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The real question I’m trying to answer is what is the novel uniquely suited to do? In our unliterary age, the reader will be pardoned for answering “nothing.” And I agree that the novel has very little relevance today for mass culture—a relevance that will only continue to diminish over time.

And yet I believe the novel is still, potentially at least, of paramount importance, for a reason very different from the one you are likely imagining.

Our culture is in need of a religious, artistic and political rejuvenation. Those who are in a place to effect such rejuvenation, unfortunately, have been raised in the same miasma as the rest of us and are therefore without a clear idea just how this rejuvenation ought to occur. Where does one start?

I believe that the novel—not the essay, the tweet, the podcast, or the item of short for video content—is the ideal form for posing and even beginning to answer such a question. I might even go as far as to say that such question cannot be satisfactorily posed except in novelistic form. And finally, the novel’s form itself provide us the right form of the answer, as the practice of engaging with art, diminished though it is, remains the only true ritual consistently practiced by educated moderns. My rationale for these strange notions are unsystematically espoused throughout the discursive essay below.

In case the essay is to discursive, at its end I have provided a little listicle of prescriptions for the serious novelist. I call this “Dogma 26” after Lars von Trier’s 1995 list of prescriptions for filmmakers, “Dogme 95.”

What is the novel today?

Let’s look at the mundane side of things. For the American writers before my own generation—beginning with the Greatest Generation and ending with Gen X—the writing of novels was, first of all, a possible path to financial success without having to work a day job. (John Updike’s son David decided he himself wanted to be a writer when he noticed how little his father actually worked. And John Updike was one the most hardworking and prodigious of his cohort.) For writers of the Baby Boomer generation onward, the writing of novels was also a path to a sinecure at a university (for the especially famous, this started a little earlier; Robert Frost captured the gist when he referred to his position at the various universities to which he was attached as poetic radiator), where one was admired by bright-eyed young people and even got to sleep with the more adventurous of them. This is (for the most part) no longer the case, though there are still some sinecures and grants for those who tick the right boxes. Why do the rest of us persist?

Well, obviously, there is more to the writing of novels than the mundane side of things. Even among commercial authors, I suspect that very few novelists become novelists for mercenary reasons, and I suspect that none of the great novelists did so. Beyond money, fame, and sex, what is the literary artist aiming for?

At the deepest personal level, the creation of a great novel is an instance of the maxim physician, heal thyself. The novelist has a cultural or spiritual wound that he or she wishes to fix. But he or she finds a very particular and roundabout way of doing so. This is by finding the larger-scale problem that correlates with the personal wound. With truly great novels, the scale is so large as to be universal. That is to say, the artist zooms out. The insane person and the narcissist project their own personal wounds onto the world, thus transforming the world into a place that only recapitulates their own very specific sad stories. The artist takes his or her sad story and finds what’s universal in it, thereby expanding his or her vantage point enormously and breaking the spell of individual hurt.

Myth and reality

The novelist thus turns the real into myth. I realize when I use the word myth I may lose some people. So let me use a few examples to make this idea concrete. One sort of myth is that of the wounded lover. An early version of this can be found in the Italian poet Petrarch’s famous sonnet sequence—which was, at least at the moment of inspiration, about a woman who had caused him pain. But Petrarch takes this pain and aestheticizes it. “Fool, look in thy heart and write,” he advises himself in the last line of the first sonnet of the series. And that very command—to take the experience and make something artful out of it—immediately takes Petrarch out of the worm’s eye view and puts him in the bird’s eye view.1 Petrarch is seeing himself from the vantage point of someone else. This echoes the shift from Romanticism to Realism that I wrote about a few year ago on my old blog.

This process of changing one’s vantage point heals the wound by removing the ego, and in so doing Petrarch also provides the means for his reader to heal his or her own wound. This particular wounded lover myth appears again and again in Western literature. Modern instantiations that immediately come to mind are Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary and Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers (both of which are, not coincidentally, first novels). In each of these novels the narrator spends the length of the novel yearning, unrequitedly, for his beloved. In each of these novels the narrator ends the book by zooming out his perspective, renouncing his yearning and (implicitly) beginning to write the book which the reader holds in hand. The plot is not only an account of a protagonist leveling up his state of consciousness, but a symbol of the alchemical artistic process itself.

Another way of making this concept concrete is to examine the structure of Shakespeare’s plays, with the help of the poet-critic Ted Hughes’s magisterial book-length essay on the Bard, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. In his preface to this book, Hughes points out that today we tend to love Shakespeare for being a precocious realist along the lines of Dickens or Balzac and other 19th century novelists; and indeed there had been no dramatist prior to Shakespeare to inject his plays with so much earthy detail. Yet Shakespeare was also deeply mythic in his perspective, and this is why we revere him—whether we know that this is why or not.

Hughes argues that the middle and later plays of Shakespeare constitute an elaboration of a single myth, which was presaged by Shakespeare’s two early long poems, “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece.” This myth is the rejection of a Goddess, and the Goddess’s ensuing revenge—by bringing madness, humiliation, or death to the character who has rejected the Goddess and has thus rejected Eros. For Hughes this is a perennial theme throughout the corpus of myth: “I pointed out,” he writes, summarizing his introductory chapter, “how the demonization of the Goddess, or one half of her, as a result of this rejection, was fully anticipated in the original mythic splitting of the Aphrodite figure (Mother and Sacred Bride) and a Persephone figure (Queen of Hell), in the various traditions. . . . According to this lineage, [Shakespeare’s] Equation is itself a primordial mythic structure, like an elemental law in physics.”

Hughes argues that for Shakespeare this was not only a perennial theme but a timely one: It was demonstrated by the recent anti-Erotic Puritan revolt to which Shakespeare’s plays responded. We first see this political-social theme crop up unmistakably in the person of Angelo, the strident reformer in Measure for Measure. (Within Hughes’s conception of the Shakespearean “equation,” Angelo’s incomprehensible and maddening lust for Isabella is an instantiation of the Goddess’s revenge.)

Finally, it is not too importunate to deduce some feature of Shakespeare’s biography that also aligns with this mythic and historical situation: What biographical evidence we have shows that Shakespeare abandoned his wife for many years, and the evidence from the Sonnets makes clear the author’s preoccupation with the travails of lust.

Thus Shakespeare’s Equation forming the plots of his greatest plays is derived from three separate strata: (1) historical occurrences (2) myths as they have come down to us in recorded history and (3) mythic structures themselves, which are like elemental laws in physics. This last category of inspiration is something that, presumably, any human at any time on earth can access innately, but to which Shakespeare had a particular attraction due to his sensitive artistic temperament and the circumstances of his own life.

So, when I say the novelist turns the real into myth, this is what I mean. I mean he or she accesses intuitively, through meditative exercises, through poetic trance, or through drugs or mental imbalance,2 the mythic structures behind reality which are elusive to us in our rational age. These structures are homologous with mundane reality (hence the power of symbols) while being in a deep sense are more real than it.

The novel and society

Prior to the 20th century, every society on earth was essentially theocratic. That is, every society subordinated its people’s worldly interests to some form of otherworldly interest. The 20th century was an interesting experiment, no doubt, but I believe it is safe to say that neither secularism nor material goods have produced the utopia imagined by such optimistic early 20th century liberals as H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. It is even looking increasingly unlikely that we will even achieve the kind of vaguely pleasant anhedonic post-thymos global nanny state envisioned by Francis Fukuyama.

It seems fair to me to posit that the sense of dissatisfaction experienced even by the materially comfortable can be explained by the fact that the society in which they live is insufficiently theocratic. By this I only mean that the principles that undergird religion—a sense of continuity with the past and future, a sense that our mundane world is contiguous with the transcendent, and a belief that ritual is necessary for the opening up of the membrane between mundane and transcendent—must also undergird decision-making mechanisms of those who run the society in order for that society to flourish. As odd as this may sound to the modern ear, it was a baseline assumption of earlier ages. After all, even the United States of America used to be such a country and putatively still is, which is why we still swear on the Bible and impress the words “In God We Trust” on our coins.

In a flourishing society, the transcendent must be successfully integrated into the social order, and it is through ritual that this integration takes place. It is ritual that opens up that membrane between the mundane and transcendent. Yet for modern man such ancient rituals are largely ineffective—except for art, which is to say mythic storytelling, which is the sine qua non of any religion new or old. Thus the novel is not only a tool for descriptively pointing toward an effective society, but is itself, by way of the artist’s breaking away into the transcendent and then bringing some element of it back for an audience, a ritual, and the most powerful and effective ritual still available to us in the desacralized modern world.

The ancient Egyptians maintained such an incredibly conservative art because they understood how powerful art was for influencing the people, and that the viewing of their art was a ritual action which effected the thoughts of the people who viewed it. This great responsibility lies with the modern artist, too. Even if he doesn’t create the conscience of the masses, he creates the conscience of those who still have the intelligence and imagination to read serious works; the odds are high enough that some of such people will be the leaders of tomorrow’s society.

How does the novelist enact such a ritual? Here is a brief attempt at enumerating the preconditions for doing so.

The novelist’s responsibilities

One cannot neglect the nuts and bolts, just as you can’t have a priest without a cincture. To write a good novel, one must be a good craftsman, an excellent practitioner of his or her native tongue. But this subject is covered ably in many other books.3 But there is a still more important element seldom discussed, and it is by ignoring this element that our modern novelists have largely brought the form to shame.

To write a good novel, you have to exit the reality distortion vortex that serves as the prerequisite for the emission of polite speech and for political jockeying. The novel is, in this limited sense, impolite and anti-political. And no one will write a great novel if he or she cannot afford to to embody either of these qualities. This does not apply only to matters of “political correctness.” An acquaintance with reality in general is necessary. James Joyce desperately needed to know the height of the railings at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin in order to write the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses; he required strict realism to take the imaginative flights that he did. This sounds simple enough, but unfortunately we got in such a habit of distorting reality in order to make polite conversation that it is easy for one’s work to accidentally suffer. A very simple example: In a roundup that includes a review of my own novel Stop All the Clocks, writes appositely of the reality distortion vortex’s effect on a novel by the affable British comedian Richard Osman:

First, Richey quotes Osman’s book:

Amy weighs up the odds. Kevin is around six two, must weigh upwards of 260lbs. If she can unbalance him, it’s an easy win for her. But Kevin is an ex-Navy SEAL. And Kevin knows that he is six two, and heavy, so Kevin also knows that if Amy can unbalance him it’s an easy win for her. Kevin is therefore keeping his distance and letting the gun do the work. Amy hears handcuffs. The second Kevin reaches for her wrists, he will be doomed. Once she overpowers him, she can worry about what to do next.

And then Richey responds:

I point this out because in all of the modern examples of amazing, girlboss, female fighters, I can’t remember anything as ridiculous as this. And there has been a lot of ridiculous stuff. I don’t care how well trained Amy is, or if she looks like Brienne of Tarth. She’s not going to automatically win against a 6’2” ex-Navy SEAL, if he but touches her wrists. That’s basically science fiction. In reality her chances of “overpowering” him in a straight up fight are next to zero, to say nothing of a situation where he’s got the drop on her and is holding a gun. “Easy win”? “He will be doomed”? Come on!? I can’t imagine Osman is really that blinkered. I guess it must be a trap to catch out bad people like me. If so, I guess he succeeded.

Success indeed. And Osman’s book is a bestseller. But what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?

Zoom out

How else does a novelist enact the sort of ritual necessary to guide elite opinion and rejuvenate society? Obviously, the novelist needs to write about the most pressing issues of his or her age. This was obvious to Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, and Dickens. But it has been forgotten for several reasons—of which modernism was a major contributor—which were discussed in the earlier essays in this series. I won’t linger on that. A more interesting question is how it is that the novelist’s craft differs from that of the essayist or anyone else deeply concerned with the issues of his or her age.

One unique feature of the novel is its adherence to the mythico-philosophical concept of the conjunction of opposites. Mircea Eliade notes the tendency of myths to “express on the one hand the diametrical opposition of two divine figures sprung from one and the same principle and destined, in many versions, to be reconciled . . . .” This tendency is also present in the religions of today; what two Gods are more irreconcilable than jealous Yahweh and generous Christ—though they be but one and the same? Within the literary arts, the novel continues this tradition. A novel is not a novel if it merely shows a superior hero’s triumph over his surroundings; this might be an epic, or a comic book, or an item of erotica. But the great novel perfectly balances competing interests; it is a concretization of ambivalence.

The novelist is free in a way other writers are not to take a longer view of the world, and to synthesize the parts that make up our daily lives into a whole. Moreover, the novelist is free not only to tell us what he or she thinks about various situations, but to imagine what it is to feel them. There is an immense power to such a way of writing, and it is the imaginative capability that the reader of novels has historically responded to so passionately. Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book primarily about the love lives of a handful of individuals, reveals more about the sort of socialism with a human face that we encounter today in the west than a dozen dry books of history could. To make ideas concrete and to imagine their effects on individual lives is already a form of thought more effective and more thorough than that which is available to the large majority of punditry today. To be able to do so on a grand social scale, as the great novelists have done, is so far beyond the powers of the average artist of today that it sometimes feels that the great 19th century novelists were of a different species.

And yet the novel’s potential power is greater still. Beyond its exoteric aim of telling a story that portrays the passions of a large social milieu, a great novel has an esoteric aim. This is the place where poetry gets mixed in, where passages make the reader’s hair stand on end. And indeed horripilation is as good a test as any for the success of a novel or any other work of art in this mysterious realm. The novel is unique in that it is sufficiently capacious to allow for the imagining of a new world in which ritual has been revived and wholeness has been restored to society, while also being sufficiently poetic that the reading of a novel might constitute participation in that ritual itself.

To put it another way: the novel is a perfect admixture of the rational and irrational.4 The novelist in this sense is the ultimate magician: he or she on the one hand reflects reality as clearly as possible, while on the other hand simultaneously induces poetic trance, leading the reader unknowingly into a realm beyond “reality.” “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins” is as much a description as it is an abracadabra.

Implicit here is a comment on the structure of reality. This comment is not “mystical” but rather requires some humility with regard to our understanding of the universe; the comment theorizes the existence of features of reality which we have not fully mapped. These features include human instincts that have been called the unconscious. I tend to agree with scholars of such psychological processes such as Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade that these unconscious instincts form a part of an objective reality which we cannot yet adequately map, and moreover that they are intimately connected with the forms of reality that we have traditionally called religion when we do attempt to make the maps. Even today when the educated west is less inclined to practice religion, these forces of reality which we have not adequately mapped break through to us in the form of neurosis or psychosis, and other irrational behavior. Or in the form of literature. As the scholar and publisher Roberto Calasso puts it, “one way or another the world will go on being the place of epiphanies.”

Meanwhile, material questions of paramount importance loom: What is a human and what is machine? What are the rules around human procreation now that much of this process can be replaced by machine? What is the proper form of government in a globally connected society? What is the role of biology now that our understanding of human biology reveals many facts unflattering to the worldview that has dominated elite opinion for the last several centuries? This is just a smattering. And perhaps most pressing of all is the question concerning humankind’s relationship to the transcendent—do we exist for the sake of anything greater than ourselves? Of course anyone can participate in the discussion of these questions but it is likely only those of peculiar temperament and peculiar capacity for leisure who will actually want to engage with them in the way that the novel allows. And, more importantly, who will be able to concentrate well enough to undergo the ritual trance that the novel may induce. My hope is that future novels may both pose the right questions and induce the right trances among the right people. If this is to be the case, then the novel may be far more important than other much more ballyhooed media.

Of course I realize people will still write entertainments and self-justifying autofiction and smut. This is fine. With this essay I only wish to indicate what, in the field of novel-writing, is genuinely worthwhile.

A Listicle (Dogma 26)

Some prescriptions for the serious novelist:

1. Your Audience is small

   You are not, primarily, an entertainer. (And yet you must be entertaining. Writing novels is hard). Your primary job is to usher forth a new era of humanity. In doing so, you will likely not appeal to distracted people reading your book on the train on their way to work.

2. Be Real

   You can’t write a worthwhile novel if you can’t free yourself from the Reality Distortion Vortex. You can’t do it if you’re trying above all be polite and win plaudits.

3. Myth-make

   You must be a mythmaker. This means you know what the realm of the mythic is, which means you must have found access to the transcendent, whether by spiritual practice or by accident.

4. Examine an Important Social Problem Deeply

   Nothing Purely Subjective, No “Slices of Life.” Your novel should convey at least some characters outside your own milieu.

5. Ambivalence is the precondition for transcendence.

   Even if, from your own point of view, the novel has a political purpose, that purpose should not be exposed to the reader. Great novelists give great lines to characters who oppose their own viewpoints (Skimpole in Dickens’s Bleak House, Ivan in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov).

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Overview

When I began the Mars Review, my aim was to smash together the most interesting writing from online outsiders with the most stylish criticism from legacy magazine writers seeking out higher ground as publications seemed increasingly intent on scraping the bottom of the barrel in order to increase ad revenue and satisfy the new requirements of the clickbait economy. My thesis was that with the Mars Review I could create a new prestige magazine that could function like the New York Review of Books, but with a tech-forward sensibility and an openminded political persuasion that reflected the pandemic-era lack of trust in supposedly official sources of truth.

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I’ve said the above statements so often I have by now pretty much memorized them. It’s a great pitch, a beautiful dream, and a worthy endeavor.

In important ways, the thesis was 100% wrong. The good news was that in trying to prove it right, I created something somewhat different from what I had intended, which turned out to be valuable indeed. Let’s talk about what happened.

The Past

I was a little naïve when I started the Review. I thought that, in general, quality of writing was the factor that determined either approbation or disapprobation from cultural gatekeepers. I found out early on after launching the Review that thousands of readers were excited about the idea of publishing outsider writing in elegant, careful prose; what I did not anticipate is that the majority of tastemakers were not.

It turns out that what is granted prestige is granted prestige largely for political reasons. (If you want to know the political reason, simply look at the nearly uniform political opinions of our major universities, biggest newspapers and magazines, and elite policy makers.) Quality may enter into the calculations when it comes to prestige—no one wants to admit a complete schlemiel to the cocktail party, after all—but it is hardly the major factor.

I can confidently say of good writing: “that and $7.75 will get you an oat mil iced latte.” If you have not only good writing, but also a real diversity of independent viewpoints, your oat milk iced latte becomes more expensive. What can I say? The heart wants what it wants, and so does the market.

So, the Mars Review never became an insider magazine. I would not have made a very good insider anyway.

What about the outsiders? The thing is, the outsiders are inclined to resist attempts to lump them in with writers who do play politics. They have their own pressures not to support anyone with any connections to an opposing camp. Even outsiders can be cliquey, although in general they’re much less likely to grind their gears over being near an opponent’s byline.

So ultimately the Mars Review didn’t become a consummate outsider magazine either. It was never primarily a political organ, and it’s hard to be a consummate outsider without being consummately political.

We’re neither insiders nor outsiders. What about being a solid book review? Well, the thing is, publishing just isn’t the industry it used to be. I don’t believe any review will take the place that the NYRB once had—because reviewing books simply isn’t as important for the culture as it was in the 1960s, and because the ease with which anyone can share a review decreases the importance of gatekeepers—a fact felt in all creative industries. I succeeded in making the MRB a great product; but it could never have been successful in the way I imagined. I was pattern-matching to an era that simply can’t be recreated.

The Present

I’ve seen a few different entities pop up that seem to have followed very close in the Mars Review’s footsteps. (And of course MRB was explicitly following very close in the NYRB’s footsteps). This has been, in some ways, heartening to see. It’s cool that other people care. It’s cool that there are still people who love books, and people who are excited to write and read. But this seems like a case where, to quote an eminent investor and theologian, competition is for losers. All of us are fighting for scraps of a pie that is getting smaller and smaller. And, although I respect many of the people doing so, it’s getting depressing to watch.

Part of what makes it depressing is that ultimately criticism, which should be the most dispassionate and objective of endeavors, becomes, in an arena of outsiders where the only judge of quality is likes and shares, a kind of clout-acquisitions game. A true intellectual is someone who can say what he or she pleases. Legacy publications suppress true intellectuals with a top-down approach. Outsider sometimes suppress the true intellectual tendency from the ground up: Popularity becomes the diktat.

And then there’s the attendant, especially stomach-churning game of people hiding their political beliefs to be prestige, or having just spicy enough beliefs to get attention but not spicy enough to alienate the prestige world. Meanwhile, a largely pseudonymous intelligentsia on X.com continues to hold the most water when it comes to accurately and fearlessly describing the things of the world—but the incentive structure on X is so mangled that the need for ever hotter takes, ad hominem attacks, and constant vigilance over the news cycle degrades all but the steeliest minds. I should make it clear that I am not absolved from any of the faults mentioned above; I’m just trying to give an accurate rendering of the landscape.

The Future

So we found it’s not possible to repeat the past. What can be done? I think that quality cultural productions in the future will necessarily have to be small and insular. I also think that criticism alone isn’t going to do the job. I’m becoming more and more convinced that art really is the transcendently important thing in the modern world. This was once a matter of faith among the aesthetically minded, although of late it has become something many find risible. In any case, the Mars Review will lean into the production of art, while continuing reviewing, podcasting, and the like. We have a great review of If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies coming up, as well as the new episode of the Mars Review podcast, with .

I don’t want to reproduce any mainstream outlet, but to provide a lifeboat for myself and others who don’t want to live in the land of slop. The for-profit wing of this project will be The Aleph—more on this soon. If you’re an accredited investor and wish to be in touch about that, please shoot over an email.

We’re doing great as is. But really, for this project to work, we need generous people who care deeply, and that’s why I’m asking to you to give on this Giving Tuesday. As with the monasteries of yore, a handful of enlightened and generous individuals is all take takes to preserve items of limitless value, and I happen to believe such individuals exist.

And thank you to all readers and to everyone who has contributed to the MRB along the way!

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Overview

There are at least a few views I hold that would likely inspire people to call me a conspiracy theorist. I’m pretty much inured at this point to the accusation, especially after having learned that the term itself was popularized through a CIA dispatch in a conscious attempt to quell dissent. But there was one interest of mine that I never thought would inspire people to stick me with the conspiracy theorist label: chess.

Yet that’s precisely what happened to me early last year, when I was expressing my support for the opinions of Vladimir Kramnik, the one-time chess champion of the world, and today the most controversial (that’s the polite way of putting it, but the truth is, the most hated) man in the world of chess.

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For the last several years Kramnik has been campaigning more and more vocally for “fair play” in chess. At the time when when I had the chess debate that led to my being labeled a peddler of conspiracies, in early 2025, Kramnik was considered more of a nuisance than a pariah. He had begun posting videos on YouTube detailing what he believed to be widespread cheating in online chess, implicating some of the biggest names in the game. When I, by chance, met a set of fellow chess at that evening in early 2025 and began discussing Kramnik, they let it be known that his theories of widespread cheating were beyond the pale.

Today Kramnik’s opinions draw even more ire. One of the top-ranked players whom Kramnik suspected of systematic cheating in online chess was young Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky, who was found dead last week at the age of 29. This death is unmistakably terrible, and Naroditsky seems to have been widely beloved by those who knew him. No report on his death has been issued, but only a few days before his death Naroditsky conducted a livestream while appearing to be under the influence of drugs, and it is widely suspected that the cause of his death was unnatural.

Predictably, the blowback against Kramnik has been intense. On X.com, users have been quick to blame Kramnik for Naroditsky’s death, or to suggest that Kramnik himself should go die. This is par for the course; one expects stupidity, groupthink and calls to violence to predominate among the general public. But there’s a stranger trend around the hate Kramnik has received—one that I noticed the germ of when I first started becoming a chess obsessive during the pandemic. Nearly every chess celebrity who is well-known in the business has lined up to insult Kramnik or at the very least question his sanity, with a homogeneity and ubiquity reminiscent of Soviet professions of faith, or party line copypasta from the Me Too or Floyd eras. The story has even made national news, with Coleman Hughes in The Free Press posting a commemoration to Naroditsky, while stating that Kramnik’s claims were “baseless.” A coordinated campaign on both X.com and Reddit, complete with Community Notes and excessive moderation, seems determined to paint Kramnik as an irredeemable villain. The actual story is much more complicated.

A bit of history

It begins in 2020, when many fans, including myself, first began paying attention to competitive chess. Around this time, chess’s biggest stars such as Naroditsky, World #2 Hikaru Nakamura, and the sisters Andrea and Alexandra Botez began livestreaming their chess play and pulling in as many views as those streamings their exploits playing more high octane video games like Fortnite.

I first became ensorcelled by the game by watching videos from chess influencers who have now been someone overshadowed: the early streamers Grandmasters Eric Hansen and Aman Hambleton, who operate under the collective “Chessbrah,” and Ben Finegold, an obstreperous chess insult comic who also had the distinction of being one of the few players to receive that title at the comparatively old age of 40. And I first noticed something amiss when Hansen’s career took an unfortunate turn. Caught on stream drunkenly uttering obscenities toward the enormously popular streamer “xQC,” who had recently collaborated with Hansen’s rival Hikaru Nakamura, Hansen found himself shunned by the online chess community. In total unison, he was condemned by his peers, and it later came out that brass at chess.com, the company which is reported to be worth half a billion dollars, and which reaps the profits from the game’s biggest streamers, had ordered his then-girlfriend Alexandra Botez not to consort with him.

Next came the scandal which made national news. The greatest player of all time, Magnus Carlsen, refused to play the young American grandmaster Hans Niemann at an important tournament—leading to speculation that Niemann had cheated in over-the-board tournaments. (Niemann had already admitted to having cheated online as a teenager.) By and large, the chess celebrities took Carlsen’s side, and Niemann was suspended for several months from using the chess.com platform where he regularly streamed and made money. Niemann became a pariah, and the butt of many jokes, including the notion (first suggested jokingly by Eric Hansen) that his method of online cheating involved anal beads vibrating in Morse Code.

Niemann was an easy scapegoat for the chess world. Brash and arrogant, with a nearly permanent sneer painted onto his face, he looked and acted like someone born to play the villain. Then came Vladimir Kramnik, a man with a calm demeanor and almost forcefully bland appearance. Disturbed by online games he had played in which he felt his opponents had made strangely brilliant moves under impossible time controls, he began documenting his studies of suspicious behavior on his YouTube channel.

While casting suspicions on an incredible run of wins by top streamer Nakamura, Kramnik eventually zeroed in on Naroditsky, who was at the time a commentator for chess.com and a popular streamer in his own right. Kramnik’s studies can seem byzantine to the casual observer, but the conclusions of his observations are pretty straightforward. Kramnik begins by noting that Naroditsky had already admitted to cheating. In one episode of a series of videos known as a “speedrun,” in which a player starts his journey from the lowest possible rating and plays as many games as need be in order to get back to his proper rating, Naroditsky admitted that he used a chess engine—essentially a panacea that automatically turns whoever is using it into the greatest player of all time. Kramnik felt that where there was smoke there was likely fire, and analyzed a series of Naroditsky’s videos, one of which appears to show, through a reflection on glass behind him, an image of a chess board on a separate monitor, to which Naroditsky is toggling back and forth during his game. (The implication is that Naroditsky is using a chess engine to discover the best moves, although looking at any other board for any reason while playing an online game is prohibited by chess.com rules.)

As a chess fan, I was rapt when Kramnik began making these allegations. And of course I’m not the only one. Nothing captures attention like a scandal. When Kramnik first began airing his suspicions, his inquiries were met with intense curiosity, with the majority of chess streamers publicly commenting that they seriously doubted Kramnik’s claims but were interested to see more. When Kramnik finally followed up with his video that strongly suggests Naroditsky was looking at a chess board on a separate monitor during competitive games, these chess influencers simply went silent and stopped covering a story that had until then served as delicious clickbait.

Is Online Cheating Rampant?

What’s going on? In the world of chess, there is an unwritten rule that you do not publicly accuse another person of cheating—which is why Magnus Carlsen’s insinuations against Hans Niemann and Kramnik’s insinuations against Naroditsky were such big news. This unwritten rule made sense in a world of purely over-the-board chess where it is relatively difficult to cheat, and so an accusation is more likely than not to be a case of sour grapes. (It should be noted that it is difficult but not impossible, and reports have always circulated, most notably in the famous World Championship between Soviet supported Anatoly Karpov and dissident Garry Kasparov).

But in the world of online chess, it is relatively easy. If you play enough games on chess.com, you’ll eventually see your rating change at random intervals, as chess cheaters are banned and their wins against you are nullified. From the comfort of your own home, you can easily access chess engines. Software from the popular chess cites can detect whether you’ve gone so far as to create a computer program to automatically enter the best “engine moves” for you, but it can do little to prevent you from simply opening up a chess engine on a separate computer or monitor. Today, chess engines are so fast and powerful that even in short time controls, like the games Naroditsky and Nakamura play online, it is not difficult to enter your opponent’s moves on a separate screen and immediately receive information about the absolute best move to play next.

So is online cheating rampant, even among top players, even in chess.com online tournaments that dole out significant amounts of cash? Because I myself am not a competitive chess player, the unwritten rule does apply to me and I feel I can say outright: Yes, it is likely. This is the most parsimonious explanation for why the chess world went so completely silent when Kramnik uncovered new information about Naroditsky, whose fortunes were tied to those of chess.com, and also for why there seems to be such a coordinated effort to smear Kramnik among those who stand to benefit most from chess.com’s success.

A quick overview will suffice: Top Grandmaster Nihal Sarin wrote in a tweet last week, clearly referencing Kramnik and blaming him for Naroditsky’s death: “When respected figures spread unfounded accusations without accountability, real lives are destroyed.” Both Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura and FIDE Master Qi Yu, two of the most popular streamers in the chess world, commented approvingly on Sarin’s statement, with Nakamura writing “Thank you for stating this so clearly.” Meanwhile, chess’s biggest streamer Levy Rozman also piled onto Kramnik, writing that while he does not condone death threats against Kramnik, “there needs to be a form of justice”—implying that some form of pain should be inflicted on Kramnik as a result of Naroditsky’s death.

There is a bitter irony here. If most players are doing at least a little bit of online cheating, it levels the playing field somewhat. Which means that, as in the steroid era of baseball, no one is really guilty when everyone is guilty. If there is indeed a large number of players who cheat online, I suspect they mostly do it to feed the insatiable algorithm (that is, to quickly churn out content like the speedrun for which Naroditsky admitted he cheated), rather than to win big tournaments during which they’re under far greater scrutiny. It may be that what put so much pressure on Naroditsky was not the accusations of small scale cheating, but the immense pressure from monied interest to deny them.

There is no question that Naroditsky’s recent death is terrible. But the reaction is one I’ve seen online many times before—the blaming of a scapegoat, in this case Kramnik, and deflection from the truth. So while the popular influencers of the chess world cry for justice, implying that Kramnik should be harmed, I salute him for his deeply unpopular commitment to uncovering the truth. His existence also serves as a useful hermeneutic for future pile-ons: No one is as hated as the person who consistently and dispassionately tries to tell the truth.

The Aleph

TLDR: The Aleph is a multi-sided marketplace and membership club for arts. We’re starting in NYC but aim to go global. We’ll have our first event in the next few weeks and plan to keep them going bi-weekly. If you’re an artist and have a project you need production & funding, or if there is a work of art you’d like to commission and produce, go ahead and fill out our form here.

But First, a Story

Before I describe The Aleph in more detail, let me first tell you a brief story. Once upon a time, in the 1950s, there was a little boy who loved cars. When he was old enough, he got the fastest one he could afford. But then he had a terrible accident. He couldn’t race anymore. The only thing he could do was dream.

And so he dreamed a lot. He told a million stories to himself in his head. And in so doing, he became deeply interested in the question of where stories come from, so he decided to study folklore and anthropology. He came across Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell said that all stories could possibly be boiled down to one: The Hero’s Journey.

So the dreaming adolescent became a dreaming young man, looking for a way to tell the story of a great hero. The young man had learned the ins and outs of film and hoped to make a movie about such a hero. But now it was the 1970s, and all the films were about crime and misery. The nation had become hopeless and so had its art. The young man dreamed of an epic, rivaling Homer and Milton, a story of good and evil and life and death, set in a distant, mythical past in which man was an intergalactic species.

But studios hated the idea. They wanted stories that reflected the grimness that was all around them. They wanted stories that were depressing, cynical, ugly. Nevertheless, the young man persisted. He got his film made.

You may have guessed by now that the young man was George Lucas, and the film was Star Wars. And with his story alone he altered forever not only Hollywood but the culture at large.

What is The Aleph?

There’s a lot of misery and grimness around us these days—especially in the arts. It’s considered a foregone conclusion that literature, film, and music will degenerate into lazy, AI-generated, algorithm-hacking slop. The institutions that still have the funds to create great works are sclerotic and overly politicized. Meanwhile, communities around Bitcoin, decentralized networks, and other tech projects have injected some new energy into these fields. But what’s lacking is an organization to collect all that energy and distill it.

The Aleph is a multi-sided marketplace and membership club for arts. What does that mean?

Whether it’s the Medicis, the Rockefellers, or Hollywood moguls, there used to be great networks of artists, producers, and patrons that were beneficial to all parties. The question I’ve been obsessed with is, how do we re-establish those networks?

I think the opportunity is there. Founders and investors are itching to form communities that are IRL, meaningful, and exclusive. Meanwhile artists are desperate for new backers. Moveable feasts like Assembly, Vibe Camp, Palestra, and the like, have proved wildly successful.

These different groups just need to be connected. That’s what the Aleph is going to do. Then, once artists and investors are in the club together, we’ll provide a platform for reaching standardized agreements, to create something like an AngelList for the arts. We may not be able to save the broader culture from slop. But we can at least build on higher ground.

That starts with getting together in the same room and having conversations. I was having a conversation with a founder and investor in crypto a while ago. I asked him what sort of art he wanted to see more of. He said, “anything that’s optimistic.” I relayed this conversation to a Hollywood producer friend. He said “I wish I understood better what that meant.” I figured I could keep playing intermediate in this game of telephone between the tech world and the arts world. Or I could build a platform to connect them. I chose the latter.

What’s with the name?

Thinking back to when I started the Mars Review in 2022, I find I achieved much of what I intended to do, but what I really needed was to dream bigger. There can be no truly dominant magazines or labels anymore. There can only be dominant platforms. The only way to dominate is to incorporate everything.

And that’s what The Aleph is for. The title comes from a story called “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges. The tale recounts how a minor poet comes across a portal in his basement, which he calls “The Aleph.” The portal affords any viewer a vision of everything that is happening in the universe, and everything that has ever happened—immediately and simultaneously.

One of the ironies of the story is that the owner of this portal, Carlos Daneri, only uses it to view scenes which he might include in the epic poem he is forever working on but will never finish. Is this not rather like the average person in the age of technology? We find ourselves with magic at our fingertips—and we use it scroll mindlessly through our feeds of slop.

It turns out, we don’t want our AIs to make art for us while we sit at our e-mail jobs, we want them to sit at our e-mail jobs for us while we make art. The plan of The Aleph is to leverage all the technical breakthroughs of last twenty years—easy peer-to-peer payments, global distribution for digital works, AI for streamlining services and training on past data—so that artists can focus on the fun stuff. But not only the fun stuff. The important stuff. The stuff that (unlike most super-serious but ultimately boring projects) actually changes the world.

The Aleph, in its final form, will be a global digital platform connecting artists and producers. However, a purely online system for funding the arts is not Lindy. Hollywood, New York publishing, Music Row: these places have always about rubbing shoulders with the best and brightest artists in the world. That’s why in-person events will be a crucial part of what the Aleph does. If this interests you, fill out the form here.

If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to reply to this email.

Best,

Noah

• “a Neuromancer for the 21st century”

• “the first genuinely compelling novel of the latest US batch [of novels]”

• “funny and terrifying and strange, like life; but, unlike life, it offers something like catharsis.”

Buy Stop All the Clocks

This is the end of a long journey, which began almost nine years ago to the day. Back in 2016, I was walking around the Village, and some paradoxical lines of poetry entered my mind. I jotted them down on a napkin, and they became the lines of poetry that conclude Stop All the Clocks. Now the book is here. It’s in stores, including at the famous McNally Jackson, where in my youth I would browse the stacks and dream of seeing my own book among them, coming in right ahead of Kundera, Kunkel and Kunzru; at Book Culture in Morningside Heights, where I had my first job in the city; at the famous City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, which was founded by the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and many more. You can read an excerpt from my publishers here.

I’m having two big events for the book: a reading and conversation with KGB Lit Journal editor Carrigan Miller at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn TONIGHT Weds June 4 at 7PM, and a party at Pubkey TOMORROW Thurs June 5 at 10PM. See below. RSVP for the Thursday party here.

Nine years is a while to have a novel in the works. I’ve had a lot of time to think about what my purpose was with this novel, and what the novelist’s purpose should be in general. One could say that the novelist’s purpose is just to tell a story. But that’s not really good enough. There are many media now for storytelling. And these new media—film, TV, and short form video content being the obvious ones—often tell stories with greater immediacy and impact. For the novel to make sense as a form, there must be some other reason for it to exist. There must be something the novelist can do that other storytellers cannot.

Buy Stop All the Clocks

I’ve never really been a manifesto sort of guy. But I also can’t produce art blindly without knowing where the whole process is going. (I deeply envy the sorts of people who can.) I need reason to follow my intuition. And a sufficient number of early Stop All the Clocks’s early readers have told me that the book is refreshing in some way—perhaps new in some way, though the principles behind it are very old—that I thought it would be worth it for me to examine what principles guided my own writing and to suggest them as principles for other novelists to follow if they so choose.

I wanted to have this piece on principles of novel-writing ready for you today, but it has proven to be a difficult piece to write, being a summation of pretty much everything I’ve learned as a novelist and a critic. And I needed to send you this email so you’d know about these events. So consider this a preview, and a promise.

Hope to see you tonight and/or tomorrow.

—Noah

• An ice-cold Nordic noir that’s just the right amount of cozy and just the right amount of depraved . . . with a subtly contra-feminist message?

• Truly the best place to get soup in New York City, with an insane back story involving fraud and fury

• Links to great takes on the Trump and Melania meme-coins launched this weekend

• Three great “alternate take” Dylan tracks you’ve likely never heard before.

If any of that might be up your alley, or if you just want to support a completely independent book review, go ahead and mash that subscribe button. You’ll get more posts like this, access to all our influential back issues, upcoming paid posts, full episodes of all podcasts, special deals on our legendary events, and more.

I’m always down for recommendations. Shoot me an email at noah@marsreview.org if you have any. And if you’re a paid subscriber, let me know what you think of this format. Also, thank you.

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Probably I should have done this before now, but I’m a little old-fashioned. Writing pages and pages of stuff and putting it in the drawer and never showing anyone is easy for me. Sharing work on social media is like pulling teeth. (Except I have to pull at least one tooth a day on each increasingly sloppified platform, and schedule the extractions on Airtable.) It feels especially hard to bang the drum for something that I’m still in the process of composing and which hasn’t even revealed to me its full form.

At the same time, it’s clear the direction the world of writing and reading is going—with consistent blogging becoming more and more important—and I suspect it will behoove me to post consistently about what I’m up to with The Mystagogues. I also suspect that a lot of people will be interested. The concerns of the book are deeply important to me; sometimes I feel that they’re far more important than anything else in the world. Not only that, it seems to me that I have a relatively rare window onto a field that is unfairly neglected, and ideas that may lead to some important advances.

The piece below isn’t necessarily the best entry point to The Mystagogues, but it contains some central ideas and works as a self-contained whole.

To orient you a little better, here are three project-summarizing paragraphs from the book proposal of The Mystagogues:

Ours is a strangely desiccated era for the study of religious thought. Modern scholarship has shown without a doubt that the world’s great religions have more in common with one another than the pre-moderns could have ever imagined. The myth of the flood can be found in sacred texts spanning the globe. The myth of Christ can be dated to a time long before the historical Christ—the Ancient Sumerian version of the myth even tells, as does the Bible, of a common criminal being tried alongside the soon-to-be-slain god. And iconography from our Abrahamic religions clearly has a basis in ancient astrology as practiced in ancient India and Egypt. For instance, the tetramorph seen often in Catholic cathedrals refers to the four fixed astrological signs representing the cardinal directions (Aquarius = man = North; Leo = lion = south; Taurus = bull = west; Eagle = Scorpio = East).

One might think that these circumstances would lead to a flourishing field of scholars working to determine the true nature of religion. And yet the reality is quite the opposite. (It is perhaps the case that “investigating the true nature of religion” is one of those tasks that is so large and obviously necessary that it goes unseen and untried.) Gone are the great syncretists such as Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Mircea Eliade. Instead, we have on the one hand psychophysical reductionists who assume a priori that religion is merely a mystification and facade. On the other hand, today’s scholars who do practice religion increasingly find it appropriate to retreat back into parochialism: besieged by a world of hedonistic nihilism, they no longer bother worrying about why one religious faith and not another might be correct. Who today, for instance, would deign to listen to a debate over the soundness of Anglicanism vs. Catholicism?—yet this was a controversy that shook British academia to its roots during the conversion of the great writer and saint John Henry Newman. And so the religious retreat back into their separate, unsystematic corners. Meanwhile, in our public life—among politicians, church leaders, and pundits—what is called religion is typically no more than a cudgel for beating the populace into submission to various opinions on ethical behavior. But any serious student of the phenomenon of religion will quickly find that at the heart of it is far more than merely political control. An understanding of Christianity, for instance, should account for the poetic inspiration of Dante, for the asceticism of the desert fathers, for the mystical visions of Hildegard von Bingen and St. John of the Cross, for the mysteries of the Book of Revelation, and the strange iconography of Botticelli and Bosch.

What then would a healthy study of comparative religion look like? To begin, it should take seriously the perennialist position—which is, at least implicitly, the position of the five writers whose lives and work will be discussed in this book: Robert Graves, Colin Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Roberto Calasso, and Ioan Culianu. The perennialist position can be briefly summarized, although a sound argument in its favor would require multiple volumes. Perennialism is the belief that an ancient wisdom far older than the Abrahamic religions is at the core of a mysterious mode of thought that was eventually transmitted to us throughout the world’s most cherished ancient texts—from Greece to ancient Sumer to ancient India.

Without further ado:

God through the Ages

We tend to think of God as Something static. Given His immortality and omnipotence, one feels He ought to at least to be regular in His habits. No one likes the thought of a mercurial God, although Mercury himself was a god, and although, when you get down to brass tacks, the God of the Old Testament can be about as dependable as a petulant teen. In the Book of Job, for instance, God is obviously evil. God’s torture of Job does not have a moral, try as we might to find it; it seems to have more in common with Michael Hanneke’s sadistic romp Funny Games than with any tale of Aesop. This is why—a rarity among Bible stories—Job serves as such excellent fodder for art—having inspired Robert Frost’s A Masque of Reason, Archibald MacLeish’s JB, and the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man.

One prominent noticer of this ugly fact about God’s occasional propensity to evil was Carl Jung. Jung believed that answers to theological questions should come in fours, not threes. Thus the Trinity is missing a Very Significant Person: the Devil, who makes of it a Quaternity. This explains the otherwise thorny question of why evil exists. As Jung writes in Answer to Job:

The idea of the privatio boni began to play a role in the Church only after Mani [the originator of Manichaeism]. Before this heresy, Clement of Rome taught that God rules the world with a right and a left hand, the right being Christ, the left Satan. Clement’s view is clearly monotheistic, as it unites the opposites in one God.

Such ideas prick Western religious ears (if there are still such ears to be pricked) but harmonize better with eastern religious notions grounded in the idea that there can be no light without darkness and no good without evil. This at least does not offend logic, and does not require the reflexive intonation that questions of needless suffering are beyond human understanding and must be accepted on faith.

More shocking, perhaps, in Jung’s Answer to Job, is the idea that God, like man, develops. For Jung, with the birth of Christ, God becomes more humane in a double sense: He sends his Son to earth to die not to expiate the sins of mankind, but to expiate His own.

Jung wrote Answer to Job in 1954 in a literal fever. The circumstances suggest that Jung only put these blasphemous ideas down on paper out of a fear that he might soon die. That God should evolve would have been a very strange idea indeed to Jung’s readers in 1954, and it feels unlikely that anyone who valued his intellectual respectability would have offered it. And yet the idea had already been brought forth in 1930, by a British poet and ex-soldier who had just burned his bridges in England with a brutally honest memoir of schoolboy sadism and wartime cowardice, and now found himself starting a new life with his Jewish American mentor-mistress on the rustic island of Mallorca.

As usual, Robert Graves had been in dire need of money, and had recently been spending eighteen hours a day writing his memoir Good-Bye to All That, which he felt would cause a scandal and which did so—climbing the bestseller charts and mortifying his pious, octogenarian father to such a degree that Graves pére clapped back with his own memoir, To Return to All That. After the publication of Good-Bye to All That, Robert Graves found himself without a grand project to take on, yet unable to get out of the habit of working every waking hour. And so he began writing diary entries which he called “A Journal of Curiosities,” which can are collected in the rare 1930 publication But It Still Goes On. This journal took on such subjects as “the problem of publicity” and “the feminine word-ending -ess.” The last curiosity is the most curious of all. “Abandoning myself to the triviality of this journal,” Graves writes, “is rather like putting myself in God’s hands and leaving it all to Him.” With that sentence, like an abracadabra, the idea takes hold. The next entry begins with quotation marks. The imagined speaker is God himself.

God begins by informing the reader that he first came into the world under the name of “Juju.” Graves translates Ju as Why and claims it is cognate with the French dieu and thus with deus. The duplication of Ju comes from a familiar refrain among those seeking answers: Why? they wonder, when the crops go dry. And Why!, they exclaim when the rain comes to replenish the soil. God is both the question and the answer. And the answer is a tautological one, just as our answer to the question of why we exist is a tautological one: We exist, we say, because a single point int he universe expanded and because prokaryotes became eukaryotes and because consciousness inexplicably emerged among monkeys. Why? Why!

Graves also asserts that tabu or taboo comes from Taba-ju, meaning not juju. Thus a tribe that identifies with the deer is prohibited from eating deer meat, and a tribe that identifies with the goat is prohibited from eating goat meat. More crucially, young girls from the goat tribe are made honorary deer, and young girls from the deer tribe are made honorary goats—thus encouraging inter-tribe cooperation, and discouraging incest and the breeding of girls at too young an age, since, having been born into the “wrong” tribe, they must ambulate across the valley in order to mate. This leads to a situation in which biological fathers are not recognized at all; rather, the mother’s brother is the man who takes an interest in the child. This is the sort of large-family matriarchal society that has lately come to be described as the longhouse.

Anticipations of the White Goddess

It has been suggested by Graves’s lover and collaborator Laura Riding and by subsequent scholars that Graves’s central ideas in his most famous scholarly work, The White Goddess, were cribbed from Riding. Certainly she had an intense influence on Graves, but it is worth noting that all the ideas that went into that book existed germinally in writing that Graves published before he and Riding met. Graves’s interest in pre-Abrahamic matriarchal societies finds its way into his first novel, the rare and rarely mentioned 1925 My Head! My Head!, and probably came down to him from the pioneering psychiatrist and anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, who treated both Graves and Graves’s close friend, the war poet Siegfried Sassoson, for shell shock. Rivers was a predecessor of the better-known Bronislaw Malinowski, whose field work would become famous. Malinowski’s studies of Papua New Guinean tribes which knew nothing of biological fatherhood were famous to enough to to have been cited by Bertrand Russell in his 1929 “Marriage and Morals,” a tract which dared to question monogamy and which got Russell blacklisted from several jobs at American universities.

Eventually, in Graves’s theologico-anthropological telling, the notion develops that failure to go across the valley for sexual activity is associated with lack of children. Thus the principles of logic and of fatherhood emerge simultaneously. At this point God takes the form of Father. His being assigned a sex, however, is merely incidental; or, perhaps more accurately, it is circumstantial. “I regret this male and female tediousness,” God explains, “though it was, as I say, a necessary part of my evolution.”

Graves’s diary then gives way to a self-contained piece called the “Autobiography of Baal.” Why Baal? The narrator explains that it would be impolite for him to use the more common name God; by using Baal, He can go semi-incognito, like a Duke or Baron who travels to foreign lands under the name of some less famous ancestor, fooling no one but avoiding the ceremonial hullabaloo. The autobiography starts as an apologia for God’s most recent works, The Book of Mormon and Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health. God explains that with these two books he was demonstrating his sense of humor—often an underrated quality of the Deity. This constitutes the first chapter, called “Alpha.”

The second and final chapter is the “Omega” chapter. The narrator jokes that because He is the Alpha and Omega, he is content to submit only these first and last chapters to posterity, and to let the rest be lost. The “Omega” chapter is mightily perplexing and seems—for anyone familiar with Graves’s biography—to hint at the sacred powers of Laura Riding, who not only believed herself divine but (and this is a far rarer and far more interesting phenomenon) persuaded several other of her close associates of this fact. God intimates in this chapter that the next stage of his evolution will involve the .01% of the world over which He does not have dominion. What is the force that falls within this sliver? It’s left to the reader to determine. Ubermensch? The devil? Riding herself?

What is all this about? Just an elaborate joke? Not at all. We have every reason to believe that Graves took his ideas about the evolutionary nature of God entirely seriously. And although he abandoned the Christian faith in which he had been raised, he maintained a sense of religious duty and placed rigorous ethical demands on himself—although in the 1930s his family and and friends did not believe in the ethics of those ethical demands. But Graves was working according to a system. Always in search of mentors, he had found one in the 1920s in Oxford in the form of the Indian philosopher Basanta Kumar Mallik, who came to deeply influence Graves’s understanding of religion and much else.

A short summary of Mallik’s philosophy might help clear things up. From Graves scholar Michel Pharand’s useful essay “A Flash of Lightning and a Crown of Jewels: Robert Graves and Basanta Mallik”:1

Mallik's philosophy is actually very simple, and if we follow his relativist ideology, we can achieve an equilibrium of values, at least theoretically. His "Law of Contradiction"—formulated on Armistice Day 1918, according to Sondhi and Walker (118)—forms the basis of his Conflict Theory and may be summarized as follows: Conflicts oppose pairs of values—freedom and order, individuality and community, monotheism and polytheism, etc.—in which the affirmation of one value leads to what Mallik calls "mythology": persuasion, conversion, suppression and dominance of the other value. "Thus the predisposing mental attitudes to war and other forms of conflict result from the illusion of thinking one's cherished values to be absolute and universal, and of those opposed to them as contradictories which must be completely negated or eliminated. Such thought processes naturally lead to divers expressions of mythology: missions of religious or political (ideological) conversion, military conflicts, patterns of structural dominance, economic expansionism or political revolution." Once "mythology" is seen as ineffective, the parties can try to locate the source of the illusions that engender tension and eventually abstain from conflict entirely. "These efforts will transform individuals who have lived in illusion and perpetual conflict to people with confidence and certainty." But since all opposing values are "mutually dependent" and none is totally "wrong," none are dispensable. "All therefore are deserving of respect tempered with reservation." And since no individual is expendable, "all cultural and social groups needs must be accorded a similar and equal respect."

Readers of Graves’s magnum opus The White Goddess will already recognize in the above passage strains of what would become Graves’s central thesis. That is, all or nearly all religious records of the western world betray a cunning redaction of the Goddess who was worshipped universally before the advent of the patriarchal religions, which are still current today in the forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This thesis at first blush sounds a tad conspiratorial. And yet a brief overview of historiography shows us just how easily our founding myths can be inverted. Whereas in the contemporary record, we find that World War II was an American battle to subdue to the barbarous race of Germans, only 50 years later we find that it was a noble project undertaken in large part to liberate the Jews. It took about half a century to completely alter the meaning of this, one of the biggest events in world history, even in an era when we all have the resources to ascertain truth. Imagine what could be done over the course of millennia, when only few had the knowledge and technology available to craft the story of the world and its inhabitants.

So, whereas in The White Goddess, Graves focuses in on the cult of the Goddess at a particular era in time, in the theological writings collected in But It Still Goes On he makes a more general point and perhaps a more profound point. Graves follows Mallik’s lead in assuming that no value is universal. Any value that is cherished also has an opposite which is also cherished. For Graves, God does not escape this principle. Rather, God is the ultimate form of this principle: the Great Contradictoriness of the universe eternally ironing itself out.

Is God Like the Moon? Or Like Love?

Can we make this a little more concrete? One problem with the word God is that it is overdetermined. It could mean the Creator, the Divine Judge, or Spirituality itself. A modern Jew, Christian, or Muslim likely sees all three meanings as permeating the word God. Can we find a single definition that encompasses all these—from a non-sectarian point of view?

Let’s start with a hypothesis which might lead us toward a more general definition: Very roughly speaking, there exists a science, related to what Wilhelm Reich has called “orgone energy,” the laws of which are described in an esoteric layer of religious texts.

This sacred science hasn’t been kept entirely hidden. Reich is one obvious example of an entirely materially minded person who butts his head up against something that cannot be explained by the current scientific paradigm. But there are many others, and many things under the sun that cannot be dreamt of within the paradigm of our current philosophy.2

Many compendia of inexplicable occurrences exist; but these melt away under the psychophysical reductionist’s general principle that such evidence or such claims are either fraudulent or else will be explained away by psychophysical reductionism at some point in the future. The third option—that the paradigm itself is incomplete—is strictly prohibited. Even certain obvious and well-known physical phenomena poke holes in the paradigm. For instance there is scarcely room for the enormous, inexplicable power of the Placebo Effect under the psychophysical reductionist regime.

We must remember that for ancient peoples religious texts functioned as the entire corpus of civilizational knowledge. There were no self-help books. There were no romance novels. There were no instruction manuals. And thus information about very diverse subjects was grafted onto the same text. Thus the text could mean different things to different readers depending on the level at which those different groups were able to read. For some, the Bible provided straightforward injunctions on the subject of how to manage crops or behave toward women. For others it spoke of deep mysteries into the universe which only few could understand.

Can modern science help us with any of this? In some respects, the concept of four-dimensionality seems to map quite well onto this abstract definition of God. Take this example. In 1884 an Anglican priest named Edwin Abbott Abbott published a speculative fiction novel called Flatland. The Flatland of the title is a world in which all beings are two-dimensional. There are triangles (peasants), octagons (warriors), and circles (high priests). But they all possess no more than two dimensions and move along a two-dimensional plane. The novel then invites us to imagine what would happen if a three-dimensional object were to accidentally make its way into Flatland. Picture, for instance, a human being. (Actually, you don’t have to picture it, because I’ve supplied below an illustration used in mathematician Rudy Rucker’s excellent The Fourth Dimension.)

At the moment being pictured here, the gentleman falling through Flatland appears to the Flatlanders as four separate circles: one at the right wrist, one at the right bicep, one at the waist, and one at the left knee. When he first appeared, assuming he fell feet first, he would have appeared as only two circles: his legs. As he is exiting, he will appear as only one circle: his head. For the Flatlander, there would be no continuity between the appearance and disappearance of these different circles. They would just be there and then be gone.

Does this not sound rather like our own experiences on earth with various spiritual or religious or occult phenomena? It is one of the main properties of both angels and ghosts that they appear and disappear in a flash, and that experiences with them seem to defy attempts to explain them using regular chronology. UFO sightings, too, follow this pattern: They are phenomena which seem to behave, within three-dimensional space, in ways apparently unaccountable by the laws that govern that space. Meanwhile, in the field of ancient iconography, mandalas and kabbalistic diagrams look suspiciously like unfolded tesseracts (4-dimensional cubes), and geometrical drawings from the likes of occultist and Neoplatonist philosopher Giordano Bruno unquestionably demonstrate a perception of multi-dimensionality.

But this advances us no further toward an answer to one important central question when considering the concept of God. Namely, is God an objective fact or a subjective one? To put it more nicely, is God like the Moon or is God like love?

No one denies the existence of the moon. Even before we had telescopes to examine it, no one denied it. And yet we perceived it only partially, and badly. At a New Moon, we perceived it as a sliver; at a half-moon as a semi-circle; at the full moon as a rotundity. Some observers in some geographical locations would perceive the moon as larger; others would perceive it as smaller. Some would perceive it in some moments as of a reddish hue; mostly others would perceive it as whitish. All through this, it remained objectively the same. There was and is a true map of the moon to be made, given the right tools. One could even visit it, given especially good tools. Is God like this?

No one denies the existence of love. More particularly, no one denies the existence of the state of being in love. And yet there is no objective version of this state of being that can be pointed to and be observed by all. It exists only subjectively, and contingently. The state of being in love requires both a lover and a love object. Moreover, the effects of the state of being in love are highly variable, as are the characteristics of the love object. One can be raised to the greatest ecstasies known to man by being in love; one can also be driven to suicide. One can love a saint, or one can love a terrible sinner. Judging by the fan mail serial rapists and killers like Ted Bundy get when they are apprehended, it may be easier to love a sinner. But the important thing is that being in love can take on just about any permutation. It has no objective shape. It can be used for both good and evil. And yet, somehow, it has a common quality agreed on by all, which we would rather not do without. Is God like this?

This is one of the central questions of the great Romanian philosopher Ioan Culianu. I will discuss this in a later post, and I’ll also discuss something a little more titillating: his mysterious murder in 1991 in a bathroom stall of a classroom building at the University of Chicago. Until then . . . .

It’s really true that all legacy media is losing ground. This is as true of both television and print. The audience for much of it will die out within the next twenty years.

And yet these conglomerate media companies still hold sway. People in publishing still care about prestige, and decisions about what to publish and whom to publish still have a large political element.

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What’s new in the age of digital media? You can circumvent this sort of politicking by becoming popular on social media. You can make sales of independently published books, or turn your popularity into income by selling a newsletter or other products. You don’t need a gatekeeper (well, other than banks).

That in itself is a huge win for people with heterodox ideas. But it’s not the same thing as power. And it’s not the same thing as acceptance of those ideas.

In the second issue of the Mars Review Tao Lin wrote a brilliant and highly unorthodox essay on the subject of why we’re currently in the midst of an autism epidemic. We have an incoming secretary of health and human services who may well agree with Tao’s conclusions.

But that doesn’t mean that such opinions will now become accepted in the major magazines, or will find a home at the biggest imprints of the Big Five publishing houses.

The masses don’t decide what ideas rise to the top of the discourse. Not even the President decides that. There’s a far more complicated network (universities, non-profits, and media, all thinking “independently” together based on shared incentives and trickle-down effects) that does the deciding. Such networks constitute the loci of power today.

.What does this have to do with book reviews, and my own successes and failures at the helm of the MRB? In the recent past, people didn’t read book reviews strictly for the content of the review. They read book reviews in large part because of the reviews were published in prestigious outlets, which helped them know what to think. In the old days, a great review from a big reviewer could make a book, and a negative one could break it. This was not because the actual content of the review was so utterly persuasive. It was because of a prestigious publication’s stamp of approval. If Michiko Kakatuni wrote her famous takedowns today on Substack, they would hardly make a dent. The difference is prestige and power—not content.

I was a little naïve when I founded the MRB. I thought that if I created a publication where the standards were as high as those of the older magazines I had grown up on, then it would automatically exist on a level playing field with those other outlets. But that’s not how the world works.

I sort of knew this at the time, but I tricked myself into not knowing it. I’m glad I did. Every major undertaking begins with at least a dollop of stupidity.

Most new media that succeed today aim for popularity, not power. There’s nothing wrong with that. A lot of the extremely popular Twitter accounts are extremely good. Some of the extremely popular Substacks are, too. But the game they’re playing usually doesn’t get them closer to prestige or to power.

So that’s the quagmire the media ecosystem is in now: popularity vs. power. Prestige is caused by power. Quality is only correlated. And yet the correlation remains. If I open certain prestigious magazines, I can expect a certain literary education among the writers, and I can expect a certain quality of prose. For now, this remains true, even if the ideas espoused are routinely and egregiously wrong.

The other thing that’s correlated with power is groupthink. If I open up one of these same magazines, I can make an extremely accurate guess of what a given writer’s take on a given subject will be. I can guess just how sizable a straw man he’ll give to the opposing side before tearing it down. I’ve gotten good at this trick. If you don’t believe me, write me and I’ll do it for you—for a price. Cash App in bio, as the kids say. (Actually, you can just donate to the MRB here).

So herein shall be found the great glory of the Mars Review. It was founded with the idea: What if we made a review where the quality was high, and the groupthink was low? We were the only ones bold enough to have tried it.

Herein shall be found the great shame of the Mars Review. It was founded with the idea: What if we made a review where the quality was high, and the groupthink was low? We were the only ones stupid enough to have tried it.

After all, high quality does not maximize for popularity, because good thinking and good writing do not play to the lowest common denominator. And low groupthink does not maximize for power, because groupthink is what power is built on.

And so the greatest failure of the Mars Review has also been it’s greatest success: the fact that it exists at all.

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From :

Collected Agenda # 20 (on Mars)

Monday, November 18

I run outside this morning, it's cold enough now. I slept for many hours last night, and now, I need the air to feel shocking. I do the dishes. They've been piling up for a while now. My sweater snags on a knife we stole from Balthazar and the sleeve rips. I don't usually steal from restaurants. Stealing is petty and ugly. It was just this one time. The knife that snags is jagged but my sweater rips cleanly. It's an old Ralph Lauren pullover, mustard yellow, far too big on me. I bought it in the Savers bins when I was sixteen. I've had it since and I think I will have it forever. The tear provides a certain sense of relief. It's already ruined. Now, if I wanted, I could plunge my arms sleeves deep into the hot water. I don't want to, but I’m no longer worried about if things splash.

David tells me that if you read my writing you might think I'm crazy. He means it in a nice way. David likes my writing. I'm not writing my diary. Today I'm writing fiction. This isn't about me. This is A Calendar of Downtown In Real Life Events.

Things that can be cheap are: Writing about writing. Baring one's soul. Confession for the sake of repenting outside of a religious context. A belief that self awareness will abscond you.

In real life: I go for a run outside. I do the dishes. I go to class. I call my friends. One of my friends went to church last week and she met an angel. The angel told her that if you pray that your suffering was for the sake of a loved one, then you will be truly grateful to have suffered. I think I understand this, but I have rarely been to church. I don't want to be naive. I don't want to grasp for higher meaning in texts I've never read.

My other friend tells me that Pluto enters Aquarius tomorrow. Pluto has been in Capricorn since 2008, she says. This means that Pluto has been in Capricorn since the edges of my conscious memory. My friend says that Pluto in Capricorn is a difficult time. I look up what it will be like now that Pluto is in Aquarius.

The New York Post says that "the power is shifting from the oppressors to the outskirts."

Emmalea Russo says that "Tomorrow, Pluto enters that midwinter kingdom -- abstract, futuristic, moving through what Weil calls "icy pandemonium" to reach truth and warmth."

Stephen Forrest says that "In the emerging Aquarian paradigm, humanity is simply no longer the center of everything."

Tuesday, November 19

On Pluto's first night in Aquarius, I stayed up all night.

Ellie said the reason they don’t allow photos at the Frog Club is probably because their frog wallpaper is ugly. I thought the frog wallpaper was ok. They had a New York Magazine photographer there today. They had mezcal cosmopolitans and martinis full of soy sauce. I spilled soy sauce martini on my magazine, and then I took it home. On Pluto’s first night in Aquarius, this is what I’m reading. I particularly like Andie Blaine’s review of Myth Lab, and Conor Truax’s review of Looking For A Kiss.

Wednesday, November 20

There is The Russian Cosmism Circle talk at TJ Byrne's and The Brain Rot Symposium in Chelsea tonight, but I am behind again. By eight pm, I have abandoned all hope of escape. Claustrophobia when I'm trapped in my apartment. Claustrophobia when I'm trapped in a cafe. I try to envision myself as someone who is trapped in the real world, longing instead for interiority, but the truth lies in the opposite. Far too tempted by physical forays.

David comes home with a baguette and raw shallots and sharp goat cheese. What are you going to do with the shallots, I ask. We don't have a stove… Shallots are best raw, he says. He cuts me a slice of cheese. He cuts the shallots into very thin slivers like Marco Pierre White and he puts it on top. I only like cheese rinds, I say. He cuts me a piece of rind. It's covered in wax, which I peel off with my hands. This is my favorite part. Peeling wax with my hands and then eating the rinds with the residue.

Later, David is opening a box from New Balance. I bought boots but they sent me a box from New Balance, he says. He opens the box. Inside, lies a pair of big black chunky sneakers.

"Those aren't boots," I say

"You got those so you can match with Your Best Friend Matthew, didn't you,” I say.

"Do you like my boots, " asks David.

"No," I say.

Later, I am All Caught Up on the tasks that were previously inhibiting my plans. I might go to TJ Byrne’s, I tell David.

"It will only be you and psueds left at this hour," David says.

"What does psued mean?," I ask

"4-chan lit board for Pseudo Intellectual," says David.

"Oh," I say.

Thursday, November 21

At Stone Street, they are playing Manhattan. Christmas starts in October now. Soon, it will come to a crescendo.

We go to a reading at Kos Kaffe tonight. It’s pouring now. A cold rain that should be snow. It’s not the type of thing that bothers me, but it’s becoming tough to venture out.

At Kos Kaffe, they are serving nuts and mulled wine. I’m dripping from the rain, and so I stand in the back. I don’t own an umbrella and my raincoat doesn’t have a hood. I could get these things if I wanted. My least favorite thing is being bogged down.

At the reading, someone is reciting a poem about Animal Crossing. The next reader reads about slugs. A third talks about having sex two to three times a day.

Ruby is somewhere towards the front. I can’t see her, but I know she’s there. She’s in the seats with the other readers. I’m in the back, dripping puddles on the ground.

Another writer is reading about tracking her period. “That shit is fascist,” her acquaintance told her.

“Why do we have readings?” Ruby texts me.

During intermission, Ruby comes to the back of the room.

"Do you want to see what I'm learning in Witch School?” Ruby asks.

She puts a hand on the top of my head. She makes other motions. I don’t remember what they are, but I get the sense that the idea is to encourage my limbs to stretch and bend like an elastic. Maybe the idea is to get your mind to stretch and bend like an elastic, too. Plasticity in the consciousness. Perhaps this is what they teach you in witch school. Ruby asks me if I feel calm. David asks me what she just did to me.

“It was something that she learned in witch school,” I say.

“Oh, I don’t like that,” David says.

“I think she’s in Good Witch school,” I say.

The conversation has moved on.

Later, the readings continue. Ruby doesn’t read about witch school. Instead, she reads about how finding your soulmate can be something that is sometimes sad, too. It’s the best reading by far.

THE MONTH AHEAD

Sunday, December 1

• From 4:45pm — Practical Magic is screening at Metrograph, accompanied by a Q&A with director Griffin Dunne.

• From 7pm — Come Confess in the Red Room. If you’ve ever wanted to read here, now is your chance - this week is open mic edition. Line up is first come first serve, so arrive early.

Monday, December 2

• From 7:30pm at Niagara — Miss Manhattan and Black Lipstick Mag present an evening of nonfiction, featuring readings by Sophia June, Rachel Gilman, Joseph Lezza, Elizabeth Burch, and Mila Jaroniec.

Tuesday, December 3

• From 7pm at Sovereign House — One Man Army hosts Vol 6 of Anthology Film Festival Paradise Shredition

• From 10pm - late — Baguette Tuesday is back at Paul’s Casablanca - a new party series launched by Vaquera and Chloe Sevigny.

Wednesday, December 4

• From 7:30pm at El Nico @ The Penny — Polyester Zine and Mixed Feelings hosts The Magical Girl Mixer. Come for a free copy of the new edition of Polyester, free cocktails, a costume contest, and more.

Thursday, December 5

• From 7pm at Old Flings — Catie Fronczak holds Probably The Last Ever Words At Flings, featuring readings by Peter Vack, Leg5, Page Garcia, and others.

• From 7pm at Berry Park — Limousine hosts the Naughty or Nice reading, featuring Eliza Mclamb, Delia Cai, and others. This is a reading for modern day neurotics - submit your moral conundrums in advance, and the readers will filter your behavior into two essential categories: naughty or nice.

• From 8pm - 9:30 at Molasses Books — Clocked Out Magazine has rescheduled the issue launch; Election Edition. Katherine Williams, Matthew Donovan, Liam Powers, Zoe Laris-Djokovic, and Fiona Miller will be reading selections from the mag. Free drinks will be served.

Friday, December 6

• From 6pm - 8pm — Parent Company celebrates the opening of Emily Janovick: Wet Blanket.

• From 11pm - late at Grotta Azzurra — Cooper B Handy hosts release show party with Test Subjects, Chanel Beads (dj), DJ Manny, Goner, and more.

Saturday, December 7

• From 7:30pm at Knitting Factory — Liturgy performs a solo set supporting Martin Rev.

• From 7:30pm at David Geffen Hall — Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 ​is performed alongside​ William Kentridge’s Oh To Believe in Another World. Tickets here.

• Save The Date — there's a full bill for this DDM / Uncensored New York event

Sunday, December 8

• From 6:30pm - 8:30pm — DeSciNYC holds their monthly meetup. This month, it’s all about prediction markets.

• From 7pm — Confessions in the Red Room

Monday, December 9

• From 7:30pm — The Thing Is returns to Jean’s. This month's show (It’s A Wonderful Life) will star Delaney Rowe, Julia Shiplett, Jake Cornell, and Rebounder.

Tuesday, December 10

• From 6:30pm — McNally Jackson Seaport presents an evening of poetry with Daisuke Shen, Liza St. James, Bud Smith & Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim.

• From 7pm at TJ Byrnes — Patio Reading Series returns with readings from Gideon Jacobs, Zans Brady Krohn, and others.

Wednesday, December 11

• From 7pm at Tara Downs Gallery — Dream Baby Press presents Perverted Book Club - a night of erotic reading by some of your favorite writers and artists. The event is hosted by Matt Starr. Readers include Jemima Kirke, Lili Anolik, Mackenzie Thomas, Joan of Arca, and more.

Thursday, December 12

• The New Criterion hosts their annual holiday party - cocktails, conversation, and good cheer

• Save The Date for Tense.

Friday, December 13

• From 7pm - 9pm at Heart — Are.na hosts the launch party for Are.na Annual 2025: “document”. There will be copies of the book, drinks, and readings.

• From 8pm - late — Mcnally Jackson and Cafe Gitane celebrate the launch of Cafe Gitane: 30 Years - “a celebration of New York’s iconic NoLita neighborhood by two of its most beloved institutions”.

• From 8m at Catholic Worker Maryhouse — Cracks in Pomo hosts a discussion on Dorothy Day and The Duty of Seeking Delight in Postmodern Culture. RSVP here.

Saturday, December 14

• From 10pm at 177 Mulberry — Drink More Water celebrates their End of Year Festival.

Sunday, December 15

• Confessions?

Monday, December 16

• Emily Pope opens at Sara's

Tuesday, December 17

• From 7pm - 10pm — Your (second to) last chance to see Dimes Square! Tickets in Brooklyn are already sold out. The Manhattan shows will go quickly, too.

Wednesday, December 18

• From 7pm - 10pm — Your very last chance to see Dimes Square.

Dimes Square

December 31

• The Dare is at Knockdown Center

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It is old hat by now to note that this all changed with Trump in 2016. My milieu became politicized in a way that I could never have truly predicted back then, and I know this was not just my own experience. A common refrain among those who would defend this politicization is to say that ‘things were always political, it’s just that we’re noticing it now.’ This is a half-truth—the worst kind of truth.

What’s true about such a statement? It’s true that everything in the world is political in potentia. Absolutely any issue can be politicized. If I hand you a stick of gum, we can dissect the political implications of this action. How did it come to be that I had the stick of gum to give in the first place? Why am I giving you the stick of gum, and not someone more deserving? What are the ethical practices of the company that produces the gum? Do they pay their workers fair wages? Are they green? Do they use animal-derived gelatin? 

The paragraph above is parodic, but only slightly. From 2016 to 2020, this was approximately the level of the discourse that rose to the top in media circles. This standard was applied neurotically to anything that might be considered for publication—whether the putative subject was literature, science, or home gardening. Of course, this hermeneutic was not born in 2016. One might even say that it is the mode of thought that his been dominant in the West at least since the Enlightenment itself. At the very least, we can say that it is precisely this mode of thinking that produced the Civil Rights movement, Women’s Lib, and other touchstones of a half-century of progressive history which have been burnt into our nation’s consciousness. This is what made it so difficult to argue against for anyone who remained within the Enlightenment paradigm. You wouldn’t say that Martin Luther King was too political, would you? You wouldn’t say that about the suffragettes.

But why did it appear to spike so dramatically with Trump? From the 1970s to 2016 the political machine had reached something like a consensus in the United States. Political parties still fought with one another, but there was very little difference between the two of them. This was the age of the End of History. Both the Clintons and the Bushes agreed that it was necessary to bomb foreign countries in order to promote democracy, and everyone from Jimmy Carter to the Koch brothers agreed—whether tacitly or explicitly—that both legal and illegal immigration into the United States should increase to the degree shown in this chart.

Trump was the first candidate in our modern era—which we can mark by the breaking of the Bretton Woods agreement and the end the Gold Standard in 1971—to diverge enough from consensus to engender a passionate reaction from the establishment media that had been propping up the kayfabe war between the Democratic and Republican party. This is why, in 2016, “everything became political.” It was not enough to be neutral in this landscape. In the first time in my lifetime, one really did need to pledge allegiance—to the two-party establishment—in order to make it.

But the same phenomenon which brought Trump into power in the first place also made this unifying anti-Trumpism untenable. The way the internet facilitated the spread of information outside of the mainstream media outlets not only allowed Trump in through the back door, it also rendered untenable the sort of consensus-building that had been a regime mainstay for over 50 years. It was no longer possible to convince the country as a whole that Trump and Trumpism were uniquely evil; in fact, it was no longer possible to convince the country as a whole of anything at all.

And yet—and here is where I am able to provide extremely good news to people whether they are left, right, or center—none of this matters much. For now, at least. Let me explain why, and why you should be happy with these election results no matter your political affiliation. 

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Some Literary History: The Birth of Literature and the Market for Literature

Divine truths have always been encoded in stories. As Roberto Calasso put it, “when the ancients want to philosophize, they tell a story.” The earliest “books” that we consider literature, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey, are texts cobbled together from the remnants of such secret-laden stories, passed down orally from generation to generation. Literature, properly speaking, is the continuation of the promulgation of such secrets. Until the modern era (~1800), this largely meant poetry, because poetry, like music, can embed within itself both phenomenological knowledge and descriptive knowledge. The phenomenological content is the poem’s prosody: It is, like music, knowledge that can only be experienced. I am speaking of the sense experience brought about by a particular melody or the rhythm of particular words. The descriptive knowledge of poetry, on the other hand, is the actual content of the words. The interplay between the phenomenological knowledge and the descriptive knowledge constitutes the art of poetry: modulating sense and sound so as to best communicate the incommunicable.

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Around 1800, two strange events occurred nearly simultaneously: (1) A class of miscreants we now call “writers” became conscious of “literature” as a form in and of itself, with all its suppleness of form and ambiguity of aim; and (2) imaginative writing became popular entertainment (for the middle classes in England, to begin, but by the age of the baby boomers it had become popular entertainment for all).

The significance of development (1) is that “literature” became an egregore; that is, it developed an independent existence, shorn of direct utility, seeking only its own self-promulgation. This is the condition described by concepts such as art for art’s sake or the “New Criticism” of the Fugitive Poets, or Roberto Calasso’s excellent term absolute literature (absolute both because it encompasses everything and because it is its own end). Prior to this, literature qua literature did not exist. An Elizabethan saw a sonnet sequence the way we might see a Tweet: It was a mode of communication.

The significance of development (2) was the great popularization of prose narratives. Thus this strange beast literature, which properly speaking has only ever existed for the sake of its own self-promulgation, achieved an uneasy symbiosis with financial motive. Sure enough, long before 1800, an Elizabethan might have written a play for money, but the script itself did not make money; the playwright was a part of a team working on the larger whole, and his words were only valuable as a part of the whole.

With literature, for the first time, one’s imagination itself became a financial instrument. This meant both the form and content of literature, and especially the form and content of the novel, progressed according to the tastes of whatever class of people happened to be willing to pay for it. And while—to repeat myself—literature has always existed only for itself, it wears many cloaks, and has lately worn the cloak of entertainment. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Both Joyce and Nabokov provide excellent concrete examples; each was a poet in his youth, and each was able to discover his genius only due to market pressures (the market was so stern with Nabokov that it forced him to write in his third-best language).

Romanticism to Realism

Literary art is the most subtle of the arts, for it produces an aesthetic effect that is simultaneous with the expression of ideas of limitless complexity. In this it is obviously unlike music and visual art, and it is even unlike film due to its far greater capacity for the expression of ideas, and greater flexibility in mode of expression. Literature can also respond most directly to the social conditions of a given age. Modernism—the privileging of a given narrator’s subjectivity, with a focus on the minutiae of his or her consciousness—is the form of literary production that has predominated for the last 100 years or so; really there is no such thing as “postmodernism,” because “postmodernism” is but a distension of modernism; for this reason William Gass correctly referred to the literary art of his era (including his own works) not as “postmodernism” but as “decayed modernism.”

It is high time that we advance beyond this stale perspective. Yet a literary form that surpasses modernism must also include it. The Hegelians among you will be familiar with the thesis/antithesis/synthesis formula whereby an idea (thesis) meets its opposite (antithesis) and encompasses it to form the synthesis. This is in fact a mere footnote to an ancient way of thinking that can be universally applied to all facets of life—but that is an essay for another time. Let us look how this concept might apply to literary trends since 1800.

Romanticism is the direct consequence of the invention of literature itself. It is brought on by the untethering of the numinous from what is commonly called religion: The Romantic poet celebrated himself and his own literary devices without reference to the rest of the world, because this new form had arisen so that man could connect with the divine not for the sake of any tradition but for joy doing so—and often for the despair of doing so as well, as was so often the case for the Romantics after they had come down from Parnassus.

Realism rose in reaction to this. Writers like Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, and Dickens simply could not abide the notion of literature that did not address the social concerns of the day. They had good reason for this. Romanticism in its self-fulfillment leads to the madness and eventual silence of a Rimbaud, or to the wild yawps of Whitman—and while Whitman yawped wonderfully, it is the rare beast who can sustain a literary yawp. The realists on the one hand rejected the notion that literature should be entirely self-contained: While they had typically been impressed by and in their youth ensorcelled by Romanticism, it occurred to them that a world out there existed, and that part of their literary aim should be to represent it. The Self did not exist in a vacuum, after all.

This epoch represented the high point of novelistic art. An internal tension existed within the realist novel that only the truly great could withstand. The author sees himself responding to society, showing how people live; perhaps he even sees himself as a radical aiming to reform the world. And yet the part of him that has been enraptured by literature knows, perhaps with just an inkling, that none of these society-oriented aims constitute the purpose of the novel. The novel assimilates all that real data about the world, and perhaps even the author’s own real political opinions, and makes of the final work something completely, ecstatically useless: a glowing trinket, a rococo bauble. This is, incidentally, the secret to spiritual development: to take all that might be useful in this world and render it useless (such is the logic of religious sacrifice).

Realism to Modernism

The modernists rightly recognized that the realist project was beset by contradictions. Such as:

• A novel which aims to convey the reality of the world will be heavily influenced by the author’s own particular perspective; shouldn’t that individual perspective be emphasized?

• Language is an inherently shaky means of conveying existence; shouldn’t this instability of language be highlighted within the text?

• The idea that humans think and behave according to logic or the dictates of plot is merely an illusion; motivation is more complicated than that. Shouldn’t the novel adapt to convey the muddiness of thought and life?

And so on.

Thet result was a kind of Romanticism Reloaded—a movement in which the author not only sings of himself but re-orients the entire structure of the work around his own inner world. The apotheosis of this movement was James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, about which the more plainspoken poet and novelist Robert Graves has written: “In order to understand the whole book the reader would have to disentangle patiently as much . . . of the snarled detail as he could (a part depends on private associations of Joyce’s); then he would have to put together a new book, working out the relations between the details and trying to see what Joyce intended to signify.”

This did not stop subsequent writers from attempting to outdo one another in creating especially recondite private worlds; thus we have the “decayed modernism,” mentioned earlier, which remained at least putatively cool until the 1980s or so.

This concludes Part 2 of the “Why I Decided to Destroy Modernism” series. The third and final part will discuss literature today and tomorrow and will tie this all back up with the Lil Skribblers project.

What this post is about

I wrote the following on X.com a few weeks ago, and it got more of a reaction than I expected:

It’s nice that people cared. That post was a tweet-length condensation of many different ideas in my head. I’m at work on a lot of different things right now—editing the Mars Review of Books, running the business end of the Mars Review (come to our event!), the Lil Skribblers art project, edits on my first novel Stop All the Clocks (Arcade, 2025), and my first book of nonfiction, The Mystagogues (Arcade, 2026), which is about five 20th century writers who smuggled perennialist ideas into their writings.

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I think a lot of talented people can be satisfied in the process of working on a diverse array of projects. But I’m not really happy unless everything I do—including what I do “for fun”—works in concert toward one unified, ultimate goal. “My object in living is to unite / My avocation and my vocation, As my two eyes make one in sight,” as Robert Frost put it.

So in this series of posts, I’m going to explain my ultimate aim. Perhaps it seems a bit deranged have an ultimate aim at all, but that’s alright. In any case, the explanation is going require zooming out a bit, and beginning with a rather broad question. Namely:

What is art?

The problem

Art is not subjective, as our age so arrogantly believes. Nor, on the other hand, is it synonymous with “beauty” or “harmony”—although those two concepts play a role. What is art?

Let’s answer that question by explaining why both of the two prevailing theories—the subjectivist approach favored by the ‘left-wing’ and the ‘beauty’ approach favored by the ‘right-wing’—are both false.

Art is not subjective

The subjectivist approach is wrong because life is not subjective. Every object has its true meaning and true name. So too does every color, sound, and letter. Art consists of the intentional stringing together of colors, sounds, and letters for the purposes leading one’s audience toward the numinous. Let us take letters, for example. Letters are not arbitrary. Each letter reveals a secret about existence; when placed in the proper order, letters reveal the true meanings of words.

This is more true of a language the more ancient it is, but the practice of understanding the true meaning of words can be done even in modern languages. To quote Antoine Fabre d’Olivet’s The Hebraic Tongue Restored: “Particular tongues are only the dialects of an universal tongue founded upon nature, and of which a spark of the Divine word animates the elements.”

It can be demonstrated that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet correspond, in some form at least, with the major arcana of the Tarot, with the Zodiac and seven major planets, and with the principal plot points of what might be called the “one true story”—i.e. the death and resurrection of the Sun King. It is more difficult to do this with modern languages, but with a little etymology, one can get down to the true meaning of any word in contemporary usage. Below is an excerpt, once more from Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, in which the author goes step by step to provide the true meaning of the perfectly mundane French word emplacement (which translates to site or location).

(If the above argument above seems too abstract or unfounded, I very much recommend reading this excerpt. It should at least clarify the method for determining that there are true meanings of words.)

Art is not about ‘beauty’

I would be among the first to agree that there are timeless ways of creating in music, architecture, and poetry; and that timeless concepts serve as a better guide than the subjective emotionalism of our current era. However, this is not to say that there is a straightforward formula for the creation of visual art or literary fiction in any given age. This is because each age and place calls for its own particular permutation of that which is timeless; on a macro level our universe is affected by our passing through successive ages (termed Golden, Silver, Iron, Bronze by the ancients), and on a micro level we are affected by the particular conditions of existence that we individually experience, and we must use these conditions as the raw material that we alchemize into art.

To make this more concrete: Around when Tolstoy was writing Anna Karenina, the creation of a train service between St. Petersburg and Moscow was considered traumatic, because it altered conceptions of space and time, so that the train became an essential symbol for his novel. Obviously, one could not construct a novel today in which train travel plays such a role. The novelist’s most solemn purpose is to act as a shaman and to incorporate that which is new and potentially destructive in a society into an artistic whole such that the new social phenomenon has been de-fanged and the correct social order—with God at the top—might be restored. The fact that today technology moves much faster than novelists can write about it is one key reason the novel has lost its effectiveness: It has become insufficiently shamanistic.

To create art is to act in both space and time. A successful creation is like a dance, in which one’s dance partner is the spirit of the age. This is why the calls of ‘dissident right’ for art to be beautiful again—to depict beautiful healthy bodies and rural landscapes—are not only gauche but impossible. Art is a ritual for the incorporation of the society one actually lives in into the numinous whole; to imitate the art of past ages is to dance with a corpse. This point can be expanded beyond art, to the field of every human action.

What is to be done? (What are Lil Skribblers?)

The Lil Skribblers project intentionally jumbles the faces, sartorial accessories, texts, and symbolic calling cards of western authors from ancient Athens until today. From a macro perspective the purpose this serves is to underline the metaphysical unity of our species—one of the essential truths of existence, which has been known from time immemorial, and which it will serve us well to recall from both a moral and an artistic standpoint. When we look at a droplet of water, we consider it a part of the whole; the droplet is not separate from water, but is rather an instance of it. Similarly an individual person is but an instance of the category person. I realize this sounds rather vague and kumbaya, but the scientific field of epigenetics amply demonstrates the idea, by showing that a person sometimes contains knowledge not accumulated in his or her own lifetime.

From a micro perspective the purpose of this artistic jumbling is to destroy the literary practice of modernism, which is, in a phrase, the immense overvaluation of individual subjectivity in literary art. This practice has led literature to a dead end, and it will take a ruthless critical attitude toward the modernist tendency in order to clear the brush and move forward. Lil Skribblers seek to spread themselves through memetic warfare and financialized fandom; having done so, they simultaneously form an egregoric financial, aesthetic, and publicity vehicle for the Mars Review of Books, and virtually embody the criticism that lays the groundwork for a new literary movement.

This work clears the way for a new literary artistic method, which prizes the play of ideas across time and space (Lionel Trilling said that the aim of the novel was to make ideas concrete) and the reemergence of perennialist truth. Without being conscious of it, I made groping gesture toward this aim with my first novel, Stop All the Clocks, which will be published by Arcade in 2025. But there’s much more work to be done.

My next post in this series will take you on a stroll through literary history. We’ll look at the birth of literature, the birth of the market for novels, and the journey from Romanticism to Realism to Modernism. Eventually we’ll answer the question what should the novel of tomorrow look like?

Until then,
Noah

• We’ll be awarding prizes to Ariana Reines and at the Mars Review of Books White Party on 8/31. Tickets are limited. Buy now.

• Lil Skribblers, a Mars Review-associated digital art project, now has a Telegram. Join here. Read more here. Follow on X.com here.

Nearly four years ago, I got involved with a project called Urbit. My first assignment was to write a book about it. I didn’t quite know what I was getting into. Every week I would sit in on virtual All Hands meetings at Tlon Corporation, which was at the time the lone company building Urbit. These meetings were equal parts fascinating and inscrutable.

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I didn’t know much about the so-called tech world at the time. I assumed that people who worked in software were mostly money-motivated, and mostly cynical about the products they were building. What I found at Urbit was the exact opposite. I found people who would say things like “de-bugging is a spiritual practice because it teaches you to have faith.” I found people who reminded me, more than anything, of artists.

Like artists, the main characters in the Urbit story (“core devs,” in the tech lingo) could be contemptuous of the idea that their work should have any appeal at all to the masses. Like artists, they could be wildly opinionated about small matters that most others would find trivial. Like artists, what they were building meant the world to them.

In some ways, this shouldn’t be surprising. Urbit was started by the only successful tech founder I know of who had previously been equally or more successful in the liberal arts: Curtis Yarvin, who achieved prominence as a writer before most people had ever heard of Urbit. Yarvin left Urbit in January, 2019. You can read his reasoning for doing so in the blog post “A Founder’s Farewell.”

Yesterday, he said hello again. In an impromptu public meeting featuring a who’s who of investors, developers, writers, and memesters, it was revealed that Yarvin would be returning to Urbit in a big way. The drama was high—it felt like something that could have come out of a Greek tragedy. I think everyone was a little stunned. So I thought it would be good to do a little unpacking.

Here’s what happened, what went wrong in the past, what it means, and three recommendations from me (hope you’ll pardon my temerity) on where Urbit should go from here:

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• We can only guarantee availability of tickets to The Mars Review of Books White Party if you purchase by Aug 15th. Ticket link here. Use code BLACKMONDAY for 10% off through this Friday at midnight.

• The below post is about technology and art. It’s clearing the ground for more posts about a collaborative art project called Lil Skribblers. Lil Skribblers are currently being dealt pre-sale. The public mint will be August 20. Get in touch if you’d like to get in on the pre-sale.

• I’m consulting with some folks about an Urbit “shrub” (an app, in normal terminology) that will allow you to use Lil Skribblers to access both digital and IRL events. It’s an exciting prospect. More soon.

• All paid subscribers to the MRB get a free Lil Skribbler. If you’re a paid subscriber, and you haven’t done so already, send me an ETH address as a reply to this email. I’ve also said the MRB completists who post a picture of all five MRBs get five free mints. You have until Aug 15 to get in on this and send me an ETH address. There are a few copies left of, Issue 1 and Issue 2 and I’ve re-listed them for sale, but they’re pricey.

• My first novel, Stop All the Clocks, will be published in the summer of 2025 by Arcade Publishing. My nonfiction book on perennialism, The Mystagogues, will come out from Arcade some time after that. More on these books soon.

I recently mentioned a forthcoming project called “Lil Skribblers.” What is it? Lil Skribblers is, simply, an art project—nothing more, nothing less. That is to say: It is the most valuable thing in the world. I don’t only mean in some touchy-feely art is good for your soul sort of way (although I agree that it is good for your soul). I mean that art is now the most economically valuable thing in the world. Let me explain.

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It is common in certain tech circles to wonder what the big use case for “web3” or “crypto” will be. Assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana are still priced as valuable (despite this past weekend’s market crash). But to what end? What will the products be? Bitcoin is not yet used as currency, and alternative systems such as Ethereum and Solana seem to be used for little more than gambling. For years proponents of these technologies have been claiming they will have real uses. Where will these uses emerge?

Oddly enough, they’ve already done so. We simply haven’t noticed it. Or, we haven’t connected the dots. People with interests in technology can sometimes err on the side of being, well, technical. They’re looking for the systems architecture that will push nascent software into the mainstream. And they sometimes forget that society itself is more complex and powerful than any technology man can dream of. That is to say, these use cases have arrived in the form of the financialization of ideas. I wrote about this a bit in my last post. I’m talking here not only of memecoins but of all that they augur.

In the post linked above, I wrote about how the assassination attempt on Donald Trump immediately launched a dozen digital tokens which quickly rose in price. Of course, the price also quickly fell. This is the trajectory of most such projects: a sharp rise before a decline to near-nothing. But this is not the case for all. It is not the case, for instance, for Bitcoin. In fact, from the time of its launch, Bitcoin had been the best performing asset of the ensuing decade.

A “Bitcoiner,” i.e. a major proponent of Bitcoin, might argue that Bitcoin should never be compared with scammy memecoins such as those that are launched daily on the upstart blockchain, Solana. Bitcoin was created to hold the ideal properties of a digital currency that cannot be debased: It is scarce (only 21 million total bitcoin will ever exist) and designed such that rewards are randomly awarded to those who spend their computing power on maintaining the system, so that power and wealth in the world of Bitcoin is decentralized. These are good technical qualities, and I happen to agree that they make Bitcoin an attractive prospect as a digital currency.

But the fact remains that Bitcoin is valuable largely because it is perceived as valuable. Because it is open source, someone could clone Bitcoin’s code and make an exact replica. (This has already been done several times.) If one were to do so today, the digital asset in question would be worthless—even though technically identical to Bitcoin—because of a social agreement that the original Bitcoin is the one people ought to put their money into. In this limited sense, Bitcoin too is a memecoin.

Another kind of detractor of memecoins or financialized ideas—the dreaded “no-coiner” in crypto jargon—might argue that none of this peer-to-peer, decentralized architecture is necessary for such meme-based projects at all. Your holdings could simply be entries in a centralized database, just as your social media accounts are entries in a centralized database (which can be deleted at any time), and just as your bank balance is simply an entry in a centralized database (which can also be deleted at any time—just ask this guy). This criticism is technically true, especially for more recent crypto projects. The memecoin trading on Solana, for instance, could probably have been done in a casino without blockchains at all. But, technically true is not the same as true.

Psychologically, anyone who holds cryptocurrency knows that, if need be, he could move it off of an exchange and into a location accessible only to himself. And this is the first time this has ever been true for a digital asset: It is a genuinely new technology. So, whereas much of landscape could indeed be mirrored in a completely centralized manner, the blockchain becomes the Schelling Point—a de facto meeting hub—for anyone who wants to create a financialized idea.

The above few paragraphs might sound pretty technical for those of my more literary readers who are less familiar with these subjects. But actually these paragraphs simply describe a new iteration of a process that has always existed. For millennia we have had a field of activity in which a person or group creates an idea, and the idea itself is considered valuable and remains valuable. That field of activity is called art.

Now, of course, art is not only ideas. It is also skill and execution. But ideation, as opposed to technical skill, has become progressively more important over the last 100 years or so. To understand why, read Walter Benjamin’s classic “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Whatever you make of the details, Benjamin’s central thesis was obviously true: In an age in which images can be reproduced at trivial cost, skill in executing such images becomes less valuable.

And yet there are still successful artists, and paintings and sculptures and such that sell for tens or even hundreds of millions. Why? Part of it is that such works of art are status symbols, part of it has to do with tax avoidance, but the largest part of it is something much more subtle. Take the example of Andy Warhol. He noticed what Walter Benjamin had noticed, yet his insight was more deep, paradoxically, because he was able to remain on the surface. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, Warhol describes an epiphany in which he realizes that a billboard advertisement on the highway is the most beautiful work of art he has ever seen.

Warhol simply had an idea. Art need not be canvas laboriously tended to by a painter; it could be a silkscreen printed by an underling. The artist need not be a hermit toiling away in a garret; he could actively seek fame. He had a very specific way of seeing the world, and he turned that way of seeing into a product. And after some strong resistance, the rest of the world came to see things the way he did, and his products became immensely valuable. They encapsulated his ideas. “This is what happens,” the author and raconteur Fran Lebowitz has said of Warhol, “when an inside joke gets into the water supply.” Owning a Warhol became not only proof perfect that one had assimilated these new ideas, but a way of embodying them—of committing to the new form of life that the artist had envisioned. In this way—and I can’t help but think I’m the only person to have made this comparison—owning a Warhol was rather like owning a Bitcoin.

Because there is no limit to the human imagination, or to the human ability to ensorcel and be ensorcelled, there is no limit to the value of future digital artworks of this kind. To create and market a digital asset as an artwork—the NFT is the common form of this—is social practice art, and though that term was invented decades ago, it has only become truly possible for it to exist in the last few years. In fact, it is possibly the only remaining genuine artistic form. In an age in which digital simulacra have superseded the real, an Instagram post about a book becomes more important than the book itself, or a controversy around a film becomes more important than the film itself. Every discrete object or event is swallowed up by the nonstop reproductions of it. Social practice art, the art of spreading an idea, is thus the only true 21st century art form.

There is a haunting video that has been lately making the rounds on social media. The year is 1995. Bill Gates is explaining to talk show host David Letterman a new project called the internet. Letterman, with quite reasonable objections, shoots down every point that Gates makes about the possibility of the internet’s success. It is all, Letterman and his studio audience agree, silly and overwrought—stuff for nerds or scammers. Gates mentions that some day with the internet Letterman might be able to check in on the baseball game when he’s not in front of his television. “Have you heard of radio?” Letterman chortles. Uproarious laughter from the audience.

Similar language surrounds crypto these days, particularly NFTs. Whereas a few years ago artists were agog with the possibilities of NFTs for changing their artistic practice, any high-minded vision in the space seems to have gone down the drain. Lil Skribblers is a project to return to high-mindedness; in the next post, I will explain how, as social practice art, Lil Skribblers will destroy the sclerotic modernist tendencies of contemporary writers and artists and return us to wholeness, i.e. holiness, in the perennialist tradition. That’s the aim, in any case.

Everyone was saying painting was dead, the artist Julian Schnabel remarked of the post-Pop Art era when he got his start, so it seemed like a pretty good time to be a painter. Schnabel was right. He became one of the richest artists in history. Similarly one can say: NFTs are dead, so it seems like a pretty good time to do an NFT project.

The revolution will not be televised, they said. Well, the assassination attempt certainly was. This was the first assassination attempt on a President that we all watched and commented on instantaneously. We marveled in real time about the framing of the candid photograph below. We speculated in real time whether this might have been a false flag operation. In group chats, we analyzed the shooter’s skill, and scratched our chins at the fact that the bodyguard protecting Trump was a woman seemingly a full foot shorter than him.

All this instant discussion was normal enough for those who had grown up on television. But what was new was the immediate production of memes—and not only memes, but memecoins. Not just a few, but a dozen of them sprung up on the website pump.fun, with names like THE BLOOD STAYS ON (TICKER: BLOOD), EARS OVER BITCHES (TICKER: EOB), and CEVIL WAR (TICKER: WAR). Death—or at least an attempt on death—had become financialized. Not just for specialized traders, but for anyone with an internet connection. It was an eerie feeling to see it all happen so quickly, and it gave me the sense that we are not very far away at all from the decentralized assassintion markets predicted by the early cypherpunks. “Real life” events had descended one more layer down into the digital.

In its viral iPad advertisement from a few months ago, Apple had shown a hydraulic press crushing various items of cultural production, including musical instruments, arcade games, and cans of paint. Critics felt the advertisement was tone-deaf; could they not see that the flattening of all cultural production into a sleek piece of hardware was something to be mourned, not celebrated?

But in a sense Apple was right not to care—or even to celebrate its Shiva-like powers of destruction. What is destroyed by our age of technology is not the music and the paintings and the sculptures that we claim to love so much, but the peculiar auras with which we’ve invested them. By making these works so easily reproducible, we strip away the extra numinosity; we can no longer continue with the delusion that it is the works themselves we love so much. It was the something extra that we have worshipped, and have lost. A frightening proposition, because we have not yet developed something new to worship. In fact, we do not even know what it is that we have lost.

In this way accelerationism, which has been coopted in popular parlance to mean something like optimism about technology’s influence, actually spells the opposite: the destruction of all that we cherished as providing us our humanity. Perhaps so that we might cherish something better. Or so that we might cherish nothing at all. 

The writer and publisher Roberto Calasso liked to joke that Marx was a poor economist but a superb theologian. What he meant was that Marx was among the first to notice that for moderns, commodities possessed the powers once possessed by the gods. This is not merely a metaphor. A god is the most powerful compression of a concept that we can imagine—this is the literal meaning of apotheosis. The Greeks imbue a little bow-wielding boy with the very pith of eros, and tell stories of him. We moderns imbue a sleek phone, or a pair of high heels, or a concept of political resistance.

In his role as the eiron—a character who raises stupidity and lack of social graces to the level of the sublime— points out that while the memecoin seems to outsiders chintzy or scam-like, it is homologous to the rewards for games played in the the traditional culture industry. Comparing his own project to the $EGIRL coin that was launched this past spring by and friends, Crumps writes with an undulating level of irony:

We have a different sort of cartel, though it’s based on the same self-aggrandizing drive for clout and relevance. But ours will be a just reward for our service to American literature. Proper and tasteful. Our only dishonesty will be in overstating the relevance and allure of this little world so that we can get bigger deals for the books we write about it. Six figures at least, from the start. Easily. That’s what everyone else is getting and they aren’t any better than us…

In this paragraph, whether intentionally or not, Crumps reveals a truth both terrible and obvious: Everything has its price. All our cultural production can be squished down into the iPad, reduced to two dimensions. (To resist this principle requires a calculation that expands, temporally or geographically, beyond life on earth.) The memecoin merely accelerates the process of creating culture—that is, of creating a speculative bubble. I think of the resistance fighters, on either side of any given political divide, trading their passion for acceptance to a crew, or for a university gig on a tenure track, or a book deal, or sexual attention from another member of the resistance, or simply for a sense of good conscience, of making one’s parents or peers or ancestors proud—perhaps even trading attempted violence for attempted glory. These were our passions, our religions, our careers, our great loves: When we look back from the future on the travails of human history, will we see only memes without coins?