Numb at the Lodge is two years old this week, and after two long years it’s finally achieved its purpose. In the last twelve months I have written 1

Two years of blindness, arrogance, and vice - by Sam Kriss

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2024-09-23 16:00:01

Numb at the Lodge is two years old this week, and after two long years it’s finally achieved its purpose. In the last twelve months I have written 145,709 words across thirty pieces. I have written linguistic apocalypses in which the divine tongue seeps across the southern border of the United States, and world-histories of hatred; I have revealed the terrifying secret of Santa Claus. Now, the time I invested in insulting my audience and inventing minor sixteenth-century theologians has paid off. That’s right: I have a book review in the New York Times. Obviously at this point the whole experiment can be wrapped up. Time for me to cash in whatever outsider cred I’ve built up with this thing, and spend the rest of my life drinking very small cocktails at very boring parties and championing various obviously shitty novels in exchange for social favours. Instead of writing long, leaden screeds about stone-age tribesmen hacking into each other’s skulls, I’ll scatter short, sparkling columns about how this time you really do need to vote for the lesser of two evils. It was nice, getting to write whatever I wanted, building my own audience, experimenting with form—but none of that compares to the dead allure of the mainstream press. The Grey Lady, with her skin like mottled ashes, mashing empty gums in her termite-eaten throne: she calls to me, and I can only obey. Goodbye.

There’s a large and established tradition of Substack writers gushing over this platform. People love to write end-of-year posts all about how good it’s been to them, how rote the rest of the media has become, how all the interesting writing is happening in newsletters, how great it feels when your only boss is your audience and yourself. If the Times came calling, they might not even answer: that’s how much they love writing on Substack. Most of the people saying this sort of thing tend to be fairly successful on the platform; you hear less of it from the vast majority of writers here, down on the long, long tail of the power law distribution, who pump out thousands of words every week to an audience of a few slightly embarrassed friends. (Actually, maybe they are saying the same thing. If they were, it’s not like I would notice.) But I have a lot of good reasons to be writing the same sort of piece. Numb at the Lodge has been absurdly, bafflingly successful, much more successful than I ever expected. This time last year, I wrote that I wanted to have 12,000 subscribers by the end of my first year, and I pretended to be extremely upset to have failed. ‘More accurately, you failed me. I kept telling you miserable cowards to like, share, and subscribe—but you didn’t do it, not enough of you, and now this is the result.’ This time, I set myself the similarly ridiculous goal of 25,000 subscribers by the time I reached the two-year mark, and prepared a whole bitter, spiteful rant for when it failed to transpire—and instead, it actually happened.