Category Archives: Books/Media

Flannery O’Connor is another great writer who’s been sidelined by the Western literary establishment for the dumbest of reasons. Unlike Céline, she hasn’t been totally written out of the history books; because O’Connor had the good fortune to be born with a vagina, the Beigeists begrudgingly include a couple of her short stories in the college English curriculum. But I guarantee that most of the non-humanities-majoring public has never heard her name.

All of the attention goes to O’Connor’s pious fraud contemporary Harper Lee.

Part of it is because O’Connor died young, wasting away from lupus not long after her 39th birthday. O’Connor was also a devout Catholic, which has been a death sentence in English-speaking countries ever since the days of Henry VIII. But the main reason why Lee is worshipped and O’Connor is ignored is because once again, Lee was an entrepreneur masquerading as a social critic. Where O’Connor was a low-key figure who spent most of her life in the rural Georgia town where she grew up, Lee moved to New York and schmoozed her way into the nation’s literary elite. Her To Kill a Mockingbird is popular and beloved because it caters to the Northern left-wing establishment’s self-congratulatory view of not only the South, but themselves.

Blogger Thrasymachus wrote the ultimate takedown of Mockingbird here, but I’ll sum it up for you. Mockingbird is garbage because it absolves Lee’s social class—the wealthy, upper-class elite—of their responsibility in fostering the culture of racism in the Jim Crow South. In the novel, all of Maycomb’s racism emanates from the Ewells, a despised and ostracized clan of white trash who live in a tin shack behind the town dump. Atticus Finch, the town lawyer (and by extension one of the most powerful and respected men in Maycomb) is not hostile to blacks; neither is the town sheriff or the other middle-class families in town. Even the working-class families such as the Cunninghams aren’t overtly and violently racist.

And yet despite being the only racists in town, the poor and hated Ewells somehow wield enough influence to get a black man convicted of a crime he clearly did not commit.

That’s why Mockingbird is part of every high school curriculum in America and why Wise Blood is read only by disaffected intellectual arsonists like myself; it’s libelous, self-serving and reaffirms the prejudices of its leftist readers. Black people are good, middle-class white people are good, poor white people are the root of all evil, and “the loss of innocence” is a real tragedy. That’s a great metric for determining whether something’s worth your time; if a book or movie is described as being about “the loss of innocence,” run the hell away like you’re being accosted by a lesion-covered junkie wielding a syringe.

Flannery O’Connor didn’t have time to tickle the fancies of Northern Puritans; she was too busy sketching the most realistic and gripping portrait of her native land since Mark Twain passed. Like Twain, O’Connor eschewed piety and sentimentality and depicted Southerners—white or black, rich or poor, man or woman—as they were: wretched, stupid, and corrupt. In her world, no one is innocent and everyone has the blood of classism and racism on their hands, including blacks themselves.

She also didn’t mince words, using “nigger” frequently (see: “The Artificial Nigger”), which to liberals is like garlic to a vampire.

O’Connor’s writing is also informed by her Catholic beliefs; many of her protagonists mirror the alienation she felt growing up in a strongly Protestant land:

It was the first hand that had been extended to Enoch since he had come to the city. It was warm and soft.

For a second he only stood there, clasping it. Then he began to stammer. “My name is Enoch Emery,” he mumbled. “I attended the Rodemill Boys’ Bible Academy. I work at the city zoo. I seen two of your pictures. I’m only eighteen years old but I already work for the city. My daddy made me come…” and his voice cracked.

The star leaned slightly forward and a change came in his eyes: an ugly pair of human ones moved closer and squinted at Enoch from behind the celluloid pair. “You go to hell,” a surly voice inside the ape-suit said, low but distinctly, and the hand was jerked away.

Informed by her Catholicism, O’Connor also wrote her characters with the promise of redemption. Not unlike Andy Nowicki (another Southern Catholic), O’Connor knew that even the most degenerate man or woman carried with them the possibility of repentance. It’s this cocktail of wisdom and observation that makes Flannery O’Connor not only a standout in American and Western literature, but a standout among women writers period.

The Complete Stories, as the title implies, is a volume containing every short story that O’Connor ever wrote, combining all the stories from her two previous collections, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, along with several unpublished works. Her stories dovetail into every aspect of mid-20th century Southern life, from racism to classism to politics and love. No one is safe from her gaze, whether it’s Old Dudley, the bitter old protagonist of “The Geranium,” grumbling about his educated Northern black neighbor or Mrs. Willerton, the vapid housewife heroine of “The Crop,” repeatedly trying to write a novel and failing miserably:

Social problem. Social problem. Hmmm. Sharecroppers! Miss Willerton had never been intimately connected with sharecroppers but, she reflected, they would make as arty a subject as any, and they would give her that air of social concern which was so valuable to have in the circles she was hoping to travel! “I can always capitalize,” she muttered, “on the hookworm.” It was coming to her now! Certainly! Her fingers plinked excitedly over the keys, never touching them. Then suddenly she began typing at great speed.

If you’re looking for an introduction to Flannery O’Connor’s work, The Complete Stories is by far your best bet. The biggest criticism I have of the collection is that several of the previously unpublished stories are redundant; O’Connor later reworked them into the plot of her first novel, Wise Blood. Nonetheless, The Complete Stories is a great read for those interested in truly talented writers.

Click here to buy The Complete Stories.

Read Next: The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories by Andy Nowicki

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on November 22, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

This one’s a little different: Jack has released this compact little book for free on his website, but he’s politely requested donations for the hard work he put into it. A brief (less than 40 pages) meditation on modern masculinity, No Man’s Land is a nice introduction to manosphere and anti-feminist thought, short enough to knock off while you’re waiting at the dentist’s.

And did I mention that it’s free?

No Man’s Land consists of three chapters, the first two taking a sledgehammer to the various “man up” arguments coming from femiservatives like Kay Hymowitz, Bill Bennett and Michael Kimmel, among other things. With unpretentious and powerful language, Donovan exposes the emptiness of their message; the Hymowitzes and Kimmels of the world want men to assume their traditional gender roles while letting women take on whatever role they want:

The patriarchal kinship system that demanded paternal investment was dismantled by feminists, technology and the legal system. It was replaced with a system that gave women control over virtually all aspects of reproduction, and where a woman could rest assured that the state would step in and provide for her children in the absence of a husband or father. Divorce, most often initiated by women, offered a way for women to seize control of their families at-will, even when a man had chosen to make a paternal investment. Men had become peripheral players in the lives of their offspring, and they could be cut from the team by coach mom at any time. The managing bureaucrat would then determine what role the father would have in his children’s lives—at best he might be offered a co-parenting role, at worst he could be reduced to a mere paycheck.

America may not yet be a matriarchy, but her family structure has become matrilineal, or at least matrifocal. The practice of giving a child his or her father’s surname is a vestigial gesture, an outdated social norm from an earlier time. If women were to stop doing it altogether, or if they were to insist that their names come first in a mother-hyphen-father configuration, any enduring illusion of patriarchy would be shattered. One has to wonder if, in the absence of that illusion, men would invest in fatherhood at all. The switch to a bonobo culture—where males are mere inseminators and helpers—would at that point be explicit and complete. Why wouldn’t men simply shuffle about alone or in small, impotent groups, playing games and seeking masturbatory short-term gratification? Why would they make the investment or the sacrifices necessary to be good husbands and fathers, when a woman could take it all away on a whim?

None of the scolds have managed to come up with a plan for getting young “guys” to stop drinking, hooking up or playing video games, and start families instead. All they’ve managed to do in exhorting men to “man up” is invoke the “musty script” of a patriarchal system that no longer exists.

The final chapter, “Misrepresenting Masculinity,” deconstructs the attempts of male feminists like Robert Brannon to redefine and muddy the concept of manliness. Buttressing Jack’s arguments are a mountain of citations, providing a great jumping-off point for those writing about feminism or masculinity. In a thoughtful touch, the PDF and Kindle versions of the book are organized differently, with the citations organized as footnotes in the PDF version and as endnotes in the Kindle one.

No Man’s Land could have used tighter editing: for example, Jack misspells “Michael” so many times I started to feel like the annoying pedants who come out of the woodwork every time I use the word “irregardless.” But still, you can’t argue with free, so get over to his website and get this book now.

Click here to download No Man’s Land, and don’t forget to kick Jack a few bucks via the PayPal button in the site’s sidebar.

Read Next: The Way of Men by Jack Donovan

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on November 22, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

The sad thing about true geniuses in the literary/art world is that their genius usually isn’t recognized until after they’re dead or otherwise unable to turn a profit on it. Philip K. Dick is the poster boy for this sort of thing, as he labored most of his life in utter poverty and died in his early fifties just months before the first film adapted from his work (Blade Runner) was released to theaters. Now nearly three decades later, Hollywood is rushing to adapt every goddamn thing he ever wrote into a movie: Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, The Adjustment Bureau, the list goes on. Not to mention all the other films that were inspired by Dick either directly or indirectly (Vanilla Sky, The Matrix, Inception etc.)

Most genre fiction is trash, and the nerd-dominated genres of science fiction and fantasy are the worst of all. The basis of all entertaining fiction is writing what you know and making sure what you know is interesting. The nerds who dominate sci-fi can’t produce anything but garbage because they don’t grasp this, substituting character development and plot for masturbatory exposition and futuristic gimmickry pulled out of their asses. There’s no verisimilitude or ethos, which is why most nerd fiction rings hollow. For instance, I can’t think of a single memorable novel or character by Asimov, Heinlein, or Herbert that stuck with me after I read the last page, and years afterwards, everything those tedious, overpraised failures wrote has slipped down the memory hole for good.

Dick sticks with me. Philip K. Dick stands alone among sci-fi writers as being worth reading, because he doesn’t use sci-fi elements to prop up bad storytelling; he doesn’t need to. His stories and characters stand on their own as being poignant and memorable. Dick’s milieu was the rapidly-changing social landscape of mid-century California, caught between the free-love hippies on the coast and the hateful, miserable Calvinists in the suburbs, Nixon’s “silent majority.” His writing is rooted in this conflict, along with his understanding of the nature of reality and his drug use, with the science fiction element nothing but glorified drapery. Dick saw modern Calvinist conservatism in its larval stages—its fixation on “law and order,” its willful ignorance, its hatred of beauty and glorification of ugliness—and feared it.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is one of his finest works in this vein, and one of my favorite novels. The setting is pure Dick, a futuristic police state America that is slowly liberalizing. Think the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. Radical college students are condemned to live in poverty in collective camps. Blacks have been given a ridiculous amount of social status after a eugenics program designed to ethnically cleanse them was reversed; early on, while driving through Los Angeles, a hotel clerk muses about how he would get the death penalty if he ran a black person over:

“They’re like the last flock of whooping cranes,” the clerk said, starting forward now that the old black had reached the far side. “Protected by a thousand laws. You can’t jeer at them; you can’t get into a fistfight with one without risking a felony rap – ten years in prison. Yet we’re making them die out – that’s what Tidman wanted and I guess what the majority of Silencers wanted, but” – he gestured, for the first time taking a hand off the wheel – “I miss the kids. I remember when I was ten and I had a black boy to play with…not far from here as a matter of fact. He’s undoubtedly sterilized by now.”

“But then he’s had one child,” Jason pointed out. “His wife had to surrender their birth coupon when their first and only child came…but they’ve got that child. The law lets them have it. And there’re a million statutes protecting their safety.”

“Two adults, one child,” the clerk said. “So the black population is halved every generation. Ingenious. You have to hand it to Tidman; he solved the race problem, all right.”

Our hero is Jason Taverner, a popular TV talk show host who, after surviving a murder attempt by his mistress, wakes up in a run-down hotel to discover that all evidence of his existence has been wiped from the Earth. His IDs are gone, his friends don’t recognize him, and his name is nowhere to be found in the government’s databases. And in a world where you’re asked “Papers, please,” every other mile, being a nonperson is a one-way trip to the gulag.

On the run from the law, Taverner hooks up with Kathy, an ID forger and police informer with a batshit crazy streak. In the process, he catches the eye of LAPD chief Felix Buckman; thinking that Taverner is some kind of high-level government agent, Buckman has the police track him down. Taverner himself flees to Las Vegas to hide out with Ruth Rae, an Elizabeth Taylor-esque has-been actress with fifty ex-husbands. Cornered by the cops, Taverner is taken back to L.A. to be interrogated by Buckman and subsequently falls under the wing of his sister Alys, a slutty, drug using bisexual who has an incestuous relationship with her brother. Alys also happens to be the only person in the world who knows who Jason Taverner is.

Flow My Tears is one hell of a riveting book, but there’s one chapter that particularly resonated with me, the chapter that most clearly elucidates Dick’s anti-Calvinist sentiments. Near the midway point of the novel, police are ransacking Ruth Rae’s apartment building looking for Taverner when they come across a Mr. Mufi, a fat, pathetic slob with a predilection for pubescent boys. While preparing to cuff him, the corporal on duty discovers that Mufi’s paramour is thirteen years old, and that as part of a campaign to take all victimless crimes off the books, the age of consent has been lowered to twelve. Frustrated that they can’t legally charge him with anything, the police leave the cowardly bastard with this:

“I hope,” the corporal said, “that someday you do commit a statute violation of some kind, and they haul you in, and I’m on duty the day it happens. So I can book you personally.” He hawked, then spat on Mr. Mufi. Spat into his hairy, empty face.

If that paragraph doesn’t sum up mainstream Calvinist conservatism—unknowing, unthinking, with no higher principles than the desire to be the topper in the cell block of American society, getting off on raping the already weak and despised—I don’t know what does. Dick even makes it clear who he’s talking about when he describes the carpet in Mr. Mufi’s living room as “depict[ing] in gold Richard M. Nixon’s final ascent into heaven amid joyous singing above and wails of misery below.”

If there’s one criticism I’d level at Flow My Tears, the narrative sort-of disintegrates in the final third. The ultimate plot twist is relatively weak by Dickian standards, and the action doesn’t really build to a climax, instead plodding along to its conclusion. The book also never explains the backstory of Felix and Alys’ relationship; they have a son, Barney, who apparently grows up to be a normal man, not suffering the physical and mental retardation you’d expect the child of siblings to have. It’s not important to the story, but I found it a bit odd. Still, I’d recommend Flow My Tears as a great introduction to the only good science fiction writer of the past century.

Click here to buy Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

Read Next: No Tears for Dead Sluts; or, Why I Have No Sympathy for Felicia Garcia

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on November 16, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

Four years of college taught me that not only does the ivory tower have no idea what makes good literature, they couldn’t care less; they’ll erase truly talented writers from the history books if they wander off the plantation. Case in point: the 20th century’s most reviled and imitated novelist, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Ask an English professor about Céline and half of them will have no idea who you’re talking about, and the other half will react like you just snapped off a Hitler salute. I still remember how my junior year Early American Lit professor reacted when I told her I was reading Rigadoon: “Wasn’t Céline a Nazi?”

I may be biased on this front, but Céline is arguably the finest Western novelist of the past hundred years. With the publication of this, his debut novel, in 1931, Leon Trotsky wrote that Céline “had walked into the pantheon of great literature like a man walks into his living room.” But with the rise of Nazi Germany, Céline made the fatal error of becoming a fascist, and like magic, he was suddenly a non-person in the world of books. Of course, he wasn’t alone in joining the losing team; Ezra Pound gave anti-Semitic propaganda speeches on Italian radio and was arrested for treason when the war ended. But Pound is still taught in the universities while Céline is a leper.

Don’t give me the argument that it’s because of Pound’s influence on literature, because Céline was just as influential if not more. Numerous writers up to the present day have mimicked or outright ripped off the bad doctor, from the good (Bukowski, Miller, Burroughs, Houellebecq) to the awful (Kesey, Heller, Vonnegut). It’s not hard to see why when you pick up Journey to the End of the Night. Like Mark Twain, the first great American novelist, Céline is less of a formal writer than a storyteller: he pulls you into his world as assuredly as your best friend bragging about the crazy adventures he had last night. His prose explodes with energy and life, never shying away from the dirty details, holding you captive in its grotesque grip. So the quality of Céline’s writing has nothing to do with his being blacklisted from the curriculum.

Nope, the reason why Pound is still loved and Céline is hated is because the latter was honest. Like all popular hacks, Pound was a better entrepreneur than a writer, a charmer who knew how to say all the right things at all the right times. Like the trendy lefties who lined up to root for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War while they were disemboweling Catholic priests, Pound converted to fascism because he thought they were the winning side, then staged a public repentance to avoid having to face a firing squad. Céline, the poor sincere bastard, never surrendered to the jeering hordes. An open supporter of the Vichy regime and author of anti-Semitic pamphlets, Céline wore his convictions on his sleeve even when public opinion shifted against them. He went to the grave without apologizing for or recanting anything he’d ever written.

But more than that, Céline is persona non grata in the literary world because he alone confronted the nihilism and emptiness of the post-WWI West. Oh sure, Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrote about the aimlessness of the Lost Generation, but they were strictly amateur hour, bedtime stories for the kids. Céline was dead serious. His books were glorified accounts of his own life, with the boring bits taken out and new details added in. In Journey to the End of the Night, he grabs you by the back of the neck, shoves your face in it and doesn’t let go.

Journey begins with Céline’s protagonist, Ferdinand Bardamu, shooting the breeze with his buddy in 1910′s Paris. Bardamu joins in a passing military parade to mock his patriotic countrymen, and ends up being drafted into the war. Deserting the front lines, he flees into the jungles of French colonial Africa to escape punishment. Bardamu’s bizarre odyssey takes him all the way to New York City, Detroit to work for Ford and fall in love with a prostitute, and finally back to France where he establishes a medical practice caring for poor Parisians who are always looking for ways to cheat him. Along the way, he is continuously dogged by Robinson, an off-and-on-again friend whose own escapades never end happily.

By Célinean standards, Journey is mild stuff, a gateway drug for his later nihilism. As is the nature of geniuses, however, even his less-exemplary works are miles ahead of everyone else. The translation by Ralph Manheim does a fantastic job of preserving the unpretentiousness and humor of the original French, as shown by the excerpt where Bardamu runs into a communal toilet in New York:

Men among men, all free and easy, they laughed and joked and cheered one another on, it made me think of a football game. The first thing you did when you got there was take off your jacket, as if in preparation for strenuous exercise. This was a rite and shirtsleeves were the uniform.

In that state of undress, belching and worse, gesticulating like lunatics, they settled down in the fecal grotto. The new arrivals were assailed with a thousand revolting jokes while descending the stairs from the street, but they all seemed delighted.

The morose aloofness of the men on the street above was equaled only by the air of liberation and rejoicing that came over them at the prospect of emptying their bowels in tumultuous company.

The splotched and spotted doors to the cabins hung loose, wrenched from their hinges. Some customers went from one cell to another for a little chat, those waiting for an empty seat smoked heavy cigars and slapped the backs of the obstinately toiling occupants, who sat there straining with their heads between their hands. Some groaned like wounded men or women in labor. The constipated were threatened with ingenious tortures.

Of course, a true artist like Ezra Pound would never have written about something as plebeian and low-class as the sight of Americans straining to shit in a public restroom. But that was the reality of post-WWI West: it was Shit World, everywhere, and Céline chronicled it like no writer before or after. In a way, I’m thankful that “respectable” people don’t dare touch Céline; it makes it easier for me to separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s the reverse of the Hunter Thompson Idiot Test; anyone who likes Céline is usually intelligent and worth paying attention to, even if I disagree with them.

One thing that annoys me about this edition of Journey is the glossary. Céline’s writing was steeped in the vernacular of interwar France, and he frequently employed wordplay that doesn’t accurately translate into English. For example, in an early part of the book where Bardamu is recovering in an army hospital, he shares a room with a Sergeant Branledore, whose name is derived from branler, the French verb “to masturbate.” Instead of using footnotes, this edition forces you to flip to the back of the book whenever you come across an asterisked term. But this is a minor ding and won’t stop you from enjoying yourself.

Click here to buy Journey to the End of the Night.

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

This is the worst book I’ve ever read.

I first heard of Killing Yourself to Live during my stay in Seattle: a guy who picked me up while hitchhiking told me that he was retracing the journey Chuck Klosterman took across America, investigating the spots where various rock stars died, and his next stop was the mansion where Kurt Cobain blew his brains out with a shotgun. It sounded like a cool book, so I instinctively threw it on my Amazon Wish List. Sometime later, I came across Mark Ames’ scathing review of Klosterman’s previous book, Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs, which opens with one of the most vicious descriptions of a human being ever written in the English language:

Klosterman is, quite simply and almost literally, an ass. His soft, saggy face bears a disturbing resemblance to a 50-year-old man’s failing, hairless back end. His tiny, red mouth is a sphincter twisting to a pained close 40 seconds after taking a brutal pounding from Peter North. To round it out, he has a mop of ironically uncombed, dyed-yellow hair and thick-rimmed glasses that look like they were placed on the ass as a frat prank, like a wig and sunglasses thrown on an old jack-o-lantern.

Ouch. To me, though, the most striking part of Klosterman’s (who I will be referring to as “Klosterfuck” for the rest of this review) appearance is his eyes. Everyone who’s ever lived in Portland or Brooklyn can recognize those eyes. It’s the empty, bovine stare of the hipster, a pose they think makes them look pensive but really makes them look like invalids on disability who got lost while going to meet their pot dealer.

As I mentioned already, the premise of Killing Yourself to Live is that Klosterfuck goes on a road trip across America visiting the spots where various rock stars died—such as the aforementioned Seattle mansion where Kurt Cobain shot himself, or the field in Mississippi where Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crashed—attempting to discover “why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing.” Along the way, he meets a menagerie of people from all walks of life. In the hands of a competent writer, this would make for a good story. In Chuck Klosterfuck’s hands, the narrative gets subsumed into a whiny memoir about how awesome Chuck Klosterfuck is.

He sums up the book at the beginning of the second chapter: “Fuck, man. This shit is complicated.” Ya think?

Killing Yourself to Live is written in a style that I can only describe as “pedantic ignorance.” Klosterfuck doesn’t just know nothing about rock, he’s proud of it. He has no curiosity, no desire to learn, and can’t even be bothered to hide his contempt for the musicians he writes about and their fans. The first chapter sets the book’s tone: Klosterfuck is sent by Spin magazine to the Hotel Chelsea to write about Sid Vicious and his murder of Nancy Spungen back in 1978. I want you to put yourself in his shoes for a minute. Even if you have zero knowledge about journalism and reporting, you can probably figure out how to carry out an assignment like this. What would you do?

a) Call the hotel’s manager ahead of time and ask to schedule an interview.

b) Track down employees who worked there when the murder happened and interview them.

c) Do some basic research about the murder at the library and/or on the Internet.

d) All of the above.

e) Show up uninvited, have a banal conversation with the front desk clerks, then get kicked out by the manager for being an annoying twerp. And sulk about it later.

If you picked anything other than “e,” sorry, but you just don’t have the chops to do what Chuck Klosterfuck does. I’m not kidding you: the guy arrives at the Chelsea having done no research or preparation, so he doesn’t even know that Room 100, where the murder went down, had been demolished nearly twenty years before. The rest of the chapter is filled with snide jabs at his subjects: Vicious is “moronic,” Spungen is “the most annoying human of the late 20th century,” and punk rock itself is “patently ridiculous.”

This sets up the pattern for the rest of the book: Klosterfuck goes to a rock star’s death site, makes a few trite observations and does nothing else. He drives to the graveyard in Rhode Island commemorating the Station nightclub fire, snorts a couple bumps of cocaine and eats dinner at Arby’s. He tries to go to the site of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crash but pusses out when he learns about the poisonous snakes that live in the area. He walks out to the bean field in Iowa where Buddy Holly’s plane went down, bitching the entire way. In between, the book is puffed up with lengthy descriptions of his girl problems, lengthy descriptions of the restaurants he eats at, and lengthy tangents on nothing at all.

Like every other mainstream literary author, Klosterfuck can’t write to save his life. He tries to mask his quotidian thoughts by overwriting and repeating himself again and again, stretching what should be throwaway observations into page-long soliloquies. For example, he spends half of the second chapter agonizing over what to bring with him on his trip. Not only that, Klosterfuck has an obnoxious habit of dragging the reader down paths and thoughts that lead absolutely nowhere. Take this paragraph describing a waitress he meets in North Carolina:

My Cracker Barrel waitress is more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Actually, that’s not true; my Cracker Barrel waitress is an ectomorphic 19-year-old woman with a semi-tragic haircut and slightly big teeth. However, by the time our four-minute conversation ends, I will be in love with her.

If the waitress isn’t more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor, then why the fuck did you say she was? Answer: to waste the reader’s time. And this is one of the more bearable examples; Klosterfuck can stretch these dead-end digressions out for pages. Just before this, he goes on a hypochondriac rant about how his colleagues at Spin would react if he were to drop dead. He caps it off with this middle finger to the reader:

At the moment, nobody in New York knows that I’m dead. And this is because I am not.

Speaking of Cracker Barrel, Klosterfuck has a sick fetish for chain restaurants; he name-drops them so often he comes off like an Aspergery Thomas Friedman. And like everything else in the book, his reasons for liking them are the dumbest, tritest crap imaginable. He spends two pages jacking off over Olive Garden (which “always makes [him] happy”) and sums up his love of Cracker Barrel in two sentences:

Cracker Barrel is sublime: You can order chicken and dumplings with a side order of dumplings. That’s advanced.

Holy shit, that’s INCREDIBLE! What amazing innovations will the restaurant industry come up with next? Free drink refills? Letting you substitute French fries with a side salad?

But Klosterfuck goes from stupid to downright creepy when he starts crying about his sex life. The guy makes a big deal about supposedly juggling three girlfriends: his “urban hippie” Spin colleague Diane, Midwestern souvenir shop owner Lenore, and one-time 420 buddy Quincy. His attempt at manly bona fides collapses completely when you realize he has all the charisma of an incel:

It gets worse because Diane’s inability to love me makes me love her more. Without a doubt, not loving me is the most alluring thing Diane (or any woman) can do. Nothing makes me love Diane as much as her constant rejection of my heartfelt advances. This is compounded by Diane’s own insecurities; the fact that she can reject me time after time after time is what she finds most endearing. She knows I will never give up. She could hate me and I would love her anyway.

Holy crap, I think I just discovered the Anti-Game Equation. Klosterfuck behaves exactly like the “Nice Guy” caricature that feminists complain about, right down to the servile boot-licking and entitlement. And naturally, the idea that Diane simply doesn’t find Klosterfuck attractive never crosses his mind. While taking her to a campout near Syracuse, our heterosexual hero decides he’s had enough of Diane’s headgames and puts his foot down:

“I can’t handle this anymore,” I say. “I have been very clear about my feelings toward you. I have run out of ways to say I love you. So this is it. You have three weeks.”

“I have three weeks to do what?”

“You have three weeks to decide if you want to be with me. And if your answer is that you do not want to be with me, I don’t want to hang out with you, ever.”

Silence.

“Chuck, I can’t guarantee that I will be able to answer that question.”

“You have to.”

“This is unfair.”

“I don’t care.”

Silence.

Man, Diane is one heartless bitch. What woman wouldn’t fall in love with a navel-gazing narcissist who talks like a teenage girl? I just can’t understand why she doesn’t see what a catch Chuck Klosterfuck is, this vagina-faced little troll who hovers around her incessantly, spends his free time hanging out with high school kids and is completely incompetent at his job.

Klosterfuck’s cluelessness around women first amused me, then became progressively more horrifying. The sad thing is that he actually seems aware of how repulsive he comes off to girls. Not enough to change his behavior, of course, but enough to refuse to inform us of the details of “Chuck’s 9/11,” a party where he disgusted Lenore so much she decided to break off their relationship for good. This little factoid doesn’t stop the Chuckster from driving to her rural Minnesota hometown in a last desperate attempt to Compliment & Cuddle his way into her panties:

“Why didn’t you tell me you loved me?” she asks by the lake. “It’s on the second page of your book, but you never actually said it to me. Not even once.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “I told you I loved you seven times.” This is technically accurate but intellectually fraudulent; I’ve told Lenore I loved her on seven occasions, but three times were in handwritten letters, three times were in e-mails, and once was when I was drunk.

Still, I was never lying.

At this point, Klosterfuck is batting 0 for 3; he spends the night before in Minneapolis repeatedly dialing Quincy without getting a response. He whiles away the time getting drunk with his frenemy My Nemesis (no really, that’s what he calls him), who he claims to “love” despite half of their encounters ending in sissy slap-fights:

…My Nemesis—who was probably my closest friend at the time—used this irrelevant alternative publication as a vehicle to publicly attack me. I responded poorly to this. It prompted me to drive back to Grand Forks, drink about 27 beers, and punch him in the face in front of all our friends.

Noticing a pattern here? ‘Cause I sure am. If Klosterfuck ever said he loved me, I’d immediately file a restraining order: “Forney had used his irrelevant blog as a means to publicly impugn my honor. I did not take the news well. I was inspired to take a four-hour flight to Portland, wait in the bushes outside his house, and crack him in the knees with a Louisville Slugger. I celebrated afterwards with a feast at Carl’s Jr. I fucking love their Jim Beam Bourbon Burgers.”

And almost as soon as he’s done bragging about that pussy punch, Klosterfuck revokes his own man card. Driving to meet up with his parents in their rural North Dakota town, he starts talking about the time his brother Bill shot a buck at 250 yards. He explains his own reluctance to hunt with this boner:

Men shoot animals, and I am just a Guy.

Dude, just stick your head in the oven and get it over with. And by the way, when your mother calls you a “bugger,” she’s implying that you like to suck big dicks.

And we haven’t even hit maximum creep yet. That comes in Missoula, Montana. After spending twenty minutes desperately freebasing the last of his weed with his car’s cigarette lighter, Klosterfuck discovers that a group of high schoolers are partying in the hotel room next door. He strikes up a conversation with one of the girls, and when she realizes that he’s higher than the Pope, she asks if she can buy some. Instead of simply telling her the truth, he gives her a bizarre lecture on why marijuana’s bad, mmmkay, ending with this:

“Right on,” she says unconvincingly. We exchange terse good-byes, and then she walks back into her room. I can hear three teenagers groan through the wooden door. They are so not going to party.

It’s that last line that clinches it. Klosterfuck thinks he’s being witty—several paragraphs back, he notes the teenagers repeating “We are so going to party”—but combined with his pedo-esque face and bunny-boiling antics, I imagined Chris Hansen kicking the door down and asking him to take a seat.

And the worst part about Klosterfuck’s failed sexcapades? They’re the only times in the book where he is even semi-honest.

Everything else in Killing Yourself to Live is a fake, phony posture. Klosterfuck throws out statements and opinions not to advance arguments or find the truth, but to mock underground culture and everyone who ever took it seriously, playing Principal Skinner to an audience of empty-headed GenX/millennial trust fund brats. Whenever he name-drops an avant-garde or underground musician, it’s to either insult them (as he did with Sid Vicious) or compare them unfavorably to the commercialized, mindless dreck he enjoys. He picks Radiohead over Pavement, Motley Crue over David Byrne, KISS over Lou Reed (even going so far as to compare his recent “girlfriends” to the members of KISS), and Guns ‘n’ Roses over Nirvana.

That last one is the most galling of all. Kurt Cobain, whatever his flaws, was a serious man who lived what he preached. In other words, he was everything that Chuck Klosterfuck is not. So naturally, when he gets to Seattle, Klosterfuck engages in some revisionist history that should have indie rock fans screaming for a fatwa on his head:

…Nevermind was no longer the soundtrack to living in the early ’90s—now it was that experience in totality. Kurt Cobain had not merely made culturally important music— suddenly, he had made culture. His death became a catchall event for anyone who wanted their adolescence to have depth: It was now possible to achieve credibility simply by mourning retrospectively. Cobain’s iconography hadn’t changed that much, really; what changed was the number of people who suddenly thought Cobain’s iconography said something about themselves.

In other words: “Ha ha you dumbfucks, Cobain’s suicide didn’t really mean anything!” All those angst-filled lyrics raging against the world? All the times Cobain said he was upset at corporations co-opting his music? Naming his band after a philosophical concept that refers to the peace of mind that comes with liberation from the lies of the material world? It was all bullshit! Cobain was just a deluded, depressed junkie.

The only real music comes from corporate hacks like Gene Simmons and Axl Rose who pander to the lowest common denominator.

That’s the endgame of the bland, Beigeist liberalism that Klosterfuck represents: a world in which nothing is at stake. Where marijuana is the only permissible drug. Where sex is negotiated through consent forms signed in triplicate. Where Olive Garden and their half-cooked McItalian cuisine is considered the height of American dining. Where there’s no danger, no risk and no passion. Where no one takes a stand on anything because believing in something is rubbish, and rubbish isn’t cool. Stuff and shit is cool.

I can already hear all the little Klosterfuckers upset at this review: “God Matt, it’s just MUSIC, why you gotta take everything so SERIOUSLY? You need to chill out and smoke a joint or something.”

Chuck Klosterfuck and his ilk are the real-life Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends: soulless, sophomoric, shallow and stupid. Smiling to your face while they stab you in the back. Haters of everything good, beautiful and moral in this world. And I’m going to keep kicking against these pricks until the loathsome culture they created is six feet under.

In the meantime, toss self-indulgent, revisionist garbage like Killing Yourself to Live in the trash can where it belongs.

Click here to buy Killing Yourself to Live.

Read Next: Naughty Nomad: Not Your Typical Backpacker Story by Mark Zolo

One of the joys of reading and learning about the past is discovering that many of the problems we’re dealing with today have been around for longer than we thought, and learning how our forerunners dealt with them. Enter Ernest Mann, a writer who is completely unknown to the manosphere (and the world at large), but deserves to be more widely read. Mann saw the problems of expanding government, environmental degradation and wage slavery and proposed the Priceless Economic System as a way of ending them. The PES was simple; eliminate currency and have everyone work for free, only at jobs they enjoyed doing, and live more simply, without television, pop music or the other myriad shiny things the elite use to keep us poor, dumb and content.

Unlike the leftists though, Mann didn’t call for wealth redistribution from the safety of his Gulfstream Five; he lived by example.

In 1969, at the age of 42, Ernest Mann decided he’d had enough of the rat race and checked out. He sold most of his worldly possessions and spent the rest of his life advocating for the PES, living in unfinished basements and rustic wood cabins in his native Minnesota. To push his radical ideas, Mann created the Little Free Press newsletter, which he intermittently published until his grandson murdered him in 1996. Nearly two decades later, my friend and Mann pen pal Trevor Blake has brought his work back into print with I Was Robot, a compilation of the best of the Little Free Press.

If you have any interest in minimalism and breaking free of the corporate consumerist hamster wheel, you need to pick this one up.

Ernest Mann saw the thin red line that connected all ideologies—communism, libertarianism, anarchism—and why it made them all ineffective when it came to solving the problems of humanity: they were all obsessed with money. That’s all ideology is, really: determining which group of thugs gets to own all the money, whether it’s the plutocrats, the royal family, the church, the government, the poor. Mann had a simple counterpoint: the problem was money itself, and the idea of working for it and buying useless shit with it. He sums up his life philosophy in one iconic catchphrase:

If you take pay, you must obey!

That’s the truth of it right there: if you work for a paycheck, you are somebody’s bitch. When your boss tells you to jump, you ask him how high. When the HR ditz demands your Facebook password, you fork it over so she can rifle through your private photos. If she decides she doesn’t like something you’ve said online, regardless of how effective an employee you are or how qualified you are for the job, she can and will show you the door. You learn that the only way to make a middle-class living is to put your brain on a leash and be as bland and compliant as you possibly can.

Meanwhile, you waste the 14-16 hours of your day that aren’t spent making some dick-clitted bittergrrl rich on meaningless diversions. Everything from pop music to video games to our high fructose corn syrup-laden food is deliberately designed to get you hooked on them like crack, to program you into buying more, more, MORE! And how do you afford to keep buying the latest installment of Assassin’s Creed or shoving sugary bon-bons into your mouth?

You work!

You slave away even more so you can have the newest, shiniest iTurd or replace the $50 espresso machine that was deliberately designed to break a year after you bought it. And yet, no matter how long or hard you work, it’s never enough. There’s never a point where you can kick back, stop angling for a promotion and just enjoy your life; you’ve got to keep working until the house is paid off and the kids move out, and maybe not even then. You’re not allowed to take your foot off the pedal until you’re 65 or so, when your brain is lapsing into senility and your body is frail and weak; in other words, when the system no longer has any use for you.

Ernest Mann saw all this nearly half a century ago and decided to fuck that noise:

I was an enlistee in WW II, but I protested the Korean War and when the Vietnam War came along and threatened to take my two sons, that made me blow my cork. I quit the real estate business. I sold my 13 rental properties to my tenants for one to a hundred dollars down and payments less than their rent. I even sold the duplex we lived in.

My wife and I took off in an old used pick-up truck with a camper. Our youngest kid was 16. We told her she could come with us, stay with a relative and finish school or go on her own. She has been on her own for 10 years now. She learned more about living than her friends did who finished school. My wife and I traveled the U.S.A. for a year just getting unwound.

I Was Robot reads like a mashup of Max Stirner and Jerry Rubin, as filtered through the voice of a revivalist preacher. Mann was an individualist above all else, who spurned politics and activism as wastes of time. He advocated for the Priceless Economic System in a manner as simple as how he lived, by fixing himself before he sought to heal the world:

Freedom started in my own mind. When I discovered the fact that I was an individual and that I could be in control of myself if I chose to be, I found ways to reject the control that society had conditioned into me. I started making my own decisions based on what is best for the individual. I now attempt to make my own individual self happy.

Where do you start? Stop loading your biocomputer (brain) with the mental junk food dispensed by the TV and the radio. Stop eating sugary food and medicating with cheap cigarettes and booze. Stop wasting your money on “labor-saving devices” that mysteriously require you to work longer hours than your “backwards” ancestors to afford and replace them. And when you’ve adopted the PES, tell two friends about it, then have them each tell two of their friends, going on and on:

There are a little over 4 1/2 billion people on this planet. How could we reach all of them? Sound impossible? Too big a job? You and I don’t need to inform them all. All I need to do is to inform and convince just 2 people so thoroughly that they EACH inform 2 more people to do the same. That is simple enough isn’t it? The People’s Grapevine, i.e., the geometric progression of numbers then takes over (see diagram in “Changes” chapter). Would you believe that 31 doublings would reach the whole world population? Try it! It’s like a chain letter, only with no money to send. Just one hell of a lot of work to convince 2 people so well that they carry on and do the same.

Calling Mann a pioneer would be an understatement: he was actually the first person to refer to the elite as the “1%.” Unlike the hipsters at Zuccotti Park who ripped him off two decades later though, Mann came up with that number via mathematics: calculating that 98.6% of Americans made less than $50,000 a year. And also unlike those hipsters, Mann didn’t “occupy” anything beyond his own mind. To him, protests were just another way that the elite (which he humorously personifies as the “Warbucks family” in a series of satirical essays midway through the book) drained our energy and distracted us from the real issues. If you really want to strike a blow against the 1%, you don’t camp out in a park and chant hackneyed slogans.

You live life for yourself and your loved ones, without wasting your time and effort on things that don’t benefit you or make you happy.

The biggest problem with I Was Robot is that it feels somewhat haphazard and repetitive. As Trevor points out in his introduction, the articles are not organized in chronological order, but arranged so that the book “comment[s] on itself as it grows.” Mann rehashes many of the same points over and over, and his relentlessly cheerful attitude wore on me after a while.

That said, like that other relentlessly cheerful minimalist from Minnesota, Ernest Mann’s work has great potential to convince people of the glories of simple living and the PES. Mann feared that if our absurd, money-centric modern economy wasn’t dismantled, World War III would turn the planet into an uninhabitable wasteland. According to him, war, pollution and the other ills of the human condition were caused by the desire for profit.

No profit, no motivation to wreck our little spaceship called Earth.

Whether you agree with Mann or not, or you’re just interested in the philosophy of minimalism and anti-consumerism, I Was Robot is a must-read.

Click here to buy I Was Robot.

Read Next: OVO 20: Juven(a/i)lia by Trevor Blake

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on November 16, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

This is a best-of collection of articles and artwork from OVO, a zine founded and edited by friend of the blog Trevor Blake, “a public record of [his] interests and inquiries.” It’s interesting, it’s weird, and I don’t entirely know what to make of it. I guess it’s because I’m too young to appreciate it: I was barely out of diapers when Trevor was printing up the early editions of OVO on his pal’s company’s copiers in the eighties. To someone of the Internet Era, where narcissistic self-expression is just a couple of mouse clicks away, the effort and dedication involved in compiling an entire magazine, from writing and gathering the material to binding the physical copies and mailing them out, is difficult to relate to.

Still, this is a great little collection of oddities, ranging from poetry to short stories to investigative journalism on offbeat subjects. They include “Holding Games for Ransom,” about how one tabletop game creator found a way to keep online piracy from cutting into his profits; “A Pit Stop Along the Inward Journey,” a stream-of-consciousness tale beginning with white guilt and ending with madness; and “23 Sperm Stories 23,” the longest article in the book, on just about every aspect of sperm, from its discovery, its function, and its future. Of particular interest to us in the manosphere are “Warbucks Intra-Family Communique” and “Becoming More Free” by Ernest Mann. The former is a satirical article on the emptiness and mindlessness of American consumerism; the latter is on how Mann unplugged himself from the Matrix of American culture:

I am wasting less of my time (LIFE) watching, listening to and reading THOUGHT LEADERS, ie, TV, movies, radio, music, newspapers, magazines and novels. These are like spectator sports. They cause me to live life vicariously, ie, second-hand, not real, only in fantasy. These mind conditioners are subtly designed to create not only fear and anger emotions but also create feelings of guilt and inadequacy. These feeling stifle growth and keep one securely in one’s rut. And of course the more visible purpose of the media is to create the desire to acquire (BUY! BUY! BUY!) and keep up with the Joneses. ‘Buying’ uses up my savings. I spent 22 years of my TIME (life) working as a Wage Slave. I helped perpetuate the status quo, ie a world of 98.6% Slaves and less than 1% Elite (Billionaires). I don’t wish to do that any more.

But the real prize is Trevor’s own writings, comprising the second half of the book. They include book reviews (including an exhaustive review of one of my favorites, L.A. Rollins’ Myth of Natural Rights), interviews with such diverse individuals as a bulimia sufferer and an expert on out-of-body experiences/bilocation, and my favorite, “Trajectory Through Anarchism,” in which Trevor tracks the evolution of his political beliefs:

1996: Feeling free of anarchism and a little burned by what I now see was my own hooded thinking, I call up the imp of the perverse to see what other forbidden ideas might be out there. Ayn Rand is suggested, and I read her works. Having already shed one hood I’m less inclined to put another one on, and I do not become an Objectivist.  But moving through Objectivism brings libertarian thinking to my attention. It’s something about the sovereignty of the individual… but I’ve walked down that path already and don’t sign on as a libertarian either.

Like The eXile, OVO 20 comes in a 8 1/2 by 11 inch size, to fit artwork and cartoons on the pages: I was particularly amused by “Attack of the Giant Killer Sperm.” One minor issue I have with the design is that all paragraphs in OVO 20 are punctuated with bullet points. I suppose they’re there to make the book look distinctive, but I found them mildly distracting, fooling my eyes into thinking I was reading a series of lists instead of articles.

Still, if you want to take an excursion into the bizarre and come back a little more enlightened, OVO 20 is a fun and informative read. If you’re still not convinced, Trevor maintains a free online archive of all OVO articles here. He also has some words of wisdom for aspiring writers and publishers:

…First and most important, get busy. Your time is already diminished by work and mortality, and neither of those situations is going to improve. Keep a printed copy of what you make and write down the date of when you made it. Large bodies of work and the pleasure they bring are made a few small pieces at a time. Learn about the history of what interests you. Novelty is rare and not always of value for being novel. Your friends are not being documented right now and you are the one who can do a good job with that. Read with regularity outside your area of interests. Nothing will point out your own ignorance and error better than attentiveness to those who disagree with you, nothing makes what you know make sense like learning something unrelated to what you know. Take as many chances as you are willing to take the lumps for.

But most of all, get busy.

Click here to buy OVO 20: Juven(a/i)lia.

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NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on February 29, 2012. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

God, what an unreadable pile of shit.

I recall stumbling across a used copy of City of Glass when I was a kid and liking it for some inexplicable reason. I never bothered reading the two following installments in the trilogy, so when I saw them all bundled together in a single Kindle volume, I jumped for joy. That was an Amazon gift card well-spent.

As soon as I laid eyes on Luc Sante’s introduction, I knew I was in trouble:

Paul Auster has the key to the city. He has not, as far as I know, been presented with the literal object, traditionally an oversized five-pound gold-plated item, dispensed to visiting benefactors and favored natives on a dais in front of City Hall by a functionary in top hat and claw hammer coat, but I doubt he needs one of those. Auster’s key is like the key to dreams or the key to the highway. It is an alchemical passe-partout that allows him to see through walls and around corners, that permits him entry to corridors and substrata and sealed houses nobody else notices, as well as to a field of variegated phenomena once considered discrete, but whose coherence Auster has established. This territory is a realm within New York City, a current that runs along its streets, within its office buildings and apartment houses and helter-skelter through its parks—a force field charged by synchronicity and overlap, perhaps invisible but inarguably there, although it was never identified as such before Auster planted his flag.

Recognize this? It’s the overwrought diction of every “real” literary novel published in the past quarter-century. You’ve got the run-on sentences, the padding, and the highfalutin vocabulary. I mean, “passe-partout?” Do you even know what that means? I didn’t, so I looked it up; it’s French for “master key.” Now that’s how “real” writers write: using obscure terms to remind us all how smart they are and what dumbfucks we are in comparison. If a student handed this in to me for a grade, I’d strike out half of it with a red pen: “Too much filler. Needless repetition. Drop the David Fuckster Wallace act and write like a normal human being.” And this is only the first paragraph!

Since this is a trilogy, I’ll review each book on its own.

City of Glass

The lengthiest book in the series, it’s also the only one worth reading. The plot concerns Daniel Quinn, a hermit mystery novel author who gets embroiled in an actual detective case after being mistaken for Paul Auster. Oh yes, Auster is a character in his own novel. I smell postmodern hijinks!

The following night, Quinn was caught off guard. He had thought the incident was over and was not expecting the stranger to call again. As it happened, he was sitting on the toilet, in the act of expelling a turd, when the telephone rang. It was somewhat later than the previous night, perhaps ten or twelve minutes before one. Quinn had just reached the chapter that tells of Marco Polo’s journey from Peking to Amoy, and the book was open on his lap as he went about his business in the tiny bathroom. The ringing of the telephone came as a distinct irritation. To answer it promptly would mean getting up without wiping himself, and he was loath to walk across the apartment in that state. On the other hand, if he finished what he was doing at his normal speed, he would not make it to the phone in time. In spite of this, Quinn found himself reluctant to move. The telephone was not his favorite object, and more than once he had considered getting rid of his. What he disliked most of all was its tyranny. Not only did it have the power to interrupt him against his will, but inevitably he would give in to its command. This time, he decided to resist. By the third ring, his bowels were empty. By the fourth ring, he had succeeded in wiping himself. By the fifth ring, he had pulled up his pants, left the bathroom, and was walking calmly across the apartment. He answered the phone on the sixth ring, but there was no one at the other end. The caller had hung up.

You can pretty much guess how the rest of the book reads from this one paragraph; lots of exposition, adjective abuse, and page-long paragraphs. Still, unlike the following two books, City of Glass is interesting because it at least tries to conform to the structure of a narrative, with a discernible plot, dialogue and a character arc, detailing Quinn involving himself in the case to the point where he descends into gibbering insanity. At the very least, I was motivated to keep reading. You can spout all kinds of babble about how City of Glass is about breaking down the boundaries between truth and fiction and questioning the relationship between author and reader, but none of it matters. If you want a good, vaguely Coen-esque mystery story, City of Glass is a decent read.

Ghosts

I was plodding my way through this godawful novella (the shortest installment of the trilogy) trying not to fall asleep, when I came across this paragraph:

One night, therefore, Blue finally turns to his copy of Walden. The time has come, he says to himself, and if he doesn’t make an effort now, he knows that he never will. But the book is not a simple business. As Blue begins to read, he feels as though he is entering an alien world. Trudging through swamps and brambles, hoisting himself up gloomy screes and treacherous cliffs, he feels like a prisoner on a forced march, and his only thought is to escape. He is bored by Thoreau’s words and finds it difficult to concentrate. Whole chapters go by, and when he comes to the end of them he realizes that he has not retained a thing. Why would anyone want to go off and live alone in the woods? What’s all this about planting beans and not drinking coffee or eating meat? Why all these interminable descriptions of birds? Blue thought that he was going to get a story, or at least something like a story, but this is no more than blather, an endless harangue about nothing at all.

There’s nothing like a book that insults you for even bothering to read it. I almost think Auster threw this in to make fun of the lit-crit hacks who gush over him: “Ha ha, you idiots are actually READING this? I farted this crap out between watching reruns of Happy Days!” As for me, I just jabbed my Kindle’s next page button until I was at the end.

The plot of Ghosts is nearly identical to City of Glass: a private detective is assigned to tail some guy and eventually spirals into madness in the process. The main difference is that with Ghosts, Auster decided to dispense with such irrelevant distractions as “action” and “dialogue,” instead burying us in a nonstop monologue of the protagonist’s thoughts, which naturally wander all over the place and have nothing to do with the story. Even better, all of the characters are named after colors (e.g. Blue, Black, White, Gold), which combined with Auster’s squid-ink prose means you’ll need a flow chart to keep track of everything.

More often than not, however, Blue will bypass the bar and go to the movie theater several blocks away. With summer coming on now and the heat beginning to hover uncomfortably in his little room, it’s refreshing to be able to sit in the cool theater and watch the feature show. Blue is fond of the movies, not only for the stories they tell and the beautiful women he can see in them, but for the darkness of the theater itself, the way the pictures on the screen are somehow like the thoughts inside his head whenever he closes his eyes. He is more or less indifferent to the kinds of movies he sees, whether comedies or dramas, for example, or whether the film is shot in black and white or in color, but he has a particular weakness for movies about detectives, since there is a natural connection, and he is always gripped by these stories more than by others. During this period he sees a number of such movies and enjoys them all: Lady in the Lake, Fallen Angel, Dark Passage, Body and Soul, Ride the Pink Horse, Desperate, and so on. But for Blue there is one that stands out from the rest, and he likes it so much that he actually goes back the next night to see it again.

These individual paragraphs may not seem so bad, but imagine reading a hundred straight pages of this drivel.

The few short segments of Ghosts that aren’t Blue’s inane exposition are like oases in a desert, but even then Auster can’t resist the urge to fuck things up. Take this segment where Blue is confronted by his fiance (just about the only character who isn’t given a color for a name, but incessantly referred to as “the future Mrs. Blue”), who has understandably gotten sick of his undercover games and found another man:

You! she says to him. You!

No quotation marks. Who do you think you are, Cormac McCarthy? And of course, that’s the only dialogue in that section; “the ex-future Mrs. Blue’s” physical assault on Blue is written in more fucking exposition! Skip this.

The Locked Room

I made it all of two chapters into this before giving up. The Locked Room is written in the exact same dialogue-free expository style as Ghosts, and I was so burnt out from trying to make it through that one that I couldn’t take it anymore. The plot is at least different; it concerns an unnamed narrator’s search for his childhood friend Fanshawe.

Fanshawe had never had any regular work, she said, nothing that could be called a real job. Money didn’t mean much to him, and he tried to think about it as little as possible. In the years before he met Sophie, he had done all kinds of things—the stint in the merchant marine, working in a warehouse, tutoring, ghost writing, waiting on tables, painting apartments, hauling furniture for a moving company—but each job was temporary, and once he had earned enough to keep himself going for a few months, he would quit. When he and Sophie began living together, Fanshawe did not work at all. She had a job teaching music in a private school, and her salary could support them both. They had to be careful, of course, but there was always food on the table, and neither of them had any complaints.

Perhaps I’m just being unfair. Perhaps The Locked Room is actually a really good read and I was just so put off by Ghosts that all of Paul Auster’s writing is forever ruined for me. But I seriously fucking doubt it.

The New York Trilogy is a encapsulation of everything I hate about modern literature. It’s turgid, condescending, obtuse, and pointless. But the sad thing is that Luc Sante got it right in his intro: Paul Auster is the poet laureate of New York City, though not for the reasons he thinks. The New York Trilogy is the perfect book for the New York of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, a stultifying police state run by over-educated SWPLs who think All Things Considered is really deep and get the vapors whenever anyone says anything vaguely controversial. It’s perfect for the New York of the hipsters, pencil-necked dweebs from Seattle or Milwaukee thinking they’re going to be the next Thurston Moore or Lydia Lunch while they snack on artisan bread courtesy of their trust funds. It’s perfect for a New York defanged, declawed and stripped of everything that made it interesting and unique, made safe for underemployed Midwestern brats and bored Australian tourists. The New York everyone romanticizes—the New York of danger, intrigue and passion—is dead and buried.

And this neutered New York has produced a literati that spends all day sniffing its own farts. Jonathan Safran Foer, Colson Whitehead, Nicole Krauss, Gary Shteyngart, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Foster Wallace (actually wait, he’s dead; I’ve never derived so much joy from a suicide in my life), and all the rest: worthless hacks devoid of curiosity, humanity or talent. There’s more merit in a single Roosh Tweet than in the entire American literary establishment.

Sorry, but I went through four years of this horror, and I’ve got the diploma to prove it. I’d rather gargle battery acid than write another ten page paper analyzing Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and I’d never read any of this garbage in my free time. I would love nothing more than to see the mainstream publishing world collapse, along with the toxic, insular culture that gave birth to it. This is why I’m such a huge booster of self-made writers like Roosh, Frost and English Teacher X; for all their flaws, they understand what makes good writing, and they don’t water down their books to make some soccer mom-fearing suit happy. I refuse to support a world where pretentious puff words and navel-gazing is considered the stuff of great literature.

As for The New York Trilogy? The only reason I can see to buy this flaming turd is if you’re an adjunct English professor looking for new ways to torture your students. Alternately, give it to them as an example of how not to write. If there was a version of City of Glass available on its own on Kindle, I’d recommend you buy that instead.

And here’s the final joke. When I sat down to write this review, I was suddenly struck with a thought: “Is Paul Auster related to Lawr—. No, he can’t be. That would just be too convenient.” Ten seconds of research and my suspicions were confirmed:

Paul is the older cousin of conservative columnist Lawrence Auster.

It pains me to say this, but Paul should have taken some writing tips from his little cousin. Larry Auster is a senile old dork, but he can at least write. He’s not great, but he can make his points clearly and concisely, without feverishly masturbating all over the page.

Click here to buy The New York Trilogy.

Read Next: Paul Elam Argues Like a Girl

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on February 21, 2012. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

I was thumbing my way through this nifty little pamphlet, the latest release from Jack Donovan’s Dissonant Hum, at a diner (yes, I’m one of those people who takes a book to read when eating out) a couple of days ago when I came across this in Jack’s intro:

In the past decade, there has been increased interest in human biodiversity and using evolutionary psychology make sense of the “war between the sexes.” First Published in 1998, All About Women was ahead of its time. Its punchy essays would be at home in the “manosphere” alongside those of popular “game,” anti-feminist and PUA bloggers like Heartiste, Roosh V, and Ferdinand Bardamu. If the chapters and charts in All About Women were blog posts, I have no doubt that they’d be wildly popular, well-linked and quoted often online.

My ego massaged by being name-checked in a “real” book, I cracked a wide grin. The waitress probably thought I was nuts.

My narcissism aside, All About Women is an important book and one you must own, if not for its content, then for the circumstances surrounding its publication. Simon Sheppard is a victim of the tyranny of political correctness, a man who has been dogged and persecuted by the British government for over a decade for “hate speech,” saying things that run counter to the prevailing multicult orthodoxy:

In 1999, Sheppard was arrested with David Hannam for publishing and distributing 1,500 copies of a double-sided anti-immigration leaflet titled, “Our Politicians Are Traitor Criminals.” After being charged with “Publishing or Distributing Racially Inflammatory Material,” and “Possession of Racially Inflammatory Material,” Sheppard was sentenced to nine months in prison.

After his release, he continued writing what he believed to be the truth.

In 2005 and 2006, the British police raided his flat several times, and Sheppard was forced to attend several hearings. He and his co-publisher Stephen Whittle were tried, and Sheppard was convicted of eleven counts of “race hate.”

In 2008, the two fled to the United States to seek political asylum. In their absence, they were retried in England. Their appeals for asylum in the US were denied by a female judge who had previously granted asylum to an IRA member who had been convicted of murdering two policemen.

All About Women was originally published in 1998 and pioneered many concepts and ideas that we in the manosphere take for granted. It’s only available on Kindle, but Jack has gone to great lengths to preserve the original text and its images and various lengthy quotes. Sheppard’s prose reads like Schopenhauer without the pretension, laying into the second sex with savagery and bluntness:

A hundred years ago the inferiority of women was obvious to all. Two hundred years before that scolding caps were used and chastity belts employed so that a man knew for certain that a woman was his alone. Whole families slept in one bed, and because of the higher population density they were probably more riddled with parasites and disease than during prehistoric times. Beating women was considered necessary, civilization being fragile enough as it was, and this was accepted provided the rod was no wider than a man’s thumb, so that no bones were broken.

All About Women is brief but comprehensive, touching on evolutionary biology, women’s suffrage, the nature of women themselves (with delightfully-titled chapters like “Women Are Inferior” and “Women Are Liars”), and the totalitarian nature of feminism (which Sheppard dubs “Big Sister”). In one short section, he confronts, much to my delight, an old pet peeve of mine; the Valerie Solanas Theory of Female Subjugation:

This example is highly relevant to the claim of feminism, because that claim is precisely an example of The Old Reverse. Feminists allege that the reason for the paucity of female inventors, notable scientists, outstanding artists and musicians and females’ mediocre showing in practically every other sphere is because they have been cruelly subjugated by men. Here is a confusion of cause and effect: firstly women have allowed themselves to be subjugated and secondly they have been because they are mediocre and if they are not then mediocrity will dominate, which is precisely what is happening in contemporary society.

It’s not all gloom and doom, though; Sheppard has a sense of humor, as shown by his “Female Stereotypes” chapter (I laughed at “Able Woman” and “Thug Woman”). His DSoD theory is pure genius, though his application of game theory (John Nash game theory, not PUA game theory) to sexual relations is a bit nutty. Still, for a brief and entertaining exploration of relations between the sexes, pick up All About Women today.

Click here to buy All About Women.

Read Next: Bang Colombia: How to Sleep with Colombian Women in Colombia by Roosh V

Aaron Clarey is cooler than you.

He’s an economist. He explores caves. He teaches salsa dancing. He rides a motorcycle. He collects fossils. He’s not married. He doesn’t have any kids. He’s self-employed and doesn’t answer to a boss. He lives life the way he wants to, not the way anyone else expects him to.

He’s living the dream, and with his latest book, Enjoy the Decline, he wants you to live the dream too.

Enjoy the Decline is not another hucksterish crapware title on how to make money running a network of plagiarism-laden affiliate marketing sites. It does have practical advice for living your life, but it’s philosophical at its core. Savvy Captain Capitalism readers will recognize “enjoy the decline” as Aaron’s catchphrase, which he uses to sign off many of his blog posts (at one point during In Mala Fide’s existence, I was using the French version, “Profitez de la baisse!”, as an homage to him), and this new book is an encapsulation of his life philosophy:

America is fucked, so you might as well have fun on the way down.

Aaron starts off Enjoy the Decline by stating why: the election last year pretty much confirmed that the country is irreversibly in decline. The American people took a president who has been a failure by every objective measure—running up the deficit with reckless spending while embroiling the military in more pointless wars and doing nothing to improve the economy—and gave him a second term in office. Not that a President Romney would have improved things, as the demolition of the land of the free and home of the brave has been an ongoing bipartisan project:

For instance, as the government grows larger and larger, it will crowd out more and more of the private sector. With higher taxation and more government regulation this will result in less economic opportunity for entrepreneurs, innovators, inventors, dreamers and just plain hard workers. Being one of these industrious sorts you may have dreams of starting a company, enriching yourself, or just having a successful career. But with taxation so high, regulations too restrictive, and capital so scarce, your dreams of starting a motorcycle company or inventing a new medical device is nearly impossible. The error you will make (especially men) is blaming yourself for failing to realize your dreams, when in reality it was outside of your control. It was doomed from the beginning. You do yourself no service misplacing the blame on yourself.

Enjoy the Decline takes square aim at the glut of Napoleon complex-afflicted wannabe rebels in this part of the blogosphere, regardless of their political affiliation—alt-right, MRAs, nationalists etc.—who still believe that America/the white race/men can be saved or that they’re even worth saving. With data and verve, Clarey shows that the trajectory of the past thirty years has been inexorably towards higher taxes,  less freedom, crappier jobs and bigger government entitlements. What’s the point of agitating for social reform when everyone else who’s tried it has failed? What’s the point of working hard or trying to build a career when you can be fired because some HR ditz is PMSing or when more than half of your income will be confiscated to pay for LaQuisha the Teenage Mother’s WIC check?

Face it people: the American Dream is dead, and no amount of defibrillation will bring it back.

From there, Aaron bounces into the practical advice segment of Enjoy the Decline. His philosophy of life is about working as little as possible, which serves the dual purpose of giving you more free time to have fun and kick back while simultaneously starving the government of money. To this effect, he gives you a crash course in minimalism—the art of living a middle-class lifestyle on a lower-class salary—as well as coaching you on how to grab as many government freebies as possible and prepare for a SHTF scenario. Aaron also argues against saving for retirement, both because traditional retirement is basically impossible for anyone born after the year 1965 and because following his advice will effectively allow you to retire right now:

In contributing to a retirement program, essentially what you are doing is trading away your youth for old age. The problem in doing so is that when you are older you cannot enjoy life as much as you could when you were young. And since you only get one life, you have to make sure it counts, making such a transaction foolish. Making it worse though is you can really diminish, if not just outright cripple your youth as you try to save for your old age. I know many young 20-somethings who just don’t have the disposable income to afford saving for retirement. However, they feel so guilty for not contributing to a retirement program, they end up contributing anyway even though it impoverishes them today.

Much like Aaron’s previous book Worthless, Enjoy the Decline is written in a blunt yet sympathetic style, meaning it has great potential to convert the skeptical or wary. I have yet to meet Aaron in real life, but I can only assume that he is one cheery motherfucker. His prose, if not particularly flashy, conveys his arguments with a relentless, infectious sunniness that will almost make you want to quit your job right on the spot. For example, Clarey is the only guy I know who can write about euthanasia and make it seem like a real fun time.

There are people who will object to the central thesis of Enjoy the Decline. They’re the people who think that they’re still somehow obligated to serve a society that has rejected them. That slaving away at some cubicle job so they can feed a fat wife and 2.5 screaming kids is somehow noble or manly. That somehow, if we can get enough people to sign on what happens to be the Great Political Cause du jour, we can turn this country around. We call these people “losers.”

“What would happen if everyone followed your advice? The country would collapse!”

And I’m supposed to care because…? Like a battered wife crawling back to her abusive husband again and again, right-wingers maintain a misguided sense of loyalty to a country that has done nothing but screw them over. If you’re an American born after the year 1965, there is absolutely no reason for you to view this country as anything other than a convenient way to get rich. The banks are picking your pockets. The politicians are flooding your cities with illiterate third world labor and sending your sons to die in pointless wars. The media does nothing but shove anti-male, anti-white propaganda in your face 24/7. Your own parents have stolen your birthright so they can get their hemorrhoids removed for free in their old age while you sling pumpkin spice lattes for minimum wage so you can pay off the degree they told you would keep you from having to sling lattes for a living to begin with!

Why should you give a fuck whether these venal degenerates who have done nothing but lie to, cheat and steal from you your entire life live or die?

Despite what some say, Aaron isn’t advocating that you move back in your parents and spend the rest of your days playing Call of Duty and feverishly masturbating to YouPorn clips. He’s advocating that you stop expending mental energy on things that you have no control over. He’s advocating that instead of sublimating your dreams or aspirations to chase the fading likelihood of a high-paid career path and a white picket fence life in the suburbs, you pursue those aspirations now. Indeed, he devotes an entire chapter of the book on how you can become the best man you can be, in part by working out, developing a cool lifestyle and not knocking up any hood rats:

This means you have to develop a skill or a trade. This means you have to develop hobbies and interests that are not common, but still unique and interesting to you. This means you have to consider others and how you interact with them. It also means you must polish yourself, your actions, and your demeanor. You need to become well-read, well-informed and knowledgeable. And hardest of all you must develop charm and a devastating sense of humor that will turn your future wife’s knees to rubber. When you walk into the room you want to be the most interesting man in the joint, not to make all the other women insanely jealous of your wife, but your wife insanely proud of you.

There are two major problems with Enjoy the Decline. The first is the slipshod copyediting. While it’s not as bad as some of the books I’ve reviewed, Clarey’s title has more typos than it really ought to. Honestly, he should stop being a cheapass and hire a professional editor one of these days; you can get good rates on Elance. This same miserliness extends to Enjoy the Decline‘s hideously incongruent cover. What exactly does a random picture of a tree-covered cliffside have to do with enjoying the decline?

My other problem is that Clarey is a little too absolutist when it comes to the meaninglessness of careers. Sure, for most people, work is pointless, but tradesmen and small business owners, if they don’t enjoy their work, at least feel that they’re accomplishing something with it. Dr. Illusion already mentioned this in his review, but men who feel like they’re going nowhere in their current career should consider the trades. Aaron doesn’t ignore the trades entirely in Enjoy the Decline, but he glosses them over.

Still, Enjoy the Decline is a great book that, with some better editing and a more topical cover, could easily become one of the cornerstone titles of the manosphere. Just remember that the operative word is “enjoy.” Moping about the end of the world is for pansies and crybabies. In the words of George Grant:

When a man truly despairs, he does not write; he commits suicide.

Men who despair probably don’t blog either.

Click here to buy Enjoy the Decline.

Read Next: Worthless: The Young Person’s Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major by Aaron Clarey