First of all, I want to apologize for allowing this substack to lie fallow for so long. It’s been a brutal year, characterized by depression, learned helplessness, and pervasive writer’s block. I haven’t written much this year and a lot of what I have written ended up unfinished and abandonned. I’ve only published three articles this year, all on The Last Estate: a reflection on the death of culture, a fragmentary analysis of Kanye West’s Donda, and a despairing review of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel series, The Rings of Power. A pitiful output, even by my already fairly abysmal standards. I hope to do better in the new year. (Don’t we all.)
As I write this, Misery Tourism’s final piece just went live. Rudy and I don’t have any big plans for the site’s closure. We’ve opted to allow it to simply evaporate, to cool and fade away rather than die in heat and light. It feels less traumatic, less final. (Plus, as I said just a paragraph ago: depression.)
But we didn’t want to leave our readers with absolutely nothing, so we sat down and had a long, frank conversation about our thoughts and feelings regarding the death of our literary child, a conversation that you can listen to in its entirety above. Be warned: this is not a podcast. There has been no editing, and we didn’t have a script. We didn’t even discuss what we were going to say before I hit “record.” It’s almost three hours of us speaking extemporaneously, “uh”s and “like”s and audio glitches included. The upside to this approach is that I think we were both more candid than we would have been otherwise (perhaps to a fault in my case). We talk openly about our frustrations with social media and indie publishing and our personal, financial, and mental health struggles. We go off on tangents. We get emotional. It’s ugly. It’s sincere. I’m selling it too hard. It’s right up there. You can listen for yourself.
A Candid Conversation on the End of Misery Tourism