In 1974, the experimental French author Georges Perec spent three days sitting at the Café de la Mairie (75006) on Place Saint Sulpice and wrote what he saw, resulting in “Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien” (An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris).

Over the past few years, I’ve sat many times at the Café …

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You’re sitting atop a verdant hill, somewhere inland from the February blue waters of Saint Tropez.

A hooting owl. A whistling wind. The roar of a suped-up motorcycle breaking the silence, its engine built to shorten the distance between where we are and where we think we want to be.

The chip-chapping of the chiffcha…

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It was the best of performances, it was the worst of performances, it was the age of salsa, it was the age of lip-syncing, it was the epoch of global celebrity, it was the epoch of Christian nationalists—in short, the two Super Bowl halftime performances can be summed up in their two most prominent messages: “The only thing more powerful than hate is lo…

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Back to the Land

In the Uber to catch a Grand Central-bound train from Stamford, we speak to Eduardo, a Costa Rican who recently moved to Connecticut from Los Angeles.

“Do you still have family in Costa Rica? I hear it’s beautiful there.”

Eduardo laughs. “That’s what they tell me. I was poor in Costa Rica. When you’re poor, it’s a very different life.”

“Do …

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A graffiti tag on a wall on Irving Avenue:

“Any behaviour you reward will be repeated.”

At Whole Foods, a grocery store which once prided itself on local organic fare, now owned by a billionaire intent on colonizing outer space, a sign suggests you can pay for your groceries with the flesh on your palm. An attendant, hired to explain the automated payment…

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Part I: An Uncanny Land of Disparate Images

The last time you entered the city b…

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I’ve been visiting New York City for over a decade,

…

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Substack is a revolutionary space that has undeniably changed my writing life for the better, and like all spaces that generate vast amounts of digital popularity power, it has also given rise to a new kind of gatekeeper that is just as potentially nefarious as traditional publishers or MFAs.

When writers are deluded into thinking the point is to make it go viral—like a disease—they can end up focusing less on what they’re saying than on getting those anemic little red hearts that have come to dictate so much of our cultural discourse about worthiness in the 21st century, leading to cult-like behavior that has the sole purpose of growing—like a disease—a faceless following.

A few months ago over at the fantastic , there was a slew of op-ed pieces about literary gatekeepers: good or bad? and I spent a solid couple of days thinking about my own thoughts on the matter; but alas, by the time I was happy with thoughts on literary gatekeepers, the topic was no longer trending, and I foolishly refrained from sharing the piece, believing that I should wait until the right moment for a chance at meaningless digital popularity.

Those gatekeepers will get ya. So lest I allow my thoughts to languish any longer, here’s to remembering to share words that feel meaningful when we feel them, contemporary digital literary zeitgeist be damned!

In literary circles, the term “gatekeeper” generally refers to:

1. MFA programs (if you don’t think they’re useful, thinks you might be insane, but ’ MFA experience was undeniably nightmarish)

2. The traditional publishing industry (according to , it has no fucking clue about what counts as good literature, but and believe it serves an essential role in cultivating the kind of literature that somebody’s great-great-great grandchild will still read).

As a working novelist (i.e. I work multiple jobs to pay the bills; I write novels; it works for me) with an MFA, two published novels (one was published more traditionally, one published independently) and once represented by a music label (that’s a different story), I’ve come to view gatekeepers the same way I view VIP lounges: they might make you feel important,

but you can never escape the quiet desperation of the roped-off section.

But lest I succumb to our binary culture’s endless insistence on picking a side— good? bad? why not both?—I choose to inhabit the in-between, in hopes that someone out there (including my future self) will be reminded of the fundamental truth that whether in literature, academia, or even right here on Substack, gatekeepers are only as powerful as the power we cede to them.

1. MFAs

They might be bullshit, but fertilizer is useful

Growing up in the USA, I was told that accruing student debt was a necessary evil what it takes to win, baby! which is why even after my disillusionment with an MA in social theory in 2013, in 2018, at thirty years old, I enrolled in an MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA).

At the time, the former director of the NYU writing program had come to VCFA to spruce it up, but alas, ten months later, the director left for vague reasons related to what I assume involved some more bureaucratic forms of gatekeeping.

Another reason I chose VCFA: Vermont is my favorite state in the USA (I did my undergrad at UVM), and VCFA’s low-residency model is one of the oldest in the country, allowing working professionals like me (i.e. people who can’t actually afford MFAs) to keep their jobs whilst studying long-distance and attending a few 10-day residencies a year (fun depressing fact: as of last year, the program’s Vermont campus no longer exists; residencies now take place at California Institute of the Arts; which I learned while teaching creative writing at the oh-so-esteemed Sorbonne … ah, academia, how doth thy disappoint).

Was it worth it? Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know. Can you repeat the question? (sing along if you remember; the song's chorus is the key to our salvation1). Like most things in life, working towards an MFA is what you make of it, which I did thanks to the academic rigour (self-disciplined, admittedly) inspired by fantastic professors (special shout out to Adam McComber, Hasanthika Sirisena, and Brian Leung), cultivating friendships with colleagues who will remain friends for life, and paying-to-play holding myself accountable to the kind of literary routine, discipline, and curiosity I required to embark upon a professional writing life.

MFA Pros:

• Multiple professors legitimately changed my relationship to writing and reading.

• The rigorous, self-disciplined nature of the program instilled an invaluable work-ethic in my literary bones.

• Being a paying student-loan holder of a largely useless degree granted me the intellectual freedom to nerd out on historiographic metafiction and postmodernism (here’s the intro to my dissertation), providing invaluable insight into developing as a serious novelist, specifically in relation to researching structural and narrative techniques that culminated in my most recent novel, The Requisitions.

• The degree led to six-years teaching disillusioned creative writing students at the Sorbonne (they were just like me!). I quit it in 2024 because academic gatekeepers might be the actual worst (despite what the hallowed Sorbonne name suggests, you can’t afford rent when you’re paid $850 for a semester of teaching).

MFA Cons:

• Serious student debt that my book sales—surprise!—haven’t paid off yet

• Coming to terms with the fact that a creative writing degree can hypothetically get you a more prestigious/higher paying job, but that doesn’t mean institutions will actually want pay for your expertise

• The literary workshop model (woof), i.e. sitting in a circle of part-time writers, all smiling creepily at each other in that distinctly American way whilst we dissect Karen’s Ronald’s prose and suggest, politely, with gritted teeth, that while the characters lack depth and the dialogue needs work and while I’m not exactly sure where this scene is supposed to be going, the first draft of the first chapter of your first unfinished novel does have a lot of potential, Ronald Karen, great job!

• Being surrounded by both the vocal fry of privileged youth and the existential desperation of empty nesters who aren’t paying for their MFAs and who’ve “always loved to write but never had the time” and “can’t imagine how hard it would be to write a whole book!” and don’t actually care about literature at all, but really, really want to know what it takes to be reviewed in the NY Times.

2. Traditional Publishing

Off with their greedy, oversized heads

I sold 1500 copies of my debut novel (Slim and The Beast, Inkshares, 2015) via a publisher more akin to traditional publishing before buying back my rights in 2022.

In 2025, I’ll finally be doing something with those rights, because it’s about time I made 100% of the profits. Later this autumn, I’ll be republishing a definitive version of Slim and The Beast: 10th Anniversary Edition (it’s much cleaner, shorter, and prettier than the 1st edition).

Inspired by 1920s indie publishers in Paris like Black Sun Press, Contact Publishing, and Sylvia Beach, who published Ulysses without waiting outside any fences, my wife partner and I founded an independent anglophone press in Paris, Kingdom Anywhere, with the goal of retaining the rights to our own work whilst printing high-quality, limited edition books of fiction, poetry, and photography.

Our mission has been to work with freelance artists professionals (editors, illustrators, designers) who are also disillusioned by gatekeepers in various ways, and I’m damn proud to say Kingdom Anywhere has already had two successful publishing debuts: in a few months in 2024, we sold out of the limited-edition (300 copies) of my second novel, The Requisitions, before making it available globally (it’s sold over 300 more copies since). In March 2025, we published Kingdom Anywhere’s first poetry collection, Spill, written by Mehta (the limited-edition print-run of 250 copies is all-but-sold-out; if you’re lucky you might be able to snag one of the finale copies).

Going from more traditional publishing relinquishing all of my rights in hopes of being venerated by the gatekeepers-du-jour to independent publishing has been worth it for multiple reasons both philosophical and financial (you can read ’s historic piece, “No One Buys Books,” if you don’t believe publishing independently can make you far more money), but I didn’t choose to write novels for the money and whether it was financially worth it or not for me can be summarized in a footnote.2

It’s an important word, worth,

because what we decide to value in this day and age says a lot about which gatekeepers we resent respect and which gatekeepers we really, really should stop venerating. And since the neverending discussion of “white male authors” in the literary zeitgeist is forever overhead, yes, I am a fan of some of David Foster Wallace’s writing despite his dickishness to women, (self)-destructive, and outsized brain, but no, I don’t believe the “vanishing white male writer” is a problem. This idea that “white males” aren’t being paid attention to is certainly proof of how fragile "the white male” caricature truly is, but regardless, the USA’s constant obsession with skin color, gender, and sexual behavior as comprehensive criteria of a human being’s worth is a primary reason why that puritanical nation is currently being governed by a pathetic tyrant.3

In the final analysis of the value or problem with gatekeeping, as with most things in life, the answer resides not in identitarian categorization binary reductionism of good or bad but rather within the pendulum swing of infinite subjectivities. If there’s one thing I still feel deep down in my human bones, it’s that the world needs more diligent, patient, not-for-profit, Honest-to-Muse storysellers storytellers4 who are in it for the right reasons, and those are the only writers I really care to engage with—folks who believe in independence, and its value, and who reject the commodified virtue of forever seeking more power viral limelight.

In conclusion, what matters is discerning which lines are worth waiting in— because many of them lead to more tight-assed bouncers standing oh-so-smugly at the door. When it comes to my personal experience with literary gatekeepers, the grass wasn’t always greener on the other side, but I did learn much about how to cultivate my own literary garden.

In the year 2025, it’s clear that the manicured Miracle-Grow-Lawns of trad publishing and MFAs are wilted and too expensive to keep up. Wildflowers are sprouting everywhere thanks to platforms like Substack, but in honor of the pendulum swing—yes, I shall repeat it—revolutions eventually return us to whence we came.

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Since Paris’ walking tour season began in April, I’ve given 34 walks on the Nazi Occupation of Paris and dozens of others on modernism, existentialism, and 19th/20th century European history.

For nostalgic reasons related to the last time many Americans United Statesians felt like their country was a genuine force for democratic…

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Me at The Museum (1/2)

The Viktor Frank…

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Next week, I’m headed to Vienna, the birthplace of Viktor Frankl, an existential psychoanalyst who managed to practice therapy as a prisoner in Auschwitz. Despite losing most of his family to mass murder, Frankl survived multiple concentration camps and went on to write Man’s Search for Meaning, the most optimistic humanistic book I’ve ever read.

Frankl’s Logotherapy can be translated as “meaning” (logos in Greek) therapy, and given the times we’re living in told we’re living in (the endless death-screen is very real), it feels fitting to reconsider some of Frankl’s theory before I head off for an adventure in Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Munich.

preamble

Over the past months during a busy Paris walking tour season, a whole lot of Americans United Statesians have expressed a renewed interest in learning about the Nazi Occupation of Paris fascism.1

Often, when I speak to clients about the history of Nazism,2 I’m asked, “What surprises you most about what’s happening today?” and my answer is always the same: “What surprises me most is that we’re still surprised.”

Alas, since we as a species can’t seem to stop voting violent bigots with inferiority complexes into power,

it feels pertinent to reflect upon how Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, believed we can be better … but lest this become a treatise on how obviously idiotic, infuriating, and all-too-human animalistic the autocrats all over the world are behaving, here are a few concise bullet points about what I think, because at a certain point we all of us have to define our lines in the sand:

• The deliberate, systematic, and repetitive bombing of the world’s largest and longest-lasting ghetto the occupied Palestinian people is, at best, a contemporary definition of ethnic cleansing, which is in itself a synonym for much of what warfare amongst humans is always about.3

• The state of Israel exists, and of course I believe in its right to exist, but the question, “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” is idiotic (only folks who sympathize with Hamas, a fundamentalist death cult which believes Palestinian infants can be “martyrs,” believes the state of Israel should cease to exist). I believe Palestinians also deserve to have their own state, however, and there are also various extremist bigots in Israel’s current administration who believe the Palestinian people do not have a right to their own homeland.

• The state-sponsored perpetuation of fundamentalist ethno-nationalist ideologies peddled by the likes of Netanyahu Trump Hamas Modi Putin has led to the mass death of human beings since time immemorial.

• Donald Trump is an uneducated, bigoted kleptomaniac a doofus who I’m unsure is intelligent enough to understand he is actually a white supremacist, and the Republican Party’s cowardice and many United Statesians’ veneration for chauvinist billionaires will go down in history as the reason why the USA crumbled.

• When governments begin to use words like “mass deportation,” “paramilitary,” “plain clothed,” “holy war,” “chosen people,” “black site,” “deportation center,” “illegals,” “invasion,” “pacification,” “eradicate terrorism” and a long list of other dehumanizing words that pit “us” versus “them,” they are exhibiting textbook signs of fascism.

With these points in mind, according to Viktor Frankl, we still have a choice a responsibility in how we respond, which brings me to Part I of this three-part essay.

Part I: The “Freedom of the Will”

There are three tenets to Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy:

1. The freedom of the will

2. The will to meaning

3. The meaning of life

The “freedom of the will” is based on the notion that human beings are not free from life’s conditions, but we are free in how we respond. Unlike the two other major Viennese schools of psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler), Frankl does not believe that psychological, environmental, and biological conditioning processes solely determine the human condition.

Sigmund Freud spent most of his life peddling the idea of the “pleasure principle,” suggesting that most people seek pleasure and avoid pain. In his later years, he argued for a different kind of binary, suggesting a simmering psychic tension between good Eros (love) and evil Thanatos (violence). Alfred Adler came next, rejecting Freud’s theory of the “will to pleasure” and proposing what he deemed the “will to power,” i.e., the human need to sublimate our inferiority complex by pursuing power within the context of what he deemed “the social feeling.”

But historical context is important, and while Freud, Adler, and Frankl all lived through one of the most violent eras in human history,

only Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, was able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

After witnessing the brutality of World War One (20+ million dead), Freud watched his daughter die during the Spanish Flu (alongside some other 50+ million human beings) and witnessed the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany before he he was diagnosed with jaw cancer in 1923 (no wonder he spent so much time theorizing about pain).

Similarly, Alfred Adler grew up during the rise of nation states, and thus was convinced humans need to overcome a deeply ingrained inferiority complex. One need only look at Alfred Adler’s childhood, however, to understand why he believed humans feel so weak: he got run over by a car twice when he was a boy, watched his brother die next to him when he was three years old, and spent much of his childhood in bed with rickets and pneumonia (woof).

Viktor Frankl’s simple point is that the traumas we experience do not dictate the entirety of our psyches. As is symptomatic of any fully developed human brain, rather than outright rejecting the ideas which preceded him, Frankl synthesized Freud’s and Adler’s theories to suggest that while “the will to pleasure” and “the will to power” are aspects of the human condition, these drives reside in the animal, not human, dimension—Frankl’s “will to meaning” thus completes the triptych.

In Frankl’s view, the evolved human being doesn’t simply want to have pleasure or be powerful, but rather to have reasons to experience joy and feel accomplished. To this end, regardless of personal circumstance, Frankl suggests human beings have the unique potential (not guarantee) to be self-determining. Unlike animals, which are entirely subject to their biochemical makeup and environments, what makes us distinctly human is our ability to transcend our animal nature by assigning a multitude of meanings to our existence.

While Frankl’s predecessors reduced the human psyche to a “nothing-but-ness,” pathologizing patients instead of treating human beings, Frankl acknowledged the reality of the psychic, chemical, biological, and environmental dimensions, but never accepted them as an exhaustive explanation for existential malaise what makes us human.

This is the crux of the “freedom of the will”:

the human animal, Homo sapiens, may very well be concerned with power > weakness and pleasure > pain, but Homo patiens, the suffering human, is concerned with fulfillment over despair.

While we are capable of transcending our conditioning processes and environments, there is no guarantee (as we’ve seen throughout the world today since The Beginning). The human animal is pushed by the Freudian “pleasure principle” and an Adlerian “will to power,” but we also can choose to be pulled by the “will to meaning,” which will be discussed more deeply in Part II of this essay.

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PS: If you’re curious how all of this relates to the current political moment, you can either read The Requisitions or check out my 4-part essay on “The Origins of Fascism,” which analyzes Freud, Adler, and Frankl’s theories in the context of Italian fascism in the 1920s.

I’ve been clearing out my Bastille apartment because and I are moving up the proverbial hill (it’s also a literal hill) to a new apartment next to the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

We have views of a blooming canopy of green and the final corporeal resting places of Gertrude Stein and Jim Morrison and Edith Piaf, and for now I shan’t say more, but as I packe…

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Some people say the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark is the finest museum in the world. It’s e…

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In Part One, I discuss Nazism, the humanness of hope and cruelty, and what I think about the success of Squid Game. Part Two (next week) will be partially-paywalled, as it has major spoilers, covers the narrative structure of The Requisitions, and it will be the first time I speak about the “controversial” ending.1

Q: It isn’t said enough that it wasn't just the Nazis who killed. In Ukraine and Poland especially, many locals killed and hunted their fellow human beings in the forest—and then they went back, and they did it again and again. The Nazis often used the local populations because their regular soldiers couldn’t take it, and the world hasn’t really understood or remembered that it wasn’t just the Nazis who committed genocide.

That's an important point. People also often forget that when we’re discussing the Nazi genocide, we’re talking about eleven million human beings. It was a different systematic policy of genocide for the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust (which is a term usually reserved for Jewish victims), but the Nazis systematically murdered another 5 million human beings, particularly Poles and Russians, which many people forget.

In The Requisitions, Martin represents one of those smaller groups of victims (gay men), and part of the challenge of writing a book about the Nazi genocide is that it’s such a vast subject. There are so many ways to write about it, and there's no real way to write about it honestly comprehensively because whatever you do, you're going to be confronted with other stories—stories that each year are illuminated, stories which nobody has ever heard of before. And it’s the scale of it which … there’s a reason why World War Two remains the most read and studied subject in human history, and it's because many, many tens of millions of people participated in systems that also resulted in the genocide—or at the very least paid lip service to a system that was taken advantage of by fascist leaders.

And the pendulum is swinging. The cycle is back. It took me a decade to finish The Requisitions, and I had already been studying the Nazi genocide for a decade, so I can't say I was surprised or have been surprised by what's happening in the world, particularly in the USA.

My dad fled Spain, a fascist country, and, lo and behold, I left the USA before it became fascist. But I would say that the writing was on the wall even in 2009/2010 … I could feel this splitting of humanity, this Us versus Them binary thinking. And it’s scary because when you feel like you are on the right side of history, there's only one thing to do with the other side of it, and that's what disturbed me most studying the Nazi genocide: the conviction (which is from the Latin term to convince someone of something), a desire to constantly convince others of one's righteousness. That's a scary thing.

SPOILER Q: The passing of time is an essential idea in The Requisitions. You say remembering is like stopping time, and when Viktor is being tortured, it’s vital for him that he knows what time it is.

That torture section is challenging to read (and was very hard to write). The chapter is based on a book by a Belgian author named Jean Améry, who survived torture by the Gestapo. He wrote a collection called At the Mind’s Limits about how to intellectualize—and is it even possible to intellectualize?—the nature of torture and brutality. If his entire life was to train to understand the mind and how to perceive existence, he wondered, could he use his intellect to better survive?

The jury’s out on that. Jean Améry ended up taking his own life (as did many other survivors, including the author Primo Levi), and of course, I don't know how one could make peace with such brutality. It was a challenge to write that section but also to put myself in a position of attempting to locate the possibility of hope in such a scenario. As far as whether or not there’s hope at the end of the book, I have my ideas. As Americans United Statesians, we believe in happy endings as an ideal; as a European, I prefer to think of them as a possibility.

Q: What do you think we’ve forgotten in 2025 that we must remember?

My knee-jerk reaction is reaching across the aisle (however you define that). I find this era is very fragmented because of technology, which connects us, like we're doing now, but which also confines us to our homes. Grocery deliveries mean you don't have to go to the store, which means you don't necessarily meet the grocer who might be very different than you.

I enjoy going to the bar and the terrace to meet people in Paris. Post-Covid, however, and especially in places where people have to drive everywhere, folks don't interact with each other like they used to. And the scariest thing for me is to recognize how many people voted for someone who is a self-described authoritarian, and [most people] don’t talk to anyone who voted for that guy, or vice versa. That, for me, is what’s scary. I don't know if it's an unwillingness, an inability, or part of the design of our society not to interact with folks who are not like us … but I know how historians and people who lived through fascist eras talk about them, and it is very rarely the most sadistic, monstrous types that are the problem—the cliché is the people who keep their head down and don't say anything.

It’s a hard thing to have a dialogue with people who don’t believe in the same kind of humanity we do—that is not easy—but that’s also the point the duty of being educated, and I have a suspicion that the conversations at the cafe or pub or grocery store immediately cut through that tension. Dialoguing face-to-face is very different than viewing the world through the key-hole of the Internet.

In times of spiritual disillusionment, we start distrusting each other because there's not a unifying thing to connect us, which leads to tribalism and … I mean, I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The shade of blue you wear can get you punched in the face. Which is a hilarious concept to me. “Duke Blue” versus “Carolina Blue” is a fundamental philosophical difference for some people—even in their sixties, their faces get red, you know, when they start talking about it, so you’ve got to reach across the aisle. Speak to the fans of your rival—that’s what I think we need to remember.

Q: What are your thoughts about the recent success of Squid Game?

What's ironic about Squid Game is the show’s writer, Hwang Dong-hyuk, was a struggling screenwriter who ended up selling his computer upon which he’d written Squid Game to pay for expenses. Years later, Dong-hyuk became a millionaire when, lo and behold, his depiction of a hyper-capitalist country consumed by greed and power was finally picked up. Today, the show is a dystopian reference point for the entire globe.

Season 1 is a valuable commentary on the Zero-Sum nature of hyper-capitalist consumerist greed. I don't think capitalism is the problem; its implementation is, and Squid Game certainly raises those questions. We all want to win are told to want to win the Nobel Prize and be the best of everything and, reach the top of the pyramid and, have our own TV shows, become president of the USA … this is the same narrative we've been taught for decades—that we all should be at the very top of the pyramid—but the pyramid is the problem, I think. So here's to circles, not pyramids. And even Squid Game, as a success story, perpetuates the issue (do yourself a favor and avoid watching Season 2). We’ve all been sold bought into this myth that becoming rich and famous is the goal, so I'm not particularly shocked by what's happening in the USA … what surprises me most is that so many people still act surprised by the absurdities and cruelties happening worldwide.

Q: Yes. At one point, there’s a line in your book about how we shouldn’t be shocked by all the cruelty happening …

Yeah. And that’s part of why there are really cruel scenes in The Requisitions. We watch Squid Game and other films filled with extreme brutality, and then some people pretend to act shocked when they see a nipple on the television. So, while I understand the challenge of reading the torture scene, we also witness gore in Hollywood movies and just call it a movie … I think we're totally desensitized in some formats and remain shocked in others, but this is no longer something we can afford. The level of outrage has become really toxic … we’ve got to look at the cruelty in the face and confront it.

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first and foremost, happy birthday to my twin brother . It’s been a beautiful ride so far. Let’s keep dancing.

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I had a surrealist phase. I suspect many writers do.

As someone who grew up in the nineties twilight of postmodernism (here’s looking at you, Seinfeld/Dave Chappelle/David Foster Wallace), for a time I was convinced that the more absurd and phallic cerebral my work became, the more I could approximate the sur-realities usually reserved for the depressed, drunken, or insane. And so, after months of telling myself that I had to see the surrealist exhibit at Centre Pompidou for reasons that escaped me until the very last hours of the exhibit, on a rainy Monday afternoon in the depths of a Parisian winter, I found myself riding a crowded escalator to the sixth floor of the museum.

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Living in Paris affords people like me the aspirational illusion that because I’m surrounded by culture, I’m thus imbued with its wisdom. But just because we exist in a space doesn’t mean the space exists within us, especially when that space is an overcrowded room filled with pop art cultured consumers.

The word consumption used to refer to the wasting disease known as tuberculosis, which infected (and killed1) many artists before surrealism came on the scene. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term surrealism at the end of World War One, a calamity so horrific that many who witnessed the brutality lost their minds (Apollinaire fought in the trenches, had a piece of shrapnel forever lodged in his head, and died in 1918 of the Great Flu ... what a time to be alive!).

In the face of such stark brutality, a young psychiatrist working with traumatized soldiers realized that some war veterans could sublimate the horrors they’d witnessed by imagining the battlefield was nothing more than a spectacle. Soon after, André Breton had a revelation: when faced with the horror incomprehensibility of war reality, the mind can transport itself elsewhere—and thus surrealism was born.

Dare my callous subconscious draw a connection between trench warfare and a crowded Pompidou? No. But this is an essai, after all, nothing more than an attempt, an experiment, and like it or not, my brain (and so yours too, dear reader) is once again making a connection between the irretrievable past and the eternally present moment.

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According to the tax man, I’ve lived in Paris since 2010. Given my luck to live in what people far wiser than me have long deemed the most beautiful city in the world, I tend to witness the most Instagrammed commercialized events in this city float by like crowded tourist boats on the Seine. Those boats can be fun, of course—I’m simply a tourist when I go anywhere else—but one of the luxuries of living in Paris is having an inkling when braving the long lines of Tik-Tokking hordes is worth the wait (my experience at the 2023 Rothko exhibit comes to mind, as do the 2024 Olympic opening ceremonies and, most recently, ice skating at the Grand Palais, which was decidedly worth the wait).

After witnessing a huffy, entitled white woman shoulder charge her way through the beginning of the exhibition, I waded through dozens of NPCs, all trying to capture a zoomed-in photo of a famous Salvador Dali painting without including the shadows of their compatriots’ silhouettes. Once I got past the eddies of iPhone-wielding jellyfish museumgoers, the types that tend to only ever pause in front of the most famous consumable works of art, I found reprieve in front of a haunting collection of nighttime photography by Brassaï. Soon enough, however, I had to cede the space to one of those types of men—why are they always men?—who believe the essence of museum art can be captured through a comically large digital camera lens and/or a live stream with a camcorder.

Moving onwards, I found what I didn’t know I’d been searching for: a quiet section that held space for René Magritte’s “Empire of Light,” which juxtaposes a suburban street at night with a bright blue sky above.

Surrealist interlude: instead of sharing a photo of the painting, write a stream-of-consciousness describing it:

Imagine a sunny day on a familiar street that reminds you of home. The air is thick enough to be summer, but it’s still just spring. Now, picture a solar eclipse, and when the moon blocks your view of the sun, cut that suburban street in half into day and night. Both lightness and darkness reign supreme in the kingdom of heaven and hell existence, but you know better than that, don’t you? Good and Evil don’t exist.

Further onwards, I watched a pensive elderly man with a cane survey Miró’s “Constellations: Morning Star” before he was bonked by an objectionable woman wearing an oversized backpack and holding an all-inclusive robot in front of her face—“Such is human nature,” Mary Shelly wrote in one of the first post-apocalyptic books ever written, “that beauty and deformity are often closely linked.”2

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If Magritte’s painting reminded me of the duality that formed the core of my latest novel, The Requisitions3, Remedios Varo’s “Papilla Estelar” confirmed what happens when feminine energy is “permitted” to enter a male-dominated space (many surrealists, most notably Andre Breton, AKA the Pope of Surrealism, were famously chauvinistic; in my mind, Varo, an artist who had ovaries, fused the surrealist ethos of dream and reality far better than most of her penis-obsessed contemporaries).

The title of Remedios Varo’s “Papilla Estelar” translates as “porridge for the stars” or “stellar pablum,” which, according to my computer’s dictionary, refers to intellectual baby food (“bland or insipid intellectual fair, entertainment; pap”). This felt particularly appropriate given the proximity of Varo’s paintings to many of her male counterparts’ more celebrated commercialized phallic obsessions: in “Papilla Estelar,” a tired-looking woman operates a hand-cranked mill to grind the cosmos into celestial porridge, feeding ground-up stardust to a captive moon.

As I stood there contemplating Varos’ brushstrokes and this male-dominated world’s continued imprisonment of the moon feminine, a young woman approached the painting, covered her mouth with her hands, sighed deeply, closed her eyes in the way one does when witnessing primordial wisdom, and remained transfixed.

Eager to remember the thought before I exited the exhibit, I jotted down the following words in my notebook:

Who are we to keep the moon locked in her cage, force-feeding her our hungry vision of the cosmos?

Or, to put it differently, exiting the museum’s main hall, what is this celestial all too human desire to consume and be consumed? To capture an unreal image of a masterpiece that can only ever be witnessed in the flesh? To imprison a never-to-be-watched-again video in the robot in our pocket, grinding up the lustrous magic of the museum instead of basking in the moonglow of the eternally present moment?

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For those curious about last week’s free lecture/discussion, here’s the full (and free) recording about fascism, historical narrative, and my latest novel, The Requisitions.1

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The above video is a long-form conversation about literary fiction between me, the novelist , and the literary connoisseur . Big thanks to all who attended and my paying subscribers, who continue to inspire me to keep focusing on this space.

Paying subscribers: on the first weekend of each month, I will now be hosting a virtual lecture & discussion about literary Paris. The first lecture will be on Saturday, December 7 @ 5 pm CET / 11 am EST about Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald & the all-American price of pursuing wealth & fame as ends in themselves. I’ll send you a registration link at the beginning of the week & will also include it in next week’s post.

1

A few years ago, I wrote an essay titled “In Search of Artistic Integrity” about a pseudonymous author named “Stokes Prickett.” In 2020, the mystery author secretly began sending independently printed installments of a novella called Foodie or The Capitalist Monsoon that is Mississippi to unsuspecting readers across the USA.

The recipients included artists, writers, editors, DJs—anybody “Prickett” deemed worthy of receiving the mysterious missives—and to the delectable surprise of the lucky few who received a copy of Foodie, the writing storytelling was abnormally good—so good, in fact, that the writer published this essay in The New Yorker about a refreshing new voice on the literary scene.

Foodie came and went without much fanfare, however, partly because “Prickett’s” identity was never discovered, but mostly because whoever “Prickett” was, they explicitly did not want to reveal their actual identity.

2

Foodie might be a perfect example of literary fiction.

From the few excerpts I could read, the writing was provocative subversive, an essential aspect of a genre often defined by subverting market-driven plots, character tropes, linear narrative structures and linguistic constructs.

But Foodie is also an example of literary fiction because of its disruptive publication model.

When it comes to publishing literary fiction, many folks’ opinions remain trapped in the brown amber of a myopic academy economy that favors traditionally vetted publishers over the rich history of independently published literary fiction.

Here are a few examples because I promised myself I wouldn’t turn this into a long-form essay:

• In 1917 in London, Mr. and Mrs. Woolf founded the Hogarth Press, bought a printing press, set it up in their kitchen, learned how to use it, and proceeded to publish the likes of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, E.M. Forster, Theodore Dostoevsky, Jacques Lacan, and dozens of other literary greats. Importantly, they didn’t ask anybody for permission.

• Five years later, a legendary Irishman with an eyepatch who was struggling to find a publisher for his magnum opus inspired a young American bookseller in Paris named Sylvia Beach to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses independently.

• Five years later, in 1927, Mr. And Mrs. Crosby founded Black Sun Press began independently publishing their obscure poetry. Within a few years, they were also publishing Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Lewis Carroll, Ezra Pound … the list goes on, and to this day, firs-edition Black Sun Press books remain some of the most highly sought after in the world.

Other Anglophone examples include Obelisk Press, which published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1932; Olympia Press, which published Beckett, Nabokov, and Burroughs in the 1950s; City Lights Books, which published the Beat Generation; Grove Press in New York City … the list goes on.

But while many of these authors’ writing style is indeed considered literary fiction because it subverts various structural, linguistic, and narrative constructs, what makes these examples of literary fiction so important, Foodie included, is that

authentic literary fiction subverts the publishing industry, too—and perhaps even suggests it has a responsibility.

3

In December 2021, about a year after publishing my essay on “Prickett’s” subversion1, I submitted the piece to an anthology being compiled by someone related to (or perhaps body-snatching?) “Stokes Prickett.”

This is what I wrote:

A few days later, my proposal was accepted. Still, after a year of no news, I’d forgotten about the submission entirely until my singer/songwriter friend sent me a text message in March 2023 that made me blush:

Ryan: “Did you know this exists? You’re part of the story now my friend.”

4

It was a small but galvanizing literary win. At that time in my life, my thirty-something self was facing the prospect of hefty student loans for an underwhelming MFA, I was disillusioned with teaching creative writing at the Sorbonne, and I’d just completed a final draft of The Requisitions, the culmination of a decade of writing and academic research a literary/historical metafiction set in both the present-day and Nazi-occupied Poland.

While I’d been toying with the idea of querying dozens of agents and waiting multiple years in hopes of securing a publishing deal for little to no control over the design process and less than (at best) 15% of profits, deep down, I knew I couldn’t in good conscience go down the traditional publishing route with “Stokes Prickett’s” subversive publishing style on my mind.2 Instead, I began envisioning a different way of bringing The Requisitions into the world, and the rest, as they say, is historiographic metafiction The Requisitions.3

AND NOW A SPECIAL HOLIDAY OFFER

5

I’d foregone my Capitalist Monsoon Dreams of becoming a “Big Five Four” published author,

but in return I gained something much more valuable, perhaps: a deep sense of professional agency and personal accomplishment that has in turn connected me with newfound digital friends like and and generous early reviewers of The Requisitions like and , all of whom are subverting the literary fiction world in their own ways.

Epilogue

A few weeks ago, I received another missive.

Dear Samuél, the letter began, please find enclosed the first fascicle of a new novel by Stokes Prickett …

The envelope included a stapled pamphlet of the first 48 pages of Ledbetter, a fast-paced, beautifully written picaresque novel about a heartbroken artist-in-recovery who moves to Delaware to repair a wooden boardwalk:

The book’s immediacy and playfulness reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Robbins—“being alone is like the moon, hanging world-weary and sexual, a swell of socialism a-brewing”—and its philosophical bent reveals an existentialist living in the USA who’s constantly flirting with absurdism:

The last piece of paper in the envelope was the most unexpected:

a rectangular piece of blue paper that includes a thoughtful, hilarious blurb about The Requisitions, written by none other than “Stokes Prickett”:

Just one slight amendment, “Stokes,” if I dare be so bold: as I suspect is the case with you, writing is less a vocation than a lifelong beloved affliction, so here’s to the literary fiction renegades who seek a different kind of fortune fulfilment—

not just in how we write it but in how we publish, too.

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It’s been ten months

since I published my second novel and there’s an image that keeps visiting me just before I fall asleep:

An easy way for a novelist to justify a prolonged period of not writing the next one is to believe what the industry dictates: the most enduring importance of writing books is selling them.

I’ve been a novelist for fifteen years and have been an author (i.e., published) for almost ten. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over my slow and steady writing life, it’s that there are few things more destructive to my novelist-self than thinking what’s most important about writing a novel isn’t the writing, the editing, or even the publishing, but marketing a book my author-self into oblivion instead of getting to work on the next book.

This essay is not, however, an excoriation of authordom, for I’ve learned much since publishing The Requisitions. I’ve built a modest literary community here on Substack,1 have diligently contacted bookstores and reviewers, have joined the Independent Book Publishers’ Association, and, most recently, have galivanted as a novelist/author/publisher2 at the 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair, where my wife and I, the proud founders of Paris-based Kingdom Anywhere Publishing, schmoozed with kind literary agents and jaded foreign rights scouts in a swanky hotel bar in the heart of a once-firebombed-city.

It's all been great, and necessary, and invigorating, and yet I keep returning to that image of the farmer at the window. Thankfully, a few nights ago, unable to sleep on the eve of the Frankfurt Buchmesse, wondering how much more time I should spend trying to convince people that The Requisitions is not only worth reading but also worthy of wider recognition, I began reading an essay a cautionary tale by F. Scott Fitzgerald called “The Crack-Up,” which discusses the difference dissonance between being an author selling books and a novelist writing them.

“The Crack-Up” (1936) was written during the Golden Age of Hollywood, a decidedly dismal age for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre. The cults of personality that had come to caricaturize them individually (Scott, a novelist Princeton student obsessed with wealth power; Zelda, a southern artist belle preoccupied with attention celebrity) turned them into one of the most co-dependent and toxic tales in US history.

The story of the Fitzgeralds is as glamorous as it is tragic precisely because it represents the effervescence of an era that began in the Jazz Age and ended in the Great Depression. It is an all-American United Statesian Cliché, an enduring cautionary tale about the existential price artists pay for pursuing wealth power and fame ego as ends in themselves.

Beware the Beginnings

F. Scott Fitzgerald was raised in a middle-class family that constantly wanted more never thought it had enough. As such, Scott’s family instilled in him an obsession with “making it,” for according to the family lore, his ancestors had once “made it,” too.

In the midwestern USA in the early twentieth century, “making it” was a puritanical euphemism for good old-fashioned materialism—“getting the job,” “getting the girl,” “getting famous” … in other words, objectification of the idea of the self (and others) via the acquirement of objects and fame of which the Jay Gatsbys and Daisy Buchanans of the real world could be proud.    

Before falling in love with Zelda Sayre, Scott pined for Ginevra King, a Chicago vixen one of the wealthiest American heiresses of her time. But alas, Poor Scott was from a lower class. In 1917, Ms. King broke off the relationship with Scott and married a man named Bill, a wealthy banker’s son. Heartbroken Emasculated, Scott dropped out of Princeton, joined the Army, and began writing a manuscript called The Romantic Egotist about love, greed, and heartbreak as he prepared to fight in the Great War.

During his military training in Alabama, however, Scott met the rich beautiful daughter of a wealthy powerful judge from Montgomery, Zelda Sayre, an intellectual debutante who knew how to party, dance, and hold deep conversation. Zelda fell for the young Yankee on one condition: before they got married, Scott would have to get rich and fast, for in both Scott and Zelda’s worlds, The Man had to bring home the proverbial bacon.3

World War One ended on November 11, 1918, allowing Scott to move to New York City to seek his riches. But even back then—if you can believe it—life was hard for a novelist to earn a living, and Scott didn’t impress Zelda with his measly copywriting and advertising income. After receiving scores of rejection letters from literary magazines and an encouraging disappointing rejection of The Romantic Egotist from the famed Scriber’s editor Maxwell Perkins, Zelda broke off the engagement. Scott became suicidal and daily contemplated the weight of the revolver he kept in his pocket. Having been rejected twice by the women of his dreams and no longer able to envision a life as an author, Scott returned to Minnesota as an unaccomplished novelist and rewrote The Romantic Egotist with a different title.

The rest, as they say, is history. Scott’s updated novel, This Side of Paradise, became a literary phenomenon overnight, helping Scott “get the girl,” thus cementing him and Zelda as the celebrity couple of the Jazz Age.

The Crack-Up

Anybody who has read Scott or Zelda’s writing knows the spiritual cost of pursuing fame and fortune as ends in themselves is a recipe for destruction.

In her only novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932), which she wrote from the confines of a psychiatric ward, Zelda Fitzgerald Sayre recounts the story of a wealthy American artist couple who moves to France and succumbs to years of mutually destructive partying, dishonest promiscuity, and insatiable hedonism.

Save Me the Waltz was published two years before Scott wrote his version of a picture-perfect romance gone wrong in his 1934 Tender is the Night. In typical chauvinist pathetic fashion, Scott accused Zelda of plagiarism even though she’d published her version two years earlier. Scott and Zelda’s relationship never recovered. Zelda spent most of the rest of her life in and out of mental asylums, while Scott moved to Hollywood to seek his riches in screenwriting (and other women).

The last pages of “The Crack-Up,” written in the depths of Scott’s sorrow,4 are proof of the novelist’s realization that he wasted years in pursuit of the wrong thing:

During the last few precious months of sobriety before his death, the author novelist finally got back to the land to work on what mattered most, a new book entitled The Last Tycoon (it was never finished) before alcoholism and depression a heart attack finally killed the once-acclaimed author F. Scott Fitzgerald at just forty-four years old.

Zelda Fitzgerald Sayre’s ending was no less tragic. At forty-seven years old (1948), she was seen as a caricature of a forgotten age, having transitioned from “the daughter of a judge” to “the wife of a famous author,” further reduced and objectified into an institutionalized shell of a human being talented artist who died in a hospital fire while sedated.

In the penultimate paragraph of “The Crack-Up,” Fitzgerald confesses:

After almost ten months of striving to present myself as the author of The Requisitions, “The Crack-Up” reminds this farmer to return to the land. While my experience at the 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair felt like a grand success for reasons neither big nor entirely small, Fitzgerald’s words remind me that an author shooting for the stars is only human, but a novelist remaining earthbound might be divine.

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From now on I’ll be reading all of my pieces out loud. Most of the time, recordings will be reserved for paying subscribers, but this one’s a freebie because I’m happy to be back in Paris/am feeling generous. Voilà quoi:

1

“We chase down happiness,

Pure hunters, us.

The sun continues to shine.

On a festival of cruelty

In your head, and in mine.”

Albert Camus, Caligula

There’s an almost identical image in the fictional movie Civil War (2024) and the 2021 docuseries The Line that’s been haunting me for weeks.

In Civil War, directed by Alex Garland (The Beach, Ex-Machina, Annihilation, Men), a hardened war photographer named Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) travels with her journalist pals across a sectarian USA to document the brutality of a 21^st-century American civil war.

Without spoiling much (I’ve seen it three times), suffice to say Civil War succeeds as an anti-war film for two reasons: first, there’s no clear understanding of which side the viewer should be rooting for, and that’s the point—when the shooting starts, you can throw your made-for-TV social-media approved morality out the window—and second, Civil War reveals just how quickly brutality is normalized during wartime; by doing so, it glorifies beautifies violence in a revolting, awe-inspiring, addictive way.

2

Whenever something violent happens in the USA, civilians and politicians alike are the first to say it:

“There’s no place for violence here in America. It’s not who we are as a nation.”

But America isn’t a nation, and such phrases are a fantasy. Civil War makes clear that there is a place for violence in the USA (the place can be almost anywhere), and pretending proselytizing otherwise only perpetuates the problem by convincing us of objective morality, and that it remains something knowable the deeper we delve into the human abyss.

3

“But Civil War is just a movie. It isn’t real life.”

Which begs the question:

where do I draw the line between knowledge entertainment and sensationalism voyeurism?

I watch blurry videos of mass shootings to stay informed experience the shock factor, noting escape routes at movie theatres and Walmarts because I’m told to be prepared. The news, the movies, and the algorithms now suggest I inform myself about child abductions in foreign countries while my friends’ real-life children learn the term “active shooter” in elementary school … and still, I insist you’ve gotta listen to this true-crime podcast while I lament the brutal videos I watch about what’s happening in conflict zones across the world.

4

What might happen if I acknowledged that in some way, I, too, am complicit?1

In 2023 alone, the United States of America spent over $900 billion on military investment, which is more than the following fourteen countries combined … still, if I want to pretend the violent bedrock of the world economy doesn’t affect my psyche, I can settle for a different kind of sublimation via made-for-TV tales of rapist celebrities serial killers, domestic abusers, cult leaders, and anything else the black screen of death can do to raise the hair on my calloused skin—here’s looking at You, Penguin, True Detective, Mind Hunter, Joker, The Jynx, Fargo, Lady in the Lake, Ripley, Promising Young Woman, Dahmer, Call of Duty, The Last of Us, true-crime podcasts narrated by soft-spoken voyeurs, and three of the four top books on the NY Times Bestseller list:

It’s uncomfortable for me to acknowledge such casual ubiquity of violence in my life,

which strikes me as a problem in an economy that sells me violence at every turn. The alternative is to continue uttering the empty phrase this is not who we are as a nation whenever a mass shooting rouses me from my sadistic slumber … or to hashtag #freegaza when enough acquaintances make me feel guilty about “not doing anything” (as if social media ever gave peace a chance) … or, finally, to chant trite slogans in the streets to sublimate my complicity, forever chasing the darker demons of my nature far, far away.

Another alternative, however uncomfortable it may be, is to steel myself

to confront the ugly truth that we are all of us living participating in a society of spectators enthralled by a culture of violence, which is precisely what Alex Gibney’s 2021 docuseries The Line reveals in a brutal, harrowing, and uncompromising way.

5

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

(Spoiler Alert: if you’re not familiar with the story of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, consider learning about him here before continuing)

A tale as old as time:

A liberation army is sent to a devastated land to protect vested interests fight monsters. In the process, soldiers within the liberation army become the very monsters they were sent across the globe to fight.

Aside from the film’s numerous achievements, The Line’s most jarring lesson is how entertainment modern warfare makes voyeurs criminals out of you and me.

Ostensibly, The Line is about the 2018 war crime trials of Eddie Gallagher,

a decorated Navy SEAL trained killing machine accused of murdering civilians in Mosul, Iraq, including a sixteen-year-old an ISIS fighter who Gallagher allegedly stabbed before posing for a photo next to the teenager’s corpse.

The docuseries interviews various witnesses and defenders of Gallagher’s misconduct war crimes, which include gruesome stories of sniping an old man standing on a street corner and shooting a little girl playing by a river in the stomach (the details are grotesque, as the filmmaker warfare intends; as a viewer an informed citizen, it’s impossible to look away).

Throughout The Line, Gallagher’s accusers insist that there are unspoken rules to war and that “the truth” (i.e., objectivity) is paramount tenable. Gallagher’s supporters, on the other hand, believe war is hell, and that to speak of its hellishness is to cross a sacred line—in other words, truth morality is malleable in times of war, or to use the words of William Tecumseh Sherman: “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”

While Gallagher’s actions were undeniably ruthless, his accusers’ naïveté is absolute regarding the documentary’s underlying lesson. Navy SEALS require a different moralistic line than you and me during times of war, and the film deftly reveals the armchair ethicist’s absurdity in criticizing a bigoted soldier an obedient killing machine for becoming the very type of psychopath he was sent across an ocean to fight.

6

At the end of The Line, the viewer is invited deeper into the abyss via shaky headcam footage that shows a Navy SEAL addicted to Tramadol Eddie Gallagher ripping open a medical kit to treat an injured ISIS fighter sixteen-year-old writhing and moaning on the ground (the headcam is turned off before the alleged war crime is committed).

According to all available sources, the captured POW dies a few minutes later from injuries stab wounds to the chest and neck, culminating in the now-infamous photo of Eddie Gallagher an American killing machine posing next to a corpse, grabbing a boy soldier by the hair, holding him up like a proud hunter who’s just felled a deer with a high-powered rifle (see below).

No longer at risk of imprisonment, in the documentary, Gallagher explains his version of the story from the warmly lit interior of a suburban home:

“Nobody had any intention of saving this dude or trying to bring him to a higher level of care … I just knew, I was like, ‘we’re not gonna execute this guy. We can’t just outright kill this dude. So we’ll just do medical treatments on him until he expires … using it as almost, like, a cadaver, like, go ahead and practice it.’ We were not trying to save this guy. It was about making this guy feel pain … The guy needed to die … I’d say the [medical] procedures were just, like, the cherry on top, I guess.”

The human being knows no limits when it comes to justifying brutality,

and while I’d like to think I’m nothing like Eddie Gallagher, The Line forced me to consider my own voyeuristic fascination as part of the same spectrum of violence that haunts me in the film’s final images.

At the end of both The Line and Civil War, the viewer is confronted with an almost identical image that beckons me closer to the screen deeper into the abyss … and though I’m writing to you, dear reader, safely from my peaceful Parisian apartment, far, far away from the killing fields of both real and fictional wars, in some not insignificant way, I’m left with the conclusion that I, too, am a perpetuator of this culture of violence, an imbiber of intoxications both real and imagined,2 that macabre elixir which polite progressive society doesn’t dare want me to  admit.

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