Brave New World, 2025 edition

Now, admit it: You’ve been walking around thinking, “The world seems to be ending but dammit, I want, no, I need another newsletter in my inbox.”

Happy to oblige.

I’ve been out of the newsletter game for a piece as I tried to sort out which new platform to call home. I stopped posting at Substack because, well, Nazis. I also canceled all paid subscriptions over there, though I’ve kept some free subscriptions to close friends. But that platform is, for me, a dead letter.

Is Beehiiv really any better vis-a-vis content moderation? I’ve done some digging. I can’t be sure, of course, but for the moment, I’m satisfied enough to pitch camp here.

So what are my plans for this newsletter? I know a few things for sure:

• It will always be free. Period. This is not a monetization project me. It’s a passion project.

• It’s a politics-free zone. By which I mean, I will not be writing or responding the current political situation even as I accept that notion at all art is, inherently, political. But I prefer to use this space to think about and celebrate art that sustains us.

• I don’t have a frequency yet, but it will be more regular than the Substack was.

• Future posts will include a bunch of stuff I’ve been thinking about/collecting, including but not limited to: Thoughts on the comic novel; understanding scene dynamics; a recap of my recent visit to the Western Flyer; and a long thing on the virtues of difficult art. (This last one I feel like I still haven’t gotten quite right, so I continue to tinker.)

• I will also continue to plumb my obsessions, so watch for a big strange secret project about The White Album; and I will republish my 2017 obituary of Roger Moore. (It’s a favorite mine, lost to the internet when the Los Angeles Review of Books inexplicably deleted its blog archive.)

• Of course, I will be talking about the books I’m reading, both good and bad, in more detail than was the norm on Substack. (My favorite of 2024 was Rosalind Brown’s marvelous debut novel PRACTICE, reviewed here by the brilliant Brian Dillon.)

I imagine there will also be various writing updates about my planned year of residencies as I work on my fourth novel. Plus probably pictures of my dog.

And, unavoidably, I will post from time to time about @UGMAN, my third novel coming from ITNA Press in June, with blurbs already in from Maud Newton, Anthony Swofford, and renowned Beatles expert Jason Kruppa.

I hope to have fun and show you a good time. I hope to light a literary fire under all of us. Until then, here’s a picture of me sitting on the actual toilet used by John Steinbeck as he and Ed Ricketts explored the Sea of Cortez aboard the Western Flyer.

See you again in a few weeks! And please feel free to forward to anyone who might enjoy this, and, of course, to unsubscribe if you are newslettered-out.