#michael crumplar

[grandhotelabyss]

How repugnant do I have to be to potentially be a literary genius? Is it bad enough I call Dimes Square fascist, only because I’m secretly jealous of Mike Crumplar who got publicly scolded irl by a bunch of a Catholic girls, which has been my fantasy ever since I was 13 and read “Parker’s Back,” and I still have dreams of Flannery (that now include Dasha, Ana, and Honor Levy) in a habit whipping me for being a naughty boy?

It sounds to me like you're on the right track. You should write this all up as an extended narrative into a latter-day Story of the Eye. Maybe Dasha will adapt it for her next movie. Speaking of dirty fantasies and of our neo-Balzac, M. de Crumpleur, I do appreciate this as prose, as visionary Burroughsian pastiche—

My cybercock picks up a transmission from outer space. Bugman extermination imminent. Kamala twinks trapped in the trumpus room. Based pederast regime. No need for the administrative state; new forms of mind control. Leading scientists find Tao Lin’s faux-naive self-infantilization especially promising. Different methods work for different neurotypes. The genial extrovert: “My politics are simple. T.T.S. Total Trump Sycophant. If Trump told me to transition I would do it.” Erections are already up 12 percent in anticipation of mass arrests and abolition of seed oils. They have to go back. All of them. We’re gonna clean up the streets. A grinning, alien hallucination of Doctor Bardamu/Benway: “Crumps, my friend, we are soldiers, lost and sinking in this mire of filth. I always knew you were a real one. We’re gonna get so much pussy now.”

—but how likely is any of it to happen? I mean aside from the pederasty, which I assume happens (to boys and girls) no matter who's in power. There is something promising and something deeply American and deeply modernist, something of both Emerson and of Stein, who liked to be called "baby," in "Tao Lin's faux-naive self-infantilization," but I who learned to write from people posturing as world-weary jaded aristocratic sophisticates could never pull it off, nor do I find it a definitionally Trumpist aesthetic as Lin first emerged as an Obama-era figure, and Obama's was a naive and infantile movement more than Trump's is.

[grandhotelabyss]

One of Honor Levy’s new poems, which I shamelessly pinch from Crumplar’s SubStack. I had to swipe it because the speaker of this poem (I say it with affection) is literally the political persona of my podcast co-host. 

Crumps writes up his attendance at a Dimes Square scene literary reading. He also gets into Angelicism01, also discussed on the latest episode of Grand Podcast Abyss. His opening riff on Christian Lorentzen NFTs is really funny; elsewhere, he plays up his tedious shitlibbery that the equally tedious acerbity and opacity of “The New Conservatism” was invented to contest. Here he is on Levy:

Honor is an “angelicist” writer, and I think she does a much better job of it than the main Angelicism01 substack. (I’m not going to try to define the nascent angelicist movement just yet but will refer to a piece by Satya Paul, who gives a good insider explanation even though he’s somewhat uncritically intoxicated by its heady aesthetic promises). Part of what makes Honor’s angelicist writing good is that it lacks this shrill “male” anger you see in Angelicism01 or Barrett Avner’s writing where their “schizoposting” sometimes drifts into Nick Land pastiche and such banalities as complaining about Brandon beating Drumpf. Even at her most obviously political in poems like “Amerikin,” she manages to snipe at pronouns without getting cringe. Honor is still a crazy reactionary but she does so by adopting the character of the “Girl Joker,” a catty zoomer bitch that is also terrified of being abandoned by God. Riffing on the impossibility of living up to the reigning ideological constellation of femininity, she conjures these transcendent apocalyptic visions without needing to use the language of Heidegger or Deleuze as an obvious crutch. “E girl egregore so sweet so solemn sorbic acid sucralose sodium citrate I taste you through the screen… where are you going? follow for follow?” What a Poggerz tour through hell!

Agreed on the Heidegger/Deleuze for the most part, though I can throw that stuff around too when I’m in the mood. You have to read Portraits and Ashes, where the academics get poisoned to death by the art installation after they’ve spent 10 pages have an impromptu theory seminar on it. Probably the meanest, funniest thing I’ve ever written. Disagree on the anti-masculine countersignaling. The masculine has its place—anyone who doesn’t think so lives in too small an emotional world—as does the capital-P political, which in America means party politics and not whatever illusory commitments (“I want more politics in art, not less, because I want communism”) our scene tourist still harbors. 

(I’m a scene tourist at second hand, yes, but you have to keep an eye on these things. Even in the digital rhizome, literary/intellectual culture spreads west from the East Coast commanding heights, much as they’re tottering these days.)

It’s “cringe” when people “snipe at pronouns” because they’re being reactive; they don’t have real reasons, just recoil. In her poem, Levy shrewdly implies the way this identity fractionation and demand for legibility helps to shore up the nation-empire. That’s a reason, a good one. (The poem reads like a satiric reductio of Jennifer Egan’s awful written-for-the-textbook—I’ve taught it five times, once on YouTube—Twitter short story “Black Box,” apparently part of her new novel, which I plan to take tremendous pleasure in not reading.) I want to refuse this fascoid command to declare an identity before I speak, a command predictably spreading from gender to race in the spiritually vastated precincts of academe/NGO/DNC/CIA/etc. Just use my full name and make sure you spell it right. This is America: I’m trying to get famous here!