R.C Waldun should have been born in the 1950s. Or the 1920s. Or literally any time period that isn’t the present—he’s not picky. “I want to start a kind of Beat community in the 21st century”, he muses in one of his videos. In another, he talks at length about the importance of being a flâneur, a 19th century French literary term for someone who is dissatisfied with urban life and modernity, which came into prominence after Marxist critic Walter Benjamin revived it in the early 1930s.

Waldun (whose real name is Robin Wu), is a twenty year old literature student from Australia who has seen immense success on YouTube in the past year. Since January of 2020, he’s gone from around 3000 subscribers to 180,000 as of time of writing, and shows no sign of slowing down. 180,000 is relative obscurity in the broader YouTube ecosystem, but in the niche communities of BookTube (YouTube channels that primarily discuss books) and AuthorTube (YouTube channels that primarily discuss writing books), Waldun is a bona fide celebrity. Certainly no YouTuber in these spheres experienced more growth than Waldun did in 2020, a trend that seems to be continuing into 2021.

Waldun makes videos primarily, though not exclusively, about classic literature. I’m using “classic” here as a catch-all term, as Waldun seems never to linger on one area of the canon, jumping from classical Greek plays to American postmodernism, from Michel de Montaigne to Henry Miller. Yet there's something slightly disconcerting about the way he approaches these topics.

In fact, Waldun seems to have very little to say about the actual ideas and content present in the books he lavishes his video titles with. In one of his most popular videos, where he goes over five of his favorite books, he spends most of the video explaining how exactly he discovered each book, his initial skepticism, and his subsequent delight. Yet when pressed on why these books matter to him, he defaults to almost blurb level descriptions, praising Fahrenheit 451 for “describing the society we currently live in” or A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for “being essential to anyone who wants to become an artist.” Now these are not bad reasons to read the aforementioned books, nor are they even particularly bad arguments to promote them to others, but you’d think that someone whose entire identity is based around the careful reading and analysis of the “classics” would be able provide more information about his favorite books than the first line of their back covers.

This penchant towards vague generalities is shown again in another video of Waldun’s, in which he details three tips for reading Thomas Pynchon’s notoriously difficult postmodern novel Gravity’s Rainbow. However, Waldun’s advice (consistency, rereading, and dividing the book into manageable pieces) seems to have little to do with the actual content of Gravity’s Rainbow at all. Waldun gives valuable advice to those struggling with difficult books on aggregate, to be sure, but why title your video after Gravity’s Rainbow if you’re barely going to mention it? It’s not just an issue of clickbait: Waldun holds up his copy of the book many times throughout the video, which suggests he believes that he’s at least saying something worthwhile about it.

You may remember that earlier in the article I said that Waldun creates videos primarily about classic literature. This is not exactly the case. What Waldun is really creating are self development videos that use the aesthetic of classic literature not only to lend credence to his statements, but to create an atmosphere of art, intellectualism, and refinement that passes through him to his viewers. You don’t watch Waldun’s videos to be smart, you watch them to feel smart, or to feel justified in your belief that you somehow possess the necessary gifts of sensitivity, introspection, and intellect required for you to live a “literary life”, whatever that means.

In short, at the heart of Waldun’s project is a certain aesthetic, borrowed heavily from the dark academia subculture, by which all other facets of his content feed into. Renaissance anatomical art, headshots of serious looking writers—Camus, Wittgenstein, Twain—or photos of Waldun himself, sparsely lit in beige and mahogany shades, adorn his thumbnails, projecting a kind of effortless intellectualism. The faux-typewriter and sleek, minimal fonts he uses in his videos amplify this, along with the cinematic, color corrected shots interspersed throughout them—close ups of classical music scores, lingering scenes of old buildings, panoramas of Melbourne. Even the usage of his initials in his channel title is an attempt to replicate the dignified, timeless posture of classic writers: E.M Forster, D.H Lawrence, G.K Chesterton, H.D, et cetera. And his pseudonymous last name is a not so subtle reference at Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, whose principles of free living and self-discovery find their way into the majority of Waldun’s videos.

If this the cultivation of this aesthetic is indeed what Waldun has set out to do, he has succeeded admirably. In fact, he has succeeded so well that he has managed to infuse the themes of his aesthetic (intellectualism, mystery, discovery) not only in his videos, but within himself. The most dedicated of Waldun’s viewers watch his videos not for their content, but for his presence, which they gush about extensively in the comments. “You look like 18, sound like 28 and write with the wisdom of a 68 year old.”, one commentor writes. On a recent video entitled “Thinking About the Future”, another commenter reassures him that “honestly your mind is so wonderfully complex and beautiful that i'd never not watch whatever content you put out.”

All of this would be more palatable if Waldun was a better writer. But despite releasing a number of videos, and an even greater quantity of blog posts, where he purports to offer writing advice, Waldun’s prose suffers from the same aesthetic festooning that plague his videos. I wasn’t making the earlier “literary life” stuff up, by the way. It’s actually the title of a manifesto Waldun wrote in March of 2020, where inbetween references to William S. Burroughs, Proust, and The Sorrows of Young Werther, he proclaims his goal of living a “literary lifestyle”, in which ordinary experiences become “profound vignettes that live in print.”

This is all well and good, but Waldun’s obsession with presenting a cultured and erudite front hinders him in pursuit of this goal. Take, for example, his first novel, The Learned Disguise, where the legitimate narrative technique of quoting, referencing, or responding to the writer’s influences becomes abused to comic extents, as the main character of the novel literally has to adopt the language and mannerisms of the authors he reads; this process of imitation constituting his titular “learned disguise.” Half the point of the book seems to be for Waldun to show off to the reader that he, in fact, has read Joyce, Hemingway, Emerson, and Goethe, among others, though “read” in this context seems to mean only their most famous work….once.

Even when Waldun dials back the references, he seems so tied down by a certain didactic, overwritten style that even the ordinary experiences he describes lack verisimilitude. Consider the story A Wasted Break, a short vignette about two characters having lunch together. The story’s not bad, but something feels a little off. Like, who talks like this?

“Well, you asked me what I found engaging.” I wiped my mouth with a napkin. “This right here’s pretty damn engaging. Marvelous. I really don’t understand your lot. You’ve the time to mull over this kind of crap. If you want to write, go write. If not, give us your resume. This job pays pretty well, I can tell you.”

But it’s not just the cumbersome dialogue that gives the story a distinctly unreal quality. It’s also the assortment of manufactured details that accompany it. Given that Waldun’s characters have no name, he resorts to series of generic signifiers to identify them. The poet has a wrinkled shirt and spectacular hair; the men and women in the cafe all wear suits and ties. Adding to this is a torrent of seemingly random information. The narrator takes a bite of his sandwich, the working professionals check their watch. You might wonder if this is what Waldun thinks literary fiction is: aggressive, moralizing dialogue combined with miscellaneous details and quotidian characters. (Also I need to point out that Waldun’s literary journal/blog/newsletter is literally called LITERARY.)

This is the point in the article where I need to mention that I don’t hate Waldun. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. Everything that I’ve written so far is just a prerequisite for me to say that I love R.C Waldun from the bottom of my heart. For what Waldun lacks in substance and guile he makes up for tenfold in passion, courage, and self awareness. Not only has he produced hours of honest, life-affirming videos, but has restored my faith in my own pursuit of writing in a way I didn’t think was possible. When watching Waldun speak, it’s impossible not to notice his love for literature, or his desire to make you love literature as much as he does: the good and the bad, the simple and the mystifying alike.

I don’t mean to sound like I enjoy Waldun’s videos cynically, or that my enjoyment comes from a place of superiority, the same way a world-weary, experienced professional comes to enjoy a newcomer’s naive, but boundless enthusiasm in bad movies. Waldun is older than me, likely knows mores about literature than me, and certainly has read more than me. In some respects, what Waldun has done in promoting classic literature is nothing short of extraordinary, pulling in tens of thousands of views on videos about books that are usually considered long, pretentious, or unreadable. Regardless of the quality of the videos themselves, there’s no denying that a not unsubstantial amount of people have been inspired to read, or even first discovered the likes of Pynchon, Proust, and Dostoyevsky through Waldun’s channel.

And Waldun is much, much braver than I am. I started a YouTube channel as well, a few years back when I was still a sophomore. What possessed me to do so I cannot for the life of me remember, but I only ended up making one video, a sort of introduction to the YouTube community. In it I covered the same ground that Waldun did, digressing on books I didn’t understand, and attempting to project a certain aesthetics—in my case a kind of self deprecation that secretly hid a sense of superiority. After that original video, I had several more planned, yet none of them were ever made. They were never made because I was growing aware of exactly the kind of person I was in danger of becoming, or had already become, the kind of person that Waldun broadcasts to the world on a weekly basis. This is not a unique observation. As one commenter wryly puts it:

“Truth is we see ourselves too much in Waldun. He's young, pretentious, is a nerd and a shitty author. The thing is that he is not self aware of that fact. Although we are exactly like him, we at least know that this is a bad thing, and Waldun doesn't seem to check in with reality much.”

But Walden is self aware, only that he doesn’t let self awareness poison him. He knows, and likely does not need me or anyone else to tell him, the manifold flaws present in his videos and writing. Replying to a particularly scathing review of his book, Waldun admits that he shares much of the same opinions as the reviewer, but ends simply with a declaration that the next book will be better. Self awareness is a virtue, but excess self awareness causes stagnation and paranoia. Sometimes knowing how you stand doesn’t help you improve, but only keeps you from attempting it in the first place. Watching Waldun share and continue to share stories, interpretations, and advice—no matter how naive or off base—is strangely heartwarming and even inspiring in a way I can’t describe.

But Waldun isn’t just some benchmark by which we can feel a little more heartened about our own shortcomings. He has ambitions of becoming a great writer, and whether he will achieve them or not, he is actively working towards them. He already seems to be slowly drawing himself out of the faux-intellectual aesthetic he's steeped himself in, or at least is overcoming his fixation with classic authors. His writing is improving as well, with his recent narrative "Streets and Strangers" being leagues better than his earlier work.

Waldun is changing, and as good writers, we must change with him. Change, after all, is essential for all writers, and the themes and books that resonate with you now may not be the same ones that do later. As D.H Lawrence puts it “My yea! of today is oddly different from my yea! of yesterday. My tears of tomorrow will have nothing to do with my tears of a year ago.” Waldun's channel is one of the few accessible ways that we can directly observe an artist's changes throughout the years. Waldun himself realizes this. "I think there needs to be a fundamental shift in how you view my content," he says "View it as a pure documentary." And in seeing Waldun's documentary of changes, I too become more confident in my own change, and to reinvent myself and my art in new, surprising ways.

In short, Waldun represents a certain striving towards art that, no matter what the end result may be, is incredibly admirable. I wish him all the best.