Samuél Lopez-Barrantes's Blog

This one’s been a longtime coming.

“For my next book, I want full control,” I declared on Christmas eve 2022, announcing a “Festivus for the Rest of Us: An Author Buys Back the Rights to His Own Book.”1

The post concluded with these words:

Despite referring to a silly Seinfeld holiday as a convenient comedic device, I actually meant what I said back then and I still mean it now, and I think and the entire team does, too: authors should have the option to hold majority rights to their own work.

So who are Slim and The Beast, anyway? Two best friends, a country bar, a famous burger, and a bloodstained floor.

This coming-of-age tale isn’t for the faint of heart. Sergeant Chandler Dykes is obsessed with two misfits: Slim, a disillusioned war veteran with a brutal neck scar, and Hugh Dawton-Fields, AKA The Beast, a seven-foot UNC basketball player with a proclivity for Southern cooking.

With unflinching humor and dexterous prose recalling the Coen Brothers’ wit and Tom Robbins’ iconoclasm, the narrator observes the approaching hurricane and the ghosts it seems to be dredging up, laying out what’s at stake in a friendship forged during the calm before the storm of the contemporary USA.

Slim and The Beast is an adult American fable set in 2010 North Carolina about male intimacy, the pursuit of passion, and the myriad ways in which young men in the USA can either transcend or succumb to that nation’s unresolved and violent past.

How is this version different from the 2015 edition?

Over the past six months, the Kingdom Anywhere team has been editing revising Slim and The Beast for a definitive 10th Anniversary Edition, making it the version it was meant to be all along.

Kingdom Anywhere’s editorial team has a knack for narrative structure and syntax that my previous editors, who were also working on dozens of other books, simply didn’t have the bandwidth to provide. Working closely with trusted editors who also now “get me” means we’ve tightened up the novel from front to back, cutting dozen of pages while adding to the narrative (we cleared up one major plot hole that the original editors missed), culminating in a much more fluid and concise edition at a sultry 158 pages.

Secondly, the book’s designers are, quite frankly, singular talents whose vision is far more in-line with what I envisioned for Slim and The Beast from the beginning. The 10th Anniversary Edition includes updated, hi-res chapter illustrations, an author portrait, and a one-of-a-kind mural at the beginning of the book, all of it illustrated by none other than my twin brother, .

Thanks to ’s design and layout skills and my father-in-law’s unrivalled ability to finesse inDesign—shout out to Ken and Lil Bit!—Slim and The Beast now reads like a classic American paperback that you can fit in your back pocket.

The updated cover design by the London-based illustrator Saskia Meiling, who we worked with for The Requisitions, is simply iconic, particularly because it conveys exactly what I hoped for a picaresque novel about a basketball player with a secret passion for cooking, his friendship with a disillusioned war veteran, and a deranged military man who won’t leave them alone.

Substack readers can get the jump on Slim and The Beast: 10th Anniversary Edition before it hits global bookshelves on November 8, 2025:

For a limited time (until November 8) new annual subscribers will receive a physical copy + eBook

Subscribe now

Current paying subscribers: leave a comment on this post / send me an email and I will send you an eBook + a discount link for the novel (shipping from France has become prohibitive because of the current US administration)

Beginning Sunday, October 26 (circa 10pm Paris time), I will use Substack Live to record Sunday Night Readings of Slim and The Beast (think of them as fireside chats, a story time before bed—not safe for children)

Free subscribers can watch live, but only paying subscribers can watch recordings

Beginning next week, October 21, I will begin serializing the novel on Substack (including audio) on Tuesdays, culminating in a professional-grade audio book complete with musical elements (I sing and play harmonica in a band we named Slim & The Beast; here’s a Sofar Sounds cover of “Harvest Moon” to whet your whistle)

Finally, if you’re not interested in subscribing right now, you can still order and Advance Reader Copy via this link (shipping included; please provide an address so I know where to send it).

Bookstores can follow this link for the press release, and I really do hope those of you in the far flung corners of the USA (I grew up in North Carolina, and Slim and The Beast is a southern “rural” novel) might consider telling your local bookstore about ordering a few copies.

Finally, anyone right here on Substack interested in reviewing the book can comment / email me and I will get you a copy free of charge (digital and/or print).

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1

A year after I paid $1000 to buy back the rights to my own book, I queried my Substack readers about independently publishing my second novel, “The Requisitions: A Query to the Substack Community,” and the response was immediately positive, resulting in a sold-out 1st edition via Kingdom Anywhere, an imprint I founded with . That book also won ’s Book of the Year Award, and was called “a strangely and luminously hopeful novel” by Substack’s own .

photo by Augusta Sagnelli

Part I: An Uncanny Land of Disparate Images

“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

Joan Didion, The White Album

The last time you entered the city by cab you got stuck in traffic at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. A billowing white banner hung over the stone wall, at its center an illustrated planet earth with a smiling face, pointing its finger at a tagline: “All empires fall. Let’s end this one together!”

This time, at the airport,

another sign catches your eye as you descend the escalator into the labyrinth that is the NYC transit system:

DON’T BE SOMEONE’S SUBWAY STORY

You ask a security guard how to get to your friend’s apartment in South Williamsburg; the armed man tells you, in a monotone voice, to take the Jamaica AirTrain to Hewes Street, which means you have twenty-one stops to become someone’s subway story.

While you wait to board the J at Jamaica, you look at the hundreds of people’s faces whose stories you’ll never know, their heads bobbing to songs you’ll never sing. On the subway platform there’s a supremely talented female singer-songwriter performing. Her cooing voice recalls a bygone era; her smiling eyes remind me of a lover from a different life—what was her name?

The suitcase-wielding masses amble towards the tracks as the train rolls into the station. Stand clear of the opening doors, please. The only missing part of this subway scene is a quick gyro on the platform à la iconic episode in Seinfeld. Surely there’s food up there, up the stairs in Queens—a carne asada taco from a food truck, perhaps, or one of those dirty water dogs bathing in a steaming vat like the big bellied Russian men at the Wall Street Bath and Spa. But we’ll get to that later.

The subway air-conditioning is a strange luxury for the dilapidated train and the advertisements confuse more than they inform:

“Remember when college was for losing your virginity not your mind?” Jewbelong.org

“Say Salam on Muzz: WHERE MUSLIMS ACTUALLY MEET”

A teenage boy’s head is blocking a word an advertisement featuring a bedazzling, buxom Latina wearing a sombrero: “MUSEUM. SUPERFUNLAND. _____SEX.”

Above the subway car’s rectangular window is beautiful artwork by a Ukrainian artist named Yevgenia Nayberg. One image in particular sticks out: a cartoonish cape-wearing superhero peering out towards The City with its tangled yellow power lines and green treetops and satellite dishes and graffiti building rooftops and worn brick facades and the derelict subway stop just before Crescent Street.

Yevgenia’ Instagram

A man with a speaker walks into the train and yells, “I’m not here to show off—this is showtime!” and proceeds to use his baseball cap as a dancing prop, flipping it up onto his head to the beats of abrasive trap music. He does a backflip in the aisle and says he goes by the name “Forthefam2023” on Instagram. Two young men speaking Spanish give him a few dollar bills. “Thank you and god bless!” FortheFam2023 says. “This is my first car of the day. Don’t forget me.” He gives the youth daps and dances down the J-train.

An image of a nasal spray with the tag-line: “Shpritz your depression away!” ketamc.com

A towering, wide man lumbers down the subway aisle. His shoes are untied and he’s wearing a blue surgical mask. In each hand, he clutches a bottle wrapped in a black plastic bag. Behind him, a man blasting reggaeton from his portable speaker is carrying an oversized Tupperware filled with snacks—chocolate bars, Capri Suns, and many other colorful, sugary delights. The woman sitting next to me is holding a stack of lottery tickets. To nobody in particular she says, “I don’t want any snacks.” She continues scratching at her lottery tickets with a rusty quarter. She doesn’t win.

A PSA: “The lack of organ donors is killing us.” You can’t read the fine print.

A teenage boy and girl take a seat in the corner of the subway car and share sips of a green tallboy can of Arizona Iced Tea. The boy is wearing a yellow Rick & Morty sweatshirt—an animated TV show for adults about an alcoholic grandfather and timid grandson who embark upon intergalactic adventures. She’s wearing all black. The teenage boy laughs at something the girl says and puts his arm around her, bringing her close. In her right hand she clutches a large vaping device with flashing lights.

if not, Paris exists because of Subway Stories Like You.

The kindness of strangers. A smile for a performer. Stand clear of the closing doors, please. Block the closing subway door—push back against the black rubber—for a tired commuter who’s running late.

“Every bite, a cheesy delight.” Borden Cheese

At Flushing Avenue—two more stops to your destination—a young woman gives up her seat so that a mother can sit next to her daughter. “Gracias,” the mother says and unloads four overloaded plastic bags onto the ground, all the while holding a scruffy white dog in the crook of her arm.

Throughout the subway system, you’ve noticed a slew of cryptic messages that only make sense later, once you’ve done the research on your phone:

“I’ll ride the subway with you.”

“I’ll never leave dirty dishes in the sink.”

“I’ll binge the entire series with you.”

“Friend [frend] noun. Someone who listens, responds, and supports you.”

All of these messages are courtesy of friend.com, an AI-necklace that acts as your confidant, which is a concept straight out of Spike Jonze’s 2013 masterpiece on technological loneliness, Her (coincidentally, the original soundtrack, written by Owen Pallet and Arcade Fire, is among the most beautiful pieces of music you’ve ever witnessed).

A handsome young man wearing sunglasses and who smells like Axe bodyspray—a highschool flashback to your first dance—sits down next to you and bobs his head to a song you’ll never hear.

As you exit the train at Hewes St., you read the same sign from the beginning:

DON’T BE SOMEONE’S SUBWAY STORY

and make your way to your South 4th Street destination.

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Part III Preview (Brooklyn): At Whole Foods, a grocery store that once prided itself on local organic fare and is now owned by a billionaire who’s building rockets to leave planet earth, you can pay for your groceries with your palm. “Once you put in data, you can swipe with your hand,” the robot attendant says. It would appear many people now consider credit cards cumbersome, and would prefer to pay with human flesh.

photo by a seasoned New York Spirit, Augusta Sagnelli

“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

Joan Didion, The White Album

I’ve been visiting New York City for over a decade,

which means for over a decade, too, I’ve been taking notes and jotting down interpretations about my lived experience in that uncanny place.

The city has grown on me since I first wrote a diatribe that concluded with these words:

But there is beauty here too, hidden beneath the stern faces and tense skin. The beauty in New York City is not aesthetic but human, hidden in plain sight in pizzeria conversations; in the voice of an elder poet outside of a diner; hidden in the basement of Wo Hop, which a doorman told you to visit, where a smiling tourist pins a dollar bill to the wall; audible in the quintessential accent of the construction worker who helps you navigate from Gowanus to Queens.

“Only in New York” is a common refrain in this city, but are these moments “only in New York,” or are they simply the enduring beauty of humanity in spite of the city’s hardness? And what does it say about a city that so often makes you forget it?

Each time I visit New York City I catch another glimpse of its redemptive human qualities, because the truth is New York City’s beauty resides not in its aesthetics but in the fact that

it represents humanity and all of our uncanny walks of life—two facts that defy conventional narrative. a view from Bowery

New York is everywhere. It is English and Italian and Haitian and Chinese. It is New England and India and Russia and Ireland and Jewish and Catholic and Polish and Sudanese and French and Senegalese and Dutch and Puerto Rican and Seinfeld and Japanese baseball and Patrick Ewing and Larry David and Billy Joel and Christopher Wallace AKA Notorious BIG and so many more people and places—so many more, more, more. It is $3 hot dogs and $10 SEC bagels (w/ hot sauce); it is $1.50 pizza slices and $25 cocktails and laughably expensive smoothies and $5 for a shot and a beer. It is street performing genius and unaffordable Broadway productions, tap-to-pay subway rides and private helicopter rides that both whisk you away to Long Island or late-night raves in Queens.

If I’ve learned to embrace New York City in all of its gaudy glory and grotesque trash heaps,

it’s probably because I no longer succumb to imposing my particular poor-writer narrative line on the city, i.e. that I’ve been too poor naïve to properly experience it. Aside from now having enough friends in the city with whom I can crash on a sofa, I’ve learned to enjoy the city without turning it into a competition.

how many narratives can you count in this image?

New York City’s streets and parks remain free (I just discovered Domino Park, and the High Line is also a real treat) so long as you resist answering that inane question, how many steps did you take today? (I refuse to entertain the notion that walking, too, can be rendered a competition), and so long as your feet are able to carry you throughout the day, there are plenty of places to witness glory both old and new and fuel up on high-quality city water, bagels, pizza, and dimsum.

if not, Paris exists thanks to my 87 paying subscribers. Join them to get your hands on the upcoming 10th Anniversary Edition of my debut novel, Slim and The Beast, which is about the pursuit of passion, male intimacy & the contemporary USA

As for the art, there’s enough live music in the subways and painting in the streets to inspire creation and forego buying a ticket to the Met, and it would appear American scientists have been working on THC as if it were a national priority to find a cheaper alternative to alcohol, which means the “city that never sleeps” is quickly becoming the city that’s always high—or at least a city wherein you can walk all day wearing sunglasses and have a perfectly pleasant “legal” experience. And as for the comically priced bars in the hip whitewashed neighborhoods of Chelsea, the West Village, the Lower East Side, and large swathes of Brooklyn, to name a few (warning signs: finance bros; white women who are all dressed the exact same; and any bar that charges $10 for a can of beer can fuck right off), well, the Big Apple shall forever attract plenty of worms who believe social status can be attained with money, but those types can always be spotted from at least a block away.

But alas, I am succumbing to Didion’s warning of imposing a narrative line upon disparate images, so what shall follow on Friday, September 3, is the continued recollection of my New York City experiences as a collection of non-sequiturs, beginning with my subterranean arrival.

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Preview: Part II, The Subway

Leaving the airport, a sign at the escalator entrance to the labyrinth that is the NYC transit system warns:

DON’T BE SOMEONE’S SUBWAY STORY

I ask a security guard how to get to my Virginian friend’s apartment in South Williamsburg and am told, in a monotone voice, to take the Jamaica AirTrain to Hewes Street—which means I have twenty-one stops to become someone’s subway story.

For new subscribers who have no idea who I am, I’ve updated my About Page. Nice to meet ya.Success cannot be pursued—it can only ensue.

I stole those words from Viktor Frankl—maybe not exactly—but here’s what he wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946):

“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself”

For this novelist in particular, such a “dedication to a cause greater than oneself,” i.e., writing multiple novels (not thinking about writing them) without any hope or despair for what may come, is the only consistent way I’ve been able to make sense of my existence aside from reading Viktor Frankl, whose work changed my life.

The story might go like this: you write a first novel, and it almost surely sucks, and then you write a second one, which is slightly better more authentic, and by the third book, you start to understand where and how exactly you are fucking up vast swathes of text, and by the fourth book you may even begin to have a clearer idea of your specific strengths and weaknesses and avoid writing the extra 30,000 words you know you’re going to cut … but then you wake up one day and you’re thirty-seven years old and you’re only just reading Moby Dick for the first time and you wonder if you need to start this whole book-writing thing all over again.

But that’s as far as I’ve gotten for now—three novels written, two of them published, a fourth in its nascent stages—so don’t count on any more novel-writing wisdom from me.

A first look at the revised Kingdom Anywhere edition of my debut novel, which is really the second novel I wrote, Slim and The Beast (2015). The cover design slaps thanks to Saskia Meiling. Viktor Frankl’s point is well-taken, however:

Devoting oneself to the practice itself is the only way to guarantee the possibility of success, and herein lies the rub about writing novels: it’s very hard to become halfway decent at it if you don’t actively choose to live a lifestyle that affords you the poverty time and mental clarity required to spend hundreds of hours putting words onto a page, a devotional act of solitudinal faith—nay, conviction!—that whatever’s inside your ever-elusive mind is far more important than anything else in the world—which oftentimes means being financially solvent.

In my entirely subjective opinion, to be a novelist is to reject the monolithic idea that the creative life is about financial success or a publicly-approved career. As my dear and prolific author friend says, writing books isn’t a vocation so much as an affliction; and I can attest that the books I’ve published written have only resulted from a mosaic lifestyle that involves choosing time over money—but actually, not in theory—and thus working various part-time gigs to make rent.

Intermezzo: the only time I’ve worked 40+ hours a week in an office was for a UFO religious cult in Paris. I didn’t realize they believed in extraterrestrial salvation until they were paying me, which shall be the subject of an upcoming essay in SOUVENIR magazine, a revolutionary arts & literature publication that harks back to the arts journals of the 1920s and gives voice to the thriving anglophone scene in Paris in the 2020s. You can read more about SOUVENIR magazine here.

“The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.”

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art (2002)

When I first moved to Paris in 2010

as an aspiring 22 y/o novelist, madly in love with a Parisian woman and with just enough money to pay two months of rent, I was already a fan of Albert Camus famous assertion that, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” and I can’t honestly say I’ve ever had the illusion that novelistic “success” is about anything more than a Sisyphean adventure.

Whoever drew this, thank you.

To use Substack as an example, the most “successful” piece I’ve ever written here is entitled “I, Too, Have a Nazi Problem,” which is patently absurd—but so, too, is the world, and if only I could write more, more, MORE! scathing critiques of sociopolitical flamewars, maybe just maybe, one day, I could make it big …

But alas, I’ve settled on defining literary “success” as finding a way to pay my rent and bills whilst working as few hours as possible for other people so that I can maintain enough mental clarity to not just write novels but actually enjoy it.

One of my former definitions of “success” was to have a novel make the front table at Paris’ Shakespeare & Company.

As I recently discussed in my essay about gatekeepers in trad publishing and MFA programs, “success” in the publishing world is at best an elitist chimera, a fickle fantasy, an orgiastic spaghetti wundermonster of the most capitalist kind: sell 1,500 books with a small-time publisher and you’ll be asked why you didn’t sell more; do a reading at NYC’s McNally Jackson’s and the first question you’ll get asked is “who’s your agent?” (I didn’t have one then and I don’t have one now).

Yes, the definition of literary “success” is forever tumbling down other people’s hills, whether you’re a Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist in search of the elusive Nobel, or an unknown novelist who started writing on Substack three years ago and feels extremely fulfilled selling one or two dozen books a month.

This autumn, Kingdom Anywhere is republishing my debut, Slim and The Beast, in a definitive 10th Anniversary Edition. Paying subscribers will receive a copy this autumn.

Sometimes, however, the Muses of Synchronicity descend upon us, revealing previously unforeseen perspectives at the top and/or bottom of new hills.

A few years ago, a kind soul working across the ocean in PR contacted me via Substack and thanked me for my writing. A year or so later, after publishing The Requisitions, exclusively for my readers at first,1 this guardian angel in question was one of the first people to champion the book and praise it not just for the story, but for how I went about publishing it with my partner-in-life, .

Perhaps a year after that, she told me—let’s call her Petya—that she was passing through Paris and wanted to book a walking tour with me—a Hemingway & The Modernists. During our literary stroll, we discussed the challenges of the consumerist corporate world, how to find fulfilling work in a for-profit for-power economy, and the impossibility of being able to succeed as a writing novelist when so much of writing these days seems to only be about selling.2

Fast forward to a few months ago, and call it synchronicity, call it fate, call it “success,” as I was busy going about my creative life (a new solo EP in the works, editing my debut novel to re-publish with Kingdom Anywhere, and working on SOUVENIR magazine—this is the second time you’ve heard about it now), from out of the creative blue sky contacted me, said she’d been following me for a while now, and that she had some ideas as an experienced publicist and would like to discuss working together.

After a decade of going at this independent publishing thing alone, I have a publicist,

a professional fighting for me in my corner—and so a new definition of “success” has appeared in my writing life. Such is my message of encouragement to all of the true novelists out there—the budding novelists, the struggling novelists, the unpublished novelists, the award winners, the runner-ups, everyone writing in the in-between who is perhaps right now, reading this very page, wondering why even though it’s Thursday, it still feels like a Tuesday, and I really should get back to the manuscript before it’s too late:

Success cannot be pursued—it must ensue. The boulder is joy. Just keep on rolling.

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12

self-portrait by my love, the inimitable Augusta Sagnelli

A few close friends have recently been through romantic break-ups, which reminded me of an unfinished piece I wrote long ago, when I was heartbroken for the second time.

To those out there going through it, I wish you honest friends, at least three good break-up albums (see the end of this piece for one of my favorites), and the kind of solitude that allows you to lean into the hard feelings, because on the other side of that confrontation is a dear friend, and that dear friend is you.

Pro-tip because nobody enjoys reading love letters in email boxes: I designed my Substack to be far more pleasant to read than this email inbox. To read via Substack, click on the above title of this piece, or the comment button, or the like button, or anywhere where the cursor becomes a little hand. If you’re tired of seeing my emails in your inbox, I totally get it—I’m tired of emails, too—so if you’re using Gmail, you can drag this into the “SOCIAL” folder so it doesn’t show up in your primaries. However you cut it, Substack writers should really be read on their individual Subtack pages for maximum pleasure)

1

You are older now, a bit wiser, and there still isn’t much time: to start new projects, to further a career you have yet to define, to write another novel.

The first night you met her, you sang a song together. You were quick to fall in love and you both sensed there wasn’t much time.

It was fresh and mesmerizing to be with someone new—was, and still is, and always will be—but that time was different. You could and still sense it.

Airplanes traversed oceans and tears traversed phone-lines. Each time you held her in your arms felt deeper than the last.

Those farewell mornings were the worst: the early-morning wake ups, the sleepy kisses on the forehead, the bleary-eyed goodbyes, the “I’ll see you soons” as she closed the door. Nothing says farewell as harshly as a 5 a.m. phone alarm, and no return is as bitter sweet as one with the next departure date.

2

But oh, to be in love! Yes, to be vulnerable. What a luxury to choose to surrender to a foreign feeling with such childlike conviction.

You’ll choose to remember how she looked in the morning making you coffee in her sweatpants in that small apartment above the quiet square. You’ll want to forget that last time she said goodbye, how you almost got into an argument trying to help her carry her bag down the stairs.

Like so many young people who lived it before you, your punch-drunk love was sobered by distance. While falling in love, you reached out for time, time to utter the words you could only utter when she was gone. Now, falling out of love, you reach out for space—space to let the empty text messages linger, two blue check marks left unchecked, an unacknowledged tightness in the chest that is oh-so-easy to revisit if you pull out that handkerchief from your sock drawer, the one she once sprayed with her perfume.

3

Swallow hard. This won’t be easy. I promise it never will be. Heed the currents of sorrow while traversing the twilight of your former self. Peer into the gloom and see what still illuminates the darkest corners. No feeling is forever. What you are feeling is the reason why books and songs are written.

Take care of the glossy photos and hold onto the trinket memories. Honor the remember-when eulogies spoken from wine-stained lips of your closest friends.

4

Oh, reckless youth! Be gone, wanton abandon! For whom will you want to make your favorite lentil stew again?

You are coming to the end now. Another page turned, another chapter begun.

You are older now, a bit wiser, but neither time nor words nor wisdom have the honor of ending love. True love waits, Thom Yorke sang, but it also lives on.

And this is what remains: a new kind of love song, which she sings alone in a new apartment. She sings it beautifully, no doubt, but her melody is no longer yours to listen.

So what of it? You will continue down the boulevard, knocking on new doors, sipping new flavors and exchanging old glances across the bar, remembering the possibility of times of yore.

Occasionally, it is certain, you will smell her familiar scent in the street; but to look over your shoulder would be foolish, for neither of you are there.

So go forth and steady your gaze, young lover, and look out towards the ever-expanding horizon. At times you will breathe deeply, and at other times you will swallow hard, but one thing is certain: love is what you miss, and so long as you believe in it, love is what you’ll find. She’ll give you reason to sing, whoever she might be. Her melody will find you again soon.

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photo by Baby Blue AKA Augusta Sagnelli

Substack is a revolutionary space that has undeniably changed my writing life for the better, and like all spaces that generate vast amounts of digital popularity power, it has also given rise to a new kind of gatekeeper that is just as potentially nefarious as traditional publishers or MFAs.

When writers are deluded into thinking the point is to make it go viral, like a disease, they often end up focusing on those anemic little red hearts that have come to dictate so much of our cultural discourse about worthiness, otherwise behaving like cult leaders with the sole purpose of appealing to faceless, bewildered hordes of digitized followers.

A few months ago over at the fantastic , there was a slew of op-ed pieces about literary gatekeepers: good or bad? and I spent a solid couple of days thinking about my own thoughts on the matter; but alas, by the time I was happy with thoughts on literary gatekeepers, the topic was no longer trending, and I foolishly refrained from sharing the piece, believing that I should wait until the right moment for a chance at meaningless digital popularity.

Those gatekeepers will get ya. So lest I allow my thoughts to languish any longer, here’s to remembering to share words that feel meaningful when we feel them, contemporary digital literary zeitgeist be damned!

In literary circles, the term “gatekeeper” generally refers to:

MFA programs (if you don’t think they’re useful, thinks you might be insane, but ’ MFA experience was undeniably nightmarish)

The traditional publishing industry (according to , it has no fucking clue about what counts as good literature, but and believe it serves an essential role in cultivating the kind of literature that somebody’s great-great-great grandchild will still read).

As a working novelist (i.e. I work multiple jobs to pay the bills; I write novels; it works for me) with an MFA, two published novels (one was published more traditionally, one published independently) and once represented by a music label (that’s a different story), I’ve come to view gatekeepers the same way I view VIP lounges: they might make you feel important,

but you can never escape the quiet desperation of the roped-off section.

But lest I succumb to our binary culture’s endless insistence on picking a side— good? bad? why not both?—I choose to inhabit the in-between, in hopes that someone out there (including my future self) will be reminded of the fundamental truth that whether in literature, academia, or even right here on Substack, gatekeepers are only as powerful as the power we cede to them.

1. MFAsThey might be bullshit, but fertilizer is useful

Growing up in the USA, I was told that accruing student debt was a necessary evil what it takes to win, baby! which is why even after my disillusionment with an MA in social theory in 2013, in 2018, at thirty years old, I enrolled in an MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA).

At the time, the former director of the NYU writing program had come to VCFA to spruce it up, but alas, ten months later, the director left for vague reasons related to what I assume involved some more bureaucratic forms of gatekeeping.

Another reason I chose VCFA: Vermont is my favorite state in the USA (I did my undergrad at UVM), and VCFA’s low-residency model is one of the oldest in the country, allowing working professionals like me (i.e. people who can’t actually afford MFAs) to keep their jobs whilst studying long-distance and attending a few 10-day residencies a year (fun depressing fact: as of last year, the program’s Vermont campus no longer exists; residencies now take place at California Institute of the Arts; which I learned while teaching creative writing at the oh-so-esteemed Sorbonne … ah, academia, how doth thy disappoint).

Was it worth it? Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know. Can you repeat the question? (sing along if you remember; the song's chorus is the key to our salvation1). Like most things in life, working towards an MFA is what you make of it, which I did thanks to the academic rigour (self-disciplined, admittedly) inspired by fantastic professors (special shout out to Adam McComber, Hasanthika Sirisena, and Brian Leung), cultivating friendships with colleagues who will remain friends for life, and paying-to-play holding myself accountable to the kind of literary routine, discipline, and curiosity I required to embark upon a professional writing life.

MFA Pros:

Multiple professors legitimately changed my relationship to writing and reading.

The rigorous, self-disciplined nature of the program instilled an invaluable work-ethic in my literary bones.

Being a paying student-loan holder of a largely useless degree granted me the intellectual freedom to nerd out on historiographic metafiction and postmodernism (here’s the intro to my dissertation), providing invaluable insight into developing as a serious novelist, specifically in relation to researching structural and narrative techniques that culminated in my most recent novel, The Requisitions.

The degree led to six-years teaching disillusioned creative writing students at the Sorbonne (they were just like me!). I quit it in 2024 because academic gatekeepers might be the actual worst (despite what the hallowed Sorbonne name suggests, you can’t afford rent when you’re paid $850 for a semester of teaching).

MFA Cons:

Serious student debt that my book sales—surprise!—haven’t paid off yet

Coming to terms with the fact that a creative writing degree can hypothetically get you a more prestigious/higher paying job, but that doesn’t mean institutions will actually want pay for your expertise

The literary workshop model (woof), i.e. sitting in a circle of part-time writers, all smiling creepily at each other in that distinctly American way whilst we dissect Karen’s Ronald’s prose and suggest, politely, with gritted teeth, that while the characters lack depth and the dialogue needs work and while I’m not exactly sure where this scene is supposed to be going, the first draft of the first chapter of your first unfinished novel does have a lot of potential, Ronald Karen, great job!

Being surrounded by both the vocal fry of privileged youth and the existential desperation of empty nesters who aren’t paying for their MFAs and who’ve “always loved to write but never had the time” and “can’t imagine how hard it would be to write a whole book!” and don’t actually care about literature at all, but really, really want to know what it takes to be reviewed in the NY Times.

2. Traditional Publishing Reading at McNally Jackson’s in NYC in 2015, back when I’d “made it”Off with their greedy, oversized heads

I sold 1500 copies of my debut novel (Slim and The Beast, Inkshares, 2015) via a publisher more akin to traditional publishing before buying back my rights in 2022.

In 2025, I’ll finally be doing something with those rights, because it’s about time I made 100% of the profits. Later this autumn, I’ll be republishing a definitive version of Slim and The Beast: 10th Anniversary Edition (it’s much cleaner, shorter, and prettier than the 1st edition).

Inspired by 1920s indie publishers in Paris like Black Sun Press, Contact Publishing, and Sylvia Beach, who published Ulysses without waiting outside any fences, my wife partner and I founded an independent anglophone press in Paris, Kingdom Anywhere, with the goal of retaining the rights to our own work whilst printing high-quality, limited edition books of fiction, poetry, and photography.

New annual subscribers will receive a 10th Anniversary Edition of Slim and The Beast.

Our mission has been to work with freelance artists professionals (editors, illustrators, designers) who are also disillusioned by gatekeepers in various ways, and I’m damn proud to say Kingdom Anywhere has already had two successful publishing debuts: in a few months in 2024, we sold out of the limited-edition (300 copies) of my second novel, The Requisitions, before making it available globally (it’s sold over 300 more copies since). In March 2025, we published Kingdom Anywhere’s first poetry collection, Spill, written by Mehta (the limited-edition print-run of 250 copies is all-but-sold-out; if you’re lucky you might be able to snag one of the finale copies).

Going from more traditional publishing relinquishing all of my rights in hopes of being venerated by the gatekeepers-du-jour to independent publishing has been worth it for multiple reasons both philosophical and financial (you can read ’s historic piece, “No One Buys Books,” if you don’t believe publishing independently can make you far more money), but I didn’t choose to write novels for the money and whether it was financially worth it or not for me can be summarized in a footnote.2

It’s an important word, worth,

because what we decide to value in this day and age says a lot about which gatekeepers we resent respect and which gatekeepers we really, really should stop venerating. And since the neverending discussion of “white male authors” in the literary zeitgeist is forever overhead, yes, I am a fan of some of David Foster Wallace’s writing despite his dickishness to women, (self)-destructive, and outsized brain, but no, I don’t believe the “vanishing white male writer” is a problem. This idea that “white males” aren’t being paid attention to is certainly proof of how fragile "the white male” caricature truly is, but regardless, the USA’s constant obsession with skin color, gender, and sexual behavior as comprehensive criteria of a human being’s worth is a primary reason why that puritanical nation is currently being governed by a pathetic tyrant.3

In the final analysis of the value or problem with gatekeeping, as with most things in life, the answer resides not in identitarian categorization binary reductionism of good or bad but rather within the pendulum swing of infinite subjectivities. If there’s one thing I still feel deep down in my human bones, it’s that the world needs more diligent, patient, not-for-profit, Honest-to-Muse storysellers storytellers4 who are in it for the right reasons, and those are the only writers I really care to engage with—folks who believe in independence, and its value, and who reject the commodified virtue of forever seeking more power viral limelight.

In conclusion, what matters is discerning which lines are worth waiting in— because many of them lead to more tight-assed bouncers standing oh-so-smugly at the door. When it comes to my personal experience with literary gatekeepers, the grass wasn’t always greener on the other side, but I did learn much about how to cultivate my own literary garden.

In the year 2025, it’s clear that the manicured Miracle-Grow-Lawns of trad publishing and MFAs are wilted and too expensive to keep up. Wildflowers are sprouting everywhere thanks to platforms like Substack, but in honor of the pendulum swing—yes, I shall repeat it—revolutions eventually return us to whence we came.

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1

They Might Be Giants, “Boss of Me” (2001): yes, no, maybe, I don’t know, can you repeat the question? You’re not the boss of me now … and you’re not so big … life is unfair.

2

Brass Tax for the Business Folk out there: I sold 1,500 copies of Slim and The Beast. After buying back my rights, the remaining income ($1500) was enough to pay for three months of student loans, which I’d taken out for two master’s degrees that the academic gatekeepers at the Sorbonne still don’t believe are worthy enough for a liveable wage (in 2025, even PhDs can’t find sustainable work in academia). On the contrary, now that I own 100% of the rights to The Requisitions, which sold 300 copies priced at $30 (+ hundreds more to date), well, you do the math. Even after considering print cost and editorial and design and shipping, I made orders of magnitude more money publishing independently than I did with my first publisher (and they were extremely generous giving me 50% of profits, compared to the industry standard 5-15%).

3

Just because the publishing industry isn’t talking about publishing “white male novelists” as much as it used to doesn’t mean they cease to exist. To phrase it differently (since we can’t seem to get past sweeping generalizations about human beings based on skin pigmentation), there are plenty of sunburnt novelists out there doing the work, like the Paris-based novelist Will Mountain Cox, who is alive and well, and Substack’s own , who got a publishing deal thanks to Substack-serialization. If you really care to delve deeper into this extremely dumb “debate,” does a good job of summarizing it, but I can’t give the supposed plight of “white male novelists” any more attention than this footnote.

4

The Philosopher Byung Chul-Han makes the clever distinction between storytelling and storyselling in The Crisis of Narration, in which he argues that authentic narratives are in decline because storytelling (as opposed to narrative) is based on the transactional exchange of information: “The cause of the narrative crisis in modernity is the deluge of information. The spirit of narration is suffocated by the flood.”

Photo by Augusta Sagnelli

Since Paris’ walking tour season began in April, I’ve given 34 walks on the Nazi Occupation of Paris and dozens of others on modernism, existentialism, and 19th/20th century European history.

For nostalgic reasons related to the last time many Americans United Statesians felt like their country was a genuine force for democratic decency in the world; and for more contemporary reasons related to the authoritarian takeover of American democracy by a daddy’s-boy-millionaire-and-convicted-rapist-reality-TV-star, many of my clients still seem surprised by the parallels between the world of 1939 and the world of 2025.

“What surprises you most about everything you’ve learned?” they often ask.

My answer is always the same. “What surprises me most is that we continue to act surprised.”

As such, over the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing a truncated history of the Nazi Occupation of Paris (1940-1944), using various stops along my walking tour route to illustrate the difference between history, memory, and why we human beings of the 21st century, in all of our infinite wisdom, prefer to forget the darker aspects of our human condition lest we are forced to confront the realities of today.

The Hotel Lutetia, 45 Boulevard Raspail, 75006

We begin in front of Hotel Lutetia, a luxury hotel that first opened its doors in 1910. Built just across the Square Boucicault, which is home to France’s most elegant department store, Le Bon Marché,1 the Lutetia was built to assuage luxury clients who, at the end of a long day of shopping, found a place to have a glass of champagne, show off their wares, and rest their heads.

Photo by Augusta Sagnelli

During the 1920s, the hotel became a Left Bank hot spot for various expat artists whose names you might just recognize: James Joyce and his young assistant, Samuel Beckett, who helped him write parts of Ulysses at the hotel; Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, Josephine Baker, the dancer Isadora Duncan, a Spaniard named Pablo … the list goes on.

Our story of the Nazi Occupation begins with a young military officer named Charles, who came to the Lutetia to celebrate his wedding night with his wife, Yvonne, on April 7, 1921. Nineteen-years later, he fled to England to escape the invading Nazi armies (“The flame of the French Resistance must not and will not be extinguished,” Charles de Gaulle famously declared via the BBC on June 18, 1940) before Nazi Germany’s counter-intelligence services (the Abwehr) requisitioned the Hotel Lutetia as their headquarters … only to witness Charles de Gaulle convert the hotel into a much more positive story four long years later.

The Battle of France began on May 10, 1940 and ended a little over one month later. In just four weeks of fighting, approximately eighty-thousand French soldiers were killed, almost two million were taken prisoner, and the German blitzkrieg all-but ran the British Expeditionary Force into the sea, forcing the evacuation of close to four-hundred thousand soldiers at Dunkirk.

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On June 14, 1940, Hitler’s armies paraded down the Champs Elysées to the shock and total disillusionment of the French capital. At the Hotel Lutetia, according to Marcel Weber, a maître d’ at the hotel, “before we even had time to realize they were there, the hotel had been requisitioned. We didn’t hear the sound of boots. It was more like a silent movie. It had happened. They were there. One of them immediately asked what there was to eat.”

For four years, the Lutetia was a playground for Hitler’s acolytes. Nazis sipped champagne at the famous Josephine Baker bar, while “political enemies” were interrogated and tortured within the luxury hotel’s walls. By late August 1944, when the U.S. Army was knocking at Paris’ door, the Abwehr commander Oskar Reile shared a final glass of champagne with his men before his men exited the hotel much as they’d arrived, as an informative 2019 Smithsonian Article revealed.

the caption: “From April-August 1945, this hotel was transformed into a reception center for a large number of Nazi concentration camp survivors. Happy to find their freedom and their loved ones from whom they’d been ripped away, their joy couldn’t erase the anguish and the pain of the thousands of the families of the disappeared who waited here in vain.” Photo by Augusta SagnelliBut if you look at the historic placard along the Boulevard Raspail,

you won’t find any mention of the fact that for four years and two months, the Nazi counter-intelligence forces called this place home.

This is because in April 1945, on Charles de Gaulle’s orders, the Hotel Lutetia was transformed into a transit center for close to twenty-thousand survivors of Nazi concentration camps “in the east.” Of the 160,000 civilians deported from France to Nazi concentration and death camps, 76,000 were Jewish, and only 2,500 survived (many of those deported were foreign Jews, however, deported explicitly because they were foreigners, a fact that many French people preferred to forget).

Approximately 60% of non-Jewish deportees survived the war, and many of them came through the Lutetia, including members of Juliette Greco’s family, whose story we will learn about in weeks to come. These survivors often returned in trains sent from Germany to the now-defunct Gare d’Orsay train station (now home to the Musée d’Orsay) before they were placed on trucks and driven to the Lutetia, where the Red Cross helped repatriate them.

read the requisitions

In other famous silver-lining stories from this dark chapter in human history, the French novelist Marguerite Duras wrote about the return of her husband to the Lutetia, a member of the resistance, in her 1985 book La Douleur. In 2005, the French novelist Pierre Assouline wrote Lutetia, a novel set during the occupation, in hopes of reawakening a forgotten history, but the complicated story of the ghosts of the Lutetia—not the least the fact that there is not a single mention of Nazis anywhere in our outside of the hotel—is now mostly lost to history.

Did Charles de Gaulle choose the Lutetia because of his fond memories of his wedding night in 1921? Or was the Hotel Lutetia chosen as a repatriation center to overwrite a darker truth? In the end, the placard at the hotel is better understood as a palimpsest: not so much a rewriting of history as selective memory, an amnesiac’s desire to recount a more positive story in favor of a darker truth, using a placard to speak of bravery, justice, and freedom while conveniently omitting the four years that preceded it.

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PS: the wise folks over at Substack’s premier literary review, , recently reviewed my latest novel set in Nazi-occupied Poland, The Requisitions; their response made me smile:

The Metropolitan ReviewThe Banality of EvilAll I knew about Samuél Lopez-Barrantes’ The Requisitions when I agreed to review it was its title. The discovery that it is a work of “historiographic metafiction” about life in the Łódź Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland prompted a small groan. In recent years, I’v…Read morea month ago · 65 likes · 10 comments · Raina Lipsitz and The Metropolitan Review1

In his novel, Au Bonheur des Dames, Emile Zola referred to a fictional version of the Bon Marché as a “cathedral of commerce”

The face that once graced billboards all along Interstate 5 from San Ysidro to the Oregon state line appears in the rear-view mirror, disillusioned and drowning under a cascade of tears in his self-driving car. Dr. Jones, PhD sheds his spectacles and stares at the man in the careening mirror once known as the “smartest man in the world” according to Vogue, the creator of TMAY™ technology, otherwise known as Tell Me About Yourself, a groundbreaking psychotherapeutic and pharmacological methodology that, according to the neural advertisement now streaming inside his head, is

proven to treat acute anhedonia via a patented dopaminergic suppository delivery system, which, when paired with Dr. Jones’ subscription-only psychotherapeutic podcast, can significantly quell societal angst and civilization malaise—subscribe now for a free trial and a 10% discount on the TMAY™ loyalty program, which includes a daily regimen of beta blocking suppositories guaranteed to make you feel not just better—but isn’t it time you felt your best?

Now back to Mervin and Marwin on the Ones. As we were saying before the break, given what’s happened to Mrs. Annie Jones—the fourth wife, by the way—I firmly believe there are only two places fit for these types of sociopaths obsessed with wealth and power: on some distant, uninhabited island, or preferably in county jail.

Dr. Jones removes his hands from the driver-less car’s steering wheel, a skeuomorph of a bygone era, and tells his neural implant to mute for five minutes.

“Very well,” Cassandra in the Cloud replies from somewhere inside his head. “This is your last override of the day.”

Dr. Jones is hell-bent on getting to the Oregon state line before the police show up at his Beverly Hills mansion and start asking questions. He can’t afford not to have a lawyer present when his 17-million-and-dropping subscribers learn about the longitudinal study published this morning at John Hopkins, his own alma mater—oh the humanity!—where he first began developing his theory of “listening sans intervening,” having studied under then-world-renowned Austrian dentist-turned-psychopathologist Reinhard Kleiberg, PhD, who helped jumpstart Dr. Jones’ storied celebrity career in psychotherapeutic dentistry before introducing him to not one, two, or three but four buxom wives—goodbye, sweet Annie—and a revolving-door of celebrity visitors to Dr. Jones’ private clinic, where they came for a teeth cleaning and to imbibe in ayahuasca suppositories, ketamine nasal sprays, and magic mushroom mouthwash.

It was there that Dr. Jones treated the likes of [redacted] and [redacted] with TMAY™ and developed his patented ART™ technology (Auditory Relationship Therapy), a deceptively simple technique based upon telling patients exactly what they wanted to hear whilst having their teeth whitened.

For decades, Dr. Jones, PhD, was the therapeutic reference in Lalaland for anyone rich enough to afford porcelain veneers and dumb enough to believe in consumption-based therapy.

What a difference a dead fourth wife and a peer-reviewed longitudinal study makes.

As his self-driving car whisks Dr. Jones towards the Oregon state line, he curses the culmination of his five-minute neural implant break.

Come on down to our ethical dog shop. It’s only dogs! And ethics for dogs!

If your dog’s unethical, bring him down.

We’ve got ethics for dogs. We’ve got hot dogs for dogs. We’ve got all the ethics you need for your dog to make sure the dog follows ethics.

Ethics for Dogs.

Two-for-one, ninety-nine cent deal.

Come on down to Ethics for Dogs!

The commercial reminds Dr. Jones of a simpler time—of a time when he and Annie used to feed caramelized popcorn to their pet, Joey, an obese Australian shepherd whom they overdosed on Prozac last year.

But it was thanks to Joey’s untimely death, after all, that Dr. Jones and Annie were able to travel to the Himalayas and co-write a NY Time Bestseller-favorite amongst afternoon talk shows geared towards empty-nesting women: The Apex is But a Base for the Sky, a self-help book about the myriad ways in which high-altitudes and enriched oxygen can help suburbanites cope with suffering, resulting in in Dr. Jones’ next $200-million acronym, The Sky is But a Base (SIBAB™), an esoteric philosophy combining Janism, Astrology, and Intravenous Ketamine therapy that places the individual human being at the “disassociated center of the multitudinal expanse,” a complex idea which, according to the investigative journalist’s voice that is once again reverberating in Dr. Jones’ inner ear,

SIBAB, like all of these idiotic acronyms, is psychological snake oil of the most dangerous kind, which sets a dangerous precedent for psychopharmacological tourism. This incessant need to pathologize in order to derive meaning and/or identity is almost certainly why every. single. one of Dr. Jones’ four wives overdosed.

“Stop it!” Dr. Jones screams, covers his ears, curls up in the fetal position in the driver’s seat but he can’t ignore the journalist’s voice, and he can’t stand his penchant for alliteration, for the voice is coming from inside Dr. Jones’ award-winning head:

…and these so-called success stories living their quiet lives of desperation—celebrities like Dr. Jones and his ilk, morally bankrupt megalomaniacs that we’ve been inculcated to venerate and emulate, by the way—we should try and release their warped souls from their wretched wishes for wealth and wining. We ought to try and release them, by example of our own lives, as Jimmy once said, from this viral era of vapid veneration. Go out and dance. Watch and listen to live music. Leave the black screen of death at home. And mark my words, for I know you’re out there listening, the John’s Hopkins report is only the beginning—TMAY™ and ART™ and SIBAB™ have killed far more than Dr. Jones’ four wives. This endless pursuit of hedonism at the expense of pursuing a reason will soon face a reckoning. We have become slaves to the solipsistic sarcophagi in our pockets—more than a fact, it’s become a feeling—and I fear in the years to come, many of us will become little more than phantom vibrations.

Dr. Jones rocks back and forth in the driver’s seat of his driverless car and weeps like a baby. Hannah, Elodie, Vera, and now Annie … who will be next?

“When will I love again?” Dr. Jones asks Cassandra. “And how far until my destination?”

“Great question. I’d be happy to help you find a suitable romantic partner via BumbleBee™ Dating. I have stored your biometrics, personal chat history, and logged your live-cam recordings, but perhaps you would like to provide me with extra information? We are two miles from our destination.”

Dr. Jones raises his head to cherish the sight of the Oregon state line, but in the rear-view mirror there’s a blue flash, and then a red one, and then an amalgamation, and now he can see little red and blue lights flashing high up in the sky, and now the lights are descending towards him, reflecting off of the driverless car’s front windshield, and so Dr. Jones begins to scream at Chauffeur Cassandra to drive faster as the law enforcement drones emit a coordinated EMP blast, forcing the driverless vehicle to yield.

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A giddy preamble: last night, around midnight Paris time, I learned about ’s glowing review of my Viktor Frankl-inspired novel, The Requisitions. Thank you to for the close & generous reading,1 which is that much more meaningful given the context of this piece.

summer bathing on the Danube, Vienna, Austria, June 2025Me at The Museum (1/2)

The Viktor Frankl Museum is designed like an interactive science museum for children, but at 1/15 Mariannengasse, 1090 Vienna, Austria, the wisdom exhibited isn’t about how the world goes round, but about how human beings try and make sense of their existence. From existential cabinets with secret compartments to levers about ethics that must be pulled to reveal their lesson, to Sisyphean dominoes that can be lined up only to be knocked down again, the museum invites visitors to consider Viktor Frankl’s life and existential philosophy with a childlike spirit.

Going to the Viktor Frankl Museum was a pilgrimage for me, the real-world epilogue to a novel inspired by Frankl’s work that took decades to gestate: a boyish obsession with World War Two, a BA in Holocaust Studies, an MA in social theory (The Humanness of Cruelty: Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl & The Psychology of Genocide), an MFA in creative writing (History is Dead, Long Live History! Postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction), and 10+ years to finish The Requisitions, a novel about a struggling academic writer named Viktor who finds himself in Łódź, Poland at the outbreak of war and wants to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, in love’s possibility.

Walking through the modest Viktor Frankl Museum (it’s only three rooms), I expected to jot down copious notes in my little black notebook like I normally do at museums, but instead, I found myself writing almost nothing at all, approaching each tactile interaction with my spirit, not my mind, conscious of my slow movements as I paced through the hallowed space. Despite the hundreds of quotes, citations, photos, and lessons to be learned at the Viktor Frankl museum, I spent most of my time without any agenda, content to be enraptured within the space, opening drawers, listening to recordings, and pulling levers that revealed Frankl’s existential wisdom.

Part II: The “Will to Meaning”

In Part I, I discussed the first pillar of Frankl’s logotherapy—“the freedom of the will”—which posits that human beings are more than psychobiological and environmental conditioning processes.2

The second pillar of logotherapy—the “will to meaning”—doesn’t guarantee meaning but rather illuminates its possibility.

This potentiality, like a farmer’s fallow field at the end of winter, is central to humanism and existentialism, two terms that are often misunderstood.

Humanists reject the idea that any divinity can protect us from ourselves.To this end, humanists place utmost faith in the potential value and goodness of human beings, not their guarantee. Similarly, existentialism, which the most cynical conflate with nihilism, is a belief that while there is no fathomable universal meaning to existence, this in no way detracts from our ability and responsibility to derive individual meaning from existence.

Sartre’s oft-misunderstood dictum “existence precedes essence” simply means the only thing we can be sure of is that we exist; any essence that follows (gender, ethnicity, skin pigmentation, sexual preference, etc.) comes after the fact of our existence, which means any “essence” is malleable and only meaningful until it isn’t.

What an individual becomes, they have made out themselves, and to blame submit to chemical/psychobiological/environmental/parental/social/financial, religious factors, etc. is la mauvaise foi—bad faith—a self-deceptive an inauthentic intellectual position that relinquishes the freedom and responsibility of what it means to be a self-determining human being.

“The Existential Vacuum”

“People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning … As to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying vein, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.” Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) came of age consciousness during one of the most brutal eras in human history that witnessed 20+ million dead during World War One, another 50+ million dead during the subsequent Spanish Flu (36% mortality rate), and the resultant rise of fascism (the reasons why fascism arose when it did arises when it does are summarized in my 4-part essay, “The Origins of Fascism”).3

According to Frankl, during disillusioned identitarian eras like the 2020s 1920s, when an individual lacks traditional directives of what they must do (according to animalistic drives/instincts) and what they should do (according to traditions/spiritual value systems), they often don’t even know what they want to do. Consequently, the individual, “either does what other people do—which is conformism—or he does what other people want him to do—which is totalitarianism,”4 resulting in an “existential vacuum” that can lead to materialist meaningless pursuits of pleasure and power, a satisfaction of animalistic drives at the expense of deriving an individual sense of meaning to existence.

“To the European, it is characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’ […] a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.” Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

The “will to meaning” isn’t a panacea or nullification of Freud’s “will to pleasure” or Adler’s “will to power,” it simply overarches them. Frankl recognizes the various psychological, biological, and environmental neuroses, too, but what differentiates human beings from other animals is the uniquely existential source of discomfort that accompanies the all-too-human question, “Why am I here?” While human beings are pushed by the pursuit of pleasure and power as ends in themselves (see: the entire world circa 2025), they are only pulled into a higher realm by the pursuit of meaning. To put it another way: while the animal Homo sapiens is concerned with success versus failure and pleasure versus pain, Homo patiens, the suffering human, is concerned with fulfilment versus despair.

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Me at the Museum (2/2)5 a most meaningful space: my writing desk, complete with a gift from the Viktor Frankl Museum

At the end of my museum visit, standing at the entrance with more mass than when I entered, I took note of the foyer, the entrance to somebody’s former apartment, which, in a former life, would have had a coat rack and a small chair to take off one’s shoes. The museum’s curator was curious to learn about my studies in logotherapy, at which point I rummaged in my tote bag and pulled out a single copy of The Requisitions, which I’d brought to Vienna in hopes of meeting someone who might appreciate it.

“That is very kind of you. We would be happy to include it in our library,” the museum’s curator said. “And I would like to give you something in return—an exchange—here is an exclusive publication of the museum, a concise overview of logotherapy.”

“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself … in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.” Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I flipped through the pages with a transcendent smile on my face.

“To whom should I make it out to?”

“To Eleonore.”

“It’s very nice to meet you, Eleonore.”

“Oh, apologies, that isn’t my name—Eleonore was—is—Frankl’s wife, Eleonore Katharina Schwindt. She still lives across the hall where she and Viktor lived.”

“He lived on this floor? But … when did they meet?”

The curator smiled. “Yes, they met just after the war. Eleonore is ninety-nine years old but is still very much with it. I’m sure she’d be pleased to read it.”

She would be pleased?

I couldn’t hide my boyish smile. To think that my tribute to Viktor Frankl’s work is now sitting on his bookshelf, and that his beloved, Eleonore, may, as-I-write-these-very-words-be-actually-reading-it, is a perfect epilogue to the “will to meaning” that inspired me to write The Requisitions.

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purchase the requisitions

1The Metropolitan ReviewThe Banality of EvilAll I knew about Samuél Lopez-Barrantes’ The Requisitions when I agreed to review it was its title. The discovery that it is a work of “historiographic metafiction” about life in the Łódź Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland prompted a small groan. In recent years, I’v…Read more2 days ago · 33 likes · 3 comments · Raina Lipsitz and The Metropolitan Review234

Viktor E. Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning: Psychotherapy & Humanism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 25.

5

One of my favorite songs of all time: “Me at the Museum, You in the Wintergardens” by New Zealand’s inimitable Tiny Ruins.

The End of the Parade, Pride 2025, Budapest, Hungary (notice the extremely small white banner in the mid-section, held by five fascist boys, the extent of the counter-protest)

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The journey began in Vienna, the more antiseptic of the two capitals of the now defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire.

During the first hours of the journey at the Viktor Frankl Museum, we each established our own sense of meaning for the trip.

The museum is overtly philosophical, an extensive introduction to Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy and his invitation to consider how to live a meaningful life.

“The past is the surest form of presence,” Frankl said in reference to the idea of “the barn of life,” where everything is “irrevocably stored.”

The question, then, is quite simple for Frankl: what do you choose to harvest?

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In Vienna, the harvest could very well be proud traditions. An aristocratic woman sits on a bench in a manicured public garden, where, in front of the sculpture of Mozart, a treble clef made of red flowers basks in the sun. Picture the aristocratic woman’s elegant fashion with her summertime heels and polished jewellry and vintage-style blue dress. Her posture—legs crossed, a newspaper in her lap, her delicate fingers scanning the pages—frames her coiffed, bygone hairdo. Somehow the dancing dappled light in the public garden, sunshine and shadow forever intertwined, confirms both the aristocratic woman’s enduring status in Austrian society and the ever changing landscape of the world at large.

After being wined and dined by an extremely generous older couple two lovers who were still very much in love, we combatted our Austrian-wine-and-cigar hangover with a visit to the Belvedere. The baroque palace, built in 1723, was designed as a summer residency for Prince Eugene of Savoy, and to this day it houses the most romantic painting in the world, “The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt. This palatial museum was the reason we’d decided to come to Vienna in the first place, to visit the Radical! Women*Artists and Modernism 1910-1950 Exhibition.

On a wall at the exhibit’s culmination was a collection of quotes by famed women artists. “You may be a woman and you may be an artist,” Dorothy Tanning said in 1990, “but the one is a given and the other is you.”

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Much of the Austro-Hungarian Empire took its inspiration from Paris, yet despite its feigned familiarity, Vienna still feels like a foreign place. The streets are pristine but empty, the language is direct yet complex, and the past doesn’t easily give itself away to the present. Here on the wide Parisian-style terraces dolloped with Viennese cream tablecloths and black elixirs, lining the vast, majestic boulevards with their 19th century décor, the story of the founders of psychoanalysts having a chat on the terrace makes way for the pristine memory of ball gowns, top hats, expertly tailored coats, horse-and-carriages clop-clop-clopping along the cobblestones laid in times of yore.

This is Vienna 2025, however, and the capital city’s harvest is clear: history is approachable, class is attainable, and the water is clean, but one can’t help but leave the city feeling a bit sterile. Vienna is a simulacrum of everything it ought to be, the enduring capital of a once-bustling Empire that has since thought better of expanding its borders beyond the elegant opera houses and national museums, for to the southeast of Vienna, somewhere along the gentle currents of the Danube, there exists a much older story that cannot be as neatly nestled into the shadow of the Alps.

Buda·Pest

“The past is never dead. It is not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

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Let us tell ourselves a story about our condition. It’s a story we’ve heard before, but for some reason, it never ceases to shock. Why don’t we listen?

The “House of Terror” is located at 60 Andrássy Avenue, that glorious tree-lined boulevard on the “Pest” side of the city. In 1944, the Hungarian Nazi Party, Arrow Cross, began using the building to interrogate and torture Jewish citizens human beings. Just a year later, after Stalin’s armies liberated the city, the secret police proceeded to occupy the city and use this elegant building for a different similar reason.

The story of 60 Andrássy Avenue has been told before, but the story told in the museum is somewhat unique. On the surface, it is the narrative of the identity of contemporary Hungary, forged in the bloodlands of state-sponsored terror of the twentieth century. Without a doubt, the museum’s design, layout, and narrative is a must-visit for anybody interested in understanding the depths of the human condition, but the museum, like history, is also a paradox—particularly in skirting the question of how and why so many Hungarians participated in the Nazi genocide were complicit in the Holocaust. The museum’s curation focuses on the brutality of the Communist Soviet years, which is perhaps unsurprising when one learns the space was inaugurated by Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s contemporary far right leader, way back in 2002.

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But oh, the baths. Oh, the Hungarian baths! What culture but one with variously heated, naturally occurring thermic pools could better understand the need to heal?

There is a solitudinal wisdom in soaking in public silence, in descending below the earth to bask in communal warmth. Here in Buda, at the Gellert Thermal Baths on the western side of the Danube, somewhere within the quiet section at the back corner of the spa where tiled mosaics reveal a 36° and 40°C pool, there is a wisdom that accompanies the act of bathing with strangers in heat, with choosing to share this space devoid of words.

Witness all the bodies, young and old, dark and light, busty and slim. Most of the mostly-naked people found in this subterranean liquid labyrinth have no need to speak, for they are healing—just take a deep breath. Down here, the elders might get the best position in the pool, but there is room for everyone, too, because everyone needs to be healed, and we could all use a good soak.

Such is the luxury afforded by a public bath: to feel the body and to sit with it. To soak. To close our eyes. To emit a moan. To witness our mostly-naked elders—we’d all of us be so lucky to step out onto these tiled floors at that age—grab onto the railing as they ascend from the steaming hot pool, take a deep breath, and cross the mosaic floor to slip their steaming bodies into a cold plunge.

What is the effect of witnessing the wet human skin of many dozens of humans beading in the heat? And what does it mean to sit in silence with strangers in a hot body of communal water? What effect does it have on our understanding of others? Of the other? What effect does bathing with strangers have on our collective understanding of the human being body—not as a commodified idea filtered photo but as a real-life undulating thing—sometimes thin, sometimes fat, sometimes skinny, sometimes thick, flabby arms and tight muscles and flat asses and large breasts and shriveled pectorals, luscious belly rolls cascading forth to meet golden-brown beer-bellies distending towards the warmth, submerging into the weightless waters where mothers can float and children can witness what it feels like to have a moment alone.

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What does it mean to lounge alongside a supermodel on one side and an overweight man on the other? What is this the poverty of language of the human body when it comes to describing the myriad ways in which each and every one of us our bodies can be unique sexy. Because to be clear: there is no guarantee of uniqueness, only the possibility.

Enter a cackling French male caricature—Gaston’s minion—as he tries to influence the quiet space with his booming voice. His guttural humor and childish jokes echoed throughout the tiled walls down below. Taissez-vous, monsieur, ça suffit, I wish I were bold enough to say, but after ascending towards the upstairs area of the Gellert pools, it becomes apparent that this man’s objectionable nature wasn’t in fact a gendered thing, for his gaggle of drunken girlfriends was just as loud.

Oh, the humanity. They fueled their complaints about life with champagne in the scorching Hungarian sun, but at least up here there were more eyes on them, more opportunities to glare, more subtle hints, and more opportunity to find beauty in the sunshine reflecting off of deep end of the pool and its 1913 mosaics.

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“Such is human nature,” Mary Shelly wrote in The Last Man, “that beauty and deformity are closely linked.” And it’s true: I shall not let these drunkards ruin one of the most beautiful places in the world, for I now know that I’ve met these drunken French tourists before. This time around, they happened to be from France, but in a different rendition they could be Spanish, or United Statesian, or Russian, or Congolese. We’ve all of us met these obnoxious types of tourists, not travelers, and one doesn’t have to travel too far to know they exist everywhere in the world—the shouters, the cacklers, the drunkards, the entitled, those lonely souls who have no idea where they are and even less where they’d like to be.

The loudness of others soon passes.

It always does, and has been passing for millennia, particularly here on both sides of the Danube, in a region once conquered by Huns and Nazis and Soviets and Rome.

It is always passing, the loudness of violence, and we should pity them, perhaps, the ones who would start wars.

But question remains: who is willing to confront them, and how? That is the question, how people choose to face the sun-kissed nakedness of our most brutish forms, whether sitting by a thermal pool in Budapest in 2025 or in Vienna in 1938 or in Hungary in 1944 … how we decide to confront tyranny, it seems, is the enduring question, and June 28, 2025 provided a perfect opportunity.

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2025 Pride in Budapest was an historic event. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world showed up to confront Viktor Orbán’s bigoted government, and millions more are supporting the event via the power of their phones.

After dancing behind a techno truck in the summer sun, we sat down for a cold beer not one-hundred-meters from the parade route. The waiter with the unkempt beard and the nascent beer belly was kind and generous and spoke with a genuine smile. One glance out towards the parade, however, and he shook his head and said something along the lines of “This is crazy.”

“Yeah,” I said, unsure of what he meant. “An incredible turnout, isn’t it? We’ve been dancing for a while and would love a cold beer.”

The waiter’s eyes were genuinely surprised. He leaned towards me and pointed at a rainbow flag. “Wait, so … you’re something like … something like that?”

“Yes,” I didn’t hesitate. “I am something like that.”

Still confused, the waiter mouthed the silent word: “G-A-Y?”

I smiled and repeated, “Sure. Something like that. We’re all of us on a spectrum.”

It took a few more muddled words and a steadfast smile to sus out each other. After an awkward chuckle, his fingertips tapping on the table, he asked, “But, so … you are atheists?”

“Yes, artists! We’re artists.”

“Ah! Artists? No I said atheists.”

He laughed a bit nervously. “Okay. So would you like some shots of Palinka?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll have three! And a cold beer, please.”

Epilogue

The police presence was calm throughout the parade, it must be said. Perhaps it had something to do with the liberal mayor of the city. There were no whispers of a single confrontation the entire day, but towards the end of the Parade while crossing Elizabeth Bridge with many tens of thousands of people, I noticed a well-designed placard that read: Boys don’t wear makeup. Men do.

On the Buda side of the bridge, perhaps to intimidate all who passed, were the only counter-protesters of the day, four post-pubescent boys to be precise, each of them wearing sunglasses and standing silently in black garb, clutching a flaccid, flapping banner in the wind that read: DEFEND EUROPE with a big red X drawn on a rainbow flag.

To witness tens of thousands of people walk past this pathetic group of five children was a revelation. Keep dreaming, boys. You’re on the wrong side of history. When it comes to historic battles, the allies always win.

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