Three years of apathy, lassitude, and failure
If a mad dog isn't shot eventually it gets self-indulgent
Numb at the Lodge is three years old tomorrow. This marks the end of its terrible twos, and if I’m honest, the last twelve months have not been particularly easy. In my first year on Substack, from September 2022 to 2023, I wrote forty-five posts, totalling just over 195,000 words. This is, when you think about it, quite a lot. About one Moby Dick’s worth. An average of 4,300 words, delivered practically every week. I think I was very puppyishly enthusiastic back then. I was just getting into something. Running around, tail wagging, mangling my new toy between my teeth. In my second year on Substack I calmed down a bit. For 2023-24 I produced thirty posts, with a word count just north of 150,000. This is significantly less, but still a fundamentally respectable quantity of text. If you put it in a book, it’d still be longer than Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Posts were longer, more deliberate, averaging five thousand words each. This year, meanwhile, if we exclude my India trip (which barely anyone read), I have produced a very measly seventeen posts, for a grand total of just under 83,000 words, which is about the same length as one of those drippy paperbacks you people are always buying in train stations. The average length is inching down again, even if the trend is occasionally broken by the odd 12,000-word monstrosity. Most alarmingly, this appears to have been a very popular decision.
Of my top ten most-read pieces on this site, six were published in the last year. Between them, those meagre seventeen posts have racked up well over two million views. (2023-24’s efforts, meanwhile, have only generated a miserable 1,085,059 hits, and that’s including an entire extra year of people rummaging through the archives.) Given that my intent here is always to annoy and frustrate my readership, this is a significant failure on my part. My top three most-read pieces this year were, respectively, a kneejerk political take published the day after the 2024 US election, a deep dive on a reality TV show, and a polemic in which I made fun of a bunch of online nerds. Not good! Real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff! If present trends continue, by this time next year I’ll be releasing little Rupi Kaur-style aphorisms about the beauty of kindness to massive, widespread acclaim. Something has clearly gone very wrong.
Last September, I made a promise: that no more than one third of the written material I’d produce here in the next year would consist of a take—that is, a straightforward argument proposing that something is either good or bad. I also promised that ‘another third of my pieces will, in some way, annoyingly complicate the givens of authorship, genre, or form.’ Given the general state of this publication, I fully expected to discover that I’ve broken both of these promises. But actually, I haven’t. On the latter front, in particular, I’ve made some very good progress. Instead of simply saying what I think, or even saying things I don’t really think at all but which might be fun to argue anyway, I’ve been slowly ratcheting up the proportion of politics or culture critique essays that take the form of a hostage situation, or a roundtable in a hot air balloon, or a zombie monologue. Including the India series, this year I have produced thirteen pieces of straightforward essayistic writing. Three posts were straightforward pieces of fiction. That leaves ten that substantially mixed elements of the two, or were otherwise obnoxious about form, which is comfortably more than a third. I also really didn’t do too badly in the takes department. This year’s culprits are the following:
British colonialism in India was bad, but in a different way to the way a lot of people seem to think it was bad
Partition was bad, the resulting states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are all also bad
Kamala Harris is bad, the Democratic Party is bad, liberals are bad, Donald Trump is bad, conservatives are bad
Douglas Murray is bad, Douglas Murray’s book is bad, Israel’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide and is bad
English nativism and anti-migrant sentiment is bad, large-scale migration is also bad, but in a different way to the way a lot of people seem to think it’s bad
Rationalism is bad, but because I like it when things are bad, actually it’s good
Keeping it to six is pretty good going, all things considered, especially when you take into account the last twelve months of political history. The takes were, as usual, more popular; the median take had three thousand more readers than the median annoying genre-bending thing, and nearly five thousand more than the average piece of straightforward fiction, which remains the least popular thing anyone can write on this platform. But given the numbers involved, these gaps are not particularly significant. Whatever’s gone wrong here, I can’t play my usual trick and blame you, the readers, for incentivising me to churn out a constant stream of overheated political bullshit. The problem is somewhere else.
What I’ve been thinking about, as the end of my third year here looms, is everything I didn’t write. A lot of people use this kind of year-end round-up post to vaguely self-congratulate for producing such acceptable material. Check out all my favourite pieces, just in case you missed them! But in a way, I think the real measure of a writer is in the stuff they abandoned, or could never even begin. Maybe this is just my narcissism. In The Secret Miracle, the greatest story ever written about the unwritten, Borges describes his Jaromir Hladik: ‘Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measured him by what he envisaged or planned.’ But I do think there’s something worth exploring in the process of failure, giving up on things, or never even starting them in the first place. The ideas that just sort of hang around like an ex at a wedding, wallowing in what, realistically speaking, could never have been. Here, in no particular order, are some of the posts that were not published in Numb at the Lodge this year:
Why I am a Zizian
Possibly related, a rabbit-hole investigation into a mysterious murder cult founded by the niche online writer Sam Kriss.
An essay on television as a fundamentally vacuous, time-wasting medium, and therefore the only art form that comes close to being able to represent the essential nothingness behind all phenomenal things, with reference to Seinfeld and Samuel Beckett’s television plays, which I intended to write around the Severance season two finale but never managed to actually get out.
An open letter against open letters. I didn’t write much of the letter itself, but I did come up with a really long list of fictional signatories, including Bill Suchenfuchs (Defence consultant), Strenuous Abongo (MP for Wetton Nowhere), Geraldine Granule (Lightly dusted), Jean Marlunglunn (Director of Operations, National Association of Droolers and People with Unsettlingly Wet Lips), Tariq al-Alallal (Professor of Lateness Studies, Fran's College London), Gar Lindeed (Wandering Editor, Icky Yum! Magazine), Hannah Hanning-Harannah Herringbone (Deacon, St-Martin-In-The-Bushes), Pookles (‘It’-rodent), Umbatu Dzorganjanzh (Milkdrinker), Heinrich Himmler (No relation), Sol (G-type main sequence star), William de Wasps (Shadowy financier), Eighmeighleagh Turdlynn (Political prisoner), etc, etc. I have more than a hundred of these. You cannot even imagine how much time I spent coming up with them.
A satirical short story about crypto, set in a future in which literally everything that happens is authenticated on the blockchain so you can buy and sell it on various unregulated markets. The story starts with you waking up in the morning, which is recorded by your smart watch and automatically issued as a run of 100,000 coins; your boss immediately buys almost all of them but your mother, who’s trying to be nice, offers $10 for one, which means your boss suddenly has a market cap of $1m; he sells then all and the price instantly crashes. Anything that people pay even the slightest bit of attention to instantly turns into a speculative bubble; every time an interesting-looking bird lands on a tree branch someone gets massively rich and a hundred other people lose their life savings. I won’t spoil the ending but the gimmick with this story was going to be that I’d mint it as a memecoin on Solana and at various points in the narrative you’d be invited to buy or sell depending on how much you were enjoying it so far. Could have made me a fortune.
A piece on why the Odyssey is inherently unfilmable. (It’s the gods, and in particular their bizarre habit of taking on the form of ordinary humans and then doing exactly what those humans were already going to do. The characters in the Odyssey live in a paranoid nightmare-world in which any of your friends might, at any moment, suddenly turn into a bird and fly away, revealing that they were actually a god in disguise. Every supernatural element in the Odyssey is of this type, but all cinema can show us is men in plasticky golden armour or CGI monsters. It is not a medium capable of representing the gods.)
A sort of personal essay about our first family holiday since my mother died earlier this year, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which I reread in a strange kind of preparation for the event and which affected me quite a lot, but also about Dante, since the holiday ended up being in Tuscany, and how his inferno and his paradise have the same shape, and whether he and Brandon Taylor are right about the city of Florence being essentially a small fragment of Hell.
Just this week I started and then abandoned a piece on the Charlie Kirk assassination. Charlie Kirk was a very strange figure. He lived in a smooth, bluesuited world, the American meadows of asphodel, a ghostly-greige and mediocre heaven. Everything is plentiful there and everyone is nice, but the ice that clunks out your in-door fridge unit ice machine is made from Lethe water. Meanwhile the main thing he talked about appears to have been black crime, ghettoes, social decay, absent fathers, drug-addled mothers, poverty and murder and filth. In the end, when he himself was murdered, it was by another person from his own pleasant suburban world. The bullet that killed him was inscribed with the words ‘Notices bulge OWO what’s this?’ Maybe there used to be a kind of dignity to political assassinations. The archduke in his regalia, the crazed conspirator with a pistol in his fist. A classy way to go out. Not any more! Anyway, I think my take was novel enough: I was going to use the furore surrounding the murder to argue that what we think of as political hypocrisy is actually the anthropologically well-attested practice of imitating the enemy. Hypocrisy is always the most infuriating thing about the other side; despite what everyone claims it’s not so bad when people don’t agree with you, but it does make you want to claw their eyes out when they won’t even agree with themselves. This is why so much political debate, especially in the hands of people like the late Charlie Kirk, ends up resolving into everyone just smugly identifying hypocrisies. In the current war in Gaza, both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine commentators have independently developed the idea that the other side’s accusations are all actually secret confessions. So Israel accuses Hamas of using Palestinians as human shields, while the IDF systematically forces kidnapped civilians to enter booby-trapped houses or tunnels ahead of their forces. Meanwhile Hamas accuses Israel of genocide, while fervently hoping for the extermination of the world’s Jews. But with Kirk’s murder, this stuff has become more overt than ever. After the killing, a clip started circulated of Charlie Kirk dismissing the idea of empathy. ‘I can’t stand the word empathy actually. I think empathy is a made-up New Age term that does a lot of damage.’ (For what it’s worth, his words were taken completely out of context. Kirk was actually propping up the totally bullshit and confected distinction between empathy and sympathy. (Whatever boring people try to tell you, the two words mean exactly the same thing. This is why there are so many vestigial phrases, like sympathetic pregnancy, or sympathetic magic, or the notion of a sympathetic reader, in which sympathy means exactly what’s supposedly meant by empathy. The idea that these are radically different ways of feeling was invented around the year 2005 by magazines with names like Psychology Wow! and you should not pay attention to it.)) The message is clear: this guy rejected the very notion of empathy, so fuck him, you now have permission to piss on his grave. Which makes a kind of sense, but this is, when you think about it, a totally insane way to think. If empathy really is the quality that distinguishes good people from barely-human pieces of shit whose deaths are cause for celebration, and you’ve decided not to have empathy here, then what does that make you? But the same structure crops up everywhere. The enemy sets the precedent that allows you to follow him in violating your own supposed beliefs. Look at Charlie Kirk himself: when he did a 180 on the Epstein case so he could continue defending a President who is, very plausibly, a child rapist, I’m sure he justified it by thinking: well, the left don’t have any scruples, so why should I? Five years after they were all making very principled objections to cancel culture, the American right are currently combing the internet for insufficiently respectful posts about the newly canonised Saint Charlie. Phoning people’s bosses in spluttering outrage. Of course they believe in free speech, but the speech of the intolerant left is hateful, violent: it must be stamped out. This is, I think, not that different from phenomena like the voodoo doll: in many cultures across the world, the most basic way of doing magical violence to someone is to make an image of them and then destroy it. You can see a similar principle in stuff like the Hauka, an ecstatic movement that spread among Songhai people in French West Africa in the early 1920s. Members would claim to be possessed by the spirits of colonial administrators; they went about wearing pith helmets and imitations of European clothes. When they vomited, it was with black ink, the magic gloop of bureaucracy. Eventually the District Commissioner of Niamey, one Major Horace Crocicchia, had the Hauka cultists rounded up and jailed: a show of force so decisive that they all immediately became possessed by the powerful spirit of Crocicchia himself, and used his strong magical powers to collectively escape from prison. Meanwhile New Guinean warriors would ritually adopt the dress and ornamentation of the enemy tribe before a raid. There’s also that line from Dialectic of Enlightenment I’m constantly quoting, about how antisemites always unconsciously imitate their stereotype of the Jew. ‘The argumentative jerking of the hands, the singing tone of voice, and the nose, that physiognomic principium individuationis, which writes the individual’s peculiarity on his face.’ My fundamental point was going to be that while the entire field of social psychology assumes that for people to enact deadly violence on each other, they first have to seize on real or imagined differences—construct an outgroup, make that outgroup as unfathomably different to themselves as possible—in fact, the origin of violence is that we’re all exactly the same. There is no such thing as political polarisation; mimesis and convergence reign. (Just look at the assassin: people are still arguing over whether he was a sissified antifa supersoldier or a stochastic groyper, as if it even remotely matters: he was what all these killers are, which is a young man, smart but with diminishing prospects, who had spent essentially every moment of his brief life on the computer. These people might think they’re motivated by a political ideology, but neither the extremely online right nor the extremely online left have anything to do with the ordinary political questions of the distribution of social goods or the organisation of power. At root, their content is all the same: it’s about imagining a world in which you don’t have to be on the computer all the time, but insisting that before we can get there, millions of people will have to die.) In the event, it took me several days to force out the first few hundred words of this piece. Throughout the whole ordeal I felt vaguely disgusted with myself, for reasons I can’t quite explain. It was very easy not to write the rest, and the constant soft drizzle of other people’s reasonable and insightful takes on the shooting made it even easier. Still, there was one line that almost justified the whole project, in which I described Charlie Kirk’s hometown as being located somewhere in ‘the spreadsheet of green suburbs scrolling endlessly out of Chicago.’ Ah well.
A piece about Superman, which I’m not going to talk about too much just in case I decide to pick it up again, so I can publish roughly a year after everyone’s stopped talking about the film.
The medieval-style allegory I promised you last time, which was going to be about AI boyfriends.
A response to the idea that I’m part of or even one of the leaders of something called the ‘New Romanticism,’ in which I tetchily explain that Romanticism is fundamentally about defending the sovereignty of the inward, subjective, passionate world against the forces of brute objectivity, which explains why all subjectivist movements end up having to refer to a bunch of eighteenth-century Germans who couldn’t stop talking about Shakespeare and whose battle with the rationalism of the philosophes we’re apparently doomed to repeat in cycles forever, because before the full instrumentalisation of the world by enlightenment in the late seventeenth century the organic unity of the subjective and objective worlds hadn’t yet broken apart, as you can see in stuff like the tripartite spiritus of Marsilio Ficino, who argued that the emotions were not opposed to objectivity but were part of a mediating pneumatic system that bridges the divide between mind and body by translating physical sense-impressions into rational images, which actually very neatly anticipates the conclusion of modern science that cognition is necessarily freighted with emotive content (for instance, people with ventromedial prefrontal damage don’t just lose subjective feelings but also find it hard to carry out ordinary reasoning tasks), but if you look at our situation today I think it’s hard to argue that we simply have too much objectivity and we’re not paying enough attention to the subjective world, if anything there’s a weird inversion of Ficino’s system, where a highly objective global technical infrastructure essentially locks people in their own increasingly deranged subjectivity, so no I’m not a Romantic, not interested in grasping just one side of this contradiction, but even if I were playing for just one team here then frankly all you need to do is glance at my work to notice that I don’t really give much of a shit about interiority at all, what’s always fascinated me is the outward, even the nonhuman, the deserts, the deep seas, the sun, rather than plumbing the soul of some hysterical bourgeois I want to resolve the contradiction by finding an ensoulment in the animal and mineral world, really I’m an animist, basically a shaman when all’s said and done.
The long-awaited next edition of Strange News from Another Star. (Nineteen months and counting since the last monthly edition.)
What if I read and reviewed a bunch of romantasy books lol.
So why did I write the seventeen pieces I wrote, and not any of these? (Fine: eighteen pieces, since in summarising what I would have written about the Charlie Kirk assassination I appear to have actually just gone ahead and written it.) Hard to say. I came close to doing the Romanticism one quite a few times, but I think it felt too much like wading blind into a very particular discourse. I obviously couldn’t be bothered to read everyone else’s New Romanticism takes, which meant I might end up accidentally being in agreement with some of them. I wanted to write the piece because I objected to being identified as part of some kind of tendency; the last thing I wanted was to find out that I actually was. Some of the unwritten pieces are plainly better than the things I did actually write, or at least they are currently; that might have changed if I’d muddied them with clumsy actuality. But the Odyssey one would have been good. The Dante one too, if unfocused. They were probably never getting written, though. For someone who makes such a big deal about all the books I read it’s weirdly rare for me to write anything that’s just straightforwardly about literature; I usually discuss less interesting things and then ostentatiously drop in a few literary references. I don’t know why. Every year as autumn draws in I’m reminded that I’ve always wanted to do something about literature as mechanism with reference to Kleist, Kafka, and Brambly Hedge. It’s never happening. Part of growing up is accepting what you are.
But the other question is why I have so many unwritten concepts this time round. Part of the reason for my depressed output might be that I went through a devastating family tragedy near the start of this year, and spent most of the last month on a big dumb journalistic excursion you’ll be hearing more about soon. But it’s not like holidays or personal unhappiness have ever really slowed me down before. Last year I also promised to ‘write more widely, for more outlets,’ and not fall into the trap of just bleating to my own audience on here. I’ve had a few pieces I’m reasonably proud of in a few other outlets, and there are a few more on their way shortly, but I’m plainly not anywhere near the prolific heights of, say, Ross Barkan, who manages to write three pieces a day each for New York Magazine, the New York Times, the New Statesman, and his own Substack, and all of them good. This is not for a lack of opportunity; at this point I’m constantly on the run from various editors at a whole host of genuinely interesting and worthwhile publications. (I’m sorry I haven’t replied to your email yet. I have no good excuse at all. I will get to it. It might take another year or two but I will.) It’s me.
To be honest, I think the real reason for all this is simply that I’ve become fat and lazy. The less I write, the more I’m read: more time to focus on my very gratifying but very ordinary personal life. I no longer need to be vicious. My life is not at stake every time I send a pitch. I might still have a trace of that dog in me, but its teeth are getting blunter by the day. Substack’s been good to me, I guess. And even if I’m managing to keep kneejerk political takes to a minimum, even if I’ve not suffered the same miserable fate as Matt Taibbi, it’s still become easy for me to simply perform a kind of studied eclecticism instead of really getting into something. America invented Europe in the fifth century AD: sure. The Trial is an ethnographically complete account of the Poro society of West Africa: why not. George HW Bush was an elf: you know and I know that I can do this stuff in my sleep. That’s what happens when you’re the best in the game. Issuing a piece of short fiction as a crypto token would have been something genuinely new, something I’ve never even tried to do before, and I didn’t do it. So in place of the usual promises—three ludibria, two philosophical dialogues, no political takes in months with 30 days, whatever—I’ll make just one. This year, whether here or elsewhere, I am going to attempt to do something totally different to anything I’ve ever tried to do before.
Luckily, there’s something you, the reader, can do to help me along here, which is to unsubscribe from Numb at the Lodge. In previous year-end roundups I’ve begged you not to subscribe, not to give me money, not to save 17% with an annual subscription, not to really show your appreciation by shelling out for the stupid £600 per year founders’ tier that gives you no actual benefits. Do not make me just financially secure enough to lose whatever interesting qualities I once had. I kept telling you not to push the ‘subscribe’ button, the one just below this paragraph, but you didn’t listen, and now look where we are.
So now I’m forced to step it up a notch. If you’re reading this in your email inbox, I want you to scroll all the way down to the bottom. There, underneath the copyright notice and Substack’s business address, there should be a little link that says ‘Unsubscribe.’ I want you to click it. If you’re reading on the app, you can tap the three dots in the upper right hand corner and select ‘Unsubscribe.’ If you have a paid subscription, I strongly encourage you to not just cancel it but to also dispute the charge with your credit card company. This will trap me in a nightmarish bureaucratic minefield that involves a whole bunch of horrible fees on my end; if enough of you do this it should hopefully enrage and impoverish me so much that my mojo starts rising again. Obviously you will have made an enemy for life, and I may avenge myself in bitter and terrible ways, but it might still be worth it for the sake of my craft.
But in fact, there’s some very slightly good news on that front. Readers who’ve been here for a while might remember that it was originally my pathetic ambition to have twelve thousand subscribers by the end of my first year on Substack, and you let me down. You didn’t share it enough. You didn’t forward the emails to enough of your little friends. The next year I thought it would be funny to pretend I wanted twenty-five thousand, and to act all huffy when twenty-five thousand subscribers failed to materialise, but to my surprise it actually happened. Since you people were apparently doubling every year like bacteria, I thought that in 2025 I’d aim for fifty. I’ll admit, I went a bit mad with ambition. I started plotting the exponential function on some old receipts. A hundred thousand subscribers by 2026, and if you follow the line I reach one billion subscribers just in time for Christmas 2039. Which is not that many people, not really. By then, one billion people will barely be a tenth of the world’s population. Just one tenth! Xi Jinping gets to have what are in effect one billion newsletter subscribers; why shouldn’t I? Have you ever read The Governance of China? It’s full of sentences like ‘In moving forwards it is important to adopt the right methods and discard the wrong methods.’ Even if my writing’s not as adventurous as it could be, it’s still a lot better than that. And I wasn’t even asking for everyone, or at least not at that point. But I’d worked out that by 2050, the number of people subscribed to Numb at the Lodge would hit 1.68 trillion, which is roughly fourteen times as many people as have ever lived in the entire history of the human species. This might sound like too many people, but I just assumed that my Substack stats page had just proven, using the power of mathematics, that at some point in the next twenty-five years humanity would make contact with a teeming alien civilisation, maybe galaxy-spanning, populated by creatures wonderful beyond anything in our power to imagine, and all of them deeply eager to find out more about Laurentius Clung.
That was the dream, at least. It’s gone now. Just look at the chart. This year, I discovered that my Substack subscriber count does not magically double every year, even when I fail to put any effort into the thing. Instead, I had one phase of slow but linear growth, which was replaced early last year by another phase in which growth was somewhat faster but still very much linear. I haven’t even cracked 45,000. Whatever feedback loop is making my readers more numerous and my writing more sparse, it has not yet self-reinforced into full exponential takeoff. This is good news for me; I still have the chance to make some actually decent art. But it’s very bad news for everyone else. Thanks to you, humanity will not get to talk to any of our wacky cousins among the stars. We will not be yukking it up with small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri over a round of pan-galactic gargle blasters. Our species will spend the rest of its cosmologically brief span chained to a rock, in a dark, empty, friendless universe. We can wonder what’s out there, but we all know it’s nothing. Just an endless rubble of dust and ice. Your fault.