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman.”) After the Northern or the Hollywood writer brings up the weather, they bring up the war. “The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 was spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.” The weather and the war probably are the most important things to bring up. The trouble is that everyone does.

The specter of divorce haunts the best Didion essays of ’66 to ’77. The ghost also claws its way into the writing of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Vegas is a reflection of the last death throes of arrested development, a boy-man’s last stand against a commitment he made to a timid, smart young woman still living in L.A. His “memoir of a dark season” is dedicated to the man who was his wife’s first, and maybe greatest, love. The W. H. Auden quote that opens Vegas is a lesson Dunne must have internalized only after the manuscript was finished:

Like everything which is not the result of fleeting emotion but of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate.

174 pages later he recollects calling Didion from his apartment on the strip. She tells him she’s depressed. He tells her a friendly prostitute lined up a nineteen year-old for him to sleep with. Didion tells him that it’s “research.” The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem—two collections containing essays from this period—are riddled with similar holes such as “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of getting a divorce” and “…the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want… between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.” A marriage in such a state, in a land so pre-occupied with marriage, could never be allowed to feel comfortable.

Dunne accompanied Didion to New Orleans, but was rarely seen in the notes. His silhouette is backlit when dinner hosts ask why her husband allows her to “spend time consorting with a lot of marijuana-smoking hippie trash.” She doesn’t note his coming to her defense, but she doesn’t record coming to her own. “I had never expected to come to the Gulf Coast married.” She visits a hospital in Meridian and she tells the doctor she has a husband. “This did not sound exactly right, either, because I was not wearing my wedding ring.” Most sections are headed by a location within the South: Meridian, Grenada, Biloxi. Each contains some inquiry into her marriage status, or a stranger proffering their own, conferring meaning upon themselves. Here in the South there is still that sense of marriage being a prerequisite for personal importance, but there is less marriage now. The right kind of women are still aggrandized here, but the wrong ones have sunk lower.

About the cathouse: the notion that an accepted element in the social order is a whorehouse goes hand in hand with the woman on a pedestal.

New places tend to upskirt our insecurities. When I visit San Francisco I feel that I do not make enough money, and when I visit D.C. I feel as though I am missing vital connections with important people. The chorus of South and West is sung by Didion’s insecurity about her marriage. But the discomfort with the oddity of her marriage was not so off-putting as the unions she found in Louisiana. “It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been eccentric and full of anger… Would I have taken up causes, or would I simply have knifed someone?”

The anger builds and builds in her notes and it drives her back to New Orleans and to a “senseless disagreement on the causeway, ugly words and then silence. We spent a silent night in an airport motel and took the 9:15 National flight to San Francisco. I never wrote the piece.”

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I.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury — before the defense begins, I propose two axioms regarding the dangers of literary myth-making which we should all be able to agree upon:

1. Writing autofiction inherently invites myth-making.

2. You cannot control a myth. Once an author’s life becomes myth, it no longer belongs to him or her, but to the people.

If these are acceptable, perhaps we can add a slightly more controversial maxim:

3. Most attempts to ‘counter’ a myth result in the creation of a new myth, not a distillation of factual truth.

In the past two hundred years, no country has been more invested in elevating authors to the strata of myth than the United States of America. And in the past fifty years, no country has been more invested in tearing down those very myths.

If the 20th century will forever be remembered as the American Century — when the United States transcended the category of nation to become the world’s premier empire, exporting its high and low culture across the globe — then one couple stands as the king and queen of that dawning golden age: Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre.

II.

My adolescence happened to coincide with the rise of a new kind of alternative-history game, very popular at schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, etc., and supercharged by social media. Perhaps you know the game. It’s called, ‘He Wasn’t Actually a Genius’, and the rules are very simple: You pick a historically admired man and point out that he had a talented (or at least vivacious) wife, and then posit that his genius was not singular but more likely the result of an intellectual partnership with said wife. So far, not that controversial. However, you cannot win this game by staying within the realms of reason; instead you must fervently argue that the man had limited talent, that he ‘stole’ the work of his wife, or else that she was an uncredited equal partner due to pervasive sexism and brutishness. And thus, you destroy the myth of the lone male genius.

Of course, this game is pointing at a sometimes true aspect of domestic relationships. It cannot be denied that Mileva Marić was a better student and more organized physician and mathematician than Albert Einstein, or that John Stuart Mill repeatedly stated that his wife Harriet should have been listed as a ‘joint author’ on some of his great philosophical treatises. And in the realm of famous littérateurs, Anna Funder’s recent book Wifedom sheds light on how closely involved Eileen Blair was in the development of her husband’s novels Animal Farm and 1984. Whether a spouse’s assistance in discussing, debating, developing, typing, or editing a manuscript should count as ‘co-authorship’ or give rise to claims of ‘uncredited plagiarism’ is a nuanced matter. What about non-marital editing relationships? Should we delete Raymond Carver’s name from his short story collections in favor of Gordon Lish? What about Thomas Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins? Or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which famously took editor Tay Hohoff two-and-a-half years to extract from the originally bloated manuscript?

This nuance, however, was nowhere to be found in the heady days of the early 21st Century, when I was making my way through secondary school. Instead, as I first dipped my toes into the fiction of Scott Fitzgerald, I was told with much gusto that he ‘wasn’t that great a writer,’ that he ‘stole most of the good stuff from his wife Zelda,’ and that she was the ‘true talent.’ It was also implied that this unfair treatment was what drove Zelda insane, with a jealous Scott committing her to an insane asylum so he could cash in on the books filled with writing stolen from his estranged, glamorous, brilliant wife.

This was the new myth: that behind every talented man crouched an even more talented, but cruelly subjugated, woman.

III.

I spent the first three years of my legal career representing individual litigants in unlawful termination cases, battling their former employers for a bit of cash. My clients were an even 50/50 split between individuals who had truly been wronged, and those who deserved to be fired but couldn’t accept it without a fight. The right person didn’t win every time. Sometimes the litigant who deserved to be fired was able to win on a technicality. Sometimes they were just more winsome and likable in the courtroom. And sometimes the person who you knew was innocent of whatever the company claimed, was so ornery and unlikeable in front of the judge that they had no hope of winning. This all goes to say that I know a thing or two about how to win a case despite defending an unlikeable person.

If there is any real competition between Scott and Zelda, it’s not about their literary abilities (more on that later) but who you should feel more pity and revulsion toward. They were both raging alcoholics that were commonly kicked out of hotels for disturbing other guests (as well as for destruction of property), that got into trouble with fire brigades and law enforcement for making false reports, that once boiled guests’ expensive watches in a pot of tomato soup as a joke. Zelda also had a penchant for throwing herself off cliffs and down staircases, setting things on fire and overdosing on pills, while Scott commonly drank himself to blackout and attempted suicide on multiple occasions. In essence, the Fitzgeralds perfected the attention-seeking, self-destructive, tabloid behavior of young people thrust into the limelight, which was set to define the following century.

However, the central question is not the character or morals of the Fitzgeralds’, but (a) the quality of Scott’s writing, and (b) whether or not Zelda was the genius behind his novels and stories. How much truth lies behind the myth and counter-myth? Does Scott Fitzgerald deserve to be called the first great American writer of the first great American Century?

IV.

Hemingway certainly thought so. One of our best primary sources for understanding the nature of Scott and Zelda’s relationship from a literary perspective is A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s swan song, completed just before he died in 1961 and published posthumously in 1964.

Hemingway, who dolled out compliments sparingly, was in awe of Scott’s raw talent when they first met in 1925. Scott had just published his third, and best, novel, The Great Gatsby, and any personal foibles that Scott demonstrated (there were many) could be overlooked by the usually impatient Hemingway. He regularly met up with Scott in Paris to discuss their respective writing, agreed to travel with him through the French countryside to retrieve a car that Zelda had impulsively left behind in Lyon, and the two young families spent holidays together, despite the strong reservations both Hemingway and his wife Hadley maintained about Zelda’s non-stop party lifestyle.

Hemingway’s recurring frustration with Scott was how he let Zelda affect his craft, how the dazzling genius emergent in This Side of Paradise (released when Scott was just twenty-four years old and before he married Zelda, who agreed to their union only after the book was published), was beaten into something self-doubting and drab by his constant ‘whoring’ — Hemingway’s term for Scott’s habit of rewriting short stories to contain dramatic twists and romances and happy endings so slick magazines would publish them — in order to provide for the lifestyle Zelda believed they deserved. As it stands, if Zelda has any real claim to being involved with Scott’s writing, it’s through her habit of reviewing his ‘far too literary’ drafts and suggesting where they might be changed to appeal to the mass market readers of The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly and Esquire, in addition to contributing a few quotes and pages to his multi-thousand-word oeuvre.

V.

For all the modern griping about autofiction, it can be extremely entertaining to read when well done. Scott struck gold with This Side of Paradise, through which he learned the power of mythologizing oneself. After that he couldn’t seem to stop doing it, no matter how sad and desperate his life became.

When you read Scott’s novels and many of his short stories you can’t help but feel the thrill of recognizing the real-life people he has given new aliases, and seeing how he shapes their brokenness into something with a deeper meaning. It works because he does more than tell us of toxic relationships and the agony and ecstasy of spiralling out of control; he places the reader inside the heart and mind of people like himself — men and women who aren’t ‘bad’ per se, who have a sense of morality, but can’t stop themselves from trying to manipulate people and grasp at things they cannot have. Scott consistently risks readers criticizing his own nature by giving us an interior view of his pseudo-biographical characters’ moral failings.

For example: in “Babylon Revisited,” a 1931 short story, we tag along with a Scott stand-in who is trying to recover custody of his daughter from his deceased wife’s relatives. Despite being a washed-up alcoholic, he has his wits about him, and he knows to play the situation delicately in order to get what he wants:

He knew that now he would have to take a beating. It would last an hour or two hours, and it would be difficult, but if he modulated his inevitable resentment to the chastened attitude of the reformed sinner, he might win his point in the end.

The crux of the story is the protagonist, Charlie, interacting with his sister-in-law, trying to convince her to relinquish her guardianship over his daughter, even as she blames Charlie for her sister’s death. And Scott freely shows us how disingenuous Charlie is, even if his desired outcome is not necessarily a bad one. He’s attuned to human emotions and he is doing his best to play them for his own purposes, but without descending into cartoonish psychopathy. At one point Charlie partially loses control, swears at his sister-in-law, and has to back off. But in doing so he leaves room for her to pounce and she overreacts, causing her own husband to take Charlie’s side, causing the narrator no small amount of glee:

But [Charlie] pulled his temper down out of his face and shut it up inside him; he had won a point, for Lincoln realized the absurdity of Marion’s remark and asked her lightly since when she had objected to the word “damn.”

This is a good short story and Scott is a good writer, but his work would be less interesting, less purely entertaining, if you didn’t know how closely his fiction dovetails with his own tragic life. Scott seemed to relish in writing about his life through the thin veil of fiction, raising him and Zelda and their cohort up to the realm of gods, while they carried on like Greek gods and goddesses — cavorting in endless bacchanals, collapsing night after night from drink, sleeping around, jumping onto the hoods of cars, literally swinging from hotel chandeliers. They were momentarily Gods of their own myth, but the myth quickly became a Titan, which began to swallow them whole. As time went on, both Scott and Zelda became suicidal — Zelda often threatened suicide in public settings as an argument-ender — and they severely mistreated their child, Frances ‘Scottie,’ while constantly mistreating each other. Through it all, Scott couldn’t stop writing about their lives in the guise of fiction, couldn’t stop trying to spin the muddy straw into gold.

As I said at the start, nothing invites myth-making about an author’s life like a work of autofiction. The only safe way to go about it is the Elena Ferrante method, total anonymity. But that was never Scott’s style, leading to the instant birth of the Fitzgerald myth. However, Scott himself admitted to editor Malcolm Cowley, another member of the Lost Generation, that blurring the line between truth and fiction came with several burdens:

Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m real or whether I’m a character in one of my own novels.

The trouble for Scott and Zelda is that self-mythologizing initially gave them a taste of the high life — all the attention and riches available for a young novelist and his exciting young wife, both willing to become the story — before it all came crashing down.

It should be recognized that Scott essentially invented the term the ‘Jazz Age’ and used it liberally, as an ongoing act of conscious mythologizing, placing him and Zelda as crown prince and princess of a kingdom that only ephemerally existed. The adolescent, freewheeling, heavy-drinking life of pre-WW1 college students, preserved forever in Scott’s mind as the best years of his life, was a representation of the Fitzgeralds’ monied decadence, not a true reflection of the ’20s and ’30s. In reality, Scott’s novels are at their heart Edwardian, with ghosts and specters and hauntings, and with characters wishing to return to the past due to conflicts in their social mores. Scott may have used the ‘Jazz Age’ as his setting, but even he knew it was a fantasy.

On the topic of myth, it’s not surprising that as a practiced mythologizer Scott would become so entranced by the real-life Max Gerlach, a millionaire bootlegging fabulist that he was able to sculpt his best work into a meditation on the nature of myth itself. The Great Gatsby is, at one level, an outflow of game recognizing game. The forever insecure Scott — always fretting about his poorer upbringing and lack of class credentials, trying to appear wealthier and more accomplished than he was — peering across the cocktail party at the ebullient Gerlach, confidently lying about his nationality and the providence of his riches. Gerlach achieved what Scott never quite managed — a fully embodied myth, a man forcefully transcending any unhelpful or unsavory elements of his origins and upbringing to become whatever he desired.

VI.

Zelda, Zelda, Zelda. A woman who was the definition of a self-determined and raucous ‘flapper,’ a term she popularized alongside Scott’s ‘Jazz Age,’ writing in 1922 that:

“[the flapper] flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure… she was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.”

Somehow she went beyond myth and became an archetype, ‘the flapper’ remarkably prescient for our age of influencers and celebrities and politicians willing to debase themselves in a million ways for attention, but unable to get out of their own way once they have it. Incredibly self-destructive, wretchedly self-obsessed, narcissistic and shallow, but rewarded by a society entranced with car crashes and natural disasters. Zelda Fitzgerald was intelligent, there’s no doubt about it, but she was intelligent in the way Paris Hilton is intelligent, or in the way Donald Trump is intelligent. And neither of them are, of course, good writers.

I propose a reasonable bar for the spouses of great writers to clear before we credit them as having contributed to the great writer’s genius: (1) they contribute a non-insignificant amount of new material to the writer’s body of work, or (2) they significantly edit or rewrite the novels most lauded by critics and the general public. And (3) they really should have demonstrated some writing talent of their own, independent of their more famous spouse.

Unfortunately for Zelda, she doesn’t pass any of these tests. All the arguments about Zelda’s supposed ‘stolen genius’ largely hinge on Scott’s use of Zelda’s diary entries and letters in several of his novels. But, importantly, this practice of wholesale reproduction was used sparingly — in the order of, at most, a few sentences in the course of a novel — and Zelda wasn’t the only target. This Side of Paradise reprints entire letters Scott himself sent to both Zelda and his priest, Father Sigourney Fay, as well as their responses, despite being categorized as fiction. Of course every writer takes characters, passages, and dialogue from life, and even if one argues that Scott should have credited her for these sparse words, his colossal genius cannot be reduced to discrete sections of text pillaged from correspondence. It’s also telling that nobody, not even Zelda’s most ardent supporter Nancy Milford (who wrote the the foundational text of the pro-Zelda mythology, Zelda: A Biography, in 1970), has been able to show that Zelda contributed meaningfully to any of Scott’s best work — not to his two best novels The Great Gatsby or Tender is the Night, nor his best short stories: “Babylon Revisited”, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”, “Winter Dreams”, “The Rich Boy”, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, “Absolution”, “May Day”, or “Crazy Sunday”. By comparison, the stories with the most clear Zelda influence are trite pieces of fluff: “The Offshore Pirate”, “The Jelly-Bean”, “Our Own Movie Queen”, “The Original Follies Girl”, “A Millionaire’s Girl”, etc.

The real genius of Scott’s prose lies in the tone and voice that is entirely rooted in the anxious ego and belligerent id of his narrators and protagonists. We are let into the inner machinations of neurotic strivers and obsessives, jealous outsiders and secret-keepers, and the entire atmosphere of his novels bends around the gravitational pull of these men who are intelligent but insecure. Scott’s talent was in realizing protagonists didn’t have to be likable to be compelling, as long as they had a soft spot among the neuroses, as long as they were vulnerable. For Scott, so similar to many of his male characters, his vulnerability was always Zelda.

The fact that Zelda demanded Scott rewrite his stories to make the plots more interesting so they sold better, then demanded he come out partying all night instead of writing, so that his follow-up to The Great Gatsby took nine years to write instead of the customary two or three he had previously managed, should be evidence enough that Zelda did not care for the work of literature. She cared for the lifestyle of being attached to a successful writer.

If you still aren’t convinced, let’s compare two similar passages from the estranged couples’ twinned novels — Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz of 1932 (which, it should be noted, Scott first accused Zelda of plagiarizing from him, but then dropped those claims for fear of further upsetting her mental health, and then ultimately helped her get it published) and Scott’s 1934 Tender is the Night, his last complete work before his death at forty-four years of age. Both novels are set in the French Riviera and involve unhappy marriages and infidelities. Here is Zelda’s description of the locale:

The Riviera is a seductive place. The blare of the beaten blue and those white palaces shimmering under the heat accentuates things.

And here is Scott’s:

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach… The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one.

Scott’s description gives us a sense of what the exclusive and sacred space the Riviera represented for a certain class of people, with hints toward deference and pride and religious piety all bound up in a few short sentences. Whereas Zelda’s own description of the same location is juvenile, the sort of thing any teenager in a creative writing class could produce. She lifts up her dress to flash you with ‘seductive’ and then refuses to go any further by retreating to the generic ‘things.’

VII.

One of the other lessons I gained from being a trial lawyer: be careful of who you call as a witness. The most seemingly eager supporters can sometimes do more harm than good.

A Moveable Feast and much of Hemingway’s correspondence during the ’20s certainly paints Zelda in a negative light — she’s shallow, vain, constantly drunk, overly materialistic, casually cruel, and oftentimes insane. She clearly interferes with Scott’s writing, both in terms of not allowing him any time away from the nightlife and by bullying him on what to write and for which publications. The feminist scholars who have been pushing the ‘Zelda as the true genius’ idea since the ’70s sideline this evidence due to Hemingway’s obvious misogyny, but even if we attempt to correct for any gendered biases, Hemingway is not actually as helpful for Scott’s case as he may seem. Despite being fond of his friend and in awe of his talent, Hemingway inadvertently (or maybe advertently) paints Scott as weak, foppish — a nancy boy, to use the parlance of the time. This too becomes part of the Fitzgerald myth.

Take, for example, how Hemingway describes Scott when he believes he has fallen sick in a hotel on their drive back from Lyon, as Hemingway tries to pamper the childish Scott despite there being nothing wrong with him:

On this evening in the hotel I was delighted that he was being so calm. I had mixed the lemonade and whisky and given it to him with two aspirins and he had swallowed the aspirins without protest and with admirable calm and was sipping his drink. His eyes were open now and were looking far away. I was reading the crime on the inside of the paper and was quite happy, too happy it seemed.

‘You’re a cold one, aren’t you?’ Scott asked and looking at him I saw that I had been wrong in my prescription, if not in my diagnosis, and that the whisky was working against us.

‘How do you mean, Scott?’

‘You can sit there and read that dirty French rag of a paper and it doesn’t mean a thing to you that I am dying.’

‘Do you want me to call a doctor?’

‘No. I don’t want a dirty French provincial doctor.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want my temperature taken. Then I want my clothes dried and for us to get on an express train for Paris and to go to the American hospital at Neuilly.’

‘Our clothes won’t be dry until morning and there aren’t any express trains,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you rest and have some dinner in bed?’

After this went on for a long time the waiter brought a thermometer.

After Hemingway messes about with the thermometer and tries to convince Scott that it is working properly and his temperature is normal, Scott demands that Hemingway use it on himself, which he does, after which Hemingway informs Scott that they have the same temperature (despite the mechanism not actually working):

Scott was a little suspicious so I asked if he wanted me to make another test.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We can be happy it cleared up so quickly. I’ve always had great recuperative power.’

This is all played for laughs, with great comic timing, but Scott then rushes off to call Zelda with claims that the two of them “have never slept away” from each other since they were married, which Hemingway points out can’t be true in the light of Zelda’s affairs which Scott has confided in him earlier that day. The version of Scott found in A Moveable Feast is consistently like this, self-defeating and foolish, and Hemingway can’t help but do what inwardly insecure but outwardly masculine men have been doing for millennia: he makes Scott his cuckold.

It’s strange that Hemingway was able to manage this, because in many ways Scott was the stronger writer, and Hemingway knew it. But to this day, Fitzgerald is far less esteemed by MFA students than their sacred ‘Papa,’ and that is partly due to the surviving mythos of Hemingway as the clear-eyed reporter of human facts vs. Scott as the romantic weakling and cuckold. When comparing their writing, I have to admit that I’m often inclined towards Scott’s romantic modernism over Hemingway’s minimalism. Take their scene descriptions in the first chapters of each of their third novels, The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, respectively:

The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

and

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Scott is clearly doing a lot more work in his paragraph, drawing us toward the lush atmospheric stage his main character is about to walk upon, compared with Hemingway’s dull and repetitive reportage. I am by no means calling Hemingway a bad writer(!), but I do think we lose something in jettisoning Scott’s romanticism for Hemingway’s dry style. I think one of the reasons this happened is due to the diverging myths surrounding the two men.

Scott and Hemingway’s Paris days among the Lost Generation are key to understanding how they would go on to be viewed by the reading public, as those brief years somehow entered the literary legendarium and formed a lens through which we view them both; but we should note that it is a legend shaped largely by Hemingway himself. In the mythic version of 1920s Paris, Scott is literally cuckolded by Zelda and figuratively cuckolded by Hemingway — he will always be the simpering, fussy loser to Hemingway’s clear-headed strongman. It doesn’t help Scott that there is a smack of truth about this. He was close in upbringing and temperament to his protagonists — Nick Carroway, Amory Blaine, Anthony Patch, and Dick Diver — neurotic and physically unassuming men, who are stuck in their own heads, always analyzing and worrying, always seeking to understand the social dynamics around them. This is why it was too easy for Zelda to yank Scott’s chain. For a period, she convinced Scott that his penis was too small to bring pleasure to a woman, which required Hemingway to inspect his friend’s member, and then take Scott on a tour of the Louvre’s classical statues to prove to him that he was normally endowed. (And in evidence against Hemingway’s supposedly raging misogyny, he also instructed Scott on the use of a pillow to achieve the right angle for pleasing his wife during copulation. Ernest Hemingway, ally of female pleasure.)

It also doesn’t help Scott’s myth that he ended his life as an alcoholic suffering from cardiac arrest in his lover’s shabby Californian apartment after a failed attempt at becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, while Hemingway was snatching marlin from his Cuban cruiser and smoking cigars with Castro, his shotgun and mouth still yet to meet for another twenty-one years.

VIII.

As both and have recently pointed out, there is probably no literary character more relevant to our culture today than Patrick Bateman, the protagonist and narrator of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 transgressive novel American Psycho. The question arises: are Scott’s characters the progenitors of Bateman? If not, then why do so many of Scott’s leading men feel nearly psychopathic, trapped in their minds, obsessive toward people and interactions with them, inwardly observant of their own minds and thought processes but unable to reach out and truly connect with another human being, unable to give any other person access to that secret locked door buried in their selves? There is something of Patrick Bateman both Amory Blaine and Jay Gatsby: the obsession with wealth and status, with class dynamics and interpersonal slights, the focus on women and wishing to have some sort of romantic connection that never quite eventuates. But even in “Babylon Revisited,” there are hints of Bateman as a purely materialistic egregore of late ’80s capitalism. See the specificity and focus on the restaurants, the lingering regret, the sense of not existing, as Charlie moves through 1930s Paris:

Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were in movement; the bistros gleamed. At the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the sudden provincial quality of the Left Bank.

Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de l’Opera, which was out of his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent façade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few bars of La Plus que Lent, were the trumpets of the Second Empire. They were closing the iron grill in front of Brentano’s Book-store, and people were already at dinner behind the trim little bourgeois hedge of Duval’s. He had never eaten at a really cheap restaurant in Paris. Five-course dinner, four francs fifty, eighteen cents, wine included. For some odd reason he wished that he had.

As they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden provincialism, he thought, “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”

But as I have said before, this is also a reflection of Scott himself. His protagonists are never very far from his own nature. Which partially explains why Hemingway describes Scott as acting so oddly upon their first meeting, incessantly interviewing people about their habits, their social ethics, their sex lives. Why do they do things and do they feel what they do is wrong? It’s like an alien trying to understand the nuances of humanity’s social cues.

The episode Hemingway describes, of travelling with a neurotic and hypochondriac Scott — delusional about his own vitality while simultaneously being convinced of illnesses he doesn’t have — reveals the man to be a sadly comic character. Tragic in his self-deceit, but somewhat innocent and lovable in how he moves through the world, sympathetic because of how much he clearly doesn’t understand while yearning to. Much in the same way Amory Blaine and Jay Gatsby are sadly comic characters — nearly Machiavellian were it not for the soft underbellies we get flashes of from time to time, and which ultimately trip them up. And, come to think of it, wouldn’t Patrick Bateman also be a sadly comic character, with his status obsession and inability to connect with people, were it not for all the killing?

IX.

It is ironic that The Great Gatsby is the work Scott is most known for today, on multiple levels. First, because it was the worst-selling book of his career upon release. And second, because it is his one major departure from clearly autobiographical writing. Gatsby is the only male protagonist in all of Scott’s novels who isn’t a direct analogue for himself (leaving aside the posthumous The Last Tycoon, which was assembled and edited by his friend Edmund Wilson in 1941, and which I do not count as a true Scott novel).

With the release of This Side of Paradise in 1920, Scott, and by extension Zelda, became stars overnight, vaunted to national newspaper columns and living in the Biltmore Hotel. But their star power was more flash-in-the-pan than most realize, and the mythos of the debutante genius capable of representing the newly unshackled younger generation vanished nearly as soon as it descended. This Side of Paradise sold 40,000 copies in the first year and made Scott a household name, but The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) was panned as too depressive, leading to The Great Gatsby (1925) selling poorly. That the novel he was most proud of, the best-written work of his entire oeuvre, was not popular, bothered Scott more than almost anything else, robbing him of his confidence and allowing Zelda more purchase in her campaign for Scott to write stories that earned them money instead of critical respect. After 1925, he would never again write anything nearly as ambitious.

Upon considering his friend’s wasted writing abilities with the benefit of hindsight, Hemingway wrote:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

By the time Hemingway wrote this, Scott had been dead for twenty-four years; penniless and pathetic in his final days, largely disregarded by the critics and general population. Zelda followed him to the grave (literally, they were buried together in a Protestant cemetery before being moved to a Catholic plot) eight years later, after being burned alive in a sanatorium, following twelve years spent inside mental facilities as a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. And this too became part of the Fitzgerald myth: the rise and fall of a literary genius and his hard-partying wife, on a speedrun through four decades of life, burning with the quick flame of gin-slinging, foxtrotting youth, without enough time left to stage a comeback.

And then, also mythically, their reputations were resurrected due to a rediscovery of Scott’s work by generations emerging from the ashes of WWII, who were removed from all the scandal and the sadness involved. With enough time passed and the sad realities dead and buried, the mythic glories of the Jazz Age could live on.

X.

Given all of the above, it is my position — ladies and gentlemen of the jury — that Zelda, the life and death of every party she ever attended, need not be remembered as a ‘literary genius’ to be part of the pantheon of American culture. In many ways, she better embodies the national consciousness than the nervous and striving Scott, though the nature of their mutual toxicity, how they brought out the worst in each other as they entered middle age, is also deeply archetypal of our modern age. In 1929, Zelda tried to kill herself, Scott, and their daughter by seizing the steering wheel of the car as they drove through the French Alps, which marked her as possessing ‘a homicidal mania.’ And upon Zelda’s initial treatment for schizophrenia in 1932, Scott wrote the following to one of the doctors at John Hopkins Hospital, laying out the nature of their mutual destruction:

Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink. Neither judgement would mean anything.

Acutely aware of how to transpose fact into myth, of how to transpose sad realities into higher legends, Scott was unable to discern any meaning behind the widening gyres of his and Zelda’s increasing instabilities. He couldn’t see how to escape the downward-spiralling effect they had on each other.

But none of this, none of the myth-making or tragic personal histories, changes the fact that Scott was the first great American writer of the 20th Century. At his best, he possessed a precocious talent for revealing the true nature of the modern man — cunning, conniving, intelligent, obsessive, but vulnerable in his felt isolation. And he was able to imbue the settings and atmosphere of his work with a unity of action, serving to twist the whole world onto the focal point of the story, the desperate man and his female obsession. That his characters are frequently disoriented by the pace of cultural progress is also prescient for the age that was to come, even as Scott and Zelda themselves broke taboos and set new patterns for how young artists in the limelight were to behave.

And more than any of his peers, Scott represents a firm commitment to autofiction, to the mythologizing of his life as he lived it, in a way that most writers only attempt at the end of their careers out of nostalgia, like Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.1

Ultimately, Zelda may have been in the right to accuse Scott of lifting pages of her diaries or correspondence, though she certainly saw no issue with using the structure of his draft novel for her own attempt at literature. But these minor events are superfluous to the underlying argument. At the end of the day, it’s clear that F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved what very few writers can, which is to completely mythologize and cannibalize his own life, and alchemize stellar literature from that process.

To me, F. Scott Fitzgerald is a tragic genius, a cautionary tale, a man whose talent I admire even as I pity the course of his life. It is a tragedy that his best work was not duly recognized during his lifetime, and that he died so young. But for us to now discredit his genius and thus tarnish his legacy, by giving credit to someone it does not belong to, is both dishonest and cruel. The truly under-appreciated should always get their due, but to create a myth in order to steal it — that certainly is a bridge too far.

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Nobody reads anymore. Or, to put it more accurately, nobody reads like they used to.

Well, except for you, of course.

This should not come as a surprise to those of us living through the late-stage evolutions of the Information Age. We have all bore witness to the rise of epochal technologies like the iPhone and the social media platforms that followed suit, which have drastically altered our information consumption habits. In an age where the static, written word must compete with AI-powered, auto-scrolling algorithms and stimulating short-form video content, the former loses. Badly.

Over the last twenty years there has been a 42% drop in the number of those who read for pleasure daily, according to an analysis of the American Time Use Survey.1 When paired with the fact that 19% of American adults were responsible for 82% of the country’s reading, the picture becomes stark.2 There are myriad theories as to why people are reading less: An individual preference for low-friction media, lowered cultural importance on intellectuality, laziness. The usual suspects. All valid, yet missing a critical component. There are deeper factors at play.

Seldom discussed is the startling, near exponential increase in the average person’s daily informational intake. At present, we consume an average of 74 gigabytes of information per day through the use of computers, cell-phones, tablets, and other technologies. This is the same amount of information that a highly educated individual would consume in an entire lifetime just 500 years ago.3 In the past, there were real constraints around how much information one could absorb. Information was scarce. Readers engaged with works over longer periods of time. The language had time to settle into the mind of the reader, helping shape their internal standards for the written word. Contrast this with our time: the age of information abundance. Information is cheap now, and we take it wherever we can get it. Our language habits reflect this shift: the quality of our words, thoughts, and ideas has fallen off a cliff. The human brain is adaptable, but a jump this substantial leads to an evolutionary mismatch, resulting in what some researchers are calling “the capacity challenge.”

Our brains evolved to efficiently process limited sets of relevant data and, as expected, run into difficulties when faced with seemingly unlimited amounts of irrelevant information. This is one of the main reasons we have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of mental health issues over the last decade.4 We are not machines, we are biological beings with finite stores of attention and linguistic processing capabilities. Yet, the world we live in is designed to bombard us with nearly infinite input, overloading our brains as a result.

The informational onslaught begins every morning with an iPhone-assisted awakening, followed by a carousel of stimulation. Consider a typical workday: You’ve responded to forty-seven emails, toggled between eight browser tabs for a single task, and spent your commute home absorbing a podcast at 1.5x speed. By evening, when it is finally time to relax, the prospect of sitting with a challenging novel feels less like leisure and more like another demand on an already depleted system. You’ve waited for this moment all day, yet can’t bring yourself to open up War and Peace, opting to reach for the remote instead. After a day of your attention being scattered, your brain is burnt, leaving you less likely to slow down, sit still, and silently read the book you said you’d finish months ago.

For much of human history, the written word was one of the most potent drugs we had access to. There was a stretch of time when books, magazines, and newspapers were the main medium through which leisure and novelty was had. Lively scenes were conjured out of nothing but ink printed on papyrus, telepathy made possible through the carrier signal of controlled hand movements and ink. It was magic. The transition from agricultural and industrial work being at the core of human society to administrative knowledge work only expedited the downfall of our reading habits. We labored and exhausted our bodies first, minds second. After a long day of physically demanding work, we relished the opportunity to finally focus our mental energy on the words of our favorite authors, resting our bodies and renewing our minds. Now, in the age of bureaucratic knowledge work, we spend most of our time exhausting our thinking minds. At the end of a workday, our mind has processed exponentially more bits of data than our ancestors did when working in fields and factories. The pace of life has sped up, the stimulation levels have multiplied, all while our brains have remained the same as they were before.

If we wish to have the requisite amount of energy needed to fully engage with a piece of text, we need to create space in other areas of our day. In creating space for our minds, we allow our energy, our attention, to remain stored for when we need to call on it the most. We must, on an individual level, decide to unshackle ourselves while we still hold the key: choosing high-friction activities like reading, reducing unnecessary information intake by learning to be bored again, and deleting the most damaging of the short-form social media apps.

Personally, I’ve struggled with this, as these apps often double as a way to stay in parasocial contact with friends and family, something that feels necessary in our increasingly isolated world. Yet this cheapening of human-to-human socialization is but another reason to free ourselves from these algorithmic grips. These applications are not suitable replacements for the social contact and creative input that we need most. I have rid the most damaging of the apps from my phone to avoid temptation, making mindful efforts to interact with the people and ideas I value most. Our minds are in the process of being depleted and commodified by technological innovations led by corporations who have made their intentions clear: profiting off of our valuable time and attention. Our brains are being digitally drained of the ability to sit in silent stillness, which is why choosing to sit with a book is liberating in a world tailored for stimulation.

We can choose to lead less digital, information-dense lives by disavowing the digital products whose main aims are to capture and hold our attention. The past can never be again, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t borrow some of their behaviors and lifestyle choices to help us reclaim our minds and our time, the two fundamentals needed to lead a fulfilling life. The future of literature, of educated society, rests in our willingness to reject the lifestyle that is praised as normal today, leaving behind the cheaper, less-fulfilling forms of entertainment in favor of the slower, but richer, mediums of the written word.

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The imperial idea cannot unite people with gadgets. The iPhone and the imperial idea are fundamentally incompatible. But feudalism and the iPhone—those can coexist just fine.

— Vladimir Sorokin

In the fourth century BCE, Zoroastrians establish a temple in the Altai Mountains at a deposit of native tellurium. The cave is called Maktulu — “The Glorious.” On the wall, an image of the sun is laid out in pure tellurium, a rare silvery, glistening metal. Forty-eight people hammer tellurium nails, forty-two millimetres in size, into each other’s heads. Then they seal the entrance from the inside. Much later, in 1782, tellurium is first discovered in the gold ores of Transylvania. Fast forward, in 2013, Vladimir Sorokin publishes the novel Telluria.

In 2022, Chinese archaeologists discover the Maktulu cave. Scientists from the Institute of Brain Research at Peking University and from Stanford University conduct research on volunteers: tellurium nails, hammered into a specific spot in the head, induce sustained euphoria and a sense of time loss. Lethal outcomes are not uncommon. In 2026, a UN convention bans experiments with tellurium nails. The nails are classified as a heavy narcotic.

In 2028, a military coup in the Barabin province of Altai happens, resulting in the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Telluria, which becomes the only country in the world where tellurium nails are not classified as a narcotic.

Over the following two decades, a succession of civil wars engulfs Russia, ending in its disintegration. Europe is struck by the “Wahhabi hammer” — a protracted and bloody war with Islamists, which Europe wins with enormous losses, but also collapses into a multitude of micro-states. Thus, in the 2060s, the era of the New Middle Ages begins — an enlightened feudalism with future technologies: smart gadgets, robots, combat exoskeletons, and so on. After all the wars, people are tired of suffering and seek happiness. To achieve it, they hammer tellurium nails into their heads to attend a séance with Sorokin and become characters in his novel Telluria, so that in 2013 he would actually publish it — because how else can you explain all this?

At the release, the novel immediately attracts attention, firstly of course because it’s a new Sorokin novel after a long break, and secondly because it’s not quite a novel at all. At the final debates for the “Novaya Slovestnost’” (kind of New Literature) prize in 2014–2015, the jury spends seventy percent of their time discussing Telluria specifically, hence contemporary literature at large, arguing over what matters more — its artistic language or the fact that it represented something greater than a novel, an attempt to explode the linguistic environment of the exhausted conservative forms. Some critics see Telluria as the pinnacle of Sorokin’s craft, others as too radical an experiment, but no one remains indifferent, and the novel resounds across the literary scene as an event that prompts a rethinking of genre boundaries and the relationship between literature and reality.

In interviews, Sorokin himself admits that Telluria can no longer be called a novel — it’s some other form of long prose for which there is no name yet, “a layered, scaly literary creature,” he calls it. The book, as we can surely call it, consists of fifty untitled and numbered chapters of varying length, each written in its own style, with its own language, telling separate stories about completely different characters: from conventional narratives to impersonal dialogues, plays, letters, chapters in invented languages, stream of consciousness without punctuation, manifestos, prayers, and much more. At first glance, Sorokin has no interest whatsoever in his characters, only in speech and their type of consciousness, and it seems he could have continued writing such chapters indefinitely, though he says he loves them equally and they are “free people who can make their own choices.” Yet the chapters themselves are also interesting, engaging, compelling, and often hilarious, but it is their sum that transforms them into something greater.

For this reason, it’s difficult to talk about Telluria as a book with a plot — such a conversation would devolve into listing chapters and ranking them (such lists probably already exist), or about particular chapters and the wonderful variety of linguistic and plot devices they employ — that would be pointless, take ages, and undermine the idea of the book itself. It is, in a sense, an encyclopedia of Telluria, a book of its lore, but told not by an omniscient narrator from above, but by its own characters, little people — from below. It has to be read to be truly experienced.

At the same time, we must note that the structural form itself — “a novel in stories,” “a novel in episodes” that may be unconnected — is something Sorokin himself started with in the ’80s, and many others have written such “novels” too: Ulitskaya, Bitov, Shalamov, Dovlatov, to name a few. For Russian literature, this has become the norm (pun not intended). Nor is it an innovation that each chapter is written in its own language — take, for example, Ulysses, a stylistic encyclopedia of English literature. (Joyce has, by the way, an immense impact on contemporary Russian literature, partially due to how late he slipped into it, partially due to his attention and obsession with language, so dear to Russian literary metaphysics.) The approach to world-building and many of the tropes Sorokin employs are not unique either; on the contrary, the book uses a mass of Sorokin’s signature devices: the description of society through the consumption of a certain substance from The Norm, the miraculous properties of a substance from the Ice Trilogy, and what he does better than anyone: taking fears, jokes, anecdotes — anything — and interpreting them literally, turning them into satirical and grotesque literary constructions that would simply fall apart in the hands of a less skilled author. But, in Sorokin’s hands, they become alive and paradoxically believable, even more real than the real. So why and how does the novel work? What makes it great?

The true achievement of Telluria is that it resolves thematic tension at the level of form alone. Here, Sorokin elevates to an absolute, transforming from merely experimental or unusual into the statement itself: the world is fragmented, so the book is fragmented, too; there is no single language (even within one language like Russian), and there should be no single style; people have ceased to be historical objects, and there are no protagonists any more, or, therefore, everyone is one. Each chapter is written in its own style, creating the effect of an encyclopedia of Russian speech and language, both real, parodied and imitated, or invented. Paradoxically, the book’s success lies in the absence of a unified tone. A non-linear, chaotic, and polyphonic world requires a non-linear, chaotic, and polyphonic novel. If in the XIX century it is possible to write a great novel — say, War and Peace — by the early twentieth century it becomes harder, after the Second World War — ever so harder, and with the emergence of the internet and the smartphone — utterly impossible. The classical novel, as Sorokin himself says in interviews, is doomed to archaization, no matter how vivid the feelings and story the author invests in it. What is needed now, he says, is a different language to describe reality, a new form, and Telluria is an attempt to find it.

In this sense, the book becomes a new utopia, both linguistic and literary. Sorokin builds and destroys his own Tower of Babel — showing how this could happen, again both metaphorically and literally (which he loves), in the present or near future. The world has begun to fragment, and describing it with a single language — single register — and linear development is impossible. If the world is fragmented, it must be described in the language of fragmentation, this is what makes both the form and the themes of Telluria increasingly relevant today.

If in the mid-2000s Sorokin’s novels looked satirical and grotesque, then with Putin’s third term, Sorokin’s metaphors began to reproduce themselves in reality. Everyone knows that life in Russia is built according to the laws of literature, but as it turns out, the whole world seems to live by Sorokin’s novels now too. At the time of the novel’s release in 2014, no one expected that fundamentalists would seize power in many Middle Eastern countries, that right-wing and far-right parties would gain ground in European elections, that the immigration crisis would loop and xenophobia would rise, that there would be a series of referendums on separation and independence of one from another, that there would be a series of terrorist attacks, that there would be a pandemic, that Russia would launch a full-scale war in Ukraine, and that the political arena would be captured by a primal-emotional, archaic-feudal rhetoric, as Sorokin himself describes: “everything is sliding towards medieval rhetoric, towards the confrontation of feudal lords: who has more servants, more lands, whose hunting is better.” The world of Telluria, with its cascading de-modernisation, neo-archaism, disintegration of states, and rise of religious fundamentalism, turned out to be far more real than it seemed in 2013. Globalisation, multiculturalism, and liberal democracy seem now far more fragile, as does faith in progress and ideology and the ability of the world to firmly stand in balance in general. But for all this grimness, Telluria is not a novel about catastrophe or apocalypse but about what happens after, and about what form that “after” might take.

The social phobias, pains, tendencies, and dreams of our epoch take on physical form in the book. Telluria becomes their manifestation, an answer to the question: what if everything that completely different people want were to finally happen? In the case of Russia and Europe, this means, for example, the disintegration of states, totalitarianism, Sinification, Stalinism, Islamism, the retvrn of the Crusaders, robots, bioterrorism, genetic mutations, and so on — there is nothing in it that doesn’t already exist around us in one way or another. Thus Eurasia disintegrates into city-states, micro-states, kingdoms, principalities, and each part goes mad in its own way, in its striving to distance itself from the others to emphasise its uniqueness and establish its own rules. At the same time, Sorokin deliberately ignores almost the entire world outside of Europe and Russia. Decentralization becomes the principle of world order, thus creating a global anarchy without a world police: no UN, no “international community,” no uni- or multipolarity. This is not chaos in the sense of complete disorder, but chaos in the sense of the absence of a single order. Telluria is not a global dystopia, but a local fantasy of Eurasian total “balkanisation” with a resulting hundred micro-utopias. Sorokin then mixes all of this with Soviet and post-Soviet aesthetics, folklore, science fiction, and even fantasy, which for the most part creates a uniquely cosy comic effect.

My house is on the edge [I mind my own business] — yes! The winds of the future smell like such a world. If you look into the Moscow metro or a European café, you’ll see people sitting, buried in their gadgets. The fragmentation has already happened, the world is atomising. Borders will be drawn where a person’s privacy ends. The world will fragment even more — into apartment-states, human-sized states. The idea of some common collective happiness linked to progress, to integration — is doomed. There’s no European who wouldn’t say that the EU is doomed. In Europe, states as such are on the periphery of people’s vision. People aren’t very ideologised, and the words ‘homeland,’ ‘state,’ ‘patriotism’ induce yawning. In Telluria, there’s nowhere left for a person to hurry: empires have collapsed, one must solve purely personal problems.

— Vladimir Sorokin

People in Telluria have ceased to be historical objects — they simply live their lives. This is the end of Hegelian history, but not in Fukuyama’s sense (the triumph of liberalism); rather, in the sense of the collapse of the very idea that people are material for the historical process, and that there exist a number of great empires that drive people somewhere and govern their fates. Instead, there are only little, ordinary people in a human-sized world. A person can once again take in their reality at a glance: know their neighbours, understand the rules, influence their surroundings. In the global, historical world, a person is a statistical unit; in Telluria — in a timeless, non-historical world — a person is once again a subject, which creates an interesting paradox: the world becomes smaller, and the person within it becomes larger.

In many ways this makes Telluria the most accurate rendering of an MMORPG in literature. There is barely a single plot, no protagonist — everyone lives their own story. The world exists as a sandbox, as a space for parallel activities. Lore is revealed not through a central narrative, but through quests, NPCs, notes — from below. The feudal structure is like guilds and factions. The happiness-granting tellurium nails are like legendary loot giving you exactly what you want. There is no endgame, no victory, just endless existence in a world where everyone optimizes their personal fun: some raid, some craft, some do PvP, some sit in the tavern and role-play. All of them are equally valid, and everyone is equally happy, because they all have tellurium.

Tellurium becomes the überidea, “the theory of everything” of the novel: a miraculous metal that brings happiness. Tellurium nails are hammered by specially trained “carpenters” into the heads of those who wish it, guaranteeing indescribable pleasure, enlightenment, and the fulfilment of dreams. Tellurium nails become both a universal aspiration and a universal currency — everyone dreams of the mythical metal mined in the Republic of Telluria. People want from tellurium what they once sought in the divine, the concept of religion and God becomes secondary and redundant, and finally the third psychedelic revolution occurs.

Tellurium, for all its miraculous properties, is non-addictive and has no side effects. This is crucial because hammering a tellurium nail into your head or not is not an impulse led by addiction, but a conscious choice for each sane person. A person does not become a slave to tellurium, does not become a degenerate, does not lose him or herself. Dying from having a nail hammered into your brain is, however, possible. There is some risk even if an experienced carpenter does it for you. You risk your life in exchange for absolute freedom. Despite all the differences between people (and also giants, gnomes, centaurs, cynocephali, and so on) in the fragmented and chaotic world, they all understand one language — the language of happiness.

Looking back, what is the world of Telluria — utopia or dystopia?

The proverbial secret third thing: a rejection of the very concept of an ideal world, and consequently of its opposite. It is simultaneously chaos and liberation: a dystopia for those who believe in a common monolithic future and the collective progress of civilization — in one überidea capable of uniting everyone, be it philosophy, religion, or even a grand common threat — and simultaneously a world of pluralistic happiness where everyone finds joy, a literal physical realization of humanity’s collective unconscious of our epoch — a personal monstrous utopia that everyone secretly wants but is afraid to admit.

And so the tellurium nail goes in.

Look at our Eurasian continent: after the collapse of ideological, geopolitical, and technological utopias, it has finally sunk into a blessed enlightened Middle Ages. The world has become human-sized. Nations have found themselves. Man has ceased to be the sum of technologies. Mass production is living out its final years. There are no two identical nails that we hammer into humanity’s heads. People have regained their sense of things, started eating healthy food, switched to horses. Genetic engineering helps a person feel their true size. Man has regained faith in the transcendental. Regained the sense of time. We are not rushing anywhere anymore. And most importantly — we understand that there can be no technological paradise on Earth. And no paradise at all. Earth is given to us as an island of struggle, and everyone picks their own struggle and how to overcome it. Themselves!

— Telluria, Chapter XXVIII, Vladimir Sorokin

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Outside the monographs of the academic historian—which, of course, are never read—every generation is reduced to three or four pictures that fade as time flees, until by the work of the world’s immanent compression algorithm, the most disparate groups of people are combined into an “age” or “period.”

Properly “capturing” a generation or particular period in time is then a quixotic and, naturally, exclusionary task.

It’s uncontroversial to say that The Great Gatsby was a generational novel but this is not because Fitzgerald captures what it was like to live in the 1920s for many different sorts of people. It is because his genius seems to peel back everything incidental and disposable and properly judge the entire age. The same could be said of the best novels by Updike, Wharton, Cheever, etc. This is what we should want from a “Great Millennial Novel.” We have not yet been satisfied.

Why not? Is it too early to estimate the lasting literary contribution of Millennial writers to this pursuit? I don’t think so. Bret Easton Ellis doesn’t think so.1 The oldest millennials are in their forties. Mailer was famous at twenty-five. Fitzgerald at twenty-three. Zadie Smith at twenty-five. Even Wallace, our last true literary celebrity, broke out in his mid-twenties. By their early thirties—certainly in the case of Mailer, Fitzgerald, and Wallace—they’d written generational works.

Before turning towards much-lauded millennial candidates, is there perhaps some systemic issue at play?

In his final book,Talents and Technicians, which the Washington Post called “a nasty little piece of work,” critic John Aldridge was happy to play the old codger and lambast the trendiest writers of the 1980s: Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, and the minimalists for a nihilistic shallowness. Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis for substituting a muddled depiction of wealthy hedonism for a full-throated critique of the age.

Aldridge is cranky, overly conservative, and too certain of his conclusions. But his derisive attitude towards the contemporary fiction of the 1970s and 1980s sheds much-needed light on how the current state of literature will appear to posterity.2

The essential problem Aldridge raises is simple: there is a tension between being a great novelist and the sort of writer who would be called “the voice of a generation.” A tension between being the writer who can adequately describe the facts of being alive at a particular time in a way that is compelling to immediate readers, and being the writer capable of vivisection, the sort of writer capable of reading entrails and telling us what we do not already know about the age, or know but cannot articulate. It is not exactly a lack of talent: more a lack of nerve. Either too much love for the time you’re writing about—often a consequence of literary success, fame, or nostalgia—or a bitter sense that the period is ultimately unintelligible. You can tell Aldridge yearns for the days of Mailer and Roth as he blames MFAs, the academization of both criticism and fiction-writing, and all those other explanations you’ve been hearing about in bits and pieces for the last thirty years. But what he claims is still true. Many contemporary novels have succeeded in their verisimilitude, giving readers the sense of being trapped in the internet, making them pine for the days that preceded it. Yet none have made the reader aware of something fundamentally new. In other words, as Algridge argues, many lauded writers can reflect contemporary reality, but do not actually give us “a reality perceived, understood, and imaginatively transformed by an extraordinary mind.” They tie themselves too tightly to the times for the sake of contemporary success. This goes beyond book sales, as many of the writers he discusses did not sell well, to intangibles like MFA clout or status among the high-brow New York literati.

These writers produce accurate work but “treat personal life as if it were a phenomenon existing totally apart from society and without connotations that would give it meaningful relevance to a general human condition or dilemma—in the sense, for example, that Heller’s Yossarian or Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim become representative both of human types and of problems shared by an entire generation.” A generational novel should be able to lay out these problems and posit a resolution of some sort through the writer’s genius. This is what we would like to read.

For any writer born after the 1960s, the trade-off between contemporary “success” and lasting endurance has posed a grave challenge to so-called generational writers. Aldridge’s book was written in 1992. Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis (though not necessarily for his literary merit), Louise Erdrich, and Mary Robinson have escaped the great literary oblivion for now (with a caveat for the minimalists who have benefitted from significant taxpayer funds and the wasted careers of their mentees). In spite of their prizes, residencies, and grants, who will be reading David Leavitt, T. C. Boyle, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Bobbie Ann Mason, or even poor Frederick Barthelme (overshadowed by his brother) in another thirty years? Am I wrong to think no one? To suggest that these writers have tied themselves too tightly to their times and sacrificed immortality for a bevy of prestige in their own little world of tenure, “Genius” grants, and Pulitzer nominations?

They were not wrong, per se, to do so. The tragedy of millennial writers is that many prostituted themselves for even less: status in irrelevant scenes, dead in a year, always ending in ridicule and a worthless heap of words. At least they built institutions and seduced college kids (not always a metaphor, unfortunately) into believing that the purpose of their lives was to get an MFA. In a sense they succeeded. Good for them.

But the contemporary writers that followed don’t even have that to count on. They have fallen back into Aldridge’s trap. We can pathologize and make excuses: the world is changing too quickly, we’re too disconnected from one another, there is no meaning to be found anywhere. If I was a millennial writer, that’s what I would do. I’d throw my hands up in the air. Who do you think I am, Flaubert? I publish in a small press. I teach college kids. I do coke with other thirty-five year-olds at parties.

In any case, while Aldridge’s diagnosis—that for various reasons writers would rather describe than vivesect—explains why so many of the once-lauded millennial writers and their novels have not had literary staying power, some of them certainly have. There are candidates. Sally Rooney is “the first great millennial novelist.” Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens “[t]he first great millennial novel.” Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation “might just answer the cry for a so-called millennial novel.”3 Will these books last? I’m not sure.

Grading on a curve, the two books that come closest to being the “Great Millennial Novel”—by judging the period in a convincing way and not just describing it—are Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Tao Lin’s Taipei. This does not bode well for millennials. These two novels create such an atmosphere of nausea that I could not read twenty straight pages of either without starting to feel sick. Though formally different, these books converge on a judgement of sorts: the millennial subject was failed by childish parents and left to rot in a hollowed-out world.

Before giving these two novels a closer look, let’s consider some of the less successful attempts. Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens, often referred to as the first “Great Millennial Novel” after its release, Sally Rooney’s Normal People (a shoo-in), and Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School.4

Tony Tulathimutte is a good writer. His 2016 debut Private Citizens is full of carefully organized facts about Bay Area life in the mid-2000s, passed through four narrators in a perfect free-indirect style worthy of a James Wood blurb. Realism with such a subtle touch, a book where the author is everywhere and nowhere, runs the risk of falling into Aldridge’s trap. But Tulathimutte, unlike many contemporary writers, does not describe without the faintest hint of irony. He invokes Balzac. His characters are attempts at loveable grotesques—a tech-nerd gooner, an ex-vagabond grad-student, a well-meaning but frustrated activist—over-inflated blimps off of which hang signs that say: “Something has gone wrong.”

But the problem, Tony, is that there are too many problems. Private Citizens is the novel equivalent of that infamous buzzword, “polycrisis,” where an intellectual attempts to show that everything wrong with contemporary life is connected in order to secure tenure. Car accidents, rape, drug addiction, cheating, racism, pornography addiction, homelessness, bad sex—Private Citizens has everything but, like “polycrisis,” the breadth confuses rather than clarifies. The reader is left wondering about the ultimate value of this impressive assemblage—a great tower of dated references and lurid, yet presumably relatable, scenarios.

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The next time ayahuasca tastes terrible—so terrible that I can’t describe it because my mind has blocked out the memory. It is not uncommon for the advanced psychedelic hitchhiker to grab his bucket and puke as soon as he gets a waft of the smell. For many this is the most unpleasant part of the journey; it’s more difficult to bear than when the ego starts drifting out into the Andromeda three hours later. Though we’re always forgetting it—such is the strength of our subjectivity—taste is mere perception. There’s nothing objective about it. In the case of ayahuasca, five hours of throwing up will change what was a pleasant taste into a horrific one.

Proofreading is like ayahuasca. Unlike editing—the creative act of smashing two minds together to excavate treasures that were only poking through—proofreading is rote, boring, brainless, mundane, and maddening. It is like asking a golfer to put down his clubs and crawl through the dirt to find every brown blade of grass on the course. No one can enjoy searching through the same words 300,000 times, hunting only for typos, missing punctuation, and erroneous formatting. Words once adored start to taste like shit. At the end of his line, the proofreader cannot bring himself to read any more. It would take the effort of climbing a steep rocky hill covered cow dung. There isn’t even the glory or difficulty of conquering a mountain.

In the arts, I cannot think of many better functions for A.I. to serve. The algorithm would not be displacing a creative job, like novel writing, but one that would allow humans to focus on more interesting pursuits. A press that once needed to pay a proofreader could instead train and, hopefully, promote that person to writing or editing. Personally, instead of spending 47,000 hours trying to find missing italics in Coby’s piece, I could have worked on essays and fiction for readers to enjoy. While I wrote computer servers would, in this hypothetical, hum in the background, cleaning up pieces based on a style guide of my direction. Once the algorithm finished, the readers would have a more polished product.

There is not a strong moral case to be made against using A.I. for proofreading. One wouldn’t even be funding the development of LLMs because many platforms offer a free tier without any advertising. Even if magazines and presses were to resist the technology, there are thousands, if not millions, of less principled businesses that would continue to pay for them. Barring restrictive regulation or mass revolution, these companies will keep building whether you use their products or not. The best a widespread boycott, at the individual level, could do is slow their speed down. The cat is, frankly, out of the bag.

Some people may refuse to use A.I. for dogmatic reasons; others may refuse for reasons of identity (e.g. baristas in Portland). It’s easier to write the whole thing off or stick to a previously held opinion than it is to think critically or admit an error in judgement. Though I am against A.I. for many use cases, it is a mistake to not take advantage of the good parts while discarding the bad. Refusing to use Claude to better understand a cancer diagnosis would be asinine. Why wouldn’t you make use of an always-on, private tutor of the sort our favorite geniuses worked with during their aristocratic upbringings? Aren’t readers better off if A.I. helps writers embody new words? Doesn’t everyone benefit if A.I. can help people more deeply understand The Brothers Karamazov?

There is only one good reason not to use an LLM to proofread: Reader preference. Using ChatGPT to find formatting errors assumes that readers prefer a greater volume of perfectly polished products to a lesser volume of imperfect ones. At first glance, this assumption appears correct. But in a world where everything is moving towards computer generation, I am betting that there will be robust demand for publications that are entirely human-created. There is already so much content out there that volume will become less important than craft. Typos and missing punctuation will become valuable stamps of human authenticity.

And how much do small errors really matter, anyway? The Village Voice, one of the most influential newspapers of the twentieth century, was marked by a multitude mistakes twenty years after its circulation commenced. Would one prefer to see the David, with its various crumbles and cracks, or 5,000 robot-built statues without a single marble speck out of place? The computers may be playing yet another trick on us, making us believe that if “perfection” is on offer we should grab it. Yet, in reality, it may turn out that no one ever wanted perfection as much as they wanted to see how close humans could get to it. If Grok can start pounding out 1,900 “perfect” novels an hour, then maybe the mistakes in human novels become valuable.

Realizing this, if it is indeed true, unscrupulous publications could start having their A.I. manufacture faults. That’s why building and maintaining trust is so important. The reason I’m writing my entire thought process out—on a typewriter, no less—is because I want our readers to know exactly what we at Non Grata believe. Without further adieu, these are our A.I. guidelines:

1. Contributors cannot use computers to generate words. Every word must originate in a human mind. Writers cannot use LLMs to pen or suggest them.

2. Contributors cannot use A.I. to edit. Every piece Non Grata publishes receives in-depth editing from a human. It is a sacred, creative, collaborative process that we will not bequeath to the machines.

3. Non Grata will not use A.I. to proofread. As horrible a job as it is, we would rather publish imperfect, human-crafted pieces than “computer-perfect” essays and stories.

4. Non Grata will not use A.I. to generate images. Illustration and photography are the domains of human beings.

5. Contributors can use software to point out structural patterns. Websites, like Grammarly or the Hemingway app, are fine to use as long as they only reveal existing patterns (e.g. run-on sentences, filler words, etc.). It is up to the writer and the editor to determine what to do about them.

6. Contributors can use A.I. for research. Questions like “What’s the vacancy rate in Austin, TX?” are akin to Google searches; they do not detract from the creative process.

7. Contributors can use software for spelling and grammar. This functionality has been around since the advent of the word processor.

8. Non Grata reserves the right to update these rules based on feedback and learnings. We’re a new publication, and this is a rapidly evolving space. We will publish new guidelines as necessary.

The goal of these guidelines is to ensure the reader knows exactly how Non Grata and its contributors use A.I., if we decide to use it at all. Please leave us any feedback you have; we are always open to new approaches and compelling arguments.

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Also, if you want something to get you through the rest of this frigid winter, we still have copies left of the Winter 25/26 print edition. It’s available for purchase through a Substack subscription and on our website. Every copy sold allows us to support artists and host events. In the words of , “[i]t’s incredibly well put together and doesn’t feel like [the] Amazon self print trash that other Substack journals use.” Can’t beat that.

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mark william lewis - Mark William Lewis

Apple Music | Spotify

It’s tough to sum up mark william lewis’s self-titled record because there’s so much going on yet everything feels familiar. It’s dark, gritty, and atmospheric; it sounds how the album art looks. His husky baritone sets an ever-present tone, and he pairs it with a lot of interesting sounds and styles. He sounds a little like Neil Young when he plays the harmonica on “Still Above,” the opener and one of the stand out tracks on the record. His collage-like, springy guitar playing invokes Vini Reilly on “Socialising” and “Petals”; it generally seems like he can rotate through influences—which include T. S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, and James Joyce—at the drop of a hat while maintaining his own feel. “Spit” reminded me of Elliot Smith circa Either / Or, double-tracked vocals whizzing around the mix. Like a lot of my favorite music from last year, this album would rip in headphones alone walking the city at night just as much as it would in a shitty basement while you’re getting fucked up and partying.

mark william lewis - Still Above [Official Audio]

Wednesday - Bleeds

Apple Music | Spotify

Over the past few years, Karlee Hartzman has steered Wednesday into becoming an alt-country-rocking-doomy powerhouse. The group has evolved to be figureheads of whatever “guitar music” is today. Bleeds builds on 2021’s Twin Plagues and 2023’s Rat Saw God and further establishes Hartzman and co. as cut from their own cloth. One of the best world-builders around, Hartzman’s writing calls to mind some contemporary combination of the witty observational style of David Berman with the punchiness of Lucinda Williams. She is only getting stronger with each record. It seems like so many groups today are going for what Wednesday has made cool over the last few years (in more ways than just the fact that everyone wants to put a slide guitar on their tracks now). You can drink beers, go wild, and crank Bleeds. You can cry in your soup and crank Bleeds. That is a rare combination and one of the hallmarks of a great lyricist and songwriter. Hartzman frequently cites Drive by Truckers as an influence, which makes sense given the Southern grit and charm evident in both of the group’s lyrics and general atmospheres. Wednesday had already established themselves as one of the best and most exciting bands of the 2020s with their first two records. Bleeds is the one that’ll be cited and looked back upon for years to come as Wednesday continue to grow in stature.

Wednesday - Townies (Official Video)

Jim Legxacy - black british music

Apple Music | Spotify

Released in July on XL (Legxacy’s debut for the label after years of honing his reputation in the London underground scene), black british music puts Legxacy on the map as a leader of the next generation of rap and hip hop voices not only in the UK, but across the globe. Several tracks (“stick”, “father”, “i just banged a snus in canada water”, “new david bowie”) already sound like classics, toeing the line between contemporary chaos and a classic rap feel. The record feels of the moment with a tinge of nostalgia throughout. The hype man doing the track intros reminds of a bygone era of downloading mixtapes off of DatPiff. The whole record has an element of taking the best of the past and pushing things forward. Legxacy has a pretty yet gritty voice. He utilizes incredible samples. One could envision hearing the tracks in the grime of a basement party just as well as on the terraces of a football ground—it would make total sense in both contexts. black british music will continue to grow in stature as the rest of the 2020s roll by, but it already feels like an instant classic.

new david bowie

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One of the most frequent conversations surrounding contemporary literature I come across is the constant back and forth between fiction, autofiction, memoir, autobiography, etc. I have never understood the real importance of these distinctions and why they inspire such concrete, hard-and-fast rules. I have put some words down for consideration by the reader, and to clarify, hopefully, some things for myself.

I am not sure what autofiction is, what it truly means or indicates, whether or not the term is looked upon favorably by those who refer to it, or if there is any consensus on the genre or style it aims to describe. I assume the term suits me, or at least suits a book that I wrote, American Pleasure. At the time of the writing, I had no concern for these terms, these genres. I say this not out of rebellion, but out of ignorance.

For that reason, the novel is an amalgam of genre and style. What I did know then and do know now is that a writer has a story to tell, if they are either lucky or damned, and that writer must use every weapon in their arsenal to get to the truth of that story, and that, interestingly enough, may include a deception or two.

I don’t mean outright fabrication, although not off the table—what I mean is to get to the root of the matter, the heart of the truth, one should be free to contort words, phrases, dialogue, time, and so on. This could be construed as a lie, depending on the preciousness of the interpreter, but if the artist can contort plainly, purposefully-driven and always bend towards what is authentic, then they can get much closer to the truth than if that truth were simply laid out verbatim, as though spat out of a machine. If you are only interested in facts, then there are textbooks for that, but even textbooks struggle with the facts, much of the time.

In that way, the truth of a story is more like a warm poem. The cold, mathematical truth, if I can put it that way, is more like a cold calculator.

I believe the exactitude of truth is found in the sustained emotion of the prose. I believe every piece of fiction is also likely a portrait, and within every portrait are strokes of fiction. Even the most “factual” of all art—photographic portraiture—can only set out to capture a moment, a fraction of the subject’s existence. The art is choosing that exact moment, with the intention of telling the broad story. Although different, the same is true of film. Every memoir, autobiography could be considered autofiction—for there is really no other choice. Memoir is quantum-fiction—to observe it at all, is to alter it in some ways.

I do know that my book, American Pleasure , was born out of an evening that droned on so long it turned to day. Andrew and I had stayed out all night and I confessed to him, you could say, with bleary eyes, that I needed to write about this thing that was itching me.

Andrew, all too familiar with the subject matter, understood. Understood so well that when I mentioned turning my debacle into a short story, he immediately interrupted to force the idea of writing a novel upon me. And just like many ideas, once they are forced upon you, you can hardly wrangle loose of them. But come to think of it, I needed no forcing—once he said it, I knew it was what I had to do all along.Having only written poems, stories and songs, I set to write a book with little to no plan, no strategy, and no outline. Instead, I went right home and began typing until noon; until I couldn’t stay awake any longer…

As for the rest of that process, which took over several years to complete just a lousy draft, I won’t say much here—nobody needs a novel about a novel. Autofiction, truth, and honesty is the heart of the matter. Throughout the various reading(s) of American Pleasure, feedback and such, frequently comes around the question of whether or not the story actually happened. If any of it actually happened, or specifically whether or not a particularly extreme part of the story had happened. Again, the word “true” is simple enough. I don’t mean to make it out to be any more difficult than it has to be: Any fool knows damn well what true means, in common speak. But also, is a fool, the writer who would swear by every line of dialogue spoken in their “true” book. Of course, I did my best to match the words and phrases to either the best of my recollection, or with the aim and sincerity of genuine portraiture.

When I mentioned the contortion of time earlier in this essay, I meant that time is true, of course, but the feeling of time is not. To get the true feeling of time, one must be able to compress and stretch time as required. For instance:American Pleasure represents one year of my life, from summer to spring. These bookend seasons are relatively short passages, but they are required. It is the Fall and, even more so, Winter, that take up the bulk of the book. But, of course, this is not “true” in any strict measurement of time. Dedicating an equal number of words to each calendar day precisely would be tedious and, also, false—in the strict sense that each day does not typically carry the same emotional weight as every other. And so it goes often mentioned in discussions about truth, that there are lies and lies by omission. Only the writer will likely know what they have omitted, so we can only reliably poke at potential fiction by insertion. In that way, it is much easier to point at a passage and question its truth than it is to point in between the lines and question what has been omitted.

I set myself out to write not only what was true, but what was true and emotionally useful. In that way, the book is largely a factual document. Every event in the book is true, in the sense that it all happened the way that I described in the storytelling. However, I should say, as I mentioned it briefly before, that most of all, time is compressed where needed and stretched where needed, due to whatever emotional or descriptive needs I felt were present at the time. It could go without mentioning, but for clarity, many names and places were also changed to protect their anonymity. Also, many passages of the book can neither make a claim to be factually false or factually true—they do not exist inside the realm of falsehoods or truths, rather, they exist in a metaphysical context. For instance, when the book drifts into psychedelia, I would describe those passages as metaphorically, or psychologically true, rather than factually true. They simply describe a psychological state of mind. You would need to read the book yourself to get a sense of what I mean:

Her fingers curl in the curvature of the earth, graceful as gravity. When they hit the earth, they discover the mud of it; the deep flower roots and the soft beds and the redwoods big as towers. They discover the rock belly salt of this earth. And she walks, tall, in her heels, shiny black ones. Lady Iris is a conflagration of experience. She holds all these experiences; doles them out like candy. Trots them out like toys, prizes. She has, too, been in the garden with the filthy flowers.

As for the obscene or the pornographic, I wrote nothing pornographic for obscenity’s sake. The ongoing discussion about obscenity and pornography seems to neglect the fact that pornographic is not strictly a style, or a mode, or a description of an event, but pornography is also a subject in and of itself. Particularly in the cultural landscape of today, pornography has cemented itself as a mainstay—writers, one way or another, had best learn to write about it, or if not, become comfortable with others doing so. I stress the difference between the obscene and the pornograph-ic, and the absolute subject of pornograph-y, as a cultural phenomenon which requires some wrestling, by someone, somewhere, for the sake of us all. I don’t claim to be that person—of course, I wrote the book only for my very own sake, and for the sake of nobody else.

I wrote my own story as a means of confession; I don’t believe I wrote a novel where the characters (the city of San Francisco being a very active one) leap off the page but, conversely, are locked inside it. They are trapped in that time and place; in this way, I feel the tone of the novel is more like a tomb. A tomb that holds all that turbulence in between its covers. It was not meant to keep something alive, but instead, to kill something. To lock something away as a means of liberation—a birth of a document that leads to a death of a kind.The truth is, I believe American Pleasure is actually a very small part of my writing’s personality; my personality as an artist. I wouldn’t purposefully intend for any other book of mine to resemble the work in any way. For instance, my latest collection of poetry, Like A Bird Knows To Sing, is dedicated to my wife, written in the countryside of Minas Gerais, and has nothing obscene inside of it.

As far as the internet novel is concerned, I may have unwittingly penned one, being that I knew as much about that term as I did about autofiction in 2013. However, I make no direct mention of social media nor dive too far into the technical terms of internet usage or slang. Any electronic technology is inferred, as I preferred to focus on nature and the nature of things as a source for the character’s company. I am aware that many disagree with that decision—that a book written in this day and age should include the many technological aspects of our society, because they are honest. And this is true—people take Uber, they split dinner on cash apps, they use Instagram and Facebook, WhatsApp and Facetime and Zoom, etc., etc. But I chose to omit any language of that sort, even though I tried to make the internet a clear and present danger. Not because I find these terms ugly (I do), but because these things, their mere mentioning, could possibly destroy the organic nature of the story.To put it another way, they may jolt the reader out of a certain tone of a story and thrust them back to reality, which is a distraction from the myth of a given story. As Tolkien put it, “myths convey the essential truths, the primary reality of life itself.” I will add that there is perhaps no point in civilization where product names and companies have merged themselves with verbs through our constant use of them. Tweet-ing, Uber-ing, Google-ing, are not simply what characters in a story may do, but their usage also adds to the commercialization of our language. The artist has every right to use these words; it is also true that an artist can refuse them, in defense of nature, in defense of myth, and in some cases, in defense of beauty and concentrated truth. In my mind, it is only if a story wishes to provide some insight to the phenomena of commercialized product language, as a means of cultural critique, that I would ever consider them. Those who have their characters uber-ing and texting and facebook-ing are all well and good, and certainly may be celebrated with their insights into the usage of that tech, but they may sacrifice some future significance, for the success of the here and now.

As for the here and now and works of art, it matters little what anyone thinks of a newly produced piece of art. The significance of a piece of art is not betrayed by present day success, but requires outliving its own time, to be celebrated by a future audience beyond its prediction, beyond its comprehension. I may speculate that the now, more than ever, is representative of that dynamic; the culture is too fractured, the world is too chaotic in its speed and output, and the celebration of mediocrity too strong to give any credence to the reception of a current work of art. In that way, the artist can make work for the here and now, and hope for some cultural bread crumbs to fall into their lap, or they can make art primarily for themselves in concert with a future audience, if it may give them some company, some north star to keep them tethered to the dream that their song may one day be heard.

As far as “myths” are concerned, I am learning to grapple with them myself, as I approach another book project, Notes On A Full Life, a biography of my father, Henry Stacy Vereen. His life was certainly rooted in myth, not only because he was my father, but because of how he chose to live. I set out to provide a text, a document to avenge his death in a way—however, he nor I are famous. Who would read an unknown writer’s book about his unknown father? Too, because of our obscurity, I have found some difficulty in research—hardly anyone he knew or loved is particularly interested in such a book, and so their responses to my inquiries are blighted by disinterest, no empathy to the cause, no motivation to provide any insight. I will try more, try harder, but I may have to write the remainder of the book on my own—ever deepening the myth and mystery of my father’s life. He once kept a genealogy archive, a box full of family photos, correspondences, family albums, and memories. But, alas, at the end of his life he moved out of his home in a frenzy and left the box in the attic. The kind family who bought the home found it, and simply threw the contents of the box out with the trash. A whole man’s history up in smoke! I will avenge this insult if it kills them. With little reliable sources for painting his past, I must accept the mystery surrounding my father’s life, and inject that fact into the story. I must make use of the myth to bridge the gaps of the unknown.

In terms of autofiction, I don’t believe one has a choice. The artist tells their story in fragments—views themselves from the kaleidoscopic reflection of a mirror that has been shattered. Each sliver of glass tells its very own story. Through the studying, a picture emerges. The Japanese art of Kintsugi (repairing fragments of a broken object with gold), may be a useful metaphor. The cracks in our self-portraits are flawed from the beginning. Yet, how we bring them back together, through style and choice, will determine their ultimate worth. Within them, we may find gold. The reflection may never be complete, but neither are we—neither is a life’s work.

I think it would be better if we didn’t genre-icize ourselves to death over our writing or the writing of others. The downward spiral of the traditional publishing system is self-evident. Writers today must make room for new ideas, vague ones, bad ones. If the gates are to be truly open, let them open fully. If we can finally put down the utensils for cookie-cutting and try to embrace the text as it lays, we can dance with words and stories as poets, humorists, pirates, heretics, truth-sayers and liars, explorers, monkeys, vagrants, etc.

JSV

2025

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—What exactly do you understand?

She placed herself by his side, leaned on his shoulders and repeated:

—What exactly do you understand?

It was surreal to read this passage for the first time some three years ago. Few books have floored me like Pedro Paramo, which went so far as to push me to learn its original Spanish so I could read it as the author intended. On the legends of the past, the novel’s impact was even more powerful: Jorge Luis Borges lauded it as one of the greatest novels in not only Hispanic literature, but in literature as a whole. Gabriel Garcia Marquez credits it for pulling him from a writer’s block that paved the path for him to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, his magnum opus. Susan Sontag declared the novel “one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature.” It is a novel filled with silence; I sometimes wonder, as I slave away at my own work, how Rulfo did it, how he made every page speak in whispers harrowed with sorrow and despair.

Call the book what you will: Mexican gothic, magical realist, surrealist. Pedro Paramo entwines Mexican folklore and culture with fragmented narratives, streams of consciousness, constant shifts from first-person to third. Rulfo blends it all masterfully, stripping the prose down to the bone so that it shines in your face yet leaves much beneath the surface. From the very first page we are wrapped in the mood of what this book will come to emanate, revealing to us its major theme, death:

I came to Comala because I was told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Paramo. That’s what my mother told me. And I promised I’d come to see him as soon as she died. I squeezed her hands as a sign I would. After all, she was near death, and I was of a mind to promise her anything. “Don’t fail to visit him —she urged—. Some call him one thing, some another. I’m sure he’d love to meet you.” That’s why I couldn’t refuse her, and after agreeing so many times I just kept at it until I had to struggle to free my hands from hers, which were now without life.

Thus begins the adventure of Juan Preciado, the abandoned son of Pedro Paramo. In the first few pages he goes from the room where his mother has died to the middle of a desert, as if in a dream. In this wasteland another man, Abundio, appears to lead Juan to his father’s town of Comala. In short, smooth sentences that read like an exhale, oppressed by the “dog days of August” heat, accompanied by ominous flocks of passing crows, Abundio reveals that he is also the son of Pedro Paramo. When Juan asks who Paramo is, Abundio answers: “Bitterness incarnate.”

All of this in the first four pages. On the fifth we come to learn, through Abundio, that Pedro Paramo has been dead for years. And when they finally reach Comala, which sinks down into the sweltering earth within the hills, Juan discovers the town is also dead, in the literal sense. Shortly after, he realizes that his guide is dead too, a ghost among many haunting the empty streets of Comala. Juan wanders into the town in a daze, searching for shelter, attempting to speak to inhabitants that vanish as if they were never there. Slowly the feelings of anxiety and terror increase as he becomes trapped in the town, doubting whether the people he meets throughout the narrative are alive or dead. The novel’s feeling of silence almost breaks when he is suddenly overwhelmed by the town’s whispers, which are scattered through perspectives divided by chapter cuts. One by one they piece together the story of the town, and how it came to be this way.

It is through these flashbacks and whispers—perhaps even from the ghost of Pedro Paramo himself—that we discover more about Juan’s father. With a name roughly translating to “barren wasteland,” Paramo is a tyrant landowner who held a heavy hand over the town. One who murdered and manipulated his way to the top, preyed on women, bore sons he never acknowledged save for Miguel, a monster in the image of his father. Paramo’s power looms even over that of the church and its priest, Father Renteria, another major character among a small handful. Torn within by doubts over his faith, he says he serves the landowner “All because I’m afraid of offending those who provide for me… I get nothing from the poor, and prayers won’t fill my stomach” (28).1

Paramo’s actions lead to the town’s decay and the death of its people. He is a cruel man who uses whoever he sees fit and discards them when they come of no use. Yet Rulfo shows us what little of a human side there is to the man, too. We first see the world from Pedro Paramo’s eyes as a child (9), already deeply in love with Susana San Juan, yearning for her when she leaves Comala bathed “in a reddish hue, in the blood red sky of dusk” (18). Her departure is not Paramo’s only loss. Everything in his life is taken away from him with the murder of his father and the death of his mother, after which rival landowners rob their lands, once proudly held, to collect on the family’s debts. His every waking day is spent working to regain the power his family once had and finding Susana so that they can be together. His scattered perspective is among the most striking, poetic, and beautiful:

“We’d laugh at the wind and find each other’s eyes as the string slipped through our fingers and ran with the wind before breaking with a faint cracking sound as if it had been cut by the wings of a passing bird. Then way above us that paper bird would flail downward, dragging its loose tail behind until it became lost in the green earth below.”

The beauty of his own words are rivaled by those of whose love he craves. Susan San Juan’s dialogue comprises some of the most beautiful passages on nature I’ve read. Her voice is that of a candle in the dark, every word a poetry of its own that I will leave you to discover.

Despite its beauty, this story is a tragedy, with the ghosts of Comala acting as a Greek Chorus. Within the ever-shifting narrative—sometimes on the same page—we glimpse the sad and tragic ends of the town’s inhabitants as it crumbles, conveyed in perfectly clean sentences; there is not a single loose thread anywhere in this novel.

You’d think a book of this caliber would have a writer with just as fantastic a body of work, but Pedro Paramo is the only novel Juan Rulfo ever wrote. Accompanying this slim book are two collections of short stories. What kind of man is able to write a novel that becomes required reading throughout Mexico, a novel that Carlos Fuentes called “The essential Mexican novel, unsurpassed and unsurpassable…” and then goes on to work as a public servant for Mexico’s National Institute for Indigenous People?

Rulfo was born in 1917, in Jalisco, Mexico, right in the middle of the Mexican Revolution. Though without memories of the conflict itself, he must have had a childhood abound with stories from that period. He came, after all, from a family of landowners who lost their lands and wealth to revolutionaries and the government during the war. Rulfo did, however, remember the Cristero War that followed shortly after. In this conflict, between the secularized government of Mexico and the Catholic Church, priests took up arms against an authority that stripped them of their influence and began killing them off. In the proceeding years, both sides committed murders and slaughters that bathed no one in a victorious light. Rulfo’s father and uncle were killed in this war, and his mother died soon after. At ten years old Rulfo was left to face the world alone, joining a class of orphaned writers, such as Edgar Allen Poe, Joseph Conrad, Jean Genet, who are known for their darker work.

In interviews, Rulfo notes that no one went outside often during those times. Bodies hanging from posts, put there by both sides of the war, was a common occurrence. The risk of being shot was great. Thus he spent much of his time reading indoors. Around then the local priest confiscated all the books in the area and hid them away in the church cellar, deeming them unsafe for faithful eyes. Later, when that priest fled into the bogs and hills to fight in the war, Rulfo wandered into this cellar and discovered the many books therein. This treasure trove of knowledge fused with the bleak history of his family and country; all mixed together to create the writer that he would become. For years, Rulfo carried Pedro Paramo inside him before he knew how to write it, as Susan Sontag notes:

[H]e was writing hundreds of pages and then discarding them. He once called the novel an exercise in elimination.

Considering the complex structure of the novel, which Rulfo described as “made of silences,” it should not be surprising the author took so many years to transpose it from his mind to the page. The non-linear narratives constantly shift from various points of past and present—sometimes going back a decade or more and back again in a single page. Leaping from one perspective to the next, the reader may lose whose perspective they’re looking through unless they pay closer attention.

Though one can feel the various influences on his work, from Elio Vittorini to Knut Hamson, it is Faulkner that casts the largest shadow over Pedro Paramo. The novel is reminiscent of As I Lay Dying with its shifting perspectives between an abundance of characters. The dreamy monologues of Susana San Juan later in the book gives me the impression of a reverse Addie Bundren, while also that of a Molly Bloom. While I have no idea if he could be an influence—it could be the translation—some of Rulfo’s characters also have a Dostoevskyian high energy, a boisterous bluntness, though they never reach the peaks of the Russian’s chaos. One can also see how works of the far past impact the landscape of the novel. Fog, for one, is brought up and used in the novel similarly to the gloomy fog of the River Styx, which souls must pass through to reach Hades in Greek myth.

Those that approach Pedro Paramo with an open mind—those interested in the gothic, the surreal, a vast cast of characters all with personalities of their own—will gather a lot from the first read. Written by a distinctly Mexican author, Rulfo layers his work with observations of the nation through dialogue, character names, and even the changing weather of the valleys. The bleak outlook of Rulfo’s work resonates with the current landscape of Mexico as it did when it was published in 1955—for the oppression depicted in Pedro Paramo, from the cruel feudal landowners to the chaotic revolutionaries bare little difference to the government death squads and roving cartels of today.

For anyone that may like the book but find it a challenge, a reread will only enrich the experience, as will a deeper dive into Mexican history and literature. The novel encompasses a tumultuous time in Mexico, from the dictatorship of feudal landowners during the time of Porfirio Diaz, to the resulting Mexican Revolution, to the proceeding Cristero War—a bloody and sorrowful history that hangs like a shadow over Pedro Paramo’s narrative. Novels such as The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela, The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene, as well as the works of Carlos Fuentes will deepen the reader’s understanding of the environment Pedro Paramo was born out of. For non-fiction, I’d recommend The Life and Times of Pancho Villa by Fredrich Katz or The Mexican Revolution by Alan Knight.

These books will help elucidate the many layers of this novel, which are as deep as perhaps your favorite classics, even down to the names of its characters. While Rulfo claimed he chose his names by reading off the tombstones of graveyards, Spanish speaking readers will be quick to catch the falseness of his claim through their own understanding of that beautiful language. To learn the meaning of these names adds further layers to the novel. I’ve already mentioned earlier that Pedro Paramo means “barren wasteland.” Comala itself comes from the name of a hotplate used to warm tortillas with, a term so aptly used in the first few pages when Abundio describes the town to Juan as sitting “on the burning embers of the earth at the very mouth of Hell.” To know the meanings of these names will allow one to look at a character and region under a different light. It may even lead one to doubt their true intentions.

Such attention to detail and a burning desire to the perfection of his craft should mark Juan Rulfo as a master in his own right that writers of today can learn from. He absolutely needs to be read. His style is perfect minimalism, breathing silence and tone in its own way rather than allowing the reader to fill in the spaces themselves. I’d argue that if Moby Dick is the great novel of America, and The Divine Comedy the great work of Italy, so too is Pedro Paramo for Mexico. He deserves more recognition in the West than he’s received and, if my word means anything, you won’t regret walking alongside Juan Preciado through the ghostly bowels of Comala.

There you’ll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You’ll see why a person would want to live there forever. Dawn, morning, mid-day, night: all the same, except for the changes in the air. The air changes the color of things there. And life whirs by as quiet as a murmur...the pure murmuring of life.

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Magazine Non Grata was founded on a few beliefs: Rebellious writing is essential for prosperous art. Healthy culture is more physical than digital. Beauty is vital.

Last month, in service of these ideas, we held an in-person event for our first print issue. Since then we’ve published six of those pieces online, for free.

The remaining six pieces—as well as all of the incredible photography and illustrations featured throughout the magazine—will remain print-only until the next issue comes out in the spring. This includes short fiction from ; an essay from ; a story from ; an interview with ; and poems from and Will E. Sloan. On the photography front, we feature Marco Andres, Dan Bell, Madison Claire Baker, Diana Catinas, Benjamin Miller, Michael O’Donohue, Jamie Pearl, Clare Perry, , , and Manuela Ventura.

We’re getting Non Grata in stores, too, starting with Soho International News. The front of the place is currently painted with MNG magazines, and will be until the 19th. If you want to show people what this Substack thing is all about, send them there.

Each purchase helps us support artists, host events, and get in more stores. If what we’re doing resonates with you, please consider getting a copy from the store, from our website, or by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack.

Thank you all.

— MNG

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White Rice. The epitome of bland. Tasteless. Scentless. Colorless. There are plenty of ways to impress a woman and, on first thought, making white rice might not enter the top one thousand. Shit, in theory, it should barely crack the top one hundred thousand. There are places you can take a woman, things you can buy her, jokes you can crack, muscles you can flex, bank accounts you can accidentally show… Hell, if you’re a halfway decent writer you can even show her your Substack (yuck)! Yet you’d be surprised that none of the aforementioned acts will give her the same satisfaction as you placing a pot of rice over a burner and cooking up some of that “bland” goodness after a night out. Because, dear reader, cooking is just like sex.

I know what you’re thinking. What would making a bland, tasteless, scentless, colorless carbohydrate have to do with sex? Well, let’s be honest fella, you’re probably a bland bed partner right now. Your brain is probably so doped up on porn and YouTube videos that you think a woman wants to be pounded, for hours on end, until she’s screaming for you to stop. This, I’m afraid, is not what a woman wants. Hate to break it to you, but PornHub lied.

What you might not understand is that if you bring a woman home after a night out, and you head to the kitchen, fill the pot about half way with rice, mix it with a table spoon of vegetable oil, and then you fill the pot up with water just above the rice, and the water starts to take on a milky quality—what you might not yet understand is that the woman you’re lucky enough to be with is inferring a few things.

First, she knows you can listen and remember. Your dumb ass did not come up with this cooking method out of thin air. Someone taught you. Most likely a woman. And you remembered it down to the measuring of the oil, the color of the water above the rice. She now knows you can take direction. This is good.

Second, she knows that you have done this before. Not the sex, the cooking. You’ve taken time out of your life to acquire a skill that is geared towards pleasing others. Here’s another tidbit you might not be aware of—sex is all about pleasing the other person. Your porn-warped brain thinks you’re the star of the show, and this could not be further from the truth. If you want to be a pleasurable bed partner, concentrate on the pleasure of the partner you are in bed with.

When the rice is cooking over high flame, with the top off, the real magic starts to happen. White rice, as I’ve mentioned, is bland. If you don’t put any salt on it, when done, you might as well be eating papier-mâché. But when the water begins to boil, get your ass to the fridge and find something to add to it. Eggs, for instance. Crack two in a frying pan drizzled with olive oil. Cook them sunny side up and turn the heat off while there is still some gooey yolk. When waterless holes start popping up through the rice, and you hear the bottom start crackling, turn the heat on low and cover it for about ten minutes.

This last and final act, as you place the eggs over the bowl of rice, adding salt and pepper, will assure her that you, good sir, are not a bland bed partner. It will assure her that you can bring something else to the table. It will assure her that she has not made the biggest mistake of her life going home with the likes of you.

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Zane Fix has been a staple of the Manhattan arts scene since the 1980s. A professional architect, musician, and illustrator, Zane has operated out of galleries and street corners in just about every neighborhood below 14th street. Today, I find him in SoHo, selling his eclectic prints on Spring and W. Broadway. Zane is easy to spot, his white hair springs from his black hat, his icy blue eyes spot me from a block away.

Magazine Non Grata

You were born in New York?

Zane Fix

Yes, I was born in New York. In Brooklyn... Flatbush. Flatbush, back in the ‘50s, baby. I was rock and roll. Chuck Berry, Little Ricky. I grew up on that. That was what was on the radio, you know.

MNG

Were you an artistic kid?

Z

Yeah, I could always draw. I had a piano in my room by the time I was four years-old, taking lessons, and I did all I could. I would always copy pictures from books. I was really into Japanese art—my father turned me on to it. My parents were into Japanese woodblock prints, they had a whole collection of them. I was fascinated with them.

My father bought me books and, one day, my father and I sat at the kids table, and he said, “Go ahead, draw me”. And I drew and it came out great. It looked just like him. And he calls my mother, says, “Madeline, look at what he just did”. And that was it. I guess that kind of started it, because my parents then really started nurturing whatever I wanted.

My father painted. My mother was an artist. My father was a professional musician, a graduate of Juilliard. That’s the piano thing, which I still play. But they started nurturing my talents and sending me for art lessons at the Brooklyn Museum. And of course, I got into music, and I started playing guitar and bass and blah, blah, blah.

Then came time to go to college. I wanted to go to Juilliard. My mother wanted me to be an architect but I wanted to be, you know, Leonard Bernstein. So I get the test from Cooper Union, and I have to do it at home. They send it to you. They ask me to do this and that, and I mean... I did the exact opposite. I did the opposite of everything that they said to do in the tests. They come back and they tell my mother: “Your son’s a genius.” I was like, okay. So I did Cooper Union.

I became the best draftsman. You go to Cooper Union, there’s like 200,000 people applying every year from all over the world, and only twenty-five people get accepted. So by the time you finish the four-year run, there’s only five people in class. Everyone drops out or gets kicked out or just can’t make the grade. I became the top draftsman, and it was amazing because, you know, it was the days. Now they sit on a computer. I did it in the days where they had the big room with all the drawing boards. I had a drawing board at my house with the main line and the lights and the shit. And you do everything by hand, and you’re tracing and working out the stuff you’re doing, the measurements, final drawings are inked, you know, and I was the best when I got out.

I got hunted right away as a draftsman working at an architectural firm, big firm, and I did some work through the years. I didn’t really like it, but it paid good. And, you know, I was a kid coming out of college, and I got a job the day I walked out, just because of my drafting skills.

But later I wound up playing in bands at CBGBs and stuff, you know, at night, doing all of that, I got into the music business. I played with some big people. I did my own stuff. I was a side man. I was a front man. That was a great run. I did pretty good and I made some money. I wrote a couple of songs. I sold the rights to them, had a little place up in Westchester, had a Jaguar. I was living large for a while, and then, of course, I became a junkie, a drug addict, and lost everything.

MNG

When did you catch the punk bug?

Z

Well, the first thing that bugged me, that gave me the bug, was when I heard the Sex Pistols on the radio. It was “Anarchy in the UK,” or one of those big songs from their record. And I was like, this is fucking it. Because before that I was a Rod Stewart, Rolling Stones kind of kid, you know, with the shag haircut and the platform shoes.

And once I got that bug and I went—I don’t know how old I was, you know, teenager—and I went to CBGB, and I couldn’t get in, and I kept looking, and then I was able to get in one night. And I’ll never forget it. I still had the long hair because I was still into rock and roll. Face it, you can’t beat the Rolling Stones in the ‘70s. They were the best. But I remember going to CBGB’s the first time in my life, and it’s this long, narrow, you know, den of iniquity. And I remember they had the tables on the side, and they had columns and a plaque, a thing that blocked where the tables were but you could climb up, and the place was packed, and I climbed up, and I’m standing somewhere towards the back, and I’m standing up and the Ramones come out, and they do a twenty-five minute set, nonstop, 1-2-3-4. Holy fucking shit. This is fucking insane. This is not the Rolling Stones. This is not Led Zeppelin, this is like, Whoa. This is not even the Sex Pistols.

But, whatever, I honed my skills and dang I worked, really, for several years as a bass player. I guess I continued with music in my own projects into my forties, with Love Maker and Starr. Love Maker, we were big in the city, and then Starr, I was the front man. Starr became pretty big. We got signed to Geffen records. And I was singing, we were playing it at the Continental, which doesn’t exist anymore, the Continental Club, you don’t know, you’re too young, that was the hot club, right off the St. Mark’s Place on Second or Third Avenue. There was some people, agents, there, and there was a TV show that they were developing, and they needed an evil rock band. It was a kids show, and they hired us to be this evil rock band because we had the big hair and the makeup.

MNG

Is there a band that sonically compared to you guys?

Z

I would say we were somewhere between early Mötley Crüe and Kiss. Kiss with the makeup and the costumes and the boots. We had custom costumes. We had the red suits, we had the black, we had silver, we had gold, you know, everything. We had somebody making us costumes. And we had a guy out in Queens that made the boots for us. We did the whole thing, you know. We did the TV show, we did a song for the show, and then we were going to go into the second season. Things were going great for us. We were touring, we were getting ready to go to Europe.

And then we got dropped by the record label. We were working on the record, and that stopped. Then the TV show did not continue the second season. And it was kind of like, oh shit. It was the right thing at the wrong time. It was like we were doing grunge and then rap. Look, I always say rap killed rock. That’s it, when the rap came out, the early rap.

MNG

Beastie Boys?

Z

Well, Beastie Boys, but like, like Coolio and, you know, “Funky Cold Medina”. I mean, I liked it too, but it killed rock. And that was kind of it. We still played a little... Jersey was big for rock. We would all play the big clubs in Jersey for hundreds of people, stuff like that. But it was over. We just knew that that was the end of it.

So I wound up getting involved in the wrong thing, and I started doing heroin. Boom, done. So I lost my house, sold my car... I sold my Jaguar to make money. Yeah, it’s a crazy story, and I had the wrong girlfriend, and guess what? That was it. I wound up in rehab. So it was crack. First, it was crack and it was always crack. I used to do it with the heroin. I never shot heroin, but I used to put the heroin and the crack in the pipe and smoke it together like a speed ball. What a high baby.

Anyway, I wound up in rehab. I came out. I was destitute. God bless my parents. When I came out of rehab my father picked me up, and they got me a room at the YMCA up by Columbus Circle. They bought me food. They wouldn’t give me money. They brought me food, cigarettes. They didn’t want me to have those, but they knew I needed them. And they bought me all arts. And I would stay, and I would work, and I did all this stuff.

I started doing the portraits. I’d find pictures in books. I’d go to the library. It was a library a couple of blocks away from my place in Brooklyn, the public library, and I would find, shouldn’t really say this, but I’d make two books, and I’d find pictures that I liked, and I’d rip them out take them back, and then sit and copy them. The first one I did that with is the David Bowie, which I still sell to this day.

MNG

When you started making prints in the early 2000s, what made you adopt this style so quickly? Was it your upbringing and your parents being into Japanese prints? Want to pull up a chair?

Z

Yeah. My ass hurts, yeah.

Anyways, I could always draw anyone’s face, and I was into rock and roll, and it just came together. I was doing stuff on rice paper, which you can’t even get anymore, because twenty years later, it’s just different. I had some Japanese portraits, and I brought them to my old lawyer from the music business. He’s dead now, Jonathan, God bless him. He was great to me, and I brought him some. And he was like, “Dude, this stuff is amazing”. He said, “Take this, go to Washington Square or Union Square, make a setup and sell them and start building up clientele and a repertoire”.

And I went and I called my mom, and I told her, “Look, this is what Jonathan told me,” and she said, “He’s right, you should.” So I’m back in my little place in Brooklyn and I said, shit, I know all these prints. Try it. And I went for a walk. It was one night, you know, I was just thinking, and outside in the garbage were five beautiful, identical gold leaf frames in great condition with the glass. Brought them back to my place. I cleaned everything up. I opened them up, I put the prints in there, set them all up. I had one of those little ragged things, all bungee cord, went on the train, and I went to Union Square.

Near the Gandhi statue at Union Square, I hung them on that little semi-circle or something, hung them up there. It was the winter, and I had a big coat on, and I was standing out there, and the lady comes over to me and says, “How much for these two?” All of a sudden. I threw a number at her, and there was a bank right across the street on the corner. She said, “I’ll be right back. I’ll bring you the cash.” She gave me the money, I gave her the piece. I said, I’m a business. This is what I’m doing now. Good price, whatever. I don’t even remember. It was a couple hundred bucks, one hundred each. And I thought, I’m in business, and that was the beginning. I figured out displays, and built it up.

There was this one print shop few blocks up on 13th Street, Village Copier. And I knew the guy over there, John, good friend of mine for many years. And they would print canvases, so I give him the image. In those days, didn’t even have a USB or anything, you know. I just brought the print. He scanned it and we made a canvas, and I made a setup, and I hung the canvas, and I had my stands with my prints and racks. I had a whole fucking tin with big print in the back, and somebody bought the big print. I didn’t know, I sold it for $300, now I sell them for $3,000, okay? So I was like, This is it. Eventually I made some money, saved up, and I met my friend Stella. She said, “Let’s make T shirts. Should we get a heat press?” I said, “What? What was that?”

So, you know, started printing t-shirts in every size, and we started doing tote bags, dude. I mean, somebody came by with a tote bag a few weeks ago, from, like, fifteen years ago. I said, “I can’t believe you still have that.” It’s unbelievable. So we’re making t-shirts. We’re making money, hand over fist, selling t-shirts. I think we were making a couple thousand on the weekend, like on Saturday, just selling fucking t-shirts. Never mind prints. But then I developed pains in my shoulder. It was such a pain that I would be up all night. Stella would call me, “Hey, dude, somebody wants a Big City Girl in a medium and we don’t have any.” I’d say, “All right, I’ll make one. Give me 15 minutes. I’ll run it over. So I’d run home. You know, it was kind of a crazy business.

Anyway, one day, I’m in Union Square. And a lady, a girl, comes over, she’s wearing a t-shirt with one of my images that I never made. And I said, “Where’d you get that t-shirt from?” And she said, “Oh, there’s a store.” I said, “That’s my work, look!” I showed her the print of it, really. You know what she did? She took the shirt off and gave it to me. Said, “I feel really bad.” I said, “Hey, I’ll give you a print.” Then I went over to the store and I showed them the t-shirt, and they were the ones that had bought some prints from me. I remember the guy when he bought it. I mean, I’m saying years ago. And I said, “Dude, you can’t do this without asking me. I sold you the artwork. You can’t start making the same thing that Jack had done.” But Jack was cool. He was a nice guy. I said, “Guess what? I’m gonna have my lawyer get in touch with you with a cease and desist. Take them all off the rack. If they’re not off the rack by tomorrow morning, you’re gonna get hit.” Okay, that was done. Another lesson learned.

I can’t believe I’m remembering this, I haven’t thought about this stuff in years. That’s the weirdest part. But, you know, it’s this long and blinding road to success. Anyways, Stella and I were doing very nicely in Union Square. We moved over to Meatpacking, right across the street from the Standard Hotel. The whole street across the Standard Hotel was just abandoned buildings. There was nothing there. So what fifteen, twenty years ago, this is before Chelsea Market. So it has to be about... Jesus Christ. Oh, my God. I actually remember Chelsea Market is where we got our first gallery space. We rented, I guess, 2010, 2012. So we went to Meatpacking, and we were doing well, and Stella—this is the best thing we ever did—we presented Stella’s work. The story is not only about me. The story should be about Stella and me, Stella and I, you know, because without Stella, I would never... I don’t think I would have ever risen. Maybe I would have found a different way, something else... maybe.

MNG

How did you meet Stella?

Z

In Union Square. She was selling jewelry. She was a collector of all kinds of weird jewelry, and I liked her look. I always said she reminded me of a perfect cross between Johnny Thunders and Patti Smith. That’s what she looked like. And I saw her profile, and I walked over to her while I was selling, and we just became friends. And actually, I fell in love. We, you know, we became lovers and everything for a while.

But anyway, she made these things. I went to the hardware store, I got them varnished, and I fixed them up, and I took them out to Meatpacking one day with my stuff on the wall, and I had these leaned up against the wall. The guy in the Mercedes Benz drives up, pulls over. He said, “How much for that?” I said, “Well, that’s not my work, this is my work” (gesturing). He says, “Well, I know your work. How much for those?” (Stella’s.) I was like, okay, I threw a number at him, he pops the trunk, towel in the back, paid me $500 cash for it. I called Stella. I said, “Now you’re a working artist. Come and get your money, honey.” That started everything.

So then we started bouncing off of each other, and then we spent some time where I just gave my work a powder, because hers became very lucrative, because now you’re not selling prints for like, one hundred bucks. Now you’re selling paintings for, like, a lot more, you know, because she’s an abstract. She’s not a printer. She’s a painter. Yeah, she’s a real painter. I sold a painting for her, this past Saturday or Saturday. Over there—$3,000 in the street. That’s hard to get these days, you know? Yeah. So she sells good and over time we’ve developed her client base. And I’ll take certain days and sell only her work, and then I’ll have my days where I come and do my shtick. And we pretty much have been doing the same thing for the last fifteen years, you know, still have a partnership. Yeah, still Stray Kat Gallery. We did Stray Kat Gallery. That’s how it came.

MNG

I remember that one in the West Village.

Z

Before that we were in Chelsea Market. And we were killing it. Our paintings and my prints. We were making money. We were making money. Then that stupid Artisan Fleas thing came, and they wanted the space, and so they got it. But the people from Chelsea Market were like, “We have a spot on 14th Street right at the High Line. Tell you what. Give it to you. $6,000 a month.” We took that. So we did Chelsea Market after doing Meatpacking. No more street. Now we have gallery space. We have our first gallery space. We’re doing events. We’re doing the whole thing, you know, wine and whatever.

So when Artisan Fleas wanted that space and our lease was up, they were like, “You know what? We have a spot for you. Give you a great deal.” Now we were at the staircase of the High Line. Across the street there was another spot that was rented. It was interesting. We did okay at the first spot, but then the people moved out across the street—it wasn’t the Chelsea Market. I forget the company that owned it. This was an 8,000 square foot space with thirty-foot ceilings. It was insane. Wasn’t properly lit, but we found out who owned it and who controlled it, and they gave us a decent deal, and we took that. We moved right across the street. Wasn’t properly lit.

I remember we had fifty can lights, and I’ve gone ladder hanging, slipping into stuff with wires tacking into the wall with electricity. Made a fucking great gallery. We started cleaning up again right there. And it was just like, why did the chicken cross the road to make more money? We were here and we went there, and it was night and day. It was unbelievable. But the space had a certain... certain... it was just... It wasn’t really a finished space. It was really cool. Cool with the artwork, with the big posters and Stella’s big paintings. And then people from Europe and tourism. It was just the right thing.

MNG

What was the creative bond? So you guys met, you hit it off from a personal standpoint. But she saw your art and saw an opportunity to expand the way you do it?

Z

Yeah, she had the brain. And it was like, Look, if Jack could make t-shirts, why don’t we make t-shirts? And she’s very smart, very forward thinking, whereas I just run with the wind, you know? I mean, whatever. Oh, it’s working. I’m just gonna keep doing it. She’s like, well, this is working. She’s more—

MNG

She has the vision.

Z

Yeah, she’s the business. I will say that she has a great vision, very smart lady. I’ll never take that away from her. So that big gallery in the West Village, yeah, then we got the space on Jane Street. It’s a beautiful corner. Remember that corner?

MNG

Of course. That was a great spot. I went to your Gallery during COVID. Bought the Miles Davis. Pink and Blue.

Z

We had that for three years. Yeah, that fucking place. Whoa. We got it right before COVID, and then COVID hit, and then everything shut down. And you know what I did: I kept it open. I would go in the late afternoon. I’d leave the lights on all the time, and I would go in the late afternoon, stay open all night, and people would come out for their walk after the day of being in their apartment. They gotta walk their dog and take a walk after dinner, smoke a cigarette. And people were coming in and buying shit. I was making money right during COVID. I would say we won by default, because we were the only game in town.

I was open, and all of a sudden somebody complained: “Why is that guy open?” No stores were supposed to be open. Three cops came. They’re like, “Hey, what’s going on?” And I said, “Hey, what’s up?” “You have people in here?” I said, “Yeah, well, by appointment.” I had a sign on the door: By Appointment Only. I said, “Yes, you know, I have somebody coming over, so that’s why.” But it was a nice day. I didn’t need the air conditioning. It wasn’t cold. I had the door open, and they were looking around. They said, “Wow, this is some cool stuff. Listen, as long as you don’t have more than six people in here at one time, including yourself, you can stay.” So that was the end. I got to pass by the cops. Hell yeah. So I was in like Flynn.

The worst thing that happened was there was this Italian restaurant, which now has that corner spot, they wanted it, and they were willing to wait till our lease was up. Well, we were paying $5,000. We were saying, okay, maybe Bruce will charge us $7,000. He comes back to me with $14,000 because the Italian restaurant had the money. They took the space next door. That was his also. And that wasn’t it. They broke the wall, turned it into a giant restaurant, and I was out. And guess what? I wound up back in the street again. Ever since then, I’ve been selling the street. But I do commercial commissions. I do logos. I work all the time. I’m doing stuff. I get photographs. People want me to do portraits of their family. And I still sell, you know?

And I went back to Meatpacking for a while, was selling some canvases, and then I wound up coming to SoHo. Yeah, you know, now I’m in SoHo. I’m working solo, and I was selling at Chanel (a block away) until that construction came. That was my lucky spot. I can’t sell there because it’s noisy all the time. So I found this empty spot, and I’ve been working here, and I do do good.

So I’ve been looking, yeah. Couple of spots. Small. 450, 500 square feet. Six, seven, ten, twelve thousand dollars, still empty. I called the broker and you know what?—it is not the owners, it’s the brokers. You can’t even get to the owner. I’ve tried to find the owners of some of these and make a deal. “I’ll do a cash deal with you, I’ll give you $7,000 down.” You know what? VoCA told us that they didn’t take cash. Don’t take cash. Cash is king. Just say it’s not rented. And if somebody says something, you say, “Oh, that’s my nephew. I’m giving him the space for free just to try something.” So I haven’t been able to find secure space, because the rents are now double what they were.

MNG

Does this sour you on New York, this crazy rent battle that’s always going on?

Z

Fuck it. I make my own gallery in the street.

MNG

You pay zero rent right now. Is that almost more optimal?

Z

Of course. Is it free money? No, still gotta come out. I gotta set up, get stuck in the rain or something. It’s just a gig, but I’m used to it because that’s how I started. Yeah, I was inside for years, but now I’m back outside. Doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing. I’m the same guy, right? My hair’s white now. I got a little older, you know, that’s all. But people still come to me. People come looking for me. I had a guy the other day who came looking for me. I met some producers, and they shot a whole thing of me, and we’re doing a show now. I’m the host. I’ll give you the card. You gotta check it out. I host a show about artists that make their own work and make a living from it. Called “Welcome to My Gallery.”

MNG

I saw one of their Instagram posts, yeah. Are you active on Instagram?

Z

Not really. I have no patience for that. I’m active doing what I do, you know. So I love when people come and say, “Do you have an Instagram?” I say, “You like this print? You want my Instagram once you buy the fucking print? Okay, follow me on Instagram.” You know? Who cares? I don’t want you to follow me. Invariably, that’s the way I do it. Yeah. I really don’t care.

What counts is the sale. I’m in it to win. I always say I’m not out to make friends. I’m out to make money. I have expensive rent. I have expenses even to make friends and run my shop where I make everything and have everything done, and with the supplies and everything, it costs money. It’s a constant thing, like any business: You make money, you spend money. Of course, the more money you make, the more money you have to spend, because you have to replenish it. Of course, that’s pretty much where it is. And sad? No, I love this fucking city. I don’t know where else I could do what I do. I meet people from all over the country and all over the world. Everyone comes to New York eventually. And my work’s all over the world. Somebody said to me the other day, “Oh, your paintings, these pieces are going to Belgium.” Well, it won’t be the first.”

MNG

Didn’t you go to Japan? You learned a lot of the craft there.

Z

I did, traditional wood block printing in Japan.

MNG

Since then you’ve been clean?

Z

I did slip once or twice, until I met Stella, and I let it go.

MNG

So Stella was huge for you...

Z

Yeah, yeah. Because, like, even when I got out, I was like... I think Stella saved my life.

MNG

Did you ever consider settling with her? Where is the business you have together now?

Z

Stella. Oh, yeah. We were settled in a way, but we were so involved in what we were doing. And she’s selling, and we’re making money, and we’re gonna sell you (Stella’s work) today. We sell me too. It was an exciting thing. So you could come from the street, save $20,000 and rent a space, and all of a sudden you have a gallery. You came from nowhere, you’re selling in a park, and the next thing you know, you opened up your own space, just from hard work, being smart, just making it happen. And I credit Stella a lot for that because, like I said, me, I’m great at making money. I’m even better at spending it. Trust me. That’s really the story of my life.

MNG

Speaking of spending money. How about New York? Do you think it’s still a good place for young artists? I mean, you’re kind of a part of the old guard.

Z

I am the old guard—when it was great for all artists, when it was affordable in SoHo. In the old days, the streets were lined with the artists. Now, on a weekend, maybe there’s five or six people. Yes, it’s still a great place for young artists, absolutely a great place. But you have to have good work first. You have to know how to engage people and speak to them. You have to make a nice display, you have to keep your area clean. If you do that, and you have good work, and you’re persistent and patient, you can make money every time you set up.

And that’s really it. So it is a great place. What’s better than New York? Like I said, everyone from all over the country and all over the world comes to New York at one point, and they’re always looking for something. You just gotta be in it to win it, baby, you know, that’s it.

Gotta be in it to win it, baby.

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Earlier this year I was trying to think of the best ass I’d ever seen. It was impossible. Think of one and one hundred more come crashing over you like waves. By then I already knew that rankings, most of the time, are nonsensical. But I was ranking anyway because my mind was breaking down. There’s a reason Fitzgerald made lists, “hundreds of lists,” when he was cracking up. Lists are a cry for help. They give the anxious mind what it wants more than all else: order, the feeling of focus, the experience of thinking continuously.

But many of the most important categories have no order. There is no ranking. It’s fruitless to rate The Elementary Particles, published in 1998, against the twentieth century’s novels. All one can say is that Michel Houellecbecq goes the distance with Vonnegut and Carver, a jangled Céline, even an injured Hemingway. I don’t know about you but this came to me as a great relief. For years I’d been believing that all the great writers were dead. But now I know that there is one still kicking over in France, and if there is one then there is always the chance of multiplication. Good writing spreads faster than the clap.

As a classical novel measured against time-honored rules, Particles holds up well. Set in France during the second half of the twentieth century, the novel follows the lives of two half-brothers who share the same mother. Michel is a lonely, despondent, brilliant scientist who holds rationality sacrosanct. His brother, Bruno, is a sex-crazed high school teacher who pursues only pleasure. Both are unfulfilled spiritually and romantically; the novel’s dramatic tension arises from their last opportunities at experiencing love. There is plot, conflict, character, theme—enough to make Shakespeare’s skeleton hop out of the grave and do a jig on the casket.

In many other aspects Particles is terrifically modern. The language is new and colloquial, there are plenty of cocks and cunts throughout. In literature slang is not inherently good or bad, but it certainly is hard to pull off. I’ve read writers who’ve tried to imbue slay, goated, aura, brunch, fuck boy, vibe, bricked, giving, lit, sick, cringe, low key, besties, rizz, and edging with artistic integrity. They’ve all failed. They use the words too literally, in contexts that are too expected. Bushwick girls calling Lana Del Ray Mother is too on the nose. Houellebecq succeeds where others fail because he breaks patterns. Just as Tarantino gives cool a new gravitas in True Romance, the Frenchman transposes common expressions from their predicted settings into surprising ones. Through this metamorphosis, the spoken word becomes art. If modern writers insist on using “serving cunt,” they should do something new with it. The expression used in a eulogy, for a prostitute who died working a soup kitchen, fits better than in a teenage text chat. As Céline proved with his “little music,” the original use of familiar words can restore their vitality.

To create vibrancy and velocity, Houellebecq writes short chapters with many scenes. It is not uncommon for an entire movement to take place in one highly-detailed, vivid paragraph. He sets these scenes firmly on the page; one reads them with the focus short poems or paintings demand. In the twenty-first century, this might be one of the few remaining styles that can achieve both literary merit and mass-market accessibility.

If one considers the story’s vernacular and tempo safer contemporary bets, then its chronology is its greatest risk. Beginning with Michel’s departure from university in 1998, the tale then rewinds one hundred years back to the birth of his grandparents. For the next seventy pages, nearly thirty percent of the novel’s running time, the narrator interweaves the lives of the brothers before returning to where the book began. This much background is generally considered a big nicht-nicht. Fiction workshops, God bless ’em, state that there should be ten times more front story than back story. Hemingway’s iceberg theory depends on a conscious withholding of historical information. Vonnegut lived by the rule that every sentence should “reveal character or advance action.” The Great Gatsby is a much stronger novel because Fitzgerald cut the protagonist’s back story from the beginning of the novel (he later released this as the short story “Absolution”).

Houellebecq makes back story work because Particles is as much a sociological study as it is a novel. He starts by elucidating how society shifts during the twentieth century, so that he can later reveal how those shifts come to bear on the main characters. When the story starts moving forward again, their decisions, value systems, and modes of thinking become predictable—almost determined—while simultaneously taking on a greater significance. Houellebecq pulls the stage curtains back and exposes the machine that moves men and women. Strange as they may appear at first glance, Michel and Bruno are not outcasts in a vacuum. They are microcosms of the society that created them. More and more, the reader starts to see the machine that rules his own life. It isn’t natural to message twenty girls on Tinder after watching fifty pornographic Instagram reels. Our actions are not entirely of our design. We act as we do, to a large extent, because the machinery changed.

One of the predominant forces Houellbecq focuses on is the sexual revolution. The reader first understands it through Jane, the mother of Michel and Bruno. Born in 1928, she is in the vanguard of what will become the sexual liberation movement. At the age of thirteen, she loses her virginity, “a remarkable achievement given the time and place” (20). From there she is off to the races. The races result in two sons, separated until adolescence because she abandons them to different sets of grandparents. After ridding herself of the pests, Jane follows the hippies to California where she spends a few years participating in sex cults. Triumphantly, she returns to France to do more of the same.

Before Particles I’d always thought highly of sixties and seventies culture. I’m not as sure now. Houellebecq reframes the movement by exposing the lost values that made it possible (e.g. sex is sacred), and by explicitly stating the new beliefs that replaced them (e.g. pleasure is supreme). Undoubtedly, his view is slanted because of his own experience. Jane is based on his real mother, a woman even more self-absorbed, delusional, and callous than her fictional counterpart. But even if Houellebecq’s angle is personally tainted, his perspective is valuable because it is a true, uncommon counter-narrative to the prevailing story. Most people think of the sixties as a halcyon. Everyone loves Presley, Monroe, that picture of Jayne Mansfield’s tits on Minetta Tavern’s northern wall. Yet hardly anyone gives credence to the way in which they, and America as a whole, ushered in “the mass consumption of sexual pleasure” (21). Hardly anyone talks about the underbelly of sexual freedom, which has led to generations that have since sought it out obsessively.

These ideas are more relevant now than ever. The confluence of “sexual liberation” and modern technology has ushered in the pornification of everything and everyone. Social media platforms, from YouTube to Twitter, are filled with billions of images that countless men, this writer included, jerk off to. Millions of Instagram profiles, already verging on porn in and of themselves, are three clicks away from nudes, facials, and gangbangs. Women who never would have considered sex work ten years ago are opening OnlyFans accounts by the thousands. In June of this year, The Economist reported that eight percent of Swedish girls, fifteen to nineteen, had already prostituted themselves or sold sexual content online. Worse still are the nameless internet mobs that cheer these sexual champions on. It is now heroic to film yourself taking one trillion dicks in exchange for fame and profit.

Bruno’s life is the embodiment of a sex-based value system. As soon as his nuts drop they grab the wheel. During his adolescence he becomes a slave to his most base instincts; since he can’t get any, what follows is a string of perversions and sexual offenses that satiate his pathological craving—but only momentarily. Soon he needs more. He splits his time at college between fast food restaurants, pornographic theaters, and brothels. After miraculously marrying in his thirties, he starts lusting after his sixteen year-old students. The union was never destined to last:

“‘I met Anne in 1981… She wasn’t really beautiful, but I was tired of jacking off. The good thing, though, was she had big tits. I’ve always liked big tits . . . A WASP with big tits . . .’ To Michel’s surprise, his eyes were wet with tears. ‘Later, her tits started to go south and our marriage went with them.’” (142)

Though many of Bruno’s episodes are dark in nature, he is an overwhelmingly comic figure. The narrator’s detached, humorous, flippant voice paces the scenes perfectly, staying with them long enough to evoke a reaction, yet never dwelling on the darkness within them. Other parties’ reactions lighten the mood of Bruno’s obscenities, which are often so absurd that they’re impossible to take seriously. After becoming jealous of a black student’s success with his favorite teenager, for example, Bruno submits a racist manifesto to a literary magazine. Earlier on, as a youth, he takes to masturbating on trains:

“If it was possible—and it almost always was—he would find a girl on her own and sit facing her. Most of them wore see-through blouses or something similar and crossed their legs. He would not sit directly opposite but at an angle, sometimes sharing the same seat a couple feet away. He would get a hard-on the moment he saw the sweep of long blonde or dark hair. By the time he sat down, the throb in his underpants would be unbearable. He would take a handkerchief out of his pocket as he sat down and open a folder across his laps. In one or two tugs it was over. Sometimes, if the girl uncrossed her legs just as he was taking his cock out, he didn’t even need to touch himself—he came the moment he saw her panties. The handkerchief was a backup; he didn’t really need it. Usually he ejaculated across the folder, over pages of second-order equations, diagrams of insects or a graph of goal production in the USSR. The girl would keep reading her magazine.” (51)

If the novelist had written this story in contemporary times, Bruno would have turned out differently. Since the narrator methodically documents the influences on his life, the reader knows why. Instead of jerking off to fully-clothed women as a teen, Modern Bruno would’ve watched gangbangs. Instead of watching light porn in public theaters as a young man, he would’ve been in his basement getting off to murderous videos. Instead of visiting prostitutes as an adult, he would’ve been incapable of physical interaction with a real woman. If he’d grown up in France I don’t know exactly what he would’ve become. If he’d grown up in the US, I do.

The cultural chain of events that leads to Bruno’s despair is clear: Society’s abandonment of traditional values and religious systems leads to the sexual revolution, which leads to his endless pursuit of sexual gratification. Since he cannot satisfy his cravings, he becomes miserable.

His brother is wholly different. Michel has no sexual desire and little interest in pleasure. The chain of events shakes out differently in his case. What sinks him into an existential crisis is not ascendant hedonism but the loss of tradition and religion:

“There used to be a time when, late in life, a man would come home to feel a certain affection for his spouse—though not before she’d borne his children, made a home for them, cooked, cleaned and proved herself in the bedroom. That sort of regard meant they enjoyed sleeping in the same bed. It was probably not what the women were looking for, and it might even have been a delusion—but it could be a powerful feeling. Strong enough that… [men] literally could not live without their wives. When, out of unhappiness, their wives left them, they hit the bottle and died soon afterward… Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property… That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inert. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value—he will live in another universe. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then he accepts that life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience: past and future generations mean nothing to him. That’s how we live now.” (141)

Michel is even more miserable than his brother, who at least has pleasure to chase. What is there for Michel? His despondence with an ephemeral, meaningless world goes beyond a personal depression. He cannot make sense of life itself. Nature is full of strong animals dismembering the weak. Humanity is a long series of horrors, which repeatedly feature rape, slavery, torture, and murder. There are bright spots during individual lives, but if one adds up the moments of suffering and joy, which way would the scale tip? This thinking leads him to the “unshakeable conviction… that nature, taken as a whole, was a repulsive cesspit. All in all, nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust—and man’s mission on earth was probably to do just that.” (29)

Those who closely follow tragedies may find this nihilistic worldview familiar. After a man blew himself up outside a fertility clinic in May, wrote a Pirate Wires piece on the philosophy, efilism, that inspired his attempt at murder. “While traditional antinatalists focus on the decision not to have children,” she writes, “efilists advocate for something far more extreme: the elimination of all sentient life on Earth.” Though efilisim is a radical ideology advocated for by a few thousand psychos—puny as far as creeds go—the movement is already linked to other horrors. One month before the bombing, another apostle convinced her boyfriend to execute her while she slept. Thirteen years earlier, the belief that life itself is malevolent motivated a monster to shoot thirty children at Sandy Hook. Thankfully Michel does not share the same interest in violence. His view is closer to that of other anti-natalists, like the rabid climate activists that believe it’s unethical to have children. The Modern Michel, however, would have been more extreme in his views.

Particles is prescient because it predicts behavior based on metaphysical mutations: “radical, global transformations in the values to which the majority subscribe” (1). Two such examples are Christianity and modern science, both of which “[swept] away economic and political systems, aesthetic judgements and social hierarchies” (2). Nearly thirty years on from the book’s publication, we are still living through the same cultural value system that shaped Michel and Bruno. The difference today is that the inventions of the colossal incels—Jobs, Musk, Zuck, etc.—have made the consequences more grave.

The novel predicts that society will continue along these tracks until a new technology or moral system shunts it onto different ones. Based on the current landscape, it is likely that A.I. will cause the next mutation.

Releasing this technology into the modern world is risky. We’ve already observed the catastrophic effects of layering less sophisticated inventions onto our crumbling moral landscape. Now, with A.I., it is possible to design avatars to meet your exact sexual preferences. After weighing loneliness against digital companionship, many have already resorted to subsisting off the latter. According to DemandSage, a reporting service, twenty million people chat with their virtual girlfriends on character.ai each month. With Musk’s latest invention, a $300 per month A.I. porn service, this number is sure to increase.

On the philosophical front, A.I. is already fanning the flames of nihilism. What’s the point of studying if algorithms will exterminate wide swaths of white-collar jobs within the next five years? What’s the point of slaving away on a novel if there is no way to prove that it was you—not a machine—who wrote it? What’s the point of having children if A.I. may eliminate human beings entirely?

The general public is not as excited about this “innovation” as the tech-lords. Most would prefer another metaphysical mutation to the A.I. ghoul Zuck is building. Through the novel’s central conflict—can the brothers overcome their programming and find love?—Houellbecq hints that there is another way out: a return to Romanticism. Recently, this idea has been gaining steam. In 2023 Ted Gioia wrote an article that describes how the original Romantic movements formed as a response to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. Just as artists and Luddites chose humanity over technology and rationality back then, we could do the same today. This idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds . How many of your friends are content with their relationship to technology? Zero?

As The Economist reports, this sentiment is already impacting the market. Vinyl sales are now high as they were in the late 1980s. Cassette tape sales in Britain are up two hundred percent year-over-year. The demand for film has doubled in half a decade. It is not a coincidence that the first edition of this magazine is coming out right as the computers threaten to take over.

Houellbecq is on the side of this new movement. Speaking to the Paris Review in 2010, he states that he is a Romantic, someone who has “a strong interest in the future… believes in unlimited happiness… [believes] in love… [and believes] in the soul.” Given his ostensible cynicism the interviewer is, understandably, incredulous. She doubles down, asking if he really, actually believes in boundless, permanent happiness. “Yes,” he replies. “And I’m not just saying that to be a provocateur.”

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