Unsure of how to start this with the right amount of irony and meta acknowledgement of the inherent narcissism of done-to-death auto fiction. It would Likely be more artistically fulfilling for me, and for the thousands other tiresome autofictives and Substack-having navel-gazers, to write real honest to god fiction, something beautiful and profound despite inevitably aping years of literary history. However, enmired in Christopher’s Lasch eternal Culture of Narcissism as we are, me and the other navel gazers have simply no other choice, and you, my dear hypothetical reader, will just have to like it or lump it. Go pick up the latest romantasy slop fiction at your next bookstore visit if you’re really hankering to test your imaginative faculties that badly. Wasn’t Proust the first autofictive? Aren’t I writing in the vein of Plath and Kafka’s morbid self hypothesising (though the latter especially would curl up and die at the though of Substack writings and its algorithmically fuelled commodification of the ‘literary’)? Hypocritical though it is, I imagine Substack autoficiton pieces as Proustian madeleines deep fried in chip fat and served as a side alongside the main dish of the dead and caramelised bodies of the novel, the author, the ‘literary sphere’, Charles Dickens, etc.
Preamble aside, welcome to my shallow excuse for a newsletter/blog, where instead of conveying any informative news of any sort or hearkening back to some imaginary forgone 00’s blogging safe-space, I will be invoking some semblance of Platonic theatrum mundi and turn this Substack into my own personal Renaissance stage for me, the forlorn last court jester, to trip up, fumble and lecture to an array of probably-empty audience seats. Expect angry diatribes on book, art, my various mental illnesses and the niche historical rabbit holes I constantly find myself in. Cheers.