This article came out last week on a day my life fell apart, which I will refrain from talking about for once. It was truly a redux of the worst moment of my life in 2021, but if you do the homework the first time something catastrophic happens you know how you want to handle it better, adapt, and have a general sense how the subsequent weeks and months will feel.
If you are the type of person that doesn’t do the homework when life hands you a shit sandwich, I simply don’t have time for you in my life or Substack. While every trend forecaster will tell you that men have just been gooning and betting on sports I will tell you that I’ve been working on my shit and betting on sports when I’m not gooning on the floor of the bathroom I share with my wife.
In the midst of my shambling last week, I called
because we’ve gotten close writing, gambling, and boxing lately. He knows what happened in 2021 from some pages I’ve shown him and once I revealed it was happening again he rushed down from Hell’s Kitchen.While I waited, I laid down on the floor of our courtyard and looked up at the buildings. For a moment, I wished that the buildings would fall on me so that I didn’t have to feel what I knew I’d be feeling for the next few months, but then my phone buzzed.
I looked and I got an alert for this article that came with a description including our boy
who went to college with Harold, hosts a pod together, and are generally inseparable. I met Harold through Sean and now we’re the equivalent of a 3on3 basketball team or Taiwanese Youth Gang that writes and boxes instead of engaging in knife fights over spilt sesame noodles.I got two paragraphs into the piece and saw this:
Men, we are assured, will return to reading when they see their own experiences reflected in contemporary fiction. A number of books over the past few years have attempted to capture a sliver of this audience. Call them novels of masculine tedium. These books, like Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi; Adem Luz Rienspect’s Mixtape Hyperborea; Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection; Sebastian Castillo’s Fresh, Green Life; and most recently, Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man, all depict the male psyche as a pulsing wound of self-conscious neurosis. Their men go online way too much, where they are bombarded by visions of contemporary masculinity: left-wing Twitter posturing, philosophy videos posted by lifting influencers, Wikipedia rabbit holes on all things crunchy and prehistoric.
If you’ve ever met Sean, you can ascertain within the first 15 minutes that, yes, his brain is full of literary knowledge and probably too full of what people are saying about literature in any one moment, but he has an inability to be anyone but himself which is why I love him and his writing. I don’t think he wrote Fuccboi as this intentional antidote to solve the male reader problem in contemporary fiction and if he did it clearly didn’t work as such.
I appreciate this trend forecaster, who was actually at school with Harold and Sean at Columbia, bringing attention to literature but personally, it doesn’t need to be men for me. I’ve said over and over again how much I revere My Year of Rest and Relaxation even though Ottessa is the homie and its corny to constantly big up the homie. That book got me through 2021 and the two best books I read this year are Laurie Woolever’s Care and Feeding as well as Karolina Waclawiak’s How to Get Into the Twin Palms which was recently re-released as a Two Dollar Radio New Classic.
Here is an AI description of How to Get Into The Twin Palms.
“Karolina Waclawiak’s debut novel, How to Get Into the Twin Palms, presents a vividly drawn portrait of Los Angeles inhabited by alienated immigrants, Russian gangsters, and sex-starved bingo-addicted octogenarians—all enveloped by smoldering fires that threaten to burn the city down.”
I love How to Get Into the Twin Palms because nobody asked for it. I don’t think Karolina set out to solve a women’s literature problem.
After spending years in LA where every manager, agent, producer is basically a trend forecaster memorizing articles from the trades trying to make new shit based on old shit, I surround myself with aliens who have no choice but be original and Karolina’s book is absolutely alien.
I’m a fan of Shordy Lit and I’d even argue that Sean’s writing IS Shordy Lit. I mess with him all the time that he is FOR THE GIRLIES and that his writing is potentially more informative for women than his own homies. My wife read his book, then confirmed as much and her exact quote after going through it twice was, “I love how he just goes IN on himself. He is just beating the shit out of his worst self.”
If anything, Sean’s Shordy,
, wrote The Places Review piece that hit hardest and said what the homies needed to hear the most.There aren’t many people who really know Sean. But I do. He wanted to keep an umbrella over my head like we were kids inside a cartoon. But the walls kept breaking down, around both of us.
Love in Tokyo felt like the weather. I held onto the moments where we were the only two people in the world. It rained and rained there. I loved the rain. I did not mind his smoking. I did not mind the authority of the books. I only ever wanted him to mind me. Maybe more than he was able. Maybe I was the one who was insatiable.
Nobody really says it, but boys are sensitive too. They are like flowers.
I haven’t seen Sean in a couple weeks cause he moved upstate, but when he shambles I just tell him to read this shit until he shuts the fuck up since we can’t go get incapacitated in the Russian Turkish Baths lol.
Cue Unbelievable, SEAN!
S-O-T-C-E is the illest, she got three hundred fifty seven ways to simmer sautee.
Everyone’s shordy is the illest and I feel if you catch our shordies on a good day they may whisper into a hole in a wall with PNB signs on 32nd Street that “my man is the illest”. A lot of men are incels and gooners and degenerate gamblers, but it is insane to think that to get men to read we need to write about those specific men. When I was a virgin gambler who played NBA 2K incessantly as a 17 year old, I also listened to Jewel.
But back to this article: