post itt writers you think are bad

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

I have always heard Gary Shteyngart is good and maybe his novels, which I've never read, really are, but he is the latest entrant in the "magazine paid me to go on a cruise ship and here's my essay" genre and what he turned in is outstandingly terrible

not a post allowed in the thread maybe but the only good cruiseship essay is going to have to conclude: "i set the timer, dove off the side and happily swam ashore… "

writers really need to leave cruise shups alone. lauren oyler wrote a cruise ship essay (for harpers!) too and it's just like, please, it's been done, wtf are you thinking

i am only halfway through that Oyler review and the writing excerpts from her book are fucking horrible

i keep meaning to look up a donna tartt thread. i can't remember what people have thought of her here. every once in a while i come across a reference to that damn goldfinch and wonder if i should read it or throw it off of a cruise ship. people either worship her or are meh about her i think. she went to school with brix smith. that is one thing in her favor.

Shteyngart wrote a good essay about his penis for the New Yorker.

Donna Tartt is a long way from a bad writer imo. I thought the Goldfinch was way too long and only half-worked, but it wasn't the writing per se that bothered me.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/goop-cruise-gwyneth-paltrow-goop-at-sea/

Maybe it's more "writers you suspect are bad" but I'm always fundamentally uncertain about translated work. How much heavy lifting / surreptitious editing is done by the translator?

But also, which writers have really good editors and really should have a co-writing credit?

Tolentino may have her faults but doesn’t deserve to be associated with Oyler in any way.

editors save writers' ass all the time #adoptaeditortoday

I can understand if a fairly famous writer needed saving when writing for the LRB/some lit mag because you want his name.

With small fish like Oyler I am not sure you'd bother if the pieces she churned out needed saving. I doubt you'd even see many bad reviews of the work.

not a post allowed in the thread maybe but the only good cruiseship essay is going to have to conclude: "i set the timer, dove off the side and happily swam ashore… "

Was there something within the last year where I would have read something by or about Oyler? She seems familiar but I can't quite place what I might have read

For the record, I sensed immediately that Lauren Oyler bragging about knowing the artists in a museum was clearly trolling. Now we have proof pic.twitter.com/9M5YEKBzIP

— cancela lansbury (@gossipbabies) April 9, 2024

always sad when no one gets one's very funny jokes

I figured it out! It was the Goop cruise piece. That was fine.

my literacy in this thread is lacking. apologies to waterface

PHILLIPS-HORST: Well, I guess we have to go. This was an absolute joy.

OYLER: This was great.

Are you related to her

No, just having fun online.

I guess the summary of her book saying "this is just a bunch of writing about stuff that happens online" is both catnip and poison to me. I can read stuff online about stuff online. I can post on a messageboard to joke about other stuff happening online. I don't need offline texts that are subjective self-insert works about stuff online!

I was driving around over lunch to do some errands and pondered something someone had told me about how you really have to go off the grid in some way to find places in the world that lack a basic sameyness that's pervaded modern life, especially in the west. Not to the extent every American suburb is basically the same place, but a more ephemeral level where the local landscape and buildings differ but there's a basic cultural understanding.

I think online is like that now -- there's a metaphysical overlay over the physical world where people are integrating small bits of the physical environment, but in a way that's tiktok- and instagram-ready. Visting the Grand Canyon and thinking "that's a ledge that some tiktoker almost fell off of" or entering one the thousand artisanal hamburger cafes anywhere and feeling like you're in all and none of them. I want to know what's not online. And then hope that it doesn't get borged in.

was her using first page google and wikipedia results for research also trolling

If you, as I do, endeavor for others to read your occasional essays and come away thinking “wow, what a hilarious genius!” then you will appreciate the intimacy on hand.

oh so she writes for the worst writers i know

Beyond the obvious answer of “she’s got a book out”, I’m curious why there are suddenly so many hit pieces about this annoying but otherwise small potatoes journalist. She’s the sort of writer I would normally expect to get mild-to-fawning reviews from friends of friends (or no coverage at all).

The url to the Bookforum review posted by ivy is here. The tweet also asks a pretty good question.

Forgive me for joining the Oyler Discourse®, but the question is surely why better known writers didn’t feel like they could risk criticism of Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay et al. If these guys were such “easy targets,” why did so few risk taking aim? https://t.co/VE3gnONzNU pic.twitter.com/LqEIXVf38j

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) April 9, 2024

feel similarly to mh, call me vain but I consider myself relatively in the know, I subscribe to or at least semi-regularly read the places her essays have run, and I can’t recall reading anything by her. in reading this bookforum revirew, and seeing listed some of her essay topics, I instinctively recognize decent taste and wonder whether she actually might have something interesting to say… then I see the excerpts

there are many negative reviews of roxane gay's work out there, i remember reading them contemporaneously

oyler has the pr juice afaict

xxp people criticize these others all the time! sometimes even on this very messageboard!

every generation gets the cat person it deserves.

ivy otm, those criticisms exist outside of the hype juice circuit

the thing that kills me is that I have never moved to the supposed cultural melting pools (brooklyn in the early 00s, berlin in.. well, the early 00s to whenever) but get why cultural dispatches come from there and I’ve been somewhat adjacent

I don’t think the cultural hype juice of “I smoke cigarettes and have two significant others and have taken ketamine” is pulling from anything for anyone at this point. That well is dry! I guess maybe some people think it’s nice to read about people being young but it’s giving stagnation

that whole interview for non-xers:

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/literature/lauren-oyler-wishes-youd-fact-check-your-reviews

oh i think people say it plenty...

"There’s this ironic voice that I use sometimes that allows me to say, “Isn’t it funny I went to an Ivy League school?” And I think that’s disarming, because you’re not actually supposed to say that, right?"

Someone should step up and attack a bigger target itt imo

Sadly I cannot help as the only writing I've encountered recently was a Charlotte Mendelsson novel and she's barely bigger than Oyler.

oh come on lol

that interview is something else

always sad when no one gets one's very funny jokes

― mookieproof, Tuesday, April 9, 2024 1:34 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^

sorry but the Elvis B tweet is not good

for reasons that others stated. i started to read that interview, but as far as i can tell, she is just somebody who says snotty dumb shit for attention and to get folks riled up. whatever. but yeah the admission of being a troll is basically my cue to stop paying attention

Bunuelo tweet is half right, don't remember anyone being bitchy about Tolentino, and the Sebald essay was necessary.