post itt writers you think are bad

damn

I mean pic.twitter.com/BW7uGbl1H1

— Adam O'Fallon Price (@AdamOPrice) April 8, 2024

trying not to enjoy myself too much

I want to read the whole thing but it's not on the website...

“the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot”

ouchy

review actually claims she's not even curious enough to be the renata adler of looking at your phone a lot

savage

"she doesn't discuss a single work of literature"

Maybe that's because she doesn't want to. Even though she has written many essays where she demonstrates she can.

No doubt this book is terrible (rather she reviews a book but I'm old) , but it also sounds like she is going for some other things here that some of the reviews are missing.

lit crit without the lit is probably the way to go tbh.

i'm enjoying the book also renata adler sucks lol

no one understands the spirit of this thread

i'll start a 'defend a bad writer' thread for y'all

You'll have to post about Sebald on that one.

you’re just missing what he’s going for

One for the young Berlin expat crowd, no doubt

I also dislike Sebald fwiw

that's the spirit

the fact that customers leave negative Google reviews for her friend Laurel's "successful bagel shop and café attached to an English-language bookstore in Berlin" and thereby "project a particular logic of capitalism onto their relationship with...Laurel that lends the consumer dictatorial power"?

ok, i'm never going to read this book, but it does sound like the stupidest thing ever written, and maybe that's what she was going for? brave

oh i think i went to that place, pretty good bagels imo!

Sometimes, the writing just collapses into gibberish: "I can't remember my mother ever telling me that if I couldn't say anything nice, not to say anything at all, which is the kind of lesson you teach a child in order to shield her from the overwhelmingly complicated truth. Same goes with 'You can't subtract a negative number,' which has always bothered me. Of course you can. Sometimes, you must."

of course you can. sometimes, you must.

Of course, Oyler doesn't want to be a writer of personal essays; she wants to be an erudite critic of the old school. But again and again, she drifts toward personal recriminations and eschews any sustained discussion of literature. In her essay on autofiction, Oyler, who elsewhere identifies her taste as "highbrow," seems to like novels by Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Norman Rush. When it comes to books written before 1990, she's on shakier ground, making some unbelievably clunky arguments premised on Emma Bovary and Humbert Humbert being practitioners of autofiction; in her commentary about the latter, Oyler concludes that writing about intimate secrets "is not nothing, ethically speaking." (OK?)

Oyler claims she is well read, even a "snob," but great swaths of No Judgement rely on the thinnest of online research. "Vulnerability has come to be seen as a first principle of living," Oyler concludes from a single search for the term on the New Yorker's website. Having decided to write about the concept, she shares, "I was hoping for some surprising etymology, specifically involving a relationship to 'vulva,' that would, in its obviousness, lead me to my argument." When a Google search reveals to Oyler that the terms are not related, she undertakes "research"—these are her words—into "historicizing" vulnerability and subsequently discovers that professor-cum-corporate consultant Brené Brown's 2010 TED Talk on the subject is "accepted as the source of the concept's contemporary popularity." Typically, "historicizing" a concept entails finding a "source" more than ten years old; Oyler's argument here is as impressive as "historicizing" contemporary discourse on "threats to democracy" with a Vox explainer from 2016. Even were she not quite to begin with Saint Paul's "strength in weakness," Oyler might at least have discussed Frued's concept of "original helplessness"; instead, she drops the Freud quote that comes up when you Google "Freud vulnerability" but fails to even mention the relevant theory. And rather than asserting, without even this minimal evidence, that Brown was "repackaging" Freud, Oyler might have actually researched any of the pit stops between Vienna and the TED stage. In the '60s, D. W. Winnicott developed his theory of the "vulnerable self," a "true self" around which the people erected the defensive "false self." In the '70s, John Bowlby developed attachment theory, which urged "avoidants" to become as comfortable with vulnerability as "secures" and has since metastasized into an unbelievably widespread pop psychology. In the '80s, transpersonal psychologists like John Wenwood preached that vulnerability was "the essence of human nature and of consciousness" and that "getting in touch with our more basic human tenderness and vulnerability can be a source of real power." In the '90s, Carol Gilligan's "feminist care ethics," with its embrace of vulnerability and interdependence, came to the fore—certainly influencing Brown as she completed her social work PhD. And while Oyler includes one of Sheryl Sandberg's many ridiculous utterances, she seems not to know that Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and Gayatri Spivak have all recently called for what Spivak termed a "radical acceptance of vulnerability." But Oyler, highbrow shock jock, has no interest in changing her mind: she pitches "vulnerability" as its dumbest possible version, belaboring tumblr argot like "radical softness" rather than engaging potentially challenging arguments. So the only history Oyler is concerned with begins in 2010, with Brown in a jean jacket on that purple-lit stage. How could Oyler have known about that other stuff, anyway? Brown's talk is the only subject discussed under "Emotional" on the Wikipedia page "Vulnerability."

In her essay on Goodreads, Oyler offers a brief account of the history behind rating books out of five stars, all of which is—you guessed it—available on the Wikipedia page for "Star (classification)," which comes up when you Google "history behind rating books out of five stars."

bad thinker, bad writer, bad researcher!!!!

triple threat

she's gotta have stellar editors at the lrb getting her pieces across the finish line

look what I've misaed

ivy did u transcribe that from print lol, I can’t find that online

typed it from a scanned pdf baby!!!!

i’ll find a place to upload it

https://jmp.sh/s/1UMcVFOx5VkBmGtAe3YU

thankig u

tl;dr

Popeye should ditch this chick imo

"Even were she not quite to begin with Saint Paul's "strength in weakness," Oyler might at least have discussed Frued's concept of "original helplessness"; instead, she drops the Freud quote that comes up when you Google "Freud vulnerability" but fails to even mention the relevant theory."

Why bother going back to your undergrad notes when you can't make a living out of this shit?

"Of course, Oyler doesn't want to be a writer of personal essays; she wants to be an erudite critic of the old school. But again and again, she drifts toward personal recriminations and eschews any sustained discussion of literature."

Again, feels like this book is an attempt to be something else.

What's the point in discussing literature when you can look at the number of stars in a Goodreads link?

The correct answer: Updike.

that Goodreads essay sounds really embarrassing. i went to Yale. i like big words. i went to an opera once. *cringe*

i enjoyed that review though! that's the kind of review that i enjoy reading. i read the whole thing. that's how i know. full disclosure: i still sometimes read Cyril Connolly for fun.

(that is my assumption about the opera part. nobody who writes like that goes to the opera all the time. but they may have gone once.)

also that review brings home my point above on here somewhere about all the googling being done these days. if anything brings books down it will be that. surface googling.

Why bother going back to your undergrad notes when you can't make a living out of this shit?

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, April 9, 2024 7:39 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes why bother writing a good essay when you can write a bad one

ivy, weren't you the one who hated jia tolentino? maybe it was someone else. i remember enjoying a few of her new yorker essays and then she blew up and became kinda polarizing i guess. now i don't hear about her. i don't really want there to be It Girls of crit but i guess people are always going to create that in media land. i mean the lit crit world could always be pretty pissy going back hundreds of years. the stakes don't seem the same now though. seems pettier. or maybe the internet just makes everything seem pettier.

do people still read james wood? he must seem like a fossil to younger people. god help me he's only two years older than me. i thought he was way older. oh god i'm dying...i should really go write a will. i can't say i read him anymore. don't know why. bored of him i guess.

Dave Eggers is fucking awful and is just an annoying person to boot

not a fan of jia's, have definitely brought her up itt before, have always been suspicious bc her cultural pieces would often purport to take something culturally maligned seriously only to be weirdly condescending about it anyway. (i do not have specific examples at this point, despite the existence of this thread i try very hard not to subject myself to writers i don't like.) some of her essays are almost good but there's something that inevitably annoys me about them. one of the reasons i can't stand oyler is that her takedown of jia is so often incomprehensible. i should've been able to enjoy it... but i couldn't!!!! maybe unfair of me but i think if you're gonna criticize a writer, you should be able to outwrite them. (also one thing jia has over oyler is that her reporting and research are rigorous and excellent, i have to give it up)

as for literary It Girls, one of my more unreasonable takes is that i think no one should be popular

I'm not a Tolentino fan either.

as for literary It Girls, one of my more unreasonable takes is that i think no one should be popular

― ivy., Tuesday, 9 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

That's been pretty clearly the take all along.

"Of course, Oyler doesn't want to be a writer of personal essays; she wants to be an erudite critic of the old school. But again and again, she drifts toward personal recriminations and eschews any sustained discussion of literature."

this seems untrue of oyler. she herself is often an uncharitable and harsh critic, so maybe this it's only fair for her to be the subject of a takedown like this. but i never got the sense that she isn't a close reader.

everything i’ve read by her misreads the subject bc of her own stupid personal shit getting in the way so it seems true to me!!!!

man, i tried to read the topeka school by ben lerner because i kept reading about it and...i couldn't do it. it was like being stuck in a room with an eternal grad student. not my thing. it reminded me of when i tried to read franzen. bleh. but maybe ben lerner is a great poet. i haven't read his poems.

― scott seward, Monday, March 25, 2024 4:33 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

i agree about the topeka school, but his first novel, "leaving the atocha station," is actually incredible. one of the funniest and most honest works to come out of the "autofiction" wave of the 2000s.

treeship get out of this thread