Author Archives: Matt Forney

I believe it was Aaron Clarey who said that people under the age of 30 should not even attempt to write fiction; if I’m wrong on this, someone feel free to correct me in the comments. It’s a sentiment I largely agree with. Not only do young people lack the necessary life experience in order to craft convincing and interesting stories, even if they had said experience, their brains themselves put them at a disadvantage. Neurological research shows that the brain doesn’t finish developing until age 25, part of the reason why you’re not legally allowed to lease a car until you’re that age (among other things). Rare is the young writer who can pull off fiction, and even then it’s usually a glorified retelling of their own lives (Bonjour Tristesse, On the Road).

Is Donlak’s debut novel, written when he was in his twenties, worthy enough to be mentioned in the same breath as those classics? No.

As I’ve said before, it doesn’t bring me any joy to pan a book by anyone in this part of the Internet, but I have to call it like I see it. While it’s far from unreadable, The Refugee is a clunker of a debut, suffocated by its overwrought prose and sickening self-indulgence. The only things that make it worth buying are its low price and because it has enough flashes of brilliance—enough signs of the talent that Donlak would become—to ease the journey.

As long as you view The Refugee as the equivalent of watching sausage being ground up in a factory—watching the growth of Donlak as a man and writer—you won’t be too disappointed.

Mind you, it takes a while before you get to the good stuff. A while. Check out the opening paragraph and you’ll see why:

I was fleeing everything. You name it, I was fleeing it. Escaping it; trying to get away from life as I had come to know it. Life was in its ever flourishing greedy, despicable decrepitude. This was the sick world that surrounded me – no, us – everywhere. What a sad and obnoxious piece of shit society had become, I thought begrudgingly – in that tiny tin box in the sky. I sat jammed in a seat that was too narrow for my skinny ass. Sitting next to me is a fat man; a fat obnoxious business man who refuses to look at my unshaven hoodlum state. You know, because he’s off in his immortal world where the universe is paved in ignorant greedy money roads. His high teacup fantasies, his martinis after work, his second drink of the flight. Well fuck him!

Holy purple prose, Batman! Not even a page in and already my grading hand is twitching to mark everything up in red ink. This has to be one of the most absurdly puffed-up paragraphs I’ve ever read in a published work. Redundancy abounds, from restating “fleeing” in three sentences to stating that the guy sitting next to him is “fat” twice to the whiny dirges about what a “piece of shit society had become.” And “despicable decrepitude?” I couldn’t help but think of Daffy Duck lisping that one out: “You’re despicable!”

The Refugee is a semi-autobiographical novel following Robert (presumably Donlak’s literary surrogate), a young writer who flees his boring inland Canadian town for the excitement of Victoria, where he can pursue his dreams of being an artist. Along the way, he bangs a lot of girls (somehow hiding everything from his live-in girlfriend Lauryn), does a lot of drugs, and eventually goes back home after reality catches up with him.

Okay, we’re on decent footing here. Realistically, ennui and decadence are about the only topics a young novelist can believably tackle; it worked for Jack Kerouac and Françoise Sagan. But here’s the thing; your writing has to have some humility and humor in order to pull this off. The Refugee falls apart mainly because Robert is such a self-absorbed little shit that it’s almost impossible to empathize with him, going on little tirades like this:

Don’t underestimate the power of poetry. Poets have been slain in countries because they are deemed dangerous men. Artists and writers have been banished from their countries because they are sinister towards the consciousness of the masses; they would fill their heads with hope. That’s what they’re afraid of. The poet is the fiercest soldier on the playing field, and we’ve languished behind the fence too long, it will reach someone, I promise – I am living proof to you. Take these words to heart. I too am dying inside.

Oh come off it, you halfwit Holden Caulfield! You’re not the second coming of Solzhenitsyn, you’re an unemployed hipster living in one of the most boring and unremarkable countries in the world. The only thing that could possibly kill you is your bloated ego.

And yet, without the slightest hint of self-awareness, Robert keeps throwing in these little asides trying to show us how convinced he is of the importance of his art. You want to jump in a time machine, slap young Donlak across the face, then strap him down in a Clockwork Orange-helmet and make him watch Barton Fink while force-feeding him LSD. Robert’s entitlement and vanity finally come to a head in one lengthy whine about how “hard” it is to be a poet, with this line in particular setting me off:

…You will take beatings from your family because they think you are taking advantage of them, because you’re lazy, that you won’t get a ‘real’ job and run around with fantasies of poetic muses – to them anyone could do it, only they wouldn’t want to, or no one can do it, cuz they don’t understand…

Hey genius, you do know that most artists/writers/musicians have day jobs, right? Lydia Lunch was a waitress at CBGB. When the Velvet Underground collapsed, Lou Reed was so poor he had to beg his father for a job. Hunter Thompson worked a million shit jobs, from copy boy for Time to low-paid sports writer, before he became famous. If your art doesn’t pay, you have to shut up and wash dishes (or wait tables or whatever) until it does. Frankly, The Refugee reminds me of that godawful Canadian “art” film Vivid. Fuck, they’re even about the same thing; obnoxious, self-important artists who agonize over how awesome they are while leeching off of their girlfriends.

Is there something in the water up in Canada that turns ordinary men into crybaby art fags?

The Refugee’s wonky prose doesn’t help things either. As is typical of first-time writers, Donlak lards up his sentences with adjectives and superfluous detail until they tear themselves apart under their own weight. The novel’s editing is also less than stellar, which combined with the workshop-style prose made it a struggle for me to keep my eyes from glazing over whole paragraphs.

Where the novel is redeemed is in its detailing of Robert’s sexual adventures. Donlak approaches the girls he fucks with an odd detachment that matches the tone of the rest of the book. There are also a number of other passages that made me chuckle in amusement. Additionally, given the Bonjour Tristesse/On the Road-esque themes of The Refugee, you might get more out of the book if you’re a teenager or in your early twenties. A commonality between all these novels of youthful ennui is that they’re unreadable when you get older; I loved On the Road when I was a teenager, but I can barely tolerate it today.

Other than that, The Refugee is a mediocre, clumsy novel interesting not for what it is but who wrote it. If you’re looking for a mildly interesting tale of masculinity and artistry, a milepost showing how far Donlak has come since then, check it out. If you’re looking for a good, stand-alone book, skip it.

Click here to buy The Refugee.

Read Next: Donlak’s Guide to Girls (How to Pick Up) by Robert Donlak

Jesse Myner sent me this book of his, a collection of stories from his South American travels, a while back, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. A former futures trader, Jesse wisely cashed out several years ago and now spends his time traveling the globe, getting himself into bizarre and hilarious situations:

I awoke to her glaring at me. She was withdrawn to the far side of the bed. Who was Maria, she said. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Who is she? Digame. I don’t know any Maria. Mentiroso. Tell me. Who is she? You talked to her all night in your sleep.

America South covers the gamut from sex (“My Ugly Nigger,” “Maria & Luciana”) to the various touristy sights of Peru, Argentina and other countries (“In Patagonia,” “A Tiny Crystal”) to crime and violence (“Papaya,” “Butch Cassidy”), totalling 25 stories in all. Most are brief enough to read in about a couple minutes, with Jesse’s laconic writing style and hilarious observations ensuring you’ll blow through the whole thing in less than an hour. I particularly enjoyed “Las Chinches,” a digression on the ubiquity of bedbugs in Peru, ending in a… strange encounter with a girl:

Delirious from a blood meal the bed bug goes into seclusion for ten days to digest, molt into its next nymphal stage, and to mate and lay eggs. The mating process is a most peculiar one termed ‘traumatic insemination’ and involves the male bed bug mounting the female and with his hypodermic genitalia piercing her abdomen and ejaculating into her body cavity. Sexual attraction between bed bugs is based primarily upon their size, and it is not uncommon for a male bed bug to attempt to mate with another male, bloated from a recent blood feeding, and will mount and wound him in the abdomen as he ejaculates inside him.

My primary issue with America South is that being a collection of stories, there’s no greater narrative; with the exception of the “La Guajira” series, nothing ties Jesse’s adventures together aside from the fact that they all take place in South America. Still, for the price, America South is an interesting and funny book and a good addition to the travel genre.

Click here to buy America South.

Read Next: A Dead Bat in Paraguay: One Man’s Peculiar Journey Through South America by Roosh V

It always makes me laugh whenever I see “people” (and by “people” I mean “teenage girls who take astrology seriously and listen to Adele”) wag their fingers and tell me that “karma” is going to get me. It’s cute, the idea that good people get rewarded and evil ones get punished. A ten-second look around our world will disabuse you of the notion that our world has any mechanism for dealing with saints and sinners.

Case in point? Eddie Little.

None of you probably know who he is, proving my point for me. I’ll bet most of you know who James Frey is though, he of the phony, Oprah-endorsed drug memoirs A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard. What you don’t know about Frey is that he isn’t just a liar, he’s a plagiarist as well, as virtually all the plot points in both of his books were stolen from Eddie Little’s two (and only) novels, Another Day in Paradise and Steel Toes. The only reason why Frey was never hit with a lawsuit—despite richly deserving one—is because he was smart enough to rob a dead man.

Oh yes, Eddie Little is dead. Barely a month after A Million Little Pieces was published, Little overdosed on heroin in a cheap motel outside of Los Angeles. Even today, nobody knows who he was or that Frey completely ripped him off. And Frey himself is still famous and rich; after being publicly castigated by Oprah, he was given the opportunity to “redeem” himself by writing maudlin novels like Bright Shiny Morning and The Final Testament of the Holy Bible.

So don’t ever fucking try and lecture me about “karma.”

Instead, redeem yourself by reading Another Day in Paradise, one of the finest novels in modern American literature. It’s a slickly written, poignant, funny and frank novel, qualities that are nearly nonexistent in modern culture. Despite being a novel, both Paradise and Steel Toes are heavily rooted in Little’s life growing up on the streets in the seventies, cracking safes, getting in fistfights, shooting smack and getting tossed into juvie hall. Think a more elaborate and bleaker version of The Basketball Diaries:

I release the box which is now stuck under me like I’m stuck under shithead, who’s enthusiastically pounding my kidneys into Jell-O. Grabbing the screwdriver, shoving it into his leg, the only thing I can get at. Now he’s off me and starting to shriek, sounding like a homicidal parrot.

Another Day in Paradise concerns fourteen-year old Bobbie, a streetwise junkie who robs vending machines and steals cars to survive. He’s accompanied by his seventeen-year old girlfriend Rosie, a molestation victim with a masochistic streak. After a hustle ends with Bobbie nearly beaten to death by a security guard, he’s nursed back to life by Mel, a dishonorably discharged army medic turned big-time criminal boss. Together with his neurotic Jewish girlfriend Syd, Mel takes Bobbie and Rosie under his wing and they embark on a career of robbing banks and dealing drugs in Chicago.

Paradise works because unlike Frey’s work, it’s dripping with verisimilitude. Little lived this story when he was a kid, and it shows. His prose rolls off the page street hustler-style, punching you in the gut until you double up on the ground wheezing. The dialogue between Bobbie, Rosie and their partners in crime is fast, funny and as accurate as you can get for seventies hoods:

“The nasty motherfucker had me tied to the bed. They just kept coming, fucking me, using my asshole, fucking my mouth. They stank, there was come all over me, running down my legs and my face. He took pictures, said he’d show ’em to everybody, said I was his whore and he’d kill me if I didn’t work for him, said he’d cut my tits off and pull my eyes out, said he’d fill my pussy with gasoline and light my tongue like a torch.”

There’s also no sentimentality in Paradise. Little is smart enough to know that morals are for churls. His writing depicts the violence and brutality of the criminal life without a drop of the bathos that defines the kinds of books that old lady book clubs love. No matter how many people around him get killed, how many people he has to kill himself, how low he has to go, Bobbie never learns anything. There’s no pot of gold at the end of his rainbow.

Even when his luck finally runs out at the end of the book, Bobbie knows that as long as he’s chasing his addiction, he’ll never escape the criminal life.

You can see why James Frey was so successful in robbing Little’s grave. Another Day in Paradise would never make Oprah’s book club because it doesn’t reaffirm bourgeois prejudices. It doesn’t give the schoolmarms what they want to hear; mawkish racial reconciliation, drugs are bad, mmmkay? preening, and overdramatized death. From encounters with violent neo-Nazis to a run-in with a flamboyantly gay Chicano boss named Jewels, Paradise depicts the criminal underworld in all of its ugliness and ignominy.

For that reason, you owe it to yourself to read Another Day in Paradise. It’s a sick, funny, dark and exhilarating journey through a poorly-understood part of America. An honest portrayal of a world that few survive. An exemplary work by a talented writer who died too young.

Click here to buy Another Day in Paradise.

Read Next: BUtterfield 8 by John O’Hara

This is the classic addiction memoir, a nice antidote to the James Freys and Nikki Sixxs pushing bathetic, crypto-Christian lies about the “evils” of drugs. An edited collection of the diaries Jim Carroll kept when he was a teenager, they detail his life growing up in mid-60’s New York City, shooting heroin, snatching purses and selling his ass to gay guys for drug money. Carroll is anchored by his skills at playing basketball, as an athletic scholarship lifts him out of the slums and into a posh private school, where he continues his hustling and smack-injecting ways:

So I buzz across 42nd to Grant’s for a birchbeer and then just roam around for a good movie. I get to this empty part of 45th St. and near the side door of some theater is this great chick about thirty years old or so, but really foxy. She gives me the hook and I stroll over and see what’s happening. She’s heavy made-up and all but she doesn’t come on like a hustler; she suggests she join me at the movies and then we go over to her place. “I got grass, sweetie, you like grass.” Sure I dig it, and we find a movie, of all things, Born Free. What nonsense, but this chick has led me up into thin air in the balcony and there isn’t another person in the whole section. “This is why I picked this flick,” she says, “privacy.” And with that she lays her hand right across my cock and squeezes. I dig the balcony nooky so I sock my tongue into her mouth and get it on. Everything is humming nice when I reach on up her leg and work my way to her thing when, holy shit, I feel it and realize this freak HAS A COCK. I though I would freak out on the spot so I jump up and make a mad dash down the stairs and take five about six blocks away from the crazy theater, still shaking…

Carroll’s prose style is relentlessly frank and fast, spilling every detail of his hustles, highs and bangs in delicious detail. However, his rapid fire, Kerouac-esque method of writing in huge multi-page paragraphs got on my nerves after a while. Like Kerouac’s On the Road, The Basketball Diaries is intended to be read while you’re still young and searching for a philosophical pier to anchor your boat to. When I first read it as a teenager, I blew through it in a couple of days, thanks to hilarious observations like this:

Today at school we had our annual Thanksgiving fast for the benefit of the poor and hungry blacks we hear of scattered throughout the South. Anyone who sympathizes with the injustice of poverty in the South does not eat his meal as a symbol of this injustice. I’m sure it interests a starving black in Mississippi that I am not eating my lunch today. Frankly, I was too embarrassed to be the only cat in the school to eat his meal so I snuck down to the corner and copped a cheeseburger. Symbolic gestures are certainly self-satisfying but they are not too nourishing for anyone anywhere. Somebody is conning everyone else and themselves with plain dumb ideas as performed here today. What happens to the food they prepared today? All that turkey and mashed potatoes would probably seem pretty dried out if we shipped it down South, even by air mail. It would have been interesting to point out that there are a lot of hungry dudes walking down Columbus Ave. that could have dug a free meal. But some of them might be drug addicts and shit and they’d no doubt make a big mess of the lunch room that all the black cleaning women would have a hard time cleaning up. I suggest that tomorrow somebody symbolically stick a stale drumstick of today’s lunch up the ass of whoever was humane enough to organize this farce.

Additionally, the book doesn’t really end, but trails off into nothingness as Carroll spirals into robbing people at knifepoint to pay for his heroin addiction.

Even with these flaws, though, The Basketball Diaries is a classic of American literature for a reason. If you’re looking for an honest and gritty memoir of teenage alienation and struggle, check this one out.

Click here to buy The Basketball Diaries.

Read Next: The Redneck Manifesto by Jim Goad

Neoreaction: doesn’t it just roll off the tongue?

I don’t know who coined it, but it’s a nice all-encompassing term for the ideology of this part of the Internet, or at least one that doesn’t make me cringe. I realize that Heartiste was trying to be cheeky with “Dark Enlightenment,” but apparently none of the nerds who picked that phrase up got the subtext. Now it sounds like something that a 15-year old goth would come up with while browsing the discount rack at Hot Topic. “Ooooh, look at me! Look how DARK and EVIL I am!”

For the rest of us, we’re just neoreactionaries.

But what is neoreaction? Anarcho Papist author Bryce Laliberte answers the question in this debut book, an absolute must-buy for anyone interested in the predominant ideology of the ‘sphere. I don’t recommend it for absolute beginners, as Laliberte’s book assumes some basic familiarity with the writings of Mencius Moldbug and other major thinkers, but if you’ve already gotten your feet wet, Neoreaction will help you better understand how the world works.

Don’t be fooled by the book’s short length; this is a dense work that requires careful thought and a re-read or two. Laliberte begins by defining ideology itself, its purposes and how it sustains itself. From this, he carefully explains not only why neoreaction is right, but what fundamentally separates it from other ideologies; namely, the fact that it doesn’t rely on popular consensus to function, nor can it:

The human race has scarcely been civilized within its own lifetime. Isn’t this a bit ambitious? Rather overreaching? It is actually the only way to win. A staring contest is won by the one who can wait the longest. If we’re in a staring contest, we’ll win if our ideology provides for the longer-run sustainability of human civilizations. We don’t need to win in the next 10, 100, or even 1000 years. If we win even only a million years down the road, we’ll have won for millions afterward. The logic of social-historical evolution dictates it with certainty. As in war, what is determined is who is left. But as the only end of ideology is to plan for human flourishing, the securing of human flourishing in eternity is the end of ideology. As such, the ideology that lives the longest may perpetuate itself ad infinitum without fear of extinction from a competing ideology.

Laliberte’s prose is similar to his blog posts; very formal and intellectual without being showy. It won’t win any awards, but he conveys his ideas and beliefs in an erudite way. Additionally, Neoreaction is largely free of the jargon that characterizes this part of the Internet (such as “Cathedral” or “Brahmin”), giving it a greater professionality than the usual fare.

From the introduction, Laliberte moves on to define neoreaction as the only ideology capable of sustaining a civilization. As he points out, organized society is no accident; in particular, he credits the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages for setting the stage for later European glory by forbidding inbreeding and encouraging exogamous marriage. He coins the term “biopolitics” (fortunately unrelated to that fraud Foucault and his nonsense idea of “biopower”) to describe the eugenic and demographic trends that make civilization possible:

It is largely impossible for the next stages of civilization to be planned for. It usually requires a shift in ideology before the mechanisms start working that launch the given society to its next position. Indeed, the variables that affect the overall success of an ideology are so vast that it may really only be possible to distinguish them many years on: only a rare genius might see them earlier, as did Kant in his What is Enlightenment? or Marx in Das Kapital.

Laliberte lays the blame for modernism at the feet of the Protestant Reformation (or as he calls it, the “Protestant Formation”), not exactly an original assertion, but he cuts to the heart of why Protestantism was so corrosive to European culture; it represented the destruction of hierarchy. Martin Luther’s assertion of salvation through faith alone and assertion that laymen could interpret Scripture for themselves annihilated the hierarchy of the old Catholic Church. It is from this that we come to the radical egalitarianism of modern leftists, in which all races are equal, men and women are interchangeable, and no one is better than anyone else.

Even so-called conservatives and libertarians are afflicted with this disease; as Laliberte points out in his critiques of libertarianism, they assume an egalitarianism of opportunity flying in the face of racial and gender differences.

Despite Laliberte’s religious biases, his later arguments in favor of neoreaction spring from entirely logical and sensible foundations. For example, he provides a secular justification for patriarchy based in the biological realities of masculinity and femininity. Patriarchy is the only system in which both the strengths of men—risk-taking and courage—and women—child-rearing and nurturing—are used to their fullest benefit, while feminism blunts both.

All of this is a massive oversimplification of Laliberte’s ideas, by the way. Get the book for the full flavor.

If there’s one thing I’d criticize What is Neoreaction? for, it’s that it feels incomplete. While Laliberte explicitly states in the opening paragraphs that his book is not intended to be an introductory text, it could have easily become one—and thus a more valuable book—had he lengthened it by just a couple of chapters.

Still, these are all minor dings. What is Neoreaction? is absolutely worth checking out if you’ve been reading up on neoreaction and want to fully understand it or if you’re a neoreactionary who wants to better clarify your ideas.

Click here to buy What is Neoreaction?

Read Next: The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics by Anonymous Conservative

Years ago, I had a friend who worked at a bulk candy shop that had problems with employees swiping sweets when the manager’s back was turned. After theft reached an untenable level, the owner decided to change the policy to let employees have unlimited free samples. What happened? The employees would stuff themselves for a week or two, then when they got sick from overindulging, they wouldn’t steal so much as a Tootsie Roll afterwards. Losses dropped to a negligible amount.

There’s a reason why “may you have everything you wish for” was a Cherokee curse.

Life experience is inversely correlated with starry-eyed wonder. The freedom porn contingent of the ‘sphere (which I once was a part of) masturbates to the idea of FOREIGN TRAVEL! SEE THE WORLD! FUCK HOT BABES! The guys who’ve actually been there, on the other hand…

English Teacher X gets some flak for his overly cynical worldview, and I too was inclined to dismiss him somewhat on that score, before I read Vodkaberg. As his magnum opus, it’s a hilarious memoir of his experiences teaching English in Russia, but it’s also a bleak warning of the consequences of the expat lifestyle. Not the bathetic, phony “warnings” of the evils of casual sex and booze, but the sober, honest warning of burnout.

ETX got to the candy store and stuffed himself to the point of vomiting.

Vodkaberg picks up where X’s previous memoir, To Travel Hopelessly, left off; following his false start in the wasteland of Desolationgrad, X returns to Vodkaberg to work in earnest. From there, his life spirals into an endless series of one-night stands, drunken orgies and fistfights, broken up by the foibles of his degenerate co-workers and incompetent bosses:

I rolled her over and undressed her and attacked her big Slavic body with my mouth and got a condom out of my pocket and had suited up and was about to stick it in when she stood up screaming, noticing the sun was up, that she was late for work.

She got dressed and rushed off.

Oh well, I thought, and jacked off.

Unlike To Travel Hopelessly, which felt like a series of loosely related short stories, Vodkaberg is a tightly-focused memoir; it’s nearly three times as long and focuses solely on ETX’s life in Russia. The book’s chapters are subdivided by each year ETX was in Vodkaberg, bookended with statistics such as GDP and murder rate that show how Russia evolved and changed during his time there. In the year 2000, the country was dirt-poor and on the verge of collapse, with Russian girls still eagerly throwing themselves at foreigners; in 2009, when ETX left, Russia was wealthier, commercialized and an almost entirely different place.

More importantly, a decade is a long time to be fucking hordes of random girls and getting drunk.

ETX recently revealed that he intentionally wrote the book to emphasize the dark side of foreign travel, but really, the only truly dark aspect of Vodkaberg is the increasing burnout he feels as the book progresses. ETX burns through so many girls in the first half of the book that he gets to the point where he can’t even keep their names straight, while the second half details his attempts to cope with a world that is leaving him behind. His friends are getting married, the cute girls are drying up, the exchange rate has destroyed his salary, and he somehow lucks into a position as his school’s Director of Studies, which carries its own set of problems:

I thought of 15 years of shitty school administrations while I shot the crap out of the small town of Paradise, Arizona, and burned and electrocuted digital civilians, even blew up Gary Coleman, while my students took practice tests.

Part of Vodkaberg’s Bukowskian tone is probably a generational thing—English Teacher X is a GenXer talking to Millennials like myself—but he expertly conveys the ennui and sheer boredom that hedonism eventually devolves into. It’s one thing to hear that kind of thing from some cornfed Middle American who married his high school sweetheart; it’s another to hear it from a guy who was banging Marilyn Monroe lookalikes every week for the better part of a decade.

By the time he manages to flee to the Middle East, you almost feel a sense of relief.

Even with this bleakness, Vodkaberg still features ETX’s deeply cynical, side-splitting prose. Also unlike To Travel Hopelessly, the book has a consistent cast of characters that add depth–and dare I say tenderness—to the story. Whether it’s ETX’s cat Doofus, the middle-aged party animal Uncle Cool, or the soft harem that ETX keeps over the years—the Insane Bisexual, Pterodactyl Girl, Dark Angel, Almond Eyes—Vodkaberg becomes downright touching at points:

I was unconscious on the sofa, with my shorts around my knees, after returning at dawn from another apocalyptic drinking binge that ended with a failed attempt to masturbate, and the covers wrapped around my head. Since I didn’t hear the doorbell, he let himself in with his key, and found me just like that.

He was kind enough to close the bedroom door.

The closest thing to a problem I have with Vodkaberg is the Skype chat transcripts. Near the end of the book, ETX breaks up the action with transcripts of his IM chats with one of his girlfriends, Dark Angel. While there are some amusing gems in them, they screw with the flow of the book and caused my eyes to glaze over the screen. Also, given the length of the book, a hyperlinked table of contents in the Kindle edition would have been nice. Additionally, the book requires you to have some familiarity with To Travel Hopelessly in order to get the most out of it.

But these are very, very small problems. If you want a travel memoir that is radically different from everything else out there, that provides a nice antidote to all the SEE THE WORLD! FUCK HOT BABES! onanism, pick up Vodkaberg. It’s violently honest, funny and poignant; everything that a story is supposed to be.

Click here to buy Vodkaberg: Nine Years in Russia.

Read Next: To Travel Hopelessly: A TEFL Memoir by English Teacher X

The urge to explore is written into the Y chromosome. There’s just something about discovering foreign lands, risking death and dismemberment for a payoff that is not guaranteed, that appeals to men. The only problem with this urge is that our world has been mapped out. Save for some inaccessible pockets of the Amazon, every possible corner of the Earth, every obscure tribe and mountain range has been explored and hooked up to the sewer line of American consumerism.

The closest we can get to living like the explorers of old is heading into second-world countries to fuck the local girls.

For a glimpse into that lost world of discovery, Tent Life in Siberia is a fantastic book. An account of explorer George Kennan’s journey across Siberia around the time of the Civil War, the book catalogues his observations and experiences as one of the first Americans to explore the most remote regions of Russia. As a first-hand look at a land that had barely been touched by the outside world, it’s invaluable.

The story: at age twenty, Kennan was hired by Western Union to journey to Siberia as part of an effort to establish a overland telegraph line between Alaska and Russia, linking the Americas and Eurasia for the first time in history. The reason why you’ve never heard about this feat is because it was a failure; while Kennan and his comrades were alternately exploring Siberia and trying to survive, a transatlantic cable was successfully laid between New York and London in 1866, rendering the Russian project useless:

We all went down into the cosy, well-furnished cabin, where refreshments were set before us by the steward, and where we talked for an hour about the news of the world, from whaling in the South Pacific to dog-driving in Arctic Asia, and from Weston’s walk across the North American continent to Karakozef’s attempt to assassinate the Tsar. But it was, on our side at least, a perfunctory conversation. The news of the complete success of the Atlantic cable was as unexpected as it was disheartening, and it filled our minds to the exclusion of everything else. The world would have no use for an overland telegraph-line through Alaska and Siberia if it already possessed a working cable between London and New York.

Nonetheless, Kennan’s story stands apart due to his party’s thorough exploration of eastern Russia. Over the course of two years, he meets with the various tribes that live in Siberia, catalogues the local flora and fauna, witnesses the aurora borealis and nearly dies of starvation and exposure several times. I particularly enjoyed his account of a Korak wedding midway through the book:

…Our sudden entrance seemed to create a temporary diversion from the legitimate business of the evening. The tattooed women and shaven-headed men stared in open-mouthed astonishment at the pale-faced guests who had come unbidden to the marriage-feast, having on no wedding garments. Our faces were undeniably dirty, our blue hunting-shirts and buckskin trousers bore the marks of two months’ rough travel, in numerous rips, tears, and tatters, which were only partially masked by a thick covering of reindeer hair from our fur kukhlánkas. Our general appearance, in fact, suggested a more intimate acquaintance with dirty yurts, mountain thickets, and Siberian storms, than with the civilising influences of soap, water, razors, and needles. We bore the curious scrutiny of the assemblage, however, with the indifference of men who were used to it, and sipped our hot tea while waiting for the ceremony to begin…

Despite the age of Tent Life in Siberia, Kennan’s prose is surprisingly modern, lacking the pretension and sentiment that was endemic to pre-Twain American literature. He conveys his thoughts and observations simply and honestly, painting Czarist Siberia as a land largely unknown, even to the Russians who controlled it. Christianity and European influence had just barely begun to penetrate into Siberia, with the traditions and lives of its inhabitants largely intact, defined by its treacherous weather and isolation from the greater world:

…If any proof were needed that this system of religion is the natural outgrowth of human nature in certain conditions of barbarism, it would be furnished by the universal prevalence of Shamanism in north-eastern Siberia among so many diverse tribes of different character and different origin. The tribe of Tunguses for instance, is certainly of Chinese descent, and the tribe of Yakuts is certainly Turkish. Both came from different regions, bringing different beliefs, superstitions, and modes of thought; but, when both were removed from all disturbing agencies and subjected to the same external influences, both developed precisely the same system of religious belief. If a band of ignorant, barbarous Mahometans were transported to north-eastern Siberia, and compelled to live alone in tents, century after century, amid the wild, gloomy scenery of the Stanavoi Mountains, to suffer terrific storms whose causes they could not explain, to lose their reindeer suddenly by an epidemic disease which defied human remedies, to be frightened by magnificent auroras that set the whole universe in a blaze, and decimated by pestilences whose nature they could not understand and whose disastrous effects they were powerless to avert—they would almost inevitably lose by degrees their faith in Allah and Mahomet, and become precisely such Shamanists as the Siberian Koraks and Chukchis are today. Even a whole century of partial civilisation and Christian training cannot wholly counteract the irresistible Shamanistic influence which is exerted upon the mind by the wilder, more terrible manifestations of Nature in these lonely and inhospitable regions…

The worst part is that these tribes and ethnic groups probably don’t even exist anymore, or if they do, they are almost unrecognizable from decades of cultural destruction of both the communist and capitalist variety. Kennan’s very voyage and purpose for being in Siberia shows this; as one of the first Americans to explore this part of the world, he brought Western influence to the Koraks, the Kamchatdal and the other peoples of Siberia.

The world gets smaller with every passing day.

My criticisms of Tent Life in Siberia are two. Firstly, Kennan’s penchant for multiple page-spanning paragraphs got tiresome very quickly. Secondly, this particular edition of the book lacks the photographs of the original edition, instead substituting them with descriptions. It’s a minor thing, as Kennan’s prose was more than able to convey the beauty and danger of Siberia for me, but it’s somewhat annoying.

Other than that, Tent Life in Siberia is one of the best travel memoirs ever written, a must-read for anyone interested in Russia or who just enjoys tales of exploration in general.

Click here to buy Tent Life in Siberia (free on Kindle).

Read Next: Life is Short and So is This Book: Brief Thoughts on Making the Most of Your Life by Peter Atkins

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on January 27, 2012. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

Most of you will recognize the name H.L. Mencken, if not from his cutting, witty books and various snide observations on American culture and democracy, then from his role covering the infamous Scopes monkey trial. But who the hell is Robert Rives La Monte?

La Monte is one of those justly forgotten figures of history, a Baltimore News writer and editor for the International Socialist Review. He’s dust, compost, worm food, only remembered in relation to his interactions with people more famous than he. The only reason his name isn’t completely lost to time is because in 1910, he wrote a letter to Mencken, at the time still a relatively obscure Baltimore Sun columnist, urging him to repent his wicked, selfish ways and join him in spreading the glorious gospel of socialism. That’s right: this pipsqueak thought he could convince H.L. Mencken, consummate Nietzschean, atheist and savage critic of “Boobus Americanus,” that socialism was the way forward.

La Monte was eager for a reply from Mencken, and he got it good and hard. But he wasn’t satisfied and wrote Mencken back; the two ended up exchanging a dozen letters in total, which were collected into Men Versus the Man, published in 1911 and one of Mencken’s first books. Despite Mencken’s later popularity, Men Versus the Man went out of print relatively quickly and was lost to time, forgotten even by Mencken himself. Fortunately for us, this early classic has been brought back into print by Kevin Slaughter’s Underworld Amusements, featuring a forward by none other than John Derbyshire, who sums up the book with these two paragraphs:

The argument of Men versus the Man is one we are still having today. The content of the argument is the relative desirability of two approaches to our social life. On the one hand is proposed a society of men: a society in which none is allowed to rise too high above another, a society that subtracts great resources from the more able in an effort to raise up the less able. On the other hand is a society of the man: a society in which individuals are left to do what they can with their inherited capabilities, in conditions of maximum personal freedom and minimal state control.

The argument has been going on in one form or another for a couple of millennia. It is reasonable to hope that we might soon—in less than another century, I’d hope—attain sufficient understanding of our species to know beyond doubt which kind of society is more stable and enduring, which less likely to foster cruelty and injustice.

Men Versus the Man is a pretty interesting read for both its content and its value as one of Mencken’s first published efforts, showing that he was as witty and incisive then as when he became famous a decade later. La Monte’s letters are a slog to get through because he can’t write; as is typical of sophists, he overwrites and pads out his letters to disguise his slipshod arguments. Mencken’s replies are blistering, shredding La Monte’s points with the grace and skill of a master debater, starting out polite but eventually devolving into the pre-Internet version of a flame war as Mencken loses patience:

But this I do know: that the plan of Socialism to lift up the “producer” class to sovereignty by an act of human volition is as absurd as the old ecclesiastical plan to solve the riddles of the universe by revelation and anathema. If the thing ever comes to pass at all, it must come by slow stages and as a symptom of changes in the needs and desires of the human race. At present the race seems to stand most in need of improvements in the art of life. To the man who offers it a secret password to heaven, it gives little, for it is little interested in heaven, but for him who offers it some new scheme to attain ease and comfort—some improvement in marketing petroleum, some device for making travel safer, some new food, some new plan of investing savings—it has rewards as large as those that once went to popes and emperors. And in this favored class of services, it esteems most the unique service. To the man who makes shoes which, whatever their excellence, are no more comfortable than the shoes made at the next bench, it gives a comparatively small reward. And so, too, it has no prize for the man who raises wheat in the old, old way, and stores it in his bin. But to the man who, by inventing new machinery or by better organizing the work, improves the comfort of shoes, and to the man who buys the wheat of the farmers and hauls it craftily to where it is most needed—to these men it gives extraordinary rewards.

Like all good writers, Mencken is difficult to shoehorn: he lampooned both socialism and Christianity, exalting elitism and individualism against the mediocre majority, whether they worshipped Jesus or Marx. Reading his evisceration of La Monte is like watching an MMA fighter bash a retarded kid in the face; the kid is so hopelessly out of his league that you almost feel sorry for him. While not as biting as his later works, Men Versus the Man is still an enjoyable read and a must-have for Mencken fans. Hell, buy an extra copy and give it to your liberal and/or Christian friends for a laugh.

Click here to buy Men Versus the Man.

Read Next: No Man’s Land by Jack Donovan

My interest in A Death in Brazil was piqued when Roosh listed it as one of the books that changed his life. An experienced travel writer, Peter Robb journeyed to Brazil from Sicily over a decade ago and recorded his observations and research in this memoir, which traverses Brazilian history from the country’s founding up to the present day, weaving together politics, sex, and religion in a tapestry of drama and intrigue.

Is A Death in Brazil a life-changing book? No, but I see how it could be for some people.

Don’t get me wrong; this is a great book. But what keeps it out of the highest echelon of travel memoirs is its lack of a personal touch. A Death in Brazil is more history lesson than story, with Robb himself little more than a fringe observer to the anarchy and chaos of this nation. If you’re looking for another tale of sex, sleaze and self-discovery, this book isn’t it. If you’re looking for a twisting and gripping novelization of Brazilian history and culture, A Death in Brazil is a great read.

And to his credit, Robb knows Brazil. Starting with the Indian cultures that inhabited the country before the Europeans landed, Robb analyzes the circumstances that make the place unique. What separates Brazil from the U.S. and Canada—and indeed, the rest of Latin America—is its racially fluid and sexually charged culture. Where the color lines are policed heavily in America and Canada, Brazilians fucked each other with enough abandon—whites with blacks, blacks with Indians, Indians with whites—to create a sort of egalitarianism that persists in the face of the country’s class inequality:

What linked the masters and the slaves was sex. In Freyre’s intricately documented study, every matter of life on the sugar plantations led subtly back to sex. The sex was so deeply present in his material that Freyre hardly needed to be explicit about it. It was sex enhanced by the gorgeousness of the climate and the sweetness of the sugar, and also sex made perverse by the cruel relationship of masters to slaves, of the Roman Catholic Church to African practices and indigenous forest life. Every new theme he turned to became an aspect of sexual life. It was a very seductive picture of a slave society, a lot more complex in its reciprocities than I had ever imagined. The Brazil of the sugar plantations was, in Freyre’s account of it, profoundly influenced by the values and practices the captives had brought with them from West Africa, so that in time the culture of the Portuguese masters had been subtly but radically transformed by the ways of the people they had used as chattels. Brazil had turned into a society vastly different from that of the slave-owning states of North America through the intimacy that existed at all levels between masters—and mistresses, and the children of the Portuguese masters and mistresses—and their slaves and their slaves’ children. If in Protestant North America sex with slaves had been nasty, brutish, short and a matter of profound shame, particularly when the children were born, in the lax Catholic Brazil of the tropics, sex across the divide of race and ownership seemed to be at the very center of plantation life. Sometimes, reading Freyre, you wondered how they ever got the cane harvested and crushed and the juice boiled down.

While at times difficult to follow, as Robb buries the reader in an avalanche of dates and names, A Death in Brazil is never laborious to read thanks to his writing style. His prose is calm, collected and powerful, like waves crashing against the beach on a hot day. Robb also expertly conveys the violence and lust of Brazilian society through his accounts of events such as the War of Canudos, a civil war that occurred in the late 19th century between the government and monarchists in the northeast resistant to the changes the elite was foisting on them:

But there were too many dead. Fifteen thousand or more from the last days. Clouds of carrion birds hung in the air over Canudos and dogs howled for their fallen owners on the ground. For years afterward, whenever rains came, corpses washed up, mummified in the desert air and still dressed, some of them, in their officers’ blue republican uniforms with the red stripe. Year after year after year, every little drylands shower brought up skulls and bones that the hooves of the oxen and the mules slowly ground back into the quartz and granite. The frenzy of extermination did not allow the Counselor to lie in peace. Two days after his community was razed, the army discovered where Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel was buried and they dug him up and photographed the corpse. The picture of the dead and bearded Counselor anticipated the postmortem photographs of the bearded Che Guevara taken in Bolivia seventy years later. They hacked off the decomposing head with a knife and carried it on a pike in civilization’s victory parade through Salvador, much as Zumbi’s had been after the destruction of Palmares two hundred years before. Then, this being the age of science, his head was taken to the Medical Faculty of Bahia to be studied for abnormalities.

The one element of Brazilian culture and society that Robb conveys in the book that stuck out to me—though he himself might be unaware of it—is Brazilians’ desire to belong. Since independence in the early 19th century, Brazil’s elite has desperately wanted the country to be considered part of the West, to be on par with America and the nations of Europe. Robb writes extensively on how this desire to belong led to a massive upheaval in Brazilian society in the late 1800’s: the country abolished its monarchy and became a republic, ended slavery (the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to do so) and disavowed its genuinely multiracial heritage in line with pro-white eugenics beliefs. This caused a massive rift between the wealthier, whiter southeastern portion of the country and the northeastern part, which is poorer and blacker.

Among nations, Brazil has always been the equivalent of the little kid who desperately tries to emulate his cooler big brother and never succeeds.

This constant longing, to the point where Brazilians will upend everything to fit in, extends all the way to the present day. The true protagonist of A Death in Brazil isn’t Robb himself, but Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose rise from poor laborer in the northeast to Brazil’s presidency forms the book’s story arc. Even if you’re not a leftist, reading about Lula’s struggles and triumphs against the military and his political opponents will make you want to cheer. Nonetheless, with Lula’s election to the presidency in 2003, Robb is oddly optimistic. My view? Given that the West is in the throes of an ideology that denigrates whiteness and masculinity, it’s not surprising that the Brazilian elite would try to fit in by electing a brown leftist as their leader.

It also explains why Lula’s successor as president, Dilma Rousseff, has gone completely ovaries-to-the-wall in insane feminist reforms.

Like I said before, Robb’s relative absence from A Death in Brazil’s story and action knocks the book down several pegs. While he shares anecdotes of his experiences and observations from time to time, he’s never involved in the action itself, constantly remaining on the outside looking in. While he’s skilled at turning what could have been a boring history lesson into a thrilling and dramatic tale, the lack of his presence in the book makes it less interesting than it otherwise would have been.

Aside from this, A Death in Brazil is a grand and epic achievement, a must-read for anyone interested in Brazil as a country or just looking for an intriguing true crime-type story.

Click here to buy A Death in Brazil.

Read Next: Roosh’s Brazil Compendium: Pickup Tips, City Guides, and Stories by Roosh V

Assuming you even know who James Burnham is at all, he probably occupies a footnote at best in your mind. A notable political theorist and activist during the mid-20th century, he began his public life as a Marxist and Trotskyist but later transitioned to conservatism, spending the latter decades of his life as a columnist for National Review. Shortly after the fall of France in World War II, he wrote The Managerial Revolution, a radical tract that deserves to be more widely read.

Burnham’s claim was that capitalism was dead, but that it was being replaced not by socialism, but a new economic system he called “managerialism”; rule by managers.

I can’t understand how this book is so ignored. Getting a hold of a copy was a real bitch for me; it’s been out of print for decades, there’s no Kindle version, and used copies go for around $40 on Amazon. Most of the top Google searches for The Managerial Revolution refer not to the book itself but George Orwell’s moronic response essay, published eight years later. I lucked out and managed to find a cheap copy of the book on Ebay… from a seller in the U.K.

Burnham’s central argument will repulse both leftists—who think that the modern world is suffering an excess of free market capitalism—and conservatives/libertarians, who think that America is one more Obamaphone away from communism. It certainly pissed off his old Marxist buddies, drunk as they were in the 1930’s on their unbelievably arrogant belief in the “historical inevitability of socialism.” Burnham’s view was that the dictatorship of the proletariat would never happen because the pincer of technological advances and increasingly complex societies meant that ruling a nation required a skill set that the proles simply did not possess:

Reality, however, as is so often the case, was rude to the optimistic expectations. Far from showing tendencies toward socialism, the Russian revolutionary society developed in a plainly contrary direction. With respect to the three decisive characteristics of socialist society—classlessness, freedom, and internationalism—Russia is immeasurably further away today than during the first years of the revolution; nor has this direction been episodic but rather a continuous development since those early years. This has occurred in direct contradiction to Marxist theory: in Russia the key conditions, as it was thought, for the advance, if not to socialism at least well into its direction, were present—the assumption of state power by a Marxist party ‘of the workers,’ and above all the supposedly crucial abolition of private property rights in the chief instruments of production.

Burnham observed that Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and the U.S. under Franklin Roosevelt were developing along parallel paths, creating an economic system in which power rested not with capitalists or workers, but managers; administrators, HR ditzes, engineers, bureaucrats, civil servants, CEOs and other figures who exist outside of the capitalist class yet are not of the proletariat. Stalin’s nomenklatura, Hitler’s vast patronage network, and the myriad agencies created by the New Deal represented this shift in power, as they were controlled neither by capitalists or by workers. The trigger for this transition was the mass unemployment sparked by the Great Depression and capitalism’s complete inability to solve it, but the foundations had been laid beforehand in the increasing scale of society and scientific advances that made large-scale organization easier:

In the earlier days of capitalism, the typical capitalist, the ideal of the ideologists before and after Adam Smith, was himself his own manager so far as there were managerial functions other than those assigned to some reliable skilled worker in the shop. He was the individual entrepreneur, who owned the whole or the greater share of a factory or mine or shop or steamship company or whatever it might be, and actively managed his own enterprise; perhaps to retire in old age in favour of management by his heirs. But, as is well known, the growth of large-scale public corporations along with the technological development of modern industry have virtually wiped such types of enterprise out of the important sections of the economy; with a few exceptions, they remain only among the ‘small businesses’ which are trivial in their historical influence.

Additionally, Burnham observes that capitalism arose in a similar fashion; a new class (in this case, the merchants) seizing power from the ruling class (the aristocracy) beginning in the 14th century, when feudalism began to wane. This transition took different forms in different countries: it was gradual in England, where the monarchy slowly lost power to Parliament and became a largely ceremonial position, or violent in the case of France, where the aristocracy was viciously overthrown. In the same way, Burnham predicted that as part of the managerial revolution, the structures of capitalist government would either be eliminated entirely—as they were in the case of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—or reduced to figureheads.

Can anyone seriously argue that that hasn’t happened in the U.S. and other “democratic” nations?

Power in America no longer rests with the elected government, but with the acronym agencies that exist beyond the voter’s control: the FBI, NSA, CIA, FEMA, the Fed, the Department of Education and so on. Despite the grandstanding of Tea Party Republicans, these agencies run themselves with minimal oversight or input from Congress, who is almost entirely powerless to control them. In fact, whenever elected officials try to exercise even the slightest amount of control over bureaucracies—as Scott Walker tried to do in Wisconsin two years ago—they always find themselves rebuffed with overwhelming force.

Burnham also predicted that the public and private sectors would effectively cease to exist as separate entities in a managerial economy. Again, looking at the comfy relationship between Washington and Wall Street, can you really argue against this? The actual capitalists on Wall Street—the shareholders—have lost big in the bank bailouts, with the stock prices of Citi and other banks cratering and shops like Bear Stearns being driven out of business entirely. It’s the managers—your Lloyd Blankfeins and Jon Corzines and Hank Paulsons—who’ve made out like bandits, giving themselves golden parachutes, stealing money from their customers and flitting back between government and the private sector as it suits them.

Despite the reference to “evident errors” on the back of my copy of The Managerial Revolution, most of Burnham’s predictions have come true, even if he got specific details wrong. For example, he envisioned a future in which the U.S., Germany and Japan would rule much of the Earth as “super-states,” with power gradually moving from sovereign states to supranational entities. Britain and France would wane and become satellite states because they clung to capitalism in the face of rising managerial empires. While Germany and Japan flamed out in World War II, the managerial state that Burnham dismissed in classic wannabe Tory fashion—Russia—became one of the world’s preeminent superpowers, jockeying with the U.S. for proxy control over Europe and the third world. As for “supranational entities,” how about the European Union, a gang of bureaucrats who have the reins on individual national governments? The U.N.? The WTO?

And this book is out of print?

The biggest flaw in Burnham’s analysis is that he’s still constrained to a certain extent by a Marxist frame, failing to take into account human motivations and stupidity. For example, he argues that Hitler’s desire for an alliance with Britain was driven solely by rational motives, as allying with Britain would allow Germany to more easily take control of Britain’s empire, which was being chipped away by America and other entities (Canada, by that point, was fully an American satrapy). He doesn’t account for Hitler’s retarded racial ideology that led him to believe he’d be leading a pan-Aryan brotherhood against those filthy evil Slavs.

But even with these mistakes, The Managerial Revolution is one of the most prescient and accurate portraits of the modern West. It’s also useful for analyzing what will happen in the future. Burnham notes that entrenched mass unemployment is one of the signs of imminent social revolution, going back to ancient Greece. If that’s the case, our managerial regime may well be in its death throes, with the massive unemployment rates in places like Spain and Greece, along with exploding underemployment in the U.S.

What will come next? I can’t say, only to say that the current system can’t last.

Click here to buy The Managerial Revolution.

Read Next: The Smell of Pines: A Long Walk with Death by James Druman