Match the Dead Author to their Substack!

Writing Life

A Note From Hamish McKenzie:

As part of our outreach to influencers, TikTok stars, and anyone else we can think of to join Substack, we have launched also a Dead Authors program. We are pleased to share that the following Substsckers have posted their first note!

Yours,

Hamish

MATCH THE DEAD AUTHOR TO THEIR SUBSTACK!

1. I despise, in roughly this order, art, women, society, men, the Russian people. Nonetheless, since I am so friggin’ talented and cannot help myself, I will dedicate this Substack to describing every single curl that falls on the neck of a society woman I once knew and every thought that passes through her alert, wistful, and yet calculating eyes which shine with the luminescence of the moonlit taiga.

2. Want to learn more about Samuel Johnson? This is the Substack for you! I will dedicate years to following every step of that weird old coot. Interested in knowing why he pockets the orange peel anytime he eats an orange? He won’t tell us but we can badger him with questions about it! Interested in knowing why he hates Scotsmen? It’s clearly just a prejudice, but we’ll spend post after post trying to get him to tell us more about it!

3. I am currently living on the traffic island at Broadway and 103rd St. These posts are written on napkins in the rare intervals when my drug-addled mind is able to think. Enjoy!

4. The boys and I had a really raging party the other night and I can’t wait to tell you all about it. Socrates asked everybody all these questions and nobody knew the answer! And then this general showed up and wanted to bugger Socrates, and Socrates said he liked the idea in principle but that it’s more fun, actually, to go around and ask people questions. Oh, and by the way, nothing is real and all knowledge comes from Atlantis.

5. I live in an insane asylum and write poems about my cat.

6. I just really love to masturbate. Some of my favorite things to think about while I masturbate include (but are not limited to!) jazz, the architecture of Paris, Henry Miller. Please excuse any spelling mistakes in my Substack as I am likely writing this with my eyes shut and screaming with pleasure.

7. I used to be a postman. Then I gave it up to be a full-time alcoholic. I am drunk off my head. Can’t wait to tell you everything about it.

8. I had this really interesting day once in 1904. My serialized Substack will revisit that day moment by moment, microsecond by microsecond. It will take years to do. I strongly recommend buying a companion to understanding it, as much of it is references to Irish politics that I do not bother to explain and other parts of it are not written in any known language. My full expectation is that you will spend the rest of your working life attempting to analyze and understand this Substack.

9. My  Substack

   Is - a furnace.

   Of thoughts - and plentitudes.

   O  it sets my mind ablaze

   And - in the haze

   Are cinders just for you

10. I am 14 years old and sometimes a medieval monk speaks through me.

11. Man is born in pestilence and spends his days in muck and mire. Reach to the very bottom of the muck and you, wretched creature, may find transcendence in the midst of all this putridity. My Substack explores these themes as well as sports betting tips.

12. I have a very hairy chest and many deep, dark secrets. Topics of this Substack include deep-sea fishing, big game hunting, firearms maintenance. No poncy literature.

13. In this America of pinched consciences and narrow quarrels, my Substack lies athwart, neither responding nor denying, neither caviling nor acquiescing. It breaths the good air of independence, it sounds its barbaric yawp to all who read it.

14. Me and the boys are headed west! My mainest man Neal knows some girls in Denver and we’ll steal cars from here to there. There are also some brothels on the way and Allen Ginsberg will try to shag me. Oh, also, we’ll find god.

15. A racy, sensuous Substack dedicated to dishing the dirt on influencers and party people!

a) Ernest Hemingway b) Anais Nin c) Thomas Chatterton d) William Burroughs e) Jack Kerouac f) Emily Dickinson g) Charles Bukowski h) Plato i) Leo Tolstoy j) Walt Whitman k) William Makepeace Thackery l) Fyodor Dostoevsky m) James Boswell n) James Joyce o) Christopher Smart