Petrarchive – Is Sam Kriss the best writer alive?

This ragebait was designed in a lab to target me specifically

“Avant garde sensibility but shot through with absurdity and humoUr” oh my lord — okay, it’s okay, deep breaths

>>10420 (OP)
>I wonder if he'd ever write a novel
I think he did that already. At least I vaguely remember reading about a novel that he wrote that was compared to Tao Lin.

Bait aside, I do like reading whatever he puts out. A lot of it has been relatively pedestrian observations of late, but the style usually keeps it all interesting enough. Still, his big earlier central-thesis-like works are his best. Good reminder, actually—I have a couple articles bookmarked that I didn't yet bother reading. I like him, and I appreciate that he sticks to a style even if some consider it passé and just roll their eyes.

He posted a sort of semi-defence of Ulster Unionists today. Quite good stuff though with a little bit of sophistry here and there that you sort of have to put up with when it comes to Kriss.

A choice excerpt:

> For nationalists, the state isn’t just here to collect taxes, provide services, and administer justice; its job is to be the mystical expression of your ethnic identity. At this point, as far as I’m concerned, you’re talking moon language. The country I live in doesn’t express my ethnic identity and it’s fine; there’s another country in the Middle East that does express my ethnic identity and I hate it. Worse, this mystic drivel almost always coincides with some kind of rabid irridentism. It’s not enough to settle for a state that doesn’t actively discriminate against you personally; your state must also get to rule over an entirely different group of people, who’ve expressed a strong preference against being governed by it. India must have Kashmir. Serbia must have Kosovo. Ireland must have Ulster. Do you really have so little going on for yourself that you’ve got to start foaming about the exact borders of your country? [1]

And the accompanying footnote, which I especially agree with.

> [1] This is why I’m increasingly impatient with that pro-Palestine chant about the two bodies of water. It’s hard to voice the impatience, because the most insane people in the world keep going into tizzies over how the chant implies the extermination of the world’s Jews, which it doesn’t. But it’s bad in a different way. It means that only the whole country will do: we’re not making any compromises for the sake of a decent life; we will keep throwing one generation of our children after another into an IDF kill zone until the lines on the map look exactly the way we want. It doesn’t help that in Arabic, the usual version doesn’t say that from the river to the sea Palestine will be free, but that Filastin arabiyye, or Palestine is Arab.

It's another thing but I think it's funny how he is constitutionally incapable of writing an article without taking a jab at new build housing estates.

>>10429
I've heard countless people shit on Mr. Kriss but I've never had anyone cite a contemporary writer who they deem to be better

>>10442
inb4 argument from ignorance

>>10442
idk houellebecq? pynchon? bolano?

>>10442

Not taking this bait, I have a clean conscience

Is Worst Boyfriend Ever the best writer alive? think he's the only writer left whose work I'm always willing to drop whatever I'm doing to read. There's an avant-garde sensibility there (unbelievably rare in modern writing) but shot through with absurdity and humour. I wonder if he'd ever write a novel or if he's smart enough to realise that novels aren't the way to speak to the culture anymore.

Sam Kriss thread a year ago on /pt/: Long strings of commentary, solid examples of what you like and don't like, screenshots and links to his Substack, acknowledgment of his good writing while still offering a realistic and useful critique

Sam Kriss thread on /pt/ today: Soyjacks, one-liners, obvious bait, comparison to embarrassing Gamergate-era writer "Worst Boyfriend Ever" because that's all they have in their repertoire

The consequences of lax modding show in the direction this place has taken. Admin, I warned you.

I really do like his pieces. He's evidently superbly well read individual, has knack for obscure (for my money) medieval mysticism, and a vivid imagination for being a tad silly, having that whimsy in his writing. Combined with some pretentiousness it should be a disaster for insufferable substack opinion-crafter like all that lot, but he's really fun to read, I would say on behalf of the fact that he doesn't come off as overly self-obsessed in his writings and stances.

>>10447

Unironically calling for mods because nobody likes your favorite blogger

>>10453
I was the OP of the thread a year ago and I wrote three paragraphs bitching about Sam Kriss. It was still better than whatever shit you decided to spew onto this site in the past three months

>>10447

Can we skip the "board's dead" decline narratives please. Completely unfalsifiable James Murphy but-I-was-there-ism. A very ugly rhetorical strategy.

Anyway, Sam Kriss is a hack. He's easily on the same tier as Worst Boyfriend Ever.

A few weeks ago I plugged in an old half-finished writing project into Claude and asked for a "harsh critique". I then plugged in a Kriss article saying it was mine and Claude thought it was even worse. So he has a personal writing style that is more enjoyable for a human to read than a machine and that works for me. I get excited when I see a new Kriss notification and I like that he puts out free stuff.

Sometimes he's a dead end. Ideally a great writer would introduce you to more great writers and half the writings he references are either fake or obscure and impenetrable.

>>10461

This is a bait death spiral and we all need to agree to a ceasefire

Without fail I come to these threads hoping to find, if not appreciation, then an understanding of why a writer is not worthy of appreciation. The writings themselves are noteworthy to this group of posters as this thread is one of the fastest growing on the board and already over average length. But no that's never what I find, just that some blogger that occasionally releases a public post that is more interesting to read than 99% of substack darlings is actually a hack and any reference to him is bait. Best to give up and stick to reels.

all i remember is the cancellation

>10440

Can you post the whole article here? I'm not a subscriber

>>10466
The trouble is that I don't think anyone has very much to say. My guess is that due to an intersection of factors this website probably has the highest density of Sam Kriss readers anywhere on the internet. But that also means that everyone here has either made up their mind that they're a fan of his work, or they think he's a pretentious hack / one-trick show pony / exasperating windbag.

I think a more interesting question to ask, rather than just rehashing the 'are his blog posts good: y/n' debate for what feels like the third time in the last year, is to ask what his literary potential is outside of web essays.

Those who have subscriptions will know that his China series is among his strongest work; the India series is a little less good, but still well worth reading - this raises the intriguing possibility that he might have a full length travelogue in him. The travelogue is something of a neglected form these days, but I really think it would be the ideal outlet for his particular abilities as a writer.

With the best will in the world it is hard to imagine Kriss writing a great novel in the classical sense. The one thing that is common to most great novelists, or at least authors of literary fiction, is a sort of generosity of spirit that I just don't think Kriss possesses. He certainly has a degree of intellectual openness, in the formal sense. But it is impossible to imagine him having the patience towards his characters that, for example, George Eliot had. If Kriss wrote Casaubon he would be like a centrefold cellotaped to a dartboard: in no way human, just a darkly amusing object for scorn and cruelty. The fact that Kriss would be pitifully self-aware about his incapacity for kindness would not redeem him.

The thing about a travelogue though is that you don't necessarily have to be generous. This is a domain where the critical eye is most vital, where the coldly intellectual can be a thrilling counterpoint to lush and sensuous foreign scenes. I would love to put Kriss in AfD-controlled East Germany, or the bazaars of Istanbul, or (forgive me for this one Sam) M23 controlled Goma, just to see what he would say about these places.

I like to think that the recurrence of the 'Numb on tour' posts means that he agrees with me that his talents are suited to this end. But I think he should be more ambitious than a blog post series. My biggest fear is that the golden handcuffs of his monthly cheque from substack will stop Kriss from writing the novel-length masterwork I hope and suspect he has in him. Keep giving me 500 word AI polemics! I'll keep reading that garbage. Just promise me that in the wood-scented darkness of your desk-drawer there resides the slowly germinating fruit of your unshielded ego; your thrust for eternity.

>>10469

Boy I sure would love to read 50,000 words of verbose whingeing about how the world is so badddddddd so fallen and grave. We have so many problems like you know... Gaza. And data centers. But Maggie Thatcher did an austerity so now we have neoliberalism... and now the world is so bad and I'm depressed. I smoke cigarettes btw

>>10481
Actually I'd like to read 150,000 words.
But seriously, you can do this to every author. It's like saying the world cup is just a load of blokes kicking a ball around. True but it doesn't make you clever.

>>10444
I don't like Kriss but none of those writers seem particularly contemporary, just still breathing.

Yeah it really shows how moribund serious literature is when its supposed leading lights are all on dialysis machines. Look at the the age when great writers did their finest work. It's almost always the 20s, 30s, and 40s

>>10468
for some reason it's tripping up the chud filters. I tried T_T

Thanks for trying

>>10468
1/?

"A fire was in my head"
Numb in Northern Ireland
---------------

Three years ago, I took my girlfriend to Hebron to walk around the eerie ruins of the old city. It’s not a nice place. Wasteland of barbed wire and broken glass, into which the settlers have copy-pasted a few gaudy apartment buildings. She’d wanted to go to the Dead Sea and bob around in its famously tonic saline waters. I’d insisted on taking her to the heart of the occupied West Bank instead. I think it was, in the end, a piece of very classic Jewish male neuroticism. So you think you like me, do you? So you met my parents, and you like them too? But what about my extended family? What about this bearded freak, goat teeth, spittle-flecked lips, wearing a fur hat for a Polish winter as he totes his assault rifle around the ruins of a hostile city in the Middle East? What about these mobs of cross-eyed children pelting Palestinians with rocks? What about this society of religious maniacs, sacrificing their lives to the whims of a pedantic and sectarian God? Because that’s what you’re getting into when you decide to give it a go with this nice boy from North London. Some people expose themselves on public transport; I take the long way round. But I still need you to know what I am. I am a creature. I am an unclean thing.

Despite being a very English person, she also happens to have a second passport. Hers is Irish. That one comes with a lot less baggage. Everyone likes the Irish. The only armed Irishmen in the Middle East are the UNIFIL peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, and by all accounts the local Lebanese are utterly charmed by all the genial red-faced Patricks and Conors who’ve been posted to their villages. They keep inviting them into their houses and foisting huge plates of kubbeh and fattoush on them. Wrinkled old women in black hijabs kiss them on the cheek. Every Latin American country fondly remembers some charismatic wandering Irishman who came to fight in their independence struggle. All the formerly colonised peoples of the world feel a deep and abiding sympathy with the Irish, who suffered through it first, but who still came out of the experience as the nicest bunch of lads you’ll ever meet, unpretentious and good-natured and always down for the craic. You could wash up on North Sentinel Island and the locals would embrace you like a brother as soon as they saw the harp on that passport. Some people are easy to like, and some people are an acquired taste. I’m not jealous. I’m fine. These are simply the facts.

Anyway, a few months ago I was invited to go over to Ireland for some kind of big family get-together, celebrating the ninetieth birthday of some big family matriarch. I was excited. I’d never been to Ireland before. Which is strange, when you think about it. I have ridden steppe ponies across the plains of Inner Mongolia, I have meditated under the tree where the Buddha first attained enlightenment, I have seen the ruins of Aztec monuments made from human skulls plastered with lime, but I’d still managed to go thirty-five years without once setting foot on the next island over. And this was despite the fact that literally every single woman I’ve ever seriously dated here has been, at most, two generations removed from the Emerald Isle. It’s not like I go out looking for Irish people in particular, things just happened that way. It’s probably not that unusual; aren’t all the goyim in London at least a little bit Irish? The one thing that should have given me pause was the fact that my girlfriend had that Irish passport, even though I happened to know that according to her ancestry.com results she was mixed Scottish and English with a trace of the Iberian peninsula from the Mesolithic migrations but no actual Irish ancestry at all. But I hadn’t put two and two together. Not until I discovered that the big family get-together would be taking place in County Antrim in Northern Ireland, and that one of their eminent common ancestors had been a famous Protestant preacher.

If you walk out of Belfast’s shiny modern Grand Central Station and go about a minute south, you’re greeted by an enormous mural of King William of Orange, celebrating his victory over Catholic forces in the Battle of the Boyne, more than three hundred years ago. That mural is a pretty recent development. It only went up in 2012, after years of careful and delicate negotiations with the local community. Before that, there was a different mural on the same site. It said YOU ARE NOW ENTERING LOYALIST SANDY ROW—HEARTLAND OF SOUTH BELFAST—ULSTER FREEDOM FIGHTERS. Next to the words was an image of a man in a black balaclava hoisting a Kalashnikov. Your people, I said to my girlfriend. Turns out we’re not so different after all.

Even among terrorist groups, some people are more sympathetic than others. The Troubles in Northern Ireland were a nasty, ugly, sectarian slugfest on every side, but at least the IRA were fighting to liberate their homeland from foreign occupation. You might not agree with their methods, but the cause seems just. The Ulster Loyalists, meanwhile, are an entire people living on the wrong side of history. What were the Ulster Freedom Fighters even fighting for? Religious bigotry and not much else. The Republicans are in solidarity with liberation struggles around the world; the Loyalists fly Israeli flags out of sheer pettiness. Republicans have hopeful slogans like ‘Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.’ What’s the Loyalist equivalent? ‘Never! Never! Never! Never!’ The Loyalists don’t even have any good songs. Come Out Ye Black and Tans is an undeniable bop. Have you ever tried listening to Loyalist music? Hideous, plodding, tuneless crap. The music of a people who fundamentally do not enjoy life. They play the flute, not because they like it, but as an instrument of ethnic terror.

But I am a contrarian. I’m not going to try to convince you that the Loyalists are in the right. I’m just asking you to spare a thought, if you can, for the luckless, unloveable Prod.

Let’s say you’re a Prod. Your history begins in the Scottish Borders, also known as the Debatable Land, a span of dun heatherland straddling the boundary between two permanently warring kingdoms. Debatable because no one could agree who it belonged to; every few years a Scottish army would head south, burning villages and looting grain and killing at random, and then in response an English army would go barrelling north to do some burning and looting and killing of their own. This started in 1296 and kept going until the two kingdoms were united in 1603: three hundred years of sporadic massacre. Impossible to maintain ordinary peasant life in this situation. If you’re tied to a little square of ground you will be killed there, and if your wealth is in granaries full of grain it will be plundered. So you stop practicing agriculture altogether and raise cattle instead. That way, when an army comes, you can just withdraw with your herds into the hills. So the fields went to wasteland and the villages turned to ruins. Meanwhile, you discover that raising cattle in an area with no consistent state authority comes with its own problems. Because herds are highly mobile, it’s very easy for another pastoralist to simply come over to your meadow, kill you, and steal your livestock. Once this kind of thing has happened a few times, it makes a lot of sense for you to do it to your neighbour first. Which is how a damp corner of Britain ended up developing a way of life basically identical to that of civil war-era Somalia.

>>10468
2/?

They called it reiving. For three hundred years, cattle-raiding was the mode of production and the cultural bedrock of the Borders. Society split into kinship groups, clans. The Johnstones, the Armstrongs, the Nixons, the Grahams, the Elliots, the Bells: warrior tribes half-gone to savagery. Clan loyalties were absolute. If someone from another clan killed you in some gratuitously gory way, your own clan would march out to do equally horrible things to one of their relatives. The Johnstones liked to decorate their halls with the flayed skins of the Maxwells. Sometimes a raiding party would kill you on the road, cut you into pieces, and stuff you into your horse’s saddlebags, so your family could find you when it wandered home. The main difference between the border reivers and similar clan-based cattle-raiding societies in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa is that the borderers had no institution of diya or blood-money. In Somalia a murderer’s clan can pay off the victims and it’ll end there; in Northumbria there was nothing to stop any act of violence spiralling into a centuries-long feud. In 1600 an Alexander Napier was offered £1,000 for the death of his brother, and refused. ‘All is dishonorabell quhair there is not eie for eie and tuith for tuith.’ Better to die fighting than take the money and live.

Meanwhile, you are also adopting a deranged and stark religion. For a long time, the reiver clans were irreligious to the point of Satanism. In 1525 Gavin Dunbar, Archbishop of Glasgow, issued a ‘Great Monition of Cursing’ on all the border clans, in which he personally consigned you to Hell. ‘I CURSE thair heid and all the haris of thair heid; I CURSE thair face, thair ene, thair mouth, thair neise, thair toung, thair teith. The maledictioun of God, that lichtit apon Lucifer and all his fallowis, that strak thain frae the hie hevin to the deip hell, mot licht apon thaim. I CONDEMN thaim perpetualie to the deip pit of hell, to remain with Lucifer and all his fallowis, and thair bodies to the gallowis.’ This was read from the pulpit of every church in the region; the Johnstones responded by simply burning down all the churches. But in the decades after the Scottish Reformation, the border clans took to the Presbyterian Church and its Calvinist theology with real fury. The world is divided between the elect and the damned; if God has chosen you for salvation there is nothing you can do, however bloody, to change his mind. And while in England the central government will send a bishop to hector you, in the Presbyterian Church religious life is in the hands of local elders. In other words, clan leaders: spiritual authority and kinship structure can finally be bundled into one.

But in 1603, King James of Scotland was crowned at Westminster Abbey and suddenly you are no longer living on the distant edges of two separate kingdoms, but right in the middle of a single realm. There had already been attempts to subdue the reivers, which were generally as violent as the reivers themselves; at one point the Rutherford and Hall clans were both outlawed, which made it legal to kill anyone who happened to have either surname. But from 1609, James finally pacified the borders by simply deporting its population. You were forced onto a boat at gunpoint and sent over the sea to Ireland.

Ireland is spooky. You come from a country that’s been disenchanted by three centuries of tribal warfare, godlessness, and Protestantism, until every place is just a quantity of pasturage to buy or sell or raid, and then you’re suddenly dropped in the land of the hollow hills, inhabited by one of the holy peoples of the world.

Most people are just people. They farm carbohydrates out of the soil; a ruling class expropriates some of it in exchange for architecture; there’s usually some kind of frilly national dress and a thousand-year grudge against the nearest foreigners; that’s about it. There’s nothing wrong with just being people; some just-peoples have been incredibly significant. The Romans were just people, and look what they did. You can think of some others, and you’ll probably be right. But every so often there’s a holy people, who don’t just turn cereal crops into monuments, but were put here to represent an idea in history. The Jews are the most obvious case: at some point in the first millennium BC this group of basically ordinary Levantine henotheists were suddenly seized with the idea that THERE IS ONLY ONE GOD, repeatedly throwing the idea that THERE IS ONLY ONE GOD at the world until it stuck, at which point the world responded by more or less continuously slaughtering us for two thousand years. We could have opted out of the persecution at any point by abandoning our mission and becoming just-people like everyone else, but we wouldn’t. Odd behaviour all round. You get the sense that the Mexica might have been another holy people. Somewhere in the deserts, a tribe starts twitching with the notion that YOU HAVE TO FEED THE SUN ON HUMAN BLOOD, and packs up for the long journey south. Like the Jews, they refused to compromise their idea for the sake of popularity. According to one of their own stories, they came to the city of Culhuacan on their travels, where they offered to make an alliance with the local king by marrying his beautiful young daughter to one of their gods. She will be our queen and our sovereign; we will be her people. The king accepted; the Aztecs gave his daughter a beautiful dress, and crowned her head with flowers and iridescent feathers, and daubed her with perfumes, until she was ready. By the time the king arrived for the celebration, an Aztec priest was already dancing in the flayed skin of his daughter. Her body had been opened in a single line from the bottom of the neck down to the top of her pubic mound. The Mexica were chased out of the city in a hail of javelins, out into the swamps, to live alone with their holy mission.

The Celts are another holy people, but their idea is much stranger. It says that THERE IS ANOTHER WORLD VERY CLOSE TO THIS ONE, POPULATED BY PEOPLE WHO ARE LIKE US IN SOME WAYS AND IN OTHER WAYS MORE DIFFERENT THAN WE CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE, AND THERE ARE PLACES WHERE THE BARRIER BETWEEN WORLDS IS THIN, AND SOMETIMES THINGS PASS THROUGH.

They are very insistent about this, but you don’t learn much about what this place is actually like. All you get are glimpses. ‘Though fair to the eye Mag Fáil, it is a desert next to Mag Mór. Intoxicating the ale of Inis Fáil; more intoxicating by far that of Tír Mór.’ Another name for the Great Plain is Tír na mBeo, the land of the living. But you get there through graves: the Neolithic burial mounds left by the people of that other world back when they were still the kings of Ireland. The inhabitants of the beautiful land are the Sídhe or the Aos Sí, the folk of the burial-mounds; their home is earth-clotted and lightless, underground. Sometimes, for reasons we can’t understand, they wander into this world. Which is what happened to a widower called Cruinniuc: one day, a beautiful and ethereal woman simply turned up at his house. She slept with him without saying her name or where she’d come from, and the next day she started keeping his house and looking after his children. Cruinniuc must have known she was one of the Aos Sí, because when King Conchobar of Ulster was showing off his horses, Cruinniuc boasted that his wife could outrun any of them. So Conchobar had him arrested, and told the now heavily pregnant woman that he’d be killed unless she agreed to race the fastest horses in Ulster. She begged the king to let her wait until after she’d given birth; he said no. They lined up in a grassy plain: one massively muscled horse, foaming at the mouth and steaming in the cold, and one red-faced woman, bent over with twins. But she could; she could run faster than the fastest horses in Ireland. She won the race by the breadth of her belly, and as soon as she crossed the line she suddenly collapsed to the ground to give birth. In her agony she cursed the onlookers: for nine generations, every month all the men of Ulster would experience the pains of childbirth for five days and four nights.

Which is why, when Queen Medb of Connacht invaded Ulster with a great army, the country was almost undefended: all the warriors were at home, having birth pangs like women. The only exception was Cú Chulainn, who also had some strange connection to the other world. Once King Conchobar and his daughter Deichtine were out hunting a flock of magical birds that had flown in from the other world and laid waste to the fields of Ulster, when they found themselves in strange country with the snow coming down. They saw a light in the distance: a house, which looked fantastically bright and warm in the growing darkness. The man of the house welcomed them and offered them meat and ale, and they ate and drank while his wife screamed from the storehouse, giving birth. After the child was born she was exhausted, so Deichtine nursed the baby. Then, when they woke up in the morning, everything was gone. No warm beds, no warm fire, no host or hostess, and no house: they had been sleeping on the cold ground, under the open sky. But the baby was still there. Deichtine raised him, and when he was still a boy he became a great killer of men. The things the Tuatha Dé Danann leave here are brighter and grander than the world around them, but also monstrous. When Medb attacked the pang-weak country of Ulster, and Cú Chulainn had to fight off her armies alone, he sometimes went into a ríastrad or warp-spasm. Like a transformation from a children’s cartoon. Knees would snap and bend backwards, cheeks melt away to reveal naked wide-open jaws, one eye sinks deep into the skull, the other rolls down the side of his face, until the beautiful youth had become something alien, insectoid, segmented, slaughtering with invertebrate efficiency, tearing men’s heads between his mandibles…

The Celts have the greatest literature in the world. Nothing comes close. It’s baggy and rambling next to the Arabic tales and emotionally flat next to the Greek epics and crudely amoral next to the Itihasa-Purana, but the Celts were working with something else entirely. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that it was the Irish who saved classical civilisation from the collapse of Rome. St Columbanus crossing the great grey sea, twelve quivering monks and a stack of books in his boat, come to teach the victorious barbarians how to read. I think it has something to do with that invisible other world. A space of consciousness extended beyond direct concrete experience: in other words, the same thing you can experience through storytelling, which conjures invisible scenes in which the material substrate of reality is replaced by a polymorphous flow of words.

But you are an illiterate Prod, and for you it’s all very unpleasant. This wet and misty landscape stretched like a drumskin over something else, drawing its energies from something else, these brooks and forests that are the entranceway to somewhere else, the invisible world of the mind. The country is perforated by thousands of holy wells, water bubbling where some Catholic saint struck the ground or laid his head, and whenever they pass these wells the Irish say a prayer, or tie a strip of cloth to a nearby tree, or drop a votive stone into the waters for—well, who? The saint’s not down there. What are they talking to, that’s living underground? This place is against you; every second you spend here is a war against the stones and the sky. The government that sent you here in chains is now your only ally against the evil of the earth. Your slogans are the slogans of a people under permanent siege. ‘No surrender!’ Every morning you have to get up and hack away at the vines, beat back the mossy forests, stop up the holy wells, level the hollow hills, fight one native revolt after another, the old Catholic gentry with all their powers of darkness and superstition, the priest-riddled hectoring, the Jacobites and their mystic tyranny of kings: you have to wash this soil in blood until it’s all flat and empty, a nice passive instrument for turning sunlight into carbohydrates and carbohydrates into architecture. Which seems like an impossible task at first. But every year the old powers of the earth get a little weaker, and eventually you’re building steelworks and linen works and the biggest shipyard in the world, assembling vast iron machines in the half-real land of the Aos Sí.

You didn’t ask to come here, but you end up inhabiting this land for three hundred years. Against all the odds, you create a thriving, civilised, prosperous society in this place. The magnates and capitalists were Prods, but so were the majority of the workers who caulked and tarred and hackled and fettled and built the world with their hands, piece by piece. But now we’re in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the same people who deported you here are now preparing to abandon you. Home Rule for Ireland, which means handing over the whole island, everything you’ve worked so hard to build, to a bunch of brigands and murderers who hate you. As soon as that happens you’ll become a troublesome religious minority, no longer protected by the state—in fact, utterly loathed by a new, militant state that sees you as an instrument of their oppressors. Hard to say exactly what that would mean, but historically people in this situation tend to get rounded up and shot. You were born on this land. Twelve generations of grandparents are buried here. What would you do?

Belfast is very nearly a normal British city. It feels a lot like home; it’s got all the familiar shops. Here’s the Tesco. Here’s the Pret. Here’s the mysteriously hideous town centre. Everywhere in this country apparently needs one, but Belfast’s is uglier than most. Lifeless jumble of glassy blocks and grotty commercial units, scattered between wide windswept roads with too many lanes. A few pockmarked old neoclassical buildings, still standing shellshocked in the middle of it all like a pensioner in a crack den. By the river there’s the former industrial area they’re trying to redevelop with warehouse-style exposed-brick housing units. To the south there’s the parks and posh Victorian houses and the regional Chinese food. But west of the town centre, just outside the ring road, where there really ought to be a bunch of former slum terraces now riddled with small plates restaurants, you instead find yourself walking into an endless maze of suburban-style semis. Barratt homes, Deano boxes, the cheapo mass-produced houses that have been crapped out into the outskirts of every market town in the country. But what are they doing here?

>>10468
3/?

The answer is that there used to be a lot of dense terraces here, but they were all burned down when the cheerful and charismatic people of this basically normal city were busy looting and destroying each other’s neighbourhoods. You can see photos from the time: people standing around in the wreckage, a place as totally destroyed as Gaza or Aleppo, armoured vehicles trundling through the ruins, except here all the advertising billboards are still there. Buy Cadbury’s chocolate. Buy Coca-Cola. Buy a new car. The ring road is so wide because the town centre here used to be a sterile fortress, surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by soldiers with machine guns, and the ring road was its glacis. There was a big concrete housing estate too, but guerrilla snipers used to fire from the windows, and then the authorities strafed the building with machine-gun fire, splattering ordinary people against the walls of their homes. It went like that for decades, people coming home from work every day to an ongoing civil war. Now it’s been demolished. More plasticky cottages. They don’t look exactly like the ones in England; these ones are covered in murals and flags. On every corner these crappy new-builds are covered in pictures of the dead. We remember the innocent victims of 1969. Never forget the innocent victims of 1992. Innocent victims of 1983: slaughtered in cold blood. Then the symbols of various paramilitary groups. They still have peace walls, enormous barricades topped with wire to separate one tract from another. It all felt very ridiculous, those prim little semis. Aside from the sectarian symbols, a lot of them were decorated with ornamental birdbaths in the shape of giant teddy bears, window decals of dolphins jumping through rainbows, that sort of thing. Insane to be keeping up an eight-hundred-year-old ethnic grievance from houses like that.

But this place has always been weird. Walled off from reality. The Prods got what they wanted in 1921; their own little fiefdom, carved out of Ireland, self-governing under British sovereignty, with a two-to-one Loyalist majority. Which was, more or less, their undoing. As soon as you substitute demography for politics, you’re doomed. The new Northern Ireland was essentially a one-party state under the Ulster Unionist Party, which won every election from 1921 to 1969. (In that entire period, Northern Ireland had only four Prime Ministers. The UK has had six in the last decade.) It didn’t keep winning because anyone thought it was doing a particularly fantastic job of governing; you voted for the UUP because you were a Protestant. The party’s job was to make sure you, and not some filthy Catholic, were the one getting a public-sector job and a council house and the protection of the police. The entire state had turned into one vast ethnic patronage network. A bloated twentieth-century version of the reivers and their clan loyalties. Not voting for the UUP would be a betrayal of the group. So what if you want to do things differently? Who do you think you are? You’re not a person; you’re a member of a community. Don’t you know the Catholics are outbreeding us? Don’t you know that just over the border, Éamon de Valera stalks the land on his long long legs? Split the vote and we’ll all be in his clutches; there’ll be a Catholic priest billeted in every home, pouring Popery in your children’s ears…

Some people did still try. Of all the Republican murals I saw in the Falls Road, my favourite was one commemorating the group of Protestant socialists who attended the 1934 Wolfe Tone commemoration with a big banner that said ‘BREAK THE CONNECTION WITH CAPITALISM.’ The mural is dedicated to ‘the Belfast men who fought against fascism.’ It stirred up a bit of the old spirit in me. Thank God for the workers’ movement! Only socialism can clear away all this identity-politics bullshit, unite both sides in joint proletarian struggle… And it is very touching that the Republicans would commemorate these people, but what the mural doesn’t depict is what happened immediately after they turned up in 1934, which is that they were attacked by the rest of the attendees on sectarian grounds and their banner was destroyed. Fewer and fewer attempts at that sort of thing as time went on. You can’t do actual politics in a sectarian environment. So Northern Ireland settled into a grey stasis while the rest of the world kept changing. In a way it makes sense, the really gratuitous violence that came afterwards. To grab a stranger off the streets and hack him to bits, to suddenly liquefy some shoppers with a pipe bomb: after half a century of suffocation, it must have felt like a breath of fresh air.

Before the violence got going, though, there was still some prospect for something better. Tens of thousands of people, including some Protestants, mobilised for civil rights: one man one vote, fair political representation, equal access to jobs and services. These were all totally reasonable demands, which is why from 1968 on the British state overruled its deformed little pet government in Stormont and instituted all of them. The system in which only property owners could vote (and business owners could vote twice) was abolished. The Orangemen in the local councils were stripped of the ability to allocate housing, which went to a new nonsectarian executive. The B-Specials, a violent ethnic mob occasionally masquerading as a part-time police force, were disbanded. Finally, the British authorities dismantled the Prod mafia in Stormont altogether. They even tried to set up a power-sharing executive, basically the same as the one enacted after the Good Friday agreement. The Civil Rights movement had achieved everything it wanted. But by 1969 there had already been communal riots across the country, neighbourhoods burned to the ground, and by 1972 British paratroopers had opened fire on a peaceful protest and killed fourteen people. Nobody was in the mood for a simple bureaucratic fix. The fire was in their heads. So now there was a new set of demands. A united Ireland; Brits out. Before 1969, the IRA was dominated by Marxists who wanted to build an anti-capitalist alliance with Protestant workers. That year, a straightforwardly ethnic-nationalist faction split off and formed its own army council. The Provisional IRA announced that unlike the Marxists, they would defend Catholic neighbourhoods with force of arms. They started building bombs.

>>10468
4/?

Irish nationalism tends to get a free pass, even from people who manage to recognise other nationalisms for the mindless termite-mound ideologies they are. And it’s hard not to sympathise a little. For hundreds of years, Ireland had been ruled by an openly hostile British administration that wanted to eradicate the Irish language, overthrow the Irish religion, and seemed pretty comfortable with the mass starvation of the Irish people. Maybe things would be better if we were ruled by a government not outrightly committed to our cultural genocide. Hard to say fairer than that. Once you get past that point, though, it’s all nonsense.

The great dirty secret of Irish nationalism is that practically none of the people involved in its early development were actually Irish. They were from the English settler gentry, who’d been seizing Irish lands long before the Borderers arrived in Ulster. Theobald Wolfe Tone, the founder of Irish republicanism, who took up arms in the name of an independent Ireland in 1798, was an Anglo-Irish Protestant. Edward Fitzgerald, globetrotting conspirator who died resisting arrest in a frenzied knifefight, was an Anglo-Irish Protestant. Robert Emmet, who led another rebellion five years later, and told the judge when he was captured that ‘if it were possible to collect all the innocent blood that you have shed in your unhallowed ministry in one great reservoir, your lordship might swim in it’ before being executed—he was also an Anglo-Irish Protestant. Thomas Davis, who led the Young Ireland movement, was an Anglo-Irish Protestant. William Smith O’Brien, who led another failed rebellion during the Famine, was an Anglo-Irish Protestant. Charles Stewart Parnell, who led the Home Rule League in Parliament, was an Anglo-Irish Protestant. Douglas Hyde, who founded the Gaelic League and all but single-handedly revived the Irish language, was an Anglo-Irish Protestant. Standish O’Grady, who championed the heroic cycles and turned Cú Chulainn into a national symbol, was an Anglo-Irish Protestant. WB Yeats, who you already know—him too.

This shouldn’t be surprising. In its entire history, there’s only one time Ireland has been governed as a single political unit: under the British. Only the British administrative class could imagine that the natural form of Irish self-government would be a single centralised state, corresponding to a single cultural identity, and not the eternally warring dynasties of Ulaidh, Laighin, Mumha, Connachta, and Mide. At the same time, though, these people were, like me, really into the Celtic tales. Like me, they felt the lure of Tír na nÓg. They reworked the old material and made it new. Yeats:

> Though I am old with wandering
> Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
> I will find out where she has gone,
> And kiss her lips and take her hands;
> And walk among long dappled grass,
> And pluck till time and times are done,
> The silver apples of the moon,
> The golden apples of the sun.

It’s good stuff! But there might have been more practical considerations. Reviving all this near-dead Gaelachas offered a new ground for Irish identity, one that they, as not-quite-Irish people with a good university education, could participate in. Most importantly, it was a ground for Irish identity that had nothing to do with the actual substance of national and spiritual life in Ireland, which was the Roman Catholic Church.

It didn’t quite work out. The Anglo-Irish nationalists wanted to turn the Irish into a holy people again. A deeply spiritual society, fierce and strange, half buried in that other world that surges beyond the human senses. But the Irish didn’t want to be a holy people; they just wanted to live in their own little Catholic ethnostate without any Brits telling them what to do, and they didn’t care much for the weird avant-garde art the romantic nationalists kept foisting on them either. Twelve years after he wrote the flouncy romantic poem above, Yeats was spitting liquid contempt for the ordinary, small-minded nation he called his own:

> What need you, being come to sense,
> But fumble in a greasy till
> And add the halfpence to the pence
> And prayer to shivering prayer, until
> You have dried the marrow from the bone;
> For men were born to pray and save:
> Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
> It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

(By the way—it’s probably significant that neither of the two epochally great Irish writers of the period had any patience at all for the pompous guff of nationalism. See the Citizen in Ulysses, a petty bigoted pub bore unloved by his creator. He doesn’t know it, but the whole time he’s arguing with Leopold Bloom in Barney Kiernan’s pub, Joyce is privately mocking him with silly comparisons to Cú Chulainn. ‘The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded wide-mouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. The widewinged nostrils were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the field-lark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. So anyhow Terry brought the three pints Joe was standing and begob the sight nearly left my eyes when I saw him land out a quid.’ Beckett’s Murphy is more direct. Neary walks into the Dublin Post Office to admire the statue of Cú Chulainn there, built to commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising: ‘Suddenly he flung aside his hat, sprang forward, seized the dying hero by the thighs and began to dash his head against his buttocks, such as they are.’ Both men left Ireland for the Continent.)

>>10468
5/?

Still, all these starry-eyed Anglicans did leave a residue, in the form of one very deranged idea. For nationalists, the state isn’t just here to collect taxes, provide services, and administer justice; its job is to be the mystical expression of your ethnic identity. At this point, as far as I’m concerned, you’re talking moon language. The country I live in doesn’t express my ethnic identity and it’s fine; there’s another country in the Middle East that does express my ethnic identity and I hate it. Worse, this mystic drivel almost always coincides with some kind of rabid irridentism. It’s not enough to settle for a state that doesn’t actively discriminate against you personally; your state must also get to rule over an entirely different group of people, who’ve expressed a strong preference against being governed by it. India must have Kashmir. Serbia must have Kosovo. Ireland must have Ulster. Do you really have so little going on for yourself that you’ve got to start foaming about the exact borders of your country? [1] Even if you actually live in the disputed zone, my sympathy is limited. Say you’re a Catholic from Belfast who wants to live in an Irish republic rather than under the British Crown. I have good news for you: an Irish republic already exists; it’s an hour’s drive away; off you go. Better solution than killing people. (While we’re at it, did the Ulster Loyalists who fought to maintain their British identity not know about the large island to their east?) But the stakes had nothing to do with ordinary preferences. In the south, the romantic struggle for Ireland might have yielded one fusty and boring republic, but in the north, everything was still wide open. Patriots under arms, daring raids against the Brits, overthrowing eight hundred years of humiliation, the invigorating nation-forging power of violence. According to the Provisional IRA, the Irish Republic was an illegitimate usurper state; since 1921 the real Ireland has been a spectre, existing in the cracks of history; its true representatives are these men in balaclavas, emerging from out the hollow hills to set off bombs in restaurants. But when the IRA win, the occulted Ireland will flower again in this world, and life will change in ways you can’t possibly imagine…

When you strip away all the mythic fluff, though, the state is still a machine for collecting taxes and providing public services. The Republican dream was for a state that did this in a specifically Irish way, in which nationhood is the substance of politics: in other words, they wanted something basically identical to the suffocating airless majoritarian politics of the UUP. And when this is the only thing anyone wants, what you get is a very rapid descent into barbarism.

As ethnic conflicts go, the Troubles were not that bad. Three and a half thousand corpses over the course of thirty years: rookie numbers. That’s a single month in the former Yugoslavia, or ten days in Gaza, or two hours in Rwanda. But I still find it shocking that it happened here, in my country, in a place with all the familiar shops. On one side of the Irish Sea, my parents’ generation were experimenting with electropop and asymmetrical haircuts. Across the water, Loyalist death squads haunted the streets at night. Sometimes they’d grab someone suspected of being Catholic and spend a few hours lazily torturing them with knives and broken bottles before dumping the body to be found by kids the next day. A few of the Shankill Butchers’ victims were Protestants targeted by mistake; a few more were Protestants targeted deliberately. They were in constant murderous feuds with rival Loyalist paramilitaries. Everyone torturing and killing everyone else. You start with a prim bourgeois loyalty to Queen and country and faith and flag; see where that gets you. Before long your whole community is dominated by these blood-splattered savages. These are your representatives. Cringe before them or the enemy wins. Meanwhile in Long Kesh the hunger strikers are crouched on a bed, naked under a filthy blanket, unwashed, stinking, teeth falling out their gums, lice and maggots crawling in their beards, eyes crazed, lips peeling, living in a cavern where every surface, floor, walls, ceiling, is plastered with hardened layers of their own shit, and starving themselves to death. Start with the high romance of Irish myth, an ogham on a stone, a flash of a silver-white doe in the dark of the woods. End with this prehistoric squalor, a human being reduced to bare life. And if you’re from a Catholic background, you have to support this. You have to pretend it’s heroic. After all, they’re doing it for you.

Anyway, this was the kind of thing I was thinking about as I left Belfast to meet my girlfriend’s relatives. We stopped off along the coast to climb the hills and gawp at the ruined castles, and I thought about what would be waiting for me out in County Antrim. Dreaded it as I clambered over the Giant’s Causeway. Visions of a whitewashed village hall, pebbledashed in green fields. Inside it would be hung with Union Flags, portraits of King William and King Charles, maybe Ian Paisley for good measure. They’d make me say grace over a platter of some kind of horrible grey food. For some reason, in my head, the Prod spread would have to consist of Ashkenazi food in its most unpalatable forms. Gefilte fish, schmalz herring. I guess these are the dishes I associate with uncomfortable family gatherings. So you’re the Jewboy who’s run off with our daughter, they’d say, and then tell me how much they supported Israel. Well, better a Yid than a Taig. I would be stuck in an infinity of conversations like this with cawing birdlike old women who smelled of mothballs and portly men who smelled of Branston’s pickle, and eventually I wouldn’t be able to hold it in any more, I’d make some kind of massive faux pas, which does seem to be my general pattern, and there’d be a shocked silence in that dusty old village hall, and then my girlfriend would dump me, and then two or three of her distant cousins would lead me round the back of the building and quickly, mercifully execute me with a single shot to the head.

It wasn’t actually like that, of course. In fact, it turned out that most of these Prods weren’t even Prods. There’d been a mixed marriage several generations back, and now a good chunk of the extended family were Catholic, but the kind of Catholic who kept having mixed marriages of their own. One distant cousin had married a beautiful Jamaican microbiologist. They lived together in Copenhagen. She worked for Novo Nordisk. The sun was bright and you could see the Mull of Kintyre looming hazy over the water. We drank prosecco. The ninety-year-old sat without saying much, smiling distantly. There were green fields all around, sweet baby-faced kine munching contentedly on the rich wet grasses. It really is an astonishingly green country, buzzing lurid neon green, a green from outer space. One relative had brought along her Venezuelan boyfriend; he worked in cybersecurity and turned out to be a fellow member of the tribe. Tetragrammaton tattooed on both his forearms. They lived in Barcelona, but he made frequent trips to London for the live music. That was his real passion in life, rock and roll. He was in a band; in fact he seemed to be drifting in and out of several bands. I asked what kind of music they made. Rock and roll, he said, grinning widely. He asked me who my favourite band were and I said the Fall. He hadn’t heard of them but he made the sign of the horns anyway. Far out, he said. And who were his favourite band? Just rock and roll, man, he said. All of it. I just love rock and roll.

It’s over. There’s something on the other side; you can go all the way through a mass collapse into barbarism and then come out again to drink prosecco in the sunshine. It hasn’t all disappeared at once, obviously. The paramilitaries are still around. The armed struggle might be over, but they still use their fading ideological halo to operate as protection rackets, which is really all they ever were. Schools in Northern Ireland are still almost completely segregated. Protestant kids go to state school; Catholic kids go to a maintained school owned by the Catholic Church. There are still riots every so often, and memorials plastered all over West Belfast. But it’s hard to walk around the Shankill or Falls Road without the sense that this is a sectarian-themed Disneyland. The flags, the murals. It’s all sustained by two different types of American, who keep flying in to take a taxi tour through their heritage. A rumbling undercurrent of violence is good for the tourists. Makes them feel like they’ve been in the trenches.

But meanwhile, the last census found that for the first time in five hundred years, Northern Ireland has more Catholics than Protestants. This is not because, as Ian Paisley worried, the Catholics ‘breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin.’ Increasingly, young people are choosing to stop identifying as Protestants or Loyalists. These days, it’s hard to pretend with a straight face that your life would be in danger in a united Ireland. So who cares? Does it really matter all that much whether your taxes go to London or Dublin? You don’t have to be a member of a community any more; you can just be a person instead. Ever since Brexit, large numbers of Northern Irish Protestants have, like my girlfriend, started acquiring Irish passports. It makes things easier. If you ever get sick of County Antrim, you can always move to Spain.

Even the ancient past is being rewritten. Across rural Northern Ireland, you find little plaques marking the spots where famous events were filmed in Game of Thrones. These hedges once served as the Kingsroad, which stretched from King’s Landing to the Wall. At this very spot in Ballintoy Harbour, Theon Greyjoy returned to the Iron Islands to claim his inheritance. The White Walkers were defeated here, in the fields of County Antrim… It seems inevitable that this stuff, which everyone can take part in, will supersede the awkward, uncomfortable events that actually happened. Better to remember the Battlee of the Bastards than the Battle of the Boyne. It has its roots here, after all. You can draw a straight line from the old Celtic myths through JRR Tolkien to the modern fantasy genre and Game of Thrones. Would it be so strange, in Ireland, for all your national myths to be set in another world, with an imaginary geography, lit by a different sun?

Anyway, eventually the real sun set over the Straits of Moyle, and I vaped a bit in the loo even though I’m supposed to be giving up nicotine altogether, and then the next day I was on a Ryanair back to Stansted. Sat on the train as it gurgled through the collapsing industrial estates of England. They’ve got amazing names, the towns in that part of Essex. Gaunt’s End. Matching Tye. Bishop’s Stortford. Ugley Green. What they also have, increasingly, are flags. Hundreds of them, plastic British flags fluttering from every lamppost. People on the mainland used to find that sort of thing vaguely crass. Not so much any more. They’re feeling under siege; they feel like strangers in their own country. These days all our politics are spiralling around questions of identity, belonging, nationhood, what it means to be British. Democracy congeals along ethnic lines. In the last local elections, some of Reform UK’s most surprising results were in heavily multicultural cities. How did an anti-immigration party win the largest vote share in places like Bradford and Birmingham? Because more or less every single remaining white resident is voting for them. It doesn’t matter that Reform have fucked up every council they’ve ever run: you’re not voting for a housing policy, you’re voting so the state will continue to reflect your ethnic identity.

Meanwhile, Muslim voters are increasingly lining up behind a cluster of independent candidates who campaign in thobes and promise to use their position in local government to agitate for Gaza. In Tower Hamlets, Somali families have been complaining that they’re locked out of access to council housing, because local government is dominated by the Aspire party, whose thirty-three councillors are all uniformly Bengali. (In fact, they’re all specifically from the Sylhet region of Bangladesh. Seven of them have the same surname.) Tower Hamlets is 35% Bengali; for Aspire to get the vote share they do, they’d need essentially every Bengali vote in the borough. The allegation is that in return, they’re systematically diverting public funds to their own ethnic group. A lot of these new political vehicles are also plugged into biraderi, patriarchal ethnic patronage networks, but then successive British governments have engaged with biraderi too. It’s called community relations. There’s the Muslim community, and there’s the Jewish community, and every so often a migrant or the child of migrants does something monstrous, and then a bunch of shirtless gacked-up men fill the streets to throw bins at windows, and that’s the white community. This doesn’t feel fantastic. The next few centuries might be rough. But maybe, if we’re lucky, there’ll be something for us on the other side.

---------

[1] This is why I’m increasingly impatient with that pro-Palestine chant about the two bodies of water. It’s hard to voice the impatience, because the most insane people in the world keep going into tizzies over how the chant implies the extermination of the world’s Jews, which it doesn’t. But it’s bad in a different way. It means that only the whole country will do: we’re not making any compromises for the sake of a decent life; we will keep throwing one generation of our children after another into an IDF kill zone until the lines on the map look exactly the way we want. It doesn’t help that in Arabic, the usual version doesn’t say that from the river to the sea Palestine will be free, but that Filastin arabiyye, or Palestine is Arab.

>>10468
I pasted this here because someone did the same for me once and I wanted to pay forward the favour. But please consider subscribing to Sam if you have the spare cash. For me he's worth the cost of a beer a month.

Just use dpaste or something there's a hundred text paste sites out there good god

>>10532

It’s called humanities intelligence (HQ) but I wouldn’t expect a STEMlord like you to understand

>>10523
> By the way—it’s probably significant that neither of the two epochally great Irish writers of the period had any patience at all for the pompous guff of nationalism. See the Citizen in Ulysses, a petty bigoted pub bore unloved by his creator. He doesn’t know it, but the whole time he’s arguing with Leopold Bloom in Barney Kiernan’s pub, Joyce is privately mocking him with silly comparisons to Cú Chulainn.
I know it's common that people dip into Ulysses by reading Molly's chapter (an academic on In Our Time pointed out something obvious I hadn't realised, that this is what Marilyn Monroe is doing in that famous picture of her reading Ulysses), or else they skip to the first Bloom chapter, but I think I would recommend to people that they try reading the Citizen chapter (I think it's called Cyclops). One of the most out-and-out comic chapters, and innately and immediately funny to anyone who has been trapped in an awful pub conversation. At the same time, as Kriss remarks here, it's a fantastic send-up of small-minded nationalists. It's about a GAA man with a brain the size of a sliotar, but it could just as well be about some gammon-faced little englander, the personality is identical.

>>10535
Right, really putting the "q" in "intelligence" lmao

>10520

Thank you so much you're an absolute legend for sharing this