The Spirit of Quarrel: A Lover’s Methodology – Manuel Marrero

October 11, 2024

On a Sunday in August 2021, celebrated indie author and artist Sam Pink launched a volley at the street credibility of freshly big-leagued author Sean Thor Conroe, claiming the six-figure acquired novel Fuccboi was essentially plagiarism, and that Conroe had been manipulative in his actions. I recall sitting on a train reading the Pink essay on my phone next to a woman I was seeing at the time. I recall how it made us feel. There was a manic energy to it, a buzz. I’ll burn any shit down. I’ve since realized that’s a mnemonic bastardization of Pink’s phrasing but the sentiment carried. The woman would go on to try and cancel me on Instagram two weeks later.

Warning and consent are unserious proclivities for an artist. It’s hard to pinpoint when people stopped behaving and feeling like people to me. Maybe it was when we extended vibe logic into much more hostile and othering territory as explicit justification to treat someone like an untouchable or non-human, memeing a new symbolic order of stigma into existence. Maybe it was lockdown. 

Sean Thor Conroe finally issued a riposte a few months ago on his Substack in which he went pound for pound with all of Pink’s allegations. 

It’s not the carriage return, it’s the cadence of the internal monologue’s oscillation that he derives heavily, on the very first page of Fuccboi. It’s like a slinky. It’s like how Tame Impala wouldn’t exist without Steely Dan. Pink is very American in that he makes things with his hands, namely, paintings. He’s also a drummer and boxer. He sees the poetry in manual labor, the meditation, the physicality. Conroe understands his style and sublimates it, accesses the invisible technology, and on the very first page, makes movement out of this back-and-forth waffling about coffee filters on sale. It’s not that Pink owns this invisible technology, it’s that Conroe emulated it, heart to heart. They both practice a love of enemy that is almost decadent. 

The woman who tried to cancel me had an unpleasant experience. We had seduced each other with our writing.

Underpinning Pink’s diatribe is an account of a relationship, and, in Conroe’s response, a separate, conflicting account. Collectively we pile on or come to the defense of the embattled. We share in the adrenaline. We’re jolted from what Kierkegaard called armed neutrality and forced to assume the mantle of our convictions.

But this isn’t the story I want to tell. 

Authenticity is quiet. It’s in what Gordon Lish called “what we don’t show,” which is as much a part of any story as what we do show. A good story doesn’t have to make sense, it simply has to move in a way that’s compelling enough for us to want to know where it goes. It often negates itself.

In seduction, trespass, conflict, and catharsis we find our bearings in a biological imperative.

The alternative is a stifling meekness whereby any honest opinion is a phenomenon and criticism has been denotatively degraded to virtual, stupefying non-existence. It’s impossible to criticize something without taking a side in a war. And yet, it provides an interesting service, albeit a surface-level grifty one. But then, I genuinely love books. The art world crackles with everything but the fire itself. Larger than life unhinged egos, bootlicking and clout striving, starfucking and dick riding. Climbers, gladhanding sycophants, nominal writers, and their works, where everything is buried beneath the psychopathy of kayfabe and LARP, pettiness and bad faith. It’s all there in the labor of love and you can come bear witness to the faults, the flaws, the failures, the anxieties, of every titanic spaz who thinks so highly of their creations, entitled to admiration. Come and see what’s long overdue. Honest appraisal. Writing a novel is not for everyone. Not everyone has a thick skin. Not everyone is really about it. Many now are taking a victory lap after meteoric success to pursue other mediums and hobbies. The best writers I know begin work on a new novel before the forthcoming one is published. They take it seriously. They don’t get enough press but they prefer it that way. If they’re asked questions about their work, they answer honestly and openly, however probing. If they receive a negative review, they pin that shit. To be read is an honor taken too lightly. To engage seriously with literature you can’t be afraid to get your hands dirty, you can’t shrink from the calling to answer for the charge that you are a voice of a generation. If writing is your first love, where were you when it became crowded?

I read somewhere that novels are essentially distilled gossip. This is ludicrous. Novels are to sex what gossip is to dating. Gordon Lish, at 90, has just fashioned a publishing imprint for the express purpose of publishing two novels. Line by line, at the sentence level, they’re exhilarating, despite the dreaded, repetitious “dear reader” exhortation. But that isn’t the story I want to tell either. I don’t want to review any books. 

I haven’t had sex in one year and ten months as of the time of this writing. I’m in awe of my marathon of celibacy. I’ve kissed hickeys and bruises and acne scars. I’ve dry humped. Looked, touched. Been on too many dates. I haven’t jerked off in sixty three days. I’ve never written more or better. I want to write all the time and for longer than anyone ever has. I believe the best writing is pressure-cooked. I believe whoever inherits all the tantric energy I’ve amassed will feel lucky and loved. I’m ready to give everything I have. Did I mention I love literature? I have left the nauseous holding pattern of the chase behind. I have let myself be found. 

I relate to Gordon Lish’s andragogical methods. I have been in that chair. But I’ve cured lust addiction and passion has filled the void, violence in my hands firing on all cylinders, high-T auratic improvement, pheromonal repair, a resensitizing.

Lish’s writing is voicey. And he’s correct that writing to literally seduce is the way, first the mind, erupting in physical tension and release at the last possible moment when tension must resolve.

Sentence by sentence seduction into the abyss of trauma is a dead end. There is nothing there but the same book. You have to be willing to bite every hand of culture if Lish’s methods are to be a living tradition and not empty dogma. There is a lot more to literature than seducing a mentor with style. Still, gun to my head, you get a lot more out of studying Lish than going to Iowa Writer’s Workshop. No contest.

But you have to say something. Lish’s most prominent scion was the late Giancarlo DiTrapano. 

The most fulfilling emotions are not those akin to post-coital bliss, but the power in a book, transcending all other mediums, is in its ability to shape your thinking. Not in making you come. The thing about arousal is, like any forgettable book, it comes and goes. It’s not meant to last. Like baby’s first literature. Lish implies good literature doesn’t ask. 

The woman who tried to cancel me claimed I had crossed a professional boundary, even after we were sleeping together regularly.

I can’t escape my reputation of things I’ve written and done and alleged to have done. Old me, new problems. Something is happening between consummation of lust and love where they cancel each other out. Romance is conspicuously, cognitively absent like a phantom limb and passion died with it. We’re left with the psychic residue. Something changed and some of us are sensitive to it. We are trapped in a seductive self-fulfilling vortex of mirroring, splitting, hair trigger fight or flight, trauma, and avoidance. Shrieking, memetic. A demoralizing feedback loop of insanity. The final act is to totalize externality. Our legacy is to be driven mad and dysgenic by propaganda. A delirium of neurotic projection and confirmation bias. Quite simply, we are enervated vitalists. Our normalcy has been colonized by aberrance and as such we are blacked out and tapped out, hormonally impaired and inutile. 

This soul-stunting infantilization of literature must be defeated zero sum. This idea of boundaries between seduction and love, between the right way and the wrong way, where you have a short interval in which to mistreat someone so that they’ll put out. If you demur then the object of desire will feel rejected, dismissed. If you lean in, it’ll be held against you at a later opportune time. It is maladjusted. All that’s left after is glory. And glory is slow. Our ability and capacity to love hinges on cognizance and nurturance of this condition. Feel free to be wrong. 

Have you been to the hollers? The sentence, or voice, to the exclusion of all else, leads to The Sarah Book. It is crossword puzzles. It is run-on sentences in an Appalachian tone. Scott McClanahan, author of the most sainted darling in all indie lit, has a place on Lish’s bookshelf, anecdotally. I haven’t met a single person who’s criticized this book. It doesn’t serve a moral purpose. It doesn’t teach you how to live well. It’s awash in godless Gen-X nihilism, liberal hand-wringing about abortion, poverty porn, it contains a blameless angelic eponymous subject who is one-dimensional, yet no one dares criticize it. Why? Because, to its credit, McClanahan is from the hollers, he holds back no trauma. My ex-girlfriend and I read it to each other in one sitting. Trading off chapters. Both of us crying throughout. I’m suspicious of any work of art so emotionally manipulative. And yet, here’s a real problem. The Sarah Book was published in 2015. It’s taken McClanahan nine years and counting to write a follow-up, while soaking up endless praise, being called the greatest living author, the book being called one of the greatest of all time, Roxane Gay blurb echoing through echo chambers. And yet, there’s no compulsion to reread this book six months later, or ever. There is startlingly little depth. That can’t be good for literature.

You can see the Lishian germ everywhere.

New rollercoasters constantly getting propped up overnight and out of nowhere. They take you for a ride. The world spins fast enough you’re never sure what’s keeping everything in place. You’ll get home all right but it’s exhausting.