Notes 8/28/2024

The end of the summer of evil, reflections on projects, Padrote Drogado

Nearing the end of the summer of evil. And next, an autumn of still deeper depravity, before a winter of complete and utter despair. We scenester-substackers (really just temporarily embarrassed PR operators—or at least I hope so, for my own sake, for my own bourgeois future) are always trying to name the seasons, it situates our vapid little Interview puff pieces somewhere in the cosmos. Ten summer-of-evil book recs from a self-published hack who flattered some dumbass editor. Nick Dove said that I hyperstitioned something nasty with the “summer of evil” thing, it gave voice to a lingering malaise among our circle of bastards and whores, inspired a wave of gratuitous treachery, and then he said the next season should be the “fall of good,” before realizing the double entendre. It only gets worse from here.

***

The people don’t know what they want…

***

Here’s an answer to that Sally Rooney question, “How can we write novels and care about love affairs in the face of human misery?”—it’s simple, we elevate our interiority to world-historical significance. Every crush, an extractive settler colony in our lush virgin hearts. Every breakup, an apocalypse. Every petty cruelty, an act of grand revolutionary terror. All the misery of the world intersects in our self-expression. Nihilism, rage, and self-pity liberate the true weirdness of our creative vision. Pervert exhibitionists, we inflict our generational traumas on the world.

It must have really sucked to have been born into a family that was not only connected to the crimes of the CIA-ville imperial capital of the Virginia suburbs, but to have been aggressively socialized into their asexual values. There is probably literally nothing in your past and your “ancestors” that you can latch on to. It probably pisses you off subconsciously or whatever that other people are cringily decolonizing themselves because they do have some kind of ontological totality to latch on to, however damaged it is.

***

Roque Dalton miraculously survives his assassination attempt. His comrades kill him in his sleep, but he wakes up, because poets never die. Betrayed and ideologically castrated, he abandons the people’s struggle in El Salvador and spends his time hanging around with the bourgeois dilettantes of Mexico City. And he runs into “Arturo Belano” at the “Café Quito.” And so on.

***

Neocolonial psychogeographies. Drinking gin and tonics for the quinine. The yappy Italian girls cutting me in the bathroom line at Time Again. Cocaine mixed with tiny shards of glass. Blood dripping on the pages of the Rimbaud book I’ve been carrying around. The fat Seward Park mosquitos. Fresh shit. Wandering from party to disappointing party. The high-heeled hookers on Canal Street. Are you going to write about this, Crumps?

***

The smog has cleared. A beautiful morning in las Lomas de Chapultepec. Lucid and well-rested, the “Mid Castiza of the Day” tweets: ¡Muerte al pueblo!

***

The “project” as a cliché. Some artists and writers have projects. I won’t say many or most or all, because there’s a very specific sense in which people talk about projects. I’m being casual right now. Don’t take notes. I’m talking about the way people talk to me about my project. I have a project, I’m often told. Projects are serious. Projects are -isms. The project is where ideology is expressed, the project is where the latent dream-content is expressed. Projects are often problematic, or the term is evoked to problematize the works that comprise the project, the subterranean meaning of the works. That’s fine, by the way.

Most people don’t have projects, they simply have their lives and their careers. But most people are also mediocrities. In those lives and careers those people might make art, but they don’t necessarily have projects. Most people sleepwalk through their lives. The project is an objective, a mission, the yearning, but not an idle yearning, not the idle yearning of mundane life and mundane careers, but rather the actual desire, which is always somehow a politicized yearning.

The project is greater than the individual work, it is the spiritual material that connects the works into a body of work, it orients the work, it gives the work weight. Projects can succeed or they can fail. Artworks can also succeed or fail, but often they just are. 

The artist is not necessarily aware of their project. The project can be unconscious. Maybe it’s even the case that the project is usually unconscious. Sometimes the project is the thing doing the speaking, and the artist is living passively in the background. The Looney Tunes moment where the oblivious artist suddenly becomes aware of the truth of their project.

The fascists have projects. They say that the downtown scene itself is the project of Peter Thiel, for instance, a delusion factory to pave the way for a based new ruling class ideology. That is the grandest sense of the project, the conscious and literal conspiracy, though it’s also a cliché, one that ultimately obscures the actual spontaneity in “the scene itself as project,” and the actual relation between poetry and power, or the actual relation between pretend poetry and pretend power. It’s not entirely wrong, but it’s too clean and simple. The Thiel money dried up fast when it became clear that the ROI was dubious. Thiel is still a metonym for the illusion of the fascist project itself. The fascist project is real—but also, sometimes it’s not.

The family as a project. But also. Self-actualization as a project. Gender transition as a project. Anyway. The relationship of the project to the family. The family yearnings of the New Right. The connection to trauma. Family trauma. Just have good old nuclear families, with their good old traumas. Pogue in Vanity Fair, quoting Honor Levy: “I just want to have a family someday.”

Maybe there is a mystical component to the project. The cosmic failure of the project. Anyway, I’m rambling. Where should we go next. I’m gonna close out.

***

Padrote Drogado visits New York. He tweets in “the Mexican style.” The bit is a sort of sentimental Spanish-language reactionary shitposting with poète maudit aspirations. El Padrote’s best anglophone counterparts faded away years ago. The grandiose narrator of the tweets has a macho tendency, so for example he’ll get in bar fights to defend his girl’s honor, but also an emo one, so he’s supposed to lose the fights, and ultimately to die, like Mishima. There’s a recurring jokerfied “you-wouldn’t-get-it” motif. Jamás lo entenderás y si no lo entiendes es porque eres un puto pendejo las cosas como son. There’s another account, “cavallo drogato,” that tweets in a similar style, though in a more regional slangy voice, and people often confuse the guy for el Padrote. Then there are some others from Colombia and Argentina, and so on. Mis amigos y yo pusimos la poesía lírica otra vez de moda entre los chavos tú no eres nadie pinche pendejo.

El Padrote says that he’s persecuted by his countrymen. No entienden la profunda soledad del whitexican. He organizes the CDMX screening of the Angelicism movie. But before that, he’s in New York. Around this time both of us are reading Nicolás Medina-Mora’s novel America del Norte. El Padrote and Medina-Mora have a vaguely similar class background, if I understand correctly, and both are “children of NAFTA”—though Medina-Mora’s path takes him through Yale and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and n+1, whereas el Padrote’s takes him through Frogtwitter. Entiéndelo bien, pendejo, yo no vengo al trabajo a socializar, yo vengo a leer los clásicos en pdf todo el día y a escribir la primera gran epopeya de México y América. He and I are at the Gasda theater to see Mamie Green’s dance interpretation of Euripides. Afterwards we go to a diner in Greenpoint.

We talk about Bolaño. El Padrote thinks that there’s something potentially misleading in how Bolaño talks about his exile. It’s true that writers were tortured and killed under Pinochet, and that Bolaño was imprisoned by the regime for a brief spell, though not tortured. El Padrote speculates that Bolaño knew that he would’ve survived had he stayed in Chile, and maybe the great writer was embarrassed by that. Bolaño was a leftist, and no fake leftist, but still a complicated and ambivalent one. He could mingle with the poet children of the Mexican bourgeoisie just as he could with the bohemians from the working classes. That famous “kidnapping Octavio Paz” thing was kayfabe, essentially. A delightful literary provocation, of course, but an illusory one. Bolaño liked the idea of being a literary terrorist, though he also ultimately made peace with Paz and his groupies. He knew he couldn’t claim to be a true terrorist. And there were certainly leftists that hated Bolaño when he was alive, though now everyone celebrates him. And we can’t forget Bolaño’s deep fascination in fascism, particularly the Nazis. But who knows, maybe he would’ve been ultimately killed under Pinochet, maybe not. Who can say? But Bolaño liked exile, el Padrote says, and he liked being an exile. He cherished it in all its bitterness. It’s a poète maudit thing. The normies wouldn’t fucking get it.