#literary journals

Do I have to join Urbit to get this or buy it in crypto on the blockchain or something? In any case, I want to read it. The manifesto strikes the note of the emerging ideology as it slowly engulfs elite aesthetics, an unlikely balance between the intellectual worlds of the New York literati and the Silicon Valley technorati (and now its Austin/Miami diaspora):

The fact is that language can be holy, at least when it’s used correctly. Every writer who is a real writer and not a mere reporter knows what it is when sound and sense form a feedback loop with one another, and the world itself comes to seem more sinuous and more clear, and the hairs on the back of the neck prickle. It doesn’t work when you cheat on the sound—which is why, for instance, a thesaurus is so handy, and why Flaubert drove himself mad over choosing just the right word. And it doesn’t work when you cheat on the sense—which is why, for instance, Joyce made such obsessive inquiries about the height of the railing Bloom and Daedalus would have to jump over in the Ithaca section of Ulysses.

[…]

Urbit is a software project. But one might suggest that at its core it also implies a different way of looking at the world. The short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which lent the first Urbit company its name, tells the tale of a parallel universe that slowly subsumes reality. It may be that such a parallel universe—one where quality beats quantity, permanence beats a flash in the pan, and a deep concern for human flourishing beats venality—is slowly twisting its way, ivy-like, through the nooks and crannies of our otherwise humdrum world. We’ll have to wait and see. In any case, we couldn’t be more grateful to the Urbit Foundation and its sister organization The Combine for their support in getting this project off the ground, and for the steady belief that something so quixotic might have staying power. However the Mars Review does conclude, we can say confidently that no other project could have provided the necessary premise.

Up-to-the-minute contents: I’m always up for more Angelicism chatter; I’m curious about the the first great work of cyborg literature as I am about the PMC; and you’ll never go wrong reading Default Friend on sex, society, and technology. 

For my specific purposes as both a literary man and an observer of The New Conservatism, “Christian Lorentzen on BAP & Logo” is the surprise here. Everything depends on the treatment, but this may be the literary-critical equivalent of Jacob Siegel’s and James Pogue’s relatively sympathetic journalistic treatments of Yarvin and Co. I’ve wondered for years who would be the first critic with ties to the older literary (I first mistyped “libterary”) establishment to take seriously the pseudonymous world of the self- and small-press-published online right or illiberal dissident sphere. 

Why take it seriously? A century ago, modernism itself, before it made the canonical cut, was a similar stew of weird little magazines, eccentric small presses, vanity-published projects, and strange urban scenes stalked by all manner of occultists, nihilists, anti-liberal cranks, ultra-reactionary queers, elitist critics, and fascist troubadours. So if Lorentzen can be the Edmund Wilson of the hour, well, somebody has to do it. 

I will await our critic’s dispatch from Mars, but, for whatever it’s worth, I’m indifferent to BAP qua literature. As for Logo, I read enough of Selfie, Suicide online to see that it was good, but I suspect his totalitarian turn of mind will inhibit his development—not an eventuality unknown to our modernist precursors either.