Mike Crumplar

The self-mythologizing Substacker of the Dimes Square literary scene gives up.

- BROCK COLYAR

I ’m often thinking about Balzac,” Mike Crumplar, a 30-year old recently lapsed Substacker tells me in the backyard of a bar in Green point, a cigarette in one hand and a pilsner in the other. “My New York is his Paris. There’s a lot of the same scene shit and intrigues—dramas and fights over poetry and bourgeois illusions and shit.”

There’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of, much less read, what the writer called his Crumpstack, a word that has no known French translation. In it, he sought to depict, and send up, the world of hard-tweeting, coke-snorting aspiring rebel intellectuals who hung out in a made-up mini-neighborhood called Dimes Square during the covid lockdown. (Crumplar himself moved to New York from Washington, D.C., in January 2022.) His newsletter, a kind of diary, mixing essays, score-settling, and party reportage, had around 7,000 subscribers, which might very well have exceeded the entire population of that milieu, where it was avidly hate-read. But as many clout-chasing arrivistes have found before, from those who wrote for the gossip rags of Balzac’s 1830s Paris to the Gawker bloggers of the aughts, the surest way to make a name for yourself is to mock those who came before you.