post itt writers you think are bad

I also object to Chu's objection that Nelson presents a lot of views of other thinkers and tells you which ones she likes, and does rather less of creating novel / original theory -- that's what expository writing is and there's nothing wrong with it!

I've read Charlotte Shane in bookforum, which is linked below Chu's take (both released on the same day) and she gave it a bad review.

I'll Chu later.

Chu is a bad thinker, imho. My friend Nora sums it up quite nicely in her review of Chu's last book:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/ontology-for-edgelords

i have nearly posted chu's name itt several times

no one to root for imo

I mean, I also loathe Maggie Nelson, but that's because I also think she's a lazy thinker.

Who cares about thinking, this thread is about writing

I will fight with your friend Nora re:

(‘I was full of rage then: red, male, viciously intellectual.’ Salingerian sentences like this,

a. That sentence is in no way Salingerian
b. Salinger's sentences are pretty great and it's suspect to use "Salingerian" as an insult to prose style
c. Salinger is a perfect example of a great writer who, if understood as a thinker (which tbf is for sure a way he understood himself), is extremely confused

I will agree with Nora that that non-Salingerian sentence of Chu's is not a good one

Who cares about thinking, this thread is about writing

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, September 8, 2021 8:57 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

uh same thing

I don't think it's the same thing. Maggie Nelson's writing puts her lazy thinking on display. Chu's writing puts their lazy thinking on display. Does that work for you?

has the US had any good writers in the past 20 years? 50 years?

no

I don't think it's the same thing

i admit i was being reductive for fun

What's the deal w/ that, was it the internet, the MFA system, novels / stories becoming a dead medium, or just the way things go?

has the US had any good writers in the past 20 years? 50 years?

thousands

but this thread is not about them

Chu's writing puts their lazy thinking on display.

oops sorry if I misgendered Chu, I thought Chu used "she"

That's actually my bad, Chu used to use they/them but now uses she/her; apologies.

The US has had a ton of great writers in the past 50 years.

has the US had any good writers in the past 20 years? 50 years?

...asks the person who doesn't read enough to know the answer

My understanding of ALC is she is bad not good but I don’t know why I just skim on the surface of these things usually

you guys are harsh

IMO Lord of the Flies is one of the worst possible things you could give to a child to read. Adults, sure, of course. Actually I have no idea if they even give it to kids to read anymore! Think I read it in high school circa 1991
― Chuck_Tatum, Sunday, February 14, 2021 

I read Lord of the Flies while I was still in primary school and it opened my mind up to whole new ways of reading and writing. I wouldn't trade the experience for a later, more 'mature' read.
― Ward Fowler, Sunday, February 14, 2021

same for me, don't know exactly how I came upon it but my mother took me to the library a lot and I read it in the 6th grade. it was fascinating and was the novel that made me realize I was ready for adult fiction

skimmed over the references to “chu” and thought for a second they were about arthur chu, lol

lol at "ontology for edgelords"

Nora is a gift, a great writer too

i read the pink Chu essay in N+1 at the time and had a "huh? what?" to the parts of it that weren't autobiographical -- the theory parts. As a reader, it was easier for me to see them as part of the personal narrative than to engage with them as serious philosophy / theory. I am so out of the loop when it comes to this stuff and the trends and conventions of critical theory. I think it's cool that the internet has made it possible for so many people to publish stuff like this ... on the other hand, it's like the internet and music ... because it is easier to publish and to have a "serious" looking website, there is a lot of content and a lot of samey-ness, and a lot of pleasant but uninspiring stuff.

#justoldpplthoughts

*a "huh? what?" response

The critic Lionel Trilling once wrote that conservatives make “irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas”; Oyler makes suggestive motions that seek to resemble arguments.

ruthless

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/03/16/lauren-oyler-no-judgment-review/

Lol. Correct on Dune's message, lol at the smug af writing

https://www.thegamer.com/dunes-paul-atreides-is-not-the-good-guy/

i read this thread title quickly as *post itt when you think you are bad*.

really really bad

This is the discursive level that Oyler remains at for much of the book. Take her defence of autofiction, which spends as much time disparaging the genre’s ‘haters’ who ‘begged [her] not to’ write about it as it does making an actual argument.

big strong men, with tears in their eyes, begging lauren oyler not to write about autofiction

https://artreview.com/things-that-annoy-me-lauren-oyler-no-judgement-review

oyler’s interesting - i read most of fake accounts on a long flight the other day, off the back of the essay on anxiety. extremely fluent, knows their own voice and can jump around like a monkey in the rigging with it. it’s enjoyable to be along for the ride. but i do feel the force of that comment about “suggestive motions that look like arguments.”

i think it’s largely m fine when it’s a breezy “this is how i experienced things” (the more or less “i” of fake accounts) though something about FA that i can’t identify about FA felt slightly off, and becomes less fine in the critical essay imo.

again, the essay on anxiety largely v good. but the bit on antidepressants was… poor. her style allows for the caveat that this is just “how i experience it” but as critical thinking it’s a position that feels like it needs some external reference - studies, another opinion etc. this bit opens up a wedge more generally. why am i reading this? what is its relation to anyone but lauren oyler? how’s the position of privileged view been established?

“skill in execution” is a reasonable answer. can’t make up my mind.

anyway. that’s not why i came here.

CHINE MIÉVILLE.

china ffs.

i read perdido street station a long time ago and thought it was okay but iirc there was *so* much about the city being fetid and rotting and horribly 'organic'

i can’t even remember what i don’t like about him and don’t really care any more, but that post has reminded me of something similar in, well, either kraken or the city and the city and thinking omg this man cannot *describe* things coherently. and also cannot write.

"For the most part, the prose in the book sweats to be chatty, with the result that it often has the slightly plaintive quality of a text message from an older parent intent on using outdated slang."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/03/16/lauren-oyler-no-judgment-review/

ouch!

Had a feeling this thread revive would be about Oyler. I don't like her -- there are lots of other writers in that vein who are miles better, but I presume have worse connections -- but not sure she's well-known enough to deserve such prominent pans.

Mieville though! Unreadable. Sentence for sentence one of the most awful writers I can think of. I'm always befuddled that people can finish his books and -- even -- like and enjoy him.

i've only read (but not finished) un lun dun -- i was interested bcz it's mieville's "children's book", and i wondered where his politics would take it given the specific constraints -- and i absolutely concur re bad sentences

but this reminds me: martin amis belongs in thread (entire body made of tin ear)

Mieville has great ideas and that counts for a lot in the genres he writes, I loved Perdido Street Station.

He recently annoyed me with deployment of a lazy-blurb staple, which I will take to the appropriate thread

Mieville's like the Grateful Dead of SF - whenever you express disappointment to a superfan, they tell you you've read the wrong one.

Can I add an audiobook reader here? I can't stand Simon Vance. He always sounds like an American's idea of an English person, like a sly cartoon lion.

i'm pretty sure it was ilx that tried to get me to read mieville. for some reason i never did but i bought some of the paperbacks. i know maria read a few. they always had the whiff of steampunk dust on them and i think that made me afraid.

with oyler, i don't really remember reading any of her reviews but i read the NYT review of her new book and that led me to her novel online because the nyt review said it was so funny and i kept reading it waiting for the funny but then i gave up. it was a little tedious. at least the first 10+ pages anyway.

there always has to be a new critic you love to hate/hate to love/etc. the bad boy/girl thing. its probably healthy in the end.

I loved Perdido Street Station too though it's The City and The City that has stayed with me. The narrative is unmemorable but I loved the conceptual framework. There's a cracking short story too called "Reports of Certain Events in London", about a group of cartographers in London who are tracking streets that seem to be sentient and move during the night. Good Borgesian fun.

i really liked that Mortal Engines movie so i wouldn't count Mieville out. i know he didn't write that book. i don't even know who did. but if someone has a good enough imagination i can overlook clunky writing in genre fiction. i've been doing it for years!

I still own The City and the City but the other books of his I read — Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council and Kraken — have not stuck with me. I don't remember them being particularly bad, just...ordinary.