Bangers and Mash

A Statement on Pseudonymy; Sketch of a Medium-Term Strategy; a Contest; our Founding Editor’s Current State; What We’re Watching; What We’re Listening To; What We’re Reading; Books Received; &c.

1.

I confess I hesitated to return to this space after the debacle recounted in Bun, our Founding Editor’s recent foray into serial metafiction. But look, that’s all over now, we’ve openly and exhaustively clarified our pseudonymy policy, and there need no longer be any ambiguity at all about the fact that I, Hélène Le Goff, do not exist — though there are perhaps some Central European logicians who might wish to clarify that I do, at least, “subsist”. Even if the metafiction’s story, as it unfolded, left you with a surge of righteous anger towards me, the great villainess, you can’t reasonably stay mad at me for attempting forcibly to upload JSR’s conscious mind to the internet and all that other stuff, because as we have sufficiently clarified it was all just one big cock-and-bull story — and again, it’s over. From now on, my byline is explicitly and openly a nom de plume, either of our Founding Editor, JSR, or of our Managing Editor, OWJ, or a blending of contributions from the both of them.

Why do they “love to hide”, you might still be wondering? Why go about veiled? Why all this Larvatus prodeo caginess? They have several reasons — not least professional expediency, but also simply because they find that they like the rhetorical effect this blurring of authorship brings about. But whatever their reasons, I can assure you that in the coming months most of the writing at The Hinternet will be far more straightforward. We will in fact be concentrating our efforts on the production of “bangers” — that is, essays by our Founding Editor treating of a combination of several of the hottest issues at our present cultural-political conjuncture.

We would, if it were not so off-putting, consistently preface these bangers with that great quote from Les Moonves, former CEO of CBS News, who reflected in 2016 that Donald Trump’s candidacy, and by extension his presidency, “may not be good for America, but it’s damned good for CBS”. You see, our decision to take the plunge into newsiness is a matter of simple economics. As we expand, The Hinternet finds itself with a growing list of necessary expenditures, not least the payment of our tiny but still not non-existent staff, as also the many guest contributors we have lined up for the coming weeks and months. But just look what happens when we crank out a banger on, say, RFK Jr. and the “paranoid style” in MAGA politics:

Our Founding Editor wrote to me yesterday: “Of course it doesn’t make any sense. These ‘bangers’ take me just a fraction of the time required by any single installment in any one of the several experimental-fictional galaxies I like to keep spinning out there. By contrast I can easily whip something up about Trump or Ukraine or, ugh, the state of higher ed with, as Rush Limbaugh used to like to say, half my brain tied behind my back. It’s like the bunny slope of thinking and writing.”

Consider, now, what happened when we capped off what must have been hundreds of hours of metafictional inventivity with Bun’s riveting resolution:

So ask yourself these two questions. First, which would you rather have, rational reader, $1512.00, or $72.00? Yeah, us too. Second, would you like to see more of the “out there” stuff? Then, it’s simple: pay for a subscription when that stuff appears. “Likes”, comments, free “subscriptions” do nothing at all. Comments that say something to the effect that “this reminds me of Borges” are, we regret to have to note, particularly impotent. The only way to “steer” The Hinternet in any direction or other is to pay for the privilege of steering.

Still, we regret nothing. Just after Shotgun Willie (1973) was released, and Waylon Jennings made the distasteful and disgusting remark that the whole album sounded to him like a “brain fart”, Willie Nelson had the poise and dignity to reply that it was rather, for him, something more like “clearing my throat”. Well, so too with Bun. That, we want to say, is what we really sound like, even if we are prepared to do the equivalent in writing of what Liberace gleefully admitted to doing when the critics told him he was so tacky and ridiculous as to be unworthy of the great composers whose work he interpreted on the keys, and he replied that he was so hurt that he’d be “crying all the way to the bank”. There is a long and eminent history of artists admitting to a similar approach — Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, for example, or Hugh Jackman (“There’s no film critic at the Bugatti dealership”), or, our favorite, the Scottish “stadium house” outfit known as The KLF, who were in fact highly adept Situationist subversives, but who decided at some point to publish a guide called The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) (1988), had a number of “number ones” themselves, only then to blow their cover upon going on some dumb British awards show and throwing a dead goat at the audience.

What we mean to say is you can expect your dead goats from us again sooner or later, but for now we feel we need to follow, for strictly economic reasons, the advice of The Manual.

When we quote Moonves as we have, we are, first of all, bemoaning the present state of reading and writing, and more broadly of the circulation of information, and we are indeed acknowledging our complicity in this system. But more importantly we are also highlighting your complicity. We personally would prefer never to mention Trump again. But we’ve studied our metrics and we know how things work: Trump makes us more money. Therefore, as long as you keep making your preferences known as paid subscribers, we will keep responding to your demand, and Trump will keep looming everywhere you look, on every glowing screen in the world, at least until he dies, but probably quite a bit longer than that. 

In fine, we’ll be serving up more bangers in the weeks and months to come, even if today, as is fitting for the “housekeeping” columns that have become my own bailiwick, all we’ve got for you is a portion of mash.

2.

So now, to begin, as our first concrete housekeeping item, we would like to encourage readers who have not done so to go and actually to read Bun, to delight in its several unexpected twists and turns, and to marvel at its many moments of near-Liberacean excess. As an incitement to do so, we would like to announce a contest of sorts: if, upon having read the Work, you find yourself so inclined, we invite you to send in a 3,000-4,000-word “book report” —or, if you wish for the effort to seem more elevated, “critical essay”— on Bun. What is it “about”? What are its key themes? Why would someone think this sort of thing is worth doing, precisely, now? You may submit your piece to editor@the-hinternet.com. The best among the submissions, if such a judgment turns out to be possible, will be published at The Hinternet as a guest piece, and the author will receive both a comped annual subscription, as well as our standard payment as specified on the “About” page.

3.

Otherwise, let’s move on, as is our typical pattern in these “housekeeping” columns, to the brief reports from our featured contributors. As usual, in view of what he (somewhat inappropriately) has taken to calling his “droit de Seigneur”, we begin with our Founding Editor. JSR, of course, reports being “too busy” with his “real job” to tell us much of anything, but he is particularly proud of what he takes to be a recent significant marker of his personal moral progress. Rather than continuing to evade by dishonest means the various television news shows still trying to have him on to talk about US politics —he recently threatened to tell them he couldn’t make it to a debate show because that happened to be the evening of his “cucumber-cream facial”—, he finally decided simply to tell the truth:

“It’s not nearly as funny as the mental image of the facial,” JSR tells me, “but man does it feel good to just lay it out like that sometimes.” He adds that he supposes he still did not tell the whole truth, for that would have involved explaining also that the televisual medium is intrinsically an unserious one, and that any dignified person must stay away from it.

I also asked JSR how his spirits are these days; how he’s feeling about what’s left of the post-Cold War liberal consensus; and, finally, what he is reading.

To the first question, he replied: “Still only as crazy as the world itself.” To the second, he said: “At this point I suspect even Obama’s tan suit is having its doubts about the viability of the post-Cold War liberal consensus.” To the final question, he says he is currently finishing The Wings of the Dove, Henry James’s modernist masterpiece of 1902. This is, he tells me, a rare case where he prioritized a book in view of its recommendation by someone else. In particular, the last time he saw Becca Rothfeld she happened to mention that this novel is so good that reading it “is like being on drugs”. And she’s absolutely right, he says, though he admits to being hesitant to take Becca’s advice, as he reports feeling “mighty butt-hurt” upon reading a few weeks ago her argument —on Substack— to the effect that Substack is “just a blog”, and that real writers still write in the old way, with editors and invoices and so on. To drive her point home, Becca declines in her post to respect the ordinary rules of English capitalization. He tells me his thought upon reading this exercise was: “Yeah no I don’t know. I’ve always sort of felt that a writer, among other things, is someone who simply internalizes the duty of capitalization and other things like that, so that we spontaneously do it everywhere, not just on Substack but even in the most telegraphic of our text messages, whether we’ve got an editor breathing down our neck telling us we must do it or not. That’s just me. Whatever though. The important thing is that Becca’s right about Henry James.”

JSR also reports, according to our usual protocols, that he has received two noteworthy titles by mail this month, both provided to him by generous senders who really were not obligated to go to the trouble:

• Steven Shapin, Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves, The University of Chicago Press, 2024. It was the Press that sent this along, after JSR had agreed to write a blurb for the back cover upon reading a pdf of the advance proofs. Here’s what he ended up writing in fulfillment of the request: “Even as a resolute non-foodie, ever indifferent to my peers’ endless discussions of their favorite restaurants and recipes, Eating and Being was for me a great revelation. Eating is always politically and metaphysically charged, and food, to paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss, is powerfully good to think with, especially when Shapin is our guide.” —Justin Smith-Ruiu, author of The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is.

• Sébastien Côté (éd.), Lahontan. Lettres de Hanovre. Correspondance inédite (1710-1716) et autres documents, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2024. It was the Baron de Lahontan (1666-1716), of course, who a few years ago so fired the imaginations of Davids Graeber and Wengrow, with his largely fictional portrayal, after some years spent in l’Amérique française, of the Huron chief Adario, aka Kondiaronk (c. 1625-1701). A lesser known chapter of Lahontan’s life, the very end of it, finds him in Hannover, where he strikes up an unusually close friendship with none other than G. W. Leibniz — their intimacy may have been intensified by the fact that they were both rapidly declining, and indeed they both died within months of each other. Lahontan’s correspondence from these years gives very vivid insight into the life he led in Germany, and indeed the several appearances Leibniz makes in this volume really help to bring him back to life as well. There is a passage, for example, in which the two men correspond about the possibility of making salad dressing with a creamy base, rather than with oil. Wonderful material. It was the most ingenious Père Duchesne, a Montreal-based Substack author, and master of Substack pseudonymy, who first recommended this work to JSR. Then, upon learning that the latter knows Sébastien Côté, mostly through the intermediation of his, JSR’s, wife, who shares Sébastien’s research interests, and as a result has been apprized over the years of the Leibniz-related parts of his work on Lahontan, the goodly Père Duchesne decided to mediate and to get Sébastien to send the volume straight to Paris. Such a nice surprise! Thank you very much to the both of you!

4.

What now about the other Hinternet contributors, with their regular reports on what they’ve been watching and listening to and so on?

Kenny Koontz seems to have lost his job at the Noah’s Bagels off I-80 in Vacaville, and is now indefinitely “visiting” his mom in that trailer park up in Shasta County, which our Founding Editor once visited along with his childhood bosom-friend in 1988, only later to report that “the sedating blue glow of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, with that strange little gnome Robin Leach, seeps out of every modular aluminum living-room at dusk. It’s just the saddest thing.” Kenny at least found the time to send us this peculiar and, at points, troubling missive, for what it’s worth:

Let’s see, what have I been watching and thinking about recently? Well, for one thing I’m coming around to the view that long-form ASMR roleplay videos are the first great new art-form of the present century. This is the long-awaited beginning of true second-person cinéma-vérité, addressing the viewer with an unambiguous Buberian thou. A century from now there will be holostatues to these young women, hovering and glowing above all of our Mars colonies. For it was they who truly made it possible to endure the loneliness of an interplanetary journey. 

What else? Have you guys seen that new Jaguar ad all of right-wing X is currently infarcting about? It’s fascinating. One can start to see by now that wokeness may in the end be most remembered for reshaping not only the values of the bourgeoisie, but the aesthetics of the nobility and pretenders to it. This is happening at precisely the same moment as gilded Trumpian kitsch is skyrocketing to cultural dominance, and even former Lower Manhattan edgelords and ladies are suddenly pretending they always naturally gravitated towards the interiors preferred by South Carolina country-club wives. So now the emptied-out signifiers of what was once an overtly political visual style recede into well-aged respectability, and take their place as the rainbow-colored charge upon the escutcheon of our unconventional family’s, our American family’s, coat of arms.

Incidentally, haven’t you just had it with that tiresome class of Americans who announce every time the Republicans win power that they’re going to “go to Canada” or “move to Europe” (note verb difference)? What they don’t understand is that their desire to leave at just that moment is a sure sign that they carry America in their hearts, and therefore can’t leave. What they want is spiritual vacation from the burden of living in history —I want that too!—, but they don’t see that there is no airline destination that could ever possibly deliver them there.

But look I gotta go. Mom’s demanding her daily CostCo junket now. God damn she’s been watching an absolutely horrible talk show this morning about some former mommy-blogger with postpartum depression who murdered her three children and then jumped out a window and was paralyzed from the neck down. Most of the audience would like to see her executed. What a depraved country. Is it not just obvious that there are some deeds so dark and so ineluctable that there simply can be no earthly judge of them?

Well, uh, thanks Kenny. That was rich indeed. Now, onward to Mary Cadwalladr. Oh Mary, would you mind telling us what you’re listening to these days? Some Little Richard, perhaps? A bit of Roy Acuff?

“How wrong you are,” our esteemed colleague and author of the “Universal Musurgy” column replies. And she continues:

I’m actually thinking a lot these days about the experimental works of the late 20th century that developed out of musique concrète, but also perhaps were more directly shaped, in a fascinating case of cross-medium fertility, by the aesthetics of the cut-up à la William S. Burroughs. In this vein what strikes me now, particularly, is just how close the mainstream commercial “sounds of the century”, on the one hand, are to the most dark and subterranean currents on the other. I suppose this hybridization, or maybe just this polishing down to its essence of what commercial jingles and Muzak and so on really were all about, was effected already by Brian Wilson as early as 1965, after which it was impossible for the discerning listener to hear even the light and smooth exotica of a Martin Denny, say, or George Martin’s own treacly easy-listening orchestral redux of the Beatles’ Help! (1965), which he himself had produced, as not doing two things at once, as not both mellowing us out and somehow portending doom. Experimental music, I mean, owes a lot to the sound-effects archives on hand in early post-war TV and radio studios (even the Beatles’ turn to experimental studio-as-instrument techniques relied heavily on what happened already to be lying around in the BBC’s audio library), so that, by the 1970s, the emerging genre of noise music, at least in its more humorous divagations, often ended up sounding a good deal like a classic Looney Tunes jaunt.

To show you what I have in mind, consider just two examples, one of them giving us a fairly faithful aural image of what the 20th century sounded like in the North Atlantic:

• Steven Stapleton’s Nurse With Wound, The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion, with Titillating Orchestrations by Murray Fontana (1985).

The other giving us something much similar for 20th-century East Asia:

• Otomo Yoshihide’s Ground-Zero, Revolutionary Pekinese Opera, Ver. 1.28. (1995).

Oh man, I’m listening to this latter one now. I’d forgotten how powerful it is.

These are, I want to say, not only or primarily works of aesthetic creativity intended for audiences who enjoy being “challenged”. They are also valuable as audio documents, that is, as distillations of the aural history of post-war global culture.

That’s all I’ve got, Hélène. Sorry. Maybe next time I’ll come back at you with some “Hillbilly Heaven” (1961) or whatever.

Thanks Mary! Now that’s what I call “showing up for work”!

5.

I just received, as I was about to go ahead and hit “publish”, a new e-mail from JSR. It seems he’s still feeling butt-hurt about this whole Substack thing. He reminds me he did recently write for The Washington Post, which, notwithstanding its Amazonification, and its owner’s craven capitulation to raw power, Becca likely takes to be representative of what she has in mind by “legacy media”. He says however that it is unlikely he will do so again in the near future, since he proved to be a difficult freelancer for the very gracious editor assigned to him, unwilling as he was to fill out the form in his author’s portal at the Post meant to gather the information that might be useful in assigning him future writing tasks. He says it would have required him to list such irrelevant things as his “most recent academic degrees”, which are, he notes, by now almost a quarter century old, and if there were any sense to this whole credentialing system would have expired long ago, much like a state driver’s license issued in the year 2000. But beyond that, he insists, it is simply “undignified” (there he goes with that word again — why is JSR so preoccupied with dignity all of a sudden?) to spend a single second doing any more online portal-filling than is legally required or absolutely necessary simply to survive. It is especially undignified, he says, for a writer to devote time to such things. Writers have better things to do, and, now, suitable venues to do them.

“There’s work to be done,” he concludes, and even by e-mail I can feel the electric current of anxious mission-focus that seems to be keeping him going these days. “Real work, as honest as the day.”

—HLG