The culture is...lit?
Trend forecasting the 2020s
Before the virus arrived in Europe, ravaging Italy then spreading everywhere else, I was planning to start a podcast. I had been talking about it, primarily to Norman, for months. It would cover things I think about on a daily basis - writing, writers, “the culture”, stuff I’m anxious about, stuff that makes me feel things, whatever that may be. I chose Sean Preston of Open Pen infamy as my co-host, knowing we’d balance each other’s outrageousness out without devolving into shock jocks. We discussed the project at Charing Cross on the last Friday of February over bad coffee. Things derailed over the next three weeks, as we followed the rest of Europe into lockdown. Over the subsequent quars, we recorded three episodes. Here’s some highlights:
On Rimbaud being interred along with Verlaine in the Pantheon: “It would be the equivalent of me being buried with someone I slept with in high school. He had certain gay experiences as a young man, but who hasn’t?”
On the accusations of Paul Mescal being homophobic in high school: “Most gay men will find it hot to be honest.”
On the relentless, sterilised culture of open letters and a certain billionaire author: “Retire bitch.”
On beauty privilege: “Beauty is just as important as brains. Himbos and bimbos for the win, this is the Greek in me coming out.”
“The culture is definitely not lit, but Sean and I had a ball,” I tweeted when we recorded the latest episode last autumn. I didn’t care about the incoming lockdown. I sort of looked forward to it with calmness. When it arrived, with all choices but to stay at home removed, I felt serene for the first time in years. I avoided Zooms and all sorts of digital catch ups, bar with one person, and retreated into myself more than ever before. I haven’t read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but from what I know of the plot, I was similarly hoping to come out on the other side with something tangible to show post-isolation. I wrote a book in two months, which has been lying dormant on Google Drive for months, waiting for me to start editing it with some creative distance.
Culture shrivelled up over the lockdowns. Theatres, cinemas and music venues all shuttered. Film festivals seemed utterly pointless even as they continued on a digital, or mostly digital, format. Nightclubs closed their doors, meaning I haven’t taken my shirt off in public in a year. Restaurants and bars were opened intermittently with all sorts of social distancing, which still feels alienating (shout out to my go-to Casse Croute, can’t wait to smash a glass or two once they’ve reopened!). The sanitisation of culture accelerated, with every loser demanding artists clean up their act and deliver HR-sanctioned work, from films to books and beyond [soz, I personally think there should be more sex scenes in everything]. Critics worth their salt threw out the end-of-year round ups, but as I’m not one of them, I thought about stuff that kept me going in 2020. Let’s call it trend forecasting the arts or whatever.
US writing is back and cooler than ever
The US is experiencing a renaissance in letters. In my previous post, I wrote about how The Drunken Canal is signifying a new future for writing. They’re not alone either. Two scenes have popped up, one centred in NYC, the other not defined by city borders.
The former saw the culture capital with a new lease on artistic expression, populated with young writers finding their feet at what can only be described as a hostile environment to dissident voices. Honor Levy is bringing something unique to our screens, best showcased by her New Yorker story Good Boys, part of the publication’s Online Flash Fiction series.
“In Greece, the cigarettes are cheap.”
Levy’s two contributions to New York Tyrant encapsulate the time’s preoccupations, delivered in a stark style and with prose so sharp it’s as if she’s taking a direct stab at the sanitisation that threatens to infect everything: “It seems like everyone is apologising these days,” she writes in Cancel Me. She ponders the pointlessness of social media (“A hot take won’t keep you warm at night.”), choosing men as her subjects. Tanned stomachs and scars make appearances, but this is hardly the work of lustful desire. Her narrative power centres on giving readers glimpses into these men’s lives, their escapist desires, as they struggle to find paradise and struggle even more to hold on to it for too long: “In Greece, they sail on boats and make sketches of naked marble women and all sleep in one king-size bed. In Greece, they touch sculptures of gods. In Greece, they put their art-history education to good use. In Greece, they were happy.”
While the online cacophonous majority keeps banging on how we don’t need to read about the lives of men, Honor Levy has taken it upon herself to prove everyone otherwise.
Kyle Brown has made his first mark at becoming the generation’s enfant terrible. His Heavy Traffic story A Delightful Evening finds the narrator fantasising about women he sees online as he sleeps with other women IRL. His descriptions of sex are rather matter-of-fact, aligned to a time where overexposure to the subject has neutered some of its underlying, subtle erotic energy. The result can at times be cold, but that seems to be the point - a culture where narcissism has replaced eroticism. His sentences are long, twirling furiously to their respective endings, as if to showcase the writer behind it, on Adderall or some other high, typing manically and denting his keyboard. We stop by the usual haunts: Clandestino, Lucien, Cafe Gitane.
Brown focuses on the interiority of his characters, lyrically describing their fears and anxieties: “If I died now from an accidental overdose my soul was forfeit, and would surely be subjected to all kinds of unspeakable torture from fascistic demons resembling Pre-Raphaelite nymphs, who would woefully take turns peeling the skin of my cock with a hot knife before casting it to the void.” He has the sensibilities of a poet, but is skilled in offering flat descriptions of public perceptions (“the preeminent writer of an apocalyptic style of romance.”), balancing the two worlds all of us inhabit in the age of social media.
He earlier delivered something similar with his Gen Z play, a satire in the vein of Shopping and Fucking. One of his characters relates the plot almost as a mission statement for Brown’s future career: “It’s about the interior, their relationship and a struggle for control over one another.” Jack is a relentless critic of the youth he seems to be surrounded by. Walter is a young, struggling playwright.
“I just had this idea of who I wanted to be for so long, I told myself I'd do anything and anyone to get there,” Walter says in one scene, reflecting our generation’s obsession with self-actualisation. Brown’s young characters consider their mortality, even as their youth is still unfolding: “I’ve worked too hard and studied too much to be left unfinished and compromised by death.” Their desire for art and beauty overshadows everything else: “The people around you should always be beautiful, because your chances of fucking someone beautiful and in turn becoming beautiful yourself increase exponentially, with each thrust.” They’re also horny-as-hell hedonists: “I just want to have some fun without having to feel sorry for it later.” In a memorable scene, they’re tripping, thinking they’re having sex, while philosophically discussing Eros and Thanatos.
These are the themes that preoccupy the writers in the latter scene, all of whom have converged around Expat Press.
Editor Manuel Marrero has brought together some beautiful minds, among them Damien Ark and James Nulick (I can’t wait to get my hands on Fucked Up and The Moon Down to Earth) as well as the group’s Queen Bee Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich, or Eris. Her debut Ruthless Little Things has arrived as I’m typing this and along with Xanthi Barker’s Will This House Last Forever? is the hottest book in the world right now (that is, according to the newsletter you’re reading).
Aldrich is a blend of a Godard girl and a Courtney Love nymph. She’s Lana Del Rey thrown out of the country club for not fitting in. She’s Joan Didion on crack and a Warhol superstar all wrapped up into one. Some of her short form work has the most sublime titles (Grief Dick is just one example). Drugs, sex, celebrity and glitter all reappear in her work. In Joyride, young girls are up to no good: “She crushes up some blow with a MAC compact and does a line, her anger switching off instantly.” Elsewhere, she reimagines Peter Pan as Hook’s lover indulging in post-sex biting.
There’s a chaotic energy in her stories, mirroring the experiences of her characters as they navigate a dangerous world. Her towering achievement (pre-debut that is) is Full Panic, a short story published halfway through 2020 that has all the trappings of a debut (first person narration, the search for identity, the need for escape), but delivers them in a voice entirely her own. Her characters are self-involved, damaged or self-damaging artists and most of all extremely funny. Duplicitous, high or horny, or a combination of the above at any given time. That is to say, they’re younglings in the 21st century.
If she was given even a fraction of the headlines reserved for those willing to adapt to the system to have a career, she’d be sipping cocktails with Sofia Coppola discussing adaptation rights in no time.
Men writing sex? In this economy?
In his essay for The TLS Emasculated: The Problem of Men Writing about Sex, which I dubbed essay of the year back in the summer, Luke Brown analyses the current moment in literature, where male writers have ceased to write truthfully, aiming for an idealised portrayal of the male sex drive. Two books stood out for me that go in the exact opposite direction: one was published to not near enough recognition and one is still on a hard drive waiting to find its right agent.
Elias Tezapsidis is a writer created in NYC sometime in the early 2010s. I’ve been following his work almost since the beginning, from Thought Catalog to the Berfrois of the world to his internship at Harper’s and beyond, as he published essays and reviews everywhere from HTML Giant to The Awl. Out of respect for his privacy, I won’t say anything about the book till it’s published, other than that I see it as a blueprint for the literature of the future - one created through the minds of young people spending time online, with a restlessness and angst resembling the relentlessness of jumping between social accounts. Live fast, die young, revive, repeat. To say that he personifies a cool that’s hard to come by is an understatement. Sign him already!
[You can buy Berfrois: The Book, which includes his autobiographical essay freedom from [context], or read his five-part Athenian Gateway online: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.]
Similarly, I’ve been following in Rob Doyle’s footsteps since his debut Here Are The Young Men, which I read after a one night stand back in 2014. His third book, Threshold, was published just as much of the world was falling into quarantines that would last months. It’s become a sort of bible ever since. I’ve read it three times so far and every time I find something new to obsess over.
The first time I finished it, I described it as riding a carousel high on coke and loudly, publicly orgasming, Euphoria style [If I ever decide to disgrace the family name even further, you’ll get to read about my carousel experience back in 2006].
Brown’s essay identifies Doyle as the sole outlier of the current wave in literature, in which male authors seem to shy away from writing about sex. Comparisons to Henry Mille are inescapable. The fictional Rob of Threshold is neither hedonist, nor nihilist, but through it all he’s faithful to both the exalting power of lust and its abjection: “You fucked until you could fuck no more, at which point you were really fucked.” When the pandemic began, I ordered all three of his books: “cos I need more material to jack off to when the quarantine is imposed.” They didn’t disappoint.
Here’s my sincerity vomit, 200-word review for “a thing” from a few months ago:
Rob Doyle’s third book, Threshold, is a multi-sensory experience that penetrates the psyche and stays with you long after you’ve read it, similar to the sex and drugs the narrator indulges in. We follow Rob, who the author insists is a fictionalised version of himself, through turbulent experiences, as he travels all over the world. Structured as a series of achronological essays, Rob continues to lose himself in art. Doyle’s book doesn’t sink in nostalgia however, even as he follows in the literal footsteps of his literary idols. The reader, much like the narrator and main character, remains firmly in the moment. We’re an uninvited Peeping Tom submerged in Rob’s thoughts, desires, erotic fantasies, relayed without shame or inhibition. Threshold engages the reader’s libidinal impulses, similar to a Gaspar Noé film. It’s a book best read in the nude, featuring the best ever use of the term ‘creative nonfiction.’ It forces the reader to ask a difficult question: have I lived enough? You’ll want to explore more, read more, perhaps you’ll begin with Doyle’s idols. But first, you’ll go back out into the world, live faster, more honestly, more dangerously.
Following him in his literary pilgrimages (Cioran, Bolano, Bataille) I had to rush back to my own favs. I reread Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus, flipped through various volumes of her diary, reread Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Dreamers, The Devil in the Flesh. I wrote a book that can’t shake off his influence, so I guess he succeeded in creating art that’s “corrosive.” I reconnected with parts of myself I thought were long dead and discovered others I wasn’t all too fond of. Going through Threshold again and again has been brutal and beautiful. And I haven’t even taken DMT yet.
My actual review is in editorial and will be with you soon on an online literary mag.
The revival of the columnist
As long as we’re talking inspiration, two columns from Spike Art Magazine led to the creation of Deleted Scenes: Out of State by Natasha Stagg [I just got Sleeveless, chaotic review pending] and For Immediate Release by Kaitlin Phillips. TV became a major point of discussion as the first lockdown progressed (Normal People, I May Destroy You, Emily in Paris, not enough of you paid attention to My Brilliant Friend) only to fizzle out as soon as the season was over. The escapades of two of New York’s finest, on the other hand, are still reverberating.
“I took down my website, deleted my Instagram account, and cancelled all of my subscriptions, just to feel something,” writes Stagg mid summer. Felt good to see someone else refusing to stay connected. There are texts from the first lockdown I still haven’t responded to, emails I deleted with time without responding, tabs I closed without reading essays I had an invested interest in. Stagg argues that writers would be better off offline, a line of thought I hope to one day embrace. For now I’m still quote tweeting shit about how if my mind was a room it’d be the bathroom from The Dreamers.
While Stagg has stayed offline, Phillips is as online as ever, which her column shows to full effect with its brilliantly fragmentary style. It’s impossible to choose the highlights, but here’s some I’m still thinking about months on: she takes the piss out of Knausgaard’s prose; she’s prepping for a party, she relays a story about a friend having a lot of sex during lockdown and another about fucking a carpenter.
With Cat Marnell now back in the game too [subscribe to Beautyshambles], the personal column inches are only bound to get larger, self-published or not. We’re all starved to read and hear from people with a point of view, whose tastes engage our curiosities. What better way to spend a tube ride post sex fest once the lockdown is over than to read about Phillips’ nylon jacket?
Get me a Philippa Snow column on The White Review!
The resurgence of lad culture
Throughout the first lockdown, I was too busy writing and breaking quar to fuck every weekend to be too online. Somehow, I seem to not have missed a tweet regardless, but what stood out most, especially in retrospect, was a peculiar video that first made the rounds on Tumblr a few years back, before our collective adrenaline deficiency and lust for reconnection led us to share, retweet, like and comment again.
It’s the video of a British lad hitting his friend with a chair. A DIY masterpiece. There’s the kiss in the beginning, the various states of undress, the smashing of the bottle, the third lad picking up a cig right off the floor to smoke what’s left, the fourth one, out of shot, filming.
These modern day Chris Burdens encapsulate a lot of what’s to come, but also provided a reflection of what we all longed for during our prolonged isolation.
They were dreamed up by Irina in Boy Parts and discarded. They’re the Angry Young Men updated for the 21st century, when all options have been stripped away and all that’s left is to go off the rails. They’re poetry in motion, on par with Slowthai’s “smell my cologne.” They’re Pre-Raphaelite art. It’s now the lads, half naked, that are the focus.
Owen and Ralph, the co-hosts of MuubTube, are the other lads that have preoccupied my mind this year [who should totes recreate the video in similar outfits].
I’ve seen more films throughout the three lockdowns than ever before, from old favs like Naked to films I had never seen before but always wanted to like En La Cama and films I never knew existed but stumbled upon like Burnt Money. Christian Petzold and Francois Ozon both returned with flicks (Undine, Summer of ‘85) but the true gem comes in the form of the lads’ pod.
If the UK has fallen behind in creating its dirtbag left, the boys are a sign of the new direction. They engage in detailed analysis that seems largely absent from most film reviews, but in talking about films they offer cultural commentary that spans everything under the sun: from politics (“Artists like us who are distressed by the current state of things politically will have to take sideway routes to kind of mourning and documenting the failed revolution that’s unfolding right now,” says Ralph in episode 14) to dick pics (“Thank you for that btw,” jokes Owen in another episode, “bit weird in the middle of the night. 8/10.”).
One of my notes sheds light into their affect: I read the MuubTube newsletter, where Ralph talks about horny and not horny directors. With Pasolini and Noe identified as human tripods I know which group I belong to, both of them my libidinal daddies.
In all seriousness, what Yukio Mishima book should a fag start with?
We should hang out and do drugs together
'Retire Bitch' slayed me. Paul we must have a catch up over many drinks soon it's been far too long.