post itt writers you think are bad

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.

Hari Kunzru? I haven’t fully read anything except some of his journalism, but every time I’ve tried picking up one of his novels, the writing just seems desperately unspecial.

see the challenge with writing like oyler's is to talk about it _without_ making fun of how bad it is

that's a difficult thing to do. well, at least, i've just conspicuously failed to do it, despite my best intentions

Lionel Shriver has another goddamn book out. (gift link)

As a novelist, Lionel Shriver has made her strongest impressions selecting some hot issue of the day — school shootings, the American health care system, the ballooning of the U.S. national debt — and working it into a well-paced drama about its effects on one family. When this formula works, as it did best with “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2003), the result can be riveting and also very popular. The intimacy of domestic politics moderates Shriver’s polemical side, which, when given free rein — as during an infamous 2016 speech she gave on cultural appropriation while wearing a sombrero — usually turns out to be smug, crude and obtuse.

In Shriver’s tiresome new novel, “Mania,” the balance is off. “Mania” is the story of Pearson Converse, an untenured academic who lives with her tree-surgeon partner and three children in a Pennsylvania college town. Most of the novel takes place during an alternate version of the 2010s, when a social-justice fad has been ignited by a best-selling book titled “The Calumny of I.Q.: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight.”

god damn that sounds dire

"inventing a person to be mad at: the novel"

I mean I can understand her being worried about discrimination against dumb people.

Although ...

It goes on and on. Cars blow up because they’re built by idiots.

Actually true if you own a Tesla

Did no one tell her they made a whole movie about this already?

"Pearson’s partner, Wade, is forced to hire an assistant who knows nothing about arboriculture and drops a branch on him."

haha, would read. i actually think she can be funny and has written books that i have enjoyed. she's madcap. i know about the whole sombrero thing with her. writers can be dunces. they are famous for it. that's why they all get married 10 times because nobody can stand living with them for more than a year or two. though i think she actually has been with the same person forever.
also, yeah, idiocracy. but, also, it doesn't sound like that much of a stretch from reality.

she is terrible in interviews too. and i have read really terrible essays she has written. but i STILL think she has written some good stuff. like, good writing. would still take her over ben lerner or jonathan franzen.