Your Journey to the Alt-Right.

[version]

Hari Kunzru's written a book called Red Pill.

After receiving a prestigious writing fellowship in Germany, the narrator of Red Pill arrives in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and struggles to accomplish anything at all. Instead of working on the book he has proposed to write, he takes long walks and binge-watches Blue Lives--a violent cop show that becomes weirdly compelling in its bleak, Darwinian view of life--and soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all.

Wannsee is a place full of ghosts: Across the lake, the narrator can see the villa where the Nazis planned the Final Solution, and in his walks he passes the grave of the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, who killed himself after deciding that "no happiness was possible here on earth." When some friends drag him to a party where he meets Anton, the creator of Blue Lives, the narrator begins to believe that the two of them are involved in a cosmic battle, and that Anton is "red-pilling" his viewers--turning them toward an ugly, alt-rightish worldview--ultimately forcing the narrator to wonder if he is losing his mind.

 

[john eden]

That looks cool. I like Hari.

 

[pattycakes_]

Wannsee is a fancy suburb/mini town, right on the outskirts of the city. A bit away from the main buzz is a popular swimming lake. See (s sounds like z) meaning lake in Deutsch. They have a designated spot where you pay to enter a closed off sand beach which is in need of some tlc. Inside you find parasols and these old school covered deck chair type things. Fkk section tucked away down the far end. Its all very kitschy & stuck in the past. Deep friend snacks and ice creams. A lot like British seaside towns. And yeah, the history there makes it all a bit of a macabre choice for family outings.

 

[version]

Deep friend snacks

 

[xenogoth]

Been really curious about Hari's book. Heard good things so far — a review I read the other day, can't remember where, really sold it.

 

[RWY]

i don't think Rudewhy is alt-right yet, just pissed off. but i'd be interested to hear from him too.

I attended a public lecture given by one of Mark Fisher's PhD students at Goldsmiths around five years ago - Mark was moderating the discussion and it was the only time I ever saw and heard him speak in the flesh. I went with a couple of friends, one of whom used to post reguarly on here and another who was born under communism and whose entire existance had been shaped and determined by the realities of such a system. We were all big fans of Mark's writings at the time and, really, we attended just to see him talk. The PhD student spoke for about an hour on their "research" into what housing would look like under an imagined future communism. To both myself, who had just finished three years attempting to study urban planning and housing in a British context, and to the friend who had spent their entire life living in the type of housing communism actually provides, it was a blatent clusterfuck of absolute nonsense - my friend spent most of the discussion rolling their eyes, facepalming and eventually getting quite angry with this middle-class English student going on about the life of luxury Britain is missing out on by not implementing communism. In hindsight, I understand that evening, and the subsequent discussions I had with my friend about what the left in Western countries get completely wrong about the state of the world, as the beginning of the process where I stopped following and reading the output of that whole intellectual scene, and subsequently stopped self-defining myself as left-wing.

i understand these major shifts in worldview in terms of emotional needs, very basic needs. belonging, sex, superiority, resentment, envy, revenge. but people will rarely explain their experience in these terms. these feelings are projected outward onto the political

This is absolutely correct.

 

[luka]

Craner loves telling the stoary of how he spent an increasingly frantic and disbeleiving evening talking Mark out of writing an essay in praise of North Korea, the model state.

 

[craner]

It worked, he didn't write it.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I thought for a sec that people here were praising Johann Hari and then thought, OK, no more drugs allowed ever again, everyone on the forum has gone totally mental.

 

[Leo]

I attended a public lecture given by one of Mark Fisher's PhD students at Goldsmiths around five years ago - Mark was moderating the discussion and it was the only time I ever saw and heard him speak in the flesh. I went with a couple of friends, one of whom used to post reguarly on here and another who was born under communism and whose entire existance had been shaped and determined by the realities of such a system. We were all big fans of Mark's writings at the time and, really, we attended just to see him talk. The PhD student spoke for about an hour on their "research" into what housing would look like under an imagined future communism. To both myself, who had just finished three years attempting to study urban planning and housing in a British context, and to the friend who had spent their entire life living in the type of housing communism actually provides, it was a blatent clusterfuck of absolute nonsense - my friend spent most of the discussion rolling their eyes, facepalming and eventually getting quite angry with this middle-class English student going on about the life of luxury Britain is missing out on by not implementing communism. In hindsight, I understand that evening, and the subsequent discussions I had with my friend about what the left in Western countries get completely wrong about the state of the world, as the beginning of the process where I stopped following and reading the output of that whole intellectual scene, and subsequently stopped self-defining myself as left-wing.

thing is, I don't think of that sort of thing as being "left-wing". It's just stupid.

 

[borzoi]

Hari Kunzru's written a book called Red Pill.

this sounds like it could be neat, kind of bolanoish. but in general i can't stand modern lit that tries to take on twitter or online. it generates the same secondhand embarrassment as translations of ovid where they do rap battles or whatever.

 

[version]

Yeah, I feel the same way. I haven't read it though, so can't pass judgement beyond that. Also never read anything at all by Kunzru.

 

[luka]

I've not heard of this Kunzru. More generally writing stories about Issues is gross

 

[luka]

Here's my contemporary play about the alt-right

 

[luka]

I will display my orthodox opinion on this contemporary issue via these stupid cardboard cutout characters

 

[xenogoth]

this is what i read in the review of it i saw (it was for the AV club). made me think it might be worth giving a chance, even if it really toes the line:

Kunzru’s novel isn’t a book about being online. Not on its surface, at least. It begins with an unnamed author contemplating middle age, that “gentle downward slope into darkness,” before leaving Brooklyn for the Deuter Center outside of Berlin. There, as part of a fellowship, he’ll spend three months working on a book about “the construction of the self in lyric poetry.” Our cultured, hyper-literate protagonist is soon undone, however, by the center’s demand for full transparency. Fellows work together, eat together, socialize. Unable to write in such conditions, he hides in his room, binging seasons of a cop show, Blue Lives, that sounds like an even more violent and nihilistic version of The Shield. When he meets the show’s creator at a party, his obsession with its “mockery of human dignity” opens a path to madness that begins to look a lot like Twitter, consumed as it is by identity politics, fascism, and trolling.

Kunzru is wise to keep the narrative both rooted in the real world and mostly divorced from the current moment more specifically. By doing so, he’s able to isolate the behaviors inherent to the online culture wars—the baiting, the debating, the veils of humor—and view them through a historical lens.

In Hari Kunzru's Red Pill, a lib gets triggered into madness

Hari Kunzru's excellent new novel follows a liberal intellectual who spirals into madness after getting owned by the brute creator of a nihilistic cop show.

aux.avclub.com

 

[luka]

Even as satire I flinch a bit from seeing Berlin and Brooklyn written down like that. It all feels like part of a gilded world of entitlement, a party I'm not invited to. How about you read it and report back.

 

[xenogoth]

i mean... saying all this... i was content waiting for the paperback...

 

[woops]

Even as satire I flinch a bit from seeing Berlin and Brooklyn written down like that. It all feels like part of a gilded world of entitlement, a party I'm not invited to. How about you read it and report back.

we were talking about ben lerner recently weren't we? his second novel is all about the trials of a poet on a literary residency in barcelona trying to decide which of two spanish girls he likes best

 

[catalog]

was just about to mention him (lerner). i meant to read that book but never got round to it and now i've decided i'm only reading old novels for a bit