post itt writers you think are bad

i'm remembering the book i read now and it was actually a long book about how horrible health care is and there were lots of polemics and rants but what i also remember is that the main character throughout the book wanted to retire to Africa! what most impressed me about the book was that NONE of the characters were sympathetic in any way. that always kinda impresses me for some reason in normal novels. it was a little like reading a book by a particularly well-read stand-up comedian.

"being able to learn and discover things, being able to use that knowledge to reach conclusions that _aren't_ shitty, to me that's what i would call being a good thinker, and i'd say that's something different from being a good writer."

i totally get this and i agree. and that was well said. having said that, and i am not including lionel shriver here, there are a lot of kinda crappy people who write really insightful books about the human condition. i don't know how they do it other than that they are human and we can be kinda crappy. myself included. like, you can have great ideas and be wonderfully creative and STILL do the crappy awful wrong thing. or say the crappy awful wrong thing. or reach crappy awful wrong conclusions despite knowing better. i do it all the time.

wait. is david lodge horrible? i should google him. was he in the national front or something?

and meanwhile i just finished a joanna trollope book last night! i think she used to go out with Skrewdriver in the 80s. i mildly enjoyed her book. it had a good wish-fulfillment ending. the rector got it in the end!

david lodge still alive by the way in case you didn't know. 89 years young. joanna trollope a frisky 80. her husband, the poor man's ian curtis, ian curteis, died in 2021.

always love people who decide they don't like wokeness and cancel culture so they not speak out against that but also simultaneously abandon every belief they previously held.

I wrote a fairly misogynist article for the school newspaper in high school claiming men were oppressed in high school when I was a privileged idiot, and my friend's girlfriend wrote a scathing email tearing me down which was well-deserved. was pretty much a feminist as long as I knew her.

abandoned it all and became a creepy Trumper in the blink of an eye for...reasons I still don't understand.

i'm remembering the book i read now and it was actually a long book about how horrible health care is and there were lots of polemics and rants but what i also remember is that the main character throughout the book wanted to retire to Africa! what most impressed me about the book was that NONE of the characters were sympathetic in any way. that always kinda impresses me for some reason in normal novels. it was a little like reading a book by a particularly well-read stand-up comedian.

i've had cerebus on the mind a lot lately, i think, my point of reference keeps being dave sim. anyway that's something that strikes me about cerebus, _none_ of the characters are in any way remotely sympathetic, including the literal author self-insert. like here's a guy who's a self-described "masculinist" and i look at his stuff and... i genuinely think i hold masculinity, men, and maleness in higher regard than sim does. the cynical part of me wants to say that awful people have a particular skill at writing books in which all the characters are horrible, but like that flattens things too much. it's a certain _perspective_, i think. someone isn't, i don't think, an awful person, in most cases. someone merely hates themselves, and acts in such a way as to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

i totally get this and i agree. and that was well said. having said that, and i am not including lionel shriver here, there are a lot of kinda crappy people who write really insightful books about the human condition. i don't know how they do it other than that they are human and we can be kinda crappy. myself included. like, you can have great ideas and be wonderfully creative and STILL do the crappy awful wrong thing. or say the crappy awful wrong thing. or reach crappy awful wrong conclusions despite knowing better. i do it all the time.

for me, crappy isn't something one _is_, it's something one _does_. i defecate, but i'm not a piece of shit. i have reached _so many_ crappy awful wrong conclusions, done and said so many crappy awful wrong things. that's kind of the importance of the idea of being a "bad thinker" as being something like a "bad writer". it's not, like, you're born "smart" or you're not. i'm _smart_, i have a _high IQ_ (which... this isn't even _controversial_... is a culturally biased and kinda racist social construct and a poor measure of "intelligence" by any standard), but this doesn't mean i can't also be a _bad thinker_.

one of the things i like about ilx is that the critical environment here has inspired me to become a better thinker. i still reach crappy awful wrong conclusions sometimes... i don't expect that i'll ever stop reaching crappy awful wrong conclusions. just like one can be a "good writer" and still write, even publish, some godawful crap, one can be a "good thinker" and still come up with some terrible conclusions. "good criticism" for me is the sort that inspires people to write and think better. i mean i guess that's just constructive criticism. i'm literally just advocating for constructive criticism.

i'd be interested in knowing more about what people you _do_ think are crappy and write really insightful books about the human condition. without knowing more about who exactly you're thinking about i don't totally understand what you mean by that.

the rector got it in the end!

― scott seward

is that a double-entendre?

There are a few of the MFA middlebrow apocalypse books that are fine, but most are, indeed, utter shit. I liked ‘On Such a Full Sea,’ by Chang-Rae Lee, quite a bit.

Was Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel as stupid as it appeared?

catching up here, but it's very funny that shriver managed to recreate Harrison Bergeron from first principles

turns out the writer of that bookforum review is a known peter thiel associate. i love new york media lol

hmm, she mentions thiel in another review here:

So the reader who skims the foreword and expects a journalistic crack at the bizarre financial reality of the downtown scene—or even an insider tell-all—might be frustrated. Though Stagg does mention “Dimes Square” once (queuing up a throwaway line about how the menu is Californian), she doesn’t mention, say, the theory that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel is funding it. Nor does she mention, say, crypto money downtown, or sponsorship, or PR, or appraisal.

https://www.bookforum.com/print/3002/fiction-meets-pr-in-these-dispatches-about-fashion-and-suburban-blight-25268

"i'd be interested in knowing more about what people you _do_ think are crappy and write really insightful books about the human condition"

with current writers i really don't know a lot about what they are like in real life. i don't read a lot of author interviews. but in the past there were certainly plenty. people you probably wouldn't want to spend a lot of time around who had noxious political views. i think Celine was insightful. that's one example. there are way too many more. but there is also probably a difference between people who were considered shits who were horrible to their families and people who were out and out anti-semitic or racist. sometimes you are lucky and you get both. people will always read Willy Wonka! i think roald dahl could be totally insightful.

i just opened up my kindle to do some reading and it reminded me of the ads for terrible books on the lock screen. people pay amazon presumably, so that i see these ads for awful self-published books on my lock screen. the obviousness of the grift is apparent from the self-evidently poor quality of the books. the book i'm seeing an ad for right now is called "Glory of The Pack: A Joe The Werewolf Novel". the author doesn't matter. i'm not sure whether he drew the cover himself or commissioned someone else to do it. in any event it's bad art. a 3.5 star rating from 20 reviews as of 3/21/24.

finally ponied up the money to go ad-free when i strongly suspected one of the advertised books to be a.i.-"written" and it turned out it was

ok, I actually read the nytimes review of that Shriver book and I wasn't off in my "world of Harrison Bergeron" guess? good god how cooked is your brain if you're writing this stuff

at least I had this sentence:

Mensa is “the kind of cerebral-supremacist organization” deemed “the greatest threat to American civic order” by no less than the F.B.I.

ok this I can get behind

We Don't Need to Talk About Shriver

turns out the writer of that bookforum review is a known peter thiel associate. i love new york media lol

― ivy., Wednesday, 10 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Terrible ppl can still write good things. Don't stop believing.

I forget which writers I think are bad I have posted itt previously and I don’t wish to check, so here’s a fresh list

HP Lovecraft (dreck drecky dreck)
Jennifer Egan (Visit from the Goon Squad is stupid)
Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go is stupid)

visit from the goon squad is so bad. i’ve heard egan can be good but have never investigated bc of goon squad, which was so bad

I will give her another chance in my next life

Lol, same

why did people like that book so much though??? i still have a copy somewhere thinking i would eventually get to it based on hype. i was thinking i would bring copies i have of There There and Trust Exercise to the store. i don't think i'll ever read them. holding on to my copy of Such A Fun Age for the moment though. i am not immune to the hype machine. though i do buy them as remainders for cheap.

every time i try to read Lovecraft i start to drift off to sleep. but even Poe is tough for me. it takes them so long to say something. just spit it out, count chocula.

Ishiguro has written good stuff but Never Let Me Go is very stupid.

I like Egan. Goon Squad falls apart badly at the end, but the first half is fun. "Manhattan Beach" is an excellent historical-adventure-romance-kitchen-sink holiday read.

"Spit it out, Count Chocula" = my experience of Turn of the Screw.

The only people I knew discussing Egan are at this message board.

My mother gave me a copy of goon squad, forgot it, then gave me another copy that was signed by Egan to me personally. i never read either copy, and both saw a little free library on a moving day a while back

The only ppl I know discussing writers are at this msg board

Somebody posted a paragraph of Ocean Vuong on Twitter and it was really goopy and terrible but maybe he's good and wrote one bad paragraph, or maybe the paragraph works as part of the novel? But I then I looked at his goodreads page of popular quotes and they're all like that.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4456871.Ocean_Vuong

I liked Vuong's bildungsroman several years ago. I don't care much if at all for his poetry.

Lovecraft does absolutely nothing for me, either. Silly, tedious stuff. Maybe most horror isn’t for me, though. I think Stephen King’s short stories are generally moronic

Re: Ishiguro. He never surpassed the quality of his first two published novels, Pale View of the Hills and An Artist of the Floating World. When We Were Orphans is an overwritten mess that forgets what its plot is

I put down the last novel after about 70 pages.

I'd add The Remains of the Day as essential.

There's something so attenuated about Ishiguro the last 20 years. It's as if Stevens the butler were writing them.

Lovecraft can be amazing. "The Colour Out of Space" is genuinely creepy, imo.

Lovecraft hate bizarre

I guess maybe I appreciate him more for his (sorry mark s) INFLUENCE

Oy those Vuong quotes:

Vuong is a bad writer, nothing anyone says will convince me otherwise. When students say their favorite poet is Vuong, I cringe (inside) as much as when students say their favorite writer is Mary Oliver or fucking Rupi Kaur.

It's like the mainstream white literary world discovered that queer Asians with complex family backstories exist, and tokenized the first person who presented this identity toward them via his awful prose and abysmal poetry.

Mary Oliver! Every goddamn Barnes & Noble poetry section stocks at least two copies of each of her volumes. Corporate America decided whom they'll promote, I guess.

Lovecraft hate bizarre

― brimstead

summarize lovecraft in three words

I doubt corporate America is very invested in poetry. B&N puts out Mary Oliver volumes bc they sell, and they sell bc she writes in a plainspoken way that resonates with people who don't read much poetry. Same with Billy Collins.

It's like the mainstream white literary world discovered that queer Asians with complex family backstories exist, and tokenized the first person who presented this identity toward them via his awful prose and abysmal poetry.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Thursday, April 11, 2024 10:53 AM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

RIP anthony veasna so

I doubt corporate America is very invested in poetry. B&N puts out Mary Oliver volumes bc they sell, and they sell bc she writes in a plainspoken way that resonates with people who don't read much poetry. Same with Billy Collins.

― jaymc,

Of course.

in the spirit of good faith research I read the first few sections of oyler’s goop cruise article. I don’t mind her style, but I kept waiting to learn something, to be challenged in the slightest…

i don't hate Lovecraft. its more like i keep the paperbacks around and whenever i think i'm going to dig in i end up going uhhhhhhhhh....and i last like five pages. i have that problem with a lot of early horror/weird/supernatural people. clark ashton smith, etc. i don't even get far with someone like wilkie collins. maybe i am missing the spooky gene. i liked stephen king when i was a kid. LOVED some of his books. clive barker. but i don't ever want to read them now.
i do like the idea of the ineffable unnameable ultimate horror or whatever. i'm fine with it in movies. i thought mandy was awesome. i loved hellraiser years ago. i am all for the spooky forest horror all the rage now. that kind of thing is made for the movies. i really liked The Mist recently! i had somehow never seen it. that ending is so awesome.
i did enjoy that area x trilogy as noted in the thread i started on ILB.

Mountains of Madness is a classic, the rest of it is have little use for.

Ishiguro drives me nuts. He’s compelling enough for me to read several of his novels, and more often than not I end up wondering if I’m missing something brilliant he’s doing, because the novels end up seeming empty and stupid? I thought the sketchiness of Never Let Me Go worked to its advantage in a way, it at least worked on an emotional level even if it made no sense if you thought about it, but The Buried Giant is just…nothing, as far as I can tell? And then he won the Nobel! When We Were Orphans has a pretty great premise and decides to use the most annoying style of unreliable narrator to explore it.

i could only get through 50 or so pages of lauren groff's Matrix. for a book supposed to be set in a convent way back in time none of the scenes really rendered or stuck with me--a lot of them were summary, and it was written in the present tense if I'm not mistaken. really bad writing and then i read a profile of her in the NYT for her new one that came out last year and she claims with a straight face that she reads over 300 books a year

Groff's Florida was a whole lot of okay. So much of this so-called local writing reads like it got workshopped to death.

not talking about Groff but sometimes i think those workshop-y short story collections that seem to multipy like rabbits by people with REALLY killer author photos and MFA creds are the new status symbol for rich folks. they are all kinda okay and these people have learned how to write but they all blend together until i'm not sure which quirky white person is which anymore. in general, i am all for lots of women and non-binary and trans writers on the shelves at local bookstores. and lots more people of color showing up on the shelves. it is really a good time for different voices. and this abundance of fiction by asian writers that just never existed in my world before! it's amazing. writers from all over being translated. i think trust fund kids should make that their priority in life. becoming excellent literary translators. there is ZERO money in doing it so it would be perfect for them. they can figure out a way to make it sexy. "oh yes i'm working on some vintage Korean horror right now..." they would love that in Brooklyn.