Kentucky Meat Shower Will Now Be Hosted on Kittysneezes + "No Country for Cringe Men" in Typebar + Issue #27
The final post on this substack, but not the final Kentucky Meat Shower post.
Hello all,
As we all know, I did say Kentucky Meat Shower would be on another platform at some point. I'm very happy to announce it'll be on Kittysneezes, where I’ll be sharing space with the podcasts Rite Gud and Infinite Danger (which I think is excellent so far), as well as other writers who aren’t satisfied with substack’s business decisions.
I was never fully comfortable with Substack’s “Intellectual Dark Web” bromides, mostly because I think those people are losers. I feel ashamed I have to have them as enemies. From a certain light, the monsters of yesterday are ridiculous as well. But for better or worse, people are going to be arguing about Heidegger for as long as we wonder what the world is all about, no matter how much dignity he threw away trying to impress the Nazis. Nobody gives a fuck about any of these Dark Web guys. They’re vessels.
What I did not expect was them to allow somebody like Richard Spencer to make money on their site. It might be old hat to talk about connections between the right and Silicon Valley, but it’s there. And then there’s the whole “follwers” controversy, attempting to turn Substack into a social media platform, which just strikes me as a stupid attempt to compete with Twitter. As other substack users and I talked about it, eventually, Matt Keeley of Kittysneezes made the offer to host Substack exiles like myself and other talented writers and creative people.
Personally, I feel like it’s a much better fit than San Fernando’s fascist answer to Mailchimp. Rite Gud is one of very few podcasts I make a genuine attempt to listen to every episode of, along with Episode 1, so you can imagine how I feel.
This process may take a moment. I will keep muleskinnerpress.substack.com open, as I don’t plan on translating all of my material. As far as getting Kentucky Meat Shower in your email goes, the best part is we’ve exported your email addresses. You’ll continue getting issues, without any sort of need to resubscribe.
As for other news…
NO COUNTRY FOR CRINGE MEN
I’m pleased to announce I’m in the first issue of Typebar Magazine, writing about one of my long standing fascinations: Doug Walker, aka The Nostalgia Critic, and his trio of full-length films Kickassia, Suburban Knights, and To Boldly Flee. The overall story of how one man from the YTMND internet created an empire and destroyed it because he gradually grew convinced he had something to say is one I’ve long found interesting. What I hadn’t done was actually watch the movies. What I found was a fascinating trio of artifacts from online antiquity, one that tells us as much about who we were as it tells us about ourselves now, when we laugh at our old selves. It was a pleasure to consider what these dogshit movies were saying, because they’re rich texts, much in the way the juice at the bottom of a trash can is a rich broth.
I’m very proud of “No Country for Cringe Men”, and also to be in the opening issue with a group of great, thoughtful pieces on everything from the Barbie typewriter to sci-fi’s readership crisis. Sean Dillon’s essay that focuses more on To Boldly Flee is good, too, especially if you want a more in-depth review of one of the films, as I’m focusing more on the trilogy as a whole.
As for other good things…
ISSUE #27 IS COMPLETE
I have finally finished the most difficult issue of Kentucky Meat Shower yet. Unfortunately, when everyone sees it, they’ll be surprised I had so much difficulty. I canned at least 5 or 6 drafts, and I never really stopped writing it. The end issue is maybe ten pages. One draft went up to 25.
To get everyone reacquainted with the loose trilogy A Prophet of His Own, I’ll be re-running the preceding issues at Kittysneezes.
But what’s next?
What’s next is I write essays purely for pleasure, which means when I want to. I’m committing myself seriously to fiction writing and getting ready to push Muleskinner Press forward into a viable zine press, which will push us from tabling into the online world.
As for issues #28 onward, I’m not even beginning to write the next “cycle” of Kentucky Meat Shower until August. But I have two ideas, and it just depends which one seems better first. (One of these means we’d be about roughly the same topic until issue #54). It may depend on which one gets written first. One thing is for sure: I’m writing a series of issues ahead of time before we publish.
Goodbye.
I despise what Substack became. But I’d like to take a moment to talk about what Kentucky Meat Shower has meant to me over the years.
I’ve never really understood how to pitch this to people. I just wrote. Just writing took a lot of faith I never would have had without the people who read. It’s a literary zine that started as a newsletter. It grew out from my writing at other places. At some point, it took over.
I didn’t get flooded with comments every time I released an issue, but I got enough that showed me enough people were interested. I call a lot of those people friends, but I wouldn’t be friends with people who have bad taste. I tend to make friends with people who like my writing because my goal is to write things I like. We’re both fans. That might be conceited but I spend a lot of time on this. If I hated it, I’d have quit.
I’d like to talk about style for a moment. I don’t write the same everywhere, but Kentucky Meat Shower is a laboratory where I work out how I might write in the future. You can’t imagine or know how valuable it is to have that unless you’re me.
Thank you all. Happy trails, I guess. I’ll see you on Kittysneezes.