{"id":3935,"date":"2022-03-01T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-01T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/?p=3935"},"modified":"2022-02-28T13:22:42","modified_gmt":"2022-02-28T18:22:42","slug":"the-spiders-web-vibrates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/the-spiders-web-vibrates\/","title":{"rendered":"THE SPIDER\u2019S WEB VIBRATES"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Editor’s note: The following double book review was abandoned\u2014typewritten, stapled, and wrapped in swaddling clothes\u2014in a thrift store bassinet on the steps of the Last Estate. Not ones to leave an orphan homeless (or increase our workload by turning down free content), we decided to take in this “bastard from a basket,” <\/span><\/i>as Daniel Plainview would say<\/span><\/i><\/a>, and give it shelter within the virtual pages and conjured walls of the estate.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

A review of:
DRAGON DAY<\/a> by Matthew Pegas. Terror House. 2021. 136 pp.<\/span><\/p>\n

DOX<\/a> by Alex Beaumais. Tragickal Books. 2021. 225 pp.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fiction exploring political violence has been a gymnasium of the mind to safely lift heavy matters since Dostoyevsky\u2019s novel critiquing nihilism and political revolution,\u00a0<\/span>Demons<\/span><\/i>. Novels treating the current political scene, and in particular the resurgent world of right-wing ideology as it plays out online\u2014the alt-right\u2014provide gym equipment much in demand for strengthening muscles long-neglected by the left\u2019s supposed stranglehold on the arts. Two new novels by Matt Pegas and Alex Beaumais nobly follow the rightward intellectual excursions of young male characters, but the extractions, the settlings, the fearful warnings that result in the two works differ greatly in quality and literary merit.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Matthew Pegas\u2019 slight, buzzy novel\u00a0<\/span>Dragon Day<\/span><\/i>\u00a0is an academic thriller disguising a bizarre political treatise. Why do I say bizarre? Because I can\u2019t quite say with certainty where it ends up, or if to the contrary it is meant to be a kind of sampler of political philosophy as it exists in 2021. The environment that the novel explores is the hotbed of political ideas and idealism begging to run rampant that is the contemporary college campus, where minds are for the most part free from economic concerns to run to whatever fanciful destination they can. In the most extreme case, as this is, it explores what motivations can there be for political violence.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Everyone wants to know why the school shooter does what he does, why the incel mass murderer does what he does, why people on the fringes resort to extreme acts to express themselves. A void is created after the dust settles that no amount of CNN talking heads and analysts and investigative journalists can fill. Media speculation in the aftermath feels so dissatisfying. It still feels that way after reading\u00a0<\/span>Dragon Day,<\/span><\/i>\u00a0but at least someone has attempted to use the scope of fiction to examine it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The novel is, technically, spoilable so I will resist the urge to spill all the beans here, should you want to support the author and Terror House by purchasing it. It\u2019s a thriller and it does have some credible twists like much genre fiction. We\u2019re informed from the very beginning that this is a chronicle speculating on what could have led a college freshman, Toby Sharpe, to set off a bomb at \u201cDragon Day,\u201d an annual parade at the very progressive Lockden University in Pennsylvania, an hour west of New York City, killing Toby and 22 other people and wounding dozens more. The point of view from which the writing is done is more than a little blurry; we\u2019re told that the book is written by Charles Jason, a PhD candidate at Lockden U. who knew Toby for a short time before the bombing. Uptight MFA students who can\u2019t abide inexplicable POV shifts: stay away.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Who was Toby Sharpe? Somebody who didn\u2019t fit in, somebody who was not too swift with the ladies or with anybody for that matter, and, in one very early and very shocking scene that sets up a good deal of tension for the rest of the novel\u2019s 136 pages, a victim. The characterization is there: Toby is a romantic wet squib having a misfire with a girl named Zoe who must spell out her lack of interest to him and give him the old \u201cI don\u2019t think I should be dating anybody right now, I\u2019m at college\u201d line, which never fails to be misinterpreted by the dumpee.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The amount of interest we have in the so-called ideological content of an incel manifesto might be limited. For people who have been living on Neptune, or maybe just have been living lives where (bless them) such exotic nomenclature was not necessary, incels means \u201cinvoluntary celibates,\u201d young men\u2014let\u2019s be real\u2014who can\u2019t convince anybody to have sex with them. The truncated self-inflicted terminology tells you all you really need to know about the brainpower of the unlucky in love: intelligent, taxonomy-obsessed, needing to reduce a common phenomenon of life (most people aren\u2019t getting laid) to a specific label from which to launch an attack on society. Toby never calls himself an incel, but that\u2019s besides the point. His sexual rejection is presented as a crucial ingredient for his apparent anti-social outrage.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a satire of academia and the intricate gobbledygook that is foisted on young minds by the ivory tower,\u00a0<\/span>Dragon Day<\/span><\/i>\u00a0is not quite successful. It\u2019s too perfunctory to be a useful dissection of the life of the mind; perhaps had the novel been thicker we could have marinated in the intellectual stockpot for longer, allowing the ideas to penetrate and the laughter to be richer and more skewering. Toby falls under the spell of a popular young English professor named Wallingford who tries to indoctrinate the boy into Derridean theories about the connection between a writer\u2019s prose style and his penile dimensions. Research funds are set aside to solicit info from writers about their peckers in tandem with their writing abilities. Much is made of the \u201cphalgorithm\u201d that gets used to measure a writer\u2019s syntax. Charles, the PhD student who was working with Wallingford on these theories, gets booted out in favor of Toby, who is thought to be more malleable for Wallingford\u2019s true intellectual aims: taking literary phalology to the next level. During a visit from Toby during office hours, Wallingford begins massaging the student\u2019s shoulders and giving him the inside scoop:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe truth is, I\u2019ve exhausted the limits of what can be accomplished using penis measurements and writing samples,\u201d Wallingford said. \u201cI want to continue the study of male sexuality started by literary phalology, but now I want to hone in on an exhaustive study of one young man, and, well, Toby, I want that young man to be you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat?\u201d said Toby, jerking forward.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cJust relax, bud,\u201d said Wallingford. \u201cYou\u2019re so tight, I can\u2019t imagine carrying around all this stress is good for you.\u201d Toby tried to take the professor\u2019s advice, squeezing his eyes shut. Relaxing had never been something that came easily to him, especially not around people he wanted to like him.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNow that Charles is out of the picture,\u201d said Wallingford, close behind Toby\u2019s ear, \u201cI think I\u2019ll be able to speak much more frankly with you about what my work is really about.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

What would an academic thriller be without a nefarious professor pulling the strings behind the scenes? Spoiler doctrine forbids me from telling everything; suffice it to say, the faux-Marxist professor has raised the stakes beyond mere dialectical materialism or Critiques of the Gotha Programme. As befits a thriller we\u2019re talking about the future of Western civilization. Strap in for some crypto-fascist accelerationist chaos magick tug of war between the extreme left and extreme right. \u201cWallingford\u2019s idea,\u201d Pegas writes, \u201cwas that by sowing chaos, feeding into either side of the supposed debate, he was bringing the whole system down.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The political thrust of the novel gets a little murky and might be easy to make fun of if it weren\u2019t unsettlingly like what you would find broadcasted in an incel terrorist\u2019s over-thinking blog post. Those interested in the finer points of what Pegas is trying to say about the current disruptive promises of the alt-right\u2014and there is a lot to be chewed on there\u2014are encouraged to read the book. Perhaps one of the greatest resonances is that a Nietzschean \u201ctranscendence of morality\u201d mainly appeals to little men swimming in excess sexual pneuma, but that is threat enough when bullets, bombs, and out-of-control vehicles are readily available. God is, as usual in indie lit productions, totally absent from the proceedings.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bombing a college campus, to the bomber\u2019s chagrin had he lived, carries consequences which the reader of Pegas\u2019 novel must contend with. A fallout less dramatic and handled with more skill and literary value is the \u201cdoxxing\u201d at the heart of Alex Beaumais\u2019 novel\u00a0<\/span>Dox<\/span><\/i>. On November 22nd, 2021, the day I finished reading Beaumais\u2019 debut novel, reports came in about photos being published of trans activists in front of JK Rowling\u2019s house. It was decried as doxxing, or publishing the home address of someone as retaliation for their politically objectionable opinions. In Rowling\u2019s case her doxx-able offenses were her now-famous objections to trans rights and their mangling definition of what constitutes a woman. Rowling has for several years occupied, in the minds of many people, the role of transphobic, out-of-touch celebrity betraying a generation of sensitive readers. Quickly people on Twitter, out for Rowling\u2019s blood, chimed in that the photos could hardly be called doxxing as Rowling\u2019s address in Edinburgh is well-known to anybody consulting a tourism website; people take photos there all the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is, at least apparently, no such ambiguity to the doxxing experienced by Rick Speer in Beaumais\u2019 novel: in his portrayal it is a frightening, career-ending, reputation-destroying act of disruption that may as well spell the end of one\u2019s life. Speer, a libertarian blogger who has amassed a small fortune in Bitcoin and who has more than flirted with far-right politics online, is being exposed and blackmailed by volatile antifa types who come to his house, throw rocks through his window, and film themselves having an altercation with him in the parking lot of his Toronto condo. In a frenzy Speer shuffles through his options, which include fleeing to other countries, paying off the doxxers, and suicide. The novel is about other things, as well, but this experience lies at the center of the narrative and propels the plot forward.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the author\u2019s very capable hands, Toronto, Canada is portrayed as a choke point of globally conscious, highly educated urban youth seeking meaning in 21st century culture wars, a more interesting battleground than Pegas\u2019 university campus. Politics is ever present and ever-important; the online universe, for this class of tapped-in young city-dwellers, is a whetstone of political philosophy against which to grind many ideological axe blades. The novel\u2019s landscape is of a tense, fearful place, and the social media environment inhabited by the characters is one saturated with opinions and, in the constantly watching eyes of the Internet, a thirst for accountability. We know this from watching the news, or more specifically by hearing of the crushing spectacles of denunciation performed by online mobs seeking vengeance in a hyper-mediated biosphere of unforgiving political correctness. Beaumais dramatizes this phenomenon, highlighting the fears of very public revelations felt by people trapped by their own actions and utterances as recorded by the eternal posterity of the Internet.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The most remarkable aspect of the novel as I read it was its intelligent and bewildering prose style, studded with au courant political and cultural jargon, a whirlwind encyclopedia of refined political positions as examined under a fearless 2021 microscope. Rick Speer reflects to himself upon the arrival at his worldview vis-a-vis the trolls of the right wing:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

At some point between indulging these people and wishing he could delete them like his Internet history, Rick had to admit that, though he hated anarcho-capitalists, PUAs, 1488ers, trad-Christians, accelerationists, NEETs, and Nazbols\u2014he hated them half a degree less than the general population. It was just too easy for normies to believe falsehoods and become human shields for consumerism\u2026You could see the cognitive dissonance in genetic-testing kits, which revealed your separateness down to whether you carried a Neanderthal allele for sneezing after dark chocolate but whose commercials showed everyone as octo-racial, with freckles, an epicanthic fold, a flat nose, a copper afro.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The portrait of Rick Speer as a man seduced by alt-right ideas and yet a sympathetic victim of mass bullying is a risky one, but Beaumais wins our indulgence by putting Rick through an ordeal that in some ways has little to do with culture wars. The doxxing central to the novel is bookended by a beginning and ending having to do with a Polish man and his three daughters, the Og\u00f3reks, and Rick\u2019s encounters with them. Bela, one of the daughters, is dating Rick while her very uptight sister Ariel looks on with extreme displeasure, because as right-wing (he would say libertarian) as Rick is, Ariel is ultra-left and driven by left-wing grievances and struggles with her own white privilege. The sections where Ariel and Rick debate politics around the dinner table are, unfortunately, weak spots in the novel, where the veneer over the \u201cnovel of ideas\u201d is at its thinnest. Beaumais and Pegas struggle to extricate their novels from this \u201cnovel of ideas\u201d rubric with varying degrees of success: Beaumais\u2019 chassis shows strain while Pegas\u2019 wheels almost come completely off the cart. Beaumais excels at narrating the inner workings of his characters\u2019 minds and is slightly less assured at this outward dialogue of bickering, educated strivers. At the dinner table when Rick first meets the Og\u00f3reks, the political scrimmage is set as European history is quickly invoked:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rick said, \u201cAre you guys Polish?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d Ariel said. \u201cWhat are you?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cKraut-Anglo. My father was born in Germany.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll trade you Szyd\u0142o if you give us Merkel,\u201d Ariel said, smiling at her formulation.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDeal.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ariel smiled and then thought about this: \u201cWhat?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rick looked surprised. \u201cGermany is always in the middle of outside forces. I guess kind of like Poland, but we actually, well, nevermind. It just seems like Germans are always marching too hard in some direction.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe you\u2019d like our history instead, of being invaded and dismembered by foreign powers?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cUm, sorry.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not like <\/span>you<\/span><\/i> did it,\u201d she sneered.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The portrayal of Ariel as an unpleasantly PC, essay-writing shrew is perhaps meant to strike a satirical tone; she \u201cprioritizes finding allyship over determining whether someone\u2019s apartment got morning sunlight,\u201d concocting an acronym \u201cJILEBAFIRG\u201d as a scorecard of issues: justice, immigration, labor, environment, banking, abortion, feminism, inequality, race, and gay rights. Rick falls short of Ariel\u2019s estimation: \u201c[H]is dog-whistles on race and immigration cast him in the reject pile. And that wasn\u2019t even counting the money he was giving Bela or the militancy of his haircut.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whatever faults of characterization exist are minor enough to be lost in the panorama. <\/span>Dox<\/span><\/i>\u00a0is a great book for readers wanting to visit the world of the present day and engage with intricate ideas and politics of the moment. It is not an escape from a politics-drenched media environment but a thorough, satisfying diving-into.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Highlights of the novel include the middle section dealing with the doxxing and a section nearer the beginning where Bela and Rick inadvertently drink a water bottle laced with MDMA and go to a nightclub. The elucidation of the two uncertain lovers\u2019 intoxicated thoughts and actions while in a crowded place full of sensory stimuli was wonderful. The right-wing \u201cThinking Man\u201d is given three-dimensions, relationships, activity, relatable failings, so that the going askew means something to us later.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Indie lit, writing accessed through Twitter, \u201ccyberwriting,\u201d is countercultural, and in the pandemic years this has its share of political manifestations perhaps surprising to the artistically minded. In reading and exploring the scene, I have felt the neoreactionary spider\u2019s web vibrate but have never really come face to face with the spider itself. Maybe the spider metaphor is all wrong\u2014too many Shelob associations, not enough Attenborough, spiders being, like neoreactionaries, just a part of the natural world we live in now.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fiction exploring political violence has been a gymnasium of the mind to safely lift heavy matters since Dostoyevsky\u2019s novel critiquing nihilism and political revolution,\u00a0Demons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":3940,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}