Cinemorphosis

Category: Literary Dispatches

  • The Ballad of Roland Beavers

    The Ballad of Roland Beavers

    You can’t understand what it meant to be a teenage boy in 1970s California without inhaling the thick, narcotic perfume of banana-coconut tanning oil. It wasn’t a scent so much as a doctrine. You lay on a beach towel the size of a small sailboat and basted yourself in that viscous syrup as if you were preparing your own body for display. No one spoke of melanoma. The goal was simple: darken, gleam, radiate. Bronze was not just a color—it was a declaration of sexual arrival. For a teenage bodybuilder, it was mandatory. Muscles alone were not enough; they needed lacquer, shine, theatrical finish. We weren’t just building bodies—we were curating mythologies.

    The culture supplied its own scripture. Xaviera Hollander hovered over the decade like a secular saint of libido, her memoir The Happy Hooker tucked into suburban living rooms beside purple bongs that leaned like exhausted sentinels. Her voice—thick Dutch vowels, half invitation, half sermon—drifted through late-night radio, as intoxicating as the oil we poured over ourselves like maple syrup on pancakes. If Hollander provided the gospel, Eric Weber supplied the tactics. His book, How to Pick Up Girls!, read like a field manual for social siege warfare: pursue, persist, override refusal, wear resistance down to compliance. It was less romance than strategy, less courtship than conquest. And like all bad ideas, it traveled quickly among teenage boys who didn’t yet know the difference between confidence and predation.

    At Lake Don Castro in the summer of 1977, we found the living embodiment of this philosophy: Roland Beavers, a thirty-year-old demigod in blue Speedos. He stood on the grassy knoll above the sand like a monument to self-belief—wavy hair, sculpted mustache, gold chain glinting against a chest that looked permanently backlit. A Playboy cooler at his feet, a boombox humming, a Frisbee orbiting his charisma—Roland was less a man than a recurring performance. We studied him like apprentices. His lines never changed. 

    Every Saturday I heard the following: Roland paid his uncle five hundred dollars for a custom paint job on his Camaro. His father owned expensive real estate in the Bay Area. He had helped manage his father’s properties since he was in high school. He was waiting to hear from a Hollywood studio for a small role as a fighter in a martial arts movie. Even though he never attended college, he had his own house in a desirable part of town called Parsons Estates. Roland would throw in the words “Parsons Estates” as if they were a magical mantra that would make stars sparkle over his coiffed hair.

    Every Saturday Roland met a new blonde, somehow more beautiful than the previous one. He and at least one woman would play Frisbee on the grassy knoll above the man-made beach’s imported sand.

    On one such afternoon, my bodybuilder buddies and I saw Roland in his usual spot, the grassy knoll, where he was tossing his Frisbee to two blonde girls in white bikinis. I had my towel spread out close by so I could study Roland’s methods. I was half-listening to him talk about how amazing he was and half-reading my parents’ dog-eared copy of The Happy Hooker.

    That’s when I heard Roland give out an alarming howl.

    “Oh my God,” one of the bikini-clad girls said. “You stepped on a bee.”

    I saw the bee spinning in the grass for its final moments before it would die without its stinger.

    The bee sting’s effects were immediate. Roland began to sweat and limp while trying to walk through the pain. The two blonde girls looked at the wincing pick-up artist with concern. One of them asked if he was all right.

    “No big deal,” he said. “Just a little bee sting.”

    “Are you sure you’re okay?” one of the girls asked as the man’s body was covered with a shiny sheen of sweat.

    “I’m fine. Really, I am.”

    “I think you should sit down,” one of the girls said.

    “No, we can still play. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

    By now, Roland’s foot had swollen into a giant ham. He looked down at the inflamed flesh, and his tumescent foot was proof of the severity of his situation. His eyes bulged with fear, and then he collapsed, and lying prone on his back he began to hyperventilate.

    An ambulance came soon after. Roland was in the throes of anaphylactic shock. The paramedics did their best, but Roland died on the spot.

    I was never the same after that incident. I obsessed over Roland’s demise, I suffered nightmares about it, and I stopped going to the beach with my buddies. 

    About six months after the incident, a peculiar daydream began visiting me with unnerving regularity. In it, I did not watch Roland die from a distance; I inhabited his final moments, seeing the world through his eyes. As his body failed, his mind seemed to step into an alternate life—a gentler, unperformed existence. He was no longer the peacock on the grassy knoll but a husband, walking along the shoreline with his wife, four children orbiting them in laughter, and two rescue dogs bounding through the surf. The air carried a soft, almost cinematic music. The sky was a pale, forgiving blue. Sunlight fell not harshly, but tenderly, as if it had chosen to console rather than expose.

    In that imagined reprieve, Roland turned toward something higher—toward God—and spoke with a clarity he had never shown in life. He promised to abandon the theater of conquest, to relinquish the hollow rituals of charm and pursuit, to grow into the man he had postponed becoming. It was as if the world had paused to offer him a final rehearsal for redemption. The horizon opened. A stillness settled over everything. And within that stillness, he seemed to experience, perhaps for the first time, a quiet and unadorned peace—a beauty that required no performance and asked nothing in return.

     And just as the possibility of redemption flickered into being—it was extinguished. His body failed. The bee won. His life ended mid-sentence.

    I carried that ending with me to the piano, where I tried to make sense of Roland’s death the only way I knew how. For two years I worked on “The Ballad of Roland Beavers,” a piece that refused to resolve cleanly because the life it memorialized never did. Nearly fifty years later, I still play it. The notes haven’t dulled. Neither has the lesson. Some performances end not with a bow, but with a collapse—too little, too late, and no encore.

  • Kings, Echo Chambers, and the Cost of Believing in Your Own Myth (college essay prompt)

    Kings, Echo Chambers, and the Cost of Believing in Your Own Myth (college essay prompt)

    In Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King and Ari Aster’s Eddington, characters pursue power with a confidence that borders on delusion. What begins as bold ambition gradually mutates into hubris, and ultimately into a distorted relationship with power itself. In Kipling’s story, this transformation is dramatic and mythic, culminating in a literal fall from godhood. In Eddington, the transformation is more diffuse and contemporary, shaped by media ecosystems, ideological certainty, and the intoxicating feedback loops of modern influence.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay in which you compare how both works portray the dangers of unrestrained ambition and the intoxication of power. In your analysis, consider how each work defines “power,” how characters justify their rise, and how their environments either reinforce or challenge their sense of authority. You should also examine how hubris manifests differently in each work—whether as overt self-deification or as a quieter, more insidious certainty—and how these differences shape each narrative’s resolution.

    In developing your argument, you may consider the following questions: Does power corrupt in the same way across different historical and cultural contexts, or does it simply adapt to new environments? Is the downfall in each work caused by external forces, internal flaws, or a combination of both? To what extent are the characters victims of their circumstances versus architects of their own collapse? Support your claims with specific evidence from both texts, and be sure to include a counterargument that challenges your interpretation before offering a rebuttal.

  • The Tradwife, Tooter Turtle, and the Collapse of Reality

    The Tradwife, Tooter Turtle, and the Collapse of Reality

    When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I fell under the spell of Arnold Schwarzenegger, as did millions of young men who believed that iron could redeem them. Arnold didn’t just build muscle; he built permission. You didn’t have to slink into the gym like a social outcast. You could walk in like a man with a project—your body—and treat the work as something worthy, even noble.

    But here’s the part we forget when we romanticize that era: the fantasy always had a counterweight. You could admire the glossy magazine spreads, sure, but the minute you stepped into the gym, reality took over. The barbell didn’t care about your aspirations. It demanded blood, sweat, repetition, and a tolerance for humiliation. The dream had friction. It had consequences. It had gravity.

    Today, the dream has been fitted with wheels.

    We spend hours online absorbing lifestyles that arrive pre-edited, pre-filtered, and pre-approved by algorithms that understand our weaknesses better than we do. The counterweight—reality—hasn’t disappeared, but it’s been shoved to the margins, like an inconvenient footnote to a seductive headline. What replaces it is a fever dream: a curated existence that feels authoritative simply because it’s repeated often enough.

    Call this Frictionless Fantasy Drift—the condition in which ambition detaches from effort and begins to float, unmoored, in a frictionless digital sky. The struggle is edited out. The consequences are invisible. What remains is a mirage that invites you to step in and live there.

    I was reminded of this while reading Hanna Rosin’s essay “The Tragedy of the Tradwife.” Rosin contrasts the influencers of today with her own pre-internet lodestar, Martha Stewart—a figure she aptly describes as “a tycoon masquerading as a domestic goddess.” Stewart was many things—ruthless, exacting, extraordinarily competent—but she was real. Her brand, however polished, was anchored in actual skill and labor.

    Today, that grounded figure has been replaced by something far more synthetic: the algorithmic mountebank, the tradwife influencer who sells a pastoral fantasy with the confidence of a late-night infomercial host. She bakes bread from scratch, produces hearty meals with theatrical serenity, and presides over a small army of children as if domestic chaos were a lifestyle accessory. Her kitchen gleams. Her apron is spotless. Her smile suggests a fulfillment so complete it borders on evangelism.

    And then there’s the final flourish: submission. She assures her audience that handing over the steering wheel to her husband has unlocked a level of contentment previously unknown to modern women. Obedience, rebranded as liberation.

    In an era defined by Frictionless Fantasy Drift—where loneliness and dislocation leave people hungry for meaning—this performance finds an audience. Millions of them. The algorithm delivers it, refines it, amplifies it, until it begins to feel less like content and more like truth.

    Enter Caro Claire Burke, who looked at this spectacle and did what any rational observer might do: she pushed back. First on TikTok, then in her novel Yesteryear, which imagines a tradwife influencer waking up in 1855. The premise is simple. The result is devastating.

    Because when the fantasy is forced to pay rent—when it has to operate under the conditions it claims to celebrate—it collapses. The cozy illusion of domestic bliss is replaced by a brutal, unforgiving reality. Labor is constant. Comfort is scarce. And the husband, far from being a benevolent co-pilot, often resembles something closer to an owner. The cosplay dissolves, and what remains is history—raw, unvarnished, and deeply unpleasant.

    Reading about Burke’s setup, I couldn’t help but think of an old cartoon from my childhood: Tooter Turtle. Tooter is a lonely, perpetually dissatisfied turtle who dreams of becoming anything but himself—lumberjack, astronaut, baseball star, you name it. His friend, Mr. Wizard the Lizard, obliges by transporting him into these fantasies.

    And every time, without fail, the dream turns on him.

    The lumberjack nearly gets crushed. The astronaut faces disaster. The hero becomes the victim. Tooter, overwhelmed and panicked, begs to be rescued and returned to his ordinary life. The moral lands with blunt clarity: the fantasy is seductive, but it is also ignorant. It doesn’t account for reality because it doesn’t know it.

    Tooter is a child—permanently so—because he confuses the image of a life with the experience of living it.

    That’s the unsettling part. The gap between Tooter and a large segment of today’s online population is not as wide as we’d like to believe. We sit in front of our screens, absorbing curated lives, and imagine ourselves stepping into them as if they were costumes waiting to be worn. With enough imitation, enough belief, we assume the transformation will stick.

    It won’t.

    That’s why Burke’s novel has struck a nerve. It doesn’t just critique the fantasy; it subjects it to reality. It forces the dream to answer for itself. And when it does, the result is not liberation, but a sharp, corrective blow—a reminder that a life without friction may be easy to admire, but it is impossible to live.

    As for me, I’m looking forward to reading it.

  • The Visitor from the Abyss

    The Visitor from the Abyss

    On a bright spring afternoon in Southern California in 1998, my writing class was dissecting evil with the clinical confidence of people who believed it could be contained in literature. We were discussing The Painted Bird, a novel so saturated with human cruelty that it feels less like fiction and more like a dare. The room hummed with theories—evil as social construct, evil as pathology—until my students quietly dismantled the abstraction. They believed in evil not as metaphor, but as presence. Ghosts. Demons. Things seen and not forgotten.

    One single mother spoke of something that crawled beneath her bed at night. She said it plainly, without theatrics, which made it worse. Another student, a nurse in her forties who worked long shifts at UCLA, waited until after class. “I have a story,” she said, as if announcing a diagnosis that required privacy.

    She didn’t look like someone given to fantasy. She was compact, practical, her thick glasses enlarging eyes worn down by long hours and human frailty. Her stories usually involved difficult patients or her childhood in rural Louisiana—earthbound things. But as she began, her voice shifted, acquiring a distant cadence, as if she were tuning into a frequency not meant for daylight.

    She was six or seven at the time, roaming the backwoods with her cousin Carmen. No supervision, no schedule, no adult intervention. Their days were filled with the idle cruelty of children left alone too long—tormenting small animals, inventing games that escalated from mischief into something darker. There were no witnesses, no consequences, and so no brakes.

    Until one afternoon.

    They were inside the farmhouse, a sagging structure with a porch that complained with every step. The screen door creaked open. A man walked in and sat down in the living room as if he owned the place.

    But he wasn’t a man.

    She struggled to describe him without sounding ridiculous. He wasn’t clothed, but that detail felt irrelevant. His body was covered in coarse, matted fur. His skin—if it could be called that—had the pallor and texture of a rodent. Behind him trailed a long, muscular tail that slid along the floor and flicked against the doorframe like a living whip. He looked like something assembled from nightmare logic: a giant rat that had decided to stand upright and enter a house.

    The girls didn’t run. They couldn’t. Fear locked them in place, as if the room itself had thickened.

    He began to speak.

    For hours—she was certain it lasted hours—he sat in that chair and talked. His voice was low and abrasive, as if it scraped its way into the room. He told stories about the things he had done, the damage he had caused, the harm he had perfected. Time lost its structure. The afternoon stretched into something shapeless and suffocating.

    Then he turned his attention to them.

    “I’ve seen how bad you girls are,” he said. “I’ve seen what you’ve been doing.”

    And then he began to list their offenses. Not generalities—details. Every small cruelty, every secret act they had committed when no one was around. Things no adult had witnessed. Things no one could have reported.

    “I’m going to recruit you,” he said. “I’m going to make you mine.”

    The threat didn’t rise in volume. It settled into the room, thick and toxic, like something you could breathe in and never fully expel. His eyes stayed on them the entire time, unblinking, patient, certain. He described what would happen if they continued, not in vague moral warnings, but in precise, almost administrative terms—consequences rendered as inevitabilities.

    The girls sat frozen, their bodies no longer their own.

    And then, as casually as he had entered, he stood up and left. The tail followed him out like an afterthought, sliding across the threshold and disappearing into the heat.

    Silence rushed back into the house.

    Carmen finally whispered, “Did you see that?”

    My student nodded. Speech had abandoned her.

    From that day forward, their lives snapped into alignment. No more cruelty. No more experimentation with harm. They went to church. They prayed. They obeyed. Not out of virtue, but out of fear sharpened into obedience. Whatever had visited them had not suggested a path—it had enforced one.

    I would have preferred to dismiss the story as delusion, but that option didn’t fit the teller. This was a woman trained to assess reality, to separate symptom from fabrication. She spoke without embellishment, without the slightest interest in persuading me. She wasn’t selling a story; she was reporting an event that had rearranged her life.

    It unsettled me more than I expected.

    At the time, I was living alone in a condo in Redondo Beach, the kind of place that feels harmless until night gives it edges. One evening, I had a dream about the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. Only this version had shed all pretense of cowardice. He chased me, snarling, his face twisted into something feral and wrong.

    I woke up, but the dream didn’t fully release me.

    At the foot of my bed, I felt it—presence. Not a thought, not a leftover image, but something that occupied space. The lion-man sat there, immense, silent, undeniable. Fear pinned me in place. Breathing became an effort, as if the air itself had thickened in protest.

    After several long seconds, I forced movement into my body. I stood, walked up the stairs on unsteady legs, poured a glass of water like someone performing a ritual they barely believed in. When I returned, I flooded the room with light, turned on the television, filled the silence with noise until the presence thinned and finally dissolved.

    Like pain receding from a crushed hand—slow, stubborn, but eventually gone.

    What stayed was the recognition.

    Evil is not just an idea we debate in classrooms or confine to novels. It has a way of presenting itself—not always dramatically, not always visibly, but with enough force to alter how you move through the world. Once you’ve felt it, even briefly, it leaves a residue. A knowledge that doesn’t argue its case. It simply waits, somewhere just beyond the edge of explanation.

  • A College Degree in Applause

    A College Degree in Applause

    When Oprah Winfrey signed off for the last time, she offered a distilled insight after decades of televised confessionals and couch-bound catharsis: beneath our surface differences, we all want the same thing—to be heard and, more importantly, to be affirmed. Not merely listened to, but validated, as if our words must pass through some invisible tribunal and emerge stamped: This life matters. This mind is not wasted inventory.

    She was right, though even that admission feels like an understatement. The appetite for validation is not a polite preference; it’s a metabolic demand. We don’t just want to speak—we want to land. We want our sentences to strike the listener with enough force that they nod, recalibrate, maybe even quote us later as if we were a minor authority in the ongoing project of making sense. We want to believe that our thoughts improve the room, that our presence upgrades the conversation from background noise to something resembling signal.

    Of course, the engine driving this hunger isn’t entirely noble. Scratch the surface and you’ll find insecurity jittering beneath the skin, narcissism preening in the mirror, tribal instincts scanning for applause from the right audience. We want to be right, but more than that, we want to be seen being right. Yet it would be too easy—and too smug—to reduce this to vanity alone. There’s another current running underneath. Human beings, for all their posturing, are wired for cooperation. We build moral systems, knowledge systems, entire civilizations on the premise that sharing ideas might actually improve the collective condition. So the same impulse that craves applause also aspires—sometimes sincerely—to contribute something of value. We may be peddling clichés, hallucinations, or the occasional insight, but the urge to be heard persists like a drumbeat.

    After nearly forty years of teaching writing, I’ve had a front-row seat to this performance. I’ve enjoyed the privilege—let’s call it what it is—of having a voice that people were required to listen to. Now, as that authority begins to fade at the edges, I’m left examining the machinery that made it feel necessary in the first place. My students will tell you they’re here for practical reasons: a degree, a job, a paycheck that doesn’t insult them. Fair enough. But beneath that utilitarian script, I suspect another motive is quietly at work. They want to matter intellectually. They want their ideas to carry weight, to be received not as filler but as substance.

    I can see it because I can reverse-engineer myself at eighteen. Put me back in that position—blank slate, open catalog—and I’d choose political science without hesitation. Not because it guarantees employment—it doesn’t—but because it offers a stage. A chance to sound sharp, to read densely, to write with the kind of authority that might make a professor pause and think, there’s something here. The fantasy isn’t wealth; it’s recognition. Money pays the bills, but it doesn’t applaud. It doesn’t lean forward when you speak.

    And without that recognition—without the sense that your mind registers on someone else’s radar—life begins to feel like static. Content generated, scattered, and forgotten. A digital smear. Noise mistaken for presence.

    Which is why so many of us operate under a quiet affliction I’d call Intellectual Visibility Panic: the nagging fear that no matter how carefully we assemble our thoughts, they will evaporate on contact—unheard, unvalued, and unremembered. It’s not dramatic enough to ruin your day, but it’s persistent enough to shape your choices. It nudges you toward certain majors, certain careers, certain performances of self. It whispers that time is running out, that if you don’t establish your voice soon, it will dissolve into the background hum.

    And so we speak. We write. We posture. We refine. Not just to communicate—but to leave a trace strong enough that someone, somewhere, might stop and say: that was worth hearing.

  • From Coffeehouse to Clickbait

    From Coffeehouse to Clickbait

    Invoking the word democracy in an essay feels like trying to sell a ghost–intangible, shapeless, and increasingly irrelevant to an audience fixated on the price of eggs and the cost of gasoline. We live in a state of Democratic Abstraction Fatigue, where civic ideals have been repeated so often and defined so poorly that they’ve lost all emotional voltage. Democracy has become a word people nod at politely while checking their grocery receipts.

    Salience is the problem. Democracy competes poorly in a culture that values immediacy over abstraction, sensation over structure. A fluctuating gas price commands attention because it hurts now. Democracy, by contrast, whispers about norms, institutions, and procedures–important, yes, but bloodless in the moment. When everything urgent is concrete and everything essential is abstract, the essential loses.

    We can attempt a definition to anchor the word: a democracy is a system of fair elections, peaceful transfers of power, and a citizenry capable of resisting manipulation by charlatans, influencers, and political opportunists whose incompetence would, in a sane society, disqualify them on sight. But even this definition now feels aspirational, almost quaint.

    Because the truth is harder: those guardrails are eroding. Adam Kirsch, in “The Era of Rational Discourse Is Over,” reminds us that American wars have often been sold under false pretenses–the Spaniards sank the USS Maine, Iraq hoarded weapons of mass destruction. But what distinguishes the present is not deception; it is indifference. The machinery no longer bothers to persuade. There is no narrative to construct, no public to convince, no Congress to consult. The decision is the justification. We have entered a phase of Executive Drift, where power operates with minimal friction and even less explanation.

    How did we arrive here? Kirsch turns to Jürgen Habermas, who witnessed the collapse of Nazism and the fragile rebirth of democratic life in Germany. For Habermas, democracy depended on what he called “communicative action”–a culture of dialogue where ideas are tested, challenged, refined, and, occasionally, improved. Democracy was not just a system of voting; it was a system of thinking.

    That system now shows signs of collapse. We inhabit an era of Communicative Decay, where discourse has splintered into tribal fragments, each sealed off from contradiction, each sustained by outrage. Argument has been replaced by performance. Listening has been replaced by waiting for your turn to strike.

    In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas imagined democracy as an expanded coffeehouse—a literate, engaged public exchanging ideas with rigor and civility. It was a world in which communication flowed in two directions: we spoke, and we listened. Today, we scroll. We absorb. We react. But we do not engage.

    The modern condition might be better described as a dopamine democracy, where public opinion is shaped not by deliberation but by stimulation. Algorithms reward the loudest, the angriest, the most unhinged voices. Complexity is punished. Nuance is buried. What rises instead is spectacle–content engineered to trigger, not to inform.

    The consequences are predictable. Citizens become passive, then inert. Critical thinking atrophies. Conspiracy theories flourish in the vacuum. Truth becomes negotiable, then irrelevant. We do not fall from democracy in a single dramatic collapse; we degrade into a version of ourselves that no longer demands it.

    Mass media and weaponized misinformation accelerate the decline. Lies are no longer liabilities; they are tools. Identity replaces evidence. Tribe replaces truth. You are not expected to think–you are expected to align.

    And so we arrive at the most unsettling feature of our moment: the people who ascend in this environment are not the most disciplined, the most thoughtful, or the most competent, but the most performative, the most shameless, the most willing to exploit the system’s weaknesses. Infantilism becomes a strategy. Narcissism becomes an asset.

    A culture that rewards such traits should provoke alarm. It should trigger a course correction. But instead, we drift–distracted, entertained, anesthetized.

    Democracy has not been overthrown.

    It has been neglected.

    And like anything neglected long enough, it begins to disappear–quietly, gradually, while most of us are still asleep.

  • Energy Vampires and the Cost of Desire (college essay prompt)

    Energy Vampires and the Cost of Desire (college essay prompt)

    Write a 1,200-word essay that advances a clear, arguable thesis about time—how it is lost, misused, and quietly drained—by analyzing Winter Dreams and Torch Song. Focus on relationships that operate like “energy vampires”: people who absorb attention, distort priorities, and leave the other person with less time, less clarity, and less life than before.

    In your introductory paragraph, define “energy vampire”–a person who consumes another’s attention, time, and emotional resources while giving little in return. Then illustrate your definition with a paragraph-long personal experience in which you encountered someone who drained your time or energy. 

    The present your thesis that examines the dynamics between Dexter Green and Judy Jones, and between Jack Lorey and Joan Harris. Where do these pairings overlap, and where do they diverge? In what ways do these relationships function as “time vampires,” diverting the protagonists from lives they might otherwise have lived?

    Finally, take a position on responsibility. To what extent are Dexter and Jack victims of these draining relationships, and to what extent do they participate in their own depletion? Support your claims with close textual analysis and specific evidence.

  • Professor of Nothing in Particular

    Professor of Nothing in Particular

    In Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, François is a man who has already filed his best years under “returned goods.” A writing professor in his early forties, he surveys his life with the cool detachment of a critic reviewing a book he didn’t enjoy but can’t quite put down. He blames, with some justice and more convenience, the moral economy of Western social democracies—systems that canonize money and status while leaving meaning to fend for itself. In this world, desire has been simplified to a shopping list. The only sanctioned faith is consumption; the only liturgy is acquisition. You study, you specialize, you exit the university with a résumé and a pulse, and then you prove your seriousness by acquiring things—objects, experiences, signals—until the performance of satisfaction becomes indistinguishable from satisfaction itself. François finds the spectacle tedious, but tedium does not grant immunity. He is as lonely, as unmoored, as anyone else—another citizen of an Ennui Infrastructure that delivers comfort with the enthusiasm of a sedative.

    His chosen saint is Joris-Karl Huysmans, the Catholic convert who traded decadence for doctrine and found, in surrender, a structure strong enough to hold a life. François studies him the way a starving man studies a menu. He recognizes the appeal—order, ritual, a metaphysical address where one might finally receive mail—but recognition is not conversion. He remains stalled in Agnostic Paralysis, admiring belief as a piece of architecture he cannot inhabit. Literature becomes his compromise: books as companions, authors as lanterns. Yet even a luminous guide cannot substitute for a destination. Huysmans can light the road; he cannot make François walk it.

    The job does not save him. Teaching, for François, is a cleanly run sham—a system that reproduces diluted versions of itself with industrial patience. A handful of students catch fire; the rest learn to approximate. He participates in Replicant Pedagogy with professional competence and private contempt, earning a salary in exchange for maintaining a machine that produces echoes and calls them voices. He is good at it. He is paid for it. He is not sustained by it.

    His relationships are equally provisional—brief alliances with pleasure that end as soon as the lights come on. Women are not partners so much as intervals, pauses between bouts of the same familiar boredom. Bitterness seeps in, not as a dramatic outburst but as a steady, low-grade leak. The pattern is reliable: a spike of sensation, a trough of meaning. François lives on Dopamine Subsistence Living, a diet of small thrills that keep the organism moving while starving the person.

    He envies the faithful with a precision that hurts. They possess what he lacks: structure that does not dissolve, families that do not negotiate their own existence, communities that do not expire at closing time. They are, in the most irritating sense, steadier. This steadiness reads to him as advantage, and advantage breeds resentment. He knows, in a way that knowledge cannot help, that they have found a grammar for living that he cannot conjugate.

    Nothing in his life bends toward change. There is no arc, only duration. He suffers the quiet violence of Spiritual Disinheritance—cut off from inherited meanings without the courage or capacity to invent replacements. The days proceed; the man does not.

    In this, François is less a character than a diagnosis. He is a cautionary specimen of Liquid Modernity—a life conducted without anchors in a culture that mistakes motion for progress. He has choices but no commitments, roles but no center, pleasures that evaporate on contact. He sees the hollowness of the system and lacks the will to exit it; even his longing for faith stalls at the threshold like a guest who won’t knock. What remains is not catastrophe but drift: a consciousness fully aware of its own directionlessness, proceeding anyway. It is the most modern tragedy—nothing collapses, and therefore nothing changes.

  • The First Chapter That Ate Your Book

    The First Chapter That Ate Your Book

    You come to a conclusion that feels less like insight and more like a verdict: you don’t write books. You write beginnings. Your first chapters arrive with swagger—clean sentences, live current, the sense that something large and dangerous has finally found its voice. Then the voltage drops. Page by page, the prose flattens, the ideas thin, the attention frays. What started as a symphony becomes elevator music. The opening didn’t lie; it just spent the budget in the first scene.

    The problem has a name: First-Chapter Mirage—that narcotic flash of brilliance that convinces you endurance will follow. It doesn’t. You mistake ignition for engine. You draft again, and again, and again—thirty years of rehearsing the same disappointment with professional discipline. Each time the opening whispers, You’re a novelist. Each time the middle replies, You’re a sprinter.

    Eventually you stop arguing with physics. You pivot. No more epics, no more essays with spinal cords. You go small—epigrams, fragments, paragraphs cut to a bright edge. They accumulate like polished shells. Thread enough of them together and you can call it a “book,” the way a pukka shell necklace can pass for a coastline if you squint.

    But don’t flatter yourself. Pukka Shell Authorship has limits. It gives you sheen without sweep, intensity without architecture. It can gesture at argument but rarely sustain one; it can dazzle in the moment and leave no aftertaste of necessity. It is, at best, a collection that behaves like a book when the lights are low.

    So proceed—just not triumphantly. Write lapidary aphoristic paragraphs with care and the transitions with suspicion. Admit what the form can’t do. Let humility do the binding your structure won’t. If you’re going to string shells, at least know you’re not building a cathedral.

  • Tragedy Laundering in the Age of Vibes

    Tragedy Laundering in the Age of Vibes

    Shirley Li takes aim at what she calls the CliffNotes treatment of classic films—works shaved down, sweetened up, and repackaged for audiences who want the aura of culture without the burden of confronting it. Shakespeare, once a blood-soaked anatomist of ambition and ruin, now gets rinsed through the aesthetic of Taylor Swift. In this new register, tragedy doesn’t end in death; it stalls just long enough for a handsome savior to materialize on cue. Consider “The Fate of Ophelia,” where despair is airbrushed into rescue, and consequence dissolves into a soft-focus finale. The title lingered with me because I’d joked to my students a month earlier that I’d heard the song on Coffee House and found it embarrassingly overwrought—an avalanche of sentiment masquerading as profundity.

    Hollywood, never one to miss a profitable dilution, has joined the exercise. Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s reworking of Bride of Frankenstein into The Bride! arrive pre-softened, their rough edges filed down to avoid drawing blood. The originals demanded something of the audience—patience, discomfort, moral stamina. The remakes offer a tour: quick, glossy, and politely unchallenging.

    Li names the trend with surgical accuracy: “the rise of CliffNotes Cinema—watered-down transformations that offer glossy but thin summaries of the originals and strip away the challenging material that helped turn them into cultural mainstays in the first place.” That sentence does the autopsy. What’s left after the procedure is a body that looks intact from a distance but has been emptied of organs.

    Should we be alarmed? Yes, because the sweetness isn’t accidental; it’s diagnostic. These remakes signal a culture inching toward infantilization—hungry for reassurance, allergic to ambiguity, and convinced that gravity can be outsourced to wardrobe. Give the audience a fairy tale that flatters its appetites, but dress it in canonical clothing so it can pretend it just attended a seminar. Call this Tragedy Laundering: the conversion of moral difficulty into marketable comfort, where death becomes a scheduling inconvenience and ambiguity a branding problem.

    A culture marinated in TikTok loops, cute-animal dopamine, and the immaculate emotional arcs of Taylor Swift’s pop maximalism will predictably resist the adult weather systems of the classics. It wants its cod liver oil chased with honey—and increasingly, it wants the honey first, the oil omitted. The result is a literature of safety: all vibe, no verdict; all sheen, no sting.