“It’s hard to believe it was only two years ago, in the spring of 2026, that The Hinternet suddenly and without any explanation pivoted full-time to critical engagement with Hawai’ian music from the early 20th century. They took a lot of heat for that, lost a lot of subscribers. But those defectors should have known better! As usual, The Hinternet was just ahead of the curve, as we are now in the midst of the third Hawai’ian Renaissance. You can’t go anywhere these days without hearing Ta-Hu-Wa-Hu-Wai piped in on the sound system!” —Jon Caramanica, New York Times, October 9, 2028

You are really going to want to read this one, but you’ll need a paid subscription to do so. Right now you can get one for just a fraction of the regular price. Do it!

Get 75% off for 1 year

Read more

The present essay continues to develop the line of reflection developed previously in my essay, “A Third Way for the Humanities”. It is recommended that you read that piece first.

1.

A few years ago I was the external member on a hiring committee charged with considering one Nathan Cofnas for a job. Cofnas, you might know, is a “race-realist” working on IQ differences across the different “races ou espèces”, as François Bernier put the matter in 1686, getting this whole race science thing off to a pretty inauspicious start. Cofnas is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy and [sic] Moral Sciences at Ghent University in Belgium. Cofnas’s funding appears to be drawn from a grant of the European Research Commission obtained prior to his arrival there by Ghent colleague Bouke de Vries. I hope those who have protested against Cofnas’s hiring, and even sought to have the decision reversed, will back off, so that he might be permitted to fail all on his own in pursuit of his meritless research program.

Here at The Hinternet, we write for our PAID SUBSCRIBERS. We are currently offering a huge discount, in the hope that you will FINALLY decide to become one of them!

Get 75% off for 1 year

We also encourage you to give your friends and family GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS to The Hinternet. You’ll be doubly loved for it!

Give a gift subscription

Finally, nothing helps us quite so much as a SHARE!

Share

Read more

Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated. And indeed this is all expressed not in full round tones but softly, in whispers, confidentially, sometimes a little hoarsely. Of course it is a kind of piping. Why not? Piping is our people’s daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while. We certainly should not want to do without these performances. —Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”

Share

I.

A musicology professor once offered my class the only definition of jazz I’ve ever thought truly apt. He said: “Jazz is the music jazz musicians play.”

You are listening to a piece of music. You wonder: is it jazz? You have only to ask yourself: what kind of musician is making it? Is it a jazz musician, or several jazz musicians? Very well, you’re listening to jazz. If it isn’t? Then you’re probably listening to something else.

The circuity is the point. Since it’s an idiom, a tradition, a world mostly to itself, jazz should not really be defined (if that can be helped). And yet—we’re certain that there was, sometimes still is, something called jazz. It was already conscious of itself as different from other kinds of music, early on. There are many moments we could point to as evidence of this difference. So I’ll choose the best I know: that moment when, in 1926, Louis Armstrong dropped the lyrics from the lyric stand while cutting “Heebie Jeebies” with his Hot Seven band, and covered for the mistake with the first official scat-singing on record. So Louie became the first Jazz Singer, not only because he scatted but because as a singer, he understood his voice was no different from his horn—and what both were really meant to do, was to take up all the dim, repetitive variations he’d encountered in his life and spin them into a different plane altogether.

Other jazz musicians played perfectly well. Jelly Roll Morton played, Fletcher Henderson played, and King Oliver played. But Louie sang—with his horn and his own natural instrument alike. And his precise genius for a kind of magical reinterpolation gave every soloist who came after him their own signature difference, too. Not just to play the thing over, with enough variations to scrape by, keeping the attention of the dancers and booze drinkers in the joint, an audience always dangerously ready to get on to the next scene. But to root people to the spot, to show them, to tell them something—to make it about the music itself, music and not decoration. Where others heard “St. Louis Blues,” or “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” or “Stardust,” Louie heard a dozen other things: harmonies, alternate melodies, moods. Your normal popular performer—Al Jolson, for instance, whom Hollywood enshrined as the face of the new talking jazz age—might sing those melodies, embellish them a bit, lean into the words, and be a decent interpreter. But for Louie the words were a pretext, a way to get him into the real thing, which was spinning off from the center and establishing its own free ellipse in orbit around it. Louie made music essentially about music—the same way every great play is really about plays, and every great movie is really about movies.

This is what his singing was, too, with scatting at the abstract extreme. First the words: start the verse, let the meaning of the song come through, establish the center. Then roll outwards, in potentially infinite variations, streams of new melodic and harmonic ideas which in Louie’s hands were as full and complex as whatever original piece he’d picked up and toyed around with. For decades afterward jazz musicians would go on building an unbelievably rich scaffolding on top of these principles—expanding into denser arrangements, more sophisticated harmony, improvisations of dazzling virtuosity and invention. But the basic difference was the same: jazz was music that had somehow built a space, nested within the full tradition of American Song, where the point of the music was to build on music, in a kind of exegesis on its own workings: it was reinterpretation raised to a fine art; a moment of singular, incendiary reinterpretation. It would expand beyond mere genre, develop its own standards and classics, its own idiolect, its own rhythms, yes—but the point of it all would always lie in the way these things were used, to burst wide open the repetitions and limitations of the popular music of their day. To make a new world of music out of it.

For the great jazz singers, the jazz difference is a bit slipperier. And this is for one simple reason: The Great American Songbook, the thousand or so songs in the canon of primarily Jewish and Black songwriters, which emerged just as the new jazz language was becoming the substrate of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunes, in the Thirties and Forties. Men like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and the Gershwins weren’t jazz musicians. But jazz informed the songs they were writing for the masses. And jazz musicians paid them back in turn for their material, taking those songs and transforming them into sandboxes, little zones of exploration, which would be transposed and re-done by musicians for decades afterwards as if there was no way to really exhaust their essence (since, frequently, there wasn’t).

Here at The Hinternet, we write for our PAID SUBSCRIBERS. We are currently offering a huge discount, in the hope that you will FINALLY decide to become one of them!

Get 75% off for 1 year

We also encourage you to give your friends and family GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS to The Hinternet. You’ll be doubly loved for it!

Give a gift subscription

Read more

Get 25% off for 1 year

Or give someone a gift subscription — you will be doubly loved!

Give a gift subscription

Read more

Meanwhile, all the other staff writers are “in the deep-freeze”, as Hélène put it to me, while refusing to explain the precise meaning of this bit of Hinternet office lingo, nor even to give me so much as a rough measure of how literally it should be taken. She said, further, that she herself is unavailable for any writing tasks throughout this Holy Week. When I asked how this observance sits alongside her more familiar practice of magic natural and unnatural, she just shrugged and said that Breton religious syncretism is “a complicated thing”.

That was also the moment she told me that I, as, technically, the only ghost on the Hinternet editorial staff, was going to have to take care of this week’s piece. “You don’t even have a body, so you can hardly have a busy schedule either,” she said. Of course she’s wrong on both counts, for first of all I happen to be constituted of rarefied pneuma, and second of all even if I weren’t I would still keep to a daily schedule no less strict than that of any being of grosser substance. But whatever. Hélène’s the boss.

Still, I think I’m going to pull a classic “French worker” move and fulfill my duty in as absolutely a quam minimum way as possible.

I will tell you, first of all, that The Hinternet will be back in full swing soon enough, and you are going to be delighted to have waited things out. In the meantime, you must take this opportunity to upgrade to a paid subscription, since paid subscriptions truly are the well-spring and the without-which-not of everything we do here.

Get 25% off for 1 year

You can also benefit two parties at once by giving someone you love a gift subscription. You will be doubly loved in return!

Give a gift subscription

I will tell you, second of all, that there is still time to apply for the inaugural Hinternet Foundation Summer School. You can read more here about some of the theoretical reflections behind this year’s focus.

Apply to participate in the Hinternet Foundation Summer School,
“WHITHER THE HUMANITIES?”,
taking place in August, 2026. Application deadline June 1.

Apply for the Summer School

And third and finally I will invite you to click on the ad below from one of our more sinister tech-world mécènes, to study the document to which it brings you, and to feel a shiver of giddy anticipation as you contemplate what you’ll be in for this summer when The Oort Cloud Review, Vol. 1, Issue 1, finally appears from Hat & Beard Press.

Big things are coming. Brace yourselves…

Share

Share The Hinternet

Get 25% off for 1 year

Give a gift subscription

High-resolution images of the entire manuscript are available here (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, ms 408).

Subscribe now

Page 9

I was only a young man, yet I distinctly recall the unease I felt when the Glaziers emerged as the City’s most revered class of men. They set about pouring sand into their furnaces, devising new ways to make glass as thick as bricks yet as translucent as air. No one could have imagined before their efforts began what wonders may be conjured out of heat and silica, ingenuity and persistence.

We live beneath glass here in the City, all the time, but we are reminded of this in practice only when we attempt to walk away from it, or when, as happens several times a day, we hear the sad thunk¹ of an oblivious bird, and then look up to see it sliding down the invisible slope. And of course we are constantly reminded of the dome by the Glaziers themselves, who have by now made it official doctrine in the City that there are twenty-seven celestial spheres in all,2 the closest of them being the one they themselves built, which, they insist, shares in the same nature as the most distant and empyrean of them all.

Page 10

The children of the City —can we even call them that? anyhow the Citizens generated after the construction of the dome— do not know that it was constructed at all. They believe it is as fixed and eternal as the other twenty-six spheres, and that it is paired, beneath the ground, with a complementary hemisphere invisible to us. But you cannot erase the memories of those of us old enough to have been here before its construction. You can kill us, which seems to have been one of the strategies Cocalus considered some years back, though in the end he understood he needed us for our expertise in sundry fields, such as mine, in botany.

Page 11

We are permitted to live, on the condition that we silence ourselves in the presence of the hatchlings (as I’ve taken to calling them). A few years ago one dour little androgyne of ten or so came to me to ask how, as it is rumored, I can know the patterns of the zodiac on the reverse side of the dome, given that there is no way to travel out of the hemisphere within which we are generated and corrupted.3 This was during the “great thinning”, and straightaway I suspected a Glazier had sent him to trick me into betraying my knowledge, for which I would have faced certain death. Glaziers are never to be trusted, given the favor Cocalus extends to them, and least of all when the Citizens’ numbers are being thinned on his express orders, in view of some supposed need for what the Glaziers call “equilibrium”. I therefore could not tell the hatchling that its question was doubly misinformed: for we do not know the shape of the zodiac on the other side of the world (which in the old geography is nothing other than the Antipodes4), while there most certainly is a way out of this dome-covered City of ours. I know the way well, and someday I will find the courage to take it.

Page 12

There are, more precisely, two ways. The first is obvious, though the hatchlings would never think to consider it: the dome penetrates only six ells5 into the ground at its deepest. One could easily dig under it within the space of a dark night, provided one were careful to avoid the wolf patrols (or whatever the beast-keepers are now calling their cross-bred monsters; that is not my concern, as I am a botanist and know only of plants, and of the insects that aid and harm them).

The other way is through the baths, which even the smallest hatchling knows to bubble up from deep thermal springs.6 But the rites of generation and hatching that occur there are so codified, taking place only at the surface, so that no one in these many years has bothered to plunge into them just ten ells or so down, to find the many passages leading to caverns filled with dark pools and dank air, great calcitic foyers shot through with openings, leading out in hundreds of different directions, some of them dead-ends, but many opening up on the earth’s surface well beyond the City. Even among the elders this is not common knowledge. My blood-brother Cacus knew, and he knew I knew, because we used to explore these passageways together as boys. But Cacus was thinned. Cocalus having decided on the name of the mythological cow-thief for my friend,7 he subsequently decided that this name he himself made up must be reflective of a bad character — and now I am the only one left who knows. Well, I and Cocalus, but he does not know that I know.

Page 13

Surely you do not need to know all these details, my Goddess. Let us reminisce instead, for that is far more pleasing than to learn the layout of our City. Do you recall our visit to the baths at Montecatini,8 where out of decorated spa-cups the plague victims drank the earth’s hot mineral broth in desperate hope for a cure?

I was a fool, my Love — I thought the very fact that you were beside me was enough to keep me safe. And I suppose there is no evidence it did not, for I did not fall ill, nor did you, but we both stripped bare and floated arm in arm, naked, like lily-pads in the hot baths at night, when the sick had all wandered off to sleep or to die.

Page 14

I told you then that before I came north as a young man I thought all the little flies flew in from torrid Libya, loved the heat, and were found little further up the boot than my own hometown.9 Yet there they were still, in the Tuscan marshes in autumn; we were shivering as we stripped, and they swarmed around us as if preparing to draw blood. But they did not, and then we dove in, and were protected by the salty water.

I sang to you like a troubadour in Occitan10 — words of love as if I were joking. But if I joked, it is only because I was a coward, and could only speak truth by pretending I was insincere. As I recall there is another Occitan ditty that speaks of just this sort of cowardice, though that is not the one I sang. Anyhow I assumed you knew the truth. I assumed the little flies and the bogs and the night themselves could not fail to see the truth of my Love for you.

Apply to participate in the Hinternet Foundation Summer School,
“WHITHER THE HUMANITIES?”,
taking place in August, 2026. Application deadline June 1.

Apply for the Summer School

And please support our work here at The Hinternet by taking out a premium subscription — for just $6 per month

Subscribe now

1

Interpreting

which would more precisely be transliterated as kapšag, as an onomatopoeia, rendered here according to the conventions of forming such sound-words in English.

5

Reading

which literally means “forearm”, as a unit of measurement comparable to the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon “ell”, which was originally a length extending from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. The reader will likely have noticed by now that as a rule I do not rely on other Voynich scholarship in my critical apparatus. Very little has been achieved in this vast body of work that would warrant mention, or that offers viable interpretations of the text that differ from my own. This of course excludes the “sub-rosa” scholarship shoe-horned into various scientific journals under false pretenses, such as that from the Polish Czasopismo nauk rolniczych, already cited in a previous installment (see Part One, footnote 9). On several occasions in the notes to future installments, we will be returning to this and to other “hidden” scholarship. The one work of overt Voynich research that constitutes an exception to our rule of active disinterest is Vitaly Ivanovich Tatur’s Rasshifrovka Rukopisi Voïnicha [Deciphering the Voynich Manuscript] (self-published in pdf form, Kazan, October, 2014, with subsequent additions and corrections through March, 2018). V. I. Tatur is believed to be the pseudonym of Lev’ Petrovich Druzhnikov, a topologist and number theorist in the Faculty of Mathematics at Kazan State University. No communications have been issued under the name of Tatur since 2018, and Druzhnikov denies any familiarity with Tatur’s work. Whatever the case may be, Tatur interprets the word in question to mean “femur”, used here as a unit of measurement. Some rather more significant differences between Tatur’s interpretation of the ms and my own will become clear soon enough.

10

Occitan was the common language of the lyric poetry recited by troubadours in Europe throughout the high Middle Ages. These performers traveled a wide circuit, and as a result many Europeans had some familiarity with Occitan without any direct knowledge of the place or the culture of its origin. This is presumably also the case for our author. Tatur (DVM, 2^nd edition, June, 2015) however notes that the tradition was abruptly extinguished by the Black Death, which began in 1348, which indeed rather calls into question the idea that an author writing in the early fifteenth century would have been exposed to Occitan-language troubadours in his earlier life. Plainly, further investigation is required.

Share

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Apply for the Summer School

And please support our work here at The Hinternet by taking out a premium subscription — for just $6 per month

Subscribe now

1.

In March, 1697, Peter the Great set out from Moscow, along with a select group of councilors, for his so-called “Grand Embassy”, a two-year tour of Western Europe. The voyage was shrouded in secrecy and disguise, and was aimed at the strategic collection of information concerning primarily Dutch and German advances in science and technology. Through the usual gossip networks, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz would soon learn every detail of the Tsar’s early visit to the Königsberg court of the Elector of Prussia, Friedrich I, and of the time these two more-or-less Enlightened sovereigns spent together at Friedrich’s maison de plaisance or country home.

The philosopher remarks in a letter that during the visit the Tsar had been “very gay, and spoke familiarly with everyone”, and that he “approved of the gentleness [douceur] with which people conduct themselves in these [German] lands, and disapproves the cruelties of his own.”1 When the Tsar took a walk with the elector, we learn, one of the servants made a gross error of some unspecified sort in tending to this distinguished visitor. The Tsar tells the servant that if he had been in Muscovy he would have been subjected to the whip, but, since they are in a “gentle” country, he will let it pass.

Get 75% off for 1 year

Read more

We are very pleased to announce the Hinternet Foundation’s Inaugural Summer School, taking place Fridays and Saturdays, August 7, 8, 14, 15, 21, and 22, at 11:00 Los Angeles / 14:00 New York / 19:00 London / 20:00 Paris (sorry Australasia!). The format this year will be entirely online.

Each year the Foundation’s Summer Schools will take a different approach to the question: “What Makes Us Human?” For our Inaugural Summer School we will be addressing this question through a sustained reflection on the current state and future prospects of humanistic inquiry.

Thanks to a generous financial contribution we are pleased to be able to offer this Summer School at no cost to participants. But the number of spots is limited to 15, so be sure to apply soon. You may find further information, as well as a link bringing you to the application page, here. The deadline for applications is June 1.

Our recent Declaration, “A Third Way for the Humanities”, explains some of the theoretical and practical considerations behind this initiative.

Apply for the Summer School

The Hinternet Foundation is a California-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity. Learn more about our programs here. Click below to make a tax-deductible donation!

Donate to the Hinternet Foundation

Share

Apply for the Summer School

Please share widely

Share

The Current State of Things

It is perhaps in the nature of academics to fret about declining standards, especially as these academics age and become ever less attuned to the always-evolving expressions of the innate ingenium of youth. But even an eternal complaint can be truer in some eras than in others. With each passing year since the economic crisis of 2008, the familiar response to complaints of decline —that we must not let our spirits flag, that we must not retreat into cynicism and defeatism— has come to sound, to those who have not lost their hearing, ever more “late-Soviet”.

No one wants to be the first shock-worker on the assembly line to acknowledge that the factory is not meeting production quotas. But at some point enforced identification with what is obviously a collapsing system grows so strained as to become unbearable, and the change that had been coming slowly for a long time now comes all at once.

Get 75% off for 1 year

Read more

Give a gift subscription

Late last year, I spent the better part of a week combing through episodes of the old MTV program 120 Minutes, which ran from 1986 to 2000, and all but defined what “alternative” music was, in its heyday. Despite being a worthy term—a name for a literal radio format and a Billboard chart—there’s always been something unwieldy and dumb about “alternative” as a musical category. We know the usual story: the Velvets and Iggy Pop get raw, invent punk; punk gets dumber/better in the Seventies; gets arty and weird in the Eighties; then in the Nineties the whole underground finally blasts itself upwards into the mainstream, via the missile Kurt Cobain (a great pop musician, never let anyone tell you otherwise), and reigns for a decade or so, under that unwieldy, dumb epithet: “alternative.”

A subsequent story says that from there the old punk spirit haphazardly resurrects, in the revanchist rock of the early Aughts (see: The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs; Toronto and NYC; “indie sleaze,” “garage rock” et al., ad nauseam). Then it goes off the rails. By the 2010s, alternative stations are playing Imagine Dragons, classic rock stations are playing Nirvana, and MTV is more famous for Snooki than the moon-man. The Gen-X Slacker is superseded by the Millennial Hipster, poptimism reigns triumphant, and “indie” supplants “alternative” as the meaningless descriptor du jour, as in: “I prefer indie music, like Lana Del Rey.” (Lana, whose Born to Die is admittedly important to any alternative Millennial canon, was released on Interscope Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group: not indie.)

Now, that second paragraph’s too simple—I’ll get to why. But the first? Alarmingly, one of the things I discovered watching 120 Minutes was just how expert the alternative media men and women of mid-period MTV were at constructing a context for the music they brought to televisions all over the world. As early as 1992 (just one year into the world’s brief courtship of Cobain & Co.), 120 Minutes was larding its year-end countdowns with a considerable history of the new insurgent underground, in terms exactly like what I just wrote above. Solid music journalism, blended with an obvious commercial imperative, yet also straddling the real cutting-edge of a youth culture that needed a mirror for itself. To watch 120 Minutes now is to gaze into that mirror: you see how, for a moment, a door was opened, and a lot of formerly subterranean stuff escaped into the world. A lot of it was dross, sure. More often, another convenient new market category for the major labels to exploit. People had to sort through all the Collective Souls and Blues Travelers and 4 Non Blondes to get to the best stuff. But a lot of groundbreaking music got through, too.

These days it’s hard to imagine a broadcast on a major channel, reaching millions of people, putting artists like Kate Bush, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, Björk, or PJ Harvey on normal people’s televisions, interviewing these artists while playing their videos. It’s hard to imagine any established and highly-trafficked channel like that whatsoever, let alone one that could quickly organize a canon of the not-quite-popular, vaguely-counter-cultural mass-art of its time, the way 120 Minutes did. For someone like me (born in 1994, a few weeks after Cobain’s suicide), it’s hard to watch the program without feeling truly sad. Not only were things seemingly more diverse and open, those people understood exactly what they had. They knew they were curating something different from the mainstream—a genuine alternative—through which a generation of kids would experience something other than what the Billboard Top 40, or else their parents, might’ve shown them.

So of course I got to thinking: if only my own generation (young Millennials, elder Zoomers) had had something comparable! Because it seemed to me, pretty much from the time I started high school in 2008, that there was an alternative, though no one ever called it that. In the late Aughts and early 2010s (stretching across both Obama terms, more or less), there was something akin to an emerging alternative. Often it was heavily electronic—a music, or even just a general vibe, which could only have been created by a generation in thrall to the infinite cratedigging properties of the Internet, handed an unprecedented democracy of accessible synthesis and cheap production software. Except that there was virtually no central place, no kept gate like 120 Minutes, via which all this foment might be properly gathered, curated, and beamed out towards any widespread youth culture. Pitchfork tried hard, and there was a time when their lovely snobbishness really did seem capable of setting a canon for this era of alternative Millennial music. But that vague dream was scuttled as soon as the publication sold out to Condé Nast in 2015 (and it was a sell-out).

Give a gift subscription

Much ado has been made recently about the usefulness, or pointlessness, of the term “poptimism.” Kelefa Sanneh had his hedging moratorium in the New Yorker last summer. Freddie DeBoer writes a piece a month about it. W. David Marx tangled with the term throughout the 300-odd pages of his Blank Space book last year. I fully accept the contention that when Pitchfork changed, it changed in a defanged and generally poptimist direction. Rolling Stone went that way, too—and went harder. Many others followed suit. Presumably, the reigning argument in music journalism since the later 2010s was that the field is still far too white and male and rock-obsessed, and that genres like hip-hop, R&B, and high-charting pop were still overlooked in favor of more overtly “album-oriented” genres (though I’ve never really bought this characterization when it comes to Pitchfork). Still, I remember these sentiments being fairly common even back in 2012, and well before that. There was a lot of Tumblr-woke, campus-social-justice ferment feeding into the journo-sphere, and this led to a lot of passionate thinkpieces about how Rihanna should be taken as seriously as Radiohead—that kind of thing. Plenty of people wanted to seem very hip, and non-elitist, so there was a lot of circuitous talk about how major-label pop and rap should be treated softly, in the highest possible intellectual-academic register, with much less time spent condescending to obscure or difficult artists. It was exhausting from the start, and only it helped to hobble music journalists, in the end.

But I’m not here to parse out that particular rhetorical battle—only to consider my proposed Millennial alternative. This is where I think “poptimism” does become a useless idea, since the music I have in mind (much of which was assuredly “Pitchfork-coded” for a time), was unique. Though the ever-poptimizing world of music journalism never remarked on it, or even seemed to realize it. What had made the underground music of decades past “alternative” was its oppositionality. The mainstream trafficked in cliches and plasticky sounds, using the newest technologies to smooth out edges instead of experimenting. Meanwhile, the underground deliberately courted old avant-garde styles of shock, weirdness, queerness, noise—or just general aesthetic discordance. It was resolutely not pop, and didn’t aspire to be. It might want to be more than pop, or broader than pop, or perhaps anti-pop. But it was not the same thing as that which, in the mainstream, was understood broadly as just “pop.”

Give a gift subscription

Though much of the great alternative music of the late Aughts and early 2010s still fits those distinctions—particularly where niche internet subcultures were involved—a lot of it simply doesn’t. This was what I found so exciting about it, what I thought was really new, especially when compared with the general history of the mainstream vs. the underground. It struck me, perhaps around 2010—certainly I knew it by 2012—that, in an inversion of all previous eras, there was a boom of less-than-popular artists who were in fact making our best unapologetic pop music. Now it was a faction of the underground which aspired to make the huge, triumphant pop music of its times, and was doing so, while the mainstream doddered on, pumping out the worst glitzy, infantile crap any generation had ever been subjected to. Had there been anything resembling a 120 Minutes for the era, anything beyond the endless decentered diffusion of the World Wide Web, a few worthwhile sites, and a few good festivals, this might have been articulable. It might even have been collectively available to a significant number of people as an idea, a style, or a genuine counter-culture.

In a sense, this is a eulogy.

There were precursors to this internet-native alternate underground vision. Many were genuine independent artists, at least initially—though some weren’t. The main wave of the best Millennial alterna-pop (roughly 2009-2018) was similarly split. Though there were plenty of artists on the major labels who belong in this loose canon, most of the interesting stuff bubbled up much less dramatically, online, before going bigger. A lot of it was made up of independent bands, duos, or producers on great historic indie labels like 4AD, Domino Recording Co., Sub Pop, Captured Tracks, Jagjaguwar, Polyvinyl, XL Recordings, Modular Records. And a lot of it started within emerging niche microgenres with ridiculous names, like vaporwave, chillwave, witch house, or hypnagogic pop—deliberately hazy, nostalgic music that toyed with what Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds kept calling “hauntology” (to varying degrees of accuracy). But then sometimes it was just outright pop, better and richer than anything the mainstream was offering.

Give a gift subscription

The first precursors I’m thinking of include Cut Copy’s first record Bright Like Neon Love (2004), the best of Hot Chip, Annie, Robyn’s self-titled album (2005), and LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver (2007). Nothing like the overly sleek mid-Aughts rock bands (Bloc Party, The Killers, Franz Ferdinand) they shared festival billings with; yet also nothing like the folky (Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes) or arty (Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective) bands whom they shared year-end best-of lists with. Rather, these were artists working at the confluence of electronic music and pop, savvy musicians who had absorbed things like house music and hip-hop, beginning to fuse together something as accessible as it was smart. Gothenburg geniuses The Knife are especially relevant here. Though they were too weird (and frequently too harsh) to really cross over, their influence has hung around for decades. Listen to “Heartbeats,” and you’ll hear one of the first examples (in 2003!) of an electronic pop that feels unmistakably 21st-century. It’s hard to imagine that the 1990s were only four years in the past, impossible to think of “Heartbeats” as having existed in anything but the present millennium. It still sounds tremendous. Classic.

Perhaps the first major turning-point in this foment came in 2007 with MGMT’s first and only good record, Oracular Spectacular. Nowadays their music is the kind of thing that shows up in films when people try to do a Naughties period piece (see: Saltburn), and their highest Spotify stream counts are in the billions. MGMT had a relatively big success at the time for the kind of group they were (indie-coded but really on a major label), and Pitchfork itself didn’t quite approve. “Kids” ended up on Gossip Girl, went to #91 on Billboard, becoming a kind of sleeper anthem. The record itself went to #38 on the album charts. These days I find the record charming, often dated, except for those justifiably beloved singles: “Kids,” “Electric Feel,” and especially “Time to Pretend,” which is one of the great Millennial pop songs. I felt as much when I first heard it: finally, here was something that didn’t sound like any other era, that belonged to the young people of its own time. Plus it sounded great. Though that hardly mattered in 2007: “Time to Pretend” didn’t even crack the Billboard Top 100. I still harbor a fantasy where it was as big a hit that year as “Irreplaceable” or “Umbrella”— good pop songs to be sure, but ones that now sound completely of their time, while “Time to Pretend” feels outside it. In fact I might just be hitting on one main difference between truly great Millennial pop and the stuff mass audiences were listening to: it signifies its time, but isn’t trapped by it.

Give a gift subscription

This fantasy of mine is, essentially, where my present canon begins. Since there’s nothing which actually separates a song like “Time to Pretend” from the big hits of its time, only that it was produced differently. Yet it’s just as anthemic, memorable, catchy, and totally accessible. But it has little to do with the flattened-out, dumbed-down, dynamic-free landscape perfected by mega-producers from Max Martin to Benny Blanco. Not only is it nearly impossible for an artist to crash the pop charts in this century without the backing of the industry’s biggest monopolies—would audiences really know what to do with something like that if they heard it? Audiences need to listen to something a lot in order to get used to it, and eventually to prefer it. The whole scheme of the music industry relies on the assumption that audiences are essentially passive and will accept whatever is given to them. One of the dirty tricks of the “poptimist” turn in music journalism is that it gives audiences tacit permission to accept passivity in the name of fighting snobbery. But every snob has always wished the radios of the world could be filled with songs like “Time to Pretend,” instead of songs like Jason Mraz’s interminable “I’m Yours.” Yet mass audiences—unfortunately, painfully—have tended to prefer the latter. I often suspect it’s simply because they’re so rarely given an actual alternative. (Then again, in 1965—a year that gave us “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Norwegian Wood,” “My Girl,” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”—the number one song was a little ditty called “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs; maybe things never change.)

Across 2008 and 2009, there was more of this new alternative pop. The extraordinary first Crystal Castles record stood at the less-accessible end of the spectrum; The xx’s (mostly anodyne) debut stood at the most-approachable one. Phoenix’s “1901” became the next song in this nebulous stream to crack the charts (peaking at #84). I also count Passion Pit’s great singles “Sleepyhead” and “Little Secrets”, and Empire of the Sun’s “Walking on a Dream,” which particularly enchanted me when it came out. Put aside the band’s stupid costumes and dumb album covers, and here was another huge pop song, successful in the U.K. and Australia but not the States, which wouldn’t reach a mainstream audience until it was featured in a car commercial years later. In fact, this kind of music breaking out via some TV show, commercial, or later Tik-tok virality, is another theme of the alternative music of the era. This always stunned me, since I understood from the moment I heard it, “Walking on a Dream” was the kind of song previous generations surely would have recognized as an inescapable hit. In 2009, I remember walking around, actively wondering why this unstoppable, essentially perfect electropop song wasn’t everywhere. When I think of 2009 today, I don’t think about “Poker Face,” “Use Somebody,” “Boom Boom Pow,” “Love Story” or any other mega-hit of the year—I think of “Walking on a Dream,” which said so much more about being young, yearning, and alive at that time, than any of those empty songs ever did, and sounded better doing it.

Give a gift subscription

From there and onwards, into 2010, came the first classics of that unfairly-lampooned genre “chillwave.” This included Small Black’s “Despicable Dogs” and Toro Y Moi’s “Blessa”; Wild Nothing’s “Chinatown,” and, of course, Washed Out’s “Feel it all Around.” Here was another completely new, unmistakably internet-derived Millennial creation: vague, psychedelic, like a warping, smeared memory of an older time’s pop music—but resolutely contemporary. Most of it still sounds great, and none better than Neon Indian’s first record, Psychic Chasms (2009). Listening to its first single, “Deadbeat Summer,” which flips a Todd Rundgren sample into one of the purest pop songs of the era, conjures up for me only more fantasies of that alternative pop world. Again, there’s nothing even remotely inaccessible about it—it’s totally accessible, infernally catchy, even if it comes from a slightly more sun-baked and woozy dimension. “Deadbeat Summer” is precisely the kind of thing a Millennial 120 Minutes might have introduced to those millions of weird kids, desperate for a refuge from the nonsense spanning the charts.

In 2010, Arcade Fire released The Suburbs and ended up winning the Grammy for Album of the Year, one of the last times that award went to anything deserving of it. I saw them live not long after, and the experience of witnessing “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” with the full stage show they had going then, made me feel as if this alternative vision might actually go somewhere. That it might turn into a proper vibe, or a culture, or anything, really. “Sprawl II” is another of the best, grandest pop songs of the era. The same year, I bought Tame Impala’s first record, Innerspeaker, an out-and-out rock album that blew The White Stripes, The Strokes, and every other “alt” band out of the water. LCD Soundsystem released their near-perfect third record that year, This is Happening. I also remember discovering tracks from the first Best Coast record and Beach House’s blissful Teen Dream, as free downloads on iTunes (if this doesn’t date me, I don’t know what else will)—all of which felt completely fresh. Though I could hear plenty of clear touchstones and influences in that music, I’d still never heard anything quite like it.

Give a gift subscription

But more than anything, 2010 brought Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” to the world—the anthemic pop song of its time—and it still astounds me to this day that it didn’t even crack the Billboard Top 100. Go listen to it again, and ponder just how on earth that track didn’t become the biggest song in the world. Robyn was the pop star that should have been: a million times more soulful and cooler than anybody. “Dancing On My Own” should have been her breakthrough. The music video alone feels like a different vision of the decade that followed: dreamier, capital-r-Romantic, less trashy, less empty. Unless you were plugged into that particular strain, what you got from the mainstream was, frankly, a lot of junk, with some occasional hip-hop or R&B classics mixed in. But this is the point I keep hammering: what was that strain? Who was there to define it, curate it, and show it to enough people to matter? It’s typical of the digitalized experience of my generation that the mainstream was continually narrowing, divided up between the same repetitive stars, while the internet diffused everything else into niches too specific for most people to know about. If you didn’t encounter something like “Dancing on My Own” through a music blog or on a TV show years later, then you simply had little chance of encountering it naturally.

In 2011, Nicholas Winding Refn’s movie Drive was released. I’ve heard people call it a cult classic in recent years; frankly it’s nowhere near as good as it seemed at 17. But the soundtrack—with songs like Kavinsky’s “Nightcall” and College’s “A Real Hero”—made it the first film of the decade to feature up-to-date electronic pop music, and fit in exactly with the alternative styles I was observing. That year, Neon Indian released “Polish Girl,” M83 released “Midnight City” (which did chart, eventually), and the first James Blake record came out. Great, classic pop music, all. But the real revelation that year was Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” Though she’s obviously hugely popular today, when “Video Games” came out she was still a cipher, who until just before that had been performing under her real name, Lizzy Grant. Her first massive record, Born to Die, wouldn’t even be released until 2012, at which point “Video Games” would just crack the charts, peaking at #91, as the record shot her into legitimate stardom. Still, the mere presence of that mysterious song in 2011 seemed seismic, another vision of an alternative to all that glitz and autotune and over-the-top “soul” numbers. But in this case exquisitely coy, ironic-but-not-ironic, certainly Romantic. Like all that hazy underground pop, it was doing something interesting and productive with Millennial nostalgia.

Give a gift subscription

The wave only accelerated into 2012. Though the year belonged above all to Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. Cityand Frank Ocean’s channel ORANGE, we also had songs like Tame Impala’s “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” Blood Orange’s “You’re Not Good Enough,” Solange’s “Losing You,” Grimes’ “Oblivion,” Chromatics’ “Cherry,” and Purity Ring’s “fineshrine.” These were massive pop songs which, again, took years to actually reach large audiences. But there were even more egregious examples of tracks which a healthier, saner world would have turned into hits: Chairlift’s “I Belong in Your Arms” and Sky Ferreira’s “Everything is Embarrassing.” Both sparkling examples of gorgeous pop-that-might-have-been, the Millennial equivalent to the biggest synth-pop anthems of 1980s England. Ferreira’s perennially-delayed career was one of the saddest results of this era’s inability to figure out its most promising pop figures—one that still feels like a loss. Her first and only record, Night Time is My Time (2013) sounds like a distillation of the era, and was produced almost entirely by Ariel Rechtshaid, who that same year helmed Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, much of Charli XCX’s debut True Romance, and the Haim sisters’ first record—all examples of indie-coded major-label acts trying to approach pop success from an alterna-pop vantage.

2013 also brought the first real examples of successful popstars finally capitalizing on this vague alternative sensibility: Lorde’s debut record Pure Heroine and Drake’s “Hold On We’ve Going On,” both of which still sound much more at home in alternative territory than they ever did alongside Imagine Dragons, Macklemore, the Lumineers, Katy Perry, or Bruno Mars—the most-played artists that year. I myself still have trouble believing something like Lorde’s “Team” (the first Top 10 hit clearly influenced by The Knife—coming exactly one decade after “Heartbeats”) came out the same year as “Thrift Shop.” That year also brought CHVRCHES’ wonderful “The Mother We Share,” Disclosure’s debut record Settle, and the accidental leak of several demos by the mysterious British producer Jai Paul. Not officially released until 2019, these rough tracks should have ushered in a new wave of their own. That didn’t happen, though more than a few great producers and singers since then have had a clear unspoken debt to Paul’s experiments.

Give a gift subscription

To listen to “Jasmine” or “BTSTU” now is to hear the Millennial alternative reconstituting itself again as genuine future-music: a mutant, genreless advance that could only have come from a fluid, internet-native producer. But then to listen to “Str8 Outta Mumbai” is to hear one of the most pathbreaking, original, and undeniable pop songs of the 21st century. In less than 3 minutes, Jai Paul crams together things never interlaced in a pop song before—earwormy vocal hooks, tablas, strafing arpeggiators, absurd noise-gates, percussion that sounds like a cash register. By the time the final verse gives way to that extraordinary Bollywood sample, he’s taken you through a series of sounds so new they still sound futuristic. I’m beginning to repeat myself. But still: this, too, should have changed the world.

2014 brought two of the greatest electronic-pop records of my lifetime, Caribou’s Our Love and Jessy Lanza’s Pull My Hair Back. It also brought the first real cresting wave of dreamy indie rock beginning to achieve its own kind of accessible pop. Perennially twee Canadians Alvvays put out “Archie, Marry Me,” a generational sing-a-long classic; Mac DeMarco released Salad Days, maybe the most outright pop record yet made by a tiny bedroom-based artist. In the years since then, that record’s “Chamber of Reflection” has gathered up more than a billion streams—just as songs by Tame Impala, Beach House, and many other once-alternative artists, whose haphazard viral success came years after their best work. Some R&B or hip-hop artists belonging in the same alternative stream—Frank Ocean, Tyler the Creator, FKA twigs—emerged eventually as genuinely popular artists on their own. Yet others like Solange, How to Dress Well, Ravyn Lenae, dvsn, Kelela, Kllo, and Nao, who all made excellent critically-praised records, never managed to do the same.

I’ve already mentioned how Pitchfork’s selling out to Condé Nast in 2015 eventually transformed its ability to argue for this music. Pitchfork had always been limited in how much contour and context it could give; by its middle years, it tended to get lost in criticizing microgenres and over-apologizing for its erstwhile snobbishness. But it could be a genuine champion for a lot of this music, premiering music videos and promoting certain smaller artists. Its move towards hosting and curating festivals in Chicago and Barcelona created one of the few actual venues where the shared vibe of so many disparate artists could be set on actual display. When I attended in 2014, the lineup included an ascendent Kendrick, Earl Sweatshirt, St. Vincent, pre-fame Grimes, Cloud Nothings, Real Estate, DIIV, Sharon Van Etten, Empress Of, tUne-yArDs, Danny Brown, SZA, Isaiah Rashad, FKA Twigs, Kelela, and others. It was hard not to feel that a widespread alternative to the mainstream (one that embraced indie rock bands, singer-songwriters, electronic musicians, and rappers alike) was on its way to being properly expressed.

Give a gift subscription

2015 and 2016 marked the high point of the wave. Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly were both watershed moments, transforming many audiences’ expectations that R&B and hip-hop could handle genuine and committed artists with highly specific visions, without losing popularity. Even more important to my eyes were songs like Thundercat’s “Them Changes,” Japanese Breakfast’s “Everybody Wants to Love You,” or Ravyn Lenae’s “Free Room”; records like Neon Indian’s VEGA Intl. Night School, KAYTRANADA’s 99.9%, Porches’ Pool, and Empress Of’s debut record Me. All of this was the kind of adventurous pop music a healthier era would have elevated to the top of the charts. Above all, there was Jamie xx’s first record, In Colour, which summed up the era, projecting a stadium-sized utopian vision of electronic music, pop, and hip-hop brought together in the warmest dance music I’ve ever heard. It’s still difficult for me to listen to the album without dreaming of that fantastical alternate past, where it might have poured out of every car, bar, and nightclub, soundtracking a generation. Difficult not to feel this past would have been much, much better than the one we actually got. Rose-tinted glasses, to be sure.

There were other artists who carried on some of this spirit and sound through to the end of the decade, particularly indie artists: Sharon Van Etten, Alex G, Angel Olsen, Men I Trust, Mitski, Soccer Mommy, Phoebe Bridgers, and The War on Drugs all released songs that could have been hits in a different world. Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek kept making great alternative pop, and still do. My favorite track from the later mid-decade was one by the bedroom-pop musician Melina Duterte (recording under the name Jay Som) whose 2017 song “Baybee” proved just what all this music was pointing towards. Duterte was a self-sufficient indie artist on a small indie label, recording every instrument on her own, in her own home. And yet she had none of the old oppositional underground ethos of former DIY punk days. Instead, she’d set about writing and recording an effortless, smooth, hook-filled, timeless pop song—in her own particular way. And it really is another of the great Millennial pop songs: sounds like no other era, like no other decade, and certainly nothing like whatever was going on in the charts. In the Millennial 120 Minutes of my mind, “Baybee” would have been on constant rotation, and young people all over would have been learning just what they’d been missing, as they nodded along to the newest miserable Ed Sheeran soundalike.

So: what to make of all this? Is it really possible to propose a canon—since it’s diffuse and difficult to tie together, based on anything more than a vibe, or a personal experience of the music? I don’t believe most of these artists consciously thought they were proposing an alternative pop vision. Mostly, they’d grown up on the internet, with very few boundaries between the genres and decades of music they encountered there, and ended up wanting to make music that combined all the things they loved best. A few blogs and sites and music critics understood what they were doing, and argued for them: almost none—least of all the avowed poptimists—seemed to recognize these artists constituted the actual great pop music of their time. And as the 2010s wore on, even those few blogs and sites and critics increasingly abandoned championing any upstart underground visions (along with the defense of any ideals of artistic authenticity whatsoever), and celebrated victorious artists who savvily exploited their stardom, commercial success, and popularity. We’re now somewhere near the breaking point of that process, with seemingly nowhere else to go.

Give a gift subscription

Still, I’m hardly the committed doom-monger I may appear to be. All throughout the Aughts and 2010s there was even more extraordinary music being made which didn’t fit into this loose vision of an alternate pop. There was tons of great hip-hop, experimental electronic music, folk, jazz, indie rock, etc. There’s still a stunning amount of great music being made in this decade, too: last year I encountered so many excellent new records, I didn’t quite know how to keep up. Almost none of those, however, reached sizable audiences, and remained far off from the kind of reach the biggest artists of our time have (though here I’ll admit I do feel that young pop phenoms like Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Olivias Dean and Rodrigo are an enormous improvement over the days of Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Adele, Sia, and the rest). We face the same problem today, but worse: there’s simply no way to get an alternative across to a big enough audience to matter, no mechanism for putting across any different vision of the possibilities of popular music in our time.

In my own haphazard way, I hope that trying to articulate what bound together so much of my generation’s truly classic music—which only occasionally got the chance to compete against monolithic pop brands—might redeem it from being totally elided into history. I think there’s a lesson in it: frequently, the biggest music is not the best, and the best lasting music of an era might be completely neglected, might in fact need to be argued for. In nearly all departments, Millennials have generally sold out or professionalized too soon to make much great art. We were given more than our fair share of the worst hit songs ever made by human beings, while collectively we’ve contributed precious little of lasting quality to the worlds of theater, film, classical music, fiction, poetry, or the visual arts. But one thing we did right was popular music. For the first time in the modern era, what was once a counter-culture actually articulated a better, deeper vision of popular culture, showing just what was lacking in the desiccated mainstream its generation was sleepwalking through. If there’s one thing that might be able to shift the trajectory of contemporary popular culture, even slightly, it might be the recognition that this really happened—we simply haven’t named it yet.

Give a gift subscription

Well, I propose that it happened, that there is an alternate canon, and this is something to build on. What’s necessary is to find a way to reach people again—crazy as that sounds—a project most music journalists seem to have little faith in anymore. Last year, Pitchfork ended its music festival for good; a few weeks ago the site itself went behind a paywall. It no longer considers itself important enough to be read by just anyone, let alone bearing responsibility towards any serious readership—it’s been absorbed into undifferentiated nothingness along with most of the internet. So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu. Perhaps whatever comes next to take its place can learn from its mistakes, and admit that while it got half the story right, it never went far enough, never fought for the best, or advocated any genuine alternative vision. The music had to do that on its own, even when there were only scattered groups of people to listen to it. It’s up to fools like us to make sure that never happens again.

—

Just give your friend or loved one a gift subscription already! They’ll love you for it!

Give a gift subscription

The Hinternet Foundation is a California-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity. Learn more about our programs here. Click below to make a tax-deductible donation!

Donate to the Hinternet Foundation

Share

Give a gift subscription

Give a gift subscription

Get 75% off for 1 year

Read more

Gerhard Richter is perhaps the greatest living painter. He is certainly the most versatile one, moving freely from astounding photorealism to grey monochrome, with several stops between these two extremes. He is also famously circumspect, deflecting questions about the meaning of his work with a flat insistence that it means nothing at all: this even as it weaves in its subject matter through many of the most momentous events of the 20th century —events Richter himself witnessed up close—, not least the Second World War and the bombing of Dresden. His claim is all the more implausible in light of what we know of his personal connection to many of his paintings’ human subjects: a beloved bipolar aunt sacrificed to Nazi eugenicism; a sinister gynecologist father-in-law who was himself, by remarkable coincidence, the immediate cause of this sacrifice; a pregnant nude wife descending a staircase; a daughter, Betty, who plainly shares in the essence of both the aunt and the wife. Often working from photographs, Richter’s paintings do not so much show us the photograph itself as the experience of looking at a photograph — of a loved one, of a hated one, of family living and dead and heavy with memory and trauma, receding into the past but still, always, defining the shape and the inescapable weight of the present.

Last November Ren, Justin, and Adina went to the massive retrospective of Richter’s seven-decade career, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton outside of Paris in the Bois de Boulogne. Ren hated the building, a Frank Gehry rush job that looks, he says, like an overturned yacht. Justin in turn hated the Florian von Donnersmark film, Werk ohne Autor [Never Look Away] (2018), that shows us a fictionalized version of Richter’s life, but with a narrative arc and an emotional tenor dictated entirely by Hollywood. Nonetheless, Ren and Justin agree on more or less everything else: that Richter’s greatest innovation comes in 1965, with the discovery of the photographic blur technique; that the color panels and monochromes are stunning too, but that it is impossible to make any sense of them independently of what we know of the entire range of his work; that the smear paintings of the 1980s and ‘90s reflect the cynicism of the art world’s increasing financialization in that same era; that the grey-scale paintings documenting the end of the Baader-Meinhof gang are powerful indeed; that the late-career Birkenau paintings are Richter’s greatest aesthetic failure and maybe even his greatest moral failure; and, again, that Gerhard Richter is perhaps the greatest living painter.

Ren prepared an exquisite presentation of more than sixty vivid slides, most of them reproductions of Richter’s work, and the discussion moves through them chronologically, from the early DDR work (which Richter has disowned), to the drawings of the most recent years (Richter, 94, is still active, but has retired from painting). Ren guides us through it all with his significant art-historical insight, anchored in Vermeer and Vélasquez, as knowledgeable as anyone who is not Richter can be about the deep sources of Richter’s work. Justin nods enthusiastically and tries to keep up.

The exhibit ends on March 2, which is to say tomorrow, so this virtual guided tour, initially conceived as something of an advertisement for the exhibit, will instead, most likely, unless you get moving this very instant, have to serve as a substitute for it instead. Not a bad consolation, in our strong opinion. —The Editors

Get 75% off for 1 year

Share

Share The Hinternet

The Hinternet Foundation is a California-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity. Learn more about our programs here. Click below to make a tax-deductible donation!

Donate to the Hinternet Foundation

Get 75% off for 1 year

The Hinternet Foundation is a California-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity. Learn more about our programs here. Click below to make a tax-deductible donation!

Donate to the Hinternet Foundation

1.

How far would you go to escape bad news? The answer for me was about 300 kilometers, by foot. And not just any walk, either, but a pilgrimage. The pilgrimage, if you’re Christian or living in Europe. The Camino de Santiago is a network of roads leading to Santiago de Compostella in northwest Spain, whose cathedral holds the relics of St. James the Apostle. Hundreds of thousands walk it every year, following in the footsteps of its medieval pilgrims, minus the poverty and hunger and dying along the way.

The bad news I was escaping was about my book manuscript. For months, I’ve been receiving a disheartening stream of rejections by agents. Finally, I’d given up and sent it directly to a few publishers willing to consider unagented manuscripts, where it would languish in slush piles. My confidence having taken a blow, I was anticipating rejections from them as well. Sitting around waiting for them wasn’t doing much for my mental health, so I thought: why not just go? A pilgrimage would be a good distraction and give me something new to write about. And who knows, it might even furnish me with a new perspective on life as a failed writer, at that point indistinguishable to me from a failed life. Living in Lisbon, the logistics were simple: if I took the Portuguese Coastal Route, I’d be back home in two weeks.

I discussed the plan with local friends. Most have already done the Camino and so have their next-door neighbor, their old high-school teacher and every member of their knitting circle. What they robbed me of in cool, they gave back in advice. I bought ear plugs, a sleeping bag liner, and good socks. I also watched movies and read books. The best-known movie about the Camino de Santiago is The Way (2010). It stars an aging Martin Sheen, walking the Camino with the ashes of his only son, who died on the same path. He’s joined by three pilgrims with issues of their own. They quibble and make up through such adventures as a near-robbery by a Gypsy kid, which leads to a Gypsy party, complete with a bonfire and fiddlers and sage advice from the kid’s father. It’s as cringe-inducing as every movie of healing and redemption you’ve ever seen. Needless to say, I cried.

Nothing prepared me, though, for the most famous literately depiction of the Camino de Santiago, The Pilgrimage by Brazilian writer Paulo Ceolho, of The Alchemist fame. I only skimmed it and, before you judge me, I defy you to read it word for word. I tried to evade even the skimming by asking ChatGPT for a summary and choice quotations, but it pulled some of those straight out of its ass. For example: “The simplest things in life are the most extraordinary.” Coelho’s actual words turned out to be far sillier.

The book is a fictionalized account of Coelho’s own Santiago pilgrimage, led by a mentor whose musings on life and love include “When you have an objective in your life [it] will turn out to be better or worse depending on the route you choose to reach it”; or the folksier “Miracles are very important, don’t you think?” Miracles do happen, attacks by talking dogs and whatnot. Coelho thinks what he’s looking for is a sword (don’t ask), but in reality he must find himself. Interspersed are spiritual exercises that beckon readers to join, for example: “Rise above and beyond the details of the problems that may be bothering you.” Coelho finally does and then insists that “the search for happiness is a personal search and not a model we can pass on to others.” What was all that for then? I wondered, having failed to rise above and beyond the problems bothering me.

I skimmed memoirs by other famous Camino walkers, such as Shirley MacLaine, who complains about a man staring at her braless breasts, and an unfunny bestseller by a German comedian that mysteriously increased the number of Camino walkers. I also skimmed memoirs from unfamous people published by vanity presses. I know because I’d gotten into the habit of checking where any book patently worse than my unpublished one was published. They weave through minor adventures like a painful blister, getting lost, wanting to give up but soldiering on — all about as exciting as your uncle’s 1980s vacation slide show.

The memoirs cautioned that you had to expect the unexpected and make yourself vulnerable, which sounded risky and unpleasant to me. As it was, I was hanging on by a thread. Vulnerability was supposed to lead to the transformation I sought for myself, but the lessons learned —to appreciate small things, to accept yourself— could easily have been picked up from a Hallmark card without walking a single step. Hell, they could’ve been picked up from Coelho’s book, or from a ChatGPT summary thereof.

Share

2.

You had to procure something called a “pilgrim passport”, and get it stamped at the pilgrim hostels along the way, if you wished to receive a credential at Santiago. I found out that such passports were available at the Lisbon cathedral, which suited my sensibilities better than the idiosyncratic mail-order alternative. When I got to the cathedral, I was directed to a booth selling religious trinkets. I proclaimed grandly that I wanted the pilgrim passport, as I was about to embark on a pilgrimage. Barely raising her eyes from her phone, the saleswoman said, “two euros.” It gave me my first inkling that I would not, in fact, be the pilgrimage’s main character.

I took a bus to Porto, spent the day with a local friend, and set out early the next morning. The trail was set with wooden planks at first, snaking through a picturesque landscape. There were trail signs with explanations on biodiversity that I lacked the patience to read. The air was fresh, the day bright, and locals greeted me with a handwave and a bom caminho. I was all but skipping, pausing only to send photos to family and friends and to post quips on Twitter, having promised to live-tweet my pilgrimage. A friend wrote “that’s the happiest I’ve ever seen you near a beach.” Another commented that I was off to an early start, to which I replied: “That’s how I win.”

A few hours in, it grew notably less fun. My shoulders ached and my back and legs grew sore. I thought everything in my backpack was indispensable when I packed it, but now more and more of its contents seemed highly dispensable. I forwent my favorite snacks, but I still made some rookie mistakes. The sunscreen was one: thinking I’d need a lot of it, I bought a family pack. People snickered at its size every time I pulled it out. When I offered to share, one person said, “You’d like that wouldn’t you.” The condoms, too, remained unused, but they didn’t weigh as much, except on my ego.

At the first pilgrim hostel, I spent a long time talking with an outgoing American walking with his reserved son. It was something “spiritual, ya know?” that they could do together before the kid went off to college. Then there was a Canadian couple that shuddered when I asked them if they were also from the USA. There were also lifelong friends from the UK who had been through so much together —studies, marriage, the birth of their children, the empty nest— that they wanted to share this, too. One of them was under the weather and I offered her ibuprofen from my stash. “Oh, I would never put that poison inside my body,” she said, “but that’s very kind, thank you.”

Early the next morning, as I prepared to head off, a Ukrainian woman I’d also talked to the previous day climbed out of bed. I asked if she wanted me to wait for her and she said no, she would have breakfast first but maybe we’ll see each other on the way? Sure, I thought, if you sprint and I die. I did see her on the way. It was after I got lost trying to track down a coffee shop that turned out to be closed and spent over an hour backtracking.

The Camino paths are well marked, and you can also track your progress on the “Pilgrim Ninja” app, as pilgrims across the centuries have done. But the people who claim that you cannot get lost on the Camino de Santiago have never met me. I have, in fact, gotten lost on multiple occasions, for example when walking right up to a bright yellow arrow pointing left and then turning right because of a condition I have whereby I don’t see things that interfere with the scenarios in my mind.

On that second day of walking, I developed a limp. It caught me by surprise, but I knew what set it off. When I was nineteen, I toured some caves with a group. You had to jump to get through one of them, and I, with my fear of heights and general cowardice, volunteered to go first and smashed my right foot. Not wanting to make a fuss, I agreed that we should go see a lookout next. By the time I got to the hospital, my foot was so swollen they had to wait a few days before fastening the dislocated bones with screws. In the end there were no lasting effects, and I had long put the incident behind me. But the foot must have been retraumatized on the Camino. It swelled and sent little jolts of pain whenever I stepped on it.

A German named Dirk was already there when I arrived at the next hostel shortly before the 2pm opening time. He’d been walking for a couple of weeks already, from the South of Portugal. When I told Dirk this was my second day on the pilgrimage, he regarded me with a look I couldn’t make out. It would come into focus only later, after seeing it repeatedly: the serious pilgrim’s scorn for the slacker counterpart. I found it comic until about ten days into the pilgrimage, when I saw people who started walking a day earlier from a place so close to Santiago they may as well have been parachuted down to the cathedral. I and the woman I was walking with commented on their fresh clothes and tiny little backpacks with hyperbolic disdain.

Since Dirk was so seasoned, I asked him if a hostel was ever full when he got there. Public pilgrim hostels are first-come first-serve, and are known to fill to capacity. It was a nagging concern for me and one of the reasons I set out at daybreak. No, Dirk said: he was cautious and always arrived before the opening time. He showed off his log listing every place he stayed with precise arrival and departure times (“I like zingz organized”). I found it only a little bit ridiculous. The fact is that people like Dirk and I would be guaranteed a spot and get to choose our beds, while loser pilgrims had to settle for top bunks.

I walked the standard twenty-some kilometers per day, sometimes with others but, as my limp slowed me down, mostly alone. I didn’t mind as there were always people to chat with while slumping on rocks or fueling up at coffee shops. Early afternoons at the hostels, a shower and then food, either in the hostel kitchen or, after crossing the border to Spain, a sumptuous set-menu lunch at a local restaurant. Evenings, I spent at the hostel communal space, online or chatting with whoever was there. Then, early to bed: lights were out by 10pm and the chorus of snoring and farting began.

There were few amenities on the Camino and no privacy at all. Clothes were handwashed, toilets and showers shared, and sleeping was in dorm rooms on plastic mattresses. Outdoors it was raining or sweltering, indoors loud and stinky, the body tired and sore. And I had a blast. I say this as a set-in-her-ways homebody with no attraction to nature and limited social batteries. Still, I was happy on the pilgrimage every day. Downright chipper, humming tunes and cracking jokes.

Share The Hinternet

3.

It did me good to distract myself from my manuscript, but there was more to it than that. The very act of walking towards a destination —which is all a pilgrimage boils down to— was salutary. You wake up in the morning and you have one job. You’re always making linear, measurable progress. It may not be easy on your body, but you don’t want it to be. Whatever your reasons for doing a pilgrimage, if you’re expending unremitting physical effort, it has to be meaningful somehow. Each day is a challenge met with its little celebrations and preparation for the next day’s walk. I had no problem imagining Sisyphus happy.

The limp, too, made me the object of attention, of which I cannot get enough. Are you okay? Can I help? I was offered painkillers and other remedies. A Dutch guy suggested sheep’s wool, and I agreed just to see what would come out of his backpack. Turns out he meant actual sheep’s wool. He tore out a piece to place against a pressure point and, lo and behold, it did nothing for the pain. A French woman found me a branch to use as a walking stick. It was huge and gnarly and twisted, making me look like an evil pilgrim on her way to worship Satan. I tossed it after she disappeared because I needed my hand for that far more important crutch — my phone. Many praised me for pushing through the pain, which I accepted with proper humility. Then, a few days in, I was upstaged by a pilgrim with a prosthetic leg. I never saw him, but I heard about him plenty. Him again, I muttered every time he was mentioned.

About halfway through the pilgrimage, it struck me that I still hadn’t discovered a new perspective on life. All I had were my problematic old ones. I needed to be more deliberate about it. As I set off the next morning, I was laser-focused on my predicament. My book might never get published. Could I live with that? No, no, I would die. But, okay, probably? If it came to that, though, how would I distinguish myself? As my aching foot reminded me, I was as needy now as I was at nineteen, jumping in a cave and suppressing the pain for everyone to see. Or maybe I could become one of those self-validating people, instead. How, though?

A couple of days later I met exactly one of those people: a thirty-something seminarian from the Midwest named Kyle. I’d never met a seminarian before, and I had questions. I swear they were more than just about taking the vow of celibacy (not a problem: he believed in love shared with God and the community). How he decided to become a priest was one. He heard the call when he was thirteen, he said, but resisted it: nothing in his upbringing would have led him to it. His parents were opposed, as was everyone else in his life. To please them, he went to medical school, then dropped out as the call grew louder. Now it was strong enough that he no longer needed anyone’s approval. He knew he was on the right path.

“But are you 100 percent sure?” I asked, because I’m never that sure about anything. He was. I said I was jealous and shared my publishing woes. Kyle said he knew how I felt but proved otherwise by adding that if I was meant to be a writer, I would write no matter what. My distress wasn’t about writing, though. It was about publishing, wishing to inhabit that larger and more interesting world of published writers. Not being admitted to it felt like limping along a well-trodden path whose protagonist was a guy with a prosthesis. I could hardly say all this to redeemed, needing-no-one’s-approval Kyle, though.

Get 75% off for 1 year

4.

I read a beautiful essay in preparation for the pilgrimage by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, about the pilgrim as a symbol of modernity. In contrast to the experience-seeking tourist, the pilgrim is a pursuer of truth and constructor of identity. And since truth and identity always resided elsewhere —projects whose realization required ongoing effort— the person who sought them had to walk and then walk some more. For Bauman, the pilgrimage was an oblique assertion of our inadequacy and incompleteness, a projection into the future of a protean and ever-unfulfilled ideal self.

But if that were so, wouldn’t you need milestones indicating that you were on the right path — in case, I don’t know, you strayed for coffee or were too self-absorbed to spot an arrow? God knows I meandered plenty. Since He wouldn’t disclose my destiny to me as He had for Kyle, I relied for guidance on family and friends, on my colleagues and parasocials, and on people who didn’t know me yet but maybe one day would, if I ever had something to show for myself.

In the beginning of the pilgrimage, I took pictures and shared them, but they’d grown too tedious even for my family’s WhatsApp group. Then I saw a woman taking pictures of the coastline and I asked her if she wasn’t sick of it already (the Coastal Route is called that for a reason). She said: “No, and I live on an Island!” She meant one of Portugal’s Azores. She introduced herself as María. “In Portugal, when in doubt about a woman’s name, just say María and you’ll almost always be right.” She was walking alone after chucking a group with an overbearing leader. Alone was definitely the way to go, but she might repeat the pilgrimage next year with her two adult sons, “because they do as they’re told.” I wrote all this down after we parted ways, as I had with every amusing conversational snippet.

One morning I met Miguel from Mexico. I asked if I could join him because it was still dark out and he had a headlamp. He said yes and then proceeded to get us both lost (he didn’t notice the arrow, and I did this little thing I do when I’m with other people, namely cede all responsibility to them). As we backtracked, I confessed that I’d used Google Maps the other day to shorten the route and he didn’t judge me. Miguel had been walking since Lisbon and met a bunch of evangelicals on the way. He said the Camino was like Christian Tinder for them. This rang true to me: I’d also shared a coffee-shop table with one who was walking with a sexy tattooed lady he met on the way. He said they’d been up half the night because of a loud snorer at their hostel who’d got people so crazed that they were trying to shush him from the other end of the room. I shared the story with Miguel, who said: “oh, the snorer,” like this was a celebrity.

I also walked for a stretch with an American whose Camino app glitched. “It keeps telling me I’m in the wrong place,” he said, and showed me the screen. He was right — the app showed him so punitively far off the trail that I suggested he searched his soul. He was the only one I could keep pace with at that point, only because he paused so frequently to take pictures and make videos. While we stopped for coffee, he showed me the videos he took of his latest trip. I was eager to get going again but there were still more of them. “Don’t worry, I won’t bore you much longer,” he assured me. I’m nothing if not agreeable so I said: “Don’t be silly.”

One morning I caught up with a 20-year-old Briton whose fish tattoo I had admired a couple of days earlier. She told me that her mother hated it, which made me fear she pegged me as being of her mother’s generation. I probably was, but I didn’t like her thinking it. When we met again, we spoke about blisters. I know I’d mentioned that they were boring to read about in the memoirs but here’s the thing about blisters: when you have them yourself, they’re a fascinating topic of conversation. She said a woman at her hostel had cut her pilgrimage short and flew back home because her blisters got infected. “Ugh, if that happened to me, I wouldn’t tell anyone,” I said. “I know, right?” she said. “Cringe.”

A Korean woman had been walking for sixty-six days when I met her at a hostel. She started in Switzerland, had already been to Santiago and was now walking down to Lisbon. She was a bundle of energy and told anyone who cared to listen that it was thanks to fresh fruit. She loved fruit and it was so much cheaper in Europe than in Korea. Every day she bought a load of it, all different kinds, and ate it on the way.

The next morning I started walking with an Italian named Francesca, who turned herself into the most popular pilgrim on our route by randomly distributing Kinder chocolates. Whenever she was not around, people would ask, “Where’s Francesca? Has anyone seen Francesca?” Francesca told me she heard a noise from the bathroom early that morning. She went to check and saw the Korean lady vomiting her guts out. We snorted: all that fruit!

My arrival at Santiago would have been anticlimactic had I not already read so much about it being anticlimactic that I was expecting zero climax. The hostel here was better, as I was to share a room with two people I already knew: Kyle the seminarian and Miguel from Mexico. Kyle said there’d be a special mass for pilgrims at the cathedral that afternoon. After a shower and food, Miguel and I went to check it out, but stayed for all of five minutes because it was boring. Then, over drinks, Miguel told me about his recent personal crisis. He was doing online therapy twice a week now, even during the Camino. He connected with his inner child and it changed everything: he was nowhere near as insecure and needy as he used to be.

He also had a different pilgrimage experience than I did, having laughed and cried almost every day. It made me feel like I’d missed out, never having been nearly so overcome by emotion while walking. “Because you weren’t really looking for it,” Miguel said. “You can’t both have the emotional intensity and stay inside your comfort zone.” He was teasing me after I said therapy wasn’t for me, as it would force me out of my comfort zone, which I like on account of the comfort. He said he couldn’t understand how I could write a whole-ass book without digging deeper inside myself.

Share

5.

I told Miguel that my book was supposed to be funny, and he saw right through it. Not leaning into pain was a mistake, he said. I might get a laugh, but then people would move on to the next joke and remember nothing. Comedy was a defense, it’s also what kept me from discovering precisely the new perspective I was after. All I’d gained was a two-week respite. I would return home as needy as I was when I left. I suspected he was right, though I’ve never been unaware that things could get worse. Better funny and needy, I felt, than serious and miserable.

The next morning, I filled out the details of my trip and waited in line at the pilgrim’s office. Finally, a clerk checked my pilgrim passport, now full of stamps, and then handed me my pilgrim credential. I thanked her and paused with an ear-to-ear grin until she clapped good-naturedly. Before I left, I had someone take my picture to share with family and friends and to post online.

The plaza in front of the cathedral was full of pilgrims, and I spent the next hour eavesdropping on their conversations. A few compared routes. “Oh, so you were taking it easy,” said one to another who clearly didn’t think he was. Two women spoke about how their walking shoes had been too small and they had to buy new ones on the way. They showed each other the bruises on their heels like Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters. One man was giving his family a blow-by-blow account of his walk. I stopped listening when I realized it was going to be longer than the actual pilgrimage. A couple of pilgrims had just arrived, sweaty and dusty. Pausing to observe the cathedral, one of them asked if they should go inside. “Nah, fuck that” said the other.

Then I saw Kyle. He was on his way to a debriefing for newly arrived pilgrims, and I asked if I could tag along. We arrived just as people pulled up chairs in a circle. They shared their experiences in the kind of religious language I hadn’t heard at all during the walk. Kyle must have been in his element because when his turn came, he spoke with unusual confidence. He was lonesome at first, he said. Everyone but him was walking away from something rather than towards something. He was walking for people he knew but found the responsibility daunting, given the lives those people led. Then he prayed on it and realized that all he could do was offer himself to God on their behalf.

I slipped out after the debriefing to avoid him. I liked him so much the first time we met, when he was normal and self-effacing, but this! Was this where not being needy got you? God might make you more secure but at least insecurity forced you to pay attention to people who could alert you when you went off the deep end.

Miguel was at the hostel when I returned to pick up my backpack. I told him I had received my pilgrim credential that morning and that it was fun; the clerk had clapped for me. “No one clapped when I picked mine up,” Miguel exclaimed. “Because you weren’t really looking for it,” I shrugged.

While waiting for the bus back to Lisbon, I spent quality time on my phone, going over the likes and congratulations for completing my pilgrimage. I knew rejections were forthcoming too, and I failed to gain insight as to how to handle them. Still, at that moment, I fully appreciated the small things. I pulled out my notebook and pen. Returning home as I’d left it also meant returning to comedy, defensive as the impulse surely was. “I’ve risen above and beyond the details of my problems,” I wrote. “Don’t ask me how though. The search for happiness is a personal search and not a model we can pass on to others.”

Get 75% off for 1 year

The Hinternet Foundation is a California-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity. Learn more about our programs here. Click below to make a tax-deductible donation!

Donate to the Hinternet Foundation

Get 75% off for 1 year

Get 75% off for 1 year

Read more

Share

Read more

As some readers will already know, last year a number of us here at The Hinternet, along with a host of incredibly talented others, were busy laying the groundwork for the Hinternet Foundation, a California based 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit. At the tail-end of 2025, with all the paperwork completed and signed and stamped, the Foundation was officially born. We are now open for business, and very eager to share some news about the year ahead.

Before we proceed with that, you may wish to peruse the website, and, if you like what you see, to click over to the “Donate” page.

Donate to the Hinternet Foundation

Now to the news, beginning with a note on the relationship between the two projects currently operating under the name of “Hinternet”. From the beginning, we have conceived the Hinternet Foundation as a grown-up, sober, and responsible counterpart to the Hinternet publication. Such a “double mouvement” is really not so unusual, historically speaking — think of André Malraux, who was no less at home writing formally audacious modernist novels than he was heading up government ministries, or of so many of the members of the Surrealist and Situationist movements, who delighted in confusing people, but also knew how to be clear and programmatic when that was what circumstances required.

There is no legal or financial overlap between the two operations, but they bear the same name, involve many of the same people, and, most importantly, they care about the same things. The Hinternet manifests its care in play; the Hinternet Foundation in work.1 The spirit of The Hinternet is anarchic and youthful and often cagey; the spirit of the Hinternet Foundation is disciplined and always forthright about its objectives and aims.

Those objectives and aims are however the same on both sides of the operation. Both are concerned, namely, as the official Mission of the Foundation has it, to steward human creativity into a machine-driven future. We are concerned, in particular, to find ways to ensure that the centuries-long, glorious tradition of humanistic inquiry should continue to have a place in a world that for better or worse is increasingly shaped by values and priorities different from, and often hostile too, what humanists have always held dear — the autonomy of the human spirit, the irreducible and unquantifiable wonder of subjective experience, and the inalienable right of all human beings to the exercise and cultivation of the faculty of the imagination, and to its free expression in something like what Friedrich Schiller called the play-drive.

We conceive humanistic tradition in an expansive way, not as a positive science but as a form of life, not as a data-driven, frantic quest for “research results”, but as a fundamentally creative endeavor. To this extent the creative arts —literature, most intimately, at the outset, but music, film, dance, too— are as central to our concerns as the survival of humanistic scholarship more narrowly conceived (we would say “traditionally conceived”, but in fact positivism in the humanities is a very recent invention, of the late 19th century, and, we hope and expect, will ultimately turn out to have been a historical aberration).

We believe there has never been a moment in history more ripe for the proliferation of new communities and institutions of what might be called “para-academic inquiry”. There are already many out there that we think of as our friends, peers, and inspiration (the Strother School of Radical Attention, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, to name a couple). Many people involved with the Hinternet Foundation are academics, and we all love universities. But we also weep for them, and we believe that in addition to efforts at reform from within, the current state of education positively requires external pressure on the universities, demonstrating to them a model of inquiry that they have themselves patently failed to uphold.

For especially as regards the humanities, the universities are failing; more tragically, taking that same verb as transitive, they are failing their students. We have encountered fourth-year philosophy majors who cannot tell us the name of a single philosopher. We have encountered film-studies majors who not only cannot read the canonical works of film theory or criticism, but cannot even sit through a feature-length film. None of this is the students’ fault. It is the fault of administratively bloated institutions that have so lost their way as to be unable effectively to communicate to young people what the value of an education is — what, in other words, they are even doing there.

Much of this failure may be traced to the bulldozing effect of our new technologies, and of the profit-model behind them, which have effectively insinuated themselves into and corroded every domain of human social life over the past few decades. We consider however that it is a fool’s errand to attempt to return to Plato’s grove, as at least some new para-academic initiatives are doing, to insist that tech must be left at the door in order for any real learning to occur. While of course there is a time and a place for imposing a “no gadgets” rule, structured learning has always itself been a technology, in the sense of a technē, and has almost always made use of external prostheses. Books themselves are gadgets, in some broad sense. They come with a particular contingent history of preeminence in human culture, and with absolutely no guarantee that this preeminence must or should continue indefinitely into the future. We must be vigilant, lest our completely understandable reverence for them degrade into a fetish.

We are of course free to remain bibliophiles, just as we are free to play in baroque chamber orchestras on period instruments. But this is not what is going to save the humanistic tradition. In order for that to have any hope of happening, what is needed is serious, sustained, collective reflection on what sort of place the humanistic tradition can have in our present age, in serious and sober recognition of the radical transformations currently underway in our millennia-old technologies and habits of literacy, and in recognition of what is by now the obvious inability of universities to do the hard work of stewarding humanism through these great upheavals.

Donate to the Hinternet Foundation

2. Hinternet Foundation 2026 Programming

When you peruse the Hinternet Foundation website, you will find several different yet plainly interrelated projects that we intend to pursue as part of the ongoing fulfillment of our Mission. We are learning, as we go, the importance of starting small, and building gradually. With this in mind, in 2026 we will be actively pursuing three of the projects in particular. Some of them may be of interest to you as a potential participant or contributor. Whether or not that is so, we hope you will help us to get the word out about the work we are doing.

Share

Hinternet Foundation Annual Summer School — “Whither the Humanities?” For our inaugural summer school, which will take place online in August, we will be adopting the approach of a “working group”, focused on the challenges, opportunities, and prospects for humanistic inquiry in the coming years (say, what remains of the 21st century). We are interested in maintaining a high-level reflection on what the humanities have traditionally been, what human needs they satisfy, and where their particular oversights and failures have been — all with an eye to finding a way forward for them. Our engagement with the issue will be theoretical and practical at once, with readings as diverse and wide-ranging in time and in focus as Erasmus, Friedrich Schiller, and Gillian Rose. A number of the sessions will include invited guest speakers. This summer school will serve as the “starter yeast”, so to speak, for the monthly working group that will be launched early in 2027, and that will aim to make significant interventions in policy and public life. Some participants in the summer school will be encouraged to stay on for the working group as well. Participation in the summer school is limited to ten people, and the cost of participation is $400 USD. Those interested in participating should send us, no later than April 15, 2026, a 1-2 page statement outlining their personal and intellectual reasons for wishing to join us. Decisions will be announced in mid-May, at which time we will also be providing a more detailed program of dates, readings, and themes.

Hinternet Foundation Fall Course Offerings. Why take a non-credit course from an unaccredited institution? The evidence is abundant that many people find this a perfectly worthwhile thing to do — for the love of learning itself, and for the opportunity to meet others with similar interests. And even if we are speaking practically, the simple truth is that doing such a thing, even if no transcript comes out of it, can lead to all sorts of new opportunities, intellectual, creative, and even financial. We are not convinced, in fact, that the practical benefit of any non-credit course from a para-academic institution is less than that of any traditional institution. We are convinced, moreover, that the presumption of such manifestly greater utility will continue to decline in the future. With all this in mind, we would like to propose at least 2, and perhaps 3, distinct course offerings, each beginning in mid-September and extending into early December. The price for participation is $200 per course, and we will be capping participation at 15 people per course. One of these courses will be similar to the summer school in scope and purpose, led by Justin Smith-Ruiu, with details to be worked out in the next months. The 1 or 2 other courses will be taught by suitable experts. So, to all you suitable experts out there, this is a call: we would like to see course proposals! These should be focused on whatever topic you know you can bring to life, you know, that thing that is such an intimate part of you that you just can’t help infecting other people with your love of it. The topic can be narrow, but it must be deep, and it must be the sort of thing that can tell us at least something, from some angle or other, about the human condition. Moby-Dick? Byzantine heresies? The Fashion System? Salic law? The Bhagavad Gita? The Qu’ran? The history of animal domestication? It’s all good, in principle! Just send us a course proposal, along with a brief statement explaining who you are and how you got where you are. There are no formal background requirements, though we encourage you to apply especially if you are one of those young Ph.D.s for whom, alas, the academy failed to make room. Their loss! Course leaders will be paid $2500 for their efforts.

Hinternet Foundation Annual Summit. In mid-to-late November, 2026, we will be hosting our Annual Summit, which serves as an occasion to bring to the public a high-level, engaging discussion of the ideas and problems that animate our work. The event will take place in Paris. Blaise Agüera y Arcas —Hinternet Foundation Board Member, AI researcher, and intelligence theorist—, is among the confirmed speakers. Dates, venue, and full program will be announced by early April.

Donate to the Hinternet Foundation

3. Other Projects

We are putting what follows in a residual “Other” category because we are not entirely certain, yet, what side of the boundary between The Hinternet and the Hinternet Foundation it will fall on (and indeed it might end up straddling the boundary), but, beginning in early 2027, we will be publishing the first fruits of our very small, very boutique imprint, Hinternet Editions. The Editorial Committee of our publishing wing is made up entirely by the Associate Editors on the Masthead of The Hinternet. Our Spring 2027 catalogue will include no more than three titles. One of these will be a collection, adapted for the print medium, of some of the best essays and experiments that have appeared here at The Hinternet (and that are now of course mostly behind a paywall). Another will be a remarkable tour de force of, let us say, imaginative philology, by the very talented Alistair Ian Blyth. We would like to publish one more title, in any genre, by any author, just so long as it is very, very good. Submissions may be sent to editor@the-hinternet.com. We’re very eager to see what comes in, but please do think hard, and move slowly, before clicking “Send”.

4. Varia

We are probably blurring the line between the Foundation and the publication already too much by including this decidedly non-Foundation-related “Varia” section in the same missive as the rest, but efficiency is also a priority for us, so:

A new batch of Hinternet t-shirts have finally gone out, and we have received confirmation of arrival, in Los Angeles, from at least one of the recipients. If you are waiting “overseas”, please hold tight just a bit longer.

We have a developing project that will require an experienced illustrator, working broadly in the graphic-novel idiom. If that’s you, please be in touch (editor@the-hinternet.com).

—

The Hinternet Foundation is a California-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity. All donations are tax deductible. Click below to support our programs!

Donate to the Hinternet Foundation

« J’aime tout ce qui coule », écrivait Henry Miller, avant de recourir à une métaphore graphique — et finalement misogyne — pour appuyer son propos. Parmi les choses qui coulent, il faut assurément compter l’écriture de la romancière belge Daphné Tamage (voir notamment son roman récent, Le retour de Saturne, que nous adorons). De son propre aveu, la sensibilité littéraire de Daphné a été profondément façonnée par Miller, aux côtés de John Fante et d’autres représentants américains du milieu du XXᵉ siècle de ce qu’on appelle parfois le « dirty realism ». Que signifie communier avec ces mauvais garçons — ou avec leurs fantômes — quand on est européenne, femme, fille d’un père d’une telle rare douceur ? Pourquoi les poursuivre, après tant d’années, à travers tant de distance, géographique comme tempéramentale ? Laissons Daphné répondre elle-même, dans cette réflexion poignante sur son récent pèlerinage littéraire en Californie, son papa juché sur le siège passager comme le Charley de Steinbeck. — Les Éditeurs

Read in English

Subscribe now

« Un jour, je deviendrais une légende de la mythologie crustacée. » —John Fante, La Route de Los Angeles

Juste avant la réélection de Mr. T., j’ai trainé mon pauvre père de San Francisco à Los Angeles en passant par Carmel, Big Sur et Cambria : l’idée était de descendre la Highway 1 en une dizaine de jours pour visiter les incontournables. Dans le souci d’épargner à mon père apiculteur une violence citadine à laquelle il était notoirement impréparé, j’ai décidé que nous dormirions, une fois arrivés à L.A., sur les hauteurs de Topanga Canyon. Plus honnêtement, mon but était de me trouver à mi-chemin entre Pacific Palisades et Point Dume, où s’étaient établis mes deux indétrônables héros de jeunesse : Henry Miller et John Fante. Héros ? Il s’agissait en fait – et c’était pire, dans un sens – de mes modèles, mentors, qui allaient, plus tard et dans une improbable filiation, donner une sorte de forme prémâchée à mon écriture et une direction à ma niaque. Je devais donc un paquet de choses à ces deux auteurs ambivalents, autocentrés, mégalomanes et tout à fait contestables. Des hommes, de surcroît.

En arrivant sur le promontoire de Point Dume, le ventre plein à craquer de clam chowder du Malibu Seafood, papa s’est affolé de voir des pancartes « Armed Security » ornées d’un pistolet noir sur fond blanc et plantées dans tous les gazons taillés à ras de Cliffside Drive.

—Chérichou, je ne me sens pas très à l’aise ici, a dit mon père en ralentissant, alors que je cherchais des yeux une place de parking.

—Ce n’est pas un quartier privé, papa, on a le droit d’être là.

—Je ne le sens pas. Et je croyais que ton écrivain était pauvre, a-t-il ajouté en désignant une propriété cossue.

—Il a été pauvre, mais il a travaillé pour Hollywood et il est devenu riche. C’est le concept du rêve américain : partir de rien et atterrir ici.

Après un temps de réflexion, papa a demandé :

—Mais pourquoi tu veux voir sa maison ?

—Parce que c’est un génie.

—Son génie est dans ses livres, non ?

—Je n’en sais rien. Peut-être que j’ai besoin qu’il sache que je suis venue jusqu’à lui. Peut-être que son âme est restée à Point Dume.

Une petite voix me disait que l’âme de John Fante rodait plutôt sur le terrain de golf d’à côté, chez Musso & Frank ou, plus probablement, au casino.

—Et tu crois qu’il en a quelque chose à faire, que tu cherches son âme ?

—Affirmatif.

Share The Hinternet

Mon père, pour qui les écrivains étaient des gens troublés, mais qui m’avait promis ce voyage depuis quinze ans en le reportant sans cesse, n’a pas moufté est a obéi à mon désir de faire le tour du quartier. Après avoir tourné trois fois dans Point Dume à la recherche d’une place de parking, il sérieusement craint qu’on nous prenne pour des voleurs et qu’un propriétaire zélé finisse par appeler son onéreuse sécurité privée. Je lui ai fait signe de laisser tomber, et je n’ai pas insisté pour nous arrêter chez Joan Didion, détour qui aurait définitivement achevé papa. J’ai tout de même demandé, avant de rejoindre les oiseaux et la nature sauvage de Topanga, de faire un détour par le 444 Ocampo Drive, en guise d’hommage à Henry Miller. C’était juste avant les incendies, le quartier était fadasse et propret, mais j’ai été émue de voir que les deux arbres reconnaissables sur les photos d’antan s’épanouissaient toujours contre la façade. Papa a pris une photo de moi devant la maison et nous sommes partis.

Mon plan initial était sensiblement plus ambitieux qu’un rodage dans deux quartiers d’un ennui mortel : il s’agissait en fait de trainer mon pauvre père jusqu’au port de Long Beach dans le but de trouver la plage de ladite « scène des crabes » de La Route de Los Angeles. Mais mon père s’était indigné, la veille, de voir que des gens dormaient par terre entre Marina del Rey et Venice. Il ne comprenait pas comment « c’était possible que personne ne fasse rien pour eux », « comment on pouvait laisser les gens mourir sur la plage », « comment c’était possible de vivre dans ces maisons si chères qui bordent les canaux (faux, en plus), et de savoir que des éclopés perdent leur vie à quelques mètres de leur jardin à arrosages automatiques », etc. J’ai répondu que je n’en savais rien, que les États-Unis avaient leur façon à eux de faire le tri entre les êtres humains, et que ce tri s’opérait en fonction de leur portefeuille, mais que nous n’étions pas forcément meilleurs chez nous même si, il fallait l’avouer, le contraste entre le luxe et la misère, à Los Angeles, était particulièrement sinistre.

J’ai donc raboté mes plans de la soirée, et nous avons pris la route de Topanga. Mon père en a été instantanément ragaillardit et j’ai dit adieu, dans ma tête, à l’idée de grimper jusqu’à Bunker Hill le lendemain matin. Nous irions voir les vieux escaliers d’Hollywoodland et l’Observatoire. Là-bas, tout irait bien. En attendant, nous étions coincés dans les embouteillages.

—Pourquoi tu voulais voir ce port en particulier ? a soudain demandé papa.

—Une scène mythique s’y déroule dans La Route de Los Angeles. Le double littéraire de John Fante, Arturo Bandini, massacre des crabes sur une plage de rochers.

—Mon père, qui aimait les animaux, a blêmi.

—Tu voulais te rendre sur les lieux d’un massacre ?

—Un massacre imaginaire, papa. Il n’a pas vraiment tué ces crabes.

—Tu veux voir un lieu où quelqu’un a écrit qu’il a tué des crabes mais où, en vérité, il n’a pas tué de crabes ?

—J’ai hoché la tête.

—Et pourquoi c’est important ? Enfin, le Hearst Castle, j’ai compris pourquoi tu voulais le visiter, même si... Enfin, je ne dis pas, le lieu est impressionnant, le type y a vécu et tout, puis Rosebud, blablabla. Mais une tuerie imaginaire, Chérichou, sérieusement ?

Subscribe now

Nous sommes restés silencieux, lui se disant qu’il avait décidément du mal à comprendre la fille qu’il avait mise au monde, moi à me poser une question de premier ordre : pourquoi, de tous temps, les écrivains faisaient-ils des pèlerinages sur les traces d’autres écrivains ? D’où venait cette tradition que nous perpétuions malgré nous ? Et surtout : pourquoi la perpétrions-nous vainement ? Est-ce que l’âme de Fante était venue parler à mon âme à Point Dume ? Et celle de Miller à Pacific Palisades ? Non, aucune n’était venue. La seule chose qui venait à moi, en ce moment, était les relents du pot d’échappement d’en face.

—Je crois, j’ai fini par dire, que la colère délirante de cette scène nous habite tous. Fante, qui a 21 ans à l’époque où il l’écrit, veut devenir le plus grand écrivain américain de sa génération, et se laisse aller à cette violence. Il a lu Nietzsche, nous sommes dans les troubles de l’entre-deux-guerres, il délire complètement. Et même si c’est tout à fait discutable, quand tu as le même âge et que tu lis ça…

—Tu as envie de massacrer des crabes ?

—De devenir écrivain. Parce que cette liberté qu’il s’accorde est tellement inouïe, son débordement si tonitruant en toi, que tu pressens que l’écriture offre une sorte d’ivresse inatteignable autrement que par l’écriture, et qu’elle ne se transmet que par la lecture.

—Et tu l’as atteinte, cette fameuse ivresse, en devenant romancière ?

—J’ai fait non de la tête alors que nous zigzaguions dans le canyon.

—Mais je la pressens, j’ai ajouté.

—Et ça suffit pour bâtir une œuvre ? Un pressentiment ?

—Ces sept pages de pure colère ont été assez fortes pour que je m’en souvienne encore avec précision dix ans plus tard. Je me dis que si je travaille assez dur, ce pressentiment, ou cette prescience d’une forme de joie, peut se transmettre comme une lanterne et éclairer n’importe qui, n’importe où dans le monde. C’est la force de la littérature, et celle de la traduction.

Mon père a haussé les épaules.

—Je ne comprends toujours pas comment tu peux prendre plaisir à lire un type qui tire à la carabine sur des crustacés.

—C’est la puissance de son imaginaire que j’admire, papa, pas son acte. Tu comprends quand même que l’autoportrait déformé de Van Gogh est une vision du peintre sur lui-même, et non pas la réalité ?

—Bien sûr, Chérichou, je ne suis pas débile. Ce que j’aimerais comprendre, c’est pourquoi tu veux te rendre dans un lieu où il ne s’est rien passé en dehors de ce livre ?

—Parce que Bandini qui dézingue des crabes, c’est mythique. Pourquoi des gens dépensent des fortunes pour des croisières qui les déposent sur l’île d’Ithaque où il n’y a rien, papa ? Parce qu’ils veulent voir où Ulysse aurait accosté ! Ulysse !

—Oui, bon, ce n’est tout de même pas comparable. Les gens visitent le Colisée parce qu’il y a vraiment eu des combats de Gladiateurs. Ils peuvent les imaginer.

Share

Je comprenais ce que soutenait mon père, mais il devait prendre autre chose en compte :

—À la fin de sa vie, Fante ne voyait plus rien, et avait été amputé d’une jambe. Mais alors patratra, voilà que Charles Bukowski le sort de l’anonymat à la fin des années 70, et que toute une génération le redécouvre presque quarante ans plus tard ! Il finira par devenir, après avoir été cet homme teigneux, cruel, colérique et hystérique, l’écrivain qu’il s’était imaginé être en écrivant cette scène. Le rêve qui se transforme en réalité. C’est ça, le mythe. Et approcher ce mythe, symboliquement, c’est quelque chose. Je ne peux pas te dire quoi, mais je sais que c’est important.

—Et si c’était juste un fantasme ? Que tu n’approchais rien du tout en suivant ses traces ?

Papa s’est garé, nous avons rejoint la cabane de location. Il a sorti du frigo une Chimay Rouge dénichée au supermarché hippie du coin et qui, par hasard, était brassée à quelques kilomètres de chez lui, en Belgique, de l’autre côté du monde.

Le soleil se couchait derrière la terrasse.

—Tu crois qu’il y a des coyotes ? a demandé mon père alors que je consignais les détails de la journée dans un carnet.

—Non, mais je peux décider que oui, si tu veux, j’ai dit pour le taquiner : « Il était tard, le père et la fille s’étaient installés près du jardin pour admirer les derniers rayons sur le Pacifique, quand… »

—Vous vous croyez vraiment tout-puissants avec vos histoires, hein ? Tu sais qu’en dehors des personnes qui lisent des livres, tout le monde s’en fiche des écrivains et des crabes-morts-pas-vraiment-morts ? Tu sais que le monde de la finance s’en fout ? Tu sais que le monde du luxe s’en fout ? Tu sais que la politique s’en fout ? Tu sais que…

J’ai hoché la tête. Je savais.

—Moi je crois, a-t-il dit, que vous vivez dans un monde parallèle parce que vous refusez de regarder la réalité en face, et parce que vous êtes incapables de l’accepter.

—On la regarde. Mais elle ne nous suffit pas. Et dans cette insuffisance, seul le statut d’écrivain nous protège. C’est notre salut. Enfin, c’est ce qu’on croit. Tu sais, comme ces enfants qui veulent devenir pompiers avant même d’être montés dans un camion, ou bien d’avoir appris à maîtriser le feu. L’écriture, c’est pareil. Pour la plupart d’entre nous, le rêve de devenir écrivain précède l’envie d’écrire.

Mon père a levé les yeux au ciel.

—Moi, j’ai aimé la pêche à partir du moment où j’ai attrapé ma première truite. Pas avant.

—Mais si tu es allé pêcher, c’est que quelque chose en toi soupçonnait que ça pourrait te plaire.

—Mmh.

—Tu as donc eu une sorte de vision. Ou alors ton inconscient…

—Chérichou.

La conversation touchait à sa fin. Mon père saturait. Je me suis quand même levée pour aller chercher l’exemplaire de Mon chien stupide que j’avais tenu à relire dans l’avion, et je suis restée debout pour lui déclamer un passage.

« Je savais pourquoi je voulais ce chien. J’étais las de la défaite et de l’échec. Je désirais la victoire, mais j’avais 50 ans, et il n’y avait pas de victoire en vue, pas même de bataille, car mes ennemis ne s’intéressaient plus au combat. Stupide était la victoire, les livres que je n’avais pas écrits, les endroits que je n’avais pas vus. La Maserati que je n’avais jamais eue. Les femmes qui me faisaient envie, Danielle Darrieux, Gina Lollobrigida, Nadia Gray. Stupide incarnait le triomphe sur d’anciens fabriquants de pantalons qui avaient mis en pièce mes scénarios jusqu’au jour où le sang avait coulé. Comme mon bien-aimé Rocco, il apaiserait la douleur, panserait les blessures de mes journées interminables, de mon enfance pauvre, de ma jeunesse désespérée, de mon avenir compromis. »

Après un certain temps, mon père a levé la tête :

—Danielle Darrieux ?

Pour lui, c’était une dame de la génération de son grand-père. En dehors de cette incongruité qui avait capté son attention, je ne savais pas si mon père comprenait le souffle qui se logeait dans cet extrait, sa vitalité. Est-ce qu’il mesurait l’espoir délirant que cet homme mettait soudain dans son chien ? Le pouvoir de changer non seulement son futur, mais aussi son passé ? Mon père comprenait-il comment la littérature venait sublimer la vie ?

—Papa, ai-je commencé dans une tentative d’explication, mais il m’a interrompu d’un geste de la main et s’est levé pour arpenter le sous-bois. Papa ? ai-je répété.

Mon père s’est contenté de poser un index contre sa bouche. Comme le soleil s’était couché, je l’ai vu disparaître et j’ai attendu, dans le silence, qu’il revienne m’expliquer qu’elle mouche l’avait piquée, et de quel droit il sabotait ce passage génial du livre que je tenais entre les mains.

—Regarde, Chérichou, a-t-il murmuré dans l’obscurité.

J’ai levé la tête vers les fourrées. Deux yeux qui reflétaient la lumière de la véranda me fixaient, immobiles, à une trentaine de mètres.

Mon père a fait craquer une branche en voulant s’approcher. Le coyote s’est enfuit.

—Tu vois, a-t-il dit en versant le fond sa bière dans le verre. Tu n’as pas eu besoin de l’écrire pour le faire advenir.

Read in English

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Hinternet

“I love everything that flows,” Henry Miller once wrote, before turning to a graphic and ultimately misogynist metaphor to drive his point home. Among things that flow we must surely count the writing of Belgian novelist Daphné Tamage (see, notably, her Le retour de Saturne, which we love). By her own account Daphné’s literary sensibility was significantly shaped by Miller, alongside John Fante and other of those mid-century American purveyors of what is sometimes called “dirty realism”. What is it like to commune with these bad boys, or with the ghosts of these bad boys, as a European, as a woman, as the daughter of a supremely gentle father? Why chase after them, after all this time, across all this distance, geographical and temperamental? Let’s let Daphne explain, in this poignant reflection on her recent literary pilgrimage in California, dad perched in the passenger seat like Steinbeck’s own Charley. —The Editors

lire en français

“One day I’ll be a legend of crustacean mythology” —John Fante, The Road to Los Angeles (1936)

Just before the reelection of T., I dragged my poor father from San Francisco to Los Angeles by way of Carmel, Big Sur, and Cambria. The idea was to drive down Highway 1 over the course of ten days and to tick off all the must-sees. Wanting to spare my father, a beekeeper, the sight of any of that urban violence for which he was constitutionally unprepared, I decided that once we reached LA we would sleep up in the hills of Topanga Canyon. More honestly, my aim was to place myself halfway between Pacific Palisades and Point Dume, where my two unassailable heroes of youth had settled: Henry Miller and John Fante. Heroes? In fact —and in a sense this was worse— they were my models, mentors who would later, through an improbable lineage, give my writing a kind of pre-chewed shape and my drive a direction. I owed a great deal, then, to those two ambivalent, self-absorbed, megalomaniacal, and questionable authors. Men, at that.

When we reached the Point Dume promontory, our bellies distended with clam chowder from Malibu Seafood, my father panicked at the sight of the “Armed Security” signs —black pistols on white backgrounds— planted in every close-cropped lawn along Cliffside Drive.

“Chérichou, I don’t feel very comfortable,” my father said as he slowed down, while I scanned the street for a parking space.

“This isn’t a private neighborhood, Dad. We’re allowed to be here.”

“I don’t like it. And I thought your writer was poor,” he said, pointing at some stately property.

“He was poor, but he worked for Hollywood and became rich. That’s the American Dream: starting from nothing and ending up here.”

After a moment’s thought, my father asked, “But why do you want to see his house?”

“Because he’s a genius.”

“His genius is in his books, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I need for him to know that I came all this way to see him. Maybe his soul stayed at Point Dume.”

A small voice inside me said that John Fante’s soul was more likely hanging around on the neighboring golf course, at Musso & Frank, or at the casino.

“And you think he cares that you’re looking for his soul?”

“Affirmative.”

My father, for whom writers are deeply unsettling people, yet who had nonetheless been promising me this trip for fifteen years while endlessly postponing it, didn’t say a word and went along with my wish to circle the neighborhood. After driving around Point Dume three times in search of a parking spot, he seriously began to fear that we’d be taken for thieves and that some overzealous homeowner would end up calling upon his expensive private security. I motioned for him to let it go, nor did I insist that we stop by Joan Didion’s place, which would have finished him off for good. Before heading back toward the birds and wildness of Topanga, I did at least ask for a detour past 444 Ocampo Drive, as a tribute to Henry Miller. It was just before the fires; the neighborhood was bland and immaculate, but I was moved to see that the two trees recognizable from old photographs were still flourishing against the façade. Dad took a picture of me in front of the house and we got back on the road.

My plan at the beginning had been far more ambitious than mere passage through two terribly dull neighborhoods: it had been to drag my poor father all the way to the port of Long Beach, in hope of finding the beach from the so-called “crab scene” in The Road to Los Angeles. But the night before he had been outraged to see people sleeping on the ground between Marina del Rey and Venice. He couldn’t understand “how it was possible that nobody did anything for them,” “how people could be left to die on the beach,” “how it was possible to live in those outrageously expensive houses lining the fake canals knowing that broken people were losing their lives just a few yards from their automated sprinkler systems,” and so on. I told him I didn’t know, that the United States had its own way of sorting human beings and that the sorting was done according to the size of their wallets, but that we weren’t necessarily any better back home — even if, it had to be admitted, the contrast between luxury and misery in Los Angeles was particularly jarring.

So I scaled back my plans for the evening and we headed toward Topanga. My father perked up instantly, and in my head I said goodbye to the idea of climbing up to Bunker Hill the next morning. We’d go see the old Hollywoodland stairs and the Observatory. Out there, everything would be fine. In the meantime, we were stuck in traffic.

“Why did you want to see this particular port?” my father suddenly asked.

“A mythical scene takes place there. John Fante’s literary double, Arturo Bandini, massacres crabs on a rocky beach.”

My father, who loved animals, went pale.

“You wanted to go to the site of a massacre?”

“An imaginary massacre, Dad. He didn’t actually kill those crabs.”

“So you want to see a place where someone wrote that he killed crabs but where, in reality, he didn’t kill any crabs?”

I nodded.

“And why is that important? I mean, Hearst Castle — I get why you wanted to visit that, even if… well, I’m not saying anything, the place is impressive, the guy lived there and all that, then Rosebud, blah blah. But an imaginary slaughter, Chérichou — seriously?”

My father didn’t press the point. We stayed silent — he telling himself that he was clearly having trouble understanding the daughter he had brought into the world, I asking myself a more fundamental question: why, throughout history, have writers made pilgrimages in the footsteps of other writers? Where did this tradition we were perpetuating despite ourselves come from? And above all, why did we perpetuate it in vain? Had Fante’s soul come to speak to mine at Point Dume? Miller’s at Pacific Palisades? No — neither had come. The only thing reaching me at that moment were the exhaust fumes from the car in front of us.

Share

“I think,” I finally said, “that the delirious anger of that scene lives in all of us. Fante was 21 when he wrote it; he wanted to become the greatest American writer of his generation, and he let himself go in that violence. He’d read Nietzsche, we’re in the turmoil of the interwar years — he’s completely unhinged. And even if it’s all rather problematic, when you’re that age and you read something like that…”

“You feel like massacring crabs?”

“Like becoming a writer. Because the freedom he allows himself is so unheard-of, the excess so thunderous inside you, that you sense writing offers a kind of intoxication unattainable by any other means — and that it can only be transmitted through reading.”

“And did you reach it, that famous intoxication, by becoming a novelist?”

I shook my head no as we zigzagged through the canyon.

“But I can feel it, a sort of anticipation,” I added.

“And that’s enough to build a body of work? A presentiment?”

“Those seven pages of pure anger were powerful enough for me to remember them exactly ten years later. I tell myself that if I work hard enough, that presentiment —or that foreknowledge of a certain form of joy— can be passed on like a lantern and light up anyone, anywhere in the world. That’s the power of literature, and of translation.”

My father shrugged.

“I still don’t understand how you can take pleasure in reading a guy who shoots crustaceans with a rifle.”

“It’s the power of his imagination that I admire, Dad, not the act itself. You do understand that Van Gogh’s distorted self-portrait is the painter’s vision of himself, not reality, right?”

“Of course, Chérichou, I’m not an idiot. What I’m trying to understand is why you want to go to a place where nothing happened except in that book.”

“Because Bandini blowing away crabs is mythical. Why do people spend fortunes on cruises that drop them off on the island of Ithaca, where there’s nothing, Dad? Because they want to see where Ulysses would have landed! Ulysses!”

“Sure, but it’s still not the same thing. People visit the Colosseum because there really were gladiator fights there. They can imagine them.”

I understood what my father was arguing, but there was something else he needed to take into account:

“At the end of his life,” I continued, “Fante could no longer see, and he’d had a leg amputated. And then —boom— Bukowski pulls him out of obscurity in the late seventies, and an entire generation rediscovers him almost forty years later! He ends up becoming, after having been that snarling, cruel, angry, hysterical man, the writer he had imagined himself to be when he wrote that scene. A dream that turns into reality — that’s the myth. And getting close to that myth, symbolically, means something. I can’t tell you what, but I know it matters.”

“And what if it’s just a phantasm?”

Subscribe now

Dad parked the car and we walked over to the rental cabin. He pulled a Chimay Red from the fridge, picked up at the local hippie supermarket and, by sheer coincidence, brewed just a few miles from his home on the other side of the world.

The sun was setting behind the deck.

“Do you think there are coyotes?” my father asked, as I was jotting down the details of the day in a notebook.

“No, but I can decide there are, if you want,” I said, teasing him. “It was late, father and daughter had settled near the garden to admire the last rays over the Pacific, when…”

“You really think you’re all-powerful with your stories, don’t you? You know that outside people who read books, no one could care less about writers and dead-but-not-really-dead crabs? You know the world of finance doesn’t give a damn? You know the luxury world doesn’t give a damn? You know politics doesn’t give a damn? You know that…”

I nodded. I knew.

“I think,” he went on, “that you live in a parallel world because you refuse to look reality in the face, and because you’re incapable of accepting it.”

“We do look at it. But it isn’t enough for us. And in that insufficiency, only the status of the writer protects us. It’s our salvation. Well — that’s what we think. You know, like kids who want to become firefighters before they’ve ever climbed into a truck, or learned how to master fire. Writing is the same. For most of us, the dream of becoming a writer comes before the desire to write.”

My father rolled his eyes.

“As for me, I liked fishing from the moment I caught my first trout. Not before.”

“But the fact that you went fishing at all means that something in you suspected you might enjoy it.”

“Mmh.”

“So you did have a kind of vision. Or else your unconscious…”

“Chérichou.”

The conversation was drawing to a close. My father was saturated. I still got up to fetch the copy of My Dog Stupid that I had insisted on rereading on the plane, and I remained standing to read him the underlined passage:

I knew why I wanted that dog. It was shamelessly clear, but I could not tell the boy. It would have embarrassed me. But I could tell myself and it did not matter. I was tired of defeat and failure. I hungered for victory. I was fifty-five and there were no victories in sight, nor even a battle. Even my enemies were no longer interested in combat. Stupid was victory, the books I had not written, the places I had not seen, the Maserati I had never owned, the women I hungered for, Danielle Darrieux and Gina Lollobrigida and Nadia Grey. He was triumph over ex-pants manufacturers who had slashed my screenplays until blood oozed. He was my dream of great offspring with fine minds in famous universities, scholars with rich gifts for the world.

After a while, my father raised his head.

“Danielle Darrieux?”

To him, this was a woman from his grandfather’s generation. Apart from that incongruity, which had caught his attention, I didn’t know whether my father grasped the breath that ran through that passage, its vitality. Did he sense the delirious hope that this man was suddenly placing in his dog? The power to change not only his future, but also his past? Did my father understand how literature, here, was transfiguring life?

“Dad,” I began, trying to explain — but he cut me off with a wave of his hand and got up to pace through the undergrowth. “Dad?” I repeated.

My father simply put a finger to his lips. As the sun had already set, I watched him disappear and waited, in silence, for him to come back and tell me what on earth had got into him, and by what right he was sabotaging this brilliant passage from the book I was holding in my hands.

“Look, Chérichou,” he murmured in the darkness.

I raised my eyes toward the thicket. Two eyes, reflecting the light from the porch, were staring at me, motionless, some thirty meters away.

My father snapped a branch as he tried to move closer; the coyote fled.

“You see,” he said, pouring the last of his beer into the glass. “You didn’t need to write it down—it was already there.”

lire en français

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Hinternet

We’ve got a remarkable piece of music history to share with you today, from the great Mary Cadwalladr. But first we have an appeal. Some of you will recall the occasional mention in Mary’s pieces of her loving partner Miguel. We are saddened to have to tell you of an incident that occurred last week, between him and two ICE agents at a gas station outside of Tucumcari, where Miguel had stopped on his way to deliver two orphan donkeys to a happy new home in Amarillo. The incident likely did not play out as you imagine. Miguel is a Mexican national, but he grew up speaking Plautdietsch in a Mennonite colony near Cuauhtémoc, and even there stood out as exceptionally leucous (in town the locals called him Gasparín el fantasma amigable). What really happened was this: Miguel entered a bathroom stall just before the two agents came in to pee beside one another. The gas-station employees had packed fresh snow, from the most recent freak winter storm, into the urinals, as business managers often do with ice, cubed or crushed, to keep men —who by nature yearn to destroy things—, singularly focused on hitting the frozen mass and causing it to melt with their warm streams, rather than to grow distracted and to pee on the floor. Now it seems these ICE agents were happy to rise to the challenge, and quickly found themselves in a lively snow-melting competition with one another. Miguel thought this was quite a sight, and so began to record with his phone. Soon enough, the one agent melted his entire pile, upon which, drunk on victory, he turned to pee on his partner’s pile as well. This upset the latter agent, who began in turn angrily to pee straight into the victor’s stream, as if to intercept it — and in no time the whole thing descended into full-on light-sabers. The two agents became so engrossed in this impromptu combat in fact that neither seemed to notice nor care when their cargo pants simultaneously fell down to their ankles and exposed their cleft and dimpled cheeks as if they were a pair of blissful 5-year-old urchins at that tender and liminal age when the males of the species have only just learned to relieve themselves from a standing position, but continue, out of old habit, to drop their drawers all the way to the floor. In the midst of all this, alas, Miguel dropped his vape pen, which brought the agents down from their giddy frolic. “Guden Dach”, he said in his native tongue after they’d kicked open the stall door, but even this did not sway them. Soon they figured out he had been filming, and charged him with “obstructing agents in the line of duty”. Most of us here, being of a more or less Kantian leaning, find this appeal to the notion of “duty” strained to say the least, but the fact remains that a member of our extended Hinternet community now has some pretty hefty legal expenses to worry about. The good news is we still have the recording, though so far we have withheld it from the public. After a private viewing here at our editorial offices in Quimper, staff members variously described it as “magnificent”, as “a rollicking romp”, and as “Robert Mapplethorpe meets Laurel and Hardy”. We’ll decide what to do with that sensational footage in due time.

Meanwhile, we hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber. In complete seriousness — all profits from today’s post will go directly to the Immigrant Legal Services and Defense Fund of the National Partnership for New Americans (yes, we will post receipts). Among other things, this is the only way you’ll be able to read this most recent installment in Mary’s truly jaw-dropping revisionist genealogy of post-war American musical culture (you can find some earlier pieces here, here, here, and here. —The Editors

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Read more

Share

You have already been introduced to this essay’s “thesis statement”. But before coming back around to its narrow defense, we will have to do some significant ground-clearing.

I have never understood, let alone been able to respond to, multiple-choice questionnaires soliciting my “political views”. The problem with being asked to say whether I am “pro-immigration” or “pro-choice” or the like is that there is always an overarching meta-issue, left totally unaddressed by the solicitors, concerning what Isaac Levi once described as “the most neglected modal” — to wit, feasibility.

Along with a reasonable concern to fix this modality, the respondent obviously also has an interest in knowing what sort of time-frame one should have in mind. In an absolute sense I would like to live in a world without borders, without abortion, without prisons, without police, and indeed without states. But I don’t think it makes sense, in the present state of the world, to say that I am an advocate of open borders or prison abolition, and I am definitely opposed to criminalizing the choice to terminate pregnancies made by girls and women in a society already so hostile to them, and so dead-set on making it as hard as possible to raise happy, healthy, prosperous children.

Still, I really do believe that prisons, wars, abortions, capital punishment, industrial agriculture, and many other things many of us take for granted as inevitable constitute real moral failures of humanity. For in all these cases there is a being of real moral interest —even if it is “just” a fetus, or indeed “just” a disconsolate calf torn from its mother, or “just” an enemy soldier or “just” an ear of Monsanto corn—, from whom (yes, whom!) the love due to them as creatures of God has been sinfully withheld. (Capital punishment, in contrast with all these other issues, is a problem that, given the minuscule numbers involved, could be solved tomorrow. There simply is no basis for believing that the state has any sovereign power over any human life. It should be abolished immediately.) It is the work of serious thinkers to envision a world without such withholdings, and to begin to lay out drafts of plans to get from here to there. So leave us alone with your mind-numbingly simplistic questionnaires, I always want to respond, and come help us think instead!

What I have said so far points at one of the reasons why I often give the impression of evading the pressing political issues of our age. I believe we have a duty —or at least anyone who sets themselves up in the world as an intellectual, as I am bold or foolhardy enough to do, has a duty— not to speak in slogans, not to serve as vessels for the speech of others, but instead to struggle to come up with and to share genuinely new ways of comprehending the world, whether through rational argument or creative vision. To this extent I find it gravely unfortunate that our new media technologies have effectively imposed on us an expectation of universal punditry, so that it is often simply assumed that to have a public presence at all, even if it is nothing more than a collection of a few hundred virtual friends or followers, entails, as part of the “job”, issuing regular statements on every new inflection of our rolling global polycrisis as if we were all the spokespeople of august institutions. I believe that this new system has been extremely harmful, and indeed that it bears significant responsibility for bringing the polycrisis into existence in the first place.

It is a great irony that just as actual democracy seems to be receding across the globe, even as a mere aspiration, a spurious semblance of debate at least has been hyper-democratized beyond any useful proportions. One result of this new discursive free-for-all is that the exchange of opposed ideas takes on an almost automated quality — indeed with the rise of chatbots it now often is automated. When human beings jump into the fray to interject their own stubs of ideas, they generally find themselves capable mostly of ad-hominems, among which a perennial favorite is the accusation of hypocrisy. Politics is consequently reduced, by people who understandably do not wish to be on the receiving end of such accusations, to a public performance of their own purity. And thus we get the absurd figure, for example, of the militant vegan who scrutinizes ingredient lists for trace amounts of animal collagen, or the environmentalist who scrupulously separates the trash into its various subspecies as if that were the ritual that could be hoped to hold the cosmos together.

But these are really just examples of what might best be seen as the comprehensive privatization of our responsibility towards one another and towards nature. I myself eat the cheese made from the milk made by the mother cow for its now disconsolate calf, who will soon be rendered into veal. This, along with many other things I do and will not reveal here, makes me particularly impure. But my point is precisely that politics, conceived as the performance of individual purity, the anxious demonstration to others and to oneself that one has transcended all hypocrisy, can never be anything but a dead end. There simply is no purity in this fallen world. It was in recognition of some such truth that the ancients performed their sacrifices before eating animal flesh — a ritual complex that really did, in some profound sense, hold the cosmos together.

Subscribe now

It is in view of such convictions as these —or perhaps of such temperamental traits— that I remained consistently at odds with the great majority of my peers throughout the years, roughly 2015-2023, of “progressive” ascendancy, call it what you will, in the western world. It was really all very simple for me: I did not want to serve, indeed could not serve, as a vessel for other people’s speech. And that, when it comes down to it, really is what that regime expected of us. As a result, and much to my displeasure —for I really do long to be universally loved!—, I found myself willy-nilly in the much-despised role of the “Well, actually…” type of guy. But now, looking back, I do think of those years with a certain amount of pride (an emotion I know I should not allow myself to wallow in for long): I managed to maintain my integrity, and I’m confident in challenging anyone, now, to find anything I said during those years that might be interpreted as a capitulation to the reigning order.

I did indeed publish an awful lot of work in an anti-racist key during those years. But of course I did. I’m an anti-racist. Racism is for ressentiment-driven yokels and losers. While I’m often uncertain as to how to describe my class origins, other than to say “it’s complicated”, one data-point that does seem relevant is that during the first eighteen years of my life hearing the n-word, spoken by white people with a hard “r”, was practically an everyday occurrence. This is, to say the least, no longer the case. I can recall once going over to the apartment of some kid whose brother was the friend of an Okie girl whom I had taken to following because she had smiled at me sweetly. There was no furniture, there were bags of Fritos and empty beer bottles strewn across the carpet, and the only decoration was a giant American flag nailed to the wall, with a hammer hanging on nails next to it. When he saw me looking at the hammer, he laughed and declared: “That there’s my n****-beater.” (Anyone who insists that America was not built on racism should ask themselves, honestly, why these two particular ornaments paired so naturally on that wall, from the point of view of our amateur interior decorator.) Political consciousness is slow to emerge, and I confess that my primary thought on that occasion was not exactly shaped by the reading I had not yet done of the canonical works of Black liberation or of the Civil Rights movement. My thought, rather, was: “Oh man, I’ve got to find myself a classier crowd!” And I suppose I did.

Share

Part of the legacy of this experience, for me, is to remain ever conscious of the fact that racism, among all the other reasons to reject it, is in the end a marker of low status. It’s something one aspires to get away from not only because it is a false model of reality, but also as part of a much broader aspirational complex. The aspirational quality of it would become particularly transparent under the ideological regime of 2015-2023, when, at least for white Americans, social media and institutional pressure would stimulate a sort of competitive public performance of individual anti-racism, such as to make the separation of one’s household recycling appear as a much more primitive art-form by comparison.

Under the regime in question, it is not surprising that whatever I might have said or written in an anti-racist key could not pass muster with the regime’s ideological enforcers, since it did not involve all the ritual prostrations that would announce to the assembled audience not only what I believe, but also what side I am on. I continued to think of myself as some kind of humanist universalist liberal — and I still do, with some significant caveats. But I always felt as if they saw me as hiding something. If that is what I was doing, it may be because it was only towards the tail end of that regime’s reign that I began to understand the real nature of my difficulty in going along with it. The difficulty, namely, is that I am just fundamentally not a Schmittian, I do not make a friend-enemy distinction, and to that extent I really, truly do not have a side.

This realization has only deepened my commitment —again, with significant caveats— to liberalism. I can recall, as a moment of something like revelation, seeing a post on Twitter, circa 2024, from one of those right-wing Catholic guys — Patrick Deneen or Adrian Vermeule, I don’t recall. I believe it was a photo of a street somewhere in London, perhaps outside of Westminster, that had been heavily adorned with Pride flags, and that reminded me of nothing so much as the Israeli flags I’d seen on many occasions in the old city of Jerusalem. When so many flags need to be displayed, my thought in that ancient walled citadel had been, it’s safe to say that this has less to do with pride —not only in the exalted sense of fierté, but even in the venal one of orgueil— than with an anxiety for the preservation of a regime the fragility of which its enforcers feel all too heavily.

Anyhow, Deneen/Vermeule added a comment in the form of a rhetorical question, something like: “The neutral public sphere?” And indeed I found I was unable not to feel the rhetorical force of it. We really were an awful long way here from anything remotely like what had been envisioned in the long tradition extending from Erasmus through Habermas as the very basis, the inviolable safe space, of secular modernity: the idea that our streets and our public squares are to remain neutral as between substantive conceptions of the good. What had emerged instead, perversely, was a conception of liberalism as the enforcement of a particular set of ultimate commitments, and even the coerced affirmation from citizens qua citizens of these commitments. Now it may have been simply inevitable that things should have come to a head in this way, under external pressure from so many different species of illiberalism. But to deny that in coming to this extreme point liberalism had, willingly or under compulsion, warped or abandoned a number of its bedrock principles, came to seem to me simply dishonest.

Anyhow my purpose here is not at all to establish my clean credentials in the eyes of the current regime and its ongoing process of dewokeification. My purpose rather is to establish just how deep my opposition is to this current regime — which, in case you haven’t noticed, has, to say the least, some ultimate commitments of its own.

Subscribe now

There were a number of people I admired throughout the years of our previous regime, who seemed to see it for what it was and were unafraid to describe it in terms that sounded truthful to me. Call them curious bedfellows, or circumstantial allies, the fact is that around 2021 I often found myself nodding my head in affirmation of what I was reading from people you might broadly describe as members of the “dissident right”.

Some of these people, in 2026, remain lucid and courageous (Andrew Sullivan comes to mind) — but alas, not the great majority of them. I had, naively, taken them all to be dissident by nature, and it was assuredly more their dissidence than their right-wing self-identification that I admired. Many turn out simply to have been circumstantial dissidents. It was not at all that their conservatism, if you can even call it that, was shaped by a sentiment akin to the great Chateaubriand’s, who once remarked that “the pride of victory is unbearable to me”. It was rather that they simply didn’t like being out of power, or, rather, they didn’t like it that those people were out of power with whom they had allowed their own identities, in their weakness and their lack of dignity, to become wrapped up.

In the end this all could come down, at least in part, to a question of temperament. I cannot imagine ever getting what I had wanted, and then declaring “I’ve got what I wanted!” and settling down with it, as a number of the anti-woke former dissidents seem to have got in November 2024 with their ultimate owning of the libs. Whenever I get what I want, I immediately start to see what had been wrong with it all along, and so start wanting something else. In part I’m just harder to please than all the current regime propagandists with whom I had some real affinity five years ago.

But even if there were no question of the role of temperament —which I think Chateaubriand rightly recognizes to be mostly fixed in each of us—, it would be plain to anyone with any sense and any honesty that this regime stinks, that it has latched onto the very worst latent impulses in the American legacy and positioned them at the center of a spurious narrative in which they are the expression of the American spirit itself.

So to all of you with whom I have once had common cause, I say: please, you are not my enemy. This current regime is our enemy, the enemy of anyone who loves their freedom — of conscience, of assembly, of expression (and evidently now of bearing arms too). None of this has anything to do with whatever your particular “political opinions”, such as might be solicited on a questionnaire, happen to be. I don’t care about your political opinions. I don’t even care about my political opinions, as I believe we’ve established already.

But I do care about honesty, and so feel the need to implore you to be honest with yourselves. Trust your own eyes and your own conscience over regime propaganda. When Florida Congressman Randy Fine claims that Alex Pretti was an “insurrectionist”, and describes his murder in veterinary terms as a matter of being “put down”, this is obviously nothing more than craven lying from a pathetic propagandist and stooge. (“Where do they find these junglies?!” a dear Pakistani friend once said, with aristocratic disdain, as we watched Jesse Helms trying to form a sentence on television — a memory that comes back to me now every time I see Fine’s thick brutish self-contented mug on the internet.) But your honor and your self-respect require that you not volunteer your services as a regime propagandist yourself. You are better than that. Even Randy Fine is better than that, though we may have little ground for hoping that he will ever become aware of this. You are better than that simply in virtue of your humanity, and of the God-given faculty of reason that comes with it.

Subscribe now

Share

Share The Hinternet