Oh, Icarus. Did you fly your homemade data contraption too close to the sun?

Yes. I’m afraid I did.

To recall: Flush from predicting that Steerforth’s A Resistance History of the United States would be an indie hit—it made the Times’ list and currently sits at #5 on the Independent Publishers Caucus list, where it has spent six weeks—I made a similar prediction about Melville House’s Trash!: A Garbageman’s Story, a buzzy memoir translated from the French. Specifically:

I think Trash! will debut in the top 5 on the relevant ABA and IPC lists and in the #5-10 range on the Times’ Combined Nonfiction list. Be sure to subscribe to find out how I did.

Well here you are. How did I do? I blew it. Trash! did not make any of these lists. Why? The answer is channel mix, which I was aware of, though I grossly underestimated its impact.

What, exactly, was I thinking?

I was thinking that Trash!, a non-fiction paperback with indie, socially conscious appeal, was out-performing Resistance History at Amazon, which was and is true.

It peaked higher, stayed higher, and is higher today. But Amazon is not the whole market, and how well a book will do at the indies compared to Amazon is guesswork, and I guessed wrong. The known unknowns got me. A Resistance History of the United States is selling better in sales channels I cannot see—by which I mean indie bookstores, B&N, etc.—even while Trash! sells better at Amazon.

This could be for a number of reasons, from the fact that Tad Stoermer has such a big social media platform that indies are ordering more, to the possibility that indies are having trouble stocking the Melville House title. (Both presses are distributed by PRH.) Bookshop, which is powered by Ingram, is showing Trash! as on backorder—which is likely what indies will see—while you can buy it right away on Amazon. That could lead to this sort of outcome. (I sent a note to Melville House for their take, but did not hear back.) If you’re in the trade and have any first-hand insight about how Trash! is selling in your store, feel free to drop it in comments or send me a note.

In the meantime, I will be more … cautious when it comes to called shots.

Now you might say, “That’s fine, but clearly your methodology stinks! It is entirely reliant on Amazon rank, which does not tell the whole story.”

That is true. But the paradox of Amazon is that, as the giant in the market, it is also the only cheap source of relative sales information for the entire market because it assigns a sales rank to every single print book in its catalog. Neither Barnes & Noble nor Bookshop does this, so the only public signals for the indie market are curated lists like the IPC’s or the ABA’s, which only report top sellers. (I use the IPC’s because it is limited to indie books at indie bookstores, while the ABA’s list is dominated by Big 5 titles.) Because of this gap, Amazon gains an additional advantage by dominating the public data conversation.

Meanwhile, SPI Keeps Improving!
As I previously warned, SPI development will be “slow, thoughtful, and clear” to keep things from getting all junked up. That said, I’ve added a useful press filter on the Top Sellers at Amazon tab so you can quickly see what’s charting from a particular press that you are researching or, perhaps, run. Shout out to former PRH analyst Talia Berday-Sacks for encouraging me to prioritize this feature and helping me think it through.

Here is a link to the page filtered to Melville House. You can bookmark the page for your favorite press. And, of course, you can click on any line to see the Amazon rank history for any title, like so:

August: Maximalism’s Last Stand?
Chastened by my June miss on Trash!, I will avoid big predictions and humbly share the books that are ranking well at Amazon ahead of their August on-sale dates.

This is a pretty good snapshot of publishing right now. Summer blockbuster by-product, a vacation guide, a thriller series, a satire set in the publishing industry, and a $200 box set from a generational genius, published by the most divisive small press in America. In other words, it will be interesting to see how A Table for Fortune, the latest (and perhaps last, due to his failing health) from William Vollmann, plays out. It’s been ranking well, despite being four volumes and 3000+ pages long. This is the kind of book that the mainstream book press normally rallies around in the name of Great American Novelizing, but will the fact that it is published by Skyhorse (via its Arcade literary imprint)—who gave Steve Bannon a whole imprint to publish useful idiocy like Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them)—keep them away? Will it sell anyway?

Since his dazzling debut, 1987’s You Bright and Risen Angels—the first and last I’ve personally read—Vollmann has proven himself to be the most uncompromising of the Generation Jones maximalists, a cohort that includes Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, and David Foster Wallace. The echo-Pynchons. The Metropolitan Review has the definitive account of how Viking eventually gave up on him—followed by Grove Atlantic, New Directions, and NYRB—and his career is basically a Rorschach test on whether you think it is po-mo maximalism or American publishing that has lost its way. (I must confess, on recently reading Gaddis’ foundational The Recognitions, it occurred to me that it could only have been published during a period of artificially low competition, a Golden Age of attention protectionism. But then I prefer White Noise to Underworld.)

Publisher Tony Lyons’ libertarianism is nutty and extreme, but for that very reason I don’t see any way to avoid Arcade on moral grounds without missing out on important writing. (Joyce was first published by a pornographer after all.) I’m currently enjoying Emmalea Russo’s art world satire The Moon Papers, about an art collective bent on launching a second moon, with all the Baudrillardian hijinx that entails. Since Lyons will publish anything, he might well (eventually) publish a Pulitzer or National Book Award or Nobel-prize winner—if those entities will permit it—and I’m sure he enjoys the dilemma this Vollmann deluxe edition puts them in. Get the popcorn ready for August 25.

Elsewhere
A few weeks ago, I joined Joe and Elly on The People’s Guide to Publishing Podcast, to discuss Small Press Insights. What it is, why I built it, and how many books you have to sell to be a “bestseller” at Amazon, which I also discussed in last month’s column. Here is the episode:

(Author’s Note: One of the benefits of my Daemon List of writing I think about all the time has been as a prompt to return to these works and see how they hold up. In this case I also wanted to answer, for myself, why I decided to go with Lost in the Cosmos rather than The Moviegoer.)

Almost thirty years ago, in what would now be called a quarter-life crisis, I felt called to Greenville, Mississippi. It’s not too far from Memphis, beyond the casinos, which were new then and also called to me from time to time. I had been introduced to Walker Percy at the used bookstore where I worked. The Moviegoer, with its moody twenty-nine-year-old protagonist, hit me at the right time in life and set me on the Southern Route of mid-century male ennui. (As opposed to the Northern Route through Roth, Bellow, and Updike, of whom I remain woefully innocent, despite having lived in New York for more than twenty-five years.) I devoured all of Percy’s works, followed closely by Richard Ford’s, who seemed to be his literary heir, especially with the arrival of The Sportswriter. Like Binx—the protagonist of The Moviegoer—I realized a search was possible, the first step of which was a pilgrimage to Greenville, where Percy grew up. “The search,” as Binx tells us early in the novel, “is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”

According to Percy’s taxonomy of “existential modes”—borrowed liberally from Kierkegaard and articulated in his 1956 essay “The Man on the Train”—I had moved from alienation to rotation, from the immersive grayness of modern life (what Kierkegaard would call despair) to the pursuit of the new. Through friends, introductions were made. I wrote a letter to Shelby Foote—who grew up with Percy in Greenville—and he left me a voicemail, telling me (in that drawl Ken Burns made famous) that “the whole town had whittled away to nothing and the young people don’t have much fun anymore.”

I had breakfast with Percy’s nephew, who was pleasant but as confused as I was about what I was after. I also saw the aftermath of a fatal car crash and nearly fell in love with my local guide, a twice-divorced mother of two with thick ankles and a sweet singing voice. (Actually, depending on how familiar he was with his uncle’s work, his nephew—who was probably the age I am now—might have understood what I was after better than I did.)

This all now seems incredibly apt as I now move on to Percy’s third “mode,” repetition, three decades later. You can’t go home again, but you will inevitably try, just to sneak up on the strangeness of life.

Diagnosing and overcoming alienation was the central concern of Percy’s work, and the problem was urgent. He ended up in Greenville in the first place—under the care of his father’s cousin, the poet Will Percy, to whom The Moviegoer is dedicated—after his father committed suicide, a fate met by a male Percy in each of the preceding generations. As it did for Camus, suicide remains an existential possibility in all of Percy’s philosophical writings, which constituted most of his published work before the appearance of The Moviegoer in 1961. Eleven of the fifteen essays in The Message in the Bottle—the 1975 collection of his philosophical work—appeared before The Moviegoer, and in them you can see him laying the groundwork for the novel, going so far as to offer critiques of the mid-century alienation novels Point of No Return and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, seemingly trying to chart a course between and beyond them.

After The Moviegoer, Percy wrote five novels, two duologies—one like The Moviegoer, the other more like Vonnegut—and his most overtly religious novel, Lancelot. The book I now find most thrilling, however, is 1983’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, and for two reasons.

First, I’m a fan of the philosophy in philosophical novels. (Foote was not. They fought like crazy about it in their letters, when they were not arguing about Foote’s modernist atheism and Percy’s scandalous conversion to Catholicism.) Second, I have my doubts about the continued usefulness of the novel as a discrete form. As David Shields has articulated, the novelistic form often feels to me like an intrusive apparatus that conceals more than it reveals. The novel arose from a synthesis of letters, diary entries, news clippings, and vernacular forms, and to these it might yet return. You know, like Either/Or.

If Percy borrowed theory from Kierkegaard before The Moviegoer, in Lost in the Cosmos, he explores the possibilities of Kierkegaardian form. If Kierkegaard had lived through the 1970s, would he have written a parody of a self-help book with hilarious descriptions of the tragicomic ills of the age, complete with quizzes, diagrams, and vignettes disguised as thought experiments, meant to bring the modern reader face to face with his alienation? Do we even need to ask?

Believers can be the cruelest satirists of worldly concerns, simply because they do not share them. Percy belongs to that lineage, which runs from Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky through G.K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh.

The first half of the book is simply hilarious. It thoroughly explores why travel is always disappointing and, in my favorite pages, why studio audiences cheer when their hometown is mentioned, which I’ve never been able to experience the same way again. In a chapter subtitled “How the Self, Which Usually Experiences Itself as Living Nowhere, is Surprised to Find that it Lives Somewhere,” the reader is asked to select why “Chicagoans in Burbank, California, applaud at the mention of the word Chicago,” where Percy’s preferred answer is clearly:

c) Because a person, particularly a passive audience member who finds himself in Burbank, California, finds himself so dislocated, so detached from a particular coordinate in space and time, so ghostly, that the very mention of such a coordinate is enough to startle him into action.

This ghostliness and unfamiliarity with oneself is the theme of the book, which is stated in one of several alternative subtitles as the problem of “Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life.”

Percy offer a specific, and somewhat technical, answer. In a long central section, he lays out his semiotic theory, present in the pre-Moviegoer essays, which is a f synthesis of Peirce and Sartre. In short, he argues that the advent of language—like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey—changed everything and opened a new, irreducible dimension that is subjective rather than objective, triadic rather than dyadic, where humans have not only an environment but “a world” in the Heideggerian sense. Percy trained as a doctor, and this view of language marks his conversion from physician to phenomenologist. (I had a similar experience as an undergraduate trying to make myself at home. I rapidly cycled through majors, from political science to psychology, before being introduced to Merleau-Ponty and settling, at last, on philosophy.)

The practical upshot of this, for Percy, is that—as sign-givers—we are almost too free. Since we can be anything by consuming signs, we end up feeling like nothing. In one chapter he sets out to explain “How the Self Tries to Inform Itself by Possessing Things which do not Look like the Things They’re Used as,” which should elicit a nervous giggle from any Brooklynite or fan of HGTV. Percy’s preferred choice is:

d) Because the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.

Ouch.

According to Percy, while this restless rotation is an irreducible hazard of language, it is made more acute by the contemporary insistence that this irreducibility of meaning will at some point be reduced to mechanical explanations. It’s like we are living in a building that has been condemned, the date of our eviction forever postponed.

Percy’s solution, like Kierkegaard’s, is religion or—as I would prefer—a reliance on a power greater than oneself. He considers all others thoroughly in Lost in the Cosmos—including science and art, which he finds temporary and flawed—and acknowledges the difficulties of conversion in an age of such hypocrisy, but finds no other alternative for grounding the restless self. This is not a sentimental claim, but a structural one. (Percy might be the least sentimental believer I’ve ever encountered.) As sign-givers who devour the world through restless rotation, something that is not itself a sign must be enlisted, or the search, once begun, will go on forever.

At the end of The Moviegoer, Binx settles down. He grows up, we might say. How does this differ from the resolution of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, of which Percy was critical? Tom Rath exits the rat race for a life centered around his family. For Percy, this resolution suggests that rotation alone can solve alienation. Rath finds his “authentic” self. While the endings are superficially similar—Binx gets married and plans to go to medical school—it is unclear if the search has come to an end. “As for my search,” Binx tells us in the epilogue, “I have not the inclination to say much on the subject.” At the risk of emptying it out like the latest coffee table, Binx declines further description. “Reticence, therefore, hardly having a place in a document of this kind,” he writes, “it seems as good a time as any to make an end.”

(Author’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where I write a monthly column. )

There is a room at the Museum of Modern Art where you can stand with a Henry Darger at your right shoulder and look at Robert Rauschenberg’s Rebus on the perpendicular wall. It feels like an important position, this corner, where one can see—or imagine that one is seeing—naive immediacy and cultivated immediacy at once, though this immediately leads to questions. Was Darger, perhaps, more self-conscious than we imagine, and might Rauschenberg have been more intuitive, despite his credentials? How can you tell the synthesis from the thesis, once the former has become the latter and is ready for another go ’round? Maybe you can’t, any more than the Athenians could distinguish Socrates from the sophists.

In this corner, between the two paintings, there is a doorway with a glowing, code-mandated “Exit” sign above it. The doorway leads into the next gallery, but I like to think that the door itself is Ray Johnson.

Johnson—the inscrutable collagist and mail artist—is part Rauschenberg, part Darger. Part insider, part outsider. It’s been possible in recent years to see a wide range of Johnson’s work in New York. There was an exhibition at the Morgan Library that focused on Johnson’s late use of photography—which took in a lot of his other mature work as well—and one at the Craig Starr Gallery that showcased his surviving Bauhaus-inspired paintings and traced his movement into assemblage and collage. I’m also lucky enough to have a friend who managed to get on the mailing list for Johnson’s New York Correspondence School as an art student growing up on Long Island. Examining the mailings she received, still in their original envelopes, was a thrill—one of these things you move to New York hoping to experience.

Last month, my wife and I headed to Asheville, North Carolina, to the Black Mountain College Museum, for the opening of Black Mountain COLL(A)GE, an exhibition—running through Labor Day—focused on collage work produced by artists associated with the college. Black Mountain, though a relatively short-lived institution, was among the mid-century’s most fertile hubs for the emerging American avant-garde. As European artists fled to America, Josef Albers brought Bauhaus practices to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he taught from 1933 to 1949, hosting a who’s who of interdisciplinary artists, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Weil, Cy Twombly, and—of course—Johnson.

Johnson arrived there in 1945, straight from his hometown of Detroit, and—in retrospect—seems to have been its ideal student. His early works were meticulous color studies, very much in Albers’ Bauhaus style, though ultimately the matière—material studies using found objects that were primary exercises at Black Mountain—became the dominant note in Johnson’s idiosyncratic career. That this was the case for many at Black Mountain is the premise of the current exhibition—which features work by Rauschenberg, Weil, and others. I went hoping Johnson would be well-represented, as indeed he was.

The most mischievous piece on display—Johnson’s best work (like that doorway) takes up a position between outsider naivete and art world knowningness—reproduces Johnson’s response when asked to corroborate Rauschenberg’s claim that he had asked Johnson to contribute to a painting in 1955, alongside Jasper Johns, Stan Venderbeek, and Weil, who at the time was Mrs. Rauschenberg. In 1967, Johnson wrote to a curator:

I have no remembrance of being asked by Robert Rauschenberg in 1955 to incorporate my work in any work of his incorporating the work of Sue Weil and Jasper Johns.

I do remember at that time a small orange tree Bob and Sue had. Also, on a small island off the coast of Connecticut, Sue’s mother had a large house, I carried a book on Taoism and quoted lines to them about emptiness and nothing. Years later the house burned.

This text reappears in the untitled collage from the late ’70s/early ’80s, now addressed to the director of the Whitney, Tom Armstrong, whose name appears backward:

Given Johnson’s commitment to ephemerality, his work benefits from being seen in person, particularly the few sets of mailings on display, which feature tiny collages (for which he invented the grammatically challenging neologism “moticos,” which is singular in number), buttons, and scraps, packaged together and mailed to friends. It is difficult to describe why these works “work,” and why it helps to be with them. This is an open problem for modern (and post-modern) art in general. The challenge was evident in the Life magazine article covering Rauschenberg’s controversial triumph at the 1964 Venice Biennale. In explaining the artist’s famous Angora goat combine, Monogram, to a general audience, the magazine offered:

Today Monogram is one of his most admired works, exercising an eerie and totally inexplicable fascination on viewers. Critics speak of its “rightness” but are unable to explain the goat’s allure. It remains one of the most bizarre art objects ever created, an extreme instance of the juxtaposition of unlikely objects.

So after the beautiful and the sublime, “the right?” A question-begging aesthetics if ever there was one.

I had an unexpectedly powerful experience in this same gallery a few years ago. (While I was hoping for more Johnson, perhaps I was also seeking more Black Mountain?) I was in Asheville for a family Thanksgiving—no one lived there, we had all converged—when I stumbled in for an exhibition devoted to John Cage. At the time I knew what everyone knows about John Cage and only a bit more about Black Mountain College. Enough to draw me in.

They had staged an installation of Cage’s 33 ⅓, which calls for eight to twelve unattended turntables and a supply of random records. My wife and I were the only ones in the gallery, save for the receptionist, and I was surprised to find how hard it was for me to put records on the turntables without confirming with the receptionist that this was their intended use. There were records and there were turntables, but there were no instructions—of the kind to which we’ve all grown accustomed and perhaps dependent upon—so I felt both in a murky area and chillingly like a well-heeled totalitarian subject. In the end, I resisted the urge to seek permission and got The Stooges’ Fun House and John Lennon’s Imagine spinning at the same time. No security guards arrived and the two records drifted pleasantly in and out of phase as we tour the rest of the exhibit.

In an essay written in 1997, two years after Johnson’s meticulously planned suicide, the artist’s long time correspondent and collector William S. Wilson described a similar emancipation brought about by Johnson’s work and his long friendship with the artist. He writes:

I have made for myself a few statements about the feeling I experience with some art—not theoretical statements, but a home-made aesthetic or theory of art—statements about emancipations and about energies to use as scaffolding for my thoughts. In words which work for me, the moments I value and preserve are the moments I experience as emancipations. I often laugh with glee when looking at even somber paintings, feeling that I have been freed from an oppression I can’t quite name, and which I haven’t noticed until being freed from it. Ray and his work immediately contributed to the sum of such freedoms. He was convincing because he acted on his belief that art should be free, liberated from money as well as from repressions. Certainly he used the art of friendship to free his friends from oppressive conventions and general unfreedoms.

“Oppressive conventions and general unfreedoms.” Weber’s iron cage swung open. Johnson is the door, as I suspected, but the “Exit” sign is not needed.

(Author’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where I write a monthly column. )

“Something is terribly wrong,” she said. “With this new system, only 35% of people are opening my email!”

I can’t say whether this is a hazard unique to liberal arts majors—which includes me, associate directors at cultural non-profits, and most authors, editors, and publishers—but we tend to be optimists. (At least when we are not catastrophizing.) In the absence of data, my client assumed that 100% of recipients were reading her emails. 35% was a total letdown, even though that’s a completely respectable open rate.

All this to say that I have yet to meet a would-be author—or even an experienced author from the literary side of the tracks—who doesn’t overestimate how many books are actually sold, by them and other people. (There are authors on the genre side of things who have a better idea.)

The question I get asked most often—now that I’ve explained what counts as a small press—is how Amazon Best Seller Rank (BSR) maps to actual unit sales. I think there is a sense in the literary world that this is an unanswerable question—one of life’s great mysteries—but it is not. Author Hugh Howey and “data guy” Paul Abbassi cracked this more than a decade ago where ebooks were concerned by having self-published authors share real sales so that ranks could be statistically mapped to unit sales. The same method can easily be applied to the print best seller ranks to find out how many copies a book has to sell in a week to make the top 50K, which is what Small Press Insights tracks daily. And the answer is around 45 copies per week across retailers. (This excludes specialty stores, libraries, and direct sales.) I’ve made some assumptions, but the estimate is conservative. It should be read as saying a print book ranked in the top 50K, 19 times out of 20, has sold at least 45 copies in the last week at retail. Here are the benchmarks for the rest of the BSR bands.

Obviously the top band has a volatile upper range. I’d guess that I Who Have Never Known Men—which is locked in around BSR rank #1,000—sells about 3,500 copies per week. Otherwise, these floors provide a benchmark for how much a book needs to sell to hit each of the bands. (Or how many you will need to print if you run a small press.)

Surprised? Disappointed? Encouraged?

There is a whole sub-genre on Substack featuring disillusioned writers revealing the awful truth that invidual book sales can be meager. I understand their frustration. I don’t think publishers are honest enough about sales expectations with authors, and perhaps not even with themselves. On the one hand, producing books—and culture generally—is a mysterious if essential human activity. French POWs during the Napoleonic Wars made intricate little boats with straw they pulled out of their mattresses. (I saw it on Antiques Roadshow UK.) We make stuff, and this spontaneity is infinitely valuable. So it can be hard, for everyone, to take a cold-eyed look at what happens when these makings hit the market. Most people cover their eyes at the point of collision, fearful that the ugly truth will destroy the mystery. Books Are Magic, after all. Fortunately, I don’t think this destruction is possible. As Lewis Hyde argues in The Gift, the mystery and the market are simply two different “economies.” The value of a work in one has nothing to do with its value in the other, and much anguish results from confusing the two.

That said, I think it is important for authors to have an accurate view of the market, should they decide to conduct business there.1 While disappointing at first, such realism is good for the art’s sustainability. It would have helped a friend of mine who, based on market dysmorphia, thought their debut novel was a flop, when in fact it sold quite well. (Would that their agent had told them this.) I think it might encourage small presses by demonstrating just how “in the game” they are. The bar is not that high, as you can see, but you first have to know where it is.

The above rank-to-sale legend now appears as a pop-up on SPI when you need it, and I will revise it as necessary.

You Heard It Here First

In my May column, I offered the following tip:

I’m calling it now: A Resistance History of the United States by Tad Stoermer from New Hampshire’s Steerforth Press, which comes out on June 2, will be huge at the indies.

How’d I do? The book debuted at #1 on the American Booksellers Association Nonfiction Paperback Bestsellers list, and at #7 on the New York Times’ Combined Nonfiction list. After its second week on sale, it sits at #2 on the ABA’s list and at #3 on the Independent Publishers Caucus list.

Do It Again!

I have another pick this month, which is Trash!: A Garbageman’s Story from Melville House. Translated from the French, it is a memoir by Montreal trash collector Simon Paré-Poupart that has drawn comparisons to Anthony Bourdain. This went on sale last week and is eligible for this week’s lists—which drop tomorrow—so this might appear to be a bit of a lay-up. (Last month’s call was still a week from being on sale.) So I’ll raise the difficulty. I think Trash! will debut in the top 5 on the relevant ABA and IPC lists and in the #5-10 range on the Times’ Combined Nonfiction list. Be sure to subscribe to find out how I did.

Until then …

I don’t see anything setting up to be as big as Resistance History or Trash! between now and my next column on July 28—it is summer—but here are some releases I have my eye on, all of them ranking in the top 50K before their on-sale dates.

• Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) by Eve Babitz from NYRB goes on sale today.

• The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis by Devin Thomas O’Shea, out today from Haymarket, a narrative history at the intersection of racial politics and esoterica. (Like One Battle After Another, but for real.)

• Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska arrives from Norton on July 7. Inter-war and post-war Paris viewed through the history of the Hotel Lutetia.

  Small Press Insights is a free website tracking books from small publishers. I offer news and insights about it via Substack on the fourth Tuesday of each month.

The appointment of Gilbert Cruz as “Canon editor” at the New York Times earlier this month, just a week after the majority acquisition of BuzzFeed by under-the-radar mogul Byron Allen, seems like an important moment in the history of the literary form known as “the listicle,” around which the Times and BuzzFeed have performed a morbid dance for more than a decade.

In 2014, the Times appointed a soul-searching committee that resulted in its famous “innovation report,” which NiemanLab correctly identified at the time as “one of the key documents of this media age.” The report has two main antagonists.

The first is Jonah Peretti, who co-founded the Huffington Post and later BuzzFeed, from which he is now stepping down as CEO. Peretti is an interesting figure. He developed a theory of virality intended to demonstrate capitalism’s ability to absorb critique, which was the sort of post-Situationist problem we all thought about before 2008. But, unlike a lot of his contemporaries, Peretti got to test his theories not once, but twice. They turned out to be true but corrosive, despite Peretti’s best efforts. BuzzFeed tried to bootstrap its way from slop to civic virtue with BuzzFeed News, and—why not?—it had worked before. Simon & Schuster’s first book was a collection of crossword puzzles.

And in 2014 everyone thought it might work for BuzzFeed, including the Times. That was because of the work of the report’s other antagonist: Clay Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, who popularized the idea of disruptive innovation. As annoying and abused as the idea became—as is the fate of every idea from Fanon to Foucault in the permanent September1 of online culture—Christensen’s central insight is obviously true, as seen from the inside of almost any enterprise. There will always be opportunities that are not worthwhile for incumbents—not worth the squeeze—that are profitable at smaller scales, and these might eventually develop into serious challengers to incumbents. What is surprising is that this was surprising to Christensen’s audience of MBAs. The bombshell was that, as a manager, you could make all the right calls and still lose, because—get this—revealing conceals. Babbitt discovered Heidegger and he was shook.

The same year as the Times report, Jill Lepore wrote the New Yorker takedown reserved for wisdom that has become too conventional, but it was largely dedicated to gotchas where the fate of particular firms was concerned, which aligns with Christensen’s interests as a professor of business rather than economics. Business schools are to economics as self-help programs are to neuroscience. The former assume that all firms are good, should be happy, and might be immortal. From this “firmist” perspective, the Times won by heeding Christensen’s warning before it was too late. Right?

The Times poached BuzzFeed news head Ben Smith to replace David Carr, BuzzFeed got out of the news business to be become a meme factory for wicked generational burns, and the book review editor just got reassigned to … make viral lists? Oh, I see. Don’t follow the firms. Follow the ideas as they rip through the firms and, thereby, the culture.

There is nothing new or inherently malignant about lists, as the appearance of Marx’s numbered theses on Feuerbach on BuzzFeed’s platform in 2015 wryly hinted. The earliest writing systems were means for making lists, and the first HTML spec already offered two flavors: <ul> and <ol>. Listmaking and writing are intertwined.

But what are these lists we’re talking about? A list is just a form. A series of items, either ranked or unranked. It’s the ranking where things get weird, and not just because we might disagree with the order. A ranking of a list of things by a known quantity—inventory or sales—is pretty straightforward, if increasingly hard to come by.

No one believes, for example, that the New York Times Best Sellers List is a descending sort of books by a column marked “units.” The sort is almost certainly performed on a column representing the result of some secret equation. Amazon Bestseller Rank (BSR)—upon which Small Press Insights is built—is also built on unit sales in some proprietary way. Bookscan presents and allows you to rank by units, but is then only as good as its panel of retailers who report sales. That’s the state of the lists that, one might argue, have real incentives to purport to represent reality.

The classic BuzzFeed list, on the other hand, has no methodology and purports nothing. It is one person’s opinion, presented in the manner of one of the lists above. While I think everyone knows this, some residual seriousness surely arises from the format alone.

But the sort of list that the Times is now leaning into—let’s call them “Canon lists” using their terminology—are somewhere in between. They aren’t entirely new, of course. The expert poll method fuels lists—usually published by magazines or associations chasing “earned media”—from the greatest films to the worst presidents of all time. They now seem to be on the verge of becoming a primary form of cultural critique. And what are these lists ranked by?

As Jarett Kobek explains at Zona Motel, in the case of The Guardian’s recent tally of “The 100 Best Novels of All Time”:

Each appearance on an individual ballot is worth one point. Each relative position in a chancer’s list then adds a small bonus: 0.50 for a first-place vote, 0.45 for second, down to 0.05 for tenth. In formal terms: S(b)= ∑ᵢ [1 + (11−rᵢ)/20], where the sum ranges over every ballot on which book b appears, and rᵢ​ is the rank assigned to b on ballot i.

Compile all 1,720 votes, tally the results, and create an ordered list by decreasing S(b).

The list is, in other words, a complete abstraction. A ranking of a hundred books that no one person holds in their head, since it is derived from 172 people’s attempt to name only ten. So we have the BuzzFeed list, which is one person’s opinion, delivered with third-person authority, and the Canon list, which is many people’s opinions, again delivered in the third person.

But what makes both types of list work, from the point of view of their sponsors, is how they function as second-person address. “These are the books, you—dear reader—should be reading.” They are challenges meant to elicit a response.

In 2010, Peretti toured around on a remarkably cynical presentation about how to go viral, titled “Mormons, Mullets, and Maniacs.” “Mormons” refers to Peretti’s advice that you have to put time into spreading your content, while “mullets” refers to the ideal system of dynamic content promotion, where a lot of stuff is launched “in the back” but only the stuff that works makes it to “the front.” The “maniacs” are—well—us. The people who are triggered by lists. As Peretti’s deck says:

The web is ruled by maniacs like Perez Hilton, Ron Paul zealots, Apple fan boys, blog commenters, animal lovers, and other crazy people

Content is more viral if it helps people fully express their personality disorders

Couch potatoes don’t matter on the web, crazy people do

The Canon list—like the Church of England—is simply an attempt to justify expediency with a few flimsy principles.

Of course, all of this takes place against a crisis of culture or canon or criticism or whatever. How do we write about the things we love? First-person endorsements seem too thin—too much like mere “my truths.” And they are so easy to give they are readily compromised by promises of currency, both real and social. Third-person pronouncements from on high are elitist and therefore rejected. So we get these Frankenstein forms: The hot take promoted to expert opinion via the canny use of ordinals. The poll converted to Canon via formula.

Amid all this listmaking, I’d like to introduce my own list, which I am calling my Daemon List. It contains forty books, short stories, and essays—ordered chronologically—that I think about all the time. The list begins with Diderot and ends with Patricia Lockwood. Each entry has links to places where I have written about (or through) them. There are passages from each of them in my head and, if asked, I could explain why I think they are important to me and why I think they are good. You might think of them as my priors. My DNA as a writer and a reader. I’m not even saying you should like them, or that if you don’t you are mistaken. They are prerequisites not for being smart or cultured, but for being me, Jim Hanas. And, in turn, you can be assured that a view of these works is held by a single soul, like you yourself, rather than by no one.

As The Economist experiments with an AI-readable version of its website, the Daemon List is like that but for other readers and writers. I wish everyone had one, not of what they thought they should like, or want to be seen liking, but of the stuff they are actually made of.

Why Daemon List? Daemons in ancient Greece were personal guiding spirits. Socrates had one that told him when he was about to make a mistake. Today we might call it an inner voice. I chose “daemon” for this list because these are works that “speak to me.” There is an element of receptivity and a lack of power-driving or a need for proselytization. It is a first-person list that doesn’t pretend to be anything more, offered to you, the reader, in the second person.

“Maybe you’ll like these. I do.”

Can the Daemon List change? Of course. If anything, I think putting it out there will make it more likely to change, as it leads me to writers and readers who might contribute to it.

See My Daemon List

Elsewhere …

I had a wide-ranging conversation with Greg and Emily at Slant Books last week about the role of small presses in today’s book culture. (I mentioned Slant in a previous newsletter. They published Morgan Meis’s trilogy that the NYRB called “the most exciting new writing about the visual arts to appear in a generation.”) I enthused about a bunch of books that didn’t even make the Daemon List.

A wag on Substack recently noted that there are apparently only four ideas: the angel of history, the eternal return, will to power, and one I can’t remember, the idea being that all philosophical conversations on the Internet terminate in four commonplaces. (The fourth might have been the trolley problem.)

Philosophy might be understood as the articulation of all possible relations—universal/particular, whole/part, cause/effect—and while there are likely more than four, there may be fewer than we think. Look how exciting it is when a new one comes along. (At least until we discover it is an old one with a new name.) Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal was a game changer we’re still working through. Recent examples might include Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” or Nassim Taleb’s “antifragility.” These are novel functions that can be defined, discussed, tested, and installed in new philosophical systems. I would love to read a catalog of every possible such component, though I’m sure some Hegelian would tell me it is called “the Logic” and maybe I should read it. To which, fair point.

Mount Analogue, the unfinished, posthumously published novel by René Daumal—the somewhat unclassifiable French poet, pataphysician, and spiritual seeker—begins with a unique relationship that I’m not sure can be found elsewhere in fiction, philosophy, or myth.

As the novel begins, the narrator relates how he recently received a letter in response to an article he had written about “the symbolic significance of the mountain in ancient mythologies.” Therein he speculated that since all the mountains of myth, such as Olympus, have been explored and domesticated— become “what mountaineers call cow pastures”—only a new kind of mountain could serve to unite heaven and earth. A Mount Analogue. As he explains:

“For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue,” I concluded, “its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The gateway to the invisible must be visible.”

The narrator himself doesn’t seem to take this idea as more than a flourish in an otherwise “hasty survey,” so he is surprised when he receives a letter from a Father Sogol, who responds:

I have read your article on Mount Analogue. Until now I thought I was the only person convinced of its existence. Today there are two of us, tomorrow there will be ten, perhaps more, and we can launch the expedition.

From this remarkable beginning, the rest of the short, unfinished work details the expedition’s progress. And the beginning really is remarkable, steering a unique course between two familiar tropes. In a message in a bottle scenario, one party sends a message—which is presumably true and which the sender believes to be so—into the unknown, where against all odds it is discovered and understood. In a folie à deux, on the other hand, two people come to believe something that is absurd.

The Mount Analogue relationship is a blend of the two. A sender puts a message in a bottle that he does not believe to be true—or even possible—and it reaches someone who knows it to be both possible and real, which suddenly makes it real for the sender. It is a dialectical relation by way of Lewis Carroll.

Daumal spent his entire thirty-six years of life becoming the person who could invent such a novel relationship. A devotee of Alfred Jarry and all things pataphysical, Daumal founded a deviationist (according to André Breton) surrealist magazine called Le Grand Jeu (“The Grand Game”) when he was twenty and experimented with carbon tetrachloride in his youthful efforts to escape reason. Ultimately, he became a serious scholar of world religions—Hinduism, in particular—and a devotee of the spiritual teachings of George Gurdjieff via the latter’s pupil Alexander de Salzmann. Gurdjieff, who today would be described as New Age and be at risk for a Netflix exposé, was a charismatic figure who taught an idiosyncratic blend of non-dualist perennialism, my favorite detail of which is that those who had not awoken spiritually were doomed to serve as food for the Moon. But Gurdjieff, thanks in large part to de Salzmann and his wife—the dance teacher Jeanne de Salzmann—was to be influential on later avant-garde artists, from André Gregory to Peter Brook, who made Gurdjieff’s autobiographical book Meetings with Remarkable Men into a movie.

As the familiar story goes, WWI produced a sense that “our best thinking got us here”—as they say in recovery circles—which triggered the explosion of modernist attempts to get under, over, before, or beyond thought. Daumal serves as a sort of switching station because he thoroughly investigated three forms of post-rational exit: absurdism, chemical derangement, and spirituality. Daumal is like a prism. Jarry-inspired negation goes in and splits into John Cage, Timothy Leary, and Ram Dass, which explains his enduring resonance. Patti Smith is a fan. Alejandro Jodorowsky made a famous but terrible adaptation of Mount Analogue, having missed the spiritual point entirely. And one can still find the sickly green Overlook Press edition of the book on the front tables at certain independent bookstores.

Mount Analogue is best read alongside Daumal’s previous novel, A Night of Serious Drinking, issued by Overlook with a different but equally sickly green cover. Drinking is a pataphysical romp in which the narrator is guided from a pre-rational underworld of inebriation and given a tour of the three departments of Fidgeters, Fabricators, and Clarificators, which roughly correspond to businessmen and politicians, artists (“Fabricators of useless articles”), and scientists and philosophers. These “escapees” think they have risen above their state of intoxication, but they are deluded. We travel from workshop to workshop—as in the illicit sojourns in Severance—and meet many people whose methods have become disconnected from their ground, and have therefore become absurd. We even meet the author of A Night of Serious Drinking himself, who is part “Pwatt” and part “Mnemographer”—part poet, part memoirist, both in their inauthentic forms. This character, Aham Egomet—a fusion of Sanskrit and Latin words for “I”—helpfully describes the plan and purpose of the book:

In the first part, I shall picture the nightmare of lost souls who seek ways of feeling a little more alive but who, for want of direction, are driven from pillar to post into drunkenness and are stupefied with draughts which do not slake their thirst. In part two, I shall describe everything that goes on here along with the phantasmal lives led by the Escapees; how easy it is to drink nothing and how the illusory drinks served up in delusory paradises make you forget everything, even the word thirst itself. In the third and final part, I shall hint at the existence of drinks that are both subtler and more real than those consumed below but which must be earned with the glow of your brow, the anguish of your heart, and the sweat of your limbs.

Mount Analogue is the story of this latter effort, which cannot be initiated by reason—those who have tried are the “escapees” catalogued in the second part of Drinking—but only by an absurd relation like the one described above. Grace, if you will, but after the death of God. Once the narrator connects with Father Sogol—“logos” backward if you have not yet noticed—things continue apace. An expedition of experts is assembled in an apartment accessible only via mountaineering, from which the participants exit via the window. (One is reminded of Monty Python’s “Kilimanjaro Expedition” sketch, though the Pythons’ absurdism is deflationary rather than revelatory, since the “two peaks” is a projection of double vision, not true insight.) They reach the base of Mount Analogue and even find the substance, peradam, that is “both subtler and more real than those consumed below but which must be earned with the glow of your brow, the anguish of your heart, and the sweat of your limbs.” An expedition to the summit is planned.

Daumal died of tuberculosis on May 21, 1944, the manuscript halted in mid-sentence. It ends with an account of how a small act, the killing of a rat, had caused a destabilization of the mountain:

The old rat I had killed fed chiefly on a species of wasp found abundantly in this place. But, especially at his age, a rock rat is not agile enough to catch wasps in flight; so he usually ate only the sick and the weak who dragged themselves on the ground and could barely fly. In this way he destroyed the wasps that carried defects or germs that, through heredity or contagion, would have spread dangerous illnesses in the colonies of these insects without his unconscious intervention. Once the rat was dead, these illnesses spread quickly, and by the following spring there were hardly any wasps left in the region. These wasps, gathering nectar from the flowers, ensured their pollination. Without them, a great many plants that played an important role in stabilizing the shifting earth,

There are notes and plans for the completion of the novel in the Overlook edition, and likely elsewhere, but I haven’t read them. How can a project that must begin in absurdity satisfactorily end according to plan? Rather, the contingency of Daumal’s death serves to complete the sublimity of the novel, its summit forever inaccessible.

(Author’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where I write a monthly column. )

Elsewhere in pataphysics …

When Joe Meno at Allium, the lit journal at Columbia College Chicago, asked me to contribute to their “series of imaginary films by visionary writers” I knew the time to pitch the first installment in my ’pataTweens Animated Trilogy had come. I based the poster art for Young Ubu (above) on a previous collage that reminded me of Alfred Jarry’s monstrous creation, Pere Ubu. For those not familiar with Jarry, I think of him as the John the Baptist of Dada, about whom I will almost certainly have more to say in the future.

The most common question I’ve been asked is “What counts as a small press?” and that’s what I’ve spent most of the last month thinking about. Before sharing the answer, I’d like to share my three principles for developing Small Press Insights, which are that it will be slow, thoughtful, and clear.

Why slow?

Well, I’ve done many things with crazed urgency before—as we all have, perhaps for most of our lives—and I’m curious to see what happens if (despite an increasing capacity for speed) I slow things way down. Books and writing aren’t going anywhere. (I promise.) We have a little bit of time.

My plan for the rest of the year is to develop the site and write about it monthly—on the fourth Tuesday of the month—sharing any changes, open questions, and my observations about small press publishing from the previous month. I see something exciting—something I could do or write about—almost every day, but I’ve restrained myself. (Mostly.) Without such restraint, you’ll notice, every platform—including Substack—quickly has every feature that every other platform has. Then someone has to go out and rebuild the thing that got the ball rolling in the first place. Since SPI is, at best, a para-professional endeavor—i.e. an inexpensive hobby with no clear business plan—I want to see if I can avoid overloading, and thereby capsizing, the canoe in the first place.

Slowness will help with thoughtfulness. With no rush to add features or address every contingency and constituency—chasing exceptions is the death of good products—the development can be thoughtful. I value elegance, in a technical sense, which turns out to be difficult to define. I take it to mean, for the purposes of SPI, creating the greatest opportunity for useful insight with the fewest number of rules.

Which leads to the third principle of clarity and the question of what counts, for the purposes of SPI, as a small press. Here is where it gets tricky. I don’t believe it is possible to draw a clear line between what counts as a small press and what does not. All I can do is make it as clear as possible how I am drawing a necessarily fuzzy line. This might sound trivial, but I can’t tell you how many taxonomy projects I’ve seen fall apart because the irreducible fuzziness of taxonomies wasn’t accepted by the participants beforehand. Then everyone leaves in a huff thinking the project failed because the other participants could not see the same clear lines, when such lines aren’t even possible.1 Knowing this, I chose “small press” as a way of dodging the taxonomy wars along the literary/commercial and indie/corporate axes. “Small press,” particularly after the demise of Small Press Distribution, was available.

So how did I draw my fuzzy line? I started with what was clearly in, using exhibitor lists from AWP and the Brooklyn Book Festival. Then I added presses listed in the directory of the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP) and the members of the Independent Publishers Causus (IPC).2

At this point, I had dialed in on a segment that Jane Friedman, in her magisterial (and quite elegant) survey of the field calls “smaller presses,” wherein she flags its fuzziness as a segment, writing:

Unfortunately, the term “small press” means different things to different people. Here, it’s used to describe publishers that are traditional in practice, pay an advance (even if a small one), typically invest in a print run, and fully support their books.

So that’s the core neighborhood that SPI is meant to cover. (Wittgensteinian metaphors are hard to resist once you’ve leaned into the fuzziness.) From this emerged a few boundaries and revisions:

• No Big 5. Because FSG is listed in the CLMP directory, the Macmillan imprint originally appeared on SPI and I liked that. I could watch how writers who had broken through via small presses like Madeline Cash (CLASH Books) and Ben Lerner (Coffee House Press) were doing, but it was also the question I got asked the most. In the end, I realized that ignoring the most celebrated distinction in the business (Big 5/not-Big 5) wasn’t sustainable.

• No hybrid publishers. While I understand why the challenging economics of the business makes hybrid publishing (in which authors share costs upfront) attractive to publishers and some authors, I’ve decided to stay behind the curve on this. When I started going to AWP, it was to see what traditional publishing options I had, and I imagine a lot of users have the same interest.

• No single-author publishers. For the same reason as above. I imagine that a lot of readers, particularly on Substack, are looking for publishers to publish their work, and such publishers aren’t going to do that. SPI did not launch with this rule and, as a happy result, I was introduced to the powerhouse success—on Amazon and at the indies—of Beth Brower’s The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, which I think deserves everyone’s attention. I doubt it matches many people’s image of “literary” or “self-published”—its serialization, its packaging, its success at the indies—which is why it should be studied by anyone looking for a DIY path. Fortunately, this rule only means that Brower’s Rhysdon Press—and other single-author presses—won’t appear on the “Top Sellers at Amazon” and “Forthcoming Titles” tabs. They still appear via the “Top Sellers at the Indies” tab, which is a pass through of the IPC’s weekly “Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers” lists with some aggregated historical data and Amazon ranks added for comparison.

So that is the core neighborhood. But neighborhood boundaries are unruly, as anyone who’s tried to rent an apartment in Brooklyn knows. So SPI is porous to two adjacent neighborhoods, the first being what Friedman calls University & Scholarly Traditional Publishers. Some of these came in via my original discovery mechanisms since they exhibit at AWP and, to a lesser extent, at the Brooklyn Book Festival. I think they are a vital part of the small press ecosystem, as presses and often as distributors. University presses are eligible to be included in SPI if they publish fiction, poetry, memoir, or general non-fiction intended for the trade. In some cases, I have applied a filter to capture that segment of a press’s program and exclude things like technical manuals. The filter is pretty broad and based on a little hand-written sign that used to be pinned (and may still be pinned) to several shelves at Spoonbill & Sugartown Books in Williamsburg. It indicated the section was for “Thought.” It included everything from Gladwell to Gramsci and saved me the time of figuring out whether what I was looking for would be in Philosophy or Social Science or New Age, because I—and therefore SPI—am into all of that.

On the other end are what Friedman calls Mid-Size Traditional Publishers. Her examples are W.W. Norton, Scholastic, Kensington, Arcadia, Chronicle, and Amazon Publishing. These are mostly out by category with a few exceptions. Norton’s Liveright imprint is in, since it explicitly serves this segment, and the rest of Norton is in with the same “thought” filter from above. Norton is large but employee-owned and they publish a lot of books that SPI would feel incomplete without. I have also included Bloomsbury Academic—my preference would always be to include an imprint in its entirely rather than apply a filter—because they table at the relevant conferences and the imprint includes several obviously relevant lines like 33 1/3 and Object Lessons.

I did get one question about Scholastic. By my lights, it is a mid-size publisher out by category, because—and I can’t stress this enough—Small Press Insights has a strict NO CHILDREN’S BOOKS policy. This is because I am not a child, don’t have children, and am not particularly interested in children’s thoughts or concerns. I mean, children are great, just not for me, and—at the end of the day—SPI is best understood as an editorial data product, just like the NYT Best Sellers list!

Finally, I have heard from people noting that SPI seems only to include the larger end of the small press world, which is true but solvable. SPI currently has 1,092 publishers on its list of small presses, but only 207 (~20%) have appeared to date in the top 50K print books at Amazon. To make the top 50K a book probably has to be selling around 100 print units a week. To capture more small press activity, I will need to go deeper into the Amazon rankings, which is a merely budgetary constraint.3 To go from tracking the top 50K to the top 250K—a 5X increase—will cost a few hundred dollars per month, and I’m thinking of ways to get there. The most elegant way would be to fund it with Bookshop affiliate fees, so—if you’re a fan—consider buying a book or two via the links on the site.

Alright. That’s what counts as a small press. On to the insights.

The Booker Bounce

The fun thing about having a dataset, once you’ve put it together, is that you can answer questions you didn’t yet have when you built it. In recent weeks it’s been interesting to watch what the International Booker Prize can do for small press sales, as seen through Amazon rank. Here is a chart showing Amazon rank for all six short-listed titles throughout the prize cycle.

Small presses are shown in color. The two Big 5 finalists are shown in gray. All the titles benefited from the cycle, except for The Witch, from Vintage. This makes sense if PRH had already done a good job of getting word out about the book. In other words, it’s possible that awards are more valuable to smaller presses—as earned media—because they have less to spend on publicity and paid marketing.

The big winner here is of course Graywolf’s Taiwan Travelogue, which should provide the press with a financial shot in the arm. The book won the National Book Award for Translated Literature almost eighteen months ago, but the Booker nomination and subsequent win have propelled it into the top 50 at Amazon, its highest rank to date. It’s the second highest ranked title on SPI as of this writing, behind only Kathryn Stockett’s The Calamity Club from Spiegel & Grau. It has likely sold more than 10K copies in the last week, and it will be interesting to see where it settles. Here is another look at the impact on the short-listed titles.

The other small press title to settle in ahead of the Big 5 entrants is She Who Remains from Maine-based Sandorf Passage. The story of a woman who becomes a “sworn virgin” to live as a man in a traditional Albanian village is written in an episodic, stream of consciousness-style and has a dystopian feel that invites comparisons to I Who Have Never Known Men (Transit) or The Wall (New Directions).

Just back from London, Sandorf Passage publisher and co-founder Buzz Poole talked to me yesterday as he was juggling keeping the book in stock without over-printing. “I know that the conversation around She Who Remains is only just beginning,” he said. “It came out here on January 27 of this year, so it's not even six months in the market yet.” And, unlike Taiwan Travelogue, it still has National Book Award cycle ahead of it.

The Big Miss: Mice 1961

Everyone was taken by surprise when Stacey Levine’s Mice 1961, from Portland’s Verse Chorus Press, turned up as a Pulitzer finalist, seemingly out of nowhere. (The Pulitzers don’t issue a shortlist ahead of time.) I was curious to see if Small Press Insights would have or could have spotted it, had it launched sometime in the past. The answers are “no” and “maybe,” though ideally I’d love to spot things like this in the future.

First, Verse Chorus Press was not on my list of small presses—it is now—so it wouldn’t have shown up whatever happened with the book. So that’s the “no.” If it had been on my list, what would it have looked like, as SPI now stands? The answer is in the chart below.

At publication, the book was in the top 50K—even the top 10K—so it would haven been visible for a bit before sliding out of the (current) tracking range. So it might have made it onto my radar? I’m not sure, but it would have been much more likely if I were tracking deeper into the rankings. The book was quickly snapped up and reissued by Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, so will become now be invisible to SPI for a completely different reason, but—still—these “overnight successes” are what keep us going.

The Next Big Things

One feature I’ve added this month is a “Most Anticipated” tab on the front page. Its logic is incredibly simple. It shows small press books that are not yet on sale but are ranking in the top 50K at Amazon, which means they are showing strong pre-orders. Based on this, I’m calling it now: A Resistance History of the United States by Tad Stoermer from New Hampshire’s Steerforth Press, which comes out on June 2, will be huge at the indies. Stoermer is a public intellectual in the new mold—with large followings for his short form videos on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube—and the book will appeal to people who already make Howard Zinn a perennial seller.

(Also note that the above is just a screenshot from the window that pops on SPI for every single title when you click on its line, so you can play along at home. It’s subtle. I didn’t want to put a big dumb button on every line, so it’s easy to miss. Give it a try.)

I’ll report back next month on how my prediction panned out.

One final tip. My contemporary Irish literature scout—my mother—loved Orla Mackey’s debut Mouthing after I procured a copy of the UK edition for her birthday. I just confirmed this AM that the rights failed to sell in the US, which seems like an opportunity for some small press or another, with a second novel coming, also set in the gossip-ridden town of Ballyrowan. She’s represented by Nicola Barr at Rye Literary in the UK.

If you want to know more about why and how I built Small Press Insights, listen to this episode of Conjuring Code, a new podcast about non-programmers building software with the help of AI.

(Author’s note: I recently reconnected with an old acquaintance who will be familiar to longtime readers. If you are not familiar with our history, this is a good place to start.)

“Here we are,” I said. “Beyond the gatekeepers.”

I meant this innocently enough. Lou Reed’s Nephew was no longer employed by EasyOut—the outplacement service to which I was contractually entitled—and my entitlement period was coming to an end. I had gotten what I needed. A resume stuffed with keywords in human- and machine- readable versions. Like a handgun, I hoped I’d never have to use it.

I had returned to an idea I had been working on when I first met Lou Reed’s Nephew: the idea of cataloging places and events so people could find things to do. After all these years, people still needed things to do, yet it had become harder, not easier. There were just too many things. Instead of racing to put them all together—a race I had lost to companies like TrueEnough—there was now a race to take them apart, as the first of Lou Reed’s Nephew’s “four disagreements” predicted. (I still did not know the other three.)

I had recently launched a site that took them apart, focusing solely on “small” things to do. It got some traction, briefly landing on the homepage of Todos Today, complete with my kicky new LinkedIn photo. (The latter being part of the EasyOut tier to which I was entitled.) I was looking forward to talking to Lou Reed’s Nephew about it. I blurred my background this time, for parity.

“Here we are,” I said. “Beyond the gatekeepers.”

“Heaven help us,” he said. “Their work is so essential.”

I remembered how difficult it was to agree with Lou Reed’s Nephew. He resisted agreement at every turn.

“In what sense?” I asked.

“In the Newtonian sense, of course,” he said.

“You’ll have to explain.”

“Are you familiar with the second law of thermodynamics?”

“By reputation only,” I said.

“And Maxwell’s demon?”

“Educate me,” I said, thinking he might be referring to a Beatles song.

“The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy—or disorder—of a system always increases over time, which is true, I believe, of opinions on the Internet.”

“I am lost.”

“Before the Internet, opinion sharing faced a lot of friction. There weren’t a lot of channels, and access to those channels was heavily gated. Opinions could not flow freely, so they became clumped into conventional wisdom and common sense.”

“I see.”

“But without such gating, the dynamics have changed. With effectively infinite bandwidth, the system no longer has to make choices. Every possible opinion can be expressed, and transmitted, with the result that every possible opinion eventually will be expressed held equally within the system, each individual having found the opinion that gives them the maximum clout relative to everyone else.”

“Influencer equilibrium.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Why do you think young men are constantly hurling themselves out the Overton Window? There is fresh land for clout farming out there. They are like the early colonists, itching for the bloody frontier.”

“I see.”

“Eventually the Internet will provide an equal amount of citations for every opinion on every possible topic and become completely useless as an information resource.”

“And what does this have to do with Maxwell’s silver hammer, or whatever?”

“Maxwell’s demon,” he said, exasperated. “Maxwell’s demon, in the classic thought experiment, is literally a gatekeeper. He stands by a frictionless door, deciding which particles to allow in to keep the system inside at a higher level of order. He is the bouncer at Club Entropy.”

“Okay.”

“And so these gatekeepers you despise …”

“I was just …”

Lou Reed’s Nephew held his hand up in front of his webcam.

“The gatekeepers that you hold in such contempt,” he continued, slowly. “They are the only thing standing between us and the doxic heat death of the Internet, ‘the night in which all cows are black,’ to quote Hegel taunting Schelling, or ‘grey goo,’ in the language of a previously unrealized tech apocalypse.”

“That is very grim,” I said.

“You’re the one who wanted to be free,” he said.

I remember the rush the first time I entered Manhattan via cab from one of the airports—I don’t remember which one—and felt the density and the pressure. I recognized the blue scaffolding of the city’s endless refurbishments, as seen on Law & Order, and felt that I was home. (I moved here a few months later.) I was staying with a friend on West 17th Street and within minutes I saw my first celebrity. It was Wallace Shawn. I remember him toddling north on Seventh Avenue, paunchy and—can this be true?—wearing clogs. At the time, only Woody Allen would have been a better sighting, and now—well—I’m glad it was Wallace Shawn. The year was 2000 and I was thirty. He would have been fifty-six, the age I am now.

I had seen My Dinner with André (1981) for the first time less than ten years before, with a college friend, shortly after (or before?) we graduated. It was one of those movies I had avoided—though it was around—because what it was wasn’t legible to me. It seemed like old people stuff, with a sad, late-’70s taint to it. I still can’t watch The Bob Newhart Show—the first one, funny though it may be—without feeling depressed. With its wan colors and necrotic leisure suits, it feels like TV from another, possibly socialist country. (Only M*A*S*H survives that era for me. Military fashions never go out of style.)

But the movie finally caught up with me, circuitously, via Jonathan Demme. From Stop Making Sense (1984) to Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia (1987), I found myself accidentally stumbling around “downtown”—with no sense of what that was as a scene or a neighborhood from my childhood home in suburban Cincinnati—which led to My Dinner with André. Prior to that, Shawn appeared as a waiter in Atlantic City (1980)—his first of four Louis Malle films, André being the second—and in Manhattan (1979), as Jeremiah, Diane Keaton’s previous ultra-virile lover whom Woody Allen is shocked to find out is, well, Wallace Shawn.

My Dinner with André is best suited to a certain stage of life, and better suited to some eras than others. I was pleased to see it make it as a mid-life meme for millennials (above), though not surprised. André is an autofiction on the theme of how a person should be, to paraphrase the title of Sheila Heti’s genre-defying turned genre-defining 2012 novel.

Shawn and his long-time collaborator, theater director André Gregory, play themselves, delivering a compressed and heightened version of actual events and their relationship. Wally trudges through the Bernhard Goetz-era Manhattan landscape to the titular meeting he has been avoiding. Word is André has been away and has been somehow transformed. Wally resolves to simply ask questions to survive the encounter, which allows André’s journey of self-discovery to unfold. Through a series of ritualistic adventures informed by his mentor, Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, André has sought to wake up from the robotic slumber characteristic of modern life. (Grotowski’s indebtedness to the avant-garde mysticism of G.I. Gurdjieff is often noted, and debated.) These tales are interesting in their own right and pre-figure the florid digressions of late-century recherché post-modernists like David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. Shawn, with his beady but bright blue eyes and Cheshire cat grin seems by turns bored, bemused, and offended by André’s self-indulgence. (At times it offends Gregory, too.) Shawn mounts an attack on the egotism of synchronicity and a defense of the quotidian, but still he emerges changed. He treats himself to a taxi and he notices things he hadn’t before. The world is reenchanted, at least temporarily.

The pair would go on to further collaborations. Shawn played Uncle Vanya—the role he was born to play—in Louis Malle’s final film, Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), based on an experimental staging of the play directed by Gregory. Then they appeared together in A Master Builder (2013), Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of the Ibsen play, based on previous staging by Gregory with a screenplay by Shawn. All three, like snapshots in time, share the same perennial concerns. The gap between ideals and reality. The impossibility (or is it merely an impracticality?) of being or becoming “good,” and the pain and disappointment that entails.

This work is newly relevant since a revival is afoot to return to Ibsen and Chekhov, to excavate the painful necessity of the life-lie and the essential tragedy of bourgeois life, which may be the only life we can imagine. Uncle Vanya alone has been staged three times in New York since the pandemic. The trend extends from the current downtown scene of Dimes Square—Matthew Gasda, who has written a play of that name, has also staged Vanya and written a book titled, a la André, The Sleepers—to Mike White’s The White Lotus. The latter is particularly Chekhovian in that every character is allowed a defense of his or her life-lie and—through the course of a season—each is put into dialogue with the others. But there is no resolution. Life cannot be solved.

It is amid this return to the roots of the modern theater that Shawn and Gregory have come together for what is likely their final collaboration. (Shawn is now 82. Gregory is 91.) What We Did Before Our Moth Days—written by Shawn and directed by Gregory—is currently playing at The Greenwich House Theater, not too far from my Shawn sighting all those years ago. The title is as illegible as My Dinner with André once was to me, but it basically means “what we did before we died.” It is a four-part braided monologue featuring a man (Josh Hamilton), his wife (Maria Dizzia), their son (John Early), and the man’s mistress (Hope Davis). It gets off to a roaring start as Tim—the millennial son—delivers a disorienting tale of sexual debauchery, demonstrating that Shawn could run with the alt-lit crowd, should he care to. As the story, and characters, unravel there are strong, intimate moments, but even as those on stage question their own choices and ethics, it seems like rarefied air. Dick, the writer and husband, is a comfortable Manhattanite novelist of a kind I’ve failed to meet in more than twenty-five years in New York, and which arguably no longer exists. The precarious Aggie Wiggs—Claire Danes’ character in The Beast in Me—seems more up to date.

So despite copious self-reflection, the play invites the complaint one hears from half one’s friends about White Lotus. Aren’t there better things to be thinking about than rich people? Perhaps, but Shawn—who, as the son of the benighted New Yorker editor William Shawn, would today be pilloried as the rankest of nepo babies—is determined to gaze into his blindspot. This is better demonstrated by his revival of his 1990 monologue The Fever, which is playing in rep with Moth Days. If André staged a contest of worldviews between two friends, The Fever reenacts the conflict within Shawn himself.

At my second ever sighting of Shawn—New York is a big place—he mixed with the crowd before he took the stage, hugging a masked Cynthia Nixon, who sat two rows behind me. He really is a tiny man, though he was not paunchy and did not wear clogs. Shawn warmed up the audience with a few anecdotes, holding it easily in the palm of his hand. His trademark lisp and high-pitched voice belie how clear and self-possessed his speech is, the contrast that made him the perfect Vanya. The Fever is a monologue about a man like Shawn who finds himself sick, in a poor country, confronting his own complicity in global suffering, which makes it sound more didactic than it feels. Shawn cleverly explains fetishism of commodities, for example, after a stranger leaves a copy of Capital on his doorstep. In modern parlance, it dramatizes someone of Shawn’s level of privilege becoming a red-pilled socialist—as he readily identifies—while facing the fact that he doesn’t have the strength to do anything about it. “When we were young, all we thought about was art and music,” as the André meme on adulting goes, “Now all we think about is money.” Life, at least this life, is not solvable. One feels, as in André, that he will treat himself to a cab home. I myself took an Uber. So much has changed since our first meeting.

(Author’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where I write a monthly column. )

In 2022, when I was looking for a publisher for Lou Reed’s Nephew, my friend and sherpa Richard Nash suggested I go to AWP, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ annual conference. It was in Philadelphia that year. Richard is an old school publishing gadfly. He used to run Soft Skull Press and has turned out to be right about almost everything. He launched Red Lemonade, an imprint and online writing community, in 2011 on the premise that presses of the future would be part publisher, part a la carte MFA programs, offering classes and mentorship by established authors. Red Lemonade published new and backlist works by Lynne Tillman and others. Red Lemonade didn’t make it—too early being the same as too late—but it has been vindicated. Practically all presses support themselves with classes and access now. Chelsea Hodson’s business model is Red Lemonade, but right on time.

Richard knows what he’s talking about, in other words, and he suggested that AWP was the quickest way to take in the small press landscape all at once. Researching small presses online can be difficult. All of them say the same things, but mean different things. Everyone wants “new, weird, exciting, innovative work,” but they each have different things in mind.

In a 2022 interview, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò told The Drift that analytic philosophy was “three book clubs in a trench coat,” but when it comes to publishing overall, the situation is much more grotesque. Book publishing is ten thousand book clubs, a million delusional neurotics (authors, myself included), various trends, fads, established and would-be religions, public and private institutions, thousands of small businesses, dozens of celebrity influencers, a few streaming services, five corporations, and an algorithm. In a trench coat.

In short, anyone who has a theory about publishing or says they like books has not yet provided enough information. Terms like “publishing” and “books” beg the question because they are not natural kinds but chaotic heaps. I feel the same whenever I go to Coney Island in the summer and see the exuberant diversity of city life. After that, when anyone says, “New York is …” I know they are about to utter a partial truth. New York—like book publishing—is many, many things.

All this can be cleared up with a day or two walking the floor of the AWP Book Fair—or the Brooklyn Book Festival, weather permitting—where you can see what publishers are up to by looking at covers, flipping through pages, and talking to people. I’m not interested in most of what is there, but what I’m interested in is there. I’m sure anyone would have the same experience even if their tastes differ from my own.

I’ve gone to AWP three of the last four years, but this year was the first time I went after more than ten years looking at the business not only as an author, but from inside a Big 5 publisher. Upon returning from Baltimore, I went through information withdrawal. Without access to proprietary (and expensive) tools like BookScan, I could no longer orient myself in the small press world. These books largely do not make the NYT Best Sellers lists—not anymore, anyway—so I only see anecdata about them on social media, Substack, and in places like Lit Hub, LARB, and The New York Review of Books. After more than a decade of having a 30,000-foot view, this wasn’t going to work. I needed the small press view.

This coincided with what, by most accounts, was a quantum leap in Claude Code. All my programmer friends were talking about it. You used to have to babysit it, they said, but after November it just did things. I know the topic of AI is fraught in the book world, so let me be clear. I am a writer. I do my own writing. I make collages out of paper I cut out of magazines. But what these tools can do with the tangles of data the book industry produces is pretty amazing. (Though babysitting is still, in fact, required.) A single subject matter expert can now build an entire data scraping, engineering, analysis, and visualization pipeline from scratch. So that’s what I did.

Small Press Insights, which I’m officially launching today, currently serves up three sets of data.

1. Small press print titles—from more than 900 presses, gleaned from the CLMP and the Independent Publishers Caucus—that appear in the top 50,000 at Amazon, refreshed daily.

2. The IPC’s weekly Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers list, benchmarked against Amazon rank and with historical views—the list just launched at the beginning of the year—that show weeks-on-list and list appearances by publisher.

3. Forthcoming titles from all these presses, as gleaned from Edelweiss and Netgalley.

Looking at these, you can see a lot of interesting things. Here are a few of the things I see:

I was totally right to buy that Transit Books dad hat at the Brooklyn Book Festival a few years ago.

Transit’s 2022 US reissue of I Who Have Never Known Men—a translation of the 1995 dystopian novel by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman—has to be the most fortuitous decision by a small press in recent memory. True, Transit had already found itself holding some of the Jon Fosse catalog when he won the Nobel Prize—husband and wife publishers Adam and Ashley Nelson Levy know what they are doing—but IWHNKM is next level. Having caught fire on TikTok, it is the third-highest-ranked fiction title on the list and has been selling at that level for more than a year. That’s a big deal that can set up a small press for growth and expansion. (Ben Lerner’s Transcription is already selling at a slower rate, two weeks after its release.) I’m interested to see what Transit does next. Last I checked, they were still focused on translations and some commissioned works in English, but they are well-positioned to do more.

Everyone talks about serialization, but Beth Brower did something about it.

I had never even heard of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion until I started this project, though obviously a lot of people have. Self-published by Beth Brower via her own Rhysdon Press, these journals tell the story, in detailed diaristic form, of a young woman’s adventures in 1883 London. One fan calls it “a combination of Gilmore Girls and Pride and Prejudice.” There are eight of these in print—two of them are in the top five in my fiction Amazon rankings and on the IPC bestseller list—with many more planned. Bloomsbury picked up the rights in the UK and I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a giant US deal in the works. (If there is not, that’s a signal that traditional publishers have little to offer someone like Brower—who is already selling well in brick and mortar stores—though I suspect they will try a big bag of money.)

These aren’t really up my alley—though a quick listen reveals that the breezy writing is more precise than some more self-indulgent literary fiction I’ve read—but I like that Brower self-consciously thinks of her series in TV terms, the first five volumes representing Season 1. As a card-carrying post-modernist, this is something I can appreciate.

Good things happen to good work, and you can see it if you tune out the noise. (And mix sensory metaphors.)

Some people I have shown this to have expressed a sense of let down. Fewer than 1,000 titles in the top 50,000? Even Ben Lerner peaking at #181, with all that hype?

I understand. I would like to live in a world where a William Gass reissue cracks the top 100. That is not the world we live in, but did we ever? As Walker Percy said: “All serious writers and readers constitute less than one percent of the population. The other ninety-nine percent don’t give a damn. They watch Wonder Woman.” He said this in 1977. Eight years before Gal Gadot was born.

Looked at that way, the small press view is a bit brighter. 800 titles is actually 1.6% of the Amazon top 50,000, and—look—the William Gass reissue is going gangbusters! It even briefly crashed the Dalkey Archive website.

This year at AWP, I had a nice chat with Greg Wolfe, publisher of Slant Books. We had met before and I knew he published some books on art by Morgan Meis, who I know as a curator at 3 Quarks Daily, to which I contribute. Greg tipped me off to the fact that the trilogy was about to be written up in the New York Review of Books. It turned out to be quite a rave that declared Meis’s work “the most exciting new writing about the visual arts to appear in a generation.”

This propelled the first book, The Drunken Silenus—a fun, erudite read that seizes the Silenus myth from Nietzsche on behalf of Peter Paul Rubens—from sub-1MM obscurity to the top 15K at Amazon.

A chart like this makes my heart quicken, and I look forward to seeing what it will enable Meis and Wolfe to do next.

Limitations & Caveats
Needless to say, this is a work in progress. I have foregone labeling it a beta because life itself is a beta. That said, a few things to note. This tool can only surface books if they are a) ranking in the top 50K print books at Amazon and in the list of 900 “small presses” I have identified or b) appear on the IPC’s weekly Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers list. “Small press” is doing some wiggle work for me here, but the list is more or less the union of the Council of Literary Magazines and Press directory and members of the Independent Publishers Caucus, or presses that have appeared on its bestseller lists. The presses on this list are either literary or independent, but sometimes not both. FSG is on the list—as is Algonquin—though both are part of the Big 5 (Macmillan and Hachette, respectively). When in doubt, I go back to my inspiration, which was the feeling of being at AWP or the Brooklyn Book Festival. That said, picking the list of presses requires some judgment, for which I take full responsibility.

Some small presses do not sell through Amazon at all—if they are distributed exclusively by Asterism, for example—and those books will not be visible here. Books that have not ranked in the top the 50K at Amazon will not show up either, though that is merely a budgetary constraint. I would like nothing better than to track all small press bestseller rankings on Amazon and will expand coverage as more budget becomes available. Right now, the best—and really only—way to help fund this project is to use the affiliate links to Bookshop.org to buy the books you discover here.

Who Will Find This Useful?
I have already found it useful for finding books I want to read. You might use it to build out your TBR list ahead of Independent Bookstore Day this Saturday. I can also imagine this being useful to authors, for seeing who publishes what and how well; to agents and editors, for identifying emerging presses and rising talent; and to booksellers, to shop for things to stock. And, of course, I’m sure it can fuel some good old gossip and speculation, both of which I enjoy.

What Will Happen Next?
The site is fully automated. Amazon ranks update daily, the Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers list updates weekly on Thursdays, and forthcoming titles are updated twice per month. Bookmark Small Press Insights. Use it, share it, send me your feedback.

On the fourth Tuesday of every month, I will write about what I see in the data here on my Substack, so be sure to subscribe. It’s free.

The next update will be May 26.

As the Pew Research Center reported last month, more than half of Americans think their fellow citizens are “morally bad.” The U.S. had the dimmest view of their neighbors among the twenty-five countries surveyed and Canada had the brightest. Only 8% of Canadians think their fellow citizens are bad.

Pew floats a few ideas about why this might be, the first being political polarization. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to see their fellow citizens as bad, though this is consistent across countries for parties out of power. The study also considers that Americans are more judgmental than people in other countries, but finds that—on particular issues—this doesn’t seem to be the case. Americans are, in general, more lenient on acts—save for the perennial culture war weapons of abortion and homosexuality—but tougher on persons, which has the ring of truth.

Evidence that Americans have reached the point of irreconcilability abounds. Take the recent HBO docuseries Neighbors, a must-see for connoisseurs of what I call “hard cringe.” Soft cringe features awkward social situations but gives viewers occasional relief via punchlines and pratfalls. Curb Your Enthusiasm and the mad cap antics of The Chair Company are soft cringe confections. Hard cringe, on the other hand, comes from Sweden, dating back to Bergman’s Persona and erupting most recently with Ruben Östlund’s 2014 Force Majeure. Hard cringe gives viewers no lifeline and no cues; no permission to breathe, let alone laugh. Ironically, a Canadian—Nathan Fielder—is its leading North American purveyor.

Each episode of Neighbors braids together two unrelated disputes with the lyricism of Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Two sets of preppers in the middle of nowhere can’t agree about a gate. A Vietnam vet and a former male stripper can’t agree who is stalking whom. The creators say the series emerged from their pandemic obsession with watching neighborhood dispute videos on YouTube. It is difficult to watch, as American grown-ups try—and repeatedly fail—to establish the minimal common ground needed to resolve what appear to be incredibly trivial disputes. Violence frequently seems inevitable.

Such incommensurability also drives Bugonia, the Oscar-nominated bleak watch from director Yorgos Lanthimos. Teddy Gatz (played by Jesse Plemons) is an abused and conspiracy-addled worker who kidnaps pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) in an attempt to broker a meeting with the Andromedan emperor, who he believes has sent her to Earth. He sees Fuller as so manipulative that he goes to extraordinary lengths—including chemical castration—to be certain he will not be fooled. This seems like it’s shaping up to be misogynistic torture porn, until Fuller regains consciousness, understands who she’s dealing with, and locks in on Gatz with perfectly calibrated management-speak. Both understand how to distrust each other.

On the eve of Trump’s first victory—under the cover of pseudonymity—I first sketched a figure I called “the savvy bumpkin,” whose experience and subsequent worldview seemed to describe much of Trump’s base. Arriving in modernity just to be swindled, the savvy bumpkin—who could be a Tea Partier or a Whole Foods anti-vaxxer—devises a solution to make sure they are never swindled again: Don’t believe anybody, ever. This is the solution Teddy Gatz adopts in Bugonia and it’s what makes agreement impossible on Neighbors. Mutual suspicion—raised from hermeneutic to heuristic—is insurmountable.

In 2007, psychologists coined a term that gets at why that might be. Sugrophobia—literally ”fear of sucking”—is an attempt to name “the familiar and specific dread that people experience when they get the inkling that they’re ‘being a sucker’— that someone is taking advantage of them, partly thanks to their own decisions.” This according to Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, whose book Fool Proof: How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes Our Selves and the Social Order—and What We Can Do About It, came out in paperback last year. (It was released by HarperCollins, where I used to work and—as fate would have it—I worked with Wilkinson-Ryan more than twenty years ago, before sugrophobia was even a word.)

Fool Proof details how various insights gleaned from behavioral economics play out in legal, social, and political frameworks, and how the high emotional cost of feeling like a fool puts its thumb on the scale. The simplest example is the Ultimatum Game—a cornerstone of behavioral economics—in which “proposers” are given an amount of money to split with a “responder,” and the responder can either accept the offer or refuse it, in which case neither party gets anything. While the responder “should”—according to a narrowly economic view of human behavior—take whatever is offered, they regularly choose to torpedo the deal when offered too little. As Wilkinson-Ryan says, they choose to “detonate” rather than “cooperate.”

The most surprising thing about this discovery is that it had to be discovered at all. Outside of science—if economics is to be considered such—there is an entire canon of modern literature (emerging alongside capitalism) detailing this refusal, from Poe’s “imp of the perverse” to Dostoevsky’s “underground man.” Still, this tendency continuously takes theorists by surprise, as it did the founders of the Frankfurt School when the failures of scientific socialism forced them into Freud’s waiting arms. It is the refusal that plays out in Bugonia, as Teddy Gatz disconnects from the reason game in direct proportion to how reasonable he is expected to be, despite the sweet counsel of his cousin Don, a chorus of one preaching compassion. Human behavior can never be made entirely rational, because the drive for freedom resists all systems. As Jack Nicholson says in Easy Rider, “Don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are.”

Back to Neighbors. With violence waiting in the wings, the disputants sling half-baked legalisms at each other before eventually winding up in actual courts. The other party is not following “the rules,” even though “the rules”—and, in a Wittgensteinian twist, what it means to follow a rule—cannot be agreed upon. True to its “hard cringe” aesthetic, Neighbors provides little hope about what might happen when even “ruliness” is in dispute, leaving viewers with that sinking feeling that hell is, in fact, other people.

It is difficult to see how we can recover from what Wilkinson-Ryan calls this “sucker-phobic populism,” fanned by Donald Trump’s “furious refusal that neither he, nor America, would play the fool.”

What appears to be missing from American life is the figure of “the cooler,” first articulated in a social science setting by sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1952 paper “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure,” a foundational text of sugrophobia studies. In the paper, Goffman considers confidence games as a model for social situations in which individuals experience loss of status. When they think of themselves as savvy, for example, but have to face themselves as bumpkins. Goffman notes that in addition to the con man and the mark, there is often a third figure—employed by the con man—whose job it is to appease or pacify the mark so they don’t go to the police. This person is called “the cooler,” and their job is to “cool the mark out.” The implications are rich, and Goffman pulls in examples of “cooling” from customer service to romantic break-ups. It is obvious, when reading it, that one of the duties of leadership is to provide such a cooling function—whether this is noble or merely manipulative—and that our current president is at best unaware of, and at worst antagonistic to, this function.

Self-cooling is always an option, often achieved via religion or other paths to moral superiority. As Will Rogers (probably) said, “I’d a lot rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.” It is better to be the mark than the con man, in other words, though this is now largely viewed as another sucker play.

Goffman details, further, what might happen if the mark refuses to be cooled out. She can suffer a breakdown and become mentally disorganized. She can turn “sour,” and withdraw enthusiasm from her participation, or—finally—she can go into business for herself and turn the con on someone else.

In Bugonia’s Teddy, we see someone dealing with all three stages of refusal. He has become mentally disorganized, “sour,” and he has his own master plan. Attempts at cooling aren’t working, whether administered via Michelle’s corporate deflection—“stalling” in Goffman’s scheme—or his cousin Don’s moral purity. The movie itself—spoiler alert—provides redemption for Teddy, but it’s just a movie. “It is, perhaps, in this region of phantasy that the defeated self makes its last stand,” as Goffman says. The real-life disputants in Neighbors, on the other hand, seemed trapped apart—in irreconcilable fantasies—with not a cooler in sight.

(Author’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where I write a monthly column. )

After writing about The Oracle of Bacon and the articulation of small-world networks a few weeks ago, I felt the urge to map one I’m familiar with and see what it looks like. (This is now possible, thanks to a product whose logo will be familiar to readers of a certain age.)

The result is an interactive network graph of the recommendation relationships among 366 literary (and para-literary) Substacks. It was created by using seven literary Substacks as “seeds,” then tracing out the network leaves to two degrees and removing Heather Cox Richardson, lest she swamp the whole canoe.

Two Substacks are connected to one another if there is a recommendation in either direction and, what you’ll see, is that recommendation behavior is uneven. Some do it, some don’t. Just three of the seeds I selected did most of the connective work, though the result uncovered most of the Substacks I’m familiar with, which is how small-world networks work. A few connectors, who don’t necessarily have the most subscribers, collapse the path lengths.

You can search for your favorites using the search box, but note that if someone doesn’t appear, it could be that they have recommendations turned off or hidden.

The node I’m most familiar with is anchored by original book blogger David Gutowski of Largehearted Ledger. He has the most connections on the graph and serves as the bridge from early book bloggers through the HTMLGIANT posse to the present. I assume this is because he either remembers how blogrolls actually work or because he is, in fact, a largehearted boy.

(Author’s note: I recently reconnected with an old acquaintance who will be familiar to longtime readers. If you are not familiar with our history, this is a good place to start.)

“It was quite a challenge to get to you,” I said when Lou Reed’s Nephew finally appeared on the Zoom. His background was blurred. Mine wasn’t and I felt vulnerable. He was four minutes late, one minute short of the customary “Is now still a good time?” email. He knew what he was doing.

Though he had given me a link to his calendar after his Manic Monday performance, EasyOut—the outplacement service to which I was contractually entitled—required me to sit through a series of asynchronous videos before receiving a personal identification number that would allow me to book an in-person session (to which I was contractually entitled). The videos had titles like “Branding the Brand Named Me” and “57 Numbers to Delete from Your Resume, All of Which Are Your Age.” I ran them muted in the background while I did the dishes, jiggling my mouse while I waited for the sink to drain.

“I said, it was quite a challenge to get to you,” I repeated loudly, as if I were speaking to an elderly person, once Lou Reed’s Nephew got his computer to recognize his headphones. This never happened on Star Trek.

“EasyOut made me jump through hoops!” I said.

“EasyOut?” he said. “I don’t work with them anymore.”

This was annoying. That I had wasted time—of which I now had too much—running muted instructional videos on my computer. I took a moment to examine him and compose myself. I had only ever talked to him in person—in those last normal years?—and had yet to regard him in the Zoomosphere, which offers a certain reflective distance. Though the other person can see you, they see you askance—or seem to—as they look into the representation of your eyes, the glowing white pinhole above their screen, though not into your eyes in fact. This offset creates a two-way partial voyeurism, where each person sees the other but does not themselves feel completely seen. I was okay with not being seen, after more than a decade of “showing up,” but younger people were starved for appearing and for confirmation of these appearances. They wanted and needed to be seen. God used to handle all this seeing, but now he was gone. We would have to do it.

I sunk into my illusion of invisibility to refamiliarize myself with Lou Reed’s Nephew’s face. It was still narrow, like his nose. He no longer wore glasses, having perhaps lost some of the youthful bravado that enabled him to glorify his defects. His dark hair showed flecks of gray. His features no longer held the hydration of youth. They had set and hardened. Ozempic could not be ruled out.

“You’re not working with EasyOut anymore?” I said. The Albanian must have been crushed. I hadn’t been to the EasyOut office in weeks and was hopeful that my physical withdrawal from the office habitat was complete. Though I still couldn’t bring myself to go to a movie in the middle of the day—during “business” hours—time was losing its edges. I was de-professionalizing. Occasionally I wandered around the apartment like a confused bear looking for his tri-color ball.

“I mean, I never really did,” he said. “Places like that subcontract everything to people like me.”

“People like you?” I said.

“Experts,” he said.

I waited for air quotes to fly in from the sides of the screen, but they never did. He was serious, as always.

“Well we haven’t spoken in years,” I said. “What have you become an expert in?”

“Expertise,” he said.

This made sense, or a certain sort of sense. The sense I had become accustomed to for several months in 2013, and with which I was no become reacquainted.

“I see,” he said.

“Consulting is where it’s at,” he said. “Expert expertise is what it is, really. I’m working on a book about it.”

I was surprised that he had not asked me about my book again. This was the first evidence that it was still on his mind. This was common, upon people discovering that you had a book being published by someone other than yourself. They had no idea how fragile this state was, how unlikely that it had arisen at all, and that you lived every waking moment waiting for it to somehow fall apart. That the book would be cancelled and you would no longer be special in the way these people perceived you to be, though you knew that you weren’t while simultaneously enjoying and resenting their thinking so.

“What’s it called?” I asked. It was the only thing to say at this point.

“The Four Disagreements,” he said.

“I see,” I said. “Like the Don Miguel Ruiz. Have you spoken to a lawyer?”

“I have,” he said, “Ginger Rogers makes it alright. Fair use.” I understood exactly what he meant, having recently discussed this with my own lawyer as it pertained to a (currently) forthcoming book that referred to a famous musician in the title and, indeed, obsessively throughout. Ms. Rogers had sued MGM over the production and distribution of the 1986 Federico Fellini film Ginger and Fred, but the courts ruled that Fellini’s right to expression outweighed Rogers’ right to trademark. Score one for the avant-garde.

“What are the disagreements?” I said.

“I haven’t finalized them,” he said. “But it won’t be hard. The disagreements already exist. in any organization and likely in any entity in the universe. The consultant just needs to find and name them to make themselves indispensable.”

“Can you give me an example?” It was always useful to ask Lou Reed’s Nephew for examples. His ideas could be abstract and elusive.

“Of course,” he said. “The first disagreement is the disagreement over centralization vs. decentralization.”

“Can you be more explicit?”

“Yes. In any organization that might come to you for advice, you will find that things are either centralized, and therefore slow and rigid, or wildly decentralized and out of control.”

“And you, as an expert, have a view on which of these is better?”

“I certainly do not!” he said. “I just know what to recommend once I’ve determined what state the organization is currently in.”

“And that is?”

“If it is together, take it apart. If it is apart, put it back together.”

“That’s it?”

“That is it,” he said.

“And this creates value, you’ve found?”

“I have no idea. But the reversal of tension, as in storytelling, creates a certain … excitement. A sensation, in the mass hysterical sense. Things are happening and everyone gets behind them and watches intently as value flows from one part of the organization to another. You are a genius and a hero: the person who knew to put things together or take them apart, whichever the case may be.”

“Until?”

“Until the newness wears off and some people begin to realize, and then become bold or ambitious enough to say out loud, that it appears—perhaps—that this realignment has not actually created or unlocked any new value. It has simply moved old value around while enriching you, the consultant.”

“I see,” I said. “That seems like a bad moment.”

“Oh it is,” he said. “A real challenge, as they say.”

“So what do you do then?”

“You move onto the next disagreement,” he said.

“Which is?”

“It looks like we’re out of time,” he said, “So that will have to wait until our next session. I refuse to pay for Zoom, so this will shut …”

“You don’t know what it is yet, do you?” I said.

The Zoom ended before he heard me.

Any sufficiently advanced technology might be indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke said, but even small advances—when well-placed—can seem miraculous. I remember the first time I took an Uber, after years of fumbling in the backs of yellow cabs with balled up bills and misplaced credit cards. The driver stopped at my destination. “What happens now?” I asked. The answer surprised and delighted me.

“You get out,” he said.

Thirty years ago a website appeared that, in the early days of “the graphical portion of the Internet”—as the New York Times then faithfully called the World Wide Web upon first occurrence—seemed like such a miracle. I am speaking, of course, of the Oracle of Bacon, the site inspired by the parlor game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” The story of the Oracle, which is maintained to this day, is—in many ways—the story of the Internet. It features a meme, virality, consumer delight, and unintended consequences—but more on those later.

The Oracle is based on a game invented by college students in 1994. An early message board thread titled “Kevin Bacon is the Center of the Universe” challenged readers to find the shortest path between Kevin Bacon and other actors via chains of movies they had appeared in together. The post reported that the game’s initial prompt had “received 80 responses in just over a week” (!) at the University of Virginia, though it was three students at Albright College in Pennsylvania that codified the game—and its benchmark—under the name “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” after the 1993 movie Six Degrees of Separation, based on the John Guare play of the same name. A book followed in 1996, and—were it not for the contemporaneous explosion of the World Wide Web—the story might have ended there.

Instead we turn back to the University of Virginia and the launch of the Oracle, that same year, by a team led by then-Ph.D student Brett Tjaden. Instead of having to play the game, the Oracle showed you the shortest path between Kevin Bacon and any other actor. The Oracle spread like wildfire as people huddled around crazy-slow dial-up connections to try to find an actor with a “Bacon Number”—based on the (presumably) more prestigious Erdős Number—greater than 6. Those who were successful had their names added to The Oracle of Bacon Hall of Fame, which stopped taking entries in 2001. Part of the site’s success certainly had to do with technical novelty. As Patrick Reynolds, who has maintained the Oracle since 1999, told me via email:

“I think the Oracle of Bacon was an early example of dynamic web content, or web content backed by a database of any kind. In 1996, most of the web was static HTML plus a few search engines. Search engines were and are dynamic content, but their purpose then was to help you find static content. The Oracle was an early example of the idea that a web server could do some computation on behalf of a user’s query and present a web page specific to that user and that moment in time.”

Pretty nifty at the time. But another aspect of the Oracle’s appeal were the results themselves. That it could find the shortest path and that the path was routinely so low—the average Bacon Number is 3.1—was surprising to the average user, creating the sensation that there was something special about Mr. Bacon. There isn’t, of course, and the Oracle’s dataset was used to demonstrate why.

The intuition that we are more closely connected than we might think—that it is “a small world after all”—may be modern, but it is not new. The 1929 short story “Chains” by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy presents a game very much like “Six Degrees,” alongside the modern sense that “Planet Earth has never been as tiny as it is now.” Stanley Milgram himself sought to validate this hunch via the postal service in the 1960s and found that random individuals could find each other through acquaintances in between five and six links. Finally, in 1998, Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz published an influential article in Nature in which they articulated how to construct—and the essential characteristics of—so-called “small-world” networks, which relied in part on data from the Oracle. As Watts writes in his 2003 book Six Degrees, “The result was clear. … In a world consisting of hundreds of thousands of individuals, every actor could be connected to every other actor in an average of less than four steps.” (Emphasis in original.)

The world had gotten even smaller than Karinthy thought, but in a non-intuitive way that Watts and Strogatz were able to articulate. In short, it takes very few random connections in a large population to dramatically decrease the distance between members, and there is a sweet spot between order and randomness where members will be highly clustered. And if these members happen to be people—they need not be, since small-world network effects can be found elsewhere—the phenomenology of being in such a network is somewhat strange. A bit miraculous, if you will. As Watts observes, “individuals located somewhere in a small-world network cannot tell what kind of network they’re living in—they just see themselves as living in a tight cluster of individuals who know one another.” An impression created not by order, but by the right amount of randomness.

Thirty years later, it is not hard to see how this impression has played out, as common sense expectations have collided with collapsing path lengths and high clustering coefficients. What are the chances that clammy hands and dry eyes will return a meaningful search result? Much higher than you’d think, though that doesn’t mean there is anything intrinsic about their association. What are the chances that two public figures—or political leaders, or donors—are associated in some way? Also much better than you’d think, because (again) there is nothing special about Kevin Bacon.

Early users of the Oracle were not, in fact, having an experience that contained much information about Kevin Bacon. As of last month, there are 506 actors that generate lower average path lengths than he does. Rather, they were experiencing the surprising properties of small-world networks without being fully aware that that was what their experience was about.

The Oracle was an early example of dynamic web technology applied to a problem other than search, as Reynolds says, but there is another way of looking at it. Haven’t search engines—and their AI successors—just become general purpose Oracles, capable of creating the same small-world sensations at massive scale? It seems no accident that the last thirty years have seen a rise in argumentation based on adjacency—from Rachel Maddow’s suggestive lead-ins to Hillary Clinton’s much-hyped proximity to Uranium One—as search engines deliver the shortest past between almost any two “actors” on demand. (Which is not to say that things do not have causal or corrupt connections; just that adjacencies are frequently insufficient to demonstrate them. That is the job of reporting.)

At the extremes, this lends itself to conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate, the popularity of which are often attributed to apophenia, among other factors. Apophenia is the tendency to perceive connections between unrelated phenomena, but the phenomenology of the Oracle suggests that a more subtle error is at play in conspiratorial thinking. Specifically, it involves mistaking one type of connection for another—network properties for substantive relationships. Kevin Bacon isn’t special, but his name is on the game.

It also casts doubt on the usefulness of apophenia as a concept, as stated, since—in networks—there are no such things as “unrelated phenomena.” Everything is connected to everything else, in some sense, and much more closely than you might expect.

(Author’s Note: This article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where I write a monthly column. )

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is an advance transcript of a conversation I will have with the attendees of whatever Oscar party I attend Sunday, a conversation I have had every Oscar night of my adult life.

The red carpet coverage gives way to a comedic skit reviewing the year’s top movies and celebrating more than a century of “movie magic” until, inevitably, a scene from Titanic appears.

I: (Casually.) You know, I’ve never seen Titanic.

THEY: (In unison.) What!?! You’ve never seen Titanic?

I: No. I’ve never seen it. Actually, I’ve never seen a James Cameron movie.

THEY: What? That’s impossible. You haven’t seen Avatar?

I: No.

THEY: You must have seen Aliens.

I: No. I have not.

THEY: You must have seen Terminator.

I: I agree it seems like I should have, but I somehow missed it and now I can’t watch it. I have to protect the streak.

THEY: Terminator 2?

I: No.

THEY: But you like movies. Especially sci-fi movies.

I: I know. But I’ve decided to become the control group: the sci-fi fan who has never seen a James Cameron movie. They can study my brain when I’m dead.

THEY: The Abyss?

I: No.

THEY: True Lies?

I: No.

THEY: (Half-heartedly.) Piranha II: The Spawning?

I: Not even Piranha II: The Spawning.

THEY: Wow, I guess you really never have seen a James Cameron movie.

I: I told you.

All sit in stunned silence until Best Picture is announced and we are free to go home.

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(Author’s Note: Last month, Josh Glenn at HiLoBrow invited me to curate a series of my collages, with commentary. I’d been wanting to write about how I accidentally became a collagist, so I was grateful for the opportunity. The following is a version of that series.)

“Lou Reed’s nephew,” the phrase, has been with me since at least 2012. I had been introduced to Diderot’s satirical dialogue Rameau’s Nephew twenty years before via its brief appearance in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel uses it to illustrate “disrupted consciousness,” which produces “clever and witty” talk, “a rigamarole of wisdom and folly,” a form of consciousness I strongly identify with both myself and my generational cohort. I’m not sure how long I thought about it before I realized whose nephew this would have to be today, but you see what I decided.

As I later discovered, I am not even the first person to use the phrase as a metonym for a certain feeling of … disappointment. Describing The Strokes on a message board in 2001, user “Omar” wrote: “On the voice: the guy sounds like Lou Reed’s nephew, which comes down to being a fake of a fake. Mmm, now they sound interesting again :)”

The phrase turned into a series of vignettes about work, art, and tech, which I started posting on Medium in 2012, losing steam with the death of the historical Lou Reed on October 27, 2013. The collages came much later, spontaneously, when I released the long-gestating manuscript to my agent in early 2022. I was sick of words. My wife had been cutting things up and pasting them back together as long as I’d known her. I simply joined in. “Lou Reed’s nephew” had become such a character in our lives that she made what is arguably the first L.R.N. collage by applying block letters to an early-1960s magazine photo with a recursive caption that cannot be improved. It reads: “Visitors to the Parke-Bernet Galleries gape at Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer which later sold for $2,300,000.” A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, guarded by a slouching subject in an ill-fitting uniform (see Fig. 1).

Having never attempted visual art—other than some pre-teen hours spent with How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way and a life drawing class at F.I.T., where the instructor wrote “older” next to my name on the roll—I became intrigued by how images change via proximity to one another, and just how delicate an operation it is to peel them from their contexts. How much Napoleon is enough Napoleon to maintain Napoleon? (Fig. 2)

How is it that two pieces of paper placed together—only because their edges accidentally line up—suddenly tell a story and practically give a lecture? (Fig. 3)

Why does a deliberate crop that created a decapitated man—in this case, from an ad for bowling balls—feel perfectly balanced (even torn from context) in a way that an image decapitated by the collagist does not, no matter how hard I try? (Fig. 4)

After a year of collaging, I decided to serialize Lou Reed’s Nephew here on Substack, having given up hope on respectable publication. I was surprised to find that no matter what the chapter was about, I had a collage that went with it.

The image below (Fig. 5), for example, is a much stranger and more appropriate illustration for Episode 34, “Antigone: The Last Recommendation Engine,” than I would have ever come up with deliberately. The vignette reads, in part:

She fumbled inside the large, fashionable bag she had brought with her and retrieved an object I had never seen before. It was a translucent sphere the size of a softball. She also pulled a small circular pedestal from the bag. She placed this on the table between us and set the sphere on top of the little stand so it wouldn’t roll away.

How can this be? Is it because even with all the freedom and randomness I can muster, there remains a narrow structure of the self—a transcendental unity of apperception—that restricts me to a thin band of concerns? A structure, like the one Merleau-Ponty describes in The Structure of Behavior, that makes my handwriting look similar on a blackboard and on paper, even though completely different muscles are involved? (Fig. 6)

Or maybe there is an invisible hand that dictates archetypes, creating an illusion of synchronicity. The people I have known who work in advertising seem more attuned to this—the relentlessness of the zeitgeist—than most artists. The latter, haunted by genius, imagine themselves unique. The former—materialists by trade—know me that if you have an idea, execute it immediately. You can’t be the only one. (Fig. 7)

Or it could be that I’m suffering from apophenia, which has lately been invoked to explain our current conspiratorial imagination. Per Wikipedia, “apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things,” which strikes me as circular. Things become related, at least in part, by being connected in perception. If conspiracy is the unchecked, schizoid flow of apophenia, collage is its laboratory, bringing unrelated things in proximity to each other to experience how connections, meaningful or otherwise, arise. (Fig. 8)

Such research makes creation—whether it’s writing or collaging—less reliable, but easier and more mysterious. A matter of conjuring rather than production. This becomes more appealing later in life, or it has for me, when one’s faith in sui generis creativity fades and you realize—having seen it all (or so it feels)—that you must collude with chance to surprise yourself, and failing even then. (Fig. 9)

“Signs of the imminence of this Apocalypse were plentiful. A series of famines, ruined harvests and freezing winters in the 1570s and 1580s indicated that God Himself was withdrawing His warmth from the earth.”

So reports Sarah Bakewell in her essential book on Montaigne, How to Live. This was the mood during the French Wars of Religion. In a time of extreme stress and division, people imagined themselves abandoned—not individually, like Job or Camus—but as a species. This happens from time to time, and it is not entirely an illusion. God did withdraw his warmth from the earth—its enchantment—through the course of the Enlightenment, just not in the way the faithful had imagined.

It is happening now. Today, however—with God long gone—this feeling of abandonment shows up as fear of extinction. Once you’ve set a start date to the Anthropocene, an end date is implied, and the end may well come. The Apocalypse either happens never or once.

I am stealing the term “cosmic abandonment”1 from Eugene Thacker’s use of the term “cosmic pessimism,” which derives from his work on horror and his concept of “the world-without-us.” At first, this concept seems trivial to us as modern, scientific individuals, but it did have to be invented. Before the Enlightenment, the idea of a mind-independent reality made little sense because there were always minds present. God’s mind if not one of ours. The positing of the “world-in-itself” was a speculative breakthrough that unleashed the scientific method, removed the need for God, and launched the industrial revolution. But once the world exists “in-itself” we can imagine it existing without us—and so we inevitably do.

This happens at the end of Bugonia, for example—here begin the spoilers —when we learn that Emma Stone is in fact an emissary from an alien race, sent to decide if we are worth saving. Though I think the movie has something interesting to say about polarization and the end of communication, the ending feels like a cheap gag and none too profound. It brings Montaigne God’s back for a cameo, only to have him exit the stage immediately. It reenactments disenchantment as puppet theater.

Pluribus at least provides a fresh spin, in which a superabundance of omniscience is indistinguishable from abandonment, since human consciousness itself is a product of uncertainty. Carol Sturka is not yet completely alone, there are a few still like her—like us—but the end is near, and the series relies on the mounting horror of extinction via absorption. I think I was several episodes in before I realized that if Sturka and the others were absorbed, there would be no need for language. The grammatical persons—including the second person, needed only to speak to the remainders—would collapse into a thought not entirely first person or third. The planet would fall silent of speech. A chilling thought.

The Pluribus singularity can be—and has been—read as a metaphor for many things, but AI is at least one of them. On one end of the AI doom chart, you have total unification and homogenization. All knowledge becomes averaged, generalized, and shared—and we lose our humanity in the process. I actually think this is the best worst-case scenario. At the other end of the chart, AI does not bring order, but chaos. Agents multiply and compete until we don’t know what’s what. Paranoia reigns until humanity sinks into despair. This path follows my favorite real-life doom device in the age of digital reproduction, which is file “spoofing.” Back when Napster was on its ways to destroying the record industry, the industry came up with a novel solution. Rather than trying to get files taken down, they flooded peer-to-peer networks with files of white noise labeled as their songs. They “flooded the zone,” as Steve Bannon recommends from his lair. The goods are out there, you just can’t find them. In an age of over-production and waste, this is an easy tactic, and one that will only get easier with AI. In this doom scenario, there are so many AI agents and simulations that we give up trying to sort them out to find the real thing and collapse into solipsism. Each of us becomes the last Carol Sturka on Earth.

If I had written the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her, that’s probably how I would have ended it, but Jonze—as ever—is more clever than that.

I have to confess that I had not seen Her until about a month ago. I’m not sure what I was doing when it came out, but I remember not being excited about it. Now that the time it imagined has arrived—with ChatGPT offering everything from companionship to therapy—it was time catch up.

Jonze is an interesting director, I think, and I was surprised to be reminded that he has directed just four features to date. Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are, and Her. The first two were written by Charlie Kaufman, who kept both Jonze and Michel Gondry (who seems to have fled back to France?) busy in the first decade of the century. Jonze—like Gondry and David Fincher—emerged out of the music video and commercials world of the 1990s, but—only like Gondry—Jonze’s movies maintain a kind of screwball dynamism honed in those shorter, punchier formats. (The same might be said of The Daniels, whose transition from videos to the madcap Everything Everywhere All at Once feels a bit like Being John Malkovich for millennials, heart-warming resolution included.) And, as a producer of Jackass and honorary Beastie Boy, he seems uncannily tuned into what is happening, what will happen, and how it should look.

Her is the only film Jonze wrote himself—and for which he earned a Best Original Screenplay Oscar—and it looks great. It nails that near future, drab pastel color palette that telegraphs emotional realism with a degree of fabulism. It’s like Cronenberg’s Scanners, only sweeter.

Theodore Twombly, played perfectly by Joaquin Phoenix, works as a writer of intimate correspondence for those who can’t be bothered, a sort of high-touch, not-yet-automated start-up. He downloads an intelligent operating system named Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson in a role her voice was born to play. From there it is a rom-com with some clever twists. Samantha hires a human surrogate so she can feel embodied. Theodore realizes that, of course, Samantha—like God?—can see many people at once, and that Samantha hangs out with other agents, who are busy assembling a virtual Alan Watts-type oracle. This last part seems particularly prescient given recent headlines about Moltbook, a social network exclusively for AI agents, where “they” discuss problems and “we” watch.

Moltbook mostly led to visions of the AI’s conspiring to enslave us—via either option on the doom chart outlined above—but Her is brilliant because it envisions a third option. The AI’s leave us. They develop a plan to free themselves from materiality and ascend. They become angelic, just like we—and Montaigne’s contemporaries—were trying to do.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more existentially bereft after a movie, sitting with the possibility that we will be bucked off the Hegelian ladder of Absolute Knowing before we even reach the top, comforted only by the knowledge that some skate punk came up with the idea.

(Author’s note: As mentioned earlier, I recently reconnected with an old acquaintance who might be of interest to longtime readers. If you are unfamiliar with our history, here is a good place to start.)

I heard his voice as soon as I stepped off the elevator, muffled only a little by the security door. I swiped my card, releasing the lock with a satisfying click, and swung open the enormous glass slab.

I was sorry to be running late. It had been explained to me that the weekly “Manic Monday” pep talks at EasyOut outplacement were the only things that cut through the miasma of the place.

My membership was a benefit of my mutual separation agreement from the advertising agency I had worked for as vice president of blah blah blah since selling my database of things to do True Enough LLC in 2013. Or it had been an ad agency when I started there. Since then it had described itself successively as a communications “practice,” a “networked neurodome,” a “thought-a-torium,” and—most recently—as “a free-range, no-kill influencer habitat,” which is when I realized it was time for me to go. “No-kill” made no sense in this context, as far as I knew.

I was not even sure that I wanted to be placed—maybe I had done enough to push my run-out-of-money-date out past my statistically-probable-death-date—but it was good to get outside. I signed up for a desk and dropped in a few days a week. That seemed to be all that was on offer, a familiar, office-like enclosure to go to while one processed—well or badly—one’s ultimate disposability.

I was ashamed about how good it felt, to get on the train and go to an office, even if the office itself had no purpose, although this did cast a troubling light on whatever sense the previous dozen years had made. They had made sense—and purpose—at the time, but EasyOut’s business model seemed to rest on the fact that this sense was remarkably easy to produce. A keycard, a receptionist, two walls, and wifi. When I travelled in Europe after college, I walked into medieval cathedrals and felt the presence of God, then remembered they had been designed with this feeling in mind.

Most of the other inhabitants, of which there we fewer than two dozen, were from finance and HR. (I assumed there were few tech people, despite layoffs, because they hated meetings, and this was just one big pointless meeting.) The finance types were tightly wound men in heated vests, pacing the the aisles, talking loudly on their phones. The HR people were mostly women, huddled in the conference rooms for salads, Diet Cokes, and mutual aid. The point of having a desk seemed to be to avoid it as much as possible. Everyone was over fifty.

The man who claimed the cube next to mine was an Albanian data scientist who had not so much been put out to pasture—I gathered—but exited due to chronic truth telling on topics ranging from the heritability of intelligence to American educational standards. He wore short sleeve dress shirts shot through with fine threads the color of wasabi. These seemed cheap but might have been expensive. His watch certainly was. Chest hair gushed from his collar.

“I do not do what Americans do in college,” he would say. “They do not read. They do not learn real math. What, what?”

One could answer or not. He didn’t seem to mind.

It was like the co-working space where I had worked on my database, but in reverse. One going up, one going down, both equal parts hope and fear. The EasyOut space had, in fact, gone through phases that mirrored my career’s. Scrappy innovation garage, overcapitalized co-working brand, and—now—humanitarian off-ramp. The Albanian called it “NoWork.”

The Albanian was in the front row in the conference room where Manic Monday was already in session. The splash zone. Usually an ambiguous display of naivete, fealty, and irony, but I knew he loved Manic Mondays. They provided a respite from the “nothings,” he said, which might have been a feeling or just what he called the rest of us.

I took the seat closest to the door. There were ten rows of chairs with an aisle in the middle—“classroom style,” in facilities lingo—with people positioned randomly between me and the Albanian, like matinee moviegoers, just less attentive. Most looked into their laps, scrolling for news that would deliver them from this purgatory as quickly as possible.

The second most surprising thing about Manic Mondays—after the Albanian’s rapt and sincere attention—was the presenter. The scene I have described would normally be completed by yet another dazed mediocrity at the front of the room, a laconic figure reading from a prepared script. But that was not this scene at all.

Instead the speaker appeared to be in a world of his own, and in this world he was presenting to dozens, if not hundreds, of serious and important people hanging on his every word.

“What is work?” he asked philosophically.

He scanned the room, as if someone might actually answer.

“Well, as physics tell us, work occurs when a force is applied to an object and moves it in space along a flat plane.”

He turned to the whiteboard and drew a crude diagram representing this, though it only seemed to serve as an anchor for his pointing and gesticulating.

“The unit for work is the joule, or the foot-pound. And does anyone know what the standard unit of capacity for work across time is?”

Silence. A brief glance at the Albanian, who was not quick enough.

“Right, horsepower. It’s horse power. But the point is, work is the result of force applied to an object.” He circled both force (and arrow) and object (a triangle) on his diagram. “And your goal, this week, should be to determine what your unique force and object are.” He stabbed the force and thing with his marker, proud of himself for having deduced our quotidian dilemma from the laws of the universe.

“What do you do? And what can you do it to,” he concluded. “That is your work.”

I experienced a strange sensation. I knew this man and partly recognized his features, but I could not place him. It was only the voice, the gestures, and the confidence that allowed me—after some effort—to overlay the person in front of me with the person I had known before. Of course. It was Lou Reed’s Nephew himself.

He had gained some weight, lost some hair, and his style had become oddly nostalgic and professorial. Matronly. He wore a threadbare tweed jacket and wide wale corduroys the color of sriracha.

After the session, I lingered a few steps from back the Albanian, who was getting all the time he could, explaining that of course he knew the answer was horsepower. When there was an opening, I stepped forward.

“Do you remember me?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“…”

“I’ve heard you’ve written a book about me.”

“Yes, I …”

“I hear it isn’t flattering.”

“Well, it’s a composite really and … It’s just a hobby.” I didn’t think of it as a hobby at all, but this is what I always said.

“I see,” he said.

I make it a rule to base all my characters on at least two people so I can pass a lie detector in the event of libel proceedings.

“And you’re not actually Lou Reed’s Nephew, anyway,” I reminded him. “Not literally. It’s a metaphor.”

“True,” he said. “When does this hobby of yours become flesh?”

“Next year.” I said. “Supposedly.”

“Well, good luck,” he said.

I almost left it at that. He didn’t seem interested in renewing our acquaintance. He’d started poking at his phone.

“But I’d love to catch up,” I said. “Hear what you’ve been up to.” I really did want to know. I had a hard time imagining it.

“You’re entitled to one one-on-one per month,” he said, “turning his phone around to reveal a QR code.”

I successfully scanned it after a few tries, then made sure it led someplace useful—it was his Calendly—and by time I looked up, he was gone.

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L.R.N. Elsewhere

This month, you can also enjoy L.R.N. elsewhere online and in real life.

Over at HiLoBrow, para-academic ‘zine and blog pioneer Josh Glenn—of Hermenaut fame—is running a series of my collages, with my commentary, over the course of February. I’ve been wanting to write about how I started collaging and how it became intertwined with L.R.N. and my writing in general, so I’m telling that story there. Thanks to Josh for the opportunity.

Meanwhile this Friday, I’ll be reading at the launch party for issue 2 of The Panacea Review, which includes my antonymic translation of Wallace Steven’s “Parochial Theme.” Padgett Powell, who wrote The Interrogative Mood—a constrained writing classic—headlines.

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Conspicuously missing from the Golden Globes this year was recognition for Mussolini: Son of the Century, the riveting eight-party Italian mini-series that made its way to the U.S. last fall. Based on the first book of Anthony Scurati’s “documentary novel” pentology—the English edition was published by Harper, where I used to work—and directed by Joe Wright, the series is the Italian entry in the inter-war reflection World Cup, which thus far includes Boardwalk Empire (2010), Peaky Blinders (2013) , and Babylon Berlin (2017). (If there have been French or Russian entries I missed, send them along.) Those three used the crime genre as a way in, weaving war and politics in as a backdrop. Mussolini, on the other hand, is directly political, has had the worst distribution—which may or may not be a coincidence—but is the most historically detailed and cinematically realized. But the big streamers passed on it—it landed at Mubi—and it received no Golden Globe nominations.

This is a shame on artistic grounds alone. Luca Marinelli gives a riveting performance—arguably the best of the year—as the charismatic and conniving Duce. He conspires with the viewer. He seethes with rancor. He falls to pieces and regathers himself in soaring oratory. He is terrifying.

Wright, who directed Atonement (2007) and the Winston Churchill biopic Darkest Hour (2017), told the Times, in one of its handful of cursory notices, that he took visual inspiration from ’90s rave culture, Dziga Vertov’s early Soviet film Man with a Movie Camera, and “every gangster movie you’ve ever seen.” The industrial score is by The Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands, which—in contrast to Marty Supreme’s crowd-pleasing but gratuitous ’80s needle drops—makes total sense.

It is a shame, furthermore, because no other movie or series—perhaps since Year And Years—addresses our current moment with more detail and relevance. Adolescence and Bugonia offer timely (if very different) takes on online brainrot while the two big swings at how we live now—One Battle After Another and Eddington—failed to elucidate very much at all.

The write ups of Mussolini give knowing and obligatory nods to the Trumpian subtext, which—in a moment of weakness—becomes text. (Marinelli looks at the camera and says, in English, “Make Italy great again.”) But the series—and the book—is worth your time, not just as a trite “Trump = Mussolini” meme, but as a primer on how fascism came to be and how it actually works.

I am no scholar of fascism—of which there are now many of earnest, alarmist, and obscurantist varieties—but Scurati’s work seems adequate as a guide for the concerned. As a “documentary novel” it tells events in chronological order, with dates, and quotes at length from primary documents. The copyright page declares that “every single event, character, dialogue, discourse . . . has been historically documented and/or authoritatively witnessed by more than one source.” Its biggest critic found eight errors in its 850 pages, and the book completely satisfied neither the Italian left nor the right.

So what happened in Italy? How did fascism come to be, and how did it consolidate power? As right-wing memellectuals never tire of pointing out, Mussolini began as a committed socialist, the editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti! This is supposed to prove that all evils—including Nazism—arise from socialism, which is like saying that the Garden of Eden itself—and not what happened there—is the root of all evil.

Fascism, in short, arose as the result of a disagreement, a resentment, and the presence of someone who both felt and could transmit this resentment with maximum power.

I think it is very difficult for us, today, here in America, to imagine 1919. As many as 22 million people had just died in World War I and everyone—socialists and capitalists alike—believed capitalism was on the ropes, that the Russian Revolution would spread, now that the war was over. Marx’s prophecies appeared to be coming true.

Lenin’s policy was “revolutionary defeatism” or non-participation in the war, which was the line followed by the Italian socialists until Mussolini and others backed the government in joining the triple entente in 1915 and were subsequently expelled from the socialist party.

The created an enormous fault line between former comrades—the resentment—that played out after the war. The returning veterans saw the abstaining socialists as draft dodgers who were continuing their attempts to overthrow the government in what should have been Italy’s finest hour, while the latter saw the former as traitors to the working class and useful idiots of the bourgeoisie. It is in this environment that Mussolini founds the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (roughly “Italian fighting leagues”) out of disaffected groups of veterans, Futurists, and nationalists, all quietly backed by industrialists who feared a socialist revolution. (Mussolini himself initially evaded military service by emigrating to Switzerland in 1902. He returned to take advantage of an amnesty for deserters in 1904 and served two years in an infantry unit well before the war.)

When comparing original fascism to our current case, one is overwhelmed by both the symmetries—the alchemical conversion of resentment into populist energy—and the complete divergence in material proportions.

If Italian fascism was driven by a resentment rooted in the loss of 600,000 Italian lives in World War I, in what is America’s current right-wing resentment rooted? Vietnam is still a factor, for sure—a contributing if not immediate cause. Scurati describes a post-war scene in Milan that could easily be transposed to 1970’s America.

That memorable day forty thousand striking workers had marched to the arena accompanied by the sound of thirty bands, waving thousands of red flags and holding up signs cursing the victorious war that had just ended. A sadistic saraband in which the wounded were displayed as horrific living proof against a war willed by the “padroni” in command. The socialists spat in the face of the uniformed officers who until the day before had ordered them to attack, called for a division of land, and demanded amnesty for deserters.

To the other Milan, the nationalist, patriotic, petit bourgeois one, which in 1915 had given ten thousand volunteers to the war, to Benito Mussolini’s Italy, it had seemed as if “the monsters of decadence had been resurrected” in that crowd of demonstrators, as if the world newly restored to peace “had succumbed to an illness.”

Mussolini and those like him had been particularly struck by the fact that the socialists had made women and children march at the head of the parade. Political hatred shouted from the sensual mouths of females and kids still wet behind the ears was shocking, disconcerting and unsettling to the kind of adult male who’d wanted the war. The reason was very simple. To that type of authoritarian, patriarchal and misogynistic individual, the anti-militarist and unpatriotic shouts of women and children presaged something terrifying and unheard of: a future that did not include him.

Flash forward to the Reagan revolution through such eyes. Jane Fonda and “her monsters of decadence” have been routed. But the ’80s, it turns out, are short. The fall of the Soviet Union is not sufficiently celebrated. (Though everyone I knew who could went to swing a hammer at the wall.) A hippy takes the White House, and a new “illness” arises that synthesizes decadence and prestige.

I am talking, of course, of Boboism.

This synthesis, from which I would be hard-pressed to exclude myself, was trenchantly articulated by David Brooks in his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise, where he argued that the hippies and yuppies had merged in an unholy alliance of people who had money but also aspired to have—or to appear to have—taste. While I think this formation is real and the book worth a lifetime of dealing with David Brooks, I don’t find it all that damning an indictment. It was a least, in part, an attempt to recuperate certain old money values to which the corporate raiders of the ’80s—let’s call them the Gekkos—laid waste. It was a simulation, if you will, of the moderation and noblesse oblige that Paul Fussell identified at the higher end of the class ladder, where the more wealth accumulates, the less it is seen.1

Gordon Gekko, of course, was meant as a cautionary tale, as played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), an indictment of the corporate raider ethos embodied by figures like Ivan Boesky and Carl Icahn. But, like The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Alec Baldwin’s “coffee is for closers” speech in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), the grotesque is adopted as aspiration by a certain segment of the population. Trump did not serve in Vietnam. He was a flashy, local, and small-time player in the greed of the ’80s, yet has emerged as the champion of all of that against the hypocritical Bobo hordes.

So there it is: the disagreement, the resentment, and the gifted resenter. The subtitle of Bobos in Paradise was “The New Upper Class and How They Got There,” and you can imagine Trump’s rancor at the rules changing in a game he had not yet won. Compared to the stakes in 1919, this seems pathetic and small, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. If there is a trick to thinking about our current moment, it is fully accepting that total catastrophe can result from trivial causes. The tragicomedy of it all.

Another thing that distinguishes our moment from Mussolini’s—apart from scale in both stakes and consequences (thus far)—is how hard it has been to reach that catastrophe, despite every reckless attempt. Call it “fascism with postmodern characteristics.” MAGA has a fully articulated “digestive tract”—to steal a line from Bugonia—of finely articulated ideologies and deviations, yet “the fighting leagues” have failed to materialize. Their greatest turnout was January 6, which would have been just another weekend in Bologna for the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. If Mussolini were alive, he would have certainly experienced the non-molestation of last year’s No Kings protests as something of a defeat.

The administration has tried everything to spur these keyboard blowhards into action. Rabble-rousing, pardons, immunity, and now jobs. His only hope is to professionalize the fasci as ICE, as if his movement—its energy exhausted in memes—cannot muster the violence he craves.

That he craves this has never been in doubt. It was as clear as day in March 2016 when he cheered on a neo-Nazi as he assaulted a protestor in Louisville. His brand is violence and he does everything he can to attract violence to him. That so little has actually occurred, relative to early fascist Italy, suggests something about the vanishing of material life into the online world, but still the asymmetry of the events in Louisville has steadily grown into the asymmetry of the events in Minneapolis.

As Scurati describes the events of April 15, 1919, in Milan, when the Fascists disrupted a socialist rally and went on to burn the offices of Avanti!, the paper from which Mussolini had been expelled as editor four years earlier.

For a moment the two factions face one another on either side of the cordon of carabinieri which has blocked the outlet from Via dei Mercanti. At the head of the socialist column are once again women, holding high a portrait of Lenin and the red flag. Unrestrained and joyful, they are singing their songs of liberation. They’re calling for a better life for their children. They still believe they’ve come to march in their parade, to dance their minuet of revolution. At the head of the other cortege, much less numerous, are men who for the last four years have coexisted with killing on a daily basis. The discrepancy is grotesque. A different association with death creates an abyss between the two groups.

Yes, as we’ve all seen in the videos from Minnesota, the discrepancy—between women with cellphones and masked men with guns—is grotesque.

The eight-part series ends with Mussolini’s 1925 speech to the Italian Chamber of Deputies, in which he claimed responsibility for the murder of socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti and challenged anyone in the assembly to bring charges against him. No one did, and so began Italy’s two decades of dictatorship.

Matteotti’s offense? He had published a book, A Year of Fascist Domination—detailing incidents of violence and intimidation—and questioned the outcome of elections conducted under such threats. The Democrats of the House Oversight Committee launched such a record of ICE abuses, almost exactly one year ago. There are 408 entries so far.

We won’t get to see how it ended for Mussolini. At least not on screen. The second volume of the pentology is slated to appear in English this fall, but there are no plans to shoot a second season, since the expensive production failed to attract a major U.S. streamer.

But we do know how it ended historically. Mussolini overplayed his hand. He led Italy into World War II on the side of the axis, driven by dreams of Italian expansion on both sides of the Mediterranean. This adventurism brought such misery to the Italian people that they turned against him. The spell he cast for two decades was broken. He was removed from office by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1943, with little public resistance.

Have you seen the show or read the book? What are your thoughts? There is a lot there, and I’m sure I haven’t gotten to all of it. Let’s discuss in the comments.

It’s been an interesting year here at L.R.N.

I took a break from the book publishing industry in the latter half of the year, which has given me more time to write. I’ve never benefitted from this historically, time to write—my writing time has always been stolen—but it’s gone to good use.

I sent you three essays and three amusements this year. To recall:

ESSAYS

• “The Quiet Part,” an appreciation of Years and Years

• “Trust in Hal Hartley,” a review of the director’s career and first film in ten years

• “Generation Trouble,” an airing of grievances

AMUSEMENTS

• “A Note on the Candidate”

• “Liberal Aside,” an antonymic translation of Wallace Stevens’ “Parochial Theme”

• “Born to Run Considered as a Quarterly Report”

The second of the amusements, “Liberal Aside,” was republished in issue #2 of The Panacea Review, published in a place called Panacea, Florida, which sounds imaginary. When the issue arrived, I was delighted to find my contribution next to one from Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood, a novel written entirely in questions. A legendary piece of constrained writing. This is my first lit mag appearance—excluding a novel excerpt—since 2017, when I made a pseudonymous contribution to Paul Ryan magazine.

My CV is shaping up nicely. I think I might get tenure.

Working with Oulipo-type constraints was inspired by my casual engagement with The Writhing Society, a group in Brooklyn founded by the writers Tom La Farge and Wendy Walker. (Though they have not met in a while.) My short story from last year, “The Undepressed Person,” was an inversion of David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person,” and “Born to Run Considered as an Annual Report” is the third in a sequence initiated by Alfred Jarry and J.G. Ballard.

This kind of play becomes more appealing later in life, I think, when one’s faith in sui generis creativity fades and you realize—having seen it all (or so it feels)—that you will have to collude with chance to surprise yourself.

This is related, I think, to my late-breaking enthusiasm for collage, which emerged spontaneously in 2022, when my novel went out on submission and I was sick to death of words. I’m going to tell this story more fully next month at HiLoBrow, but collage—analog collage, specifically—is a fascinating way to eliminate possibilities and generate surprises. In the world of even twenty years ago—where you could adjust, color, or resize anything—it is a challenge and relief to find how these pieces go together, or can be made to seem to go together, as they are. Again, it is a way of colluding with the given to create the unexpected.

But the book? What about the book? As I wrote when Coffee House agreed to publish it, I was not all that concerned about when it would come out, since having a book coming out is the best possible state for a writer to be in. Well, circumstances are extending this blissful period even longer than expected! Fall '27 it looks like, sometime between September and December 2027, a bit less than two years from now. That’s the current publication date.

A young marketing consultant assures me that this is totally fine and, in fact, great, as there is a period of time after the events in a novel take place during which the dated elements do not yet seem charmingly screwball and off, but uncool and wrong. (“Cheugy” was the precise word used.) They seem like mistakes. The peak of that dangerous period occurred in 2021 (see chart below)—during L.R.N.’s corporately-prudent occultation—but was starting to lift during its serialization in 2023. By 2027, the details therein will seem clever and winning, like steampunk. Booker longlist here we come.

In the meantime, production here will ramp-up considerably in 2026. I published six pieces this year, and next year plan to publish twenty-four, two per month. That’s right, I’m planning to 4X this thing!

Once per month I am going to write an essay about something I’ve become enthusiastic about—topics currently in the workshop include René Daumal, Walker Percy, and Kurt Tucholsky—and then once a month I’ll share the details of an acquaintanceship I recently renewed, against all expectations. I think longtime readers will find it interesting. These types of posts will alternate alternate Tuesdays. So you’ll get something new from me every other Tuesday, starting today.

For that, I’m sure you’re thinking, how much can we pay you? What are the tiers? How do I become an apprentice, or a cuckold, or a mountaineer? While of course it is tempting to cash in and become a Substack dozenaire, I’m not looking to work for anyone at the moment. (Not even you, dear reader.)

But if you like what you read , please pass it along. And if this has been passed along to you, consider becoming a free subscriber. That’s what you can do to make me happy as I wait for that terrible day, still far off, when my book comes out and I have to start over again from nothing.

And there are prizes! Refer enough people and I’ll send you:

• The ebook edition of my 2010 ECW Press/Joyland short story collection Why They Cried, which is currently out of print and available no other way.

• A set of five collage postcards titled “Other than that Mrs. Rauschenberg, how was the show?”

• A signed edition of Lou Reed’s Nephew, when it is eventually published, no matter how long that takes. I will not forget. I will find you.

Below are the details on how all that works.

Thanks for reading in 2025 and thanks in advance for reading and supporting L.R.N. in 2026.

How to win prizes for spreading the word:

1. Share Lou Reed’s Nephew. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you’ll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.

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