An In-Depth Profile of JSR and The Hinternet

“The 6,069 Fictions of Justin Smith-Ruiu”

Read Kevin La Torre’s profile: “The 6,069 Fictions of Justin Smith-Ruiu”.

Smith-Ruiu is not who he once was, by his own narration. And he has been narrating these surreal days of his deposition, in nonfictional missives but also in speculative fiction which suit the strangeness of his arc… The autofictions at The Hinternet, though they are particular enough to tire large language models, are never exhausted. Smith-Ruiu names Mark Twain as “one of our spiritual ancestors here at The Hinternet: that great American bard who always refused to explain to his readers when he was telling the truth (‘journalism’) and when he was making stuff up (‘literature’).” In this conceit, one can read many Hinternet stories as the published first-person accounts of Smith-Ruiu’s life, but only if his life were expansively unreal and pulsing with his own idiosyncratic vision of linguistics, technology, and philosophy. His unreality makes his fiction bottomless, since, unlike a Lerner or Heti, the I of Smith-Ruiu can venture far, far from himself: Smith-Ruiu is the protagonist in 2027, or the minor character noted in a passing glimpse, or the archivist stumbling into a fictional tract of history which he introduces to his readers with an italicized paragraph and the scant “JSR.”

The above quotation is just one small part of a surprisingly detailed and knowing profile of our Founding Editor and his Hinternet project, written by the American poet and essayist Kevin La Torre. We strongly encourage you to read the entire piece, and we warn you that we will be milking it for promotional purposes at least until an even more exhaustive profile comes along — and we aren’t holding our breaths.

We had seen some hints in our feeds that this piece was in the works. Given that it did not mention us by name, however, we also wondered whether our perception —that the forthcoming piece on “a writer on here” who “is the heir to Borges” even though “he himself denies it” (not exact quotes!) was none other than our own JSR— was in the end only a presumption, and a self-aggrandizing one at that. But no, we were right, it was about us… or rather, mostly, about him. We do most of the work, he gets most of the credit. We’re ok with that. It is, after all, his “baby”.

JSR was off to teach a class on William Harvey’s De motu cordis (1628) when I forwarded him the piece. As usual, he was in a rush, and at least pretended to be annoyed that I was interrupting him during ordinary work hours with this “unimportant stuff”. He did however manage to write a few words reacting to what La Torre had to say about him, and offered some reflections on the significance of this moment in the history of our critical reception. I quote him at length here:

Well yes indeed this is a fine honor. It shows, I think, that our approach is working — that it does not just look like some awkward public schizo breakdown, but like the successful transmission to our readers of a singular creative vision. Thank you, Hélène, sincerely, for your tireless work in helping me to make this happen.

I have been saying for a while that what I am after here is the creation of “writing fit for the internet”. Before we came along, this would have sounded like an insult, as if to say “fit for the minor leagues”, or “not quite ready for prime-time”. But I wanted to invert the value of that description, and to make it sound somewhat like what Walt Whitman meant in describing Hegel’s philosophy as the only philosophy “fit for America”. I wanted to write on the internet in a way that does not simply imitate writing on paper, but that truly embraces our new medium and exploits its latent potentials.

The boldest and perhaps the foolhardiest thing I’ve ever done was to come out as a creative writer. And it was, precisely, a “coming out” — it’s me finally being who I always was, after a multi-decade dérive into a form of life, based primarily on the fetishizing of credentials and rationality, that was never truly my own. Because I came out late in life —presumably, unless I live to 100—, I knew I couldn’t mess around. I didn’t have the time to waste seeking approval and green lights from sundry gatekeepers and tastemakers. I just had to start doing it. For my poetry, there could be no dallying with “Submittable” (shouldn’t that be “Submissible”?), and I certainly wasn’t going to drop my whole adult life in Paris to go pretend to be someone’s apprentice somewhere in fucking Iowa.

Ultimately I think this fundamental constraint worked to my advantage — for now I am operating in a mode of total freedom. It took me until I was 50 to realize that if you want something, you’ve got to just start building it, man. Quit waiting for others to give you permission!

Just after we finished transcribing this long passage from our shared Hinternet Samsung smartphone, JSR sent us a follow-up message, which reads as follows:

Wait, Hélène, don’t share that! It was way too self-aggrandizing! I mean, this is all so small-time in the end! Sure, it’s a write-up, a very good write-up, but it’s just another Substack writer, in-network… a local. It’s like winning a Dean’s Office Award for Excellence in Teaching at Ball State — I mean it’s sweet and all, but it’s not exactly gonna launch you onto the talk-show circuit. Look Hélène, just forget it.

Oh please. We don’t have time to go back and edit out JSR’s first e-mail. What he said is what he said. We’ll publish the two messages, and let the reader decide which of the two gets us to the heart of the matter. Teach both sides haha. Our own view is that, sure, there still are some out there who would point out that KLT is himself “just” another Substacker, and that this sort of validation hardly carries the same weight as a Times profile. But we say, and we say that anyone who is half-awake will say with us, that it’s all good, and that the Times will catch up sooner or later, and let all the normies know tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, what KLT has let us know today.

In the end, we’ve always seen our JSR as more of a Henry Darger than a Jeff Koons — well, we mean, he probably has a somewhat more accurate understanding of human anatomy than that stunted Chicago shut-in (who died just three months before JSR was born — the normal delay, we have come to believe, for the reassignment of souls), with his delirious watercolors of naked girls with ram’s horns and penises, all accompanying his impenetrable 10,000-page novel. But still, we mean, JSR just does what he does, and whether it gains institutional traction and acclaim, or whether it remains mere art brut, depends mostly on us — his handlers.

—The Hinternet