I think it is safe to say that M/M romance has experienced its mainstream breakthrough moment. The Gen-Z girls sitting next to me in a hip Brooklyn coffee shop at this very moment in time are breathlessly discussing Heated Rivalry, which one of them binged in a single horny session yesterday. She confesses aloud that she really hasn’t ever been into porn at all before, but this is different…!

Here’s the thing about Heated Rivalry. It is different, but as with many mainstream breakthroughs that seem to the gen-pop to be blindingly new and original, extremely sudden and unprecedented, it is in fact entirely precedented and quite derivative —NOT IN A BAD WAY !!!!

But its explosive popularity has led to a new flood of uninformed people stumbling through the darkness, attempting to answer from first principles a question that fandoms centered on this material have already spent 50 years fruitlessly trying to resolve amongst themselves: Why Slash?

In fact, the idea that this topic is destined to be completely unending and circular and boring forever was its own fandom meme at one point, when “my thoughts on yaoi” became a phrase to denote a long opinionated online discussion that nobody gave a shit about.

Slash = yaoi = M/M. The first term comes from Western media fandom; the second from Asian boys’ love/BL media; the last is most often used in mainstream romance publishing.

Slash is sex and/or love between two guys, ideally drawn or written—not onscreen, as in much gay porn made by and for gay guys, which is an important distinction. Slash is pornography by women, for women. It is a literary body genre, a lovechild of pornography and melodrama, with a focus on characters, emotions, and relationships alongside and inextricable from the sexy bits, coming in at least 33% romance by volume—often more.

Gay erotica in general has been a thing for a long time, obviously. (Haven’t you heard of Sins of the Cities of the Plain?) But the first nascent motions at the new form of slash, as any reader or writer of the stuff rightfully ought be able tell you, came in the form of fan literature in the 1970s exploring the possibility of a romantic and sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock—called K/S, pronounced K-slash-S, which is where “slash” comes from.

While some examples may have circulated privately earlier, the first published K/S story appeared in a fanzine in 1974. Around the same time, manga stories with M/M themes, known as yaoi, were being serialized in Japanese shoujo magazines aimed at young women, kicking off the Eastern side of things—which eventually became the formalized, popular genre of Boys’ Love or BL.1

Both cultures evolved and grew in parallel during the 80s and 90s, until the rise of the global internet massively increased the popularity of Asian BL media in the English-speaking fandom world, and allowed them to mix and mingle and (partially, at least) merge: which is why today you see all gay ships being referred to as “yaoi” (which seems to be winning the linguistic battle of the fittest over “slash”) and female fans of gay ships as “fujoshi” (instead of “slashers” or “slash shippers”) — a Japanese term meaning “rotten women,” originally a slur at yaoi readers, reclaimed by those readers as a proud appellation.

OK, but, so, anyway, get to the point—why slash? What are my thoughts on yaoi?

Well, the main thing I want to emphasize is there is no one answer to the question. Set Deep Thought running on it for 7.5 million years and you would not get anything coherent. This is because slash is erotic, which is personal, which is ineluctably resistant to complete comprehension, especially by outsiders… Explaining anything erotic is like trying to train cats and then get them to take feedback on their KPIs.

We know this: but we keep trying, because anything that opaque and mysterious is also irresistible. Trying to explain it enacts its erotics in miniature, which is addictive, like a scab you can’t stop picking at.

And, importantly, just because it’s impossible to fully explain doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen when people attempt to do so. And it also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep encouraging them to try: for there is a value in that continued effort on an individual and collective level, establishing a diverse archive of meaning throughout time.

Janice Radway approached her seminal 1984 study on 1970s and 80s romance paperback readers, Reading the Romance, by approaching the genre “on the basic assumption that if we wish to explain why romances are selling so well, we must first know what a romance is for the woman who buys and reads it,” and utilizing a methodology that included listening seriously (imagine that) to how the women “have defensively elaborated a coherent explanation for why they find [romances] so satisfying.”

Though the romances in Radway’s study were heterosexual Harlequins, it follows that her approach would suffice for slash as well. Joanna Russ, in her 1985 essay “Pornography By Women, For Women, With Love” was in agreement:

I’m convinced, after reading through more than fifty volumes of K/S material (most of it “X-rated”) that only those for whom a sexual fantasy “works,” that is, those who are aroused by it, have a chance of telling us to what particular set of conditions that fantasy speaks, and can analyze how and why it works and for whom. Sexual fantasy materials are like icebergs; the one-tenth that shows above the surface is no reliable indicator of the size or significance of the whole thing. Sexual fantasy that doesn’t arouse is boring, funny, or repellent, and unsympathetic outsiders trying to decode these fantasies (or any others) will make all sorts of mistakes.

Russ and Radway are important to keep in the conversation because modern Western slash fandom condensed in the 70s and 80s out of three things women were enjoying and responding to: popular visual media, transformative fanworks, and mainstream romance fiction. Contemporary M/M, even the tradpub stuff, even and perhaps especially Heated Rivalry, cannot be understood outside of the history of all three of those things.

The slash experience

Every individual slash shipper or M/M reader has a different reason why it appeals, very much related to one’s experience with the media in question, which is why the real answer to “why slash?” is a multivocal, transnational kaleidoscope of erotic self-definition.

For every woman that enjoys slash because she finds one man hurt or near death while another man comforts him very arousing (a subgenre known as “whump” or “hurt/comfort,” which often includes no sex at all), another one craves the happy-ever-after of two male characters getting married and having kids and/or lots of wholesome fulfilling sex (known as “fluff” or “curtainfic”).

Some readers want pure PWP, a.k.a. porn without plot, a.k.a. media like the original 1979 self-published manga which gave rise to the word “yaoi,” a Japanese acronym for a phrase meaning “there is neither climax, conclusion, or meaning.”2 Others want deeply researched, believable stories dealing with serious consequences of homophobia in the context of a canon’s setting.

And it’s important to note that a lot of Thoughts On Yaoi from the past few decades are not hip to the idea, well-known in fan spaces by this point but not readily acknowledged by outside commentators, that a lot of the women who are super into yaoi are not really women at all, but transmasculine/queer individuals discovering and forming their sexual and gender identities through the medium of fandom erotica—for more on this, see James Frankie Thomas’s excellent novel Idlewild.

One is tempted to consider fujoshiism as a third-dimensional axis of sexuality where the Kinsey scale and the gender spectrum are the first and second axes. It has really never been just straight women doing this stuff, despite public perception. As early as 2000, a PhD student found that over half of surveyed slash shippers identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual.

The identity makeup of slash fandom’s demographic may have shifted since 1985, but I think I would not be remiss to note that the actual demographic has not changed very much. It’s the same kinds of people—that is to say, we can’t possibly know how members of those early slash communities would identify today if raised by Tumblr in the same way we were.

I don’t think the proportion of transgender people in slash fandom invalidates the Russ essay at all, nor her basic idea of slash as “pornography by women, for women, with love.” She was a lesbian who loved slash! She knew it was bizarre and incongruent, which was why she made such an impactful attempt to explain it.

What is clear is that women and queer people get many, many different things out of slash and yaoi. 50 years of trope-construction and expectation-building from generation to generation has led to a variety of standardized ways to approach the genre in art and writing and fan experience: the strict Asian seme/uke (top/bottom) dichotomy; the Western queerbaiting exemplified by Sherlock and Supernatural, complete with mortal showrunner/fandom enmity; the bandom stage gay of Panic! at the Disco and 2000s emo.

Band slash fandom is in fact the garden from which contemporary hockey slash fandom grew. Circa 2010, so the story goes, Fall Out Boy had just gone on hiatus, and a handful of prominent BNFs (Big Name Fans) who had relocated to Chicago (FOB’s hometown) were left without an active fandom. This happened to be a big year for the Blackhawks and things followed on from there. There was, as I understand it, a legendary ship manifesto which made the rounds on LiveJournal around that time and convinced lots of people to make the leap from shipping band members to shipping hockey players.3 The idea of a romance between the two specific real-life hockey players that Rachel Reid based Heated Rivalry on came from this fandom; before she officially published the previous book in the series, Game Changers, she did so first on AO3 in the guise of a Steve/Bucky (you know, from Marvel) fanfiction; she clearly very much comes from the world that Kirk/Spock made, as do huge numbers of other tradpub romance and SF/F writers.

But Heated Rivalry has now gone far beyond that world. Despite Jacob Tierney’s laudable attempts to draw on Radway-esque explanations for the popularity of M/M among women, Russ’s prediction holds true and we now have “unsympathetic outsiders trying to decode these fantasies [making] make all sorts of mistakes.”

One thing that has always been a point of contention in slash communities (at least Western ones) is the idea of appropriation. Is women writing about men like this wrong or bad? Since the dawn of slash, gay men have found it within their rights to stomp around and tell women that yes it is very bad and you should stop—see David Gerrold, gay Star Trek writer and convention-circuit pundit of the 70s and 80s who issued various denigratory decrees against (in general) delusional women writing fanfiction and (in specific) imagining Kirk and Spock as romantically involved.

In the Geocities and LiveJournal eras of slash fandom, cis gay men established lordly presences on the platforms as arbiters of how M/M sex ought to be written by women, with female and queer fic writers cowed into obeisance by these guys’ complaints that too many fingers were going into asses in unrealistic ways and suchlike. These guys were generally liked and respected in these communities even if the power dynamic was a bit odd; but these days hardly anyone is putting in that kind of helpful effort. Every day another dude discovers Heated Rivalry’s female fandom and/or AO3 and and/or slash and is like you are fetishizing us!!!!! not realizing this is far from a groundbreaking new take. There is not a clear solution to this and it’s probably going to keep being relitigated endlessly because of misogyny et cetera; but the Jacob Tierneys of the world actually listening to women when we explain why we, as individuals, dig this stuff is certainly a good start.

Slash as social technique

Personally I could not possibly tell you why I like slash. I just do—although I think I am not as much of a die-hard as others, who engage with M/M nearly exclusively in fan and pro work. (I like other stuff too! I go months without reading any M/M at all!)

But I will acknowledge that I am irreversibly fujo-brained, having labored for 15 years in the media fandom mines and in the process gained a variety of triggers. I first logged onto Tumblr to look at pictures of David Tennant for reasons relating to my own tween erotic development; the community that I quickly became a part of loved posting pictures of David Tennant and John Simm together, gazing into each others eyes; the rest was history.

We must consider slash as, like all other fandom practices, a subcultural technique. These techniques are inherently memetic, transmitting themselves from node to node like a virus, situated within a complex network of social relations.

You become a slash shipper because your loins are set afire by a hot gif set of Dean and Cas from Supernatural; your best friend becomes a slash shipper because she wants to enjoy creativity in communion with you, a.k.a. the dominant form of play in fan spaces, which may include roleplaying, sharing fic recommendations, trading erotic headcanons, and producing fanworks for/with each other. (And then by enacting these forms of play her loins eventually are trained to be set afire as well.)

When the fans with the highest status in your community are slash shippers, as is often the case, others fall in line like ducklings.4 One BNF inventing a new ship out of whole cloth, or promoting a ship via a manifesto to her immediate social circle, can become the originating event of a self-perpetuating fandom which 10 years later is so popular that its origins have long become obscured.

I find that this social aspect goes vastly underacknowledged in the ongoing “thoughts on yaoi” discussion. The feedback loops that are reinforced by taking active part in a community that puts value on shared fan techniques—shipping, writing, drawing, posting, curation, analysis—can have an enormous impact on individual experience and taste. While some are born fujoshis, others, like me, have fujoshiism thrust upon them by way of participatory culture.

Slash fans used to have their own spaces, but since Tumblr, media fandom is (for better and for worse) one big stewing pot of context collapse, and everyone ships, and everyone reads fic, and the lines between fandom and the mainstream continue to blur. M/M romance as a subset of the traditional publishing industry has nothing, sales-wise, on its counterpart F/M juggernaut, but the success of Casey McQuiston (an erstwhile Tumblr mutual of mine, I must disclose) with Red, White, and Royal Blue was the first indicator of how an AO3 slash shipper to NYT bestseller to film/TV adaptation pipeline was now well within the realm of possibility. Now we have reached the next level.5

The week before Heated Rivalry aired, only its existing diehard fans were tweeting about it: BookTok girls, romance girls, hockey girls, and people in the relatively small middle of that Venn diagram who had been following the production of the show for months if not years. And I took notice… I shan’t dox my fandom account here but on November 22, a week before it premiered, I tweeted something along the lines of “not sure if I’m going to be watching the hockey show, but I am closely tracking its impact on the culture” … because I could already tell that something was going on.

I was right. Heated Rivalry pulled off the spectacularly difficult acrobatics of making a show based on niche M/M erotica for women which appeals also to gay men as well as people completely and totally outside the slash fandom orbit. Hats off to Jacob Tierney and may we see more fujo writer x gay showrunner collabs in the future.6

Thanks to the fact that it’s quite good and (importantly) something new and exciting in the barren, desiccated TV landscape, Heated Rivalry is getting watched by people who would be very unlikely to have engaged with M/M subculture otherwise. Straight girl fans of beach reads and fairy smut; straight guy hockey fans; gay guy fans of TV shows about gay guys; moms and grandmas and, it seems, pretty much everyone in Hollywood.

Heated Rivalry might well be the first M/M adaptation that manages to effectively transport the whole kit and caboodle of written M/M—all the different reasons women love it—from the page to the screen. It doesn’t skimp on sex but it also doesn’t skimp on feelings—the romance stuff, the character stuff, the goopy chewy tropey smarmy stuff that differentiates slash from other types of erotica and pornography for other audiences. It fully embraces slash’s origins in the holy trinity of visual media, transformative fanworks, and romance fiction.

Also, I think many analyses underestimate the importance of Shane and Ilya being celebrities within the world of the show, or at the very least well-known people who are often on television. This creates a kind of mirrored parallax effect that amplifies the effect of the plot. RPF (real person fiction) is transgressive in a highly erotic way; the people who ship real-life hockey players and band members have long known this, and now fans of Heated Rivalry get to experience a diluted but still powerful version of that transgression within the canon of the show. (They can certainly also ship the actual actors if they want to—and uhhhh let’s just say there is a whole… situation… happening right now re: that.)

The girls next to me at the coffee shop, emerging born-again into the glorious world of M/M, now have the opportunity to become caught by those fandom feedback loops I mentioned earlier, which play to a variety of needs in a woman’s life: a new context to think about hot men in sexual situations; an erotic object to joyfully connect with friends over without involving one’s own personal sexuality or intimate desires; a generic unresisting canvas upon which to enact tropey narrative fantasies like bodyswaps, soulmate AUs, and of course omegaverse.

But in part because of the gateway they came in through, the world they are entering is very different than the slash world of 10, even 5 years ago: one far more intimately connected to cultural producers, high-level decision makers, and the grinding industrial combine of the pop mainstream.

I hope that these new fans will take the time to look back at the history of slash, yaoi, and M/M in order to understand how things have changed, and understand how Heated Rivalry in no small part part owes its success to decades of fan practices building the cultural scaffolding necessary for it to break through.

Banger of the week

Over on my polar blog I recently published a lengthy recap of my research on Fanny Cohen (1887-1975), a fairly obscure Australian mathematician, scientist, and teacher.

I only know who she is because she attended the University of Sydney with a handful of my favorite polar people circa 1909-1910. The presence of a buxom Jewess in Edwardian snapshots also featuring assorted explorers sparked a kind of fannish self-insert excitement in me.

What I like about Antarctic explorers is how unrelatable they sometimes are, in their archaic Victorian masculinity and desire to live the kind of adventurous life that I, famously “not an outdoors person,” tend to avoid… but here was Fanny Cohen, well-born and well-educated, strong-willed, academic, funny, fashionable, someone who was as close to ME as anyone I’ve ever found in history, closer even than my own ancestors—who, at the time that Fanny was gallivanting around Australia’s Hunter Valley with her grad school friends, laughing and singing and flirting and rock-collecting, were (as far as I know) living lives of poverty and fear in the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement.

I don’t do history academically or professionally, at least not at the moment. I am an amateur in all the best senses of the term, which means I can spend a lot if not all of my research time on self-indulgent, quixotic ventures, like trying to establish a character portrait of Fanny Cohen that would prove we could’ve totally been best friends.

A.S. Byatt’s award-winning 1990 novel Possession is the best book ever written about doing archival biographical research. In the novel, contemporary researchers Roland Michell and Maud Bailey discover letters which reveal a brief but consequential relationship between prominent Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, until then unknown to scholars. The plot unfolds propulsively from there, peppered through with pastiches of period letters and poetry.

Not only does Possession accurately capture the breathless thrill of the research chase, the opening up of intoxicating possibilities of new retrospective understanding, it also centers on how the lives of researchers inevitably become intertwined with, and project themselves upon, the lives of their subjects; while in turn the lives of the subjects project forward through time to influence, against entropy and logic, the lives of their biographers. A dead poet is not so dead that they have no power; or rather, the biographer’s interest (a little like an observer in quantum mechanics) revitalizes a closed life, introduces new questions, reopens it up again so that it regains at least some of the power it had during life to love and be loved, to change others and to be changed. The titular possession goes both ways.

In the novel, Michell and Bailey do a lot of things that professional scholars are not supposed to do, like stealing letters from archives and digging up dead bodies. Their deepening identification with Ash and LaMotte, and the dead’s power to influence the romantic arc of the living, is cast alongside these no-no’s as a cautionary tale, one causing quite a bit of adultery… yet because this is a novel, and a romance at that, the reader is rooting for these meddling kids, and weeps at their eventual dual triumph, academic (they solve the mystery) and romantic (they get a happy-ever-after together).

When I read Harry Pennell’s love confessions in his diary for the first time, I remember thinking, This is my Possession moment. Every researcher secretly dreams of finding a smoking gun that will change everything. Some kind of confession: love, sex, murder, betrayal, adultery, a secret child, a hidden grudge. We want to charge that closed life up again with vitality; we want to be the ones to invoke that retroactive reassessment, we want to possess and be possessed.

Well, maybe not every researcher—academic scholars may well have had that desire drilled out of them long ago, but us amateurs have no such compunctions in voicing that desire, especially those of us who are also fiction writers. Because Byatt’s novel is specifically a novelist’s fantasy about historical research, infusing a dry process with a romance which, at its best, it actually does have the potential to have, in my experience—though perhaps not reaching to the soaring heights of the research done in the book.

“Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable,” wrote Byatt in Possession. The self-indulgence of looking for a friend or lover in the archive, of searching out a coherent story with a happy and/or sensical ending—it is not very professional, or realistic, or even advisable. I’m not planning on writing a novel about Fanny, but approaching research as if I were is intoxicatingly fun.

Hilary Mantel, queen of the historical novel, long may her memory live, had much to say on this aspect of speculation. “I think novelists are alert for everything historians can find and verify, but then for something different, and extra; history’s unconscious, if you like,” she said. “To a degree, historians have to believe that people meant what they said and said what they meant, and that their actions can be interpreted by the logic of their lives and times. But fiction redirects us to mystery and chance, and doesn’t assume that people know their own minds or hearts.”

There’s also an aspect of research-as-entertainment, which was not really possible when Mantel was writing her first historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, in the 1970s:

I started it when I was twenty-two, a year after university. That would be 1974. I wrote it in the evenings and on weekends. I did more of the research up front than I would have done at a later stage—luckily for me, because in spring of ’77, we went to live in Botswana, where there were no sources to speak of, as you can imagine. I had an intense few weeks before we went, when I said to myself, Get everything you haven’t got, because this is your only chance.

Ok, ignoring that she wrote it in her early 20s because that makes me want to die, think of how easy we have it now! For Mantel to become possessed by Georges Danton (who gets some of the most gloriously horny character descriptions I’ve had the pleasure to read in a historical novel) and his French Revolution compatriots, she had to sit at a desk in a certain library in a certain city. I can get possessed by opening a new tab, or emailing an archivist on the other side of the world; that romantical drug, history, is only ever a click away.

Banger of the week

If you follow me on other platforms you may have heard the news that I was unexpectedly let go from my full-time job a few weeks ago, after only working there for 10 months. It had been my first “real” corporate 9-to-5 since leaving the music industry during the pandemic. I was grateful to land it after a year struggling to break even as a freelancer, and I started it with super high hopes that were then very quickly dashed due to a variety of factors completely outside of my control.

Luckily I was able to walk out with my head held high thanks to the knowledge that I already have some incredible plans lined up for 2026! Among some other fun things I can’t talk about just yet, I’m on track to deliver my final book manuscript by the fall for publication in Summer 2027. Whew!

In the meantime I plan to get back to freelancing (so if you are taking pitches for articles or want my services as a fandom consultant, please let me know!!!!) as well as writing more on here.

I wanted to poll my loyal subscribers on what type of tchotchkes you would like to be receiving from me.

Taking a look at my sporadic posts from 2024-2025, my best performing one by far was a breezy meditation on tech addiction through an archival lens. My second-best performing one was a personal essay about Tavi Gevinson’s Taylor Swift zine—very different in tone and much more timely/newsy. Nobody reads my posts about Antarctica and that is fine, lol.

Ideally over the next year this newsletter will become an active pipeline for getting people to pre-order my book about fandom history. So despite mainly wanting to continue writing about stuff only I care about, like polar explorers and British indie rock bands, I do have to start thinking audience-first. Here are some ideas for stuff I could start putting out on here—please tell me what you want to read!

• Fandom history explainers—stuff like “A short history of RPF,” “What is ‘kpopification?’” “Did the fourth wall ever really exist?”

• Archival deep dives—interesting obscure dead people and what they can teach us about our modern situation

• Newsy/timely commentary on pop-cultural happenings

• Personal essays about my fandom/internet experiences as a Zillennial

All of the above? Something else? Let me know!

My challenge to myself in 2026 is to get better at writing quick, short, simple pieces more frequently. Prolificity seems to be the key. I have a mental block about Substack stuff needing to be extensively researched/long/super original but looking a lot of other stuff that does well on here I don’t think that’s true…. I just need to start firing shit off!

Anyway happy new year 🥰

Banger of the week

I love emails, and it’s a problem. I love emails and, to a lesser extent spreadsheets; I love producing large-scale events, orchestrating complicated multi-author publications, organizing merchandise sales, starting groups and clubs and podcasts and brands, buying domain names and building websites, delegating tasks and managing a team… all good things, right?

But when I reflect on over 10 years of successful admin—the first event I personally organized was a Homestuck prom in my hometown in 2013!—I wonder if, perhaps, it has fatally doomed me.

This reflection was prompted by Virginia Woolf’s essay “Middlebrow,” written in the 1930s and published posthumously in 1942. The piece was her salvo in the Battle Of The Brows, an ongoing critical back-and-forth which began before the Second World War and continued well into the 1960s, as the greatest minds of their generations tried to figure out if mass culture was bad for humanity and if so, just how bad.

Her take on that issue is typically and endearingly snobby, but I specifically was interested in her definitions of the highbrow and the lowbrow as species of people.

Highbrows, she writes, “for some reason or another, are wholly incapable of dealing successfully with what is called real life” — too busy “[riding] his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea” and driving the avant-garde forward with their art.

Highbrows like Woolf herself, like “Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Scott, Jane Austen, Flaubert, Hardy or Henry James” lead lives of art, lives of the mind, and meanwhile are utter messes on any given day. They don’t follow trends, they don’t know nor care about having the “right thing” to wear or do or say, for that is the province of the distasteful striving middlebrow.

Domestically and administratively, Woolf implies that the labor of the lowbrow (of any class, for she claims that she has known highbrow charwomen as well as lowbrow duchesses) is necessary to rely on to sustain the galloping genius of the highbrow.

This sort of relates to the ideas she expressed in A Room Of One’s Own, namely that a certain level of financial and domestic independence is necessary for the emergence of genius. But she also seems to be making an idiosyncratic case for the inconvenient aspects of a true artist’s existence; the necessity of a certain kind of incompetence.

And it scared me a little. Have I been doomed by competence? What if I die a better administrator than an artist?

I wouldn’t say that the kind of admin I enjoy is wholly uncreative: far from it. It requires a flexibility of mind and the ability to continuously generate ideas; it requires social confidence and the ability to imagine a world where the crazy thing I want to do actually happens, and then manifest that world. But the fact that I am good at it and have gotten better at it seems to have put me in a corner.

There will always be work for someone who is good at getting things done, email- and spreadsheet-wise; there will not always be work for an artist, especially one who is not by any means an outstanding genius or a voice of a generation. It’s so much more lucrative—and sensible—to be a good emailer, professionally, than a mediocre writer!

This stings especially because in some ways I am the kind of incompetent person Woolf describes as a highbrow: but in my case, instead of that leading me to a life of the mind, it simply means I have a disastrously disorganized apartment, am bad at cooking and dating, and can be found taking the path of least resistance towards pleasure (lowbrow mass culture, which I have built my career around publicly enjoying) and money (I am gainfully employed in a full-time editorial marketing job).

If I were only capable of being an artist, I would have had no choice but to try to become one: much like my father, who dropped out of college twice, turned down big corporate radio gigs, and generally avoided lucrative prospects in favor of the peripatetic and risky lifestyle that often jeopardized the family finances but nevertheless maximized the time he would spend actually playing his instrument, which was until the end of his life really and truly the only thing he cared about.

He was an excellent producer, a brilliant and popular radio host, a writer and critic of spectacular talent, but that wasn’t what he wanted to do, so he didn’t do it; he wanted be a musician and he was one; he lived an artistic, highbrow, galloping, chaotic life.

Meanwhile since childhood I have ostensibly really wanted to be a showrunner or novelist or a singer but, pathologically averse to sacrifice and effort and (this is important and worthy of an entire separate essay) attention and critique, I am none of those things. But I am very good at admin.

The disappearance of the relevance of the highbrow/lowbrow distinction in the 21st century has been explained by writers more versed in cultural theory than I; but the continued importance of Woolf’s short sardonic piece lies in her explication of such thing as a highbrow temperament, a personality of genius, which comes off to a modern reader as amounting to some kind of neurodivergence, some critical difference which contributes to single-mindedness and fierce independence in an artistic sense even as it makes them “wholly incapable” of handling real life.

Competence, conversely, makes for an un-genius life, one whose destiny might lie instead in competently facilitating the genius lives of others: not a bad life, I emphasize, and one I personally know to be full of joys and excitement and proud accomplishment, but is it my ultimate goal?

And should it be, after all? Would it be so terrible after all to avoid the many, many pitfalls and failures of my father, and of all the other artists who chase ideas across uneven and perilous country?

Banger of the week

I still don’t understand LA.

I think it’s because you drive through it. New York, at at the pace of perambulation, is fundamentally comprehensible: you walk past a place and you understand it, or you crawl past it on a bus, or you rumble past it below, underground, unseen, and it never enters your mental universe at all.

Whereas traveling through Los Angeles one receives only a preview, a promise, a glimpse—one’s imagination can run wild off of a half-lit neon sign, a painted storefront, a boarded-up mansion, a gated bungalow court. What goes on in there?

I enjoy living in New York better on a day-to-day basis than I ever did LA. But New York is utterly and comfortably mundane. I find I understand it easily. It offers itself up without a fight; it has utterly failed to stir in me the kind of compulsive curiosity that Los Angeles did when I lived there.

The longer I lived in LA the stranger it got: the less I understood it, the more I had the irresistible urge to delve, to explore, to uncover what I could not help imagine was some kind of fundamental secret the city held and would reveal to a chosen dedicated few.

Lacking anything resembling a real social life I gave into this urge on the weekends and evenings, exploring the dusty ground of the old Red Car property above Silver Lake, the hidden stairs and passageways around the Hollywood Bowl, the funerary sprawls of Hollywood Forever and Glendale’s Forest Lawn.

Up in Angelino Heights the huge, sun-bleached turn-of-the-century mansions left over from a bygone age of luxurious California living gave way, on my aimless walks, to leafy backstreets hidden from the main avenues, full of ramshackle structures, crumbling apartments lofted out over the hills, to me some kind of wonderland, where real people lived—though for them, the strangeness and beauty I saw would probably have long faded into mundanity.

But even the neighborhood I was resident at the time, in Glendale just north of Atwater, was strange to me, hinting at all kinds of history it refused to reveal: the shuttered diner around the corner, all its decor still intact inside; the furniture store, its preserved 1950s neon sign glowing immortally, turned into office space; the freight trains which would rumble over the nearby bridge late at night, carrying what? going where?

The first time I watched the film Under The Silver Lake (2018, dir. David Robert Mitchell) I dismissed it as a kitschy Lynch rip-off, over-the-top, far too long, too contrived—but then I found I couldn’t stop thinking about it, for months and then years after.

I found out that the scenes at Andrew Garfield’s apartment complex had been shot in Los Feliz, close to where I lived, and I tried to visit, to take one of my investigative walks down past the pool where Riley Keogh floated and through to the darkened riverside walkway where Garfield’s irredeemable yet sympathetic Sam was chased by a murderous owl god. However when I arrived I found the gate to the complex impassable without a key and no residents willing to let me in. This seemed somehow correct.1

Under The Silver Lake, upon rewatch and reflection, confirmed its status as the film that represents Los Angeles’s hallucinatory, kitschy, contrived qualities most accurately to me. There is something going on in the city, something almost fictional, a conspiracy you will never understand completely, never see in its fullness—only ever drive past, or be stopped at the gates.

Along with its most obvious antecedent Mulholland Drive (it even features Patrick Fischler in a supporting role) I suggest pairing the film with Inherent Vice, ideally the book. Lynch evoked the inexplicability of Hollywood and fame; Pynchon got at the weirdness of Los Angeles real estate, which interests me a little more: the way pockets of strangeness cluster around the city, the way that in Under The Silver Lake the climactic, morbid confrontation takes place in Griffith Park, presumably with children frolicking on the merry-go-round just over the hill.

Working as a glorified secretary right after college, essentially chained to a phone inside an often-empty office in West Hollywood, I’d plot out sprawling Pynchonian novels I’d never write: cults at the Paramour Estate, the ghost of Tom Mix haunting Gelson’s, new luxury apartment complexes harboring ancient secrets, billboards for television shows that didn’t exist. Whenever I visit the city these days, all those imagined secrets come back to me as I drive.

Do you have a favorite weird place in LA that you’ve investigated? Or a film or book to recommend that represents that sense of the city’s unknowable secrets? I want to know!

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