post itt writers you think are bad

anything early.

I think the writers currently itt aren't bad enough

I'll tell you who's bad, Stephen Markley, author of _The Deluge_ is bad, I opened this up at random in the bookstore and couldn't believe what I was seeing

I'm sure the book has virtues but being well-written is not one of them

the early stories are very cool and then you realize lots of american short stories in the future totally came from him and not hemingway. the style. the attitude. the pessimism. but later he got bloated and rich and boring. any of the stories from the 30s and 40s are worth reading. the novels of the 30s are likewise cool.

xxxpost

"I think the writers currently itt aren't bad enough"

we should have a reading club where we all read fuccboi.

https://i.imgur.com/fkNsJMz.jpeg

Is this a good thread to post my VC collection

i am pretty good at buying books. i rarely buy anything THAT bad. maybe some old sci-fi comes closest. mostly something might turn out to be, as the kids say, MID. it will be boring or tedious or it goes someplace uninteresting or is just too damn normal for me to want to continue. i have no problem now stopping a movie 45 minutes in or a book 60 pages in. i'll stop reading a book with 30 pages to go! sometimes i just don't care anymore and i drop them. no big deal.
i don't really read a lot of online non-fiction either and i'm sure i would find terrible stuff there. or music writing. i leave it to more intrepid souls to seek out stuff that ends up on the ilm bad writing thread. i have a TON of good writing to get to.

is denis johnson overrated? and do only dudes read him? people kinda worship him but i never want to read his later stuff. the old stories might be all i need.

xp NICE. Of those, I've read Bright Lights Big City, Bushwacked Piano, A Fan's Notes, The Last Election, and Cathedral. All five in VC edition I'm pretty sure.

Unfortunately I have “must finish” syndrome

do people still read brodkey or is his rep gonesville. i really liked stories in an almost classical mode when i read it years ago. i never read the stuff published after that. proustian and dreamy and with that hyper-real memory of things that nobody could ever have memories of. early childhood. it reminded me of how much i loved scott bradfield's the history of luminous motion. i loved that book. the last samurai sometimes reminded me of that too even though all three things are kinda completely different.

Oh man, history of luminous motion, THERE is a book that every writer read and now I feel like it's been completely forgotten? I had completely forgotten it anyway. There was a whole segment of people who wrote like that. Brad Leithauser? Wasn't that a guy?

WAIT I am supposed to be talking about who's bad

is denis johnson overrated? and do only dudes read him? people kinda worship him but i never want to read his later stuff. the old stories might be all i need.

― scott seward, Saturday, September 7, 2024 2:47 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

don't know about worship but i love everything i've read by denis johnson. and i am a dude

is denis johnson overrated?

no

indie rockers love him. are you an indie rocker? trying to really pin down the demographic.

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reading denis johnson in the 80s reminds me of reading madison smartt bell in the 80s. i never read them after the 80s though. i don't think. unless jesus' son came out after the 80s.

https://bookshopapocaly✧✧✧.com/cdn/shop/files/zerodb-1sq_1024x1✧✧✧@2✧.j✧✧?v=1711050948

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51i2aNWtWuL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

I think the writers currently itt aren't bad enough

The bar is Brown*, pls find writers worse than that

*Dan, not anyone else of that name

tried Dies The Fire by SM Stirling but it was completely unreadable IIRC

i think the only REALLY bad stuff i see is local writing. which doesn't really count for this thread. there is an arts magazine that comes out around here and they always come in to the store and ask if i'll buy some and i always do because i'm nice but i'm always tempted to throw them in the trash after the person leaves. which is so mean! i usually end up giving them away. its just a cringe machine on paper. its so bad. and there are tons of writers in it. tons of poetry. and you can tell they are serious about it and they are not young. so bad.
if only bad poetry were a renewable resource. we would be carbon-neutral in a week.

What’s bad though. Maybe someone else would get find it humorous at least. Need a bandcamp for writing

calstars, the esrly stories of O’Hara are good and Appointment in Samarra is an excellent book about bootlegging, alcoholism, infidelity, and self-destruction. An indelible scene of the anti-hero stumbling drunk off rye playing record after record and smashing the ones he isn’t playing by stomping on them accidentally

Thanks!

Denis Johnson definitely has a big rock following but he is absolutely amazing imo. His poetry from the eighties is worth checking out too.

if only bad poetry were a renewable resource. we would be carbon-neutral

lol, agree! maybe this qualifies as challops but like, I feel people get away with absolutely dire dire writing in poetry, or "hybrid forms" or "creative non-fiction" even in major publications or Poetry Foundation or whatever. I read poetry probably every day and I love poetry, but Jesus I also fucking hate it.

My experience of studying two creative writing degrees is some types of work or forms never get critiqued because it's too awkward and in an MFA-heavy world we can see the results of that.

My god, yes, so much poetry is abysmal. LG, we have a name for a certain type of poetry or "hybrid" writing among my friend group: "MFA-core." What's funny, of course, is that many of us *have* MFAs, but we were lucky enough to not fall into the usual traps of them, or to have teachers that eschewed the styles so seemingly preferred by the tenured Creative Writing Professoriate. Like, my teachers were all absolute fucking weirdos who broke the rules all the time, one of them didn't even have a college degree!!

Johnson's 'Already Dead' is an astonishingly accurate depiction of the weird world of Northern California weed grows, tweakers, small town cops, and death hippie cults. Certainly my favorite book of his, but I have only read two others.

indie rockers love him. are you an indie rocker? trying to really pin down the demographic.

x-post

― scott seward, Saturday, September 7, 2024 3:25 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i like indie rock but i was more in the punk/hc/noise scene. i feel like noize bros might be the denis johnson demographic tbh. like arcade fire named an album after a jeffrey kennedy toole novel. they couldn't handle dj's twisted and seedy protagonists

I love poetry, but Jesus I also fucking hate it.

otm

lol table, mfa-core is a definite thing. the weird thing ime was before I studied I'd often seen people saying mfas breed legions of, idk, conventional three-act fiction writers or traditional canon worshippers or whatever, but this wasn't my experience at all. in my second degree, which was focused on writing a book, maybe nine of eleven classmates were writing a novel of fiction but the entire syllabus bar maybe one book was like hybrid shit, creative non-fiction, blah blah blah. just a really weird bubble seemingly insisted on by lecturers.

it's not like there aren't myriad interesting ways of following or reacting against conventional forms, plus also seems you need to know your scales or whatever before you start doing free jazz.

also by the end of my first degree p much everybody craved more technical teaching rather than vibes/politics, since politics or class debates or whatever are so often used as a kind of cheap carb substitute for teaching technique.

it's quite corrosive imo. anyway my novel WIP is p much a satire of all this shit. poetry in particular is an absolute grifter's paradise.

like idk towards the end i started reading russian literary theory for my final thesis and there was so much absolute gold in there. being 100 years old or whatever does that mean it's 'masculo-sexual' or retrograde or similar? quite possibly except like any other thing you read or learn you're an independent person in a modern world capable of accepting and rejecting whatever parts of it you choose.

shit like this absolutely blew my mind, just detailed analyses of things you have known to be real for years but never been able to define: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095807354

anyway back on topic:

Carrots have very clear boundaries. You can tell that by looking at them. The same with celery. The corrugated circumference of a stick of celery announces quite emphatically that it is not an especially receptive vegetable. Carrots and celery are hardy, and hardy entities – people included – aren’t inclined to take much in or give much out. In order to get anything out of celery or a carrot you have to turn up the heat and make them sweat. Potatoes aren’t like that. It doesn’t take much for a potato to fall apart, and if you plop a few of them, raw and halved, into a tomato-based vegetable stew the starchy nubs will wallow away beautifully, thickening the glossy juice while at the same time taking on its vibrant flavour.

Indeed, spuds can take a lot. Which might well explain why they are frequently referred to as ‘humble’, and why they are renowned for their soakage skills. I know of a man who (many years ago, it should be said) horsed down a packet of Smash before heading to the pub for a rake of pints. Apparently he had nothing else in the cupboard. And so impatient was he to get down to the boozer, he neglected to prepare the potato flakes properly. Apparently they swelled up, in the intended fashion, deep inside his gut as he perched pleased as Punch on a barstool, blithely pouring pint after pint down his gullet. Apparently the flakes fluffed up and expanded so much he eventually fell from his perch and was carted off to hospital where he had his stomach pumped. The nurses couldn’t get over how much mash came out of him. Scoopful after scoopful, apparently.

Johnson's 'Already Dead' is an astonishingly accurate depiction of the weird world of Northern California weed grows, tweakers, small town cops, and death hippie cults. Certainly my favorite book of his, but I have only read two others.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Saturday, September 7, 2024

I haven't read that, but 'Tree of Smoke' also contains some of that and is a pretty great novel

if only bad poetry were a renewable resource

I mean... we don't seem to be running out

Ha I just read Already Dead and didn’t dig it. Angels, and his stories and poetry are all awesome though, don’t remember much about Tree of Smoke

LG - Is the person who wrote that a food columnist? It has an that air of being breezy, confident, professional and somewhat barking mad ["hardy entities – people included – aren’t inclined to take much in or give much out"]- in the style of Giles Coren or similar.

Entertaining in small doses - but it sounds like someone who prides themselves on having firm and expert opinions and an anecdote for almost everything and would probably become tiresome quite quickly.

I wish they were! It's a Fitzcarraldo Editions writer, hyped to the beyonds in LRB, the New Yorker etc.

Aint' got nothin on Marilyn of Grand Forks.
This thread is reminding me that I still want to get Brodkey's early story collections, and what the hell even the novel sounds worth a try---especially intrigued by the Brick Magazine reviewer's experience. linked on this lively thread:
Harold Brodkey

Long ago enjoyed Anne Tyler's Searching For Caleb. especially the New Orleans scenes, and took the rootsadelic zen lyrics in A Slipping-Down Life as Stipe parody, before realizing it was published way before R.E.M. But The Accidental Tourist went too cute and I bailed, though maybe too early? She's written many many many more since.

I wouldn't have ever previously thought of Zadie Smith as a bad writer, I loved 'White Teeth' and 'NW' and I like how her novels focus on clashes between different cultures and different groups of people and illuminate how people see the world. I am looking forward to going back and reading 'On Beauty' from 2005.

But honestly, 'The Fraud' was such a dud. I listened to it as an audiobook. It was read by Smith herself!

First of all, her marble-y-mouthed narration was appalling, it sounded like someone reading an almost 500-page novel with a hand over her mouth (and if you are trying to do a parody of a mumbly upper class British accent, this is it)

And then the substance of the novel... It had some good passages but overall just focused on many, many uninteresting characters. The best part of the novel was an extended sequence that took place in Jamaica, supposedly written by a novelist in the story who Smith seemed to imply through her writing was unimportant, although maybe that means she is making fun of herself as an 'unimportant' writer as well, which if so, kudos. In the novel everyone is a fraud, there's supposed to have some resonance with the current Trump-world, but it doesn’t really land.

It consists of ~200 tiny chapters constantly jumping around over an 80-year time period. God help you if you fall asleep while listening to it, which you ~will~ do because it is so boring. You won’t be able to find your way back again

Loving this takedown

This makes me sad because I too love White Teeth and NW

LG, what we refer to as MFA-core is project- or book-based works that have an overarching conceptual, formal, and thematic core that makes the work legible and didactic, thus easy to use as a teaching tool. In a sense, many MFAs don’t do a great job of much except pumping out people who only seem to be able to write work that is beloved by people either teaching or in MFAs.

One of my mentors— my thesis advisor!— was Dodie Bellamy, and so while I get the loathing for hybridity and narrative essay forms, I was lucky enough to learn from the best and so I don’t have as many qualms with the genre.

Smith is so overrated. One very good but flawed first novel, and absolute stinker second novel, then a series of other books that are mostly rewriting better books by other people. And some really awful short stories and privileged centrist opinion pieces.

writing workshop fiction has always been its own tedious beast. its such a closed system. all anyone knows is school. which is how you end up with endless autofictions where a writer writes about a writer who is having problems writing....blah. no thank you. i'd rather read anne tyler any day.
i just don't have time for clueless young writers who don't know shit about shit. i want to know shit.
(having said that, there are tons of great young writers out there.)
(although i do end up reading too much short fiction by long women who look like they were queens of their finishing school because i am fond of fucked up body horror post-angela carter semi-genre stuff that would never be in the new yorker. at least they are using their imaginations. i don't want even one cell phone text exchange in anything i read. call me old-fashioned.)

Long women?

absolute stinker second novel

WRONGEROO, On Beauty is better than the not-as-under-control White Teeth

I can’t read poetry but I realized that there is this dope city lights o’hara edition that I’ve seen before

https://i.imgur.com/Fr7HDnZ.png

I have that edition!!