Three years ago, I was a 34-year-old who hadn't had sex in fifteen years. Since then I've failed miserably at dating, then turned into a total manwhore, and eventually found someone really special to commit to. In my previous piece "The Harem of an Autist", I shared the story of that journey. Some comments accused me of making it up, a bunch of others asked: "How?" This essay is the answer, the practical guide I wish someone had given me before I started.

What This Is

Why should you listen to me? Because I'm a fairly regular dude who attracts women without any easy-mode levers like money or being a turbo-chad. I'm just a weird nerd who (after fifteen years of celibacy) decided to make dating his autistic special interest and discovered that it's actually not that difficult.

Before embarking on this experiment, I read a lot of dating content online and in books, and all the good advice can be boiled down to: self-improvement, self-respect, confidence, openness, honesty, and vulnerability. That all sounds a bit abstract though, so I'm going to break it down into some more concrete advice.

Ultimately the central point is that it's a lot easier than you might think. Before I started dating, I had no idea it was even possible to meet a hot young woman who begs you to spit on her face on the first date. But eventually I realized it's completely trivial and practically accessible to almost anyone: you go on the apps, have a fun conversation in a bar for a couple of hours, and it just happens. If you take anything away from this essay, it should be that this is easily achievable for a normal person who actually puts some effort into dating.¹ But you need to actually try. You need to intentionally and consciously improve yourself and your approach.

I recognize that much of this advice comes from my personal experience. Dating is highly individualized, and what worked for me will not necessarily work for everyone else. But I think the broad principles will apply to the vast majority of cases, and it's up to you to adapt them to your particular situation.

Reality Check: The Modern Dating Landscape

The first thing you must understand is that dating markets are ruthlessly efficient at matching people of equivalent SMV. It's nearly impossible to consistently date out of your league. There is a kind of beauty in the brutal clarity of this system: it does not allow for any delusions about your position in the world of dating.

It has been said that dating apps brought gay dating norms to straights, but I don't think people have internalized exactly what that means. The truth is that if you are even a little bit handsome, you can hit a 3-digit bodycount (with attractive women) in a few years, easily.

Dating apps are a numbers game and must be treated as such. Very roughly the ratios for me were 100 swipes → 1 match → 0.1 dates → 0.05 lays → 0.005 meaningful connections. This is basically a funnel that would make a B2B SaaS startup founder hang himself. You will be rejected again and again and again. Eventually you get desensitised, but still there's a sense that one ought to be filled with a feeling of abject horror. How can one continue to believe in the existence of a benevolent deity in the face of these ratios?

Consider the time you spend on dating apps as a tax you pay for the possibility of sex and/or love. Some people are in a higher tax bracket than others, and yes, it's absolutely unfair. But people like to complain without actually putting in any work. You need to actually commit to the process, which means setting aside at least an hour a day for swiping and chatting on the apps, and consciously optimizing both yourself and your profile to achieve your goals. You need to try trying.

The relationship between attractiveness and results on the apps is a power law. If you improve your appeal by 5%, you're not going to increase your matches by 5%, you will double them. The people far above you are doing unimaginably well. Orders of magnitude, baby. Think Timmy Chalamet spreading chlamydia across the NYU campus like an STD crop plane.

Casual vs Serious

It doesn't matter, the fundamental principles are exactly the same: self-improvement, honesty, vulnerability, intentionality. The only thing that changes is what you explicitly state you're looking for.

However, even if your ultimate goal is a serious relationship, I strongly recommend that you start with casual dating. Not to stack bodies like some notch-counting sociopath, but because it's the only way to develop the skills, confidence, abundance mindset, and self-knowledge that serious relationships actually require. Serious dating without a hoe phase preceeding it is like trying to run a marathon without doing any training first. If you enter a relationship from a position of scarcity, insecurity, and desperation, of course things are going to be difficult. You need to figure out who you are and what you want before you can actually choose well. You will know when you're ready.

When I met my current partner, I instantly recognized something extraordinary precisely because I had enough data points to make that judgment. Without that contrast, without knowing what mediocre connections feel like firsthand, I'd have no idea what "exceptional" even means. You need a baseline for comparison.

The only real difference between casual and serious dating is how you articulate your intentions. For casual: "I'm not looking for anything serious right now". For relationships: "I'm looking for a long-term partner". Either way, the honesty, the vulnerability, the self-respect remain identical.

Practical Fundamentals

The Handcuff Rule

In everything you do, you should never go for broad appeal; always target the niche you're actually after. You do that by being polarizing in the right way. Example: I was looking for kinky, adventurous, open-minded women, so I had a picture of a pair of leather handcuffs on my profile. That's a really strong filter! It almost certainly decreased the total number of matches I got, but the ones I did get were a much better fit. Whatever niche you are interested in, the important thing is to create filters that draw in the target audience and pushes away everyone else. Finding your niche in the dating market and adapting your approach to the needs of that ni is crucial.

Table Stakes: Fitness, Looks, Life

Physical fitness is the highest ROI investment in your dating life. Actually in your life in general. It's entirely within your control, compounds benefits across your entire existence, and dramatically increases your options. Lifting heavy weights will improve your appearance, physical health, mental health, diet, sleep, and interpersonal interactions. Cartesian mind-body dualism is a fiction—your body is you. Hit the gym, lift heavy (aim for 1/2/3/4 pl8s), and get below 15% body fat.

Women aren't just selecting for aesthetics—they're selecting for the discipline, confidence, and vitality that a fit body represents. (And you want to be in a position where you can do the same!) As a bonus, you'll actually enjoy sex more when you're not wheezing after 30 seconds of mild exertion. Looking your best isn't shallow, it's a sign of respect for yourself and the people you hope to connect with. A fit body is a billboard advertising self-love, and if you can't love yourself, are you really ready to love someone else?

Beyond fitness:

• Wear decent clothes that actually fit your body (not what you hope your body looks like).
• Grooming and basic hygiene (shocking how many men fail at this).
• Lead an interesting life that your potential dates would want to be a part of. But do it for yourself first of all.

These are table stakes. Without them, you're not even in the game.

On the App

First of all, you need to pay for the apps. The system is pay-to-win, it's just how it is.

Pictures

Dating apps are fundamentally a visual medium. You can either whine about how shallow it all is, or just put in the work and get yourself some good pictures. Up to you. Just know that if you don't own a good camera or pay for a photographer, you're not serious about dating and should just delete the apps.

Your photos should be tailored to your target audience. Want an outdoorsy woman? Hiking pics. Intellectual type? Reading in a cool café. Don't try to appeal to everyone—polarize deliberately to filter for what you're actually looking for.

If you're serious about dating, you need to move up the photo quality hierarchy: professional photos > actual camera photos > high-quality phone pics. And absolutely nothing else is acceptable.²

What to do:

• A clear headshot
• A full-body shot that shows your build
• A social pic that proves other humans can sometimes tolerate your presence
• An activity pic showing something you're passionate about
• A conversation starter that filters for compatibility
• Cute animals

What not to do:

• Group shots where it's unclear which person you are
• Sunglasses in every photo
• Photos with women that could be exes
• Photos with babies
• And definitely no fucking pictures with dead animals, what is wrong with you people

If you have the physique for a shirtless pic, include one, but only in a context that makes sense: at the beach, not a dirty bathroom mirror selfie. If you don't have the physique, then lift and diet until you do, then take the pic.

The purpose of these photos isn't just to show what you look like—they're telling a story about your life. Make sure it's a story someone would want to be part of. If your photos show a boring life, don't be surprised when interesting women swipe left.

Finally, test your pics. Use PhotoFeeler or just ask female friends which ones work best. Your perception of how you look often doesn't match reality, and there are stark gendered differences in how pictures are perceived. Guys routinely pick photos where they think they look cool but women find intimidating or off-putting.

Bio

Depends on the app. On Hinge, the classic "you, me, us" triad of answers works well: one prompt that describes you, one prompt that describes who you want, and one prompt that describes what life would look like for the two of you together. Again, do not be generic. Do not go for mass appeal. Polarize your audience and filter for what you're looking for.

Convos

App conversations should be brief. Your goal isn't to build a deep connection through text, it's to establish basic rapport and move to an in-person meeting ASAP. Three to five exchanges is ideal before suggesting a date, but don't force it against the flow of conversation.

Be direct but not desperate. "I'm enjoying our conversation. Want to continue it over drinks?" works better than the endless pen-pal routine many guys fall into. Ask questions, engage with their profile, and respond with something that gives them material to work with. If the convo feels forced, then it's probably time to move on. If you're after a kinky casual relationship then it's perfectly fine to be up-front about it. If you're after marriage and 4 children you should be up-front about that.

Some typical convos. 5/6 did not lead to a date, this is normal. Be honest, light, and polarize in the right way. Most conversations won't lead anywhere, don't try to force it.

Dating

Logistics

If you schedule a date more than 3 days out, you can pretty much write it off, it's gonna be a flake. I don't really understand why it be like this, but it do. For some reason people feel like they can be incredibly rude when it comes to first dates; this is by far my #1 annoyance with dating apps.³

You are in charge of planning the date; you wouldn't believe how many men out there don't have the mental capacity to pick a bar. Pick venues where you can actually talk. Bars work better than restaurants or coffee shops—there's just enough ambient energy, and alcohol helps loosen people up without the commitment of a full dinner. Activity dates can work if there's still room for conversation.

Location matters. Make it convenient for both of you. If you're planning to get laid, walking distance from your home is a good idea.

Confirm the day of. A simple "Looking forward to seeing you later" can save you from showing up to an empty bar.

The Dates

Honestly I don't have much advice on how to make first dates fun, other than have a good conversation. I'm a shy, introverted nerd and I never really had an issue with this. This is great advice on being a good conversationalist.

I think most dating failure comes down to neuroticism, people getting in their own way. They overanalyze, try too hard, and lose their chill the moment they actually like someone. The solution is trivial: relax, stay present, don't be an idiot. Be open and vulnerable, but also don't traumadump. Merely knowing this doesn't make it any easier to follow, though.

If I was into someone, I would always go for a kiss on the first date (and I highly recommend asking for consent first: "is it alright if I kiss you?").⁴

Connection isn't always instant. My most significant relationship started with a fairly lukewarm first date., but by the third date we couldn't keep our hands off each other. If you think the basics are there, give people a chance to open up. First date nerves are real, and some people take longer to show their true selves.

Sex

This one really depends on your own tastes. When I was starting out, I tried to have sex as soon as possible after meeting, but I eventually realized that it was better to wait a bit, even for completely casual relationships. Delaying sex to the second date made both of us more comfortable, relaxed, secure, and just generally improved the vibes, which led to better sex and better retention rates.

That said, I think you should have sex on the first date at least once, just so you know you have it in you. Afterwards you can do whatever you want. It also helps with insecurity issues.

For serious relationships the trajectory might be a bit longer, but the decision about when to have sex isn't about following arbitrary rules, it's about what works for you. Wait as long as you want, but don't turn it into a power struggle or test. Whether casual or serious, the sex timeline should feel natural, not strategic.

Rejection

Rejection hurts. The difference between successful daters and unsuccessful ones isn't that successful people don't feel the sting—it's that they don't let it stop them. The brutal truth is that you need to get rejected repeatedly until you're somewhat desensitized, but it never really goes away.

Remember the numbers game aspect: even with good photos and a solid profile, men will need to swipe hundreds of times for a handful of matches, and many of those matches won't lead to dates. There will be long stretches where you don't get any matches. This isn't a reflection of your worth, it's just how the system works, and you need to stay grounded and keep grinding.

Sometimes you'll fall madly in love and they won't like you back. The third person I went out with after I started dating was incredible: hot, interesting, weird, it felt like we clicked right away, really a one in a million kind of person. We went on four dates in total. She just wasn't that into me. It fucked me up real hard, to the point that I was still dreaming about her more than a year later. After just four short dates! It hurt like hell, but in the end it's all worth it.

The only guaranteed way to fail is to stop trying.

Feedback

Getting better requires feedback, and feedback is really difficult to get in the dating world. People are not exactly incentivized to be honest, and you'll probably never hear back from your failed dates anyway. One solution is to talk things out with your friends and have them tell you what you're doing right and wrong, share tips on what you feel is working or not. You can also talk with your partners: after you have dated someone for a while, ask about their impressions of your first few dates. What did they like, what did they not like, how did they see it from their perspective.

Keep a dating journal. Take notes on what you did, how you reacted to certain situations, what you were afraid to say or do. Experiment on the apps with different pictures, bios, or approaches to conversation. Find what works for you.

Sometimes the truth is "she wasn't into you" and there's nothing to learn. But often, there are things you could be doing better. Dating is a skill, and getting better at that skill means figuring out what you're doing wrong, fixing it, and then iterating over and over.

Mindset

Team Sport, Not Battle

The biggest mistake people make in dating is treating it like warfare. They think of the opposite sex as adversaries to be fought through tactics and manipulation. This mindset is not just toxic, also just plain ineffective. Dating is a team sport. When dating is working well, you and your dates are on the same team, working together towards a common goal. You're not trying to trick someone into bed or a relationship; you're finding someone who wants the same thing you do. This is an atmosphere that you have to cultivate, and it starts with you making the first move of vulnerability and openness. You must lead by example, and your partners will reciprocate.

The team sport mentality applies especially in bed. Sex isn't something you "get" from women—it's something you create together. The goal isn't conquest but mutual pleasure. This mindset alone puts you ahead of 90% of men who are focused only on their own gratification or ego.

The most successful men I know are completely honest about their intentions. Openness and honesty alows potential dates to make an informed decision about whether they want to go out with you. Some will bounce, and this is good, you've saved both of your time and the ones who stay are actually on board with what you're offering.

I must acknowledge that this is not an easy thing to do. If you are insecure about your appearance, personality, experience, skills, or anything else, it's natural to try to hide away and refuse to confront that. When I started dating I was terribly ashamed of sharing the details of my 15 years of monk mode and was totally dishonest about it. It felt awful, and of course my dates picked up on the insincerity. I quickly learned that I had to be open about these things. And two years later when I met my current girlfriend, one of the things that initially pulled her in was my weird sexual history: turns out it was not even a weakness.

This extends to seeing multiple people too. The mental gymnastics guys do to hide this are absurd. Just say, "I'm seeing other people as well." Most women in the app ecosystem are doing the same. Transparency creates trust, even in casual arrangements, and trust is necessary if you want to have great sex. This is partly why women trust me to tie them up with 20 meters of rope just a couple of hours after we first meet.

Another benefit of honesty is that it attracts honest people and pushes away everyone else. People who play games (which is generally a symptom of insecurities) tend to match up with other people who play games, a perfect little soup of toxicity. Again, some will bounce, and this is good.

Above all, do not be ashamed of your sexuality. Sexual desire isn't something to apologize for or disguise behind fake intentions. It's not something to trick people into satisfying. Women are horny too, and great sex can be a profound experience. Confidence in your desires is magnetic. It signals self-respect. You're not desperate; you're selective. You know what you want, you are offering something valuable, and you're looking for compatible partners.

This brings me to standards. Have them. High ones. Not just for physical appearance, but for personality, intelligence, kindness. If the women you're meeting aren't worth talking to, that's on you. Make yourself worthy of more interesting women. Build a life that attracts the kind of partner you want—whether for a night or forever.

Honesty is always difficult and always a work in progress. Nobody is perfect. But approaching dating with transparency isn't just ethically superior, it's pragmatically superior. It leads to better connections, better sex, better relationships, and less wasted time.

Authenticity & Connection

Be Genuine(ly cool)

Your job in dating isn't to make people like you—it's to be your best self and see who's compatible.

Stop sweating all the small stuff. When to kiss, how to escalate, negging, how long to wait until to text, being suave 24/7 with some James Bond quip always up your sleeve. None of that matters much. Just chill. Just be nice. Be cool, honey bunny. A woman who wants to fuck you will make it easy for you. Cooperate with her! You are not enemies, you are not fighting over control of a scarce resource, you are on the same team, looking for the same thing.

I've often asked women to come back to my place without even having kissed them. No elaborate escalation ladder, no push/pull, no "3 points of contact before suggesting location change", none of that bullshit. Just a pleasant chat over a drink or two and "we should get out of here, want to go back to my place?" If she's into you, this works. If she's not, no technique in the world will change that. It's true that some people use sex as a tool in relationship power dynamics; you should stay far, far away from them, and that will just happen naturally as long as you stay true to yourself.

Nice Guys Finish On Her Face

Women really like guys who are nice. Not "nice guys" who are nice from a place of weakness, from a place of dishonesty, neediness, insecurity, hiding their intentions, etc. Women like it when you are nice from a place of confidence, strength, and magnanimity, when it's genuine. Sometimes the nice thing to do is tie someone up and spank them until they cry. Being genuinely nice means being attuned to what the other person actually wants, not what you think you're supposed to provide. And it definitely doesn't mean concocting hidden agreements where you expect to receive something in return for your niceness. So be nice.

The foundation of all meaningful connection is honesty and vulnerability. You need to make the first step here—show your cards before asking to see theirs. When you're vulnerable first, you create space for the other person to reciprocate. This doesn't mean trauma-dumping on a first date, but it does mean being real about what you want, what you enjoy, and who you are.

Casual Sex Attitudes

One of the weirder discoveries of my dating adventures was women's bizarre relationship with casual sex. Many are having it despite not particularly enjoying it. They're often chasing the feeling of being desired rather than pleasure itself. I've slept with beautiful women who admitted they don't really enjoy hookups but keep doing it anyway. When I asked why, the answers were all variations of "I like feeling wanted" or "It's validating" or just "well it was something to do". For them, sex is an abundant but joyless resource: easily gained, but almost never satisfying.

This divorce between sex and pleasure was a big surprise for me. The act has somehow become weirdly performative, less about the actual raw experience itself and more about what it represents. Are you sexually liberated? Desirable? Normal? The apps amplify this dynamic by creating an endless marketplace of validation where actual human connection is almost beside the point. People mindlessly performing scripts about freedom and desire while feeling increasingly alienated from both.

This mind-fucked dynamic explains a lot about modern dating, honestly. When neither party is primarily motivated by actual desire or connection, is it any wonder most casual sex is so mediocre? The good news is that you can easily set yourself apart by crushing the competition on this front.

Sexual Compatibility

Whether you are looking for something casual or a life partner, sexual compatibility is non-negotiable. Different people have radically different preferences, but are usually very reticent about discussing them up front; this is how you end up divorced 5 years down the line. Some women want romance and tenderness; others want to be thrown against the wall and degraded. Some prioritize their pleasure; others get off primarily on yours. There's no universal "good at sex"—there's only "good at sex with this particular person."

This is why sexual honesty is crucial. It filters out mismatches before emotional investment makes the inevitable split more painful. The right sexual match creates a feedback loop of mutually reinforcing desire and fulfillment that elevates the entire relationship. The physical connection elevates the mental one and vice versa. When you're sexually compatible, everything else becomes easier: communication improves, resentment decreases, and your bond deepens through shared vulnerability. Do not, under any circumstances, settle for mediocre sex

If you want better than mediocre—and you should—then aim higher. Be honest, be present, be genuinely interested in your partner's pleasure, and be good at sex (more on that in my next essay). The bar is so low it's practically underground.

Intentionality: Design Your Relationships

Being authentic goes hand in hand with being intentional. Most people are not really choosing their relationships. They're just stumbling into whatever arrangement emerges from unconscious social scripts. They fuck on date 3 because they're supposed to fuck on date 3, they go exclusive because that's what you do after a while, they move in together because rent is expensive, and then they wake up five years later wondering what the fuck happened.

Intentional dating means actively designing your relationships rather than letting them happen to you. This starts with brutal honesty about what you actually want. Not what you think you should want, not what dating coaches say you should pursue, but what genuinely brings you fulfillment.

This is another thing that's going to limit your target audience, but ulltimately works in your favor. Yes, being upfront about wanting casual arrangements means that many people will swip left, but the ones who match are actually going to be interested in the same thing. No wasted evenings, no disappointed expectations, no messy situationships.⁵

This intentionality should extend to all aspects of a relationship. A friend of mine told me the story of her first divorce: he was her first boyfriend, they had been dating for 8 years starting in college, and eventually decided to get married. So they have a lovely ceremony, exchange vows, eat cakes and all that, and the next day the husband says: "time to start trying for kids now". She was absolutely horrified as she had absolutely no intention of having kids with him. This is an extreme example, but people go through relationships based on unstated assumptions and expectations when it comes to jealousy, communication, security, living arrangements, life goals, and how to enhance each others' lives that are often totally incorrect.

The most successful relationships are those that involve two people who act as conscious architects and not passive participants. This might sound clinical, but it actually creates space for deeper emotional connection. When the structural elements are clear, you can focus on actually enjoying each other rather than constantly renegotiating unspoken rules. Do not let life just happen to you. Have you tried trying?

Yes, But...

"But Alvaro, I'm too fat/ugly/old to succeed at dating."

Have you put in consistent effort at the gym for a year? Have you optimized your diet? Have you invested in clothes that actually fit? Have you gotten professional photos? No? Then you haven't actually tested this hypothesis. These are all easily fixable issues, and you just need to stop complaining and put in the work. You don't need to be a male model—you just need to be the best version of yourself.

"But Alvaro, I'm too short. Women won't date men under 6 feet."

I'm not going to tell you that height preferences are not real. They can be brutal, and they are totally unfair. But if you're fixating on the women who reject you for immutable characteristics rather than focusing on the many who don't care, you're creating your own prison. The height issue is real, but the impact is wildly exaggerated by men looking for an uncontrollable excuse for controllable failures.

"But Alvaro, I'm socially awkward/on the spectrum/have anxiety."

What do you think my social skills looked like after 15 years of monk mode? I get social anxiety all the time, and from the silliest things. But social skills are just that—skills. They can be learned and improved like any other. As long as you keep practicing intentionally, figuring out what you can do better, and keep putting yourself in new and uncomfortable situations, you will improve. The alternative to that is to resign yourself to using your temporary weaknesses as a permanent excuse, which guarantees failure.

"But Alvaro, there are no interesting women in my area."

Have you tried living somewhere else? I'm entirely serious. If dating is important to you and your location is legitimately terrible for it, moving is a rational decision. I've known people who relocated primarily for dating prospects. Besides, most likely, there are interesting women around you—you're just not interesting enough to attract them yet. Focus on building a life and personality that naturally draws in the kind of people you want to meet.

"But Alvaro, the dating market is rigged against average men."

Is the market difficult? Yes. Is it "rigged"? No. The problem is that most men are putting in minimal effort while expecting exceptional results. They have terrible photos, boring lives, mediocre fizeeks, and underdeveloped social skills, yet somehow believe they deserve supermodel girlfriends who fall into their laps without effort.

Dating markets are highly efficient. You generally get what you're worth. Tinder is a mirror disguised as a window. If you're not getting what you want, you have two options: improve your market value or adjust your expectations. Both require honest self-assessment and real effort.

"But Alvaro, I don't have time for all this."

Then you don't have time for dating. If you can't commit a few hours a week to swiping, a few hours in the gym, and a few hours on dates, you're not actually prioritizing this area of your life. That's fine, but admit it's a choice rather than pretending it's an impossibility.

Wrapping Up

Dating is a skill like any other. I went from a decade and a half of celibacy to more casual sex than I knew what to do with, and ultimately to finding someone truly remarkable. You just need to work on it, try different things, iterate, improve yourself. Love thyself. Do not lower your standards, do not accept "good enough" in yourself or others, do not hide behind masks that attract the wrong people. Focus on what you're best at, but don't be terrible at anything. I'm not claiming everyone will achieve identical results with identical effort. What I am saying is that nearly everyone can substantially improve from their current baseline, whatever that may be.

Most men fall into one of two categories: the reliable "boyfriend material" guy who fails to inspire true desire, or the exciting "fuckboy" who can't maintain a meaningful connection. The sweet spot is being both—reliable enough to trust but exciting and hot enough to desire. It's not about being perfect at everything, but about being good enough across the board. It's about honesty and skills and confidence. When you're not constantly worried about hiding your insecurities or playing tactical games, you can be present and actually enjoy the person across from you.

I cannot emphasize enough that the same principles serve both casual and serious dating. Honesty, vulnerability, self-respect, and intentionality create better experiences across the board. These aren't just ethical considerations—they're pragmatic strategies that lead to better sex, better connections, and less wasted time.

Much of this post focuses on casual dating, but most people will eventually get bored of that, and finding the right teammate changes everything. When you meet someone who genuinely gets you, who wants the same things you do, the entire experience transforms. Dating stops feeling like a grinding job interview process and becomes an exciting collaboration. The right partner will enhance your life, pushing you to grow to ever greater heights.

Approaching dating with intentionality and treating it as a skill to be developed changes everything. Your dating life isn't happening to you; you're actively creating it. You are in control of your romantic destiny.

Further reading, in case six thousand words on dating wasn't enough for you:

• Putanumonit: Dating: a Research Journal, Part 1
• Most Online Dating Advice is Terrible

Stay tuned for the final installment in the series, How to be Good at Sex.

Closure. I keep hearing that word.

Of the qualities which ordinarily raise novels to eminence, Bouvard et Pécuchet has absolutely none. It is unfinished. It is a failure on almost every level: it is gimmicky, repetitive, the characters are shallow, there is no plot, it is supposedly comedic but never funny, and it tells instead of showing at every turn. Flaubert was well aware of its faults, writing to Émile Zola that "there are no quotable excerpts, no brilliant scenes, just the same situation over and over…" Yet this novel counts among its admirers Borges, Calvino, and Pound. Bolaño classes it among the "great, imperfect, torrential works that blaze paths into the unknown", while Gass says that "it is not for the faintly minded. It is a devastation, a blowup as total as the bomb".

Laurel and Hardy at Epidaurus

On a horizon that receded further each day, they glimpsed things at once strange and wondrous.

The year is 1872. Flaubert starts working on something he's had on his mind for a very long time. The intention is to write a comic novel of ideas, viciously skewering the stupidity he sees everywhere around him. At its center will be two fools, a slapstick duo of dilettantes who embody everything that is wrong with the world and are justly punished for it—a picaresque of knowledge starring two Quixotes and no Sancho. In their adventures they will try their hand at virtually every art and science known to man, from horticulture to theology—and fail, painfully, at every single point. In a letter, he writes:

I’m contemplating something in which I’ll vent all my anger. Yes, at last I shall rid myself of what is stifling me. I shall vomit back onto my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me, even if it means ripping my chest open.

But Flaubert is nothing if not a perfectionist, and if he must write about stupidity then he must first make a comprehensive survey of it. He reads one tome. He reads ten. He reads a hundred. By the time he reaches one thousand it is clear that he's still nowhere near the end. In 1879 he announces to Zola that he has finally finished his readings and will not open another book until the novel is done, but before long he finds himself lost in the pages of yet more ecclesiastical texts. By the end of his life (which will not be long enough to complete his work) he will have read more than 1500 books in his quest to understand the minds of François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard and Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet.

He's never really sure about the work, writing to his sister in 1877 that "at times, the immense scope of this book stuns me. What will come of it? I only hope I’m not deceiving myself into writing something goofy rather than sublime." In another letter he writes that "one must be mad to undertake such a task." And between all this, he is also repudiating his earlier style, deconstructing and demolishing the conventions of the realist novel, replacing them with irony, self-reference, and the endless fragmentation of language and meaning. The line between author and characters is blurred, the linear becomes circular, and the very act of reading itself is interrogated as Flaubert inaugurates the 20th century modernist tradition in literature

They Gave Up

What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano.

The novel follows two Parisian copy-clerks who meet by chance and quickly bond over their shared intellectual curiosity. When Bouvard unexpectedly inherits a fortune, they retire together to the countryside to devote their lives to learning and self-improvement. Flaubert shoves his characters into a labyrinth of intellectual disciplines and subjects them to relentless misfortune; barely a paragraph goes by without some absurd failure; there is no pause, no space whatsoever for comedic timing, and the joke unfolds in the same way every time—with the inevitability of a mathematical proof.

The vicious cycle begins with curiosity, moves on to true belief, then disillusionment and contrarianism, only for them to give up at the end. A series of grand revelations, each leading nowhere, or worse, back to the beginning. And was the journey worth it? Flaubert offers no answer to that question. The pace is astonishing: in the span of a few paragraphs, they become theologians, stumble on the answer to Job, get depressed, and quit.

Our world is therefore but a point in the totality of things—and our universe, which the intelligence cannot penetrate, only one universe in an infinity of neighboring universes with infinite modifications. Extension envelops our universe, but is enveloped by God, who contains in His thought all possible universes, and His thought is itself contained in His substance.

They felt as if they were in a balloon, at night, in the glacial cold, carried along in an endless rush toward a bottomless abyss—with nothing around them but the ungraspable, the immobile, the eternal. It was too much. They gave up.

When they tire of studying things, they begin studying the discourse about them instead. While trying to understand history, they acquire a totalizing notion of historical truth which is then subverted in the same paragraph; they then immediately move on to historiography, only to find themselves stuck in yet another cul-de-sac.

They no longer had a single fixed idea about the individuals and events of that time. To form an impartial judgment, they would have to read every history, every memoir, every newspaper and manuscript, for the slightest omission could foster an error that would lead to others, and on unto infinity. They gave up. But they had acquired a taste for history, a need for truth for its own sake. Perhaps the truth was more easily uncovered in earlier periods? Surely the authors recounted events more dispassionately at a greater remove. And they delved into the good Rollin. “What a load of hogwash!” cried Bouvard as of the first chapter.

Having stopped caring about dates, they moved on to disdaining facts. What counted was the philosophy of history!

The first moment of true pathos only appears near the end of the novel, as our two protagonists reach their nadir and decide to commit suicide. Just as they are about to hang themselves, they are saved by the gleam of distant lanterns, lit in celebration of a midnight mass, only for the Sisyphean torment to begins anew. They go from suicidal, to being saved by religion, to fanatics of the faith spending a fortune on relics, to skeptics and Spinozists, to mythologists debating priests, to Buddhism (first ironically, then really), and finally to liberation by way of disgust.

C'est moi

Certain authors extol the pleasures of a picnic or a boat ride.

At some point Flaubert discovers that he has been writing about himself all along. What appeared to him as a comic work of social criticism (what was intended as a work of social criticism), ends up being a melancholic meditation on his own being. The act of writing this novel has forced him into the same kind of bookish learning and bewildered ascetic impulse that he mockingly inflicts on his characters. Driven by a barren obsession for knowledge, he has turned himself into an encylopedia of the universe and alienated himself from the real world. The impulse had always existed in Flaubert: decades earlier, in 1854, he wrote in a letter to Louise Colet: "One ought to know everything, to write!"

He writes to Turgenev in a moment of despair, confessing: "At times, it seems to me that I am becoming idiotic." Perhaps this should not surprise us from the man who said "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." It certainly surprised him though:

Bouvard and Pecuchet have filled me up to such a point that I have become them! Their stupidity is my own and I am bursting with it….I live as much as I can in my two fellows…the stupidity of my two characters has invaded me.

As Flaubert becomes more like them, they become more like Flaubert, disenchanted, dissatisfied, and disappointed with everything they see around them:

Then their minds developed a piteous faculty, that of perceiving stupidity and being unable to tolerate it. Insignificant things saddened them: newspaper advertisements, a burgher’s profile, an inane comment overheard by chance. And reflecting on what was said in their village, and on the fact that one could find other Coulons, other Marescots, other Foureaus stretching to the ends of the earth, they felt upon their shoulders the weight of the entire world.

By the end of the novel they are little more than stand-ins, and Flaubert even grants them the authorship of his own Dictionary of Received Ideas.

And if Flaubert is writing about himself, what does he have to say on the subject? He writes about an infinite curiosity that is always subverted by human finitude; he suffers simultaneously from a superabundance of learning and a desire that will never be quenched. And the novel, too, is torn in opposite directions: between comedy and tragedy, between greed for experience and a corrosive suspicion of Ideas.

Ideas and pain are inextricably linked, right from the beginning: "...their newfound curiosity caused their intelligence to bloom. [...] And, having more ideas, they suffered more acutely." Imagine Faust—sans Mephistopheles! And while our heroes abandon every field they touch, they never give up the greater quest. The struggle of Bouvard and Pécuchet (and Flaubert (and me (and you))) is not comic, but tragic and Romantic—they and he and we are not buffoons but martyrs, tortured and broken on the wheel of the human condition.

The Problem of Knowledge

I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,—
And even, alas! Theology,—
From end to end, with labor keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before [...]

And see, that nothing can be known!
That knowledge cuts me to the bone.

Are the failures of Bouvard and Pécuchet a commentary on our norms of knowledge? Is the problem with the people, their sources, or how they handle them? Is it a declaration of the triumph of skepticism over truth? Is it a more general attack on Western civilization (as Gass would have it)? Or is it perhaps a condemnation of the entire universe?

The original subtitle of the novel was "An Encyclopedia of Human Stupidity", which was later changed to "On Lack of Method in the Sciences". This change represents a shift in how Flaubert saw his task: it started as a mere attack on the follies of his contemporaries, but in the end it was a much broader assault. The flaws of the characters are still there, but they are not imbeciles: in many ways their faults are understandable.

While the overall structure repeats itself, the actual errors they commit are diverse: sometimes it's a matter of an over-reliance on book learning, at other times it's an issue of science vs metis. Sometimes it's a question of stupid experimental methods, while at other times it's a matter of social epistemology. Flaubert systematically dismantles epistemic authority, pitting each source against another in a cascade of contradictions. His protagonists' earnest curiosity is crushed by the disorienting barrage of information that assaults them from every direction.

The fields they try to tackle are too vast and too complex, so they are too fast, too shallow, and fail to synthesize or think critically. They see knowledge as a conclusion, when it should be a process. They fail to realize the limits of their knowledge. Even when they do acquire some truth, they put it into practice in the wrong way. They believe that knowledge is acquired easily, and once acquired will solve all problems.

But Bouvard and Pécuchet are not just bad learners—Flaubert's true concern runs deeper: they are constantly striving for meaning in a world that resists clear answers. Their epistemological failure is a minor reflection of a much greater existential failure. Their desperate search for meaning in a universe that is indifferent to such inquiries leads only to alienation and disappointment.

Flaubert is not interested in specific epistemological criticisms: those questions are left open to interpretation and that's part of the appeal. Flaubert's ultimate target is the pursuit of absolute truth, epistemological certainty, the idea of reaching the end of thought. He declares that ineptitude is not understanding the twilight.

"Yes, stupidity consists in wanting to conclude. We are a thread and we want to know the pattern. [...] What mind of any strength—beginning with Homer—has ever come to a conclusion?" And this novel certainly revels in its refusal to conclude! For Flaubert, the search for knowledge is an existential trap, a synecdoche for the futility of reaching any kind of certainty or ultimate purpose. Both for him as for his characters, this quest for knowledge leads only to disorientation.

One Must Imagine Flaubert Happy

End with a view of our two heroes leaning over their desk, copying.

Bouvard et Pécuchet is an Ecclesiastes for the 20th century. For Qohelet this was all tragic. For Flaubert, it's an unintentional tragicomedy. For both, it's an existential torment. While Qohelet has a way "out" (unsatisfying as it is) in God, Flaubert has no such option. We moderns, having ripped off the theological blinders of our forefathers, can appreciate the cosmic irony, and—perhaps—laugh back at it. While the ancient existentialist can preach a sense of acceptance and resignation, Flaubert instead gives us...The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, except the wanderer is about to trip and fall under the fog again.

Bouvard and Pécuchet act out of compulsion, convinced that the next piece of knowledge will somehow save them, redeem them, or justify their existence, but it never does. The universe, for Flaubert, is not only meaningless and indifferent, it is also indecipherable. We are doomed to absurdity and contradiction. Even at our best, we may only ever reach the truth of chessmasters, never that of angels.

This sense of futility is not just reflected in the characters—it was Flaubert's experience in writing the novel itself. It's fitting that a book against concluding was left unfinished, almost feels like it's part of the joke. A great work of circularity, with no ending of its own! It even infects its readers: I have been writing this review for more than two years now. The irony of an unfinished novel about the impossibility of finality speaks louder than any conclusion could.

In the novel's intended finale, after so many futile attempts to learn and improve themselves, Bouvard and Pécuchet would return to copying, caught in an eternal loop of seeking, failing, and beginning again. Whether this vision is beatific or horrific is left to the reader to decide.

Every year, despite my best efforts, my to-read list gets longer. Soon it will exceed what I can reasonably hope to achieve before my death. Like Bouvard, like Pécuchet, like Flaubert, like all men—I am destined to spend my meager allotment of time chasing an ever-receding horizon. We are doomed to seek, knowing we will never arrive.

A Cypriot friend of mine (who wishes to remain anonymous) has produced some new translations of Cavafy in a modest private printing. They are not without merit, so I felt they deserved to be read outside our small circle. After a few vigorous attempts at persuasion (which may or may not have included the use of spirits and sweet liqueurs), he has graciously allowed me to post a selection.

The God Abandons Anthony

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession passing by
with exquisite music, with voices—
your retreating fortune, all your works
that failed, your life's plans
that all turned out illusions, do not idly mourn.
As if long prepared, with courage,
bid goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all do not delude yourself, do not say
it was a dream, that your ears were deceived;
do not stoop to such vain hopes.
As if long prepared, with courage,
as befits one who proved worthy of such as a city,
go firmly to the window,
and listen with emotion, but not
with the pleading and whining of a coward,
your final pleasure—the music,
the exquisite instruments of the mystical procession,
and bid goodbye to her, the Alexandria you are losing.

 

Dangerous Thoughts

Said Myrtias (a Syrian student
in Alexandria, under the reign
of Augustus Constans and Augustus Constantius;
partly pagan, and partly Christianizing);
"Strengthened by theory and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
I will give my body over to pleasure,
to my dreams’ delights,
to the boldest erotic desires,
to the lustful urges of my blood, without
any fear, because when I want—
and have the will, strengthened
as I shall be by theory and study—
in critical moments I will find again
my spirit, as before, ascetic."

 

Thermopylae

Honor to those who in their life
define and guard a Thermopylae.
Never straying from duty,
just and true in every deed,
but with pity too, and compassion;
Generous when they are rich
and when they are poor, still generous in small things
still sharing what they can;
always speaking the truth,
but without resentment for the deceivers.

And yet greater honor to them
when they foresee (as many do foresee)
that Ephialtes will appear in the end,
and the Medes will finally break through.

 

Philhellene

Ensure the engraving is skilfully done.
The expression serious and majestic.
The diadem preferably a bit narrow:
I don't like the broad ones from Parthia.
The epigraph, as usual, Greek:
not bombastic, not pompous—
the proconsul might misunderstand,
he's always nosing around and reporting back to Rome—
but of course commendatory.
Something very fine on the other side:
some discus-thrower, young, good-looking.
Above all I urge you to see to it
(Sithaspis, for God's sake, do not forget!)
that after the King and the Savior,
they engrave with stylish letters, Philhellene.
Now don't start with your wisecracks,
with your "Where are the Hellenes?" and "Where is the Hellenism
out here behind the Zagros, beyond Phraata."
So many others more barbarous than us
inscribe it, and so shall we.
After all don't forget that sometimes
we are visited by sophists from Syria,
and versifiers, and other triflers.
So we are not, I think, un-Hellenic.

 
 

Emperor Heraclius, 629 A.D.

The war had already been lost when he took the throne,
but he crossed the Black Sea,
and struck the Persians in the heart of their empire.
Six campaigns, six triumphs—each more glorious
than the last. The banners of Byzantium
waved over Ctesiphon’s ruins.

The return was a continuous celebration.
In Jerusalem, he laid aside the purple and the diadem,
and barefoot returned the Holy Cross,
which he had so gloriously recovered.

His triumph was magnificent.
As he entered the City drawn by four elephants,
the senate and the people came out to meet him
with tears and acclamations,
holding olive branches and lamps,
and throwing flowers on his path.
Surrounded by the splendor of his conquests,
surrounded by ambassadors from every nation bearing gifts,
precious jewels from the ruler of India,
and an eternal peace from the leader
of the barbarous Franks,
they hailed him Basileus.
The poet had already composed a splendid work—
not inferior to those of the ancients—
likening him to Moses, and Alexander, and Hercules.

And while the City celebrated,
on the borders of Syria an obscure village was pillaged
by the followers of a desert prophet.

 

Before Time Changes Them

They were deeply sorrowed           by their parting.
They didn’t want it;           it was the circumstances.
The need to earn a living           compelled one of them
to journey far —           New York or Canada.
Their love of course           was not the same as before;
the attraction           had faded gradually,
the attraction           had faded a lot.
But separation,           that was not what they wanted.
It was the circumstances.—           Or perhaps Fate
appeared as an artist,           parting them now
before their feeling is extinguished,           before Time changes them;
each for the other           will remain forever
that beautiful youth           of twenty-four.

 

Alexandrian Kings

The Alexandrians were gathered
to see Cleopatra's children,
Caesarion, and his little brothers,
Alexander and Ptolemy, displayed
for the first time in the Gymnasium,
there to be declared as Kings,
amidst the gleaming ranks of soldiers.

Alexander—they called him King
of Armenia, of Media, and of Parthia.
Ptolemy—they called him King
of Cilicia, of Syria, and of Phoenicia.
Caesarion was standing up front,
draped in rose-coloured silk,
a garland of hyacinth on his chest,
his belt a double row of sapphire and amethyst,
his shoes laced up with white ribbons
embroidered with pink pearls.
Him they called greater than the young ones,
him they called King of Kings.

The Alexandrians knew, of course,
that these were merely words and theater.

But the day was warm and poetic,
the sky a light blue,
the Alexandrian Gymnasium
a triumphant artistic achievement,
the courtiers in extraordinary splendor,
Caesarion all grace and beauty
(Cleopatra's son, blood of the Lagidae);
and the Alexandrians rushed to the festival,
exuberant and cheering
in Greek, in Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,
charmed by the lovely spectacle—
but of course they knew,
what hollow words these Kingships were.

Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!

St. Augustine

In 1863, William Lang ran a mile in 4 minutes and 2 seconds, a record that would endure for 80 years. Standing undefeated across the decades, across two world wars, from horse and cart to television and airplanes, the record attained a mythical status. After innumerable failed attempts at breaking it, the 4 minute mile was considered impossible. Experts claimed the human heart would explode from the strain.

In 1954, Roger Bannister did what doctors had declared physically impossible: he ran a mile in under 4 minutes. A few weeks later the record was crushed again, and then another 46 times within just three years.

The essay you are reading right now is the four minute mile of Fucking.

Monk Life

Starting in my 20s, I spent about 15 years being celibate. Not because I couldn't get laid, I just chose not to. I was more interested in reading books than chasing women. A mediocre relationship as a teenager, feeling like I had to change who I was in order to get women (and turn into something I didn't like), feeling like I was undesirable, and generally just being more interested in learning at this time led me down that path. Then one day, at 34, I got bored and suddenly decided to make Fucking my autistic special interest. Soon, I was juggling relationships with multiple women and turning down eager propositions because I had better things to do.

Of course, I had to leave some things behind. I betrayed the philosophical life. Didn't read very much, and certainly didn't write anything. The mind atrophies as more and more blood is dedicated to engorging the penis, starving the brain of its essential nutrients and withering away its noumenal capacities.

This isn't a pickup guide. It's the story of a self-experiment. It's a case study in arbitrary limitations and choosing one's character. It's about social scripts. And it's about the discovery that what many consider to be rare and precious is actually abundant and easily accessible, if only you choose to pursue it.

People convince themselves of the absurd nonsense like "I'm just not good with women", "I'm too old to start dating seriously", "I'm not attractive enough for casual sex". These are nothing more than meaningless fixed ideas, and you can just wake up one day and decide to follow a different one.

Before we go further, let's establish that I'm not some gigachad by nature. I'm in my late 30s, tall and lean, not particularly handsome, and with the kind of light balding that says "I read too much philosophy". I'm a pretty good baker, I have a decent job that nobody is impressed by or interested in, and in the end I'm fundamentally a weird nerd writing esoteric blog posts on the internet.

What's a Vagina?

So what is it like to be a manwhore? Pretty sweet, actually. (If you were wondering why I haven't written a real essay in 2 years, now you know.) But it didn't start out that way...

My approach to trying new things is to dive into the deep end of the pool and figure out if I can swim. So, naturally, the first thing I did was to buy some leather handcuffs and a wand vibrator. I took a few decent pics, created a tinder profile, and started swiping.

My first date a few days later was a cute 21 year-old Ukrainian girl. We had a quick chat on the app and I invited her out for a drink. We met up outside the metro, walked to a bar and had a pleasantly anodyne chat for about an hour or so. I did not touch her beyond an initial hug. At that point I asked her if she wanted to come back to my place; she was up to it, and we headed off. On the walk back I thought to myself: "what the hell are all those people on the internet talking about? Dating is the easiest thing in the world".

She asked me about my sexual experience, especially with BDSM, but I was too insecure to tell her the truth, so I bullshitted about how some ex introduced me to the idea a couple of years ago.

We got back to my place and started making out on the couch a bit. It was at this point that ambition and reality came crashing into each other. I suddenly realized that I did not remember how any of this worked. I was basically a virgin all over again. I took her into the bedroom, but everything was off. I was too nervous, too eager, moving too fast. Neither of us was comfortable. I could barely get hard. Neither of us came. A disaster on every level.

I walked her down to the tram stop and never contacted her again. The embarrassment was just too bad.

The second time around was...not much better. And the third one too. Let me quote some of my dating notes from this time:

It is probably too early to judge after 4 dating partners, but thus far the apps have brought me nothing but disappointment, pain, and anxiety. I can't even get hard for the women I sleep with. I sincerely hope there is something better down the line because otherwise I am so fucked.

Initially thought I'd just fuck around, but very quickly discovered I was not built for casual sex. Don't enjoy sex all that much to begin with tbh. Can barely cum from it, when I manage to get hard! (Later note: maybe this was a bit misguided? (Later later note: it was misguided.)) [note from significantly later: casual sex is good actually]

But I kept trying, figuring out what to do and what not to do, getting feedback from my partners, experimenting with all sorts of new things, and just generally getting the hang of it. About a month after starting, I met someone I became madly infatuated with, fumbled it hard, and it was all over after just 4 dates. My notes are amusing in retrospect, so earnest:

Intrusive thoughts all the time, even when I'm spending intimate time with other women [...] I'm terrified of doing the wrong things, being too honest or not honest enough, coming on too strong or not strong enough. I'm scared that by liking you too much I'm going to start repulsing you: afraid of challenging you, acting like a doormat. Nobody wants a doormat.

Went from fucking being happy all on my own to the utter bullshit of limerence, loneliness, neediness...this shit better be worth it in the long run, man.

What if in the end our relations are the only thing that really matters, and it's too late for me? What if I'm totally fucked?

That was my first inkling that I really wanted something more than just casual sex, but I also felt the need to explore more before trying to settle down.

I had grown up on a steady diet of third-hand dating wisdom: I needed to act like a douche, develop "game," become some sort of Alpha Chad. Early on, dating felt like a rollercoaster partly because I was not really secure in myself. A week without any matches would feel depressing, a week with multiple dates would make me feel like I was on top of the world. Fundamentally the issue was that I was looking for external validation and trying to protect or build up a fragile ego.

So easy to get discouraged, even when things are going relatively well, I'm banging multiple women, etc. One failure and I'm feeling bad ffs.

What took a while to figure out was that being a weirdo worked just fine. More than "just fine", it was the right thing to do, because that's the only way you can attract people who are really into you. Breaking through the initial pain and anxiety was crucial though, I think it's easy to get caught in a cycle of low self-esteem, failing to improve, and self-sabotaging, which just causes more low self-esteem. But I just picked up the pieces, kept learning, and kept going. I tried to embrace rejection: fear of rejection is paralyzing, yet actual rejection gives clarity, courage, and finality. The absurd thing is that even after dozens of rejections, the fear never gets easier. The lesson seems impossible to internalize—maybe I needed more repetitions? Should've done 5x5 rejections twice a week like some kind of twisted gym routine?

The Harem of an Autist

Between August 2022 and June 2024 I went on 36 first dates with women of 26 different ethnicities. I slept with 17 of them, and had steady relationships with 7. From portfolio managers to women with shaved heads and dagger tattoos on their chest, I was mostly drawn to the "art hoes".

It didn't take long for me to figure out what to do in bed. Six months after my first date, one of my friends with benefits used the words "transcendent" and "I felt something die in me" to describe our night together. But my brain was busy cataloguing her self-absorption and being bored.

A curious thing I noticed was that many of the women I dated weren't actually seeing other guys on the side. Some were uninterested, unwilling to put in the effort, while some (even really cute girls) seemed to have trouble finding even someone willing to bang them. So I found myself in a weird harem situation, dating 3-4 women at a time, having threesomes and generally living a life of debauchery. My calendar looked like a messy game of Tetris.

This is the timeline of all my dates/relationships (blue: had sex; red: no sex):

The reality of being a "player" was not always what I had imagined it to be though. Take Alice, for example: she was kind of a hopeless romantic who had spent a decade pining over her ex. Three dates in, she was clearly falling for me harder than I was for her. She was lovely: beautiful, intelligent, great in bed, had her shit together. She wrote me poems. We even lived together for a couple of months. And yet for some reason beyond my understanding, I felt an emotional distance that could not be overcome. I think on some subconscious level I was getting off on making her fall for me even more, but the screwed up power dynamic just gave me a hollow feeling. I almost stopped reading during my relationship with her, and my creativity died completelyal. I realized that I needed something different out of my partner, something with more intensity, even if it means having to go through more turbulence. Alice thought we'd date for a year and amicably go our separate ways, and that's what happened in the end.

Having women compete for your attention, maintaining multiple relationships, the power to say "no"—it pumps up your ego in a way that feels amazing at first but eventually reveals itself to be a bit empty. You end up creating these parallel lives, each relationship its own little universe that never quite achieves escape velocity. Sometimes that's exactly what you want. But it gets old.

In the midst of all this, I met some truly remarkable people. Despite things not working out romantically in the long run, I'm genuinely grateful for their presence in my life. I don't think failed relationships are a waste of time, not every connection needs to last forever to be meaningful. Some people are just passing through your life, leaving it better than they found it. And hopefully you leave them better than you found them. I also fucked up, more than once. I hurt people who didn't deserve it—made promises I didn't keep, acted in ways that I'm not proud of. Sometimes other people had to pay the price of my learning curve.

The one thing I was consistent about was being radically open and honest about everything, including seeing other people. Every time I tried to be "strategic" it backfired spectacularly. The whole pickup artist mythology about being a manipulative seductor is complete bullshit.

The Dating

Sex is easy to get in enormous quantities; finding someone you actually like is basically impossible. In the end, the game is probabilistic—you have to keep trying, keep meeting people, keep rolling the dice until you find something real. The scariest thing is that compatibility is mostly ineffable. The evidence collected by gwern is extremely interesting, and basically boils down to this: it's impossible to predict a couple's romantic success based on their explicit characteristics. Understanding this also helped me understand why the relationship with Alice didn't work out. The best you can do is try to minimize false negatives by letting go of your preconceptions and dating broadly.

That said, I found myself drawn to women who were independent, challenging, intelligent, creative, and unapologetically weird, the ones who weren't entirely sane but were intensely curious about the world. Other than lack of physical attraction, the most typical reason I would reject someone was "they're boring"—after spending years hanging out with 155 IQ schizophrenic metapolitical anarchomonarchists on the internet, conversation with normal people can start to feel a bit plain.

More on this in a future essay.

The Sex

Great sex comes from the same place as great relationships: openness, honesty, and genuine confidence. When you're comfortable with yourself and actually give a fuck about your partner's pleasure, spectacular things can happen. Sometimes your partners will orgasm so hard they start crying, and that's a good thing.

Just as runners for decades believed breaking that barrier was physically impossible, most people have convinced themselves that transcendent sex is out of reach, that "good enough" is the best they can hope for. They've internalized stories about how men are just naturally bad at sex, how women are difficult to please, how great sexual chemistry is rare and magical rather than just a learnable skill. But mastering this skill means leaving your ego at the door.

The truth is this: the bar for men is on the fucking floor. The vast majority of guys are absolutely terrible at sex, to a degree that is almost unbelievable. I met multiple beautiful women with bodycounts in the dozens who had essentially never had good sex in their lives before meeting me. Not because I'm some magical sex god, but simply because I gave a damn and put some passion into it.

A strange realization: I have vastly more sex than Aella, who is famous for being a whore. If even Aella isn't getting laid enough, what hope is there for normal people? How do we increase the fuck rate for the masses? I think the answer is depressingly simple: most people don't have more sex because the sex they do have is mediocre at best. They settle for "good enough" and stop looking for better, stop trying to be better. It's like someone declaring they don't like sushi after only eating gas station California rolls. So, to answer Tyler's question: people don't have more sex because most sex is lame.

More on this, too, in a future essay.

Imaginary Barriers

Nice guys: a lot of people think you need to be a jerk to get laid, but that's just another fake social script. The truth is this: being "nice" from a position of weakness is dating kryptonite. Women can smell the desperation. But being genuinely kind from a position of confidence and abundance is incredibly attractive. The difference isn't in the behavior itself, but in the energy behind it. True kindness flows from having clear boundaries and standards, from being genuinely interested in someone's wellbeing and pleasure—not from being a pushover hoping to trade basic decency for sexual access.

The power to say no:

One of the most liberating discoveries wasn't the sex, but realizing I could...say no to it. At some point I started waiting for the second date before getting physical—the connection was better, the sex more comfortable. But it resulted in the strange scenario of girls practically pleading to come back to my place on first dates. Women find it bizarre when you say "no" in that situation, it's just not in their script. They're so accustomed to men desperate to get their dick wet that when you flip the dynamic, it short-circuits their entire understanding of dating.

This whole pathetic dance of men begging for a crumb of sex, trying to push the girl to come back to his place while she resists and acts as a gatekeeper to sex, etc.—it's entirely a choice. A collective delusion that persists only because everyone keeps playing their assigned role. You can simply reject it.

Abundance mindset: when I had 2-3 concurrent partners, I became extremely selective and rejected almost everyone I went out with. The psychological impact of abundance is to make you secure in your own judgments, to push up your standards to where they should be in the first place and stick with them. Scarcity creates artificial commitment to bad relationships. Abundance helps you realize that compatible partners aren't unicorns—they're just people you haven't met yet. And entering a serious relationship with the perspective and attitude that abundance bestows on you makes everything so much easier.

Cold approach: the barrier I have not broken yet. I'm too fucking terrified to cold approach women in public, yet at the same time, I've had way more sex than friends who regularly chat up strangers. A friend casually mentioned hitting on a cute girl in a museum, talking to her for an hour, and then bailing unceremoniously, not knowing how to close the deal. The very thought of hitting on a stranger makes me sink into the floor, melting through the boards, my liquefied body dripping right into the third circle of Dante's hell, but I have infinitely (literally, divided by zero) more sex than he did at the time. This makes absolutely no sense and completely contradicts conventional wisdom about "getting out there".

Finding Fluorescence

Once sex becomes easy, it loses some of its mystique. I found myself having as much sex as I wanted, but it was a fleeting satisfaction that left me yearning for more. One of the notes in my dating journal, following a breakup, reads:

All I'm left with is a nostalgic longing for a future that never was.

Maybe that's not such a bad thing. Getting your heart stomped when someone doesn't reciprocate your feelings is a special kind of hell, but it turned out to be a necessary step.

Last year, I wrote to myself:

I'm not looking for someone who ticks my boxes. I'm after "I can't believe you exist", I want to be amazed, I am after fluorescent effervescence and electric bolts running up my spine, I want to feel like I'm on amphetamines 24/7, entirely incapable of sleeping, lose my job and end up in an early grave because of my romantic obsession.

Perhaps my relationship standards had been set by reading too many Russian novels, but then, improbably, unbelievably, astonishingly, I found her! And while boatloads of casual sex was pretty damn good, it doesn't hold a candle to settling down in a loving, inspiring relationship with a fantastic partner.

But here's the thing: I don't think I could have found it, or been ready for it, without all the fucking around first. The experience, the confidence that comes from abundance, from knowing you can walk away, from having your pick of partners—it fundamentally changes how you interact with the world. Without experiencing the wrong relationships—the boring ones, the sexually charged but emotionally empty ones, the ones where you're more therapist than partner—you lack the contrast needed to recognize something extraordinary when it does appear.

This stuff often fucking hurts. There's a reason the Buddha thought desire was the root of all suffering. But you know what? Fuck the Buddha. Some pain is worth having.

Sometimes I wonder if getting into all this so late in life was a mistake. Did those years of celibacy permanently rewire my brain? Did I miss some crucial developmental window? A friend of mine said that celibacy has already destroyed my psyche. But I don't think that's true, it's never too late to fall in love.

So, what's next? Back to the books, or happy-ever-after relationship wireheading? One thing about breaking through arbitrary limitations is that it leaves you facing real ones, like how to spend the few days you have left on the planet. Nobody knows what the future holds, but I'm really happy with my life right now.

Fin

We're all role-playing, and most people don't realize that they can just switch roles. You can just choose to be whatever you want. You Can Just Do Stuff™. So here's the four-minute mile of Fucking: if you're a reasonably put-together guy in his mid-30s, you could be having threesomes with cute college students. You simply have to make the choice to do it, the barriers are all inside you. If you're actually handsome or successful, you can basically live like Leo in perpetuity, though you'll probably get bored of it faster than he does.

But even if that's not what you want, I still recommend making sex your autistic special interest for a year or two. Not just for the obvious benefits, but because it opens up new mental and emotional states, teaches you surprising things about how people work, and most importantly, lets you enter a serious relationship knowing exactly what you want and what you're worth. And then you can make an informed decision: do I want to go monk mode, or full Simon Sarris? (Those are the only legitimate options).

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

We are going around the table on new year's eve, rating our past year on a scale of 1 to 10. The guests: artists, fashion designers, jewelers, and one or two people with real jobs sprinkled in for diversity. Two immaculately groomed poodles run around and entertain the visitors. Before us, an exactingly curated procession of morsels: blini with salmon and caviar, black brioche with cured egg yolk and parmigiano foam, ravioli with pumpkin and cod with browned butter and crispy sage. The apartment, naturally, is luxurious without being gauche (that would be unforgivable) every piece selected with impeccable taste and just the right amount of personal touch. And so we rate our years, the numbers start coming out, and it is a parade of 2s and 3s, each delivered with a sort of practiced weltschmerz. One of the guests plans to commit suicide soon. The only 10 in the room: me. Is it because I've been perfectly happy, carefree? No—not quite.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, about my relationship with suffering. All this pain in the past few months, I think most people would recoil from it. Instead, I'm drawn towards it. Is it psychological masochism? The intensity of emotion—it makes me feel alive, present, it gives me a heightened awareness of everything, inside and out.

I compulsively play with the pain in my mind: my thoughts trace its edges like fingers mapping an unknown shape in the dark; I run my mind over its surface to feel its texture, sometimes sharpcutting, sometimes soft and dull; I press against it, and see how it reacts; I savor it, let it melt in my mouth and glory in its bitterness; I feel the heat radiating from it like the dying embers of a fire late at night, and other times like x-rays blasting out of a black hole; I spin it around examining it from each and every angle one by one, appreciating its style from every point of view; I push it far away and look at it with a telescope to admire its entire structure, and then bring it right up to me and inspect every microscopic little element on its surface, and then sometimes I dive in and give myself over to it and let it envelop me and permeate my whole being until I feel and perceive nothing else and time stops completely.

(And sometimes I will take a good look at myself as though I were a case study: "Subject displays strong tendencies toward self-dramatization, perpetually overthinking and rationalizing their emotions through baroque metaphors.")

I am even amused and entertained by it. I laugh at my life and these surprising and delightful and wretchedly dark alleyways it's leading me down. A dull psychiatrist would say it's nothing more than a defense mechanism. I don't believe that at all. This is not about protecting myself or "processing". It's "saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems"—not to be liberated from terror and pity, but "in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming". There is a kind of distance there, but it's not a detachment, it is rather a doubling of perception. It's a way of transmuting things. It's not that the pain becomes less real or less painful—it becomes more real, more vibrant, more itself—but it also becomes something else simultaneously.

To treat reality as a medium, to live life with the texture of a novel—this is part of the bargain of being me: simultaneously the author and his character. The paradox: rather than dulling your emotions, this splitting of consciousness instead makes everything more vivid. Like adding a mirror to a mirror and creating—infinity. When you view yourself from the third person, as someone whose life you are sketching out, every powerful emotion is a delight. And it's not just pain that works this way—joy, too, takes on this double character, I'm swept up in it while also watching myself being swept up, and somehow the watching makes the feeling more intense rather than less. I am both the alchemist and his quicksilver, the sculptor and the clay, creature and creator.

I love my life — aesthetically.

It's not a mechanical collecting of experiences to dissect on a couch or on the page. Baudelaire writes of the artist-dandy as "a man possessing at every moment the genius of childhood, in other words a genius for whom no edge of life is blunted." Not "making meaning" after the fact, but in the experience of every moment. A perpetual state of creative tension, of becoming and self-overcoming.

That is―Anti-Buddhism. Self-examination not to feel less, but to feel more. Not to avoid suffering, but to glory in life. Not to detach but to overcome. Not to escape, but to revel in life! Not to transcend, but to heighten. Cultivating not detachment, but intensity and sensitivity, with a poet's intentionality, making the self into an artist in the joy of its own eternal becoming. Creating a layer of aesthetic appreciation that runs parallel to the raw experience, and shapes it. Saying No! to the inhuman, life-denying ascetic nihilism of seeking "liberation" from attachment and suffering, No! to the naiveties about pleasure and pain that constitute this intellectual morass that surrounds us.

Everywhere people seek to smooth life's edges. Instead of riding its violent waves, they seek to transform them into a tepid swimming pool suitable for gentle laps without the least chance of drowning. They cling desperately onto old religions when they talk about enlightenment but mean only quietude, when they preach transcendence but mean only escape. What petty bargains with existence! This is not wisdom, but cowardice masquerading as enlightenment. They seek to tame, diminish, and bridle everything that should be wild! What is this if not a rejection of life itself? Life, which knows nothing of balance but only of tension, nothing of peace but only of creative strife! What sickness entices you to paddle in the shallows instead of making infinite demands on life and always finding yourself in some new wilderness? For "life consists with wildness, and the most alive is the wildest."

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto? That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength, its terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting misfortune, and whatever of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it – has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

I used to view the tortured artist with both envy and skepticism. It was a Romantic idea that I thought I wanted, while at the same time dismissing it as an affectation, a trope, a false source of inspiration, or perhaps just a tool to seduce women with. Sour grapes, I suppose. Now I have become him (inadvertently? or by design?) and the view from the inside is not quite what I was expecting...it is both more silly and more real than I thought it'd be. There is certainly an absurd theater to it all. But the authenticity lies precisely in embracing the sublime and the ridiculous, in realizing that the real thing is both more serious and more playful than the cliché suggests. But it's not about turning pain into art, it's this splitting of consciousness that makes the darkest moments shimmer with beauty. Pain is not raw material to be processed later—it's already art in the moment of perception, if you've developed the right kind of vision. "Art from pain" is shallow, I am talking about a methodology of life and consciousness: Amor fati!

The great sickness of our age: the belief that life is something to be managed rather than a drama to be enacted.

Anyway, this is all a bit melodramatic if not pretentious...

—A wonderful piece.

The Best

Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

A mix of fiction, history, and autobiography as a failed author and high school teacher navigates 80s Bucharest. Cărtărescu is a great stylist. Filled with surreal episodes in the liminal space between the droll ordinary life of late communist Romania and an incredible psychedelic fantasy world. People protest against death and have sex while levitating in the air, abandoned factories hide fantastical secrets. About writing, literature, art, humanity, dreams, death, life, love, bureaucracy. Nihilism and its defeat. Very wide array of influences, including H. P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, all the Latin American magical realists as well as Bulgakov, Bolano, Pynchon, Dylan Thomas, Franz Kafka, even Cronenberg.

We search like idiots, we look in places where there is nothing to find, like spiders that weave webs in the corner of a bathroom where flies don’t come, where not even mosquitos can reach. We shrivel in our webs by the thousands, but what doesn’t die is our need for truth. We are like people drawn inside of a square on a piece of paper. We cannot get out of the black lines, we exhaust ourselves by examining, dozens and hundreds of times, every part of the square, hoping to find a fissure. Until one of us suddenly understands, because he was predestined to understand, that within the plane of the paper escape is impossible. That the exit, simple and open wide, is perpendicular to the paper, in a third dimension that up until that moment was inconceivable. Such that, to the amazement of those still inside the four ink lines, the chosen one breaks out of his chrysalis, spreads his enormous wings, and rises gently, leaving his shadow below in his former world.

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

Not quite as strong as Civilization & Capitalism, but it's a brilliant work, the result of decades of painstaking research. The Braudelian world-view is felt on every page, the interlocking systems of trade, production, geography, crops, animals and people. Mountains shape trade routes, climate patterns determine harvests, sea currents guide merchants - everything connects to everything else in Braudel's Mediterranean. Written in a Nazi POW camp, it brought a fresh perspective on how to think about history: not kings and battles, but the slow dance of geography and climate, the rhythms of peasant life, the endless circulation of ships and goods. Immensely ambitious and beautifully written.

But we cannot hope for precise measurements; at most we shall discover an order of magnitude. In this respect the Mediterranean was still broadly speaking the same size in the sixteenth century as it had been in Roman times, that is, over a thousand years earlier. Or to put it another way, the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century was comparable, mutatis mutandis, to the entire globe in 1939. It was vast, immeasurable, and its reputation as a 'human' area was earned only by contrast with those other monsters which sixteenth-century man was just beginning to tackle - the Atlantic Ocean, not to mention the Pacific. These were truly monsters, alongside which the Mediterranean was more like a domestic animal, but certainly not the 'lake' it has become in the twentieth century, the sunny resort of tourists and yachts where one can always reach land within a few hours and along whose length the traveller could be transported in the Orient Express. To understand what it was like in the sixteenth century, one must mentally magnify its area to a maximum and draw on remembered images from travellers' tales of the days when months, years, even a whole lifetime, could be spent on a voyage.

Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

Basically nothing happens in this book, and it is absolutely spectacular. Non-stop linguistic fireworks. A masterpiece. Outcasts, drifters, hobos, and various other miscreants in 1950s Knoxville. Among its many virtues: the best ever passage about someone fucking a watermelon. Funny and human, no Judges or cosmic pain here.

Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea.

Benjamin Labatut, The MANIAC

The book is split in two portions: first, a semi-fictionalized biography of von Neumann, with each chapter being told from the perspective of the people who knew him (his mother, brother, wife, scientific collaborators, etc). It doesn't focus strongly on the science, more on the person and his relations, and the recurring theme is one of petty resentment and inability to understand von Neumann because he was simply so far above and ahead of everyone else around him. The resentment often manifests as a kind of petty moralism, and Labatut basically makes everyone in von Neumann's life look rather pathetic. I don't know how factual that is, but it certainly works as a literary device.

The second part concerns Lee Sedol and AlphaGo. It's a bit drawn out, but it's an exciting story that's well-told. The point is essentially to underscore just how much von Neumann could see 60+ years ago, when everyone around him was essentially blind. AlphaGo is to the greatest humans as von Neumann is to normal ones -- we should expect the relations to play out in a similar way in both cases.

I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends, and Albert Einstein was a good friend too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Janos von Neumann. I remarked on this in the presence of those men, several times, and no one ever disputed me. Only he was fully awake.

Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems

Deceptively simple, philosophical, dark, ecstatic. Autistic at times. Incredibly dense. Loneliness, death, beauty, nature. I keep returning to her poems.

I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro' endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –

When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door –
When Butterflies – renounce their "drams" –
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

A short story of an incredibly intense and mostly one-sided love affair. Raw, intimate, with complete lack of dignity, it felt like an invasion of her privacy. Living life novelistically. How lovers really only exist in our minds. I think the essential, unique part of the story is that there is no attempt at justification, explanation, etc. She accepts and presents the bare facts about herself, and almost nothing about her lover. In a way this is a portrayal of incredibly deep passion, on the other hand her approach also makes it feel really shallow: he's handsome, drives a fast car, career-minded. We have absolutely no clue what her passion is for exactly, but that's exactly the point, that the reason of the passion is irrelevant or unknowable or inexplicable or not worth explaining, what really matters is her own experience and what she takes from it ("I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it." and "Whether or not he was “worth it” is of no consequence.") She considers herself luckier than him because she has the obsession and he does not, that really stood out as the cornerstone of the whole thing.

When he rang to arrange a meeting, his long-awaited call had no effect on me and I remained locked in the same state of anxiety as before. My condition was such that not even the sound of his voice could make me happy. It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were together making love. And even then I dreaded the moments to come, when he would be gone. I experienced pleasure like a future pain. I longed to end the affair, so as not to be at the mercy of a phone call, so as not to suffer, realizing at once what this would entail, seconds after the separation: a series of days with nothing to wait for. I preferred to carry on at any cost—let him have another woman, or even several. (In other words, accepting a torment far greater than the one that made me want to leave him.) Compared to such emptiness, my present situation seemed enviable and my jealousy a sort of frail privilege which I would have been mad to want to end since one day it would end anyway, outside my control, when he would leave the country or would decide to stop seeing me.

Ctrlcreep, Fragnemt

A collection of tweets and very short stories from @ctrlcreep. "Why would I want to own a collection of tweets", you might think, but these are brilliantly etched little gems: dense, fantastical, inventive, awe-inspiring and terrifying.

The forest's immortal animals are weary of life. Stags rest in the shade for years, antlers growing, intertwining with ivy and brick

Tiny bots build nanoliths, defining sacred spaces on the underside of leaves, between scales of bark, in the grooves of your fingerprints

My brain is a temple, my body is the crowd of money-lenders and market stalls desecrating its courtyard

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

Man being pulled apart between his civilized and the wild nature. Intellectual and spiritual crisis; despair; isolation in bourgeois society. Both the protagonist (Henry Haller) and the manic pixie dream girl Hermine are essentially Hesse self-inserts. Sex, drugs, jazz, liberation from the shackles of over-thinking, transcendence. Written in the 1920s, but parts of it feel straight out of 60s psychedelic culture (especially the hallucinatory magic theater section). A perennial favorite with intellectual misfits for a reason.

But, when he was a wolf, the man in him lay in ambush, ever on the watch to interfere and condemn, while at those times that he was man the wolf did just the same. For example, if Harry, as man, had a beautiful thought, felt a fine and noble emotion, or performed a so-called good act, then the wolf bared his teeth at him and laughed and showed him with bitter scorn how laughable this whole pantomime was in the eyes of a beast, of a wolf who knew well enough in his heart what suited him, namely, to trot alone over the Steppes and now and then to gorge himself with blood or to pursue a female wolf. Then, wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly absurd and misplaced, stupid and vain. But it was exactly the same when Harry felt and behaved as a wolf and showed others his teeth and felt hatred and enmity against all human beings and their lying and degenerate manners and customs. For then the human part of him lay in ambush and watched the wolf, called him brute and beast, and spoiled and embittered for him all pleasure in his simple and healthy and wild wolf’s being.

Camille Pagile, Sexual Personae

Paglia said this book "was intended to please no one and to offend everyone." It's not quite as offensive today, 35 years after its original publication, but it still manages to maintain a sharp edge. Paglia brings sex into art history in an incredibly entertaining style. Everything is rapid and extreme, grand pronouncements jump at you from every page, and Paglia's erudition will dazzle you. Sex, decadence, Apollo vs Dionysus. Bombastic and aphoristic. It's a bit too long, and the energy of the first few hundred pages isn't maintained to the end, but well worth experiencing. You'll never look at art the same way again.

Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

Paul Cronin, Herzog on Herzog

Few people have led more interesting lives in the 20th century than Werner Herzog. The drive, the vision, the creative power, the collaborations, and the endless series of insane situations he put and found himself in make the whole thing feel fictional. Provocative thoughts on art, life, and everything in between. "Inspirational" is generally a dirty word when it comes to book reviews, but this is truly inspirational in the best way possible.

Months before, I had hired local Indians who had captured the hundreds of savage little monkeys, the ones who overrun the raft with Kinski. I paid only half the money for them because I knew if I paid full price, the guy organizing everything would run off with the cash. The monkeys had been sitting in Iquitos for weeks, but when it came to actually having to use them for the scene it turned out they had all been sold to an American businessman and were already on a plane waiting to go to the US. We ran to the airport and insisted we were veterinarians and that we had to see the vac- cination papers for the animals. We shouted so loudly that they admitted they had no papers, and they embarrassedly unloaded the animals from the plane. We just put them into our truck and left. When it actually came to shooting the sequence, the monkeys had some kind of a panic attack and bit me all over. I could not cry out because we were shooting live sound at that point.

Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony

Kafka's best short work. In the Penal Colony starts as meticulous horror: a bureaucrat proudly explaining an elaborate torture device, and ends as transcendent horror with an almost religious ecstasy. Kafka pulls off a perspective shift that transforms everything that came before. The Officer's devotion to the old system, his obsession with procedure and machinery, and the Traveler's polite detachment capture the essence of instituional horror, yes, but the story evolves into something completely different.

Can you now appreciate the work of the harrow and the entire apparatus? Just look!” He bounded up the ladder, turned a wheel, called down, “Watch out, step aside!” and everything started moving. If the cog hadn’t screaked, it would have been wonderful.

Richard Zenith, Pessoa: A Biography

Pessoa is one of my favorite writers and this biography is fantastic, very well-written, almost consistently captivating over nearly 1100 pages. Reveals a lot of hidden and surprising aspects of Pessoa's life, and made me want to be part of the Lisbon literary scene of the early 20th century...Astrology, magic, weird politics, a series of lost literary movements, and at the center of it all: a bizarre life. Would have been interesting to dedicate more space on his posthumous reception though, it ends kind of awkwardly in a place where he has only published a single book and is not well-known in Portugal and completely unknown in the rest of the world.

For Pessoa as for Campos, who in this case served as his creator’s faithful spokesman, the self’s true emotions cannot be intelligibly known, much less expressed, and the self is unreliable, its reality forever fluid, contingent on its changing relations with the surrounding environment. Self-knowledge, or individuality, is therefore a matter of attitude, of acting. The great artist, or great anything, is a great pretender. In the coming years, the editors of Presença would repeatedly invoke sincerity of expression and trueness to one’s self as hallmarks of superior art, while Pessoa would repeatedly question whether words such as sincerity and trueness can signify anything useful for a creative artist.

The Worst

Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century

Utterly irredeemable garbage.

This was sold to me as a kind of sequel to Braudel's Civilization & Capitalism, one of my favorite books. I was really disappointed to find something completely different; Arrighi has none of Braudel's strengths, but is happy to copy his weaknesses. He displays none of the curiosity, none of the interest in data (while Braudel's work is filled with numbers, it would not surprise me if Arrighi was innumerate). But he does share Braudel's attitude towards growth (which is to say that he ignores it). To ignore productivity growth in a study of the 15-18th centuries is bad enough; to ignore it in a study of the "long twentieth century" is downright deranged. Not to mention ignoring demographics...

Arrighi writes about economic history but does not seem to have opened even a 101 econ book in his life. He frequently uses terms of art like "comparative advantage" incorrectly. Wild causal claims are made without any basis in data whatsoever.

While Braudel famously approached history in a highly quantitative manner, for Arrighi economics seem to be a kind of language game rather than something that can be measured and analyzed. It's all "as X has argued..", "as Y has suggested..."! Evidence? What's that? He likes to quote Robert Reich! His predictions about the US's decline have of course not been borne out. And it's terribly written on top of everything.

Indeed, to be the Venice of the nineteenth century was still the objective advocated for Britain by leading members of its business community at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. And the same analogy was evoked again – albeit with negative connotations – when the nineteenth-century expansion of British wealth and power began reaching its limits.

Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.

A pleb filter is a piece of art which, by virtue of its impenetrability, "filters out" people with bad taste. What makes the pleb filter such an entertaining addition to online Discourse is that it's a ready-made kafkatrap, a perfect concept for trolls and shitposters to weaponize: once an artwork has been declared a "pleb filter"—no matter how absurd the claim—any disagreement instantly labels you an unsophisticated rube, a pleb who has been filtered.

Thus one may find oneself in futile internet conversations trying desperately to explain that, no, Ishtar really is quite bad, that Ringo is not the best Beatle, and that Joel Schumacher's nipple-Batman is not actually a sublime work of misunderstood cinematic genius. The troll choices are virtually infinite, but work best when applied to creations that are universally agreed to be terrible: the prequels, St. Anger, or the oeuvre of 6ix9ine.

There are fake filters, like Tarr's Werckmeister Hamornies—art which tries to be challenging and hints at great depths while actually being quite shallow. A picture of a pool drawn on a piece of paper, and often frustrating because they are a pleb's idea of a pleb filter. Still, some (like The Magus or The Recognitions) have their charms.

Finally we have the actual pleb filters, works which are both brilliant and inaccessible. Trout Mask Replica, Michael Mann's Miami Vice, Faust Part Two, Enter the Void, the Paradiso, Season 2 of True Detective, Fanged Noumena, the Iliad's catalogue of ships.

The IQ of Shitposters

To proclaim the genius of Hamlet is commonplace; to successfully defend The Two Gentlemen of Verona as Shakespeare's greatest play takes some serious intellectual firepower. Defending the indefensible is a great signal of brainpower: a recent study finds that "bullshit ability is associated with an individual’s intelligence and individuals capable of producing more satisfying bullshit are judged by second-hand observers to be more intelligent". The pleb filter is not just a fun tool for trolling, it also offers a great opportunity to show off one's smarts.

It is genuinely challenging to truly appreciate the talent and artistry that goes into bullshit—Armond White (perhaps the greatest bullshitter of our time) is himself a pleb filter, perhaps the ultimate one. Some are liable to react with horror, but I think it's a game worth indulging in.

At the same time, there's a countersignaling game being played. On the barber pole of intellectual status, the highbrow will adopt lowbrow tastes in order to signal that they're not midwits. Thus we get fancy restaurants serving mac and cheese, and big-brained shitposters defending Showgirls. It is no coincidence that the very idea of the pleb filter was invented on a website whose users are famous for being very smart and pretending to be very stupid.

Sometimes isolated communities spiral local status markers into overdrive, creating unintentional bad pleb filters, with wild signaling and counter-signaling battles cascading downwards, leaving outside onlookers utterly bewildered. The famously unintelligible world of high fashion offers a memorable, and sometimes beautiful, instance of this phenomenon.

Criticism and the Anxiety of the Filter

The pleb filter is also a formidable force in the realm of art criticism: the critic must always maintain a position of superiority over his audience, for it is this stance which gives him the authority to dictate what is good or bad. He must therefore never be filtered, and even more importantly never appear to be filtered. Thus he will praise formulaic "high culture" garbage, lest he be mistaken for someone who doesn't get it.

When a critic encounters a work that eludes his understanding, something that may surpass his grasp, the anxiety of being filtered becomes palpable—and he often reacts to such works in an extreme way by denigrating them. This is why so many of the great classics were initially met with unfavorable reviews: The Thing, Moby-Dick, Lolita, half of Kubrick's movies. Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles's best film, was savaged when it came out and barely got distribution due to the terrible advance reviews. The anxiety of the filter is to the critic what the anxiety of influence is to the artist.

The Case of Michael Thomas Green

The most interesting pleb filters are those that lie exactly on the line between being a troll pleb filter and a real pleb filter: Speed Racer, Love Exposure, the Book of Numbers, the Metal Gear Solid series, perhaps Dhalgren—works where powerful arguments can be made in both directions, works stuck in the limbo between stupidity and genius. Who can forget the iconic image of Sean Connery in the red trunks from Zardoz? There's a particular form of failure that is borne of great ambition. Take Southland Tales, for example, an utterly bizarre work of deranged grandeur. It is bad beyond belief. And yet there's something there, something alluring, something that pulls you in and props you up and keeps you watching.

In 2001, Tom Green wrote, directed, and starred in Freddy Got Fingered, a stupid yet brilliantly fearless comedy about a failed cartoonist and his relationship with his family. The critics hated it, filling their reviews with adjectives like "embarrassing", "witless", "vile", and "sad", but the film maintains a dedicated following to this day. Some have described it as a surrealist masterpiece, others as a $14 million dollar prank on a movie studio, others as a film before its time. Nathan Rabin writes that "studios exist precisely to keep films this audacious, original, and transgressive from ever hitting theaters", while Lindsay Ellis calls Green "the Orson Welles of our time" and describes Freddy as a film of pure insight into the soul of its creator and a "dadaist masterpiece".

Freddy offers a perfect example of the anxiety of the filter: Ebert gave it zero stars, but in his infamous review he compares Tom Green to Buñuel, and declares that "the day may come when "Freddy Got Fingered" is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism." 16 months after his initial review, Ebert was still thinking about the inscrutable genius of Freddy, writing in his review of Stealing Harvard:

Seeing Tom Green reminded me, as how could it not, of his movie Freddy Got Fingered, which was so poorly received by the film critics that it received only one lonely, apologetic positive review on the Tomatometer. I gave it—let's see—zero stars. Bad movie, especially the scene where Green was whirling the newborn infant around his head by its umbilical cord. But the thing is, I remember Freddy Got Fingered more than a year later. I refer to it sometimes. It is a milestone. And for all its sins, it was at least an ambitious movie, a go-for-broke attempt to accomplish something. It failed, but it has not left me convinced that Tom Green doesn't have good work in him. Anyone with his nerve and total lack of taste is sooner or later going to make a movie worth seeing.

Ἐγὼ δ ̓οἶδα μὲν ὡς αἱ ὑπερμεγέθεις φύσεις ἥκιστα καθαραί

Longinus, in his essay On the Sublime, observes that mediocre artists don't make mistakes: their works are faultless because they stay within convention and take no risks. Perfection is merely an artifact of insufficient ambition. Errour is the purview of the Great!

Is it not by risking nothing, by never aiming high, that a writer of low or middling powers keeps generally clear of faults and secure of blame? Whereas the loftier walks of literature are by their very loftiness perilous? [...] Though I have myself noted not a few faulty passages in Homer and in other authors of the highest rank, and though I am far from being partial to their failings, nevertheless I would call them not so much wilful blunders as oversights which were allowed to pass unregarded through that contempt of little things, that “brave disorder,” which is natural to an exalted genius; and I still think that the greater excellences, though not everywhere equally sustained, ought always to be voted to the first place in literature, if for no other reason, for the mere grandeur of soul they reveal. [...] Would you rather be a Homer or an Apollonius?

Bolaño plays with this notion in the famous passage on the bookish pharmacist, but I find the most striking echo of this idea is found in Flaubert's final novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet. He spent nearly a decade working on it, but did not manage to complete it before his death. It is a strange, repetitive work teetering on the brink between comedy and tragedy; ostensibly a work of social criticism, it is really about Flaubert looking inwardly. And it was a radical departure from anything that he (or anyone else) had written before. He writes in a letter:

At times, the immense scope of this book stuns me. What will come of it? I only hope I’m not deceiving myself into writing something goofy rather than sublime. No, I think not! Something tells me I’m on the right path! But it will be one or the other.

He even places some self-relferential meta-commentary on just this topic within the book—

He was assailed by doubts. For if mediocre minds (as Longinus observed) are incapable of faults, then faults are committed by the masters—and we should admire them? That’s too much!

And for critics, it is exactly this ability to appreciate something great and flawed, as opposed to something small-souled and perfect, that separates the plebeian from the noble taste.

...We Yearn, Nonetheless...

What unites these works in the interstice between the goofy and the sublime is a reckless ambition that goes against all standards of good taste, no not even against but beyond, powered by some unprincipled eruption of creative élan, and not due to some misguided contrarianism but because the old standards are simply incapable of containing the artist's vision which, pushing out against its own limits, bursts like a star. They are a dive off the edge, a rejection of any interpolation between known points, a heroic leap beyond the confines of the billion-dimensional latent space of ideas, riding exotic vectors into unknown territories, vectors invisible to to all but their discoverer—what Bolaño had in mind when he was writing about those "great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown".

Perhaps this ought to be our attitude not just toward our artistic creations, but also the sculpting of our life and character and even our beliefs.

Great philosophers and artists have always endeavored to chart their own path, to avoid recapitulating the shackles of their social conditioning, to find new vantage points that will allow them to see farther and more clearly. Is this not what Plato was after when he sought out the Pythagoreans in Italy? Is this not what Herodotus was looking for when he was interviewing the sages of Egypt and the Scythians of the Don? Is this not what Nick Land was reaching for when he was "lying on the ground, croaking into a mic while Mackay played jungle records in the background"? It doesn't always work. But one must at least try.

"There are two kinds of scientific progress," declares my old pal Prokhor, "the methodical experimentation and categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge, and the revolutionary leap of genius which redefines and transcends those boundaries. Acknowledging our debt to the former, we yearn, nonetheless, for the latter." We yearn indeed, but what dear old Prokhor has omitted is that the leap is risky, and the risk usually fails to pay off. Make no mistake—this is a perilous path. Tradition is Smarter Than You Are, so striking out in your own direction is almost always doomed to fail. Rapid change is almost always for the worse. Human beings are almost constitutionally incapable of taking ideas seriously. Virtually every gene in our body militates against it. "The more people have epistemic learned helplessness and less they trust extreme ideas, the more they'll just default to playing Civilized American." But the Romantically low odds of that heroic action have a bewitching appeal, and our social epistemology works only to the extent that brilliant people are able to ignore it.

This all converges on liberalism, which postulates that ideas are not to be taken seriously.² All true masterpieces bear within them an implication of extremism, a deep conviction in the importance of some new, radical idea, an implication that this singular point of view really does matter, and has the strength to overcome all others. Every great artwork is a fascist revolt—a form of revolt that, alas, does not fit very well into our æra.

Freddy Got Fingered can be streamed on Amazon. Why not check it out tonight? Perhaps you will catch a glimpse of the sublime in the scene where Tom Green jerks off an elephant and sprays his father with a pachyderm-penis firehose of sperm. You're not a...pleb, are you?

Over the last decade there's been virtually endless discussion about the effects of austerity on the UK economy. The Guardian: The lost decade: the hidden story of how austerity broke Britain. FT: Years of austerity are now writ large on the UK state. NYT: What Is Austerity and How Has It Affected British Society?. And just a few days ago David Wallace-Wells, discussing the country's growth problems, wrote that "the country’s obvious struggles have a very obvious central cause: austerity".

There's just a little problem with all of this: there was never any austerity in the UK. It's a pure media fabrication that persists only because nobody cares to look at the data.

So, let us bring out the charts! First of all, the UK has been running deficits for more than 20 years now. The deficits were huge even right in the middle of the supposedly austere period. Living beyond your means is not austerity, it's profligacy.

What does Wallace-Wells say to justify his claims about "austerity"?

In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and in the name of rebalancing budgets, the Tory-led government set about cutting annual public spending, as a proportion of G.D.P., to 39 percent from 46 percent.

This is technically true, but stupid. The 46% figure comes from the middle of the Global Financial Crisis, when GDP dropped by more than 15% and the government was trying to stimulate the economy. A decade later, spending as % of GDP had simply returned to its pre-recession level. This isn't "austerity", it's just good old regular Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policy. In fact, the UK had already escaped from recession in 2010, and it continued to run huge deficits anyway.¹

And to emphasize just how unsustainable this profligacy has been, the UK's debt-to-GDP ratio has gone from ~35% to ~100% during this period of "austerity"!

Did spending ever actually go down? Nope:

"But Alvaro, there were cuts to this one particular thing I care about, therefore there was austerity." Sure, spending has been moved around a bit; some areas have gotten more money and others less. As you'd expect from an aging society,² the UK spends a lot more on healthcare these days than it did 20 years ago; this is just a natural shift in priorities, not austerity. Here's inflation-adjusted spending broken down by category, straight from His Majesty's Treasury:³

I would also add that despite the huge increase in healthcare spending, this is the one area that Wallace-Wells chooses to highlight in his article blaming austerity!

On average, English ambulances were taking an hour and a half to respond to stroke and heart-attack calls, compared with a target time of 18 minutes; nationwide, 10 times as many patients spent more than four hours waiting in emergency rooms as did in 2011. The waiting list for scheduled treatments recently passed seven million — more than 10 percent of the country — prompting nurses to strike. The National Health Service has been in crisis for years, but over the holidays, as wait times spiked, the crisis moved to the very center of a narrative of national decline.

Despite this incredible profligacy, the effects of deficit spending on growth have clearly not been very successful—why then does Wallace-Wells expect that yet more profligacy would somehow avert national decline? The UK government and economy obviously have many problems; austerity is not one of them.

The Best

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger/Stella Maris

A salvage diver (Bobby Western) is sent to investigate a plane at the bottom of the ocean. Somehow the plane is intact and one of the passengers is missing. When he gets back, shadowy government agents are after him. Western is also a genius mathematician and a racing car driver. This is a potboiler!

On the other hand we have the deranged visions of his sister, in a Pynchonian absurdist mode. The thriller plotline is quickly abandoned, and the rest of the novel plays out mostly in a series of conversations. Mathematics, physics, the atomic bomb, JFK assassination conspiracy theories, the role of the unconscious: this is a novel of ideas in many ways. At the same time it's deeply romantic, filled to the brim with longing, regret, loss, and love. It's an incredibly sad book.

Overall this is a novel that strikes out in many directions, many times in unsatisfying and imprecise and undisciplined ways, but it somehow achieves an effect. "Blaze paths into the unknown" etc. To the usual McCarthyan mix of Hemingway and Captain Ahab, he now adds heavy doses of Pynchon and DeLillo.

Perhaps the passenger is the conscious, or the unconscious, or they're both passengers (probably all of the above).

The second novel is a series of conversations between Bobby's sister Alicia and her psychiatrist, a short time before she commits suicide. It's mostly a companion piece, and many times it feels like Alicia is McCarthy's mouthpiece. It's about mathematics and giving up mathematics and the foundation of mathematics, about language, about meaning in a godless world, about the inability to experience the world directly and the effects of various intermediation mechanisms (including language), about love and longing, about the burden of knowledge, about intelligence, evolution and evolutionary psychology, physics and the bomb and the sins of the father. Both books try their damnest to tackle Gnosticism.

One of the best works in many years, I can't wait to go back to it.

Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.

Cantor, Gauss, Riemann, Euler. Hilbert. Poincaré. Noether. Hypatia. Klein, Minkowski, Turing, von Neumann. Hardly even a partial list. Cauchy, Lie, Dedekind, Brouwer. Boole. Peano. Church is still alive. Hamilton, Laplace, Lagrange. The ancients of course. You look at these names and the work they represent and you realize that the annals of latterday literature and philosophy by comparison are barren beyond description.

Gene Wolfe, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

Slightly uneven but the best stories are really great: in particular I loved Feather Tigers, Death of Dr. Island, Toy Theater, and Seven American Nights. Loads of classic Wolfeian mindfuckery. Many of the stories are in that classic Wolfe style where you have to piece together what's going on from tiny hints left in the text, and it's all a bit ambiguous in the end and so on. There's a lot of focus on religion (often explicitly Christian) and death. Two stories, The Hero as Werwolf and The Doctor of Death Island, being fairly explicitly death-ist. Technology and its social effects, the problem of evil, mastery of art versus human relations, the hollowness of immortality, how people would react to a messianic figure, and more!

An exaggerated and solemn respect always indicates a loss of faith.

François, Baron de Tott, The Memoirs of the Baron De Tott, on the Turks and the Tartars

A look into the past, from the past. Filled with fascinating little observations (I found the book through an anecdote about forks which Braudel mentions in C&C). Roughly at the time the American revolution was happening, the same time when Johnson and Boswell were drinking too much claret at the Mitre, de Tott was joining the Crimean Tatars on a slave raid into Southern Russia. He spent many years in the Ottoman empire over two stints, and finally also traveled around the middle east. Most fascinating for its observations of Ottoman society, and the role de Tott played in the Russo-Turkish war of '68-'74. Somewhat niche, but definitely worth a read if this is your kind of thing.

What causes the fall of empires? Culture, Tott says: all decay ultimately comes from within. He's particular critical of the effects of despotism in government: everyone's place is precarious and there is no room for prosocial ambition. Simultaneously totally lawless but also extremely despotic—anarcho-tyranny at its finest, made worse by abitrary and capricious system of punishments.

Oh, and the introduction by the translator is absolutely hilarious (unintentionally).

How can so Sovereign a contempt for human nature amongst the Turks consist with that whimsical beneficence they display towards certain animals the most useless to fociety? Barbarity itself, no doubt, stands in need of some relaxation, whilst it crushes mankind under the weight of its iron secptre, it condescends to smile on objects whole insignificance give no occasion for alarm; and the pride of the despot blending all beings together in one common Contempt, selects its favourites from amongst the weakelt.

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

A review of a fictional philosophical tome on clothing, with various notes on the life of its author, the also fictional Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. Imagine a mix between Borges, Laurence Sterne, and Fichte. And it's got Carlyle's ridiculous style (which was extreme even in his own time) to top things off. And you can almost never tell when it's serious and when it's not. This book caused Emerson to start corresponding with Carlyle, and even inspired Borges to learn German!

In Sartor Resartus, only a lifelong quest for knowledge can lead one to the truth that knowledge is unattainable (or perhaps the other way around?). Carlyle hates the limiting effect of the standard philosophical approaches of his time, so he instead opts for this extreme type of illegible, non-linear anti-discourse in which everything is both deadly serious and potentially an ironic joke. What I'm saying is that Carlyle was the first zoomer.

The age of Curiosity, like that of Chivalry, is indeed, properly speaking, gone. Yet perhaps only gone to sleep: for here arises the Clothes-Philosophy to resuscitate, strangely enough, both the one and the other! Should sound views of this Science come to prevail, the essential nature of the British Dandy, and the mystic significance that lies in him, cannot always remain hidden under laughable and lamentable hallucination. The following long Extract from Professor Teufelsdröckh may set the matter, if not in its true light, yet in the way towards such. It is to be regretted however that, here as so often elsewhere, the Professor’s keen philosophic perspicacity is somewhat marred by a certain mixture of almost owlish purblindness, or else of some perverse, ineffectual, ironic tendency, our readers shall judge which

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

To say that it's about a dockworker would be both true and misleading. Nostromo is the dashing Capataz de Cargadores, a man obsessed with his image and driven to heroic tasks out of a desire to maintain it.

A chopped-up story from various points of view, the narrative is kaleidoscopically structured: fragmented, unclear, conflicting, and circular. Character motivations and world-views clash with each other as the fate of Costaguana is determined. Politics, heroism, revolt (internal and external), the worth of social status, reputations, perceptions, allegiances, and material vs idealistic interests. Betrayals of all kinds. Private and public vindications and redemptions. Great stuff.

To be a millionaire, and such a millionaire as Holroyd, is like being eternally young. The audacity of youth reckons upon what it fancies an unlimited time at its disposal; but a millionaire has unlimited means in his hand—which is better. One's time on earth is an uncertain quantity, but about the long reach of millions there is no doubt.

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

A story set in a future in which a cloistered religious-academic order is devoted to playing the Glass Bead Game, a kind of unification of all the arts and sciences. A kind of nihilistic telos for all intellectual pursuits, with an alluring beauty all of its own. The actual game itself is never described; instead we follow the life of Joseph Knecht from student, to leader of the order, and the next steps after that, as he is torn between the real world and the ivory tower.

The Borges influence can be felt throughout, and there's nothing quite like it.

The life of the mind, asceticism, the lifecycle of organizations, hierarchies and servitude, purpose and nihilism, beauty, sacrifice, duty, transcendence.

Especially for young men with gifts like those of Joseph Knecht, who have not been driven by a single talent to concentrate on a specialty, but whose nature rather aims at integration, synthesis, and universality, this springtide of free study is often a period of intense happiness and very nearly of intoxication. Were it not preceded by the discipline of the elite schools, by the psychic hygiene of meditation exercises and the lenient supervision of the Board of Educators, this freedom would even be dangerous for such natures and might prove a nemesis to many, as it used to be to innumerable highly gifted young men in the ages before our present educational pattern was set, in the pre-Castalian centuries. The universities in those days literally swarmed with young Faustian spirits who embarked with all sails set upon the high seas of learning and academic freedom, and ran aground on all the shoals of untrammeled dilettantism. Faust himself, after all, was the prototype of brilliant amateurishness and its consequent tragedy.

Laurent Binet, HHhH

Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich. The story of Operation Anthropoid (to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich in Prague) and everything that led up to it. 257 short chapters, sometimes consisting of nothing more than a quotation. It's a blend of a mostly-historical retelling of the operation with a ton of metafictional elements on top. Binet constantly comments on the issues with constructing a historical novel, compares his approach to other books and movies, and even brings his personal life into it. Irony, humor, self-consciousness (especially about the author's view of Heydrich), the tension between history and fiction, and a slow, horrific build-up that absolutely fills you with terror. Incredible that this book can manage such a powerful emotional effect despite the ironic tone. The absurd scenes (whether comical or horrific) are true, which makes the whole thing so strange. Goring is showing off his model train set to Heydrich when he's there to get the final solution started...

Anyway, the RSHA hydra has enough heads to keep him busy. So now he has to delegate. He gives each of the RSHA’s seven divisions to a colleague who is selected first and foremost for his abilities rather than his politics—and this is rare enough to be worth mentioning in the lunatic asylum that is the Nazi regime. Heinrich Müller, for example, who is put in charge of the Gestapo—and who identifies so completely with his job that hereafter he is known simply as “Gestapo” Müller—is a former Christian Democrat: an affiliation that does not prevent him from becoming one of the Nazis’ most devastating weapons. The other RSHA offices are given to brilliant intellectuals: youngsters such as Ohlendorf (Inland-SD) and Schellenberg (Ausland-SD), or experienced academics like Six (Written Records). Such men contrast strongly with the cohort of cranks, illiterates, and mental degenerates who populate the Party’s higher echelons. One minor branch of the Gestapo—a status that does not reflect its true importance, but it’s always better to remain discreet with such sensitive subjects—is devoted to Jewish affairs. Heydrich already knows who he wants to run it: that little Austrian Hauptsturmführer who did such good work before, Adolf Eichmann.

Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet

It's difficult to write anything about this bizarre, unfinished novel. Despite being comic or satirical, it's never really funny. It's extraordinarily repetitive. There are really no characters, no plot, no development of any sort. And yet it's a powerful commentary on the tragedy of the human quest for knowledge. With it, Flaubert renounced all his earlier technique and essentially inaugurated the 20th century (post-)modernist tradition in literature. I can't really recommend it, but it's a unique masterpiece.

They no longer had a single fixed idea about the individuals and events of that time. To form an impartial judgment, they would have to read every history, every memoir, every newspaper and manuscript, for the slightest omission could foster an error that would lead to others, and on unto infinity. They gave up. But they had acquired a taste for history, a need for truth for its own sake. Perhaps the truth was more easily uncovered in earlier periods? Surely the authors recounted events more dispassionately at a greater remove. And they delved into the good Rollin. “What a load of hogwash!” cried Bouvard as of the first chapter.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Here's a book that manages to entirely live up to its reputation. Parts of it can be a slog, but it's filled with great observations on psychology, sociology, economics, politics, law, the future of America, and more. Tocqueville's analysis of the pressures of social conformity prefigure the (great) work of Timur Kuran.

Fascinating both for how it reveals how things have changed, and how they have stayed the same.

The Americans of the United States must inevitably become one of the greatest nations in the world; their offspring will cover almost the whole of North America; the continent that they inhabit is their dominion, and it cannot escape them. What urges them to take possession of it so soon? Riches, power, and renown cannot fail to be theirs at some future time, but they rush upon this immense fortune as if but a moment remained for them to make it their own.

The Worst

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

An unstructured mishmash of warmed-over pop science and a cavalcade of bad arguments around abduction, philosophy of science, intelligence, infinity, qualia, etc.

The arguments about superhuman general intelligence not being possible because humans are universal Turing machines are utterly absurd.

One of the worst treatments of abduction in the history of philosophy, and that's really saying something.

Deutsch's comments on heritability are downright idiotic, and it's clear that he didn't even bother spending 30 seconds reading the wikipedia page. He just makes stuff up (incorrectly). A lot of uppity commentary about shit he doesn't understand.

And then it's just filled with a whole bunch of random shit, like a galaxybrained theory of why the UK has the best voting system, a terrible theory of aesthetics, etc.

Qualia are currently neither describable nor predictable — a unique property that should make them deeply problematic to anyone with a scientific world view (though, in the event, it seems to be mainly philosophers who worry about it).

Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies

Tainter's theory mostly comes down to decreasing marginal returns to additional societal complexity, which eventually leads to collapse. Parts of it are highly reminiscent of Chaisson's Energy-Rate Density paper (which everyone should read), but much more limited in scope. He's too focused on explaining everything with a single theory, leaving little room for contingency in history. He ignores the aspect of time: just because a system works well for 10 years does not mean it can work for 1000. And he treats rulers as being virtually unconstrained in their policy choices.

Ultimately I just found it badly argued and completely unconvincing. Full review.

In the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.

Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

Absurdly overlong scifi story about virtual realities and sinister conspiracies. There's a series of parallel fantastical stories set in a virtual reality and they're all pointless and awful. After 800 pages there is no resolution, only sequelbait. A bit outdated in terms of how it imagines the internet, it does have a few interesting ideas but overall not worth the effort at all.

Ho! We are being taunted by some sort of otherworldly fireflies. Someone fetch me my rifle!

Links

Cormac

1. The Passenger: A brief and imperfect guide for the perplexed. A bit over the top, but I thought this was the best piece on The Passenger.

The Passenger is an omni-dissolver, an intergalactic acid rain, a necromantic encyclopedia whose entries are unfamiliar tarot cards.

2. A new conversation with David Krakauer. 100% worth listening to.

3. An article by Krakauer in Nautilus: The Cormac McCarthy I Know. Montaigne, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Melville, and more.

It is over tea and lunch with our friends and colleagues that we discussed everything. A typical day might include new results in prebiotic chemistry, the nature of autocatalytic sets, pretopological spaces in RNA chemistry, Maxwell’s demon, Darwin’s sea sickness, the twin prime conjecture, logical depth as a model of evolutionary history, Godel’s dietary habits, the weirdness of Spengler’s Decline of the West, and allometric scaling of the whale brain. I believe Cormac’s recent novels The Passenger and Stella Maris have their origins partly in this foment of ideas that connect domains of unyielding precision to the frailty of life and the militancy of society.

4. James Wood's review is pretty good: "To traffic in serious mathematics is to commune with truth; to traffic in words, to merely write novels, is to produce dim approximations of the truth. This is what too many colloquies at the Santa Fe Institute will do to a novelist’s self-esteem."

5. Joy Williams is also not bad: Great, Beautiful, Terrifying

Perhaps the business of The Passenger, for all its somber romanticism and Gnostic leanings, is to defer to this unconsciousness, to give shape to that which might well be the soul, or at least its most faithful companion.

McCarthy is not interested in the psychology of character. He probably never has been. He’s interested in the horror of every living creature’s situation.

6. This negative(!) review in Slate compares the book to Pynchon, DeLillo, Ellroy, and Lovecraft.

Machine Learning/AI

7. Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT

So, inside the imagined universe of ChatGPT's mind, our virtual machine accesses the url https://chat.openai.com/chat, where it finds a large language model named Assistant trained by OpenAI. This Assistant is waiting to receive messages inside a chatbox.

8. On the persistent mental effects of looking at AI art: Relaxed/Flawed Priors As A Result Of Viewing AI Art. "Since this period of consuming a large amount of this flawed AI art, perhaps a dozen notable times, I've recognized myself initially parsing some visual stimulus in an incorrect way - one that maps to some flaw common in AI art - only to moments later consciously realize that I must have parsed the stimulus incorrectly and fix my initial perception."

9. Ebook semantic search using AI.

10. Wordcraft Writers Workshop

The Wordcraft Writers Workshop is a collaboration between Google's PAIR and Magenta teams, and 13 professional writers from a diverse set of creative writing backgrounds. Together we explore the limits of co-writing with LaMDA and foster an honest and earnest conversation about the rapidly changing relationship between technology and creativity.

11. Midwit AI: Inverse scaling can become U-shaped

12. Riffusion: using an image model to generate images of spectrograms, which are then turned into audio.

13. Nintil makes predictions about AI in 2026.

Forecasting

14. Scoring the midterm election forecasts from PredictIt, 538, and Manifold.

15. Prediction market does not imply causation

Take the other 95% of the proposed projects, give the investors their money back, and use the SWEET PREDICTIVE KNOWLEDGE to pick another 10% of the RCTs to fund for STAGGERING SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS and MAXIMAL STATUS ENHANCEMENT.

16. Michael Story: Why I generally don't recommend internal prediction markets or forecasting tournaments to organisations.

Metascience

17. Nintil: Limits and Possibilities of Metascience.

The failure of meta-entrepreneurship to establish deep links with entrepreneurship, given stronger incentives for improvement, makes me be pessimistic about the possibilities of these bidirectional linkages from manifesting in metascience. Hence I predict metascience and metascience entrepreneurship will continue walking separate paths: The next big NIH reform or new institution started will not be strongly influenced by academic or theoretical metascience.

The Rest

18. The Sweet Life: The Long-Term Effects of a Sugar-Rich Early Childhood. Using the end of WWII rationing in the UK to look at the effects of early sugar consumption. "Excessive sugar intake early in life led to higher prevalence of chronic inflammation, diabetes, elevated cholesterol and arthritis." Not entirely convinced, a lot of marginal/non-significant results, but Figure 5 is really wild.

19. On Galton: How to keep cakes moist and cause the greatest tragedies of the 20th century (Straussian)

Here’s a few highlights of Galton’s many experiments, studies, and investigations:

• Tries to learn arithmetic by smell, succeeds

• Worships a puppet to see if he can convince himself it has godlike powers, succeeds

• Makes a walking stick with a hidden high-pitched whistle inside it, takes it to the zoo and whistles at all the animals (most don’t care, but the lions hate it)

• Replaces the blood of a silver-grey rabbit with the blood of a lop-eared rabbit to see if it can still breed (it can)

• Tells himself that everyone is spying on him to see if he can make himself insane, succeeds

• Tries to consciously control all of his automatic bodily processes, nearly suffocates

• Hears animal magnetism is all the rage, learns it in secret (it’s illegal), magnetizes 80 people

20. Scott Sumner on...Robert Louis Stevenson?! A very good piece that will probably add some items to your to-read list. "So what’s going on here? It cannot be that Stevenson is too difficult for the literary establishment, as he’s also popular with average readers. I suspect it is more nearly the opposite problem—Stevenson is too pleasurable. Some critics wrongly equate greatness with difficulty."

21. What it's like to dissect a cadaver. One of the many hidden benefits of living in the Bay Area?

22. The robot on EA. Don't fully endorse it, but quite interesting.

23. Walking with Nietzsche

The path that Nietzsche took is documented, so I followed him in his walking again (this time solo), starting with the Le Chemin de Nietzsche from the Hotel Cap Estel, the exact hiking trail Nietzsche took almost daily, now dedicated to him. The 2.5-mile arduous ascent with coastal views of the Mediterranean, which goes from the village of Èze bord-de-Mer to the main town of Èze, is perhaps the most beautiful hike I had ever summited, crowned by Èze’s Église Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption, perhaps also the most sublime church I had ever seen.

24. Pynchon's archive.

25. Erik Hoel on the MFA's influence on literature.

Faulkner didn’t finish high school, recent research shows Woolf took some classes in the classics and literature but was mostly homeschooled, Dostoevsky had a degree in engineering. Joyce did major in literature, but even he entered medical school (before leaving), and also failed multiple classes in his undergraduate days. Not one of these great writers would now be accepted to any MFA in the country. The result of the academic pipeline is that contemporary writers, despite a surface-level diversity of race and gender that is welcomingly different than previous ages, are incredibly similar in their beliefs and styles, moreso than writers in the past.

26. Stuart Ritchie on the NIH deliberately crippling human genetics research because the results are politically inconvenient: The NIH's misguided genetics data policy.

Audio-Visual

27. And here's the 37-minute live version of Sister Ray.

What I've Been Reading

• The Passenger/Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy. Dark and beautiful. This may well be the last great novel of the human era in literature. It would be fitting for the 89-year old McCarthy to be writing a coda for himself and humanity at the same time. Especially since he views the 20th century productions of science and engineering as far more important and groundbreaking than those in literature.

  The plot is mostly irrelevant. Both books consist mostly of conversations: bars and restaurants for the first, a psychiatric institution for the second. McCarthy grapples with every idea that's been on his mind for the last few decades: mathematics, physics, language, the unconscious, the sins of the father, Kant, evolution, psychology, gnosticism, genius. It's not just a novel of ideas, though—The Passenger is filled with yearning, regret, nostalgia, isolation...just an incredibly melancholic atmosphere in general. Stella Maris is geekier, and basically The Virgin Internal Voice vs The Chad Cerebration: The Novel.

  To the usual mix of Hemingway and Captain Ahab, McCarthy adds strains of Pynchon and DeLillo. It works.

  There's even a cool, oblique Borges allusion: toward the end, Bobby writes down a couple of lines from a 17th century German poet, Daniel von Czepko. Those lines form the epigram of A New Refutation of Time!

• Tiger Technology: The Creation of a Semiconductor Industry in East Asia, by John a. Matthews. This book comes out of academic "management" studies, which entails a lot of bullshit. A lot of overdone abstract ideas that are never really tested, a lot of extremely silly diagrams, etc. And its predictions about the future (it came out in 2000) turned out quite wrong. Viewed purely as a collection of facts it's quite an interesting book, however.

• Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, by Chris Miller. Much stronger than the above, and also up to date as it just came out. Covers both the history of chip production across the world, as well as current issues and where they will lead in the future.

• Bouvard and Pecuchet, by Gustave Flaubert. A comic(?) novel of ideas, which is also about Ideas. Quite weird, very bad, very good, not sure if I can really recommend it to anyone. Full review forthcoming.

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick. Some interesting differences between the book and the movie. The latter is vastly superior. There's very little of the cyberpunk aesthetic present here, and Scott wisely ripped out almost everything about the artificial animals, the futuristic cult with the TV host antagonist, etc. Still, it's not bad.

• Children of Dune, by Frank Herbert. I can confirm these get sillier and worse as the series goes on.

• The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David W. Anthony. Pretty cool book on the origins of Indo-European, combining archaeological and linguistic evidence. Unfortunately it was written just before the ancient DNA era, so it contains some things we know today are inaccurate (though to Anthony's credit, he was leaning in the right direction). Dull in sections (dry lists of finds at various sites), but easily skimmable. It's difficult to recommend it when Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here exists.

• The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. I love some of his work, but overall not a fan of the average poem.

• Flashman and the Mountain of Light, by George MacDonald Fraser. The audiobooks for this series are really well done. This time Flashman gets embroiled in the First Sikh War, a rather silly affair all around even without the fictional elements. Naturally, he gets his hands on the Koh-i-Noor. Not the best Flashman novel, but still good fun. The ending is pure perfection.

• Murder as a Fine Art, by David Morrell. Historical detective fiction, in which an old, opium-addled De Quincey and his hot, spunky daughter are roped into a murder mystery and become citizen-detectives. Meticulously researched but not very good, unfortunately.

• Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays. Just a dull collection of academic essays focusing on pointless minutiae and ignoring the big questions.