"The Secret" of the Alt-Right

Harris’ success has been built on his parents’ wealth, his connections, and a media and audience lusting after the kind of warmongering-but-liberal calls to action that he spouts, touched up with a veneer of intellectual credibility.

What say you, my misshapen virgin creatures?? Will you analyze Proust's art with me??

i was suddenly feeling guilty for being back there and reading it, like it was some kind of forbidden knowledge, and i ducked behind the stack before i started reading.

"Plenty of Communists do drugs!" you whine with dismay.

ariana reines doesn't understand men. but she's got a pair of eyes, her wits about her, a mountain of insecurity, an intimidating intellectual foundation, bouts of sexual confidence, and a way with line breaks. and so she might be the most terrifying thing in the world to a man.

I like Mad Men for personal reasons. Sure, they have good writers and an attractive cast, but I really feel like integral parts of my upbringing are reflected in the story lines. There’s something so familiar about the touches of despair hinted at by the characters. At the end of the day you’re staying up late and putting in your heart and soul for laxatives or car models. It’s worth noting how much of the first world’s best creative talent is funneled into the business. Ralph Waldo Emmersons and Picassos are regularly consumed by the long hours, ridiculous expense accounts, and substance abuse.

if you like sick burns, then "the imperial messenger" by belén fernández is where you want to go, she provides them by the spoonful, sometimes it seems as though they'll never end. you're caught up in a whirlwind of sick burns, ascending to heaven as she delivers killing blow after killing blow against the great mustachioed master of the new york times op-ed page.

is Assisted Living by Nikanor Teratologen. feel free to look it up for yourself. a section on the back reads, “leaving no horror unattended to, be it murder, incest, nazi fetishism, substance abuse, or even continental philosophy.” i’m about ten pages in and it’s funny, dark, insightful, creepy, astonishingly well-written, exciting, and a million other praiseful adjectives. i recommend you read it. every other line is worth quoting and showing to a friend.

American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) comes down the moment that Patrick Bateman confronts his lawyer in person after leaving him an emotional confession over voicemail the night before. The lawyer is at first joking, then serious, then offended... he doesn't believe Bateman's experiences, in fact, he doesn't even think he is talking to Patrick Bateman. It's this complete dispossession of his identity, his great experiences that leads Bateman to insist "Don't you know who I am?" over and over to his lawyer, existentially insistent that he is, that his deeds have been.

Dark Days is gritty as heck and has an amazing sound track (dj shadow), shot masterfully in black and white (the film they dug out of dumpsters) with shopping cart dollies rigged to rotting train tracks. it's an hour and a half long documentary about a village of homeless people who find community underground in abandoned amtrack tunnels. they hack into the utilities and take pride in building their hovels. they chat about lost family members and their struggles with substance abuse. most of the film is just long shots of conversation between friends discussing the challenges of everyday life, how to make money, how to love and defend themselves in such vulnerable situations.

The pipsqueak, by now, is an old, well-explored character in literature. Normally I’d avoid quoting Tao Lin, but he’s one of the few writers today who’s realized that the pipsqueak’s mind-disease has leaked out of literature and now roots in the populace at large—that is, we’re all of us, men and women, rich and poor, smart and dumb, we’re all of us becoming pipsqueaks. Never has this been more clear than at a party I attended last Friday night.

“For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California . . . Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments.” -- Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism

Ever since reading that D.H. Lawrence was a reactionary monarchist, and having an Irish Lit. friend tell me that Yeats was an Irish Fascist, it's come to me that a significant number of Great Writers are reactionaries, far more than their percentage in the population at large probably justifies.