Laymancellectuals

I guess I’ll start straight up: is Sillyboy a work of autofiction?

What’s your definition of autofiction?

I mean, is it based on your life, autobiographical in a way?

It’s definitely based on my life. But what I find interesting is that my favorite parts of the novel are things that I’ve made up. In order to make it work as a cohesive piece, I had to add a lot of fictional elements. So, I am definitely using material from my life, but I’m turning the dials up and down on parts of myself and on experiences I’ve had to make them hit harder, to eke out satire, to be funny, to be provocative. I jokingly call it semi-autofiction on my meme page, and I feel comfortable with that. And then, when you’ve been working on a piece of text for years and years and years, it starts to feel like something that didn’t happen to you, and I’m interested in that.

Yeah, it’s almost like you’re writing about it so much that it’s becoming fiction.

I mean, I started this in 2015, then I made a film in 2015, and I released it in 2017. The bulk of the writing happened between 2017 and 2021. Then I put it down, made another film in 2022, and did significant rewrites in 2022 and this year. When you live with something for that long, you almost start to doubt your memory about what came from reality and what came from your imagination. So, straight up saying “this is autofiction” makes me feel like I’m the unreliable narrator. Clearly, like my protagonist, I am somebody who makes films and acts, and wants to write. I’ve had problematic relationships, and dealt with all these things that the characters are dealing with. But there are also things that I know for a fact didn’t happen. Those things kind of make the book a book to me.

Prior to this book, I didn’t know the extent of your film stuff. But I knew your Instagram account, @themasterofcum.

Hell yeah. Did you know there was a guy behind that account, or did you just come across it as memes?

I just came across it through the whole Cellectuals thing and the downtown lit scene.

Do you remember which Cellectuals account you encountered first?

I think one of the first ones I ever really saw or knew of was just the @taolincellectuals and then some other niche ones.

I was one of the admins on that. Almost by definition, all Cellectuals accounts are pretty niche. The least niche was probably the progenitor account, @incellectuals, that had a real moment in 2020. And then every subject-cellectuals account is an offshoot of that.

Do you have a hand in all of those?

Yes. you should write that I absolutely do. Parenthetically, the reality is that I don’t, but I like to joke about that. Actually, you should cut that out. You know how there are some theories that a lot of different dudes wrote Shakespeare’s plays? The reality is that I have this very grandiose fantasy that people will attribute all the Cellectuals accounts to me, just because I have probably been a part of more of them than most people. But the truth is, by no means. Me and my friend Writers Life Tips, Patrick, we sort of began that. We found that account with two posts on it and then became admins, and then many other admins joined.

I was excited to see what Writers Life Tips looked like at the recent Tao Lin thing. I’m a fan of his writing too. He recently posted a piece on his Substack that was so good. It was so funny. It was the best one he’s written in a while.

Really? What’s it called?

It’s called “The Big Roll”. It’s a really short little story about a fat guy. It’s really funny.

I gotta check it out. I love Patrick. I’m also a huge fan of him.

So, about the whole Cellectuals thing, I feel like the esotericness and just the vibe of that can get sort of almost incomprehensible if you’re not deeply on the internet, because it’s five stages past irony. As someone who’s not a part of New York City or of this scene of actual real-life people, I was trying to understand the vibe shift thing of summer 2021, the Angelicism thing and all that stuff. The Cellectuals thing seems like it was almost a result of that. I can’t say for sure which one came first, the Cellectuals or the vibe shift, but that’s when the accounts got on my radar. I was curious if you had a thought on what all this meant.

The beauty of the Cellectuals accounts to me is that they are hard to define. I feel like part of where their mystique comes from is that their definition isn’t clear to anyone yet. I think they’re a means to move away from 20th-century models of cultural production that everyone is so familiar with to the point that they’ve become almost annoying. We’re so used to knowing how to take in a TV show, a movie, a play, a rock concert. But then, to encounter a Cellectuals account is to truly engage in a new model of cultural production. I don’t even think that the people who produce them fully understand it. It’s that gap of understanding, that incomprehensibility, and that is what gives it its stickiness and heat.

In terms of the vibe shift, there are competing definitions. My personal definition is that the vibe shift was this feeling that happened right at the beginning of 2021, that if you were to meet up IRL with your mutuals, who you felt a kinship with online, that kinship does translate. Now, as a caveat, it doesn’t always, but it’s a way to commit to be like ‘you know what, I’m going to fucking go to New York or North Carolina or L.A. or wherever and I’m gonna meet up with this person or this group of people who I think I share values or sensibility with.’ I feel like having that become totally un-stigmatized and the norm is part of the vibe shift for me. But then, I think that the Angelicism crowd has a definition of it. And I know Sean Monahan has a definition of it, which has more to do with creating a space outside of “woke” or PC culture being such a defining monoculture. I think that’s true too. But my personal homegrown definition was the thing that happened when everyone realized you could meet up with the rando schizos from the meme page and they were all pretty chill. For some reason, that’s the one I like.

That is the coolest, clearest way I’ve ever heard that, and I fuck with that. Back to Sillyboy. By the way, I have a “without spoilers” specifier, but to be honest—

—I don’t care about spoilers. That doesn’t bother me at all.

Great. Before I came in and met up with you, I saw a physical copy of Sillyboy in McNally Jackson. How would you briefly describe the novel to someone seeing the book in McNally Jackson and who has no idea who you are, no idea what @themasterofcum is?

The way I typically describe it is that it’s a novel about a dysfunctional relationship. But an early reader told me that they thought it was a novel about ambition, and that’s been my favorite take on the book so far. I also think that you don’t need an understanding of my meme work to get the book. There’s definitely work I’ve done where I think you do, where having an understanding of memes is your entry point. A poetry project that’s been ongoing for me is very exclusive in its references and its use of meme phrases as stanzas. For someone who isn’t versed in meme culture, the poem almost intentionally makes no sense. But Sillyboy came from the desire to really be legible to people and to tell a story with no barrier to entry. You don’t have to be in this niche online community to understand it. The character is like a proto me before I found that world. He has an idea that he might want to make content, he calls it art online, to be a poster. All those ideas are really nascent in culture in 2015, which is when the book takes place. He’s taking what he observes from the net art community and wondering how he can extrapolate that into something that he could make and do. But he doesn’t figure that out in the book. There’s just a glimmer of that.

However, even though I never wanted the book to become something that a regular, not extremely online person couldn’t pick up and relate to, I did feel like it was important that the internet played a role. Because even in 2015, social media, phones, and texting were already chipping away at or heightening certain good and bad things in terms of relationships. These were themes I felt comfortable exploring and wanted to read more about myself.

Yeah, there is no barrier to entry in Sillyboy.

Thank you!

All the references, like the Future songs, made it such a delicious book, so digestible and such a good read.

Thank you.

I love that it didn’t have some outsider culture esotericness to it that was unapproachable. That’s what I love about reading and books right now—I write some too and that’s what I’m trying to write, stuff that’s just approachable and digestible. I want to write something I can send to the skater homie and say, ‘read this.’ I don’t want it to be so deep and so philosophical that your normal layman can’t understand. I like stuff that’s in layman’s terms.

Well, I’ll say that there were drafts of the book where I think I was aiming for something that really is against my values now. Earlier drafts came from a younger writer’s impulse for me to try to sound literary or smart. In the process of editing, I realized that the stuff I like and want to read is something anyone could understand. And if it does have something to say that has any element of profundity or depth that’s not easy to parse, then it’s actually not worth being in the book. I’ve had phases where I’ve tried to read dense theory and stuff, but I always feel like I’m larping and it doesn’t actually stimulate me emotionally or intellectually. I much prefer books that are fun and digestible. And If there’s depth, or if there is an idea or two of value, that’s later in the taste profile, that comes secondary.

I feel like I could not relate to you more on that, that’s sick. About the ideas you’re exploring—reading some parts of Sillyboy made me wonder if you are or were into David Foster Wallace at all.

Honestly, no.

The screenplay, 7th grade part gave me this DFW vibe, specifically Infinite Jest, specifically ETA scenes, at the Enfield Tennis Academy.

Tell me more about it.

In the book, there are multiple narratives, multiple settings, and multiple groups of characters and they all more or less intermingle. One of them, specifically, that most people would consider the main one, is about a private preparatory school that’s specifically for kids who want to be star tennis players. There’s this vibe at ETA, almost, of toxic masculinity, but among young kids, before they know what that word is. There’s this element in Sillyboy too, I feel. There’s this pressure to one up your bros as a young male, specifically, lying about who you made out with, or jerking off in the closet. It’s like this take on toxic masculinity that the screenplay part in Sillyboy hits on, but out of a political, PC context. You know what I’m saying?

Yeah, you’re hitting on something really true. I started writing the book in 2015, in the context of the strong nationwide critique surrounding the awakening of toxic masculinity and, the following years, of the #MeToo movement. So it was so on my mind. It did make me remember these experiences that I had had as a child of what you’re talking about, where you pick up on this real aggression, anger, and brutality of young boys. On the way that young guys are cruel, evil almost. Cruel to each other. I’m not sure the book offers any solutions because I don’t really have them myself.

I’ve also found it easier, more freeing to look at that idea of “toxic masculinity” through the world of kids because whatever that is starts there. The problem that I don’t have a solution to is that there’s some aspect of being a man that does require a healthy relationship with a natural aggression that isn’t bad. There’s a quality to masculinity that is rough, and you see it when dogs or really good male friends playfully fight with each other. But as a child I also remember being terrified. So it’s in us. To what extent it’s socially put in us, or in there as biology, I really don’t know. I was trying my best to grapple with this idea that there was something true about the innate anger in a man that might be there because we needed to literally hunt when we were prehistoric. But what do we do with that in society? The kids I went to school with were scary to me. They just were. But what do we do about that? I think just labeling everything men do that society doesn’t like as toxic is definitely not the way. People don’t want men to unethically use whatever this innate anger or rage in them is. But there has to be some room for it because it’s probably not going anywhere and it might just be cellular, it might just be in us.

Yeah, I definitely picked up on that and really enjoyed that about the book. What was so cool, and purposeful too, is that kind of work you were doing with that was outside of the main narrative.

But it’s also in the main narrative, because Sillyboy’s fascination with Future is that he feels like rappers can own it. He feels like it’s allowed in that culture, but in his, it isn’t. Even the fact that he is using this name for himself is a self-deprecating dig at his masculinity. It’s also underlining his masculinity because he is using his gender in his own name. But he’s not calling himself Toughboy, he’s calling himself Sillyboy because, for him, in that moment, that’s how he feels.

The last thing on the book I wanted to draw on can potentially be a spoiler.

I do not care.

The whole book is very real and realistic, it’s of the times, to the point that it could not have existed twenty years ago. It’s really hitting on the age of the internet, the relationships, the apps and all that kind of stuff. So, what’s up with the premature epilogue, that is followed by another chapter, and then the absurdist, abrasive and violent ending? Some of the best lines in the book are located in that absurd part, too. There’s a line about Sillyboy’s dad hitting him in the nuts with a steel duck head door stopper or something, or vice versa.

Yeah, exactly.

And this line about something like hitting—

—Yeah, smashing the nuts that made him or something.

Exactly.

Well, when I began writing this, I felt very ill-equipped to write it, and very neurotic about telling this down-to-earth story. It didn’t feel worthy of literature. So part of how I dealt with that was including all this neurotic interjection from the narrator, which is in the final project a little bit. But the first draft had, I would say, twenty times that. And it was really unreadable. That epilogue which comes before the end of the book is a vestige of all this neurotic interjection, and it was just a part that I liked.

Also, Sillyboy is this striver, this ill-formed person looking for his identity. At the time I was writing the book, there was this feeling—that still exists now—that you can only tell stories that are coming from you. You know, you can’t go out of your culture to tell a story, you can’t go out of your gender, you can’t go out of your race—all these things that used to be the purview of authors everywhere, I mean, your job as a writer is to contain multitudes. But when I was writing Sillyboy, the idea that doing that was problematic was really strong. So it almost felt like my response to that was that I had to unmask at a certain point, and be like, ’actually, it’s just me, I’m actually just writing this as me’. That felt like an interesting gesture to keep.

And then in terms of the final fantastical psychotic, surrealist ending, that actually was a suggestion from my editor and publisher, Jon Lindsey because when he was reading early drafts, he may have been slightly influenced by my work as a filmmaker, because it had so far been much more surreal, much more magical realist, with very strong shades of schizo shit. So, he wanted to figure out how we could make this ending hit a little bit more. Because I come from this psychoanalytic background—and the character does too—I felt like he would be taking out all of his rage on his parents in a killing. And then because that didn’t feel realistic, I thought it would be better as a symbolic killing. This is kind of ordinary, but I tried it, and it just sort of felt good, so we kept it.

I love it. It was very strong.

This guy, Sillyboy, is struggling to become something he’s not. He wants this “great moment of becoming” so much, but the only one he feels he has any ownership over is a very superficial one about his looks. The murder harks back to incel rage, the 4chan guy. When people are so lost, sometimes they do feel like violence is their only way to become something. That’s a very tragic idea some people sadly take up. I’m satirizing that because it’s just in his head. He’s not going to go through with it, he never would. But in a way It’s like another way of dealing with the impotence/impudence of the male rage. You want to direct it somewhere productive, but you actually don’t know how to do that. So you may direct it at an angry fantasy, and it’s unfortunately pretty relatable.

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Sillyboy is available from Cash 4 Gold Books.