One of the joys of reading and learning about the past is discovering that many of the problems we’re dealing with today have been around for longer than we thought, and learning how our forerunners dealt with them. Enter Ernest Mann, a writer who is completely unknown to the manosphere (and the world at large), but deserves to be more widely read. Mann saw the problems of expanding government, environmental degradation and wage slavery and proposed the Priceless Economic System as a way of ending them. The PES was simple; eliminate currency and have everyone work for free, only at jobs they enjoyed doing, and live more simply, without television, pop music or the other myriad shiny things the elite use to keep us poor, dumb and content.

Unlike the leftists though, Mann didn’t call for wealth redistribution from the safety of his Gulfstream Five; he lived by example.

In 1969, at the age of 42, Ernest Mann decided he’d had enough of the rat race and checked out. He sold most of his worldly possessions and spent the rest of his life advocating for the PES, living in unfinished basements and rustic wood cabins in his native Minnesota. To push his radical ideas, Mann created the Little Free Press newsletter, which he intermittently published until his grandson murdered him in 1996. Nearly two decades later, my friend and Mann pen pal Trevor Blake has brought his work back into print with I Was Robot, a compilation of the best of the Little Free Press.

If you have any interest in minimalism and breaking free of the corporate consumerist hamster wheel, you need to pick this one up.

Ernest Mann saw the thin red line that connected all ideologies—communism, libertarianism, anarchism—and why it made them all ineffective when it came to solving the problems of humanity: they were all obsessed with money. That’s all ideology is, really: determining which group of thugs gets to own all the money, whether it’s the plutocrats, the royal family, the church, the government, the poor. Mann had a simple counterpoint: the problem was money itself, and the idea of working for it and buying useless shit with it. He sums up his life philosophy in one iconic catchphrase:

If you take pay, you must obey!

That’s the truth of it right there: if you work for a paycheck, you are somebody’s bitch. When your boss tells you to jump, you ask him how high. When the HR ditz demands your Facebook password, you fork it over so she can rifle through your private photos. If she decides she doesn’t like something you’ve said online, regardless of how effective an employee you are or how qualified you are for the job, she can and will show you the door. You learn that the only way to make a middle-class living is to put your brain on a leash and be as bland and compliant as you possibly can.

Meanwhile, you waste the 14-16 hours of your day that aren’t spent making some dick-clitted bittergrrl rich on meaningless diversions. Everything from pop music to video games to our high fructose corn syrup-laden food is deliberately designed to get you hooked on them like crack, to program you into buying more, more, MORE! And how do you afford to keep buying the latest installment of Assassin’s Creed or shoving sugary bon-bons into your mouth?

You work!

You slave away even more so you can have the newest, shiniest iTurd or replace the $50 espresso machine that was deliberately designed to break a year after you bought it. And yet, no matter how long or hard you work, it’s never enough. There’s never a point where you can kick back, stop angling for a promotion and just enjoy your life; you’ve got to keep working until the house is paid off and the kids move out, and maybe not even then. You’re not allowed to take your foot off the pedal until you’re 65 or so, when your brain is lapsing into senility and your body is frail and weak; in other words, when the system no longer has any use for you.

Ernest Mann saw all this nearly half a century ago and decided to fuck that noise:

I was an enlistee in WW II, but I protested the Korean War and when the Vietnam War came along and threatened to take my two sons, that made me blow my cork. I quit the real estate business. I sold my 13 rental properties to my tenants for one to a hundred dollars down and payments less than their rent. I even sold the duplex we lived in.

My wife and I took off in an old used pick-up truck with a camper. Our youngest kid was 16. We told her she could come with us, stay with a relative and finish school or go on her own. She has been on her own for 10 years now. She learned more about living than her friends did who finished school. My wife and I traveled the U.S.A. for a year just getting unwound.

I Was Robot reads like a mashup of Max Stirner and Jerry Rubin, as filtered through the voice of a revivalist preacher. Mann was an individualist above all else, who spurned politics and activism as wastes of time. He advocated for the Priceless Economic System in a manner as simple as how he lived, by fixing himself before he sought to heal the world:

Freedom started in my own mind. When I discovered the fact that I was an individual and that I could be in control of myself if I chose to be, I found ways to reject the control that society had conditioned into me. I started making my own decisions based on what is best for the individual. I now attempt to make my own individual self happy.

Where do you start? Stop loading your biocomputer (brain) with the mental junk food dispensed by the TV and the radio. Stop eating sugary food and medicating with cheap cigarettes and booze. Stop wasting your money on “labor-saving devices” that mysteriously require you to work longer hours than your “backwards” ancestors to afford and replace them. And when you’ve adopted the PES, tell two friends about it, then have them each tell two of their friends, going on and on:

There are a little over 4 1/2 billion people on this planet. How could we reach all of them? Sound impossible? Too big a job? You and I don’t need to inform them all. All I need to do is to inform and convince just 2 people so thoroughly that they EACH inform 2 more people to do the same. That is simple enough isn’t it? The People’s Grapevine, i.e., the geometric progression of numbers then takes over (see diagram in “Changes” chapter). Would you believe that 31 doublings would reach the whole world population? Try it! It’s like a chain letter, only with no money to send. Just one hell of a lot of work to convince 2 people so well that they carry on and do the same.

Calling Mann a pioneer would be an understatement: he was actually the first person to refer to the elite as the “1%.” Unlike the hipsters at Zuccotti Park who ripped him off two decades later though, Mann came up with that number via mathematics: calculating that 98.6% of Americans made less than $50,000 a year. And also unlike those hipsters, Mann didn’t “occupy” anything beyond his own mind. To him, protests were just another way that the elite (which he humorously personifies as the “Warbucks family” in a series of satirical essays midway through the book) drained our energy and distracted us from the real issues. If you really want to strike a blow against the 1%, you don’t camp out in a park and chant hackneyed slogans.

You live life for yourself and your loved ones, without wasting your time and effort on things that don’t benefit you or make you happy.

The biggest problem with I Was Robot is that it feels somewhat haphazard and repetitive. As Trevor points out in his introduction, the articles are not organized in chronological order, but arranged so that the book “comment[s] on itself as it grows.” Mann rehashes many of the same points over and over, and his relentlessly cheerful attitude wore on me after a while.

That said, like that other relentlessly cheerful minimalist from Minnesota, Ernest Mann’s work has great potential to convince people of the glories of simple living and the PES. Mann feared that if our absurd, money-centric modern economy wasn’t dismantled, World War III would turn the planet into an uninhabitable wasteland. According to him, war, pollution and the other ills of the human condition were caused by the desire for profit.

No profit, no motivation to wreck our little spaceship called Earth.

Whether you agree with Mann or not, or you’re just interested in the philosophy of minimalism and anti-consumerism, I Was Robot is a must-read.

Click here to buy I Was Robot.

Read Next: OVO 20: Juven(a/i)lia by Trevor Blake

NOTE: In preparation for another book review I’ve written for tomorrow, I’m reposting this article, originally published at In Mala Fide on November 16, 2011.

***

This is a best-of collection of articles and artwork from OVO, a zine founded and edited by friend of the blog Trevor Blake, “a public record of [his] interests and inquiries.” It’s interesting, it’s weird, and I don’t entirely know what to make of it. I guess it’s because I’m too young to appreciate it: I was barely out of diapers when Trevor was printing up the early editions of OVO on his pal’s company’s copiers in the eighties. To someone of the Internet Era, where narcissistic self-expression is just a couple of mouse clicks away, the effort and dedication involved in compiling an entire magazine, from writing and gathering the material to binding the physical copies and mailing them out, is difficult to relate to.

Still, this is a great little collection of oddities, ranging from poetry to short stories to investigative journalism on offbeat subjects. They include “Holding Games for Ransom,” about how one tabletop game creator found a way to keep online piracy from cutting into his profits; “A Pit Stop Along the Inward Journey,” a stream-of-consciousness tale beginning with white guilt and ending with madness; and “23 Sperm Stories 23,” the longest article in the book, on just about every aspect of sperm, from its discovery, its function, and its future. Of particular interest to us in the manosphere are “Warbucks Intra-Family Communique” and “Becoming More Free” by Ernest Mann. The former is a satirical article on the emptiness and mindlessness of American consumerism; the latter is on how Mann unplugged himself from the Matrix of American culture:

I am wasting less of my time (LIFE) watching, listening to and reading THOUGHT LEADERS, ie, TV, movies, radio, music, newspapers, magazines and novels. These are like spectator sports. They cause me to live life vicariously, ie, second-hand, not real, only in fantasy. These mind conditioners are subtly designed to create not only fear and anger emotions but also create feelings of guilt and inadequacy. These feeling stifle growth and keep one securely in one’s rut. And of course the more visible purpose of the media is to create the desire to acquire (BUY! BUY! BUY!) and keep up with the Joneses. ‘Buying’ uses up my savings. I spent 22 years of my TIME (life) working as a Wage Slave. I helped perpetuate the status quo, ie a world of 98.6% Slaves and less than 1% Elite (Billionaires). I don’t wish to do that any more.

But the real prize is Trevor’s own writings, comprising the second half of the book. They include book reviews (including an exhaustive review of one of my favorites, L.A. Rollins’ Myth of Natural Rights), interviews with such diverse individuals as a bulimia sufferer and an expert on out-of-body experiences/bilocation, and my favorite, “Trajectory Through Anarchism,” in which Trevor tracks the evolution of his political beliefs:

1996: Feeling free of anarchism and a little burned by what I now see was my own hooded thinking, I call up the imp of the perverse to see what other forbidden ideas might be out there. Ayn Rand is suggested, and I read her works. Having already shed one hood I’m less inclined to put another one on, and I do not become an Objectivist.  But moving through Objectivism brings libertarian thinking to my attention. It’s something about the sovereignty of the individual… but I’ve walked down that path already and don’t sign on as a libertarian either.

Like The eXile, OVO 20 comes in a 8 1/2 by 11 inch size, to fit artwork and cartoons on the pages: I was particularly amused by “Attack of the Giant Killer Sperm.” One minor issue I have with the design is that all paragraphs in OVO 20 are punctuated with bullet points. I suppose they’re there to make the book look distinctive, but I found them mildly distracting, fooling my eyes into thinking I was reading a series of lists instead of articles.

Still, if you want to take an excursion into the bizarre and come back a little more enlightened, OVO 20 is a fun and informative read. If you’re still not convinced, Trevor maintains a free online archive of all OVO articles here. He also has some words of wisdom for aspiring writers and publishers:

…First and most important, get busy. Your time is already diminished by work and mortality, and neither of those situations is going to improve. Keep a printed copy of what you make and write down the date of when you made it. Large bodies of work and the pleasure they bring are made a few small pieces at a time. Learn about the history of what interests you. Novelty is rare and not always of value for being novel. Your friends are not being documented right now and you are the one who can do a good job with that. Read with regularity outside your area of interests. Nothing will point out your own ignorance and error better than attentiveness to those who disagree with you, nothing makes what you know make sense like learning something unrelated to what you know. Take as many chances as you are willing to take the lumps for.

But most of all, get busy.

Click here to buy OVO 20: Juven(a/i)lia.

Read Next: Why You Should Purchase a NexxtLevelUp Membership

“Man, I wish I had all the free time you do.”

“Man, I wish I had rich parents like you do.”

“Man, I wish I was as lucky as you.”

A lot of people wonder how I do it. I publish blog posts here three to five days a week. I’ve published three books and am working on two more at the same time. I run a minor online empire of which MattForney.com is only the tip of the iceberg. I constantly post links to my Twitter and Facebook pages that my readers might find interesting. And this is all on top of my day job, hanging out with my real-life friends, lifting, reading books and everything else.

What’s the secret to being an accomplished superman?

That’s what Boobus Americanus thinks when he sees someone like me: that I’ve got some special quality that he can’t obtain on his own. That’s if he likes me. If he’s looking for an excuse to hate me, he’ll claim I don’t have a “life.”

Ah, “lives.” So enviable, and yet the people who brag most about having them are the ones least deserving of them.

Boobus Americanus is such an interesting guy, because he has a “life.” He doesn’t spend his nights doing something lame like working on a small business or writing a book. He’s out there setting the town on fire!

Boobus Americanus makes $35,000 a year and lives in a flat that he shares with three other guys. He has $34.04 in his savings account, which will be gone when he and his buddies order bottle service at the club on Saturday night. Their Ed Hardy duds and free-flowing booze will entice some girls to talk to them, but aside from Joey getting a drunken makeout after last call, none of them will get any.

The morning after, Boobus will awaken on the floor of his filthy living room, with a brain-splitting headache. He’s not fazed. That’s how all his Sundays have gone for the past five years.

Boobus Americanus is proud of the fact that he hasn’t picked up a book since college. When asked about it, he always says he’s “too busy” to read. Unaware that bookworms get the same amount of time in a day that he does, he’s logged hundreds of hours in wasting terrorists in the latest Call of Duty game. You know he’s a badass because he’s gotten all the achievements. Way to go, Boobus!

Good thing he’s beaten this game, because the sequel’s coming out in a couple of months.

Boobus Americanus doesn’t vacation abroad because he “can’t afford it.” Despite this, he always has enough money to get the latest carbon-copy FPS for his PS3, or to go see the latest action flick at the Cineplex, or pay his monthly digital cable bill. Plus, his job only gives him a week of vacation time a year, and his boss has a private investigator on retainer to make sure that he doesn’t use his sick days to go gambling down in Atlantic City.

Boobus has gone abroad once: to Italy with a couple of friends. He didn’t bother learning any Italian before he left, because he’s always had a hard time with foreign languages, going back to the bad old days of high school Spanish. He envies polyglots with their magical ability to converse in multiple tongues without any work.

“Man, it must be nice to be smart and stuff.”

And naturally, Boobus Americanus doesn’t take care of himself. When asked about why he doesn’t lift, he says it’s because he doesn’t have the time. That, and he claims to have “poor” genetics, so trying to get jacked would be a waste of time. When asked why he always eats out, he says it’s because he doesn’t know how to cook anything good.

He never, ever connects the dots.

In ten years, Boobus will be married and live in a three bedroom house in the suburbs. Despite getting a raise to $40,000 and having a hard-working, same-aged, “curvy” wife with a full-time job, he will still be underwater on his mortgage. He will have three kids, two ulcers and one heart attack underneath his (Expand-o-Waist) belt. His hobbies will include watching re-runs of Pawn Stars and playing more video games. His scant vacation time will be spent going to some shithole like Virginia Beach every year.

In ten years, I’m likely to be independently wealthy, doing what I please, not beholden to a boss or a bitch wife or a debt collector. And when that happens, Boobus Americanus will turn his prematurely wrinkled, sagging, triple-chinned face to me and say:

“Man, I wish I had all the free time you do.”

Read Next: The Secret Life of Matt Forney

I posted this over at Roosh’s forum a few days ago, but I thought it was too good to let languish there, so I’m republishing it here. Enjoy! (Click here for the post’s inspiration.)

***

I awoke with a pounding headache, last night’s drunken revelry calling my body’s tab. I drowsily smacked the Snooze button on my alarm clock, pulled the crusty sock off of my post-slumber erection, and groggily trudged over to the bathroom to prepare for my shift at Starbucks.

Angry at failing yet again to lay one of the hypergamous bitches of my hometown of Buffalo, New York, I arrived at work unshaven and irritated. My boss, the chain-smoking whore, chided me for being five minutes late. I fantasized about the entire city evaporating in a mushroom cloud as I walked over to the espresso machine.

After three hours of serving pumpkin spice lattes, it was lunchtime. I took my sack lunch (peanut butter and jelly with the crusts cut off, a banana and a Coke) and maundered over to Barnes & Noble to take advantage of the free WiFi. After checking Roosh, Heartiste and MattForney.com, I pulled out my copy of Bang Ukraine and began reading. Man, Ukraine sounds like a fun place. I wish I could afford to go there.

As I read, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pair of skinny legs and heard a voice: “Yeah, I couldn’t find the right ones for her.” I looked up and saw a skinny black woman with a lighter-skinned daughter and a white man with a darker-skinned son.

My jaw damn near dropped. Omigod, a black woman who didn’t look or act like she walked out of a Tyler Perry movie? Omigod, an intact nuclear family in the year 2013? It was like seeing two unicorns rutting in a barn. My brains were blown out of my ears. I thought, “Man, I have GOT to share this with the guys on Roosh’s forum.”

Then I realized something: if they were an intact family, that means that the guy was married…

“CHUMP!” I stood up, pointing at the white guy. “BETA BETA BETA!”

As they stared at me like I was some kind of gibbering lunatic, I strutted out of the store with a wicked grin. They now knew who the true alpha was.

Read Next: Compliment & Cuddle: The Beta Male Guide to Getting Laid by Roosh V

When Frost launched his new site Thumotic several months ago, he included alongside it this e-book, a brief action plan detailing how to put the site’s precepts into action. I passed on originally because he was charging $4.99 for it. Recently though, Frost has made the Challenge free, probably because he’s now bundling it with the new edition of The Freedom Twenty-Five Lifestyle Guide, which has been re-christened The Thumotic Lifestyle Guide. At the new price, you might as well check it out.

A warning, though: the Challenge is exactly what it says.

As Frost announces in the beginning, the Challenge doesn’t explain the hows or whys of its advice; all it does is tell you what you need to do to turn your life around right now:

The average modern man is soft, weak, lazy, emasculated, cowardly, and fearful. Even the typical above-average man, who works out and gets laid and makes decent cash, would be an absolute embarrassment in a world in which masculinity was respected and revered.

To this end, Frost outlines four areas of your life—Health, Money, Women and Focus—and the steps you need to take to improve them. His advice runs the gamut from a workout program to creating a website to approaching girls to limiting the amount of time you fart around on the Internet. The Challenge is fundamentally similar to Robert Koch’s Brains & Brawn, though much, much tougher: Frost’s advice is not for pussies or the weak-willed.

As I stated, the book has little to no explanation, so if you’re looking for a self-help book, don’t bother with the Challenge. If you actually want to take action and improve your life, get it ASAP.

Click here to download The Thumotic 30-Day Challenge.

Read Next: The Freedom Twenty-Five Lifestyle Guide by Frost

NOTE: As Vox Day referenced this article in his recent review of Infinite Jest, I’m reposting it here; it originally appeared at In Mala Fide on February 29, 2012. Books like The New York Trilogy are the reason why I completely abandoned trying to get my books released by a “real” publisher: the New York literary establishment couldn’t recognize good writing if it DP’ed them with a pair of iron spikes.

***

God, what an unreadable pile of shit.

I recall stumbling across a used copy of City of Glass when I was a kid and liking it for some inexplicable reason. I never bothered reading the two following installments in the trilogy, so when I saw them all bundled together in a single Kindle volume, I jumped for joy. That was an Amazon gift card well-spent.

As soon as I laid eyes on Luc Sante’s introduction, I knew I was in trouble:

Paul Auster has the key to the city. He has not, as far as I know, been presented with the literal object, traditionally an oversized five-pound gold-plated item, dispensed to visiting benefactors and favored natives on a dais in front of City Hall by a functionary in top hat and claw hammer coat, but I doubt he needs one of those. Auster’s key is like the key to dreams or the key to the highway. It is an alchemical passe-partout that allows him to see through walls and around corners, that permits him entry to corridors and substrata and sealed houses nobody else notices, as well as to a field of variegated phenomena once considered discrete, but whose coherence Auster has established. This territory is a realm within New York City, a current that runs along its streets, within its office buildings and apartment houses and helter-skelter through its parks—a force field charged by synchronicity and overlap, perhaps invisible but inarguably there, although it was never identified as such before Auster planted his flag.

Recognize this? It’s the overwrought diction of every “real” literary novel published in the past quarter-century. You’ve got the run-on sentences, the padding, and the highfalutin vocabulary. I mean, “passe-partout?” Do you even know what that means? I didn’t, so I looked it up; it’s French for “master key.” Now that’s how “real” writers write: using obscure terms to remind us all how smart they are and what dumbfucks we are in comparison. If a student handed this in to me for a grade, I’d strike out half of it with a red pen: “Too much filler. Needless repetition. Drop the David Fuckster Wallace act and write like a normal human being.” And this is only the first paragraph!

Since this is a trilogy, I’ll review each book on its own.

City of Glass

The lengthiest book in the series, it’s also the only one worth reading. The plot concerns Daniel Quinn, a hermit mystery novel author who gets embroiled in an actual detective case after being mistaken for Paul Auster. Oh yes, Auster is a character in his own novel. I smell postmodern hijinks!

The following night, Quinn was caught off guard. He had thought the incident was over and was not expecting the stranger to call again. As it happened, he was sitting on the toilet, in the act of expelling a turd, when the telephone rang. It was somewhat later than the previous night, perhaps ten or twelve minutes before one. Quinn had just reached the chapter that tells of Marco Polo’s journey from Peking to Amoy, and the book was open on his lap as he went about his business in the tiny bathroom. The ringing of the telephone came as a distinct irritation. To answer it promptly would mean getting up without wiping himself, and he was loath to walk across the apartment in that state. On the other hand, if he finished what he was doing at his normal speed, he would not make it to the phone in time. In spite of this, Quinn found himself reluctant to move. The telephone was not his favorite object, and more than once he had considered getting rid of his. What he disliked most of all was its tyranny. Not only did it have the power to interrupt him against his will, but inevitably he would give in to its command. This time, he decided to resist. By the third ring, his bowels were empty. By the fourth ring, he had succeeded in wiping himself. By the fifth ring, he had pulled up his pants, left the bathroom, and was walking calmly across the apartment. He answered the phone on the sixth ring, but there was no one at the other end. The caller had hung up.

You can pretty much guess how the rest of the book reads from this one paragraph; lots of exposition, adjective abuse, and page-long paragraphs. Still, unlike the following two books, City of Glass is interesting because it at least tries to conform to the structure of a narrative, with a discernible plot, dialogue and a character arc, detailing Quinn involving himself in the case to the point where he descends into gibbering insanity. At the very least, I was motivated to keep reading. You can spout all kinds of babble about how City of Glass is about breaking down the boundaries between truth and fiction and questioning the relationship between author and reader, but none of it matters. If you want a good, vaguely Coen-esque mystery story, City of Glass is a decent read.

Ghosts

I was plodding my way through this godawful novella (the shortest installment of the trilogy) trying not to fall asleep, when I came across this paragraph:

One night, therefore, Blue finally turns to his copy of Walden. The time has come, he says to himself, and if he doesn’t make an effort now, he knows that he never will. But the book is not a simple business. As Blue begins to read, he feels as though he is entering an alien world. Trudging through swamps and brambles, hoisting himself up gloomy screes and treacherous cliffs, he feels like a prisoner on a forced march, and his only thought is to escape. He is bored by Thoreau’s words and finds it difficult to concentrate. Whole chapters go by, and when he comes to the end of them he realizes that he has not retained a thing. Why would anyone want to go off and live alone in the woods? What’s all this about planting beans and not drinking coffee or eating meat? Why all these interminable descriptions of birds? Blue thought that he was going to get a story, or at least something like a story, but this is no more than blather, an endless harangue about nothing at all.

There’s nothing like a book that insults you for even bothering to read it. I almost think Auster threw this in to make fun of the lit-crit hacks who gush over him: “Ha ha, you idiots are actually READING this? I farted this crap out between watching reruns of Happy Days!” As for me, I just jabbed my Kindle’s next page button until I was at the end.

The plot of Ghosts is nearly identical to City of Glass: a private detective is assigned to tail some guy and eventually spirals into madness in the process. The main difference is that with Ghosts, Auster decided to dispense with such irrelevant distractions as “action” and “dialogue,” instead burying us in a nonstop monologue of the protagonist’s thoughts, which naturally wander all over the place and have nothing to do with the story. Even better, all of the characters are named after colors (e.g. Blue, Black, White, Gold), which combined with Auster’s squid-ink prose means you’ll need a flow chart to keep track of everything.

More often than not, however, Blue will bypass the bar and go to the movie theater several blocks away. With summer coming on now and the heat beginning to hover uncomfortably in his little room, it’s refreshing to be able to sit in the cool theater and watch the feature show. Blue is fond of the movies, not only for the stories they tell and the beautiful women he can see in them, but for the darkness of the theater itself, the way the pictures on the screen are somehow like the thoughts inside his head whenever he closes his eyes. He is more or less indifferent to the kinds of movies he sees, whether comedies or dramas, for example, or whether the film is shot in black and white or in color, but he has a particular weakness for movies about detectives, since there is a natural connection, and he is always gripped by these stories more than by others. During this period he sees a number of such movies and enjoys them all: Lady in the Lake, Fallen Angel, Dark Passage, Body and Soul, Ride the Pink Horse, Desperate, and so on. But for Blue there is one that stands out from the rest, and he likes it so much that he actually goes back the next night to see it again.

These individual paragraphs may not seem so bad, but imagine reading a hundred straight pages of this drivel.

The few short segments of Ghosts that aren’t Blue’s inane exposition are like oases in a desert, but even then Auster can’t resist the urge to fuck things up. Take this segment where Blue is confronted by his fiance (just about the only character who isn’t given a color for a name, but incessantly referred to as “the future Mrs. Blue”), who has understandably gotten sick of his undercover games and found another man:

You! she says to him. You!

No quotation marks. Who do you think you are, Cormac McCarthy? And of course, that’s the only dialogue in that section; “the ex-future Mrs. Blue’s” physical assault on Blue is written in more fucking exposition! Skip this.

The Locked Room

I made it all of two chapters into this before giving up. The Locked Room is written in the exact same dialogue-free expository style as Ghosts, and I was so burnt out from trying to make it through that one that I couldn’t take it anymore. The plot is at least different; it concerns an unnamed narrator’s search for his childhood friend Fanshawe.

Fanshawe had never had any regular work, she said, nothing that could be called a real job. Money didn’t mean much to him, and he tried to think about it as little as possible. In the years before he met Sophie, he had done all kinds of things—the stint in the merchant marine, working in a warehouse, tutoring, ghost writing, waiting on tables, painting apartments, hauling furniture for a moving company—but each job was temporary, and once he had earned enough to keep himself going for a few months, he would quit. When he and Sophie began living together, Fanshawe did not work at all. She had a job teaching music in a private school, and her salary could support them both. They had to be careful, of course, but there was always food on the table, and neither of them had any complaints.

Perhaps I’m just being unfair. Perhaps The Locked Room is actually a really good read and I was just so put off by Ghosts that all of Paul Auster’s writing is forever ruined for me. But I seriously fucking doubt it.

The New York Trilogy is a encapsulation of everything I hate about modern literature. It’s turgid, condescending, obtuse, and pointless. But the sad thing is that Luc Sante got it right in his intro: Paul Auster is the poet laureate of New York City, though not for the reasons he thinks. The New York Trilogy is the perfect book for the New York of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, a stultifying police state run by over-educated SWPLs who think All Things Considered is really deep and get the vapors whenever anyone says anything vaguely controversial. It’s perfect for the New York of the hipsters, pencil-necked dweebs from Seattle or Milwaukee thinking they’re going to be the next Thurston Moore or Lydia Lunch while they snack on artisan bread courtesy of their trust funds. It’s perfect for a New York defanged, declawed and stripped of everything that made it interesting and unique, made safe for underemployed Midwestern brats and bored Australian tourists. The New York everyone romanticizes—the New York of danger, intrigue and passion—is dead and buried.

And this neutered New York has produced a literati that spends all day sniffing its own farts. Jonathan Safran Foer, Colson Whitehead, Nicole Krauss, Gary Shteyngart, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Foster Wallace (actually wait, he’s dead; I’ve never derived so much joy from a suicide in my life), and all the rest: worthless hacks devoid of curiosity, humanity or talent. There’s more merit in a single Roosh Tweet than in the entire American literary establishment.

Sorry, but I went through four years of this horror, and I’ve got the diploma to prove it. I’d rather gargle battery acid than write another ten page paper analyzing Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and I’d never read any of this garbage in my free time. I would love nothing more than to see the mainstream publishing world collapse, along with the toxic, insular culture that gave birth to it. This is why I’m such a huge booster of self-made writers like Roosh, Frost and English Teacher X; for all their flaws, they understand what makes good writing, and they don’t water down their books to make some soccer mom-fearing suit happy. I refuse to support a world where pretentious puff words and navel-gazing is considered the stuff of great literature.

As for The New York Trilogy? The only reason I can see to buy this flaming turd is if you’re an adjunct English professor looking for new ways to torture your students. Alternately, give it to them as an example of how not to write. If there was a version of City of Glass available on its own on Kindle, I’d recommend you buy that instead.

And here’s the final joke. When I sat down to write this review, I was suddenly struck with a thought: “Is Paul Auster related to Lawr—. No, he can’t be. That would just be too convenient.” Ten seconds of research and my suspicions were confirmed:

Paul is the older cousin of conservative columnist Lawrence Auster.

It pains me to say this, but Paul should have taken some writing tips from his little cousin. Larry Auster is a senile old dork, but he can at least write. He’s not great, but he can make his points clearly and concisely, without feverishly masturbating all over the page.

Click here to buy The New York Trilogy.

Read Next: Paul Elam Argues Like a Girl

Dirt Man is one of the manosphere’s most interesting, underrated bloggers, mainly because he approaches masculinity and sex from a distinctly philosophical bent. Most people in the manosphere approach game from a utilitarian mindset—do x thing and become y so you can bang z girl—but Dirt Man looks beyond, to the great questions of life and the universe. His “Letters to a Young Man” series is some of the finest writing to come out of this part of the Internet.

But does this make his debut book, End Game, worth buying? Well…

When Dirt Man first announced End Game, I took a look at its Amazon sales page and stopped cold when it said that the book was only 32 pages long. “That’s got to be a typo,” I thought. “No one would publish a 30-page book. I’ve written essays in college that were longer than that.” While I’ve urged people who want to publish books to always offer a paperback version alongside the electronic versions (because most people still don’t consider a book “real” unless it exists in physical format), the unstated implication in my advice is that your book has to be long enough to justify offering a paperback version.

Then Dirt Man sent me an e-book version to review and my worst fears were confirmed:

Secondly, this book is short. This is intentional, and not the byproduct of a lazy mind. As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to appreciate brevity. Soul of wit, and all that. I’ve taken much more away from this book than I started with. It is meant to be a summation of sorts, a laying down of my tracks so that you may see where I have been, and hopefully profit from my mistakes. I have no desire to rattle on and on. Nor do I wish to entirely rehash what I’ve written about before. If I tread over familiar ground, it is inevitable and unavoidable.

I’m a fan of brevity as well, but the problem is that 32 pages/6,000 words is not long enough to justify End Game’s $6 price tag, especially considering that while the book is good, it’s not blow-your-brains-out-the-back-of-your-skull good. End Game is half memoir, half philosophical tract on the nature of masculinity, detailing Dirt Man’s journey from mediocrity to contentment:

She had told him that she loved him, that her marriage was over. He believed every word and was getting what he wanted, so what did transgressing a marriage matter? He pushed record on the video camera as he laid back on the bed. She kneeled before him in her cheerleader outfit, hair in tails, hands running up and down his thighs, “Are you gonna give me your sweet cream, Daddy?” Months later he would watch the video and get off watching her clean up every drop. Later still, he would destroy the videotape, unsure what place it could possibly hold in his life.

Each of the book’s chapters are organized similarly, with a philosophical rumination written in the first person follow by two brief autobiographical snippets written in the third person. It’s an interesting approach, which reinforces End Game’s nature as a philosophical tract rather than a memoir or a how-to guide. Dirt Man only breaks voice in the final chapter:

In the end, there are many more things that bring enjoyment, happiness and a feeling of living life to its fullest than sex with women. Sex has its place, and is an important part of a healthy and vibrant life, but I’ve seen more than one man abandon all of what else is good in life in the pursuit of that one end game. Myself included.

Much like his blog, Dirt Man takes you through his world in a careful, deliberate manner, without resorting to hyperbole or purple prose. His writing is like a lake on a calm day: stoic and powerful.

End Game is certainly unique in the canon of manosphere literature, but uniqueness isn’t a selling point on its own. After finishing it, I felt like I had read a flipbook that had had half its pages torn out; there’s enough left to tell you what happened, but not enough detail to make you feel fully satiated. And again, the book’s cost (at least for the e-book version; the economics of publishing a print book prevent charging too low a price) is a major sticking point for me. If the e-version was $2 or $3, I’d recommend it without reservation, but $6 is simply too much to charge for what is essentially a Kindle single.

The bottom line: if you enjoy Dirt Man’s writing, End Game is worth the buy, as its a nice summation of his worldview and beliefs. If you’re not already a fan of his, skip it.

Click here to buy End Game.

Read Next: 30 Bangs: The Shaping of One Man’s Game from Patient Mouse to Rabid Wolf by Roosh V

Have you ever stopped, looked at yourself in the mirror and thought, “Man, I’m kind of a piece of crap?”

Well I have some good news and some bad news for you! The bad news first, so we can rip off the Band Aid: you probably are a piece of crap! But the good news is that it is never too late to change yourself into what you want to be. All you have to do is set out for yourself reasonable goals and then set about achieving them.

I know it sounds simple, and its probably something you’ve tried before and it didn’t quite work: that’s why I’m going to help you get started today. You see, not too long ago I wrote a fancy little blog called The Alpha Persona. It was pretty great, and thousands of people managed to stumble their way onto it each day. At the time of writing it, I really was living the life.

Then I stopped writing it.

I got in a serious relationship with this girl (that I’ll probably end up with for the rest of ever, to spit in the face of all you angry manospambots) and the writing became harder. Then I realized that most people wanted me to write, and they wanted me to go out and bang some chicks, all while they stayed home, scratched their balls and laughed at people who didn’t get laid (ironically).

It got me down and I decided I’d quit.

And because I was in a relationship I might as well not work out as much. I might as well stay in more and watch movies and TV, let my posture go to shit, let my diet go to shit: just generally let myself go. Right?

Dead wrong.

I’ve begun to get my act together because I’m tired of being a lazy, useless piece of garbage. I want to make a lot of money, have a helluva lot of sex, and live life to the fullest: and that is what I’m going to do!

So let’s say you want to do the same thing and get your act together. You want to become a better person than you currently are and you want to see massive improvements in your life over all. That’s great! And I’m going to help you get there.

The first thing you need to do is get your goals and a plan of action to reach those goals written down. Once you’ve done that I need you to sit back, close your eyes, and think of something you’ve accomplished. Something specific, something special, something you didn’t think you could do. For me, the very first thing I thought I could never do or learn but did was Tables in HTML coding. I thought they were hard and confusing (because they looked confusing) and I never bothered to learn how to use them. Until I needed them.

Well when I started working out again to get back in shape and get jacked I would think about those Tables in HTML, about how I learned to use them and how they really aren’t hard at all. That’s what got me up my first few weeks at 5am (so I could get things accomplished before work). That’s what got me through that first day at the gym.

In order to get ahead and succeed with your goals, you must first define them. Then you must find something that you’ve done before and are proud of to use as a jumping off point, a hope point. “I’ve done X, Y, Z, I can do this.” Keep it in the forefront of your mind so you don’t get run down. Stay optimistic!

As you move through your goals and get closer to reaching your dreams, you’ll find you naturally shift your hope point. For me, getting up at 5am doesn’t happen anymore because I have a far passed accomplishment; I now get up at 5am because I know that if I do I’ll make more money!

I’ve made money getting up at 5am, and it stands to reason that if I keep getting up early, I’ll keep making money.

I get through my workouts now using the previous day’s workout as a hope point: I did 45 cleans yesterday, I can do 45 squats today. The further along you get, the more progress you make, the easier it is to continue making progress and the harder you work to reach your goal.

I told you the good news was that you didn’t have to be a piece of crap for the rest of your life. I told you that you can start today to make things better. I’m sure you’ve heard it and tried it before, and I’m sure you’ve given up before. We all have. The secret to success is to never give up! The way you keep yourself from getting burned out is to keep your eyes fixed on something you’ve done successfully, giving you the courage and energy to keep going until you see results.

Once you start seeing results in your new lifestyle you’ll find that your success begins to feed into itself. Best of luck to you in everything you do! May your arms stay strong, your feet stay on the right path, and your vision never fail you but instead guide you.

Remy Sheppard used to write at a shindig called The Alpha Persona. He now writes about success, motivation, and freedom over at RemySheppard.com. Check him out, give him a like on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter.

Read Next: What Next?

Please welcome our very special guest contributor: Red Pill Princess.

Oh hai there! If you’re wondering who I am, I’m a happily married 32-year old from St. Cloud, Minnesota who has swallowed the red pill. Actually, you could say that I swallow the red pill every day, twice a day! When I first started, the red pill kept triggering my gag reflex, it was so big and hard. Nowadays, I’m proud that I can get it all the way down without flinching! :D It still leaves a funny aftertaste, though…

Anyways, you might be wondering how I came to the red pill. The manosphere can be a dark and scary place at times, what with all the hatred against women you find here. But there’s a lot of wisdom too.

Shortly after my 30th birthday, I realized that there was a huge void in my life. After spending my post-college years traveling the world to find myself, I came back to my hometown of Des Moines and began a career as a human resources officer for Wells Fargo. I had an annual income north of $50,000, I had a nice apartment in the suburbs, and I had the latest, greatest iPhone model. I even had enough vacation time to visit NYC and LA every year, to the jealous murmurs of my girlfriends. And most of all, I had my pick of Des Moines’ most eligible bachelors.

But despite all this, I wasn’t haaaaaappy. :(

Even with all the money, electronics and hot guys I could dream of, I felt unsatisfied. It was like there was this gaping hole in my soul that couldn’t be filled, no matter what was thrusted into it. One Friday night, rather than hitting the bars with my girlfriends, I stayed home because I was so depressed. While mindlessly surfing the Internet and listening to Ke$ha, I stumbled across In Mala Fide: a website that changed my life.

From IMF, I bounced to all the big, huge manosphere blogs: Roissy, Roosh, The Spearhead etc. I was instinctively horrified at all the things they were saying about women—that they needed to forget about their careers, stop being “independent,” marry young and be submissive—yet for some reason, I kept reading. With each article, I grew angrier and more resentful. :x Who did these assholes think they were? What gave them the right to say all those disgusting things about women? What would their mothers think if they knew their sons were posting all this misogynistic drivel on the Internet?

But as I kept reading over days and weeks, I realized that they were right.

I had followed the feminist life trajectory for the first twelve years of my adult life and all I’d gotten out of it was an empty bed and a lot of nights puking cherry daiquiris into my toilet. I felt empty and unfilled. Conventional wisdom wasn’t working out, so I had to make a change.

To begin with, I cancelled my monthly appointment at the salon so I could grow my hair out. I stopped eating out and bought some Betty Crocker cookbooks. I began wearing makeup and high heels almost every day. My friends thought I was being weird, but I knew those bitches were just jealous. I was swallowing the red pill, licking up the drops and loving every minute of it.

I realized that by following my hypergamous impulses, I was thirty years old and unmarried because none of the men I was dating were living up to my high standards. I decided to be more realistic and look for a dependable guy who would make a great father. While wasting time on Facebook one night, I came across the profile of my future husband, the Admiral, and suddenly realized he’d make a great hubby! :) I knew the Admiral from high school; he was a slightly chubby, bookish nerd, a smart kid but on the shy side. In the decade since, going by his profile pic, he’d lost weight and had really grown into himself. I sent him a message saying hi and asking if he wanted to get coffee and catch up, and he accepted!

When I met the Admiral a few days later, he told me that he had been working in the fracking fields of North Dakota as a parts driver, making $80,000 a year. Aside from the aforementioned weight loss, he looked like he hadn’t aged a day! We hit it off great and after six months of my newfound cooking talents (men love Spanish omelets!) and letting him take the lead and feel like a man, he popped the question. I was so overjoyed I nearly fainted, or maybe that was the sherry! :D The manosphere saved my life!

That was nearly three years ago. Since then, we’ve gotten married and moved to St. Cloud to be closer to his job. We have one daughter and will be trying for another little bundle of joy soon! My husband is returning to Williston next week for another month. If any of you big, strong men of the manosphere are passing through St. Cloud and the Twin Cities, feel free to pay me a visit! It gets soooooo lonely up here in the frozen north! ;)

To contact Red Pill Princess, send her an email at redpillprincess [at] gmail [dot] com.

Read Next: A Dead Bat in Paraguay: One Man’s Peculiar Journey Through South America by Roosh V

This post is not aimed at anyone in particular, but is intended to address a consistent problem with my blog and other blogs that occasionally accept guest posts. What happens is that many times when people read said guest posts, they attribute them to the blog owner instead of the person who wrote them… even when said person’s name is clearly visible at the top of the post. So whenever you read a blog post and you don’t want to make an ass out of yourself when you go to post or comment about it, I highly encourage you to RTFB. What is RTFB, you may ask? It’s a simple acronym that stands for:

Read.

The.

Fucking.

Byline.

What’s a byline? It’s a little line at the top of most every blog post, article, essay or whatever found on the Internet (or at least on sites worth half a damn). In fact, the byline has been in use for centuries, going back to the advent of newspapers and journalism. It tells you exactly who wrote the article, so there’s no confusion.

“But Maaaaaatt, where can I find the byline on your post?” Watch and learn:

Now, because I accept guest posts on my blog, that means that not every article on MattForney.com was written by moi. So how can you tell who wrote what? By Reading The Fucking Byline. For example, here’s the byline on Tuesday’s post, “On Male Friendships: Part Four“:

In case this isn’t enough for some people, I’ve devised a little mathematical formula to help you determine whether I am the author of a particular post. It goes as follows:

Matt Forney = Matt Forney

x ≠ Matt Forney (where x is any combination of letters, numbers or symbols that is not exactly the same as “Matt Forney” or “Matthew Forney”)

THEREFORE:

Adiaforon ≠ Matt Forney

And there you have it: a convenient, easy to understand method for determining who wrote a particular article, story or blog post. When in doubt, take two seconds out of your busy, busy day and remember to RTFB. It could just save your life.

Read Next: An Easy Way to Get More Hits on Your Blog