Haven't read it, but this is the first piece to convince me permanently to put away my wallet. A lack of craft doesn't deter me, but a lack of honesty, of courage...why is that worth anybody's money?
Thank you Gary. I've been really shocked actually to kind of put this together. I think the book business is much more broken than I even would have suspected.
I'm with you on this, Sam, but I have my typical gadfly question: does the market owe artists anything? I too find myself feeling curmudgeonly before my time (well, I'm almost 50, maybe it is my time). Speaking truth to the market has its place, but is there any reasonable expectation for it to change or to come to view literature as that sacred activity?
You really ought to read Willa Cather's "The Kingdom of Art." She viewed art and religion as interchangeable. And she was fortunate to come of age as an artist in a time when Alfred Knopf was just starting out. Knopf believed you could sell craft, and it was a happy partnership. But she did not get on well with Houghton Mifflin and was so repulsed by her brush with Hollywood (Warner Bros wanted to cut the whole second half of her novel "A Lost Lady" from the film because it was "too depressing") that she forbade any of her other novels from ever being adapted to the screen.
Cather wrote to her friend Mariel Gere in 1896 about a very similar irritation to the one you describe. Only she was responding to a philistine from Nebraska named Thomas Wing:
"As to T. Wing's words, Heavens how much or how little did I tell you on that night of much morphine and little Morpheus? The less I care about T. Wing and his "words" the better, thast thats one reason I was so awfully glad to get away from Lincoln. I am going to quit writing to that gentleman pretty soon and then forget all about that conversation. Only yesterday I wrote him that I had never forgiven it and never could. He has one creed and I another. They are creeds that never meet in this world. There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; thats my creed and I'll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be. Its not an affectation, its my whole sle self, not that I think I can do anything myself, but the worship of it. That is about all that life has given me: it is enough. I dont ask anything more. I think I get as much good out of it as most people do out of their religions. I love it well enough to be a failure in it myself, well enough to be unhappy."
Isn't that kind of the pact we must make with our art? To love it well enough to be a failure, well enough to be unhappy when the market or the public does not love us back in the way that we'd like?
On art and religion being interchangeable, I have it on good record that enlightenment philosophers upon realising the effects of suppressing public religion, discovered that religious feeling and the feelings of enchantment and awe went with it. They didn't want to bring God back into the public sphere. But they needed those feelings. So they sought to ground it somewhere else. Art was their choice. And it half-works.
Thank you Josh. I really do need to read Cather! She was just never on my radar until you put her there. Yes, I suppose that's right, that the market owes writers nothing - but then writers and readers do have something of an obligation to find forms of transmission that do not owe themselves entirely to the market. This famously is what universities represent - and bohemian culture as well. I think what's happened is that the post-war history of literature is of the publishing industry taking more and more power in terms of regulating cultural transmission and doing so at the expense of bohemians or of the coterie of taste-setting mandarins. At this point, though, the publishing industry just doesn't turn any real profits from literary fiction so is pretty much giving up on that (except for publicity-building exercises like My First Book) - and something that I would really like to see happen in my lifetime is for circles of writers to wrest power back from the publishing industry.
Circles of writers wresting power from industry has a sweet sound, indeed. I fear that we are too often envious of one another to mobilize very effectively. But Substack offers many exceptions to that rule. Now I'm curious what you think it would take to really wrest power away from the publishing monopolies? Perhaps you recall that I had a depressing conversation with a local bookstore owners sometime ago. I asked if he had a "local author" shelf, a fairly standard thing for most small shops like that. He gave me a big speech about how local author stuff, especially the self-published kind, isn't very good and doesn't sell well, and so he really just relies on whatever list comes out of Penguin to stock his shelves. Partly because he can just return whatever inventory doesn't sell. But it left me wondering why I was supporting him at all? For writers to effectively combat industry, they are going to need to have some other method of curation that ensures that what they produce is demonstrably superior. I'm here for that conversation. But it's a steep climb.
I wanna take the short-cut! Darn it, knew I should've been hanging out in New York more. (To my followers, this is a great and genuinely revealing look into the HL phenomenon).
I wanna take the short-cut! Darn it, knew I should've been hanging out in New York more. (To my followers, this is a great and genuinely revealing look into the HL phenomenon).
Thanks for another thoughtful essay. I suppose a lingering question, especially in light of Lorentzen's and Barkan's erudite takedowns of Sinykin's "conglomerate fiction" thesis, is whether Sinykin may be onto something. Perhaps I'm missing the boat, but it's just hard to escape the notion that a grim industry cynicism doesn't stoke the bad faith that rumbles underneath these sorts of literary burps. Everybody's laughing all the way to the bank.
As an oblique contrast, I remember reading Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" some years back. It's a fraught book, and after its staggering success Wilson became something of a crank, but it was a sensation when it was published in the mid-50s. And arguably, it retains its literary value some 68 years later. Wilson was very young when he was discovered, a dark horse, and he was briefly greeted as a wunderkind. The publishers raked in tons of cash, sure, but I don't think it was with a wry grin. Or was it?
Thank you for the thoughtful comment! I haven't read the Sinykin book and the excerpts I saw of it in Lorentzen's piece make it seem moronic, but, yes, I suspect that Sinykin is basically right. That the history of 'literature' is actually the history of publishing, and we really miss how much of what we take to be great literature was manufactured (sometimes very cynically) by the publishing industry. I think what that does, actually, is that it gives curator/critic types an opportunity to go backwards as well as forwards, to say, wait a minute, this thing that was popular at one moment and got canonized is actually rubbish, that this thing that was passed over by the industry is brilliant. Editorial work is supposed to go backwards in time as well as forward, and that's an important activity for people who care about literature.
I've read a lot about Wilson but never read him directly! My understanding is that Wilson really wrote a good book and then the publishing industry thought they could turn him into a star - he was very handsome, it was the right moment for it, etc - but then Wilson turned out to be more independent-minded and more difficult than anybody expected, and the industry quickly dropped him.
Thanks for this, Sam. I think you're right about historicity and critique.
Wilson's "The Outsider" is absolutely worth reading. It's staggering, actually, and the story of Wilson himself is quite tragic. You're likely right that he was discarded due to his intellectual wildness (his follow-up to "The Outsider," "Religion and the Rebel," was also a work of tremendous perspicacity, but its tone was less welcoming). Of note, though, and apropos of your piece, the publisher of "The Outsider" was Victor Gollancz, who was somewhat visionary and a very interesting figure. Definitely a relic of a very different literary-historical period.
Thanks Mary Jane. I was I guess expecting to dislike the book. But some people I respect - Dwight Garner, Valerie Stivers - had positive things to say about it, so went in with an open mind. I actually had my mouth hanging open at how bad much of it is.
This is a great column, but I think disagree with most of it. Buzz and publishing advances and money centers overwhelmingly around books that don't even pretend to be the sort of literature you hold sacred: genre fiction and young adult novels or tacky sentimental pseudo-literature like All the Light We Cannot See. If you can think of a way to speak up against this stuff, more power to you!
Levy (like Oyler and Patricia Lockwood) is trying to write a novel about the experience of being online all the time. I think that that's a worthy goal, all of our brains are constantly marinating in online nonsense so somebody should write literature about it this fact. I remember being impressed by Oyler early on because she wrote in the ubiquitous, to-me-annoying style of online feminist journalism but was nevertheless able to say something. I thought that Oyler's novel was so-so and I take everyone's word that Levy's is worse; you can only read so much of this stuff. I agree with everybody on this platform that @arxhan's internet novel is better than the ones that get written about in the traditional press.
I do think it is perfectly natural, a healthy and old-fashioned cultural phenomenon, that there should be scenes known for being provocative like the LES/Dimes Square situation. All the pieces by journalists who clearly wanted to join the set or at least understand it but were snubbed by their subjects were hilarious. If what emerges from the scene is mediocre, the best thing to do is ignore it. Denunciation feeds the buzz.
Thank you Secret. Those are all interesting points so I want to respond to them carefully.
The issue that I have is that a sort of grade-inflation has taken root all over the publishing industry - in blurbs, reviews, etc. People very much do pretend that shlocky, pandering stuff is great literature - All The Light We Cannot See is a prime example. The overall effect is that there are vanishingly few people whom I would consider to be 'real writers' who are getting published and promoted by mainstream publishing houses right now.
I have nothing against writing that tries to tap into internet consciousness/discourse. I thought "No Is Talking About This" was a really great book and did it extraordinarily well. Oyler and Levy, as far as I'm concerned, simply aren't good writers - there's no issue with the topics they're covering, but they would have to do it well. I'm suspicious of justifications for books like these that go like: well, they're evocative of a new frame of discourse so they need to have slack cut for them. You wouldn't just cut-and-paste some Buzzfeed article, put a dust jacket around it, and call it literature because it's evocative of the internet. (Although that's exactly what Oyler's No Judgment is.) The bar for literature has to be higher than that - which is something about what the actual emotional human experience is of living in our particular era. So much of online writing is so low-cal but that doesn't mean that the literary writing about it gets to be similarly non-nutritious.
I agree with you that a denunciatory piece like mine feeds the loop - but that's part of what's so insidious about loops like these. At the moment these scenes have really captured the mainstream media/publishing industry's notion of literature, and the result is that these shit sandwiches get put out and then get five-star reviews from reputable critics. It's just not a good situation all the way around. The only thing that can happen is for people to wake up - to read with real seriousness and to be capable of reading stuff that's difficult and written by adults.
Retractions are welcome. For example the Bechdel Test. The first modern meme was written into a cartoon in 1985. I would like to see it performatively. Full stop. But Ms Bechdel said enough already. But I say there we see the power of words, unless like Tom Wolfe you want to say at 80 that He castigated his enemies and subtly satired his friends....in his book The Powers of Speech? Fuck it, once published a hardcopy book belongs to its owners. And logically and like you are gentle with this author here, retractions are always welcome...for instance your ten thousand hours ...guaranties nothing about the ideas that take place in your soul when you realize you have not also written the Ubu plays. Am I write? I mean Vollman is both logghorea and good enough to read. A close to the breast question of who you believe about the form fitting the content. I listen to Forster saying that, who at the same time occupies the Don place of whatsisname Lewis Carroll. Or Camille Paglia who I will spend 14 more hours of my life with because she is serious abt her pronouncements. We still live in the Romantic moment? Mmmaybe...but then why I am not slumming in Romania? To which my answer goes: in the land of the crazed, the monomaniac is king. Ideas like ableism are idols made of words, Sam Kahn raspberries bullshit in the theatre, I appreciate that ..we are doing our versiin of the Cultural Revolution and it is a bettors odds we will well understand each other after, insert raspberry , isn't that part nearly done?
I heard Romania is beautiful in the way that our American unschooled tastes find beautiful. Wild and dangerous. Zbigniew Herbert in a poem In the Event of Catastrophe suggests as much, he says leave quickly your chambers without too much gear. If that isn't a recommendation to head for the tree line, IDK, but it seems to say to try your hand at camping...
Here was a contemporns review of Wolfe's Kingdom of Speech. Mr. Wolfe…shows no sign of mellowing. His new book, The Kingdom of Speech, is his boldest bit of dueling yet. It's a whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution…Secondarily, this book is a rebuke of the work of the linguist Noam Chomsky…Rebuke is actually too frivolous a word for the contumely Mr. Wolfe looses in his direction. More precisely, he tars and feathers Mr. Chomsky before sticking a clown nose on his face and rolling him in a baby stroller off a cliff…The Kingdom of Speech is meant to be a provocation rather than a dissertation. The sound it makes is that of a lively mind having a very good time, and enjoying the scent of its own cold-brewed napalm in the morning.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner. Napalm. Some distant relatives of the Du Ponts will continue to serve us napalm when we have not achieved the a-pplomb...
Thank you. I haven't read this book but I have read parts of Oyler's "Fake Accounts," which I sort of liked but I also didn't finish the book. When publishing hitches itself to social media this is what we get. There are now book coaches that teach authors to devote themselves to becoming content creators instead of devoting themselves to their craft. It totally makes sense though if you understand The Troll School of Lit as you noted. Follow the money and laugh your way to the bank.
Thanks Autumn. Fake Accounts is just not very good, although I think an earnest, good-faith attempt to write a credible contemporary novel. My First Book is something else altogether.
‘like an Old Testament prophet hurling down denunciations on some fairly random people’. Not sure about the random, Sam: they were calling out the charlatans of their own times.
You mention the Trump parallel, but there's also a striking parallel with the Booktok trend (or whatever it is). Specifically, I think it speaks to the relative vapidness of that platform and the books recommended there. There are, I'm sure, exceptions, but it seems as though the machine operating there is the same you decry here. There, mediocre books are recommended to "the masses," who as we know are, by definition, unexceptional. And it's a match made in heaven: easy books for easy readers.
Thanks Evan. One of the things I am most grateful for in my life is that I have never been on BookTok. I really have no problem with middlebrow or lowbrow writing - and for communities to develop around that. The more the merrier! The problem I have is when ostensible guardians of taste - The New York Times Book Review, Penguin, whatever it is - decide that they're being stodgy and boring (and not making enough money) and then decide to pretend that some really low-quality, middlebrow work is actually the next big thing. Tastemakers need to be a bit tougher than that!
Well. They're not really scamming the publishing industry. They're serving up something that the publishing industry can make use of. The publishing industry measures everything in terms of profit rather than quality, so I'm sure Penguin is very pleased with the buzz the book is getting and couldn't care less about its actual worth.
true. and here we are talking about it. but I'm curious what the bookscan numbers are like. I mean, whatever, we were all talking about Fuckboi too but how much did that sell?
Haven't read it, but this is the first piece to convince me permanently to put away my wallet. A lack of craft doesn't deter me, but a lack of honesty, of courage...why is that worth anybody's money?
As mysterious to me as to you. The amount of coverage this book is getting is ridiculous as well.
I had a certain suspicion that things were just as you suggest, but you've laid it out so nicely
Thank you Gary. I've been really shocked actually to kind of put this together. I think the book business is much more broken than I even would have suspected.
I'm with you on this, Sam, but I have my typical gadfly question: does the market owe artists anything? I too find myself feeling curmudgeonly before my time (well, I'm almost 50, maybe it is my time). Speaking truth to the market has its place, but is there any reasonable expectation for it to change or to come to view literature as that sacred activity?
You really ought to read Willa Cather's "The Kingdom of Art." She viewed art and religion as interchangeable. And she was fortunate to come of age as an artist in a time when Alfred Knopf was just starting out. Knopf believed you could sell craft, and it was a happy partnership. But she did not get on well with Houghton Mifflin and was so repulsed by her brush with Hollywood (Warner Bros wanted to cut the whole second half of her novel "A Lost Lady" from the film because it was "too depressing") that she forbade any of her other novels from ever being adapted to the screen.
Cather wrote to her friend Mariel Gere in 1896 about a very similar irritation to the one you describe. Only she was responding to a philistine from Nebraska named Thomas Wing:
"As to T. Wing's words, Heavens how much or how little did I tell you on that night of much morphine and little Morpheus? The less I care about T. Wing and his "words" the better, thast thats one reason I was so awfully glad to get away from Lincoln. I am going to quit writing to that gentleman pretty soon and then forget all about that conversation. Only yesterday I wrote him that I had never forgiven it and never could. He has one creed and I another. They are creeds that never meet in this world. There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; thats my creed and I'll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be. Its not an affectation, its my whole sle self, not that I think I can do anything myself, but the worship of it. That is about all that life has given me: it is enough. I dont ask anything more. I think I get as much good out of it as most people do out of their religions. I love it well enough to be a failure in it myself, well enough to be unhappy."
Isn't that kind of the pact we must make with our art? To love it well enough to be a failure, well enough to be unhappy when the market or the public does not love us back in the way that we'd like?
On art and religion being interchangeable, I have it on good record that enlightenment philosophers upon realising the effects of suppressing public religion, discovered that religious feeling and the feelings of enchantment and awe went with it. They didn't want to bring God back into the public sphere. But they needed those feelings. So they sought to ground it somewhere else. Art was their choice. And it half-works.
Just thought to say.
I agree with that, busyminds. Romanticism as the replacement for religion. I think that makes a lot of sense.
Thank you Josh. I really do need to read Cather! She was just never on my radar until you put her there. Yes, I suppose that's right, that the market owes writers nothing - but then writers and readers do have something of an obligation to find forms of transmission that do not owe themselves entirely to the market. This famously is what universities represent - and bohemian culture as well. I think what's happened is that the post-war history of literature is of the publishing industry taking more and more power in terms of regulating cultural transmission and doing so at the expense of bohemians or of the coterie of taste-setting mandarins. At this point, though, the publishing industry just doesn't turn any real profits from literary fiction so is pretty much giving up on that (except for publicity-building exercises like My First Book) - and something that I would really like to see happen in my lifetime is for circles of writers to wrest power back from the publishing industry.
Circles of writers wresting power from industry has a sweet sound, indeed. I fear that we are too often envious of one another to mobilize very effectively. But Substack offers many exceptions to that rule. Now I'm curious what you think it would take to really wrest power away from the publishing monopolies? Perhaps you recall that I had a depressing conversation with a local bookstore owners sometime ago. I asked if he had a "local author" shelf, a fairly standard thing for most small shops like that. He gave me a big speech about how local author stuff, especially the self-published kind, isn't very good and doesn't sell well, and so he really just relies on whatever list comes out of Penguin to stock his shelves. Partly because he can just return whatever inventory doesn't sell. But it left me wondering why I was supporting him at all? For writers to effectively combat industry, they are going to need to have some other method of curation that ensures that what they produce is demonstrably superior. I'm here for that conversation. But it's a steep climb.
I wanna take the short-cut! Darn it, knew I should've been hanging out in New York more. (To my followers, this is a great and genuinely revealing look into the HL phenomenon).
Lol! I think the shortcut isn't worth it! And some of the people you'd meet on it are really awful.
I wanna take the short-cut! Darn it, knew I should've been hanging out in New York more. (To my followers, this is a great and genuinely revealing look into the HL phenomenon).
Thanks for another thoughtful essay. I suppose a lingering question, especially in light of Lorentzen's and Barkan's erudite takedowns of Sinykin's "conglomerate fiction" thesis, is whether Sinykin may be onto something. Perhaps I'm missing the boat, but it's just hard to escape the notion that a grim industry cynicism doesn't stoke the bad faith that rumbles underneath these sorts of literary burps. Everybody's laughing all the way to the bank.
As an oblique contrast, I remember reading Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" some years back. It's a fraught book, and after its staggering success Wilson became something of a crank, but it was a sensation when it was published in the mid-50s. And arguably, it retains its literary value some 68 years later. Wilson was very young when he was discovered, a dark horse, and he was briefly greeted as a wunderkind. The publishers raked in tons of cash, sure, but I don't think it was with a wry grin. Or was it?
Hi Ben,
Thank you for the thoughtful comment! I haven't read the Sinykin book and the excerpts I saw of it in Lorentzen's piece make it seem moronic, but, yes, I suspect that Sinykin is basically right. That the history of 'literature' is actually the history of publishing, and we really miss how much of what we take to be great literature was manufactured (sometimes very cynically) by the publishing industry. I think what that does, actually, is that it gives curator/critic types an opportunity to go backwards as well as forwards, to say, wait a minute, this thing that was popular at one moment and got canonized is actually rubbish, that this thing that was passed over by the industry is brilliant. Editorial work is supposed to go backwards in time as well as forward, and that's an important activity for people who care about literature.
I've read a lot about Wilson but never read him directly! My understanding is that Wilson really wrote a good book and then the publishing industry thought they could turn him into a star - he was very handsome, it was the right moment for it, etc - but then Wilson turned out to be more independent-minded and more difficult than anybody expected, and the industry quickly dropped him.
- Sam
Thanks for this, Sam. I think you're right about historicity and critique.
Wilson's "The Outsider" is absolutely worth reading. It's staggering, actually, and the story of Wilson himself is quite tragic. You're likely right that he was discarded due to his intellectual wildness (his follow-up to "The Outsider," "Religion and the Rebel," was also a work of tremendous perspicacity, but its tone was less welcoming). Of note, though, and apropos of your piece, the publisher of "The Outsider" was Victor Gollancz, who was somewhat visionary and a very interesting figure. Definitely a relic of a very different literary-historical period.
Harsh but fair (I’m assuming, having never read HL and knowing her only as one of the figures in the very hazy space in my head called Dimes Square)
Thanks Mary Jane. I was I guess expecting to dislike the book. But some people I respect - Dwight Garner, Valerie Stivers - had positive things to say about it, so went in with an open mind. I actually had my mouth hanging open at how bad much of it is.
This is a great column, but I think disagree with most of it. Buzz and publishing advances and money centers overwhelmingly around books that don't even pretend to be the sort of literature you hold sacred: genre fiction and young adult novels or tacky sentimental pseudo-literature like All the Light We Cannot See. If you can think of a way to speak up against this stuff, more power to you!
Levy (like Oyler and Patricia Lockwood) is trying to write a novel about the experience of being online all the time. I think that that's a worthy goal, all of our brains are constantly marinating in online nonsense so somebody should write literature about it this fact. I remember being impressed by Oyler early on because she wrote in the ubiquitous, to-me-annoying style of online feminist journalism but was nevertheless able to say something. I thought that Oyler's novel was so-so and I take everyone's word that Levy's is worse; you can only read so much of this stuff. I agree with everybody on this platform that @arxhan's internet novel is better than the ones that get written about in the traditional press.
I do think it is perfectly natural, a healthy and old-fashioned cultural phenomenon, that there should be scenes known for being provocative like the LES/Dimes Square situation. All the pieces by journalists who clearly wanted to join the set or at least understand it but were snubbed by their subjects were hilarious. If what emerges from the scene is mediocre, the best thing to do is ignore it. Denunciation feeds the buzz.
Thank you Secret. Those are all interesting points so I want to respond to them carefully.
The issue that I have is that a sort of grade-inflation has taken root all over the publishing industry - in blurbs, reviews, etc. People very much do pretend that shlocky, pandering stuff is great literature - All The Light We Cannot See is a prime example. The overall effect is that there are vanishingly few people whom I would consider to be 'real writers' who are getting published and promoted by mainstream publishing houses right now.
I have nothing against writing that tries to tap into internet consciousness/discourse. I thought "No Is Talking About This" was a really great book and did it extraordinarily well. Oyler and Levy, as far as I'm concerned, simply aren't good writers - there's no issue with the topics they're covering, but they would have to do it well. I'm suspicious of justifications for books like these that go like: well, they're evocative of a new frame of discourse so they need to have slack cut for them. You wouldn't just cut-and-paste some Buzzfeed article, put a dust jacket around it, and call it literature because it's evocative of the internet. (Although that's exactly what Oyler's No Judgment is.) The bar for literature has to be higher than that - which is something about what the actual emotional human experience is of living in our particular era. So much of online writing is so low-cal but that doesn't mean that the literary writing about it gets to be similarly non-nutritious.
I agree with you that a denunciatory piece like mine feeds the loop - but that's part of what's so insidious about loops like these. At the moment these scenes have really captured the mainstream media/publishing industry's notion of literature, and the result is that these shit sandwiches get put out and then get five-star reviews from reputable critics. It's just not a good situation all the way around. The only thing that can happen is for people to wake up - to read with real seriousness and to be capable of reading stuff that's difficult and written by adults.
- Sam
Thank you so much for this.
Thank you Sherman! My pleasure lol.
Loved this, Sam. Thanks.
Thank you Andrew! Really liked the 'male vulnerability' piece. Great to see it get so much of a response.
Retractions are welcome. For example the Bechdel Test. The first modern meme was written into a cartoon in 1985. I would like to see it performatively. Full stop. But Ms Bechdel said enough already. But I say there we see the power of words, unless like Tom Wolfe you want to say at 80 that He castigated his enemies and subtly satired his friends....in his book The Powers of Speech? Fuck it, once published a hardcopy book belongs to its owners. And logically and like you are gentle with this author here, retractions are always welcome...for instance your ten thousand hours ...guaranties nothing about the ideas that take place in your soul when you realize you have not also written the Ubu plays. Am I write? I mean Vollman is both logghorea and good enough to read. A close to the breast question of who you believe about the form fitting the content. I listen to Forster saying that, who at the same time occupies the Don place of whatsisname Lewis Carroll. Or Camille Paglia who I will spend 14 more hours of my life with because she is serious abt her pronouncements. We still live in the Romantic moment? Mmmaybe...but then why I am not slumming in Romania? To which my answer goes: in the land of the crazed, the monomaniac is king. Ideas like ableism are idols made of words, Sam Kahn raspberries bullshit in the theatre, I appreciate that ..we are doing our versiin of the Cultural Revolution and it is a bettors odds we will well understand each other after, insert raspberry , isn't that part nearly done?
Thank you Nathan! I do enjoy raspberry bullshitting in the theater - as well as slumming in Romania lol!
I heard Romania is beautiful in the way that our American unschooled tastes find beautiful. Wild and dangerous. Zbigniew Herbert in a poem In the Event of Catastrophe suggests as much, he says leave quickly your chambers without too much gear. If that isn't a recommendation to head for the tree line, IDK, but it seems to say to try your hand at camping...
Here was a contemporns review of Wolfe's Kingdom of Speech. Mr. Wolfe…shows no sign of mellowing. His new book, The Kingdom of Speech, is his boldest bit of dueling yet. It's a whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution…Secondarily, this book is a rebuke of the work of the linguist Noam Chomsky…Rebuke is actually too frivolous a word for the contumely Mr. Wolfe looses in his direction. More precisely, he tars and feathers Mr. Chomsky before sticking a clown nose on his face and rolling him in a baby stroller off a cliff…The Kingdom of Speech is meant to be a provocation rather than a dissertation. The sound it makes is that of a lively mind having a very good time, and enjoying the scent of its own cold-brewed napalm in the morning.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner. Napalm. Some distant relatives of the Du Ponts will continue to serve us napalm when we have not achieved the a-pplomb...
I haven't heard of the Kingdom of Speech actually. I tried to read Chomsky recently. He's way more of a mess than I was expecting.
Thank you. I haven't read this book but I have read parts of Oyler's "Fake Accounts," which I sort of liked but I also didn't finish the book. When publishing hitches itself to social media this is what we get. There are now book coaches that teach authors to devote themselves to becoming content creators instead of devoting themselves to their craft. It totally makes sense though if you understand The Troll School of Lit as you noted. Follow the money and laugh your way to the bank.
Thanks Autumn. Fake Accounts is just not very good, although I think an earnest, good-faith attempt to write a credible contemporary novel. My First Book is something else altogether.
You diagnosed this phenomenon. What do you think the solution to it is? Besides untethering ourselves from being extremely online.
‘like an Old Testament prophet hurling down denunciations on some fairly random people’. Not sure about the random, Sam: they were calling out the charlatans of their own times.
Lol. Thanks Adrian. Yes, I'm sure if Honor Levy had published My First Book in ancient Israel, Isaiah also would have flipped the fuck out.
You mention the Trump parallel, but there's also a striking parallel with the Booktok trend (or whatever it is). Specifically, I think it speaks to the relative vapidness of that platform and the books recommended there. There are, I'm sure, exceptions, but it seems as though the machine operating there is the same you decry here. There, mediocre books are recommended to "the masses," who as we know are, by definition, unexceptional. And it's a match made in heaven: easy books for easy readers.
Thanks Evan. One of the things I am most grateful for in my life is that I have never been on BookTok. I really have no problem with middlebrow or lowbrow writing - and for communities to develop around that. The more the merrier! The problem I have is when ostensible guardians of taste - The New York Times Book Review, Penguin, whatever it is - decide that they're being stodgy and boring (and not making enough money) and then decide to pretend that some really low-quality, middlebrow work is actually the next big thing. Tastemakers need to be a bit tougher than that!
kinda gotta admire them for scamming the publishing industry though
Also, totally forgot that this was the lady who wrote internet girl, which was kind of good and weird when it came out. I remember that.
Well. They're not really scamming the publishing industry. They're serving up something that the publishing industry can make use of. The publishing industry measures everything in terms of profit rather than quality, so I'm sure Penguin is very pleased with the buzz the book is getting and couldn't care less about its actual worth.
true. and here we are talking about it. but I'm curious what the bookscan numbers are like. I mean, whatever, we were all talking about Fuckboi too but how much did that sell?