53 Comments
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Aristocratic Dog's avatar

Beautiful writing, man. I was not aware of who WBE is. This has made it clear that he is another bland, morally-bankrupt degenerate. My lack of knowledge of his person made me mistakenly believe that there must be some greater message to his blog.

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Aodhan MacMhaolain's avatar

No there's nothing of worth in his blog but chuckles and disgust

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Ogre's avatar

This is a little less simple. Bad people usually deny they are bad, this kind of self-awareness or transparency is unusual.

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Nick Nogoski's avatar

My only problem is with your Hemingway comparison - you use a passage form WBE about the objectification and depersonalisation of a woman and compare it to Hemingway writing about a landscape and a river. I think there has to be some admittance that achieving the former in a way that is ‘beautiful’ is a lot more difficult than the latter. If we are dealing with ugly thoughts, the beauty has to present itself in unexpected ways, and surprising places. James salter is a good favourable comparison, because it’s writing about the same feeling of lust. I think WBE’s big lazy problem is that he never creates atmosphere, a sense of place, a scene- not that he doesn’t intellectualise his desires.

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Hugh Selwyn Mauberley's avatar

That’s a fair critique—in my defense I’d say that WBE’s descriptions of scenery are not any stronger than the quote I provided. You also say “If we are dealing with ugly thoughts, the beauty has to present itself in unexpected ways, and surprising places.” I think that’s well-put.

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Fenrir the Shih Tzu's avatar

Very well written essay. Forgive me the metaphor, but WBE was the grain that irritated your mind enough to produce this pearl. The author of WBE would do well to learn from your prose style.

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Osnat Katz Moon's avatar

This review made me think and feel more things than the entirety of WBE. Truly outstanding stuff. Thank you for writing this.

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SirTophamHatt's avatar

Forgive the non sequitur, but your profile picture looks like a female Nathan Cofnas.

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ARX-Han's avatar

A superb critique in all dimensions.

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Belte's avatar

It was his utter contempt for what should be a thrilling, nerve-wracking first kiss and affair that made me hate his writing and not bother with his book. Just lazy sentence structure, repetitive vocabulary, and BookTok-tier phrasing. He writes (hopefully fictionally) of acting as a washed up sad sack who comes in like a soy boy Dracula to steal a young girl’s innocence for twenty seconds.

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Jen's avatar

Soy boy Dracula LOOOOOOOL

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Matt Cyr's avatar

Excellent example of a thorough and time-saving review. I’d seen WBE referenced in a few posts and wondered why it was even a topic of conversation at all. This well-written review made me so grateful I never spent time reading this book. Respect for taking the time to read and write this.

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Anthony Marigold's avatar

Great writing

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Sam T. Oates's avatar

Agreed. There was a brief period where I thought WBE was fictional.

He constantly tells you that, and I thought maybe there was some deftness there, that we should take that statement at face value like everything else he writes.

I imagined some Californian writer, accomplished in other registers, who created wbe from some sunlit little campus apartment. Read that way it’s kind of fun, but I still felt there wasn’t much to it, and wondered if that was a deliberate choice as well.

But then it became clear he is a real person and I realised the whole thing was a waste of time.

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Jxsh8's avatar

How did you realise he is a real person?

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Bridget's avatar

Agree wholeheartedly. I've enjoyed his blog as a sort of popcorn read, entertaining but not substantial. You can tell it's going to trickle out of popularity sooner rather than later because, like you mentioned, he has no range or depth, and it's getting tiring reading about his banal thoughts on slut #927 sprinkled with self pity about his own failure to launch. This critique was much needed!

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nole's avatar
Jun 1Edited

Interesting read, and you do make good points. However, this reads to me as overly feminine and romantic. No matter how pathetic and how much of a loser WBE is, at least he lives in reality, and does the best he can with what he has, without complaining or making a big deal out of everything. You seem to me like a man who lives overly in his imagination, in his delusions and fantasies, instead of living in the real world. You have the typical artist's despise for things that are 'real. You want everything to be grandiose, and romantic, and 'beautiful'. And unless you are in any way personally comparable to your 'heroes' and their grand achievements, you should probably refrain from critiquing others and instead focus on your own flamboyant romantic gestures and successes.

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Hugh Selwyn Mauberley's avatar

The point of romanticism is to inspire a kind of fanatical devotion to some ideal. The goal is not escapism (though of course this temptation exists). The point is to show that another kind of world, another kind of life is possible for man on earth.

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blank's avatar

Can he really said to be living in reality when his nomadic lifestyle requires maintaining a Very Online presence so he can beg incels for money?

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MadelynGrace's avatar

Really Good

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Alice Clara's avatar

Thank you so much for this. Occasionally one happens upon an essay like this, and for a long pregnant moment one stops fretting over the future of literature, and who will go on writing it, reading it, or especially appreciating it. This was fantastically enjoyable from both a stylistic and a cognitive angle.

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blank's avatar

Thank you for putting into words everything I was thinking about the guy!

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Spergler Acolyte's avatar

Wonderful review.

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geoduck's avatar

Look, this is a very nice review, and I certainly have no regard for Mr. WBE or his supposedly grim lifestyle, but you have to understand how hard you are selling this thing. The number of slur-spewing Substack e-girls who, desperate for the slightest hint of punk rock, Buy It Now and then rush out to intercept WBE's indiscriminate snail trail is only going to snowball.

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