The wrong dimensions
I spent most of this month wishing I was in a psych ward. I wasn’t in particularly bad shape, but I have felt frayed and vulnerable in a way that was hard to capture and harder yet to mend. Part of it stemmed from where I left off in my last post—this simmering hatred of the internet writ large and various subcultures in particular and maybe just people. Among other things, Substack has especially annoyed me. I swear to God that half the blogs here publish shit that sounds straight out of Nick Land: “What appears to humanity as [DEI] is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.” Works cited: crack.
Whether we’re talking about podcast hosts, Substack writers, or other commentators, I firmly believe that people need day jobs to keep them grounded. This wasn’t always the case. But in the age of the internet (and especially under paid subscription models), “the life of the mind” unfolds over an endless psychic terrain. You end up with critics who are incredibly isolated “intellectuals” formulating totalizing worldviews out of tweets, written by other people who base their worldviews off of tweets. They haven’t stepped foot in an office since 2017, but they rant about Sarah (she/they) from HR who is castrating young boys with her witch coven in her spare time to hasten the racial demographic collapse and upend democracy with cancel culture and the end of free speech on anti-semitic college campuses. I’m supposed to believe that Western civilization has entered its death throes because of this guy? Buddy.
It’s just really bold of some people to live the life of the mind when they’re so fucking stupid. (There’s a reason why I don’t attempt it!) You really need the 4HL to keep you level-headed.
One through line to this Substack—which has waned and thickened, proven at times more convincing and less, hysterical and rational—is that the internet robs people of the correct dimensions for their lives. As a thirty-something, straight DL man, I shouldn’t even know who Lizzo is, and had I been born a generation ago, I would only know her from magazine covers at the grocery store that I didn’t really look at. It isn’t that you shouldn’t care about a war on the other side of the globe, say, but that you shouldn’t devour this information from a firehose all day long.
I think this was the essence of the grillpill, to revive an old and kinda kitschy concept. It wasn’t so much about “touching grass” as it was about discovering the actual dimensions of your life. The problem is that it’s hard to accept these dimensions, because they’re usually small and become boring fast. You have to find a way to keep them slightly volatile and, therefore, interesting.
In short,
The romance of a psych ward is that you return life to the most basic dimensions.
Bourgeois literature
Hans Castorp—the hero of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924)—does almost precisely this. He goes to a mountain in Switzerland to visit his cousin at a sanatorium for three weeks but stays for seven years, during which time he contemplates the future of bourgeois society on the precipice of the Great War but mainly tries to get laid. Hans Castorp is the prototype of the bourgeois—exhausted and dreamy. Even his underwear is described in the German text as file d’écosse (French: Scottish-lined, i.e., plaid). He’s a sufficiently well-off cosmopolitan with a future ahead of him but, more importantly, time to kill.
A main arc of the novel pits Hans Castorp between two different teachers, each eager to use him to prove the other wrong. The first is Settembrini, a sickly, hectoring, liberal humanist who believes in the Enlightenment, reason, and progress. His eloquence is, paradoxically, the very sign of his failure. His exultant liberal humanism is not self-evident to anyone and must be pummeled into them. The more he does so, the less one believes him. His foil, Naphta, enters the book rather late. Naphta is a Jewish convert to Catholicism, a communist, and truly anti-bourgeois. He isn’t your Twitter-esque, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, “everyone should have free healthcare” guy. He’s anti-bourgeois in the Nietzschean way where he exults suffering as morally purifying. He’s a different breed altogether and a much harder sell, especially because, as it becomes clear, he has a reactionary impulse.
For The Magic Mountain’s original readers on the other side of World War I, the irony of Settembrini’s celebration of progress and the senselessness of Naphta’s defense of suffering had to have been palpable. It’s a false dichotomy, sure, but positioned between them now and knowing of Mann’s own political conversion, I wonder if we aren’t to accept, begrudgingly, Settembrini’s hectoring. Is any reactionary movement even capable of undoing the bourgeois belief that suffering is bad? It can convince some that other people’s suffering is unimportant—even good and just—but their own? One can’t go back to a Catholic peasant mindset on this issue. You might become resigned to your own suffering for a time, but you’re more likely to become resentful of it (which is where contemporary reactionary movements emerge instead). There are some beliefs that are impossible to replant once they’ve been uprooted.
The Magic Mountain forces me to confront something else. I take issue with the assumption in literary criticism that the political is the most foundational layer of a novel—its unconscious—or, if not that, its most secretive or important dimension, its controlling logic. For me, The Magic Mountain, though it couldn’t be more political of a novel, reduces to a single point: I don’t want Hans Castorp to die. The novel ends—this isn’t even an interesting spoiler—with Hans Castorp’s life in jeopardy. I wouldn’t admit this in a graduate seminar, and if a student said that they wanted Hans Castorp to live, I’d say that the point isn’t whether he lives or dies but the indeterminacy of it. And yet I, more than anything, want Hans Castorp to survive. To live, to flourish.
Naphta would smirk: In wanting Hans Castorp to live, I’ve already made a decision about what death means—the seedbed from which politics emerges. Maybe so, but the novel reveals that I don’t care about the implications. I just want him to live.
The necessary bathos
The red/brown alliance notwithstanding, Naphta really has peak /r/redscarepod takes:
Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loathing one autumn afternoon when, as they were walking along the main street, it suddenly began to rain and, as if on command, there was an umbrella above every head. That was the symbol of cowardice and vulgar effeminacy, the end product of civilization.
Curiosity ensues
Anyway, I went to see Saltburn in theaters because I wanted to see Jacob Elordi’s dick. I’m a pervert, yeah, living in a culture that produces more and more porn or pseudo-porn, but I also feel that at a certain point in some male relationships, you really have to see each other’s dicks. It’s hard to describe, because with some men, it wouldn’t make a difference whether you see their dicks or not. With other men, it’s deeply clarifying. A sort of curiosity builds, which isn’t quite sexual, because once you see it, you can move on, with almost an air of anticlimax. And it isn’t clarifying because dick size correlates to and therefore reveals personality. Rather, you just know what they’re about. You understand their dimensions… metaphorically, probably.
I’m talking mainly about men I’ve known personally, but I also felt this way about Elordi. I haven’t watched Euphoria and only know of Elordi through the digital ether, but to understand the general intrigue, it felt necessary to see his dick on the big screen.
(To be clear, it’s up in the air, for both of us, whether I believe any of this bullshit.)
I’m sort of tired of movies, TV shows, books, etc., like Saltburn about the ultra-wealthy. All anyone seems capable of imagining are novels of manners, because everyone wants to feel knowing. The contradictions of capitalism reduce to the ironies of oblivious privilege. The aim of such art is to recreate the intellectual tedium of the graduate seminar that produced the writers but with hot people and timely humor. America Ferrera’s feminist rant in Barbie was unintentionally a brilliant illustration: social criticism has become a series of bullet-point truisms, a half-assed Jenny Holzer display. We’ve reached the point where its natural rhetorical form is the list. Just play the hits, baby. Turn signal into noise and vibe out. With Saltburn (and tbf, Barbie), the only concrete payoff is the occasional stunning visual. Otherwise, everyone already knows every “critique” there is to know. There’s nothing more to say, but the think pieces will be rolled out anyway. Maybe you’ll read one to see if you missed anything. You didn’t. You couldn’t.
Under such circumstances, the only non-cynical way to approach a work of art is to experience it only to see Jacob Elordi’s hog. This is the apogee of the new sincerity—a single-entendre principle in action. Basically praxis. The movie is a retelling of a certain novel with a famous film adaptation, which I won’t name because it would spoil everything, and takes up the original’s interest in the mimetic desire in male friendship, both its homoeroticism and its hatred, before concluding once again its impossibility, which I’ve written about before. Even if it didn’t articulate anything genuinely new, it would be forgivable if it managed to say anything at least different from the original novel and film. But it didn’t. Turns out that reified social conditions don’t produce originality.
They might, however, produce decent porn, so I’m sorry to say that we don’t see Jacob Elordi’s dick. I was led astray again by the “male frontal nudity” tag on IMDB (wrong actor)—an eleven-dollar mistake, which I could have invested in an OnlyFans subscription of that guy who pivoted from owning a black squirrel as a pet to making porn. (Not that guy who pivoted from feeding a seagull to making porn, and definitely not that guy who pivoted from posting quail in fun hats to making porn.) But I also lost interest in Elordi a half-hour into the film. In the end, he isn’t someone to figure out.
So let me tell you my own, equally banal story with zero payoff.
On my Houellebecq shit
I saw my neighbor at the grocery store on a Friday night. I heard his front door close a few minutes before I left. Smelling the traces of Dior Sauvage or Armani Acqua di Giò in the hallway, I assumed that he had a date or was going out to a bar. I don’t know him well—we just trade perfunctory greetings in the hallway on the rare occasion we cross paths—but he seems rarely to leave his apartment most weekends and weeknights; his unmistakable BMW is always in the lot outside my window. He is single and doesn’t seem to have anyone in his life. We are the same age, and we may well have everything in common, living perfectly symmetrical lives. What separates me from him is the same that separates him from me, and yet I feel no solidarity with him. Magnanimously, we decided not to notice the other on opposite sides of the produce section. That was all right with me. Preferable.
Sometimes, when I’m fumbling with my keys on the landing outside our apartments—the lock requires some trick I’ve yet to learn—I hear Ben Shapiro’s voice playing from his apartment. I saw a clip of Tucker Carlson not too long ago. His advice to young people is to get married too young, have more kids than they can afford, and live life to the fullest (🤪). (One imagines that he was talking exclusively to white people; I can’t imagine that he’d tell a black woman to have more kids than she could afford, but w/e—this isn’t social justice hour.) I wonder how my neighbor feels when he hears such messages from right-wing pundits—whether he feels his nose crushed into the ground. Or maybe he holds out hope that if he learns to make his bed every morning, he’ll become the right sort of man who can attract the right sort of woman. Which might be even more humiliating than Houellebecqian despair.
Right-wing pundits like Tucker no doubt rebuke neoliberal anti-welfarism to advocate for pro-family and pro-marriage social and economic policies. Maybe they go so far as to advocate for limiting porn—I don’t follow him closely enough to know nor care enough to research. The problem is that love isn’t a policy outcome. What undercuts this vision of marriage and children isn’t contemporary gender dynamics, dating apps, or hookup culture so much as the fact that it feels harder to even like anyone these days. Pace Byung-Chul Han, I’m not sure that techno-neoliberal-narcissism is even the culprit. And my fear is that love, like the belief in virtuous suffering, is impossible to restore once it’s gone.
Or maybe I’m just talking about myself.
Lest we forget, though, avowed Marxists used to write books about how to love. Now their lessons only live on in the final pages of Sally Rooney novels: “To love someone under capitalism, you have to love everyone. Is that theory or theology?” Such sentiment doesn’t feel crucial, but overwrought.
Off my Houellebecq shit
A week later, I had to make precisely forty-eight cookies for an office cookie swap. (This is the only time of year I grumble about working in a woman-majority office. Welcome to the longhouse; the holiday cookie swap is at 10:30.) I ended up with fifty-three, so I packaged the extra five and left them at my neighbor’s door. My saving grace is that I hate the right things about myself, including my capacity for self-pity. So I do what I can to not be a miserablist.
Post-sincerity
On reflection, I feel like I’ve finished the project that I started with the undertaking of this Substack, which is ironic, because I never undertook my stated project at all. This may be for the better, because I really didn’t want to reread “E Unibus Pluram” or write about why you (YOU) should read Infinite Jest, though you should.
When I started this newsletter, I was inspired by a quarantine photoshoot with the Italian model Pietro Bosseli. In terms of beauty, I find Bosseli too perfect to be even mildly interesting, but this photoset provided a visual vocabulary for me in quarantine—one of virtuosity, activity, and self-amusement. Anxiety casts a shadow on the photos, but it can be confronted, purified, or simply lived with. Maybe spiritual enlightenment was possible in all of this, I thought. A higher life—something above the standstill.
Isn’t it pretty ridiculous to think so?
Soon, the ideological churn of that time made the concept of post-sincerity—which I intended as an academic joke (just adding post- in front of a random concept and committing to the bit)—feel real. You had people, myself included, who believed firmly in the candidacy of Bernie Sanders and ideology backlighting him and suddenly were on the opposite side of that sincere belief. How do we live on the other side of conviction? Do you cling to it, replace it with another belief, or simply live in cynicism and doubt or—more positively—openness and speculation? I’m not sure. It feels very self-serious, but at the time, it seemed open for question.
Now, it seems like most people are placing their bets.
Me?
I’m just trying to have a good time.
New Year’s Resolutions
Finish my lean(ish) bulk (190 lbs.)
Reread 2666, Nightwood, The Passenger, Don Quixote, at least Swann’s Way, etc.
Go to New York City to visit the Russian baths (not in a gay way)
Buy a great pair of sunglasses
Nice post and I adore your resolutions. This year I’ve been to an open-sea sauna in Sweden and it was marvelous. I wish there was more of a sauna culture in Eastern Europe, unfortunately the only ones available here are gay meet-up spots. Do you have a regimen to follow when bulking?
Re: Saltburn, the "class-concious" filmmaking of loaded directors is getting on my nerves at this point. While visually great (it reminds me of 2000s movies in that regard), it falls on its face so fast. Funny how it's her second movie (with this shit of an ending).
So much interesting here. For one, I think you nailed it with podcasters and the 4HL. It seems like these days people with a 4HL and Creators are farther apart than ever. The things that make a podcaster a podcaster - engaging with people online, caring about as many topics as possible - also make a normal person a podcaster.
What I'm saying is, podcasters seem to live a very different lifestyle, and it seems like it's become more responsible for a creator to stay online and more hazardous for a consumer to stay online. This gives us consumers a highly different culture than the cultural critics.