The Marin County Book Review

For the conservative project in the arts to succeed, we need conservative literary critics.

Reviews are under Articles.

[The Marin County Book Review @SevereCritic]

https://t.co/AtCEm5mIzX

[The Marin County Book Review @SevereCritic]

@BrookeBrandtjen With the exception of John Lydon.

[The Marin County Book Review @SevereCritic]

@AndrewGilmerUS There is no connection between intellect and virtue.

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@UnfleshedO @SketchesbyBoze My point exactly.

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@FinalTelegraph Which is why Somalis leave it.

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@EricRichards22 Stop buying cheap shoes.

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@5haronl Stop asking why and do something about it.

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@cmcolby71 🎯

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@ColonelTowner "I was just following orders."

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We are at the beginning of a cultural renaissance. Cope is dead and hope has begun.

[Matt Forney @mattforney]

"Popularity" has nothing to do with how good something is. By that logic, Bad Bunny is the greatest creative mind of our time.

The inherent problem with Worst Boyfriend Ever's work is, ironically, something that's out of his control; the sadfuck genre and other edgylit genres are dead. They're dated. They were birthed in a culture that no longer exists.

This detached insouciant "realistic" style of writing was a product of the late Bush/Obama era, itself copied from 90s GenX edgelordery (VICE, the zine scene, writers like Jim Goad and Mark Ames), itself a revival of Bukowski/Thompson, which itself came from the work of Fante, Celine, Miller, Hamsun...I can be here all night talking about this.

Notice the correlation? All of these writers arose during periods of decline or perceived decline. Celine sneered at the bourgeois pretensions of interwar France; Thompson speedran the hippie-to-hedonist arc until his brains were pure liquid; Ames et al. revolted against schoolmarm political correctness (what we now call "woke") by being morally and physically disgusting. The revival of edgylit was spurred by the Obama years of slow, miserable decay ("enjoy the decline"), saw a slow retrenchment during Trump 1.0, then came roaring back under the Biden interregnum.

We are no longer a culture of decline. We are a culture of ascendancy. America is going to the moon and to the frontiers of human consciousness. We are deporting the foreigners and imprisoning the traitors. This is increasingly reflected in culture. America sounds more sure of herself, more self-confident, and all the decline-prophets---from cynical influencers wanting to pretend the sky is still falling to hack writers Xeroxing the work of better men---now look painfully, embarrassingly out of step with the times.

This ties into the growing psychosis that has taken over this site. I think a lot of people have become so genuinely inured to decline that they're psychologically incapable of imagining a better world, let alone recognizing it being built brick-by-brick in front of them. You are all Raped, believing yourself shackled to Plato's allegorical cave wall, not realizing that your cuffs are unlocked and shouting down anyone who tells you you're free to leave. GenXers are handling this transition the worst---it's not a coincidence that the worst blackpilled influencers are GenXers---but millennials and "zoomers" (not real, "zoomers" are just young millennials) are little better.

The picaresque protagonist of Miller, Bukowski, WBE cannot survive an ascendant culture for the same reason why Stoicism, a philosophy invented out of literal cope over Rome's decline, cannot. The cynicism of Henry Chinaski is a mental shield against an abusive world. It falters when the blows stop raining down. You are no longer Hunter S. Thompson. You are Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Cope is dead and hope has begun.

I don't exclude myself from this analysis. I keep getting accused of being a paid hack for Peter Thiel/Israel/Trump/whoever because I talk about the genuine political and cultural progress we can all see instead of dooming like a hysterical maniac. But I was marinaded in the same culture of decline everyone else was. There are writers who seem to be mentally trapped in certain periods because it was when their lives peaked or something. If I'm trapped in any period, it's from 2007-2012: the era of hipsterdom, the early manosphere, Internet feminism, and when the smartphone's effects on society hadn't yet manifested. This period coincides with when I became a public writer and I STILL have people who read me back then following me now.

I have volumes of poetry I've written over the past few years. I have a chapbook I am rewriting now for publication, as well as an unfinished novel, the bulk of which was written from 2022-2023. Looking over all this with fresh eyes, my immediate impression was how absolutely, suicidally depressed I was during that time period and how I need to desperately break away from the sadfuck tone that is so horribly dated in 2026. I THINK I'm succeeding. The poem of mine that 1325 published last week was the first one I'd written in some time. It discusses themes that recur in my earlier work---embarrassing sexual encounters, psychotic fantasies, dead Internet cultures, upstate New York/Eastern Europe/Mexico---but has a tone of hope, as opposed to a tone of reach-for-the-razors.

I'm riven with as many doubts as all of you about whether this right-wing counter-revolution will succeed, if we'll just end up living in libtard slap-happy tyranny anyway. The difference is that I don't let my doubts control me or my mental state, because nobody needs to put up with my problems. If it got to the point where I was too depressed to poast gud, I'd just take a break.

Tl;dr: stop coping, the world is getting better, take off the shit-colored glasses and raise your standards for culture.

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@Mankosmash @mattforney Being popular does not mean you are a decent writer. It's more likely to mean the opposite.

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@QuetzalPhoenix Why not wear real shoes?

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@OG_GenericName @JesseKellyDC Why not? It was an excellent time for women's fashion as well as for men's.

Challenge: write your answer without using the word "comfort."

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@ozzybearm @HumbleFlow Ditto. Although it would be a mistake to think St. Francis was typical.

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@QuetzalPhoenix You'll be glad to know ham does not expire. No food expires, though some do go bad, which you can only find out by using your nose. Ham is not one of these. That's a pull date you're looking at.

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@Will_Tanner_1 #Truth. The Great Man theory of history is the truest one.

[Antigone Journal @AntigoneJournal]

Our latest free books give-away, open to all worldwide. This time it's 8 books from the last 200 years, and 8 people will be drawn to pick their choice. Retweet this and you're in for the random draw on Sunday 11 October. Proper books these. Details to follow over next few hours!

[The Marin County Book Review @SevereCritic]

@HumbleFlow Glad to see THE BALL AND THE CROSS and not the everlasting (and to me incomprehensible) MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. The poignancy of those two men being prevented from duelling by the powers that be--men must not be violent!--is very apropos to our times.

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@PhxInsurgent In a breeches role, such as Rosalind in "As You Like It" and Imogen in "Cymbeline," a woman character puts on breeches and pretends to be a man. The actress is not pretending she really is a man.