Staying alive
On the autumn trench, the stupidity of Nobel Prize discourse, White Women in Brooklyn, and the lack of joy in contemporary art fiction.
Interesting dinner party conversation last night that the only interesting thing about literary prizes would be the author refusing them. Of course we’re all vegetarians but even the cat meowed.
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I am in a period of deep intellectual depression. I feel old, weak, gray, bitter, angry, and lost. Even when I feed Jacks he ignores me. Over the past few month I deleted over 1,000 of my interesting tweets from the late spring and summer. One of the greatest short runs I’ve ever completed. I always planned to delete them, and of course I requested my archive, but anyway at times it was hard. I did not repent. I did not pray. I watched Wallace Stevens’ birthday go by without anyone in my feed reminding us he refused to teach his wife to read. But they had no problem reminding me it was Wallace Stevens’ birthday. I mean, why would anyone know such a thing. That’s what modernism means to me.
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There’s always so much talk about how literary criticism has gotten shallow, but what if the books themselves are shallow.
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This week I read another 10,000 word essay blaming “White Women in Brooklyn” for everything. I’ve finally helped myself to saying those four words in *extreme John Travolta Staying Alive voice* and I suggest you try the same.
A precise line in Blake Butler’s substack about “the slowly dying Lishian school of the sentence” in [male] writing has gotten stuck in my head like a popular song. There does seem to be a new strain of romanticism in American fiction, particularly in indie fiction by youngish men, as they emerge from the Lishian books they wrote in order to get published. The writer Jon Lindsey even doubts (one can only hope) the carvings of minimalism, and after publishing his standout debut Body High he summoned the Germans for their “chaotic heart” and “a childlike yearning for a Heavenly Father,” while the swift-boated Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi was such a dashingly romantic book, in no small part because of its childlike yearning for Heavenly Mother Sheila Heti, that dozens of well-read men I know socially and/or parasocially couldn’t let it infiltrate their shelfies, like they were being forced to sniff Shelly’s corpse at Viareggio.
This new romanticism smells more like nature fiction, not climate fiction, for in the lucrative latter the subject marginalizes themselves for a marketplace that rewards state power, its zenith the green energy motoring the certified prose in Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel, 10:04. Lerner’s protagonist, during Hurricane Sandy, becomes blinded by the post-risk sheen of Goldman Sachs and all of his good-liberal Obama-era proclivities are washed away. That’s a fine fiction, a rose by the name of rose, but a nature fiction might suggest you can pick a sidewalk flower and watch the world burn. Maybe that bullshit smells, to today’s kids, even sweeter. It stems from a tradition born a generation ago in so-called Alt Lit, despite decades of mocking by the medicated elite, a tradition that protects what Andrea Long Chu, writing for them in The New Yorker, in a milquetoast review of Tao Lin’s Leave Society, shoddily defined as an “infinitely mediated sentimentality.” One senses the end of something, and not just spring. Whatever it was Tao Lin’s Paul, during the rain, vaguely knew in the romantic, non-Lishian novel Taipei, as if he were a tree: “that he was in the center of something bad, whose confines were expanding, as he remained in the same place.” I think things like this because Gordon Lish used to brush my girlfriend’s ass at the old NYU bookstore, and he never got cancelled for it.
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I play the music I own on vinyl, I play the music I own on CD. I give the music I learn about in Recommendation Corners the old college try.
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That’s the tweet. But Thomas Pynchon won.
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Prolific writer and self-proclaimed “Absurdist” Jesse Ball published a book called Autoportrait and it’s whatever, but its publisher hideously allowed Ball to suggest it represents the carefree spirit of Edouard Leve’s Autoportrait, one of the most light hearted and charming books of all time. Leve: Mozart. Ball: 50s serialism no one has ever listend to. On the last page Ball claims he wrote his pages in one day on John Grisham’s Mississippi estate, a more prolific writer he then insulted. Ball’s next invitaton should be reading all of John Grishman’s books in one day, over and over again.
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Maggie Nelson spends a great deal of time in On Freedom discussing Sedgewick’s distinction between reparitative and paranoid reading and writing. I find this moment of writing reparitive. Some of the writing in this piece was born in tens of thousands of words of paranoid writing. But right here, right now, the writing feels good. Even when I am being critical of someone, like in the above paragraph, I feel warm. I am reminded of a comment by Al Goldstein, the founder of Screw magazine, or was it the novelist William Gass: Filth is pure. I love it.
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I did not take off from work for Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. I did not repent. I did not pray. I lied to my father a few co-workers and some friends about all of those things. I did read the first 3 pages of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. I watched Wallace Stevens’ birthday go by without anyone in my feed reminding us he refused to teach his wife to read. I saw and read a tweet about Tao Lin’s poop, which meant I had to read even more about his poop than I had to read while reading Jordan Castro’s The Novelist.
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Reading Kirkergaard’s Either/Or, I learned that “interesting” is a modern concept. I thought that was really interesting. I watched café patrons look at their phone instead of the book in front of them, which was often Elif Batuman’s Either/Or, and I too participated in their uninteresting failures.
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On the Red Line last week about a dozen white male college students got on drinking cans of Bud Freedom. When they got off the guy across from me said, my god, were we that bad? I said to him, haha, come on now brother, we were much, much, worse.
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I discovered Avital Ronnell a few weeks ago, through Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom, which was an education in itself. Last Saturday morning I sat in Oz Park while my child played with kids who are much, much wealthier than him, and I read Ronnell’s Crack Wars, which is batshit crazy. I may as well have been readng Reading Lolita in Tehran in the playground, etc. Anyway I am deeply in love with Ronnell’s jizz, a page of her being bored is the greatest page from any boring writer, although I fear she too is too smart for me. On the internet I learned she was cancelled a few years ago for la-dee-daing one of her students. Cultural critic Andrea Long Chu wrote a convincing essay about how white-collar work sucks, which I agree with. Ronell wrote a biggish book called Stupidity. Not On Stupidity, just Stupidity. The amount that I miss is interesting.
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On Monday I told my wife I was depressed because it was Monday, and she said, “if it’s not Monday with you, it’s something else.” I am losing my summer tan and must now spend months looking down at my corpse-colored feet, which are now, somewhere in between summer and winter, the color of the bottoms of black people’s feet I have only seen in interracial pornography, which I also started viewing again after a 3 month repreive. I felt like Li from Leave Society the day he relpases and views pornography with furious anger and hapless glee.
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I was in a hurry and said excuse me, miss! to a woman blocking the corner of Broadway and Argyle. Only after I boarded the train did I realize it was Katia. The last time I saw her she was screaming at her then husband about growing up the fuck up, which made my child cry. The thing about children is that they never become then.
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After finishing Jordan Castro’s The Novelist, I re-read the first 100 pages of DeLillo’s Mao II—which is dedicated to Gordon Lish.
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Oh boy am I digging how cream colored trench coats seem to be back in style this fall. Think Elizabeth Shue in Adventures in Babysitting. Sometimes they look cream, sometimes toasted brown, sometimes just plain ol’ tan. The other night at Siena Tavern I counted no fewer than five cosmopolitan women in their “absurdly early thrities,” as DeLillo writes of Brita Nelson in Mao II, wearing a thinner version of this coat.
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Nobody asked me, but I do not believe art has the ability to change the world. I believe the redistribution of wealth from the top 1% has the ability to.