Libertine Dissolves
A novel by Toxic Brodude - 2025
Libertine Dissolves
Toxic Brodude
Self-published on KDP
2025
It’s safe to say that “alt-lit” or “electronic literature” is at its end. It’s not that these movements in art are no longer in style; it’s that technology has made them obsolete already.
Figures like Jay McInerney or Bret Easton Ellis were the swan song of a post-literate society that has moved away from reading and into “the universal of the technical image,” as Vilém Flusser puts it. To the postmodern artist, a “book” is an artistic medium, not a historical document. In addition, American billionaire Jeff Bezos has made it widely acceptable to self-publish books using his service of Kindle Direct Publishing. All the author needs is an ISBN, a bank account, and his formatting skills to put together a simulacrum of a professional book at Barnes & Noble.
This is different from a piece of academic writing, a research paper, government documentation, transcripts, or English instructions. A “book” to the artist has become another artistic medium to express himself in. Instead of thinking in terms of the “content” of the document, it is judged solely on the design of the object itself. What we know as a “writer” is as ambiguous as a school teacher or a professional who does copywriting. What happens when an artist writes in English? We call that a “creative writer.” However, many of these new creative writers are actually not writers at all, but are using the medium of the book as another outlet of expression for an entirely different artistic skillset and industry, proving the point that we are in a post-literate society that has moved away from reading and writing in Western culture.
New York dandy Matthew Donovan and his “sweetychat” project focus on “literature gatherings” in the city, and yet they are rather considered to be “parties.” The beautiful Winifred Wang, known for her stunt against Sanje Hojah, “Well, at least I am not a Hegelian E-girl,” is good enough to have her own event, with professional pictures taken of her like a model, then really having any sense of resume or prowess in intellectualism. To Donovan, it’s not about literature (and not the kind you commonly think of). It’s the continuation of the 1980s Gen-X worship of McInerney or Ellis, where the privileged children of the rich Boomer class believe they are yuppies or new wave New Yorkers, where punk zines of the 1960s have been commodified into Dennis Cooper worshipping Arthur Rimbaud because “he’s young and transgressive!” The problem, however, is that this has been going on for the last half a century as a byproduct of both the TV and the internet age. Flusser is right to question, “Does writing have a future?”
The post-literate mind has become something of a visual schizophrenic, thinking of English words in that of Chinese, where the word is the visual object without any consideration of how one reader thinks. Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga once said that the entire point of philosophy is a loving pursuit to think really hard about something. There is no thinking concerning a concept like a “graphic novel,” and to assume Jim Woodring’s Frank comic series and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake are the same because they are both “graphic novels” is a total fallacy. Then there is no writer in the sense that he is just an artist composing images. Rather, the Donovans and the Wangs are composers using writing as an alibi to enter an already dead and older market. And as Theodore Adorno has put it, there will be a commodity fetish over the actor or the actress, and the medium in which they partake is a mere illusion to sell you a culture industry of dreams.
Think about it.
“You see the hot goth Asian girl? This is her lifestyle. This is what she thinks, this is how she acts, and if you want a piece of this action, you have to understand the subculture and the cultural anthropology behind it. Imagine 20 years from now, there was a unique and vibrant goth Asian girl scene in New York, and you would be a late 40s, thinking how you too were a part of the scene because you also had a quirky Asian girlfriend in it. This is what it means to be a cosmopolitan and to be in an original queer culture in the 2020s.”
There is something absurd about this American liberal fantasy.
With that being said, we have to treat creative writing as a design-centric discipline. We don’t read these new creative writing books because of the prose, a certain contemporary subject, an argument, or for enlightenment. Rather, these are pamphlets (and Aesop's Fables to the worst extent) to support the “writer” as a culture industry actor. It’s one unit in the grand scheme of profits-in-demand liberalism and the short attention span learned from TikTok and Instagram.
Is any of this truly liberating?
The publishing industry has been monopolized by Bezos, and if you do want to make it as a creative writer, well, tough luck, because it means working under Bezos, who has all the means to produce the paper and publishing houses that work on behalf of think tanks to support the American regime of liberalism and nihilistic New York parties.
I write this in the hope that artists learn from their mistakes and move on from industries that equally hate them back. After all, if the entire point of this is to make a profit from the art we make, we should have a sense of ethical consumption and production in the industry we would like to see lift us. And yet, if that’s just a group of high school friends or strangers you met in an online group chat, the difference in demand for consumers and supply of art does not increase the surplus of wealth to the artist. This means one has to stop the cult of hipsters in Bushwick that go to the same DJ events, “all ages show,” and clubs in favor of attracting a national loyal audience from the dark parts of Virginia to the isolated city of Reno. This obsession with regional identity of pride in one’s city is a pathetic plea for help, realizing there is indeed, nothing going on in Philadelphia, and yet those who cry about how great the city is, honestly wish they were having fun in New York! An artist must attract all possible audiences on an international scale. As Gustave Flaubert would say, “Art is superior to everything as a global citizen.”
…I digress. I would rather want to write about an art object I have come across surfing on X. While I am certainly not a fan of the Republican bent-psyops of X (as it’s certainly not as sad as BlueSky), I have come across a user named “Toxic Brodude” and his work.
I soon bought a copy of his “book,” Libertine Dissolves.
I now take it with a grain of salt that I should judge such an object as a zine. With KDP out of the way to represent a monopoly of book publishing, it could be said that Mixam now has a monopoly on zine creation, as well as offering print-on-demand links for said zines one creates.
Those who are deeply ironic are ironically the ones who cry and complain about “authenticity” within their flawed subculture. Such complaints entail that “it can’t be a zine if it’s made of this material,” or “it can’t be a zine because I didn’t see it at the West Philly anarchist flea market!” I always bring up the fact that Cincinnati punk Robert Inhuman was known for his lifestyle mantra, “more punk, less rock.” What the deeply ironic do not understand is that KDP has become the platform to create “alternative literature” like it was “alternative music” or in politics like an “alternative right.” Anything “alternative” reeks of the college radio station of 20-somethings making pretty things to express a language they are illiterate in. And that is why visuals, such as a naked woman, incite natural arousal to our biological urges. The naked woman should not be conflated with poetry or any intellectual endeavor. Sure, “beauty” is a motivator to art, but not the sole purpose. As there must be a pursuit of what is wise and what is good, to what Aristotle called “eudaimonia.” I hardly see it anymore in zines about sorry Palestinian children or brown homosexuals who hate fascism.
The person named “Toxic Brodude” is one of many in their age where pen names are no longer formal names like “John Doe,” but something more experimental are cartoony like “Delicious Tacos.” My name “pilleater” has origins in internet and gamer subcultures, and is irrelevant to any artsy “Kilroy was here” type of artistic Situationism.
The cover of Libertine Dissolves is an ode to Ralph Steadman. Timothy Jackson of Rosemonet College wouldn’t shut up about how much he liked the man, and honestly left a bad taste in my mouth since 2015. I would rather want to conjure up the aesthetic and art of Andy “Dog” Johnson, who did the art for The The’s 1986 album, Infection.
I also love how there is no information on the spine of the book. No author, no title, no publishing house name or logo. Just a beautiful strip of darker cyan colors. It looks pretty stuck between my other books by the window. As if someone just stapled a bunch of drawings together and then colored on the front. Again, my plea is that this is an artistic object rather than an actual English document.
It’s strange that the English language can be an artistic medium, written or spoken. Ron Silliman has pushed poetry to the limits with Xing and Ketjak, and honestly, there is not much left we can do when we have crafted all possible worlds with the medium. Those who succeed as “writers” are engineers rather than designers. It is my bias that the only successful writer who was able to excel both in engineering and proper design of prose with English is Gene Wolfe, who is still underappreciated and frowned upon by the Dennis Cooper mobocracy. Wolfe mastered the mannerisms, culture, and eloquence of European English and then spun the novel around by creating a playful machine out of it. To Wolfe, “My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.” It is the latter notion most creative writers and alt-lit youth fetishists lack, because they shy away from engineering and logic, two fundamental foundations of design, and the very thing they are supposedly after.
There is something playful with Libertine Dissolves, and I can’t take my eyes off it.
A book should follow a format guideline. There is an art to formatting. A lot of it is just emulating what professional books are out in public and taking all notes from there. The disclaimer page, copyright, dedication, “about the author,” all that. But what makes a book different from a zine is that a zine does not have an ISBN. Even if it did, it would be sent out to the Library of Congress! Hence, zine publishing has always been about making pamphlets out of cheap materials and throwing them in a market of people not interested in them. KDP is turning that concept on its head, where every single time a book is published with them, you see a “Made in the USA” with the date created note on the final left side page. Back then, people would create X amount of copies under 100. But because the elite are Social Darwinian and Malthusian, hellbent on the degrowth movement, they are making sure everything is print-on-demand for the sake of nobody wanting to hear that white boy’s sexual confession stories from Cleveland.
Regardless of what New York English majors are whining about, they seem to be ok with any expression, as long as it’s transgressive and confessional, where they are conflated with actual thinking. Every creative writer today is just a musician with no training, an actor with no gig, a programmer with no sense of logic, or a painter with no brushes. For the creative writer, it’s just composition. And poetry is just a visual array of big English words with some confessional badguy stories until it’s pretty. It’s not smart like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, but vain like Edmund White’s trauma bonding.
For the first time in a book, there are hyperlinks to Toxic Brodude’s X and Substack under the title. It implies that this book was brought into existence by a superior internet presence. Imagine if I were to find Libertine Dissolves collecting dust in a bin at the Bushwick flea market. My trail back to the source is an X or Substack page that might as well not exist, just like a Myspace or Geocities site. It came out of the sky from this blogger, and only the year of “2025” is printed.
No chapter numbers or titles. No indents either. Page numbers are at the bottom center.
There is no linear narrative. It’s non-linear. Flip to any page, pick a sentence, isolate it, read and meditate on it.
Such as,
“What you read here is the full extent of my capabilities to document my life, and as much of it as I am willing and prepared to share.”
“An example to illustrate my delayed adolescence, I once saw a large group of my schoolmates in town, and asked them where they were going. They told me that they were going to go and smoke a joint, and asked me what I was doing, to which I told them I was buying children’s playing cards.”
“The people in attendance at this one concert were the gatekeepers. Put on a good show, and you could be in with a chance of courting them.”
“She walked towards me and started kissing me, slowly. I think she wanted me to massage her, to take it slow, to enjoy the environment she had created. …It was a mating call.”
“I became weird and intense, psychotic, paranoid. My relatively peaceful and harmonious life had become chaotic, corrupt. I lay in my garden and drank neat spirits until I fell asleep in the sun. My sexual appetite became voracious, and there were multiple times that I hurt my new girlfriend during sex out of nothing but boredom.”
“We spoke about the men we were, in our teens, and our twenties. Raging against the world, working out our place in it.”
…Writing like this is a palindrome. What begins is what also ends, and what is in the middle is the same. It never really ends with, “and that was how cool life was as a twenty-something having sex with women in a punk band.” But yes, it feels like that from the start and the closure. So with all of alt-lit and the visual arts being a palindrome, things should be read in the middle, where everything is the same—being non-linear means that the reader decides what he wants to get out of it and what type of play can be found in the text.
I imagine I am at some lower Manhattan art gallery event with installation pieces by Mike Kelley, and free copies of Libertine Dissolves are free to pick up next to the Trader Joe’s manchego cheese. Some old guy who used to teach at the School of Visual Arts comes up to me and doesn't shut up about how cool Maggie Lee is and how he knew Kevin Killian and Bill Viola when they were alive. The yapping won’t stop. I would likely say, “Listen, buddy, I had sex with Maggie, and you should be looking into Greg Johnson, a gay white nationalist who peddles in all this Malthusian shit you support.” Of course, that’s why I joined Caleb Maupin’s CPI party to fight this, until he doubled down and called Douglas Kim “the great.” You honestly can’t trust any of these people. Nope. No one. Why does it matter that I was connected to this or that person? Why is it they don’t support me in return and use me “as that guy who makes YTMND art and says things about Asians?” This shallow New York City whoring is the problem and has only absorbed all anti-liberal forces into destabilization and de-radicalization. Gabriel Rockhill is correct, regardless of whether you are into Marxism or not.
What am I supposed to say at the party? “I’m not a musician, painter, programmer, or actor. I’m a writer! I compose things with the English language and wish other people would get it.”
But yeah, that book would be there too, and I guess I would have to start thinking about something in that environment. …And we are back to Donovan and Wang’s problem with creative writing!
No one is an artist anymore because a true artist would dare to say whatever they want and use any medium regardless of whether a think tank backs them or not. X is getting on my nerves because it’s the same post-alt-right grifters watching us. Another Sam Hyde and Nick Fuentes’ interview with 300k views in under 24 hours feels way too orchestrated by the liberals in New York who hate us. But again, “don’t say anything bad about them, or we will take away your paycheck!”
“Please, just shut up! Here, James Nulick is going to recommend your book. He knows Dennis Cooper! You belong in the tradition of William S. Burroughs! Lydia Lunch and Jim Goad are your family associates! Nulick has got you covered!”
I have seen my fair share of Republicans into Sam Pink, and I do believe all of it has been planned. Carl Oglesby was right to declare that there have only been two elite classes: The Yankee and Cowboy War. Perhaps the Republican wing will finally meld with the Williamsburg 2000-era Democrats. Is it Trotskyism? Absolutely. But it’s also managerialism; English majors from Smith College to Dartmouth who praise David Foster Wallace and Harold Bloom as fake plastic gods with no industry outside the Ponzi scheme of controlling the goyim. The elite manage and do nothing. They want to be vain and roleplay a character till the Earth becomes cold. Rape, pillage, and abuse other women. Destroy families and harm virtue. This is what should make anyone disgusted and turn them ideological or straight-edge.
Regardless of what I just wrote about the current situation, you should pick up Toxic Brodude’s book and think about design and art anyway. I am guilty of being influenced by Peter Sotos and Vanessa Place. But these are just footnotes to a greater cultural context of what art does.
There is no right way to read a piece of art. One is merely looking at it. Perhaps as Neil Gaiman said about Gene Wolfe, “It's a knife-throwing act, and like all good knife-throwing acts, you may lose fingers, toes, earlobes, or eyes in the process. Gene doesn't mind. Gene is throwing the knives.”
-pilleater
8-10-2025
Will pick up a copy once I get my paycheck