Writing Autobiographical and Theoretical

Hallo all,

Another brief communication really, in fact, to apologize to those of you who feel you are being too massively bombarded with texts that are not “relevant to your interests”, as the 4chan kids put it. I would really like to generate some traffic on this Substack and am currently, therefore, experimenting with the posting of a whole range of texts of different genres and different sizes. The greatest interest by far, to my surprise, has been generated by the one literary/autobiographical piece that I have put up here and I fully intend, as I announced in the last of these general communications to my subscribers, to write and post more material in this style.

Just because the autobiographical appears to be the “crowd-puller”, however, I’m very susceptible to persuasion to publish material of this sort that I already have, some of it dating from decades ago. A young follower on X just now, for example, suggested that I put up on my Substack any material that I may have to hand on “les belles dames du temps jadis” - his idiom was actually a slightly variant one: namely “some stuff about fuckable foids from back when you were young” - and it is in fact the case that, aside from the autobiographical pages I published here a few months ago, my other fragments of autobiographical writing are in fact “erotic-themed” (they were intended for a book that was to be entitled, after an aphorism of Walter Benjamin’s, “Books and Whores”).

Easily persuaded, then, I have decided to post some excerpts. I preface the publications, though, with the warnings to my subscribers that (a) this is not writing that I consider to be of the same quality as the “Empire of Regret” piece that I published here some months ago (b) though of poorer quality it does in fact cover some of the same ground as “Empire of Regret” and (c) what is new in this material often verges on the pornographic.

I ask for the forbearance, then, of any subscribers who may find the next few envois importunate. More writing - of a philosophical or of a more honed and disciplined literary nature - will follow shortly.

Alex Reynolds