/lit/ - Literature

pitch 2/???

sometime in the 1980s a young Steven Pinker suffers a crisis of conscience and slips into alcoholism, incredibly winding up in the same bar that a frail Young Land and a small coterie of others happen to be in. Pinker has been drinking heavily, and after hearing Land discussing his theory of cybernetic capital and enlightenment he inexplicably balls up his fists and beats the shit out of them all in a back alley. the other patrons in the bar are dumbstruck. it's still Pinker after all, and there is a captivating shot of him seeing the blood on his knuckles in a rain-slicked 1980s alleyway, swirling newspapers and everything

he takes Land's notes back to his hotel and compares them with his own, which becomes an unusual project called The Dank Slate later accessible in a fragmented form via Internet Archive, but which he never finishes. Pinker disappears into Neo-China, and everyone who knew him wonders why he did not go on to live a happier and more productive life, while Land becomes a kindly and well-meaning professor of English literature at Duke. basically just Sliding Doors for /acc

>ywn never read edgy and disaffected Not Pinker's provocative counter-cultural masterpiece, The Dank Slate, in which he argues that this in fact the best of all worlds but only if you are a complete and total chad b/c fuck the haters and fuck you too
>reviews for The Dank Slate are largely forced out of other authors he has physically beaten with his fists in back alleys and recorded on a walkman, extorting such praise as 'yeah...okay...i- Steve's book is...really great' (Nassem Taleb) and '[Pinker] is a complete fucking lunatic who makes me despair for the fate of Western civilization' (Sam Harris)