I was listening to a podcast by NY Times token “conservative” Russ Douthat talking to conservative publisher Jonathan Keeperman.
Keeperman is a publisher for a press called Passage Publishing. He has a lot of avant-garde friends like Curtis Yarvin and possibly some of the Silicon Valley folks like Peter Thiel. He and Douthat talked (a lot) about how the Right is becoming a sort of counter-culture in the way that the Left did back in the 1960s and beyond.
It’s kind of interesting to hear them discuss this shift in the culture in general but one of the more interesting things that Douthat said was that up until now the Right hasn’t produced any real literature on its side of the cultural divide. Then Keeperman made some offbeat suggestions saying things like Cormac McCarthy’s
“No Country for Old Men” is from the right. I think specifically he said that the Coen Brother’s movie based on it is from the Right. Now never in any imagining have I ever equated the Coen Brothers or their movies with anything right-wing. So, I find this very strange. And honestly, all the people associated with Curtis Yarvin have always struck me as hipsters. And I have always ranked hipsters as the most left-leaning of all the various weirdos to be found in New York City. So, none of this makes a lot of sense.
But I guess if someone interested in literature who wasn’t a Leftist wanted to talk to the New York Times about literature, he would talk to Russ Douthat and try to find some middle ground where they could both make believe that Douthat wasn’t a total leftist.
I was interested to read that Keeperman has published illustrated editions of H P Lovecraft and Robert E Howard and that leads me to think that maybe he’s not a leftist. The Left despises both of those old authors and would never publish their works under any circumstance. So, I need to find out a lot more about Keeperman and his press. It could be interesting.
But he said one interesting thing about the current state of right-wing literature. He said that the problem with most of it is that it’s mostly just grievance based. It exists to rail against and blame the leftist society we currently live in and therefore loses the chance to be “vital.” Essentially, it’s existence is only as a protest against the status quo and therefore only has a negative presence.
And that interested me. Because my book is in a real way, exactly that. It is a war being fought against the status quo. And so, I have to look at what I wrote and see if his criticism of this kind of story is a legitimate case against the value of the story I have written. In order to do that I will have to look at what gives “vitality” and entertainment value to a story.
Of course, all things are relative and being objective, especially about something I myself wrote is fraught with peril. Probably the only way to know for sure is to attempt to get it published and see what results. But it has given me pause and I will think long and hard to see if I think there are any aspects of the story that lack “vitality.” Whatever that is. Boy when it rains it pours.