Self Care:
Missing well more than a hyphen

Bret Ellis manqué Russell Smith’s tenth and final book, Self Care (Biblioasis, 2025), treats an amour fou between a feminist and an incel. One of those categories is an animating force of the state. The other is purely notional, its ostensible members pursued with the full force of the state and its cutouts.

Russell, having been divorce-raped by his ex-wife (who now has custody of his son, whom she could transgend), cannot surmount his need for titillation in order to somehow address the present day honestly. His coterie of left-wing editors, and a publisher dependent on régime largesse, make matters worse.

Three kinds of cover

  1. Reportage by the corporate press provides prestige cover for the régime’s project of incarcerating (preferably extirpating) its domestic enemies.

  2. Court rulings enact that project through binding precedent.

  3. Self Care confers small-batch-artisanal literary cover on this selfsame project, giving it currency in the soi-disant cultural elite.

Type, copy, and usage

The warning signs were right there in Black and White (in a poor choice of typeface, as we shall see): Black is capitalized, but white and god are not.

You don’t need to know anything else or look further in any respect. What I’m doing here is well more than is necessary to understand the structural dishonesty in Self Care. Russell’s editors, like leftists everywhere, quite enjoy racial suprematism. It’s just their flavour of same. It’s never OK to be White, for example, least of all with majuscule, but Blacks are sacred. That’s why they get reverential capitalization.

The same ladies with bullshit jobs in the publishing industry who think Black-girl magic is real think God isn’t. Are they ever in for a surprise. Still, that’s why they lowercase (v.t.) His name. They do that even though single-word lowercased bowdlerizations have been available for nearly a century: omigod (OED 1961–) · ohmigod (1927–) · omigawd (1969–).

The same demographic that capitalizes black but renders God in lower case also believes that Catholics spent decades covertly bulldozing hundreds of Indian children into the aforementioned mass graves. Such capitalization choices are irrefutable signals.

Don’t let anyone younger than Russell Smith edit your copy

The fundamental problem, as I explained elsewhere, is that Kids Today have simply not read huge masses of well-edited copy. Everyone from the previous century was steeped in well-edited copy. In that era, one had to know shit, which facility came about through voracious reading, germinating wide general knowledge.

Hence anyone under the age of 50, save for the preternaturally gifted, all of whom long ago got the hell out of Dodge, is incapable of copy-editing.

What are the editor credits?

Ainsley lives in Fredericton (I’m from Moncton); works for small presses; misrenders the name of his own job (it isn’t a single word); and has the expected physiognomy.

I had had a whole jeremiad loaded in the chamber to lambaste lady copy-editrixen for having imposed their failed ideology on a male writer. Just as right-wing assholes decry spiritual faggotry, here I want Ainsley to quit editing like a girl.

Neologisms used

I maintain the lexicon of right-wing-asshole coinages. While avoiding shitpost like the plague, Russell deploys a few:

  1. pronoun people (not really)

  2. trad wife (it isn’t two words)

  3. alpha-male · sigma-male

  4. cuck(boy)

  5. black pill (twice, and in these usages it isn’t two words)

  6. Staceys (and) Chads

  7. soyboy (I’m amazed that one made it to final copy)

  8. simp

99 ways to misrender numbers

Females operate by unspoken consensus. Some sorority girl or other in New York publishing decided a decade or so ago that the struggling book industry had to really, finally differentiate itself from those ghastly blogs (short for “Web logs,” a kind of online journal or diary). Print has to feel like it’s better than HTML – even when it isn’t, and even if electronic books in the ePub format are HTML.

In the hindbrains of the publishing cartel, book typography has, at root, two differentiators from beastly blogs: Em dashes and rendering basically every number as a word.

  1. Nospace-emdash-nospace does not work in continuous composition, not least in justified text (try that on a Kindle) and worst of all when adjacent to quotation marks or any word containing a hyphen or en dash. Space-endash-space solves every problem.

  2. Integers one through ten are rendered as words most of the time, as are some larger integers, especially when used figuratively (“I told you that a hundred times already”). Dollar values in particular are not meant to be rendered as though a pajeet at a call centre were banging them out (“forty-three thousand dollars” – what do you do if there are cents attached?).

    Of course numbers can, and, in many contexts, must be rendered as numerals. Of course a numeral can start a sentence. Of course Self Care borks this completely.

Type is half-assedly klassy and wrong

What else did the editorial team get wrong?

First of all, like a jeet they misrender Canadian English. I literally wrote the book on that topic and there is no excuse. Mr. and Dr. are rendered with word-final periods.

In this list, which I am not going to copy-edit further, see top/bottom/mid of cited page numbers.

  1. 289b blatantly missing end quote

  2. 9 errant comma after woman

  3. 15 djs; cf. 17m DJing

  4. 14–15 too much space between open quote and italic caps

  5. 140b that isn’t going to be the name of the “site”

  6. Literally on p24 misses the chance to say “May 2‑4 long weekend”

  7. 40b comma mandatory but missing

  8. 41 forty • 47m • 50–51 • 78m dozen fifteen · 129b you have got to be fucking kidding me

  9. 44 Black • 26 white cis • 46m

  10. 46 PhD but cf. TA-ship in How Insensitive (yes, I specifically remember that, and it was typeset wrong)

  11. 49 MrDr elsewhere • 224t

  12. Why boldface only the first five words? 66 THE • 170b

  13. 65, 68 hours/times

  14. 97 actual Nazis (one of several references)

  15. 102m those should be slashes

  16. 106–7 spaceband too wide • Dr • Two of them end in periods

  17. We have variously stalky and stalkery

  18. 182 not enough resolution for a page of Bembo Italic

  19. 185t it’s Dungeons & Dragons

  20. 189 $75

  21. 206 gagnant not ital (was twice before). And comma or slash?

  22. 208 nobody actually utters “YA novel”

  23. 229 and others: one does not dial one’s best friend (on what? a Contempra phone?)

  24. 240p4 make up your minds about numbers

  25. 236/273 in no respect is this how things work

  26. Endpaper misrenders title

And for reference, the book’s title is a reduction of Gloria’s column title, “Daily Self Care,” which indeed must be rendered in quotes. Self-care in its usual senses is correctly hyphenated otherwise.

Honesty

Sympathetic, except toward the boy who gets murdered

Self Care is highly sympathetic to Gloria and her autist paramour Daryn. Russell understands that Gloria “had a feminist education,” but also believes there really are men who hate women.

I suppose so.

But Self Care manages to meld wish fulfillment with predictive programming in that Gloria fantasizes about harming Daryn on page 34 and finally finishes him off by kicking him down a flight of stairs 253 pages later. (Except page numbers are off by six.)

Russell includes enough right-wing neologisms to give the impression he has read what these disaffected young men write. Like Gloria, he makes the mistake of believing them, or taking them literally. But Russell never goes so far as to accurately describe them and their lives using their own coinages. Meanwhile, he complains that the English language has a paucity of terminology for organs of reproduction and what one might do with those. As such I suspect Russell knows what he’s doing.

We’re presented with all sorts of true-to-life details, in other words. But the whole setup is colossally fake, and Russell knows it.

The régime is getting everything it wants. Feminists are inseparable from the régime, and they wonder what the holdup is in putting incels in prison for misgendering a tranny.

Fact-checking various asses

Russell is belittled as a “former contributor” at the Globe and Mail, which, like all media outlets that aren’t Blacklock’s, CanadaLand, Rebel News, or a couple of others, survives on government grants. I downloaded, printed out, and read every article in the Globe that used “incel” in its headline (text archive), which I guarantee is more than anyone at Biblioasis bothered to do.

Joy unknown to soyboys

I would note that, while highly disaffected, right-wing boys are the only ones with a sense of joy or fun in their lives. At root that’s because they’ll laugh at anything short of God. (“Even the Holocaust?” ”Starting with the Holocaust. Also, which one?”)

Russell creditably avoids the commonplace that leftist girls (tautological) like right-wing boys because they’re basically hotter. Not quite: The only hot young men are non‑ or anti-progressive. (The swole left is as real as the trans child. Working out makes you right-wing.)

We can hardly risk another Proud Boys

Progressives are not living in reality

Let alone consensual reality. Russell Smith vaguely is, but he could not get his book published if he were honest. How banal to “remind” me of the denotative senses of “novel” or “fiction.” I’m the one who constantly advocates printing the legend, for heaven’s sake.

Feminists, and progressives generally, and girls generally, all truly believe there are masses of incels out there and that they’re a problem, and find it credible that such masses might arrive en masse at a subway station. Russell is doing fan service for the readership he hopes he has – gals who have never quite twigged to the fact that The Handmaid’s Tale was not, at root, a cautionary tale of how fascistic Republicans are, but straight-up erotica.

When not talking about English usage or men’s fashion, Russell’s entire œuvre amounts to titillation. (I did what I could to skip pages and pages of shall we say physical intimacy in Self Care. I pay good money to keep female sexuality out of my life. But there seemed to be quite an interest in the phallus.)

Spy used to incessantly refer to “bosomy dirty-book writer Shirley Lord.” Cross your fingers, but maybe Russell Smith has taken up that mantle.

I jest, but Russell’s dishonesty cannot get a pass.

Russell would never have been permitted to go full Houellebecq

If Russell had managed to use more than a smattering of true-life right-wing vocabulary, he wouldn’t have ended up with a fundamentally untruthful novel. But Biblioasis, captured by the régime at remarkably low cost, cannot risk that kind of honesty.

It will never be illegal to call an edgelord an incel

Or, for that matter, a Nazi. (Gloria also believes there are such things as Nazis here in Toronto.) Libelling young men in this way facilitates their persecution by the régime. Self Care is the champagne-socialist West Queen West flavour of such targetting of enemies. All the sad young literary girls have the licence they didn’t know they needed.


Choosing to work within the system

Russell Smith grew up in the previous century and began hamster-wheeling in the publishing milieu of that century. He has consistently chosen to keep working within the system even after said system fucked him over time and time again.

These facts are downstream from the divorce-rape that separated him from his son and stuck him in “a rental apartment in Parkdale.”

Whoops. That’s not the actual quote (sic throughout):

I have great difficulty earning a living; a live in a rented apartment in Parkdale, I’m always worried about money and my quasi-fame such as it was has vanished entirely.

Yeah, well, I’m a bigger has-been than Russell is, but at least I know how he could solve the problem.

In person in situ

Russell Smith (full head of hair; crossed fingers) in black T‑shirt and sweater Having missed the book launch, last week (2025.10.20) I was one of six punters at a talk at a bookstore ostensibly starring Russell. He was there with his sexy-vampiress authoress and another novelist, whom I rather liked. I was the best-dressed man in attendance and Russell very much was not the second‑.

Again staying on-brand, Russell managed to utter the words “orgasm” and “ejaculate” (v.). (Michael Cunningham: “I can’t help noticing that as soon as I write a novel without a blowjob, they give me the Pulitzer Prize.”)

He’s well(‑)preserved for his age (≈62), and obviously works out to some extent, but sarcopenia is eating away at him. I was not aware that both hands were affected by syndactyly. Really, though, Russell’s sad-sack demeanour about book publishing was well treated in Super Sad True Love Story, though I doubt Smith would trade his hexed fingers for Shteyngart’s crumpled wang.

I heard a lot of back-and-forth about naming actual streets and subway stations, and whether or not some imagined reader in Winnipeg would recognize such names. (Queen’s Park wasn’t named; Self Care can’t make up its mind even on that degree of honesty.)

Novels: passé

Well, they are. Gangly Hebraic shitlib David Shields reprogrammed my mind in one fell swoop with Reality Hunger, which permanently discredits the novel as a Victorian form that has not evolved even if it’s talking about interstellar travel or a final solution to the incel problem.

I cannot remember the last novel I read before Self Care.

This too is another manifestation of Russell’s suicidal need to work within the system. Even if one accepts the novel as (a) form, all the excitement is coming from based and redpilled authors like Delicious Tacos and Dan Baltic (and Mike Ma and Sam Finlay and so many others). Despite working with a small press in a failed state, Russell could still, right now, position Self Care within that milieu.

So do what those guys do

You can teach an old dog with a Wintel shitbox new tricks.

What’s he going to talk about in these new ventures? Two things – literature, from his vantage point as a male novelist who isn’t David Shields or some kind of homo, and men’s style (ditto).

At no time would Russell self-shitcan from his pity-fuck job at Dundurn. If they or a bunch of girls in masks try to cancel him, well, cancelling is over. Every right-wing asshole who gets doxxed and/or cancelled ends up more famous and richer.

Let’s set a goal of earning Russell an extra $10K (not “ten K” and also not “ten thousand dollars”) within the first twelve months.

Last but not least, why can’t Russell start his own publishing house? All the joyous young literary spergs are doing that. And it’s working out great for them. One of these guys commissioned a new translation of and reissued The Camp of the Saints.

“It’s OK to be Russell Smith”

I’m not in a position to help Russell out, not least because one should never meet one’s fans – let alone, as he surely has done, bone them.

Nobody has put this much effort into studying Russell or his work. What you’re reading here is about $10K(’s) worth of editorial consulting. (Still not ten K.) Legend-printing doesn’t come cheap.

For a man who wrote about mourning coats and presented a radio show on “language” (archives) alongside a lesbo cohostess, surely only this degree of detail is warranted. He’ll always have one fan.

The young gals he’s sympathetic toward, and rather fancies, will send him to the gulag first.

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Posted: 2025.10.27