Rubble's Interregnum

Trump, UAPs, literature—an update on where we're headed this summer.

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Well, it’s been quite the past few months. Even just this week’s been a doozy. Trump’s federally indicted, it appears aliens are in fact real, and you guys, my subscribers, have been instrumental in getting Barney’s Rubble firmly off the ground!

Barney’s Rubble has been on a steady, bi-monthly publication streak since April Fool’s Day—no laughing matter. I’ve covered the phenomenon of quantum spinors in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies; the unknown masterpiece that is Wild Thorns; published a short story about a writer who just can’t seem to die, no matter how many tomes he pens about his terminal ailment; and covered the corpuses of two of my favorite writers, the late and great Martin Amis and the octogenarian Cormac McCarthy—the latter of which has generated 5,000 reads! Along the way I’ve received such amazing encouragement from you guys and have had some very stimulating discussions in the comments section.

Now, most of my content is free, and that’s how I’d like to keep it going forward. However, it takes a lot of time and creative energy to write many of my pieces, which I do on the weekends and after the work of my two (count ‘em, two) paying jobs is done. My most successful piece, the one on Cormac McCarthy, is 10,000 words! Now, that’s the stuff I’d like to be writing more of, and it’s clearly what you guys want based on page views. But the only way to make more pieces like that happen is if I can start earning some dough from this venture. (I’m even going to launch a podcast interview series with writers and other movers and shakers in the literary world). By upgrading your subscription to a very cheap paid plan, you are in effect becoming something like my employer—and I’ll even give you the contractual power to make me quit my other jobs!

So, as a thank you to everyone, I wanted to offer this super cheap subscription plan:

(I also wanted to drop this UFO/UAP video here, because I think everyone should be paying attention to what’s going on. Even if it’s just a further complication and legitimizing of a well-worn conspiracy theory, why are so many legitimate intelligence personnel coming forward? Is there a conspiracy behind the conspiracy? It’s all worth asking.)

Summer Update & Why You Should Upgrade

Now, I’m sorry I’ve had to break the bi-monthly streak this weekend, but I’ve been working on a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, which will supplement my AirMail article that got me blocked on Twitter by Joyce Carol Oates. Not sure who will block me this time…

Also, I’m not exactly breaking my streak, am I, as I’m taking this slot usually reserved for literary criticism to lay out what you can expect over the summer:

1. Podcast. I’ll be launching an interview series with writers and other movers and shakers some time this summer, stay tuned!

2. Whales and Men. A review of Cormac McCarthy’s unpublished screenplay Whales and Men, which I briefly covered in my previous McCarthy essay.

3. Something Amiss. Another piece on Martin Amis — I might revisit his infamously bad Yellow Dog and its savage reviews, questioning along the way, “Is it really that bad?” and “Why are the reviews particularly nasty?” OR: I might explore Amis’s misevaluation of Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, which, judging by Amis’s appraisal, is Nabokov’s Yellow Dog. Arf arf, I think not.

4. Infinite Joyce, or, why David Foster Wallace is crap. Period end of story.

5. The Importance of Being Ernest. The genderfluidity question—unasked by virtually everyone—of, yes, Ernest Hemingway. (The Garden of Eden, anyone?)

6. Anti-Federalism and The Articles of Confederation. The original, founding American constitution was not The Constitution, but the Articles of Confederation, in which there were congressional term limits, one-year presidencies, no standing army, no police, and stringent laws against gerrymandering. I’m going to explore the little-known history of this document and its seven year span as America’s founding polity, as well as the specific positions of the anti-federalists who fought against its extrajudicial replacement with the plutocratic Constitution, engineered by the monied classes. Anti-federalism is the founding, dissenting American position, and, oddly enough, the direct ancestor of both progressivism and libertarianism. They say if you go far enough to one end of the political spectrum, you wind up on the other side. The American political spectrum is not a line so much as a secret loop, which I’ll attempt to square… wish me luck!

Also in the offing will be a deeper dive into the quantum physics behind Blood Meridian, which I really only teased at in my piece, and which needs far greater exploration than what McCarthy scholars have ever been able to drum up.

Anyways, that’s just a taste of what can be expected this summer. In the meantime, I’m going to take this brief interregnum to get cracking on those pieces. I’ll also link to my LARB piece when it’s out this July!

Thank you once again for your support. Starting this Substack, I didn’t want to just howl into the void—though there is that. No, I’m so beyond grateful that the abyss is populated with such cool people.

See you soon,

Nick Vincenzo Barney