post itt writers you think are bad

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!!

<shameface> haven't read it </shameface>

"Long women?"

yeah, like society dames. like they should be in town & country magazine or something.

I was introduced by Denis Johnson in 1997 by a creative writing professor who wore a leather jacket and bragged about how he'd once gotten pulled over by "the federales" while traveling in Mexico. He was really into Denis Johnson.

(introduced *to* Denis Johnson)

(to Denis Johnson's work, that is)

was he an actual professor or a TA

i wasn't going to say "dude lit" but you know...

not saying he couldn't write. he was a way better writer than any beatnik. those short stories were really good. but fairly or unfairly i think of rebel english majors when i think of him. NOT that there's anything wrong with that.

and hey i'm a big harry crews/barry hannah/larry brown fan.

harrybarrylarry

was he an actual professor or a TA

He was a prof. He wanted us to know he was a cool prof. I mean, he was probably in his early 30s at the time. Oh God, I just looked him up and he is currently writing a book of essays about fly fishing.

omg

From Denis Johnson to JR Hartley

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.

this is interesting to me, cos for me i think my uni was trying to avoid this so determinedly that we seldom did anything like this. it was all really voguish stuff apart from a short story module near the beginning. it seemed like they were somewhere along the road towards thinking teaching writing technique is wrong, like morally or politically. or at least that they were afraid to do so in the way any other subject would be taught. which i get but i can honestly say there were a range of backgrounds in our group and by the end everybody was wondering why technique was so avoided.

i do agree tho whatever you feed people kinda comes back out. like in my case this was auto-fiction/creative non-fiction over the two years of my first degree. and then it was weird starting my second degree which was much more about just writing a book-length work. and most people hadn't studied at the uni before. this meant they were sort of arriving in that degree with their own pre-uni idea of a novel or whatever, then mystified by why we're reading some psychogeographical autofiction about a london bike courier or whatever. there was literally one novel out of twelve things we were assigned to read as we began our books. i prob lost the chance to get a first by writing as scathing a takedown as i could of one of the books, abandoning whatever 'academic writing' is, just out of four years of increasing frustration and a burning need for someone in the faculty to read a takedown of their terrible view of art, lol.

I was introduced by Denis Johnson in 1997 by a creative writing professor who wore a leather jacket and bragged about how he'd once gotten pulled over by "the federales" while traveling in Mexico. He was really into Denis Johnson.

lol at this. it makes total sense. and yet the stories are brilliant and almost unique imo, and transcend the whole dudes love dudes taking drugs stuff.

extremely stoked for R's takedown of the lit scene ngl

just gotta finish it and get it published, lol. but it is ticking along.

what’s funny, skot, is that yr kind of negging on Johnson but Larry Brown wrote one somewhat interesting semi-autobiographical novel and everything else he wrote was southern baked bullshit.

its not that funny. i brought up larry brown on purpose to show that i am not immune to dude lit charm. and i like larry's stories a lot. and his non-fiction firefighting book a lot as well.

the weird thing is like... who even are these dudes reading this dude lit? any of the men that i know who read don't read this way or with this mindset, and then there's i guess the archetype of the university professor or whatever, but none of mine were like that at all. and then there's the archetypal male student but there were only a few men in my MA and no men in my MFA.

not saying they don't exist just idk, dying breed perhaps.

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

Maybe, but it’s her third book. Her second was the wretched THE AUTOGRAPH MAN.

brb just gonna text my best friend to see if he's read any more rachel cusk xpost

i mean denis johnson's fancier than larry brown. larry brown was never going to win a national book award. but sad men writing about sad men for sad men is a thing and i always have some room for it and i'm not...being negative. (i can't use that n-word that reminds me of dude dating books)

just wondered if people thought he was overrated. like i said, haven't read him in years. looking at his stuff i think resuscitation of a hanged man was the last thing i read by him and i didn't love that and now i'm thinking that denis is probably responsible for stuff like motherless brooklyn which is also not great. existential indie rocker stuff.

does anyone still read jim crace?

not saying they don't exist just idk, dying breed perhaps

1. They do things different in America

2. Lots of ppl itt are older than us

is how I break it down to an extent

"the weird thing is like... who even are these dudes reading this dude lit?"

old gen xers. i dunno. there are always going to be people who read narrowly and who read from some mental list of things that they think they should read. i see it all the time in used record world. denis johnson has an aura. jesus' son will probably always make some sort of doomed lit list somewhere and people will seek it out. i mentioned this somewhere else but i went to a store that opened up near me recently and the used fiction section was the perfect example of a section curated by a white man my age who went to college in the 80s and who reads denis johnson. it was an uncanny time capsule to find in 2023. it was like Borders Books circa 1988. but their new book selection on the other hand was awesome and totally future-centric and exciting. it was quite the contrast. one section dark and brooding and sad and 85% male and one colorful and weird and represented by all kinds of writers.

I saw an otm post — I guess there had been a day of discourse on bluesky/x, I didn’t actually see any of it directly but it basically seemed to be “genre” ppl whining that they don’t get no respect (in a way that itself seemed to be stuck in an old argument that the actual reality of things left behind ages ago) — the otm post was tangential to that & just said can everyone stfu with that annoying cliche that literary novels are all about “middle ages academics sleeping with students”; this applied to like 2 books 50 years ago & doesn’t reflect anything about anything in 2024

Middle aged obv lol

Yeah it's v reductive! Also like ime as you hint in citing that tweet there's a fairly visible pushback against the idea that some of the quintessential sad men writers are only read by men or only by white men. Not all sad men, lol.

Anecdotal but my experience of university was that, at the beginning there were a lot of entrenched positions about work and among the class towards individuals even, but over time the concept of benefit of the doubt kind of grows stronger both in the interpersonal relationships but also as regards how people experience reading. That was prob the best part of studying creative writing and it isn't talked about enough.

I can definitely think of some stuff I was blown away by which the discourse around it online had made me think I wouldn't like. Being part of a community where people unpick this sort of stuff together and form friendships was very powerful to me, and a real retort to all the "universities coddle the mind" shit.

Needless to say social media doesn't cultivate this sense of community learning so well.

I saw an otm post — I guess there had been a day of discourse on bluesky/x, I didn’t actually see any of it directly but it basically seemed to be “genre” ppl whining that they don’t get no respect (in a way that itself seemed to be stuck in an old argument that the actual reality of things left behind ages ago) — the otm post was tangential to that & just said can everyone stfu with that annoying cliche that literary novels are all about “middle ages academics sleeping with students”; this applied to like 2 books 50 years ago & doesn’t reflect anything about anything in 2024

― keep kamala and khive on (wins), Sunday, 8 September 2024 12:22 (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Quite right! All literary fiction now is autofictional tales of the online with titles like We Are All Exactly Like This All Of The Time

(slight impudent wink there, as I'm not a skilled enough writer to convey it in the actual post obv. we are in the age of the Tone Indicator)

Hastily stuffing the manuscript of my new fiction Tone Indicator into my desk drawer

lol I was actually thinking that'd be a likely title of something before you posted it

(sincere)

My only experience with ppl who've Studied Writing were the scriptwriters in my comics group and yeah they had major hangups about three act structures and the like, I guess TV writers aren't invited to deconstruct as much as lit writers are. It got very frustrating, sometimes seemed like they believed there was one correct way to tell a story, also a strange insistence that every character have a fully detailed backstory, everything had to be explained.

God that stuff drives me up the wall, you hear it so much these days not just from scriptwriters but also ppl who have internalised all this nonsense from podcasts/tvtropes/goodreads or wherever it comes from, this half baked third hand theory of narrative stuff… I joined a book club recently and I would have bailed immediately if someone used the word “pacing” or the like

(It wasn’t like that at all luckily, everyone just spoke normally about how they liked the book, what it seemed to be attempting & how successful it was — & obv you can talk about story mechanics & stuff but just not in the most rigid & banal way possible please)

Maybe, but it’s her third book. Her second was the wretched THE AUTOGRAPH MAN.

ha ha oops! there was even a part of me that thought "wait should I check there's not some other second novel I haven't heard about?"

Proposal: the people of today who match up temperamentally with people thirty years older who love Denis Johnson & such now read e.g. Ben Lerner

not saying Ben Lerner writes like Denis Johnson but I think he applies different fingernails to the same itch

no he fucking doesn’t

Or family! the endless "in-law" "step-mom" narratives. (Of course Sophocles is like, yeah bro.)

No mention of Kerouac in this thread, fish in a barrel but he's who comes to mind.

― Blitz Primary (tipsy mothra)

i mean, i get it, my mommy didn't love me either. i suspect mike pence calls his wife "mother" for related reasons, though i don't know that for sure. on a personal level, though, it's just really frustrating. speaking as a Woman of a Certain Age, people look at me either as a "MILF" or, worse, as a "mommy dommy". it is one of _the_ hardest things about dating for me. these constant memes about people talking about how much they want a mommy, and so of course when they look at me that's what they see. sigh.

Aw I liked The Easter Parade. But it's true I never finished Cold Spring Harbor. I was just ... not very interested. (Richard Ford has a similar effect on me, at least at novel length. I like some of his short stories.)

― Blitz Primary (tipsy mothra)

try the book on tape of it, it runs a lot faster. at least in its original release. i hear they reissued it at its "proper" speed, but where's the fun in that?

i'm working through the Richard Ford edited "Book of the American Short Story vol. 2" - Granta, 2008 - and am coming across some of these famous post-war men that i'd never read before. the stories he cherry picks are all amazing in their own ways. But I realised i'd never read Updike - a novel or a short story before - and the story included, "Natural Color", is both 1) extraordinarily written - vivid and sharp, perfectly conveying the kind of panicky, unruly emotion that adults usually need to tamp down and 2) utterly poisonous; would i want to spend more than these few pages with these people? no i would not

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand)

this is one of my other problems as a writer, i start writing and all the truly nasty shit i try not to say or do around other people comes out. i got some extremely fucked up shit in my head. but goddamn all anybody i know ever writes is trauma porn. i don't want to write trauma porn.

I’ve been reading an unlikely amount of 50s short stories lately and it’s wild how many “parties” seem to be happening in them, several times a week. It seems like there would be social networks that would support a cocktail hour literally every night of the week, at different people’s houses, and people would just live in each other’s houses practically. Did this really happen? In a certain moneyed set, I guess? And I guess the amount of alcohol consumed and the general age of the participants (pre parenthood) and the total lack of anything that could be called feminism would lead to some hanky panky (at best) but probably pretty easily shading into abusive, sex pest behaviour

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand)

meanwhile i'm out here reading the Beebo Brinker novels lol

this was my favorite column online. i wish they hadn't stopped it. other than the interviews, it was the only thing i wanted to read on PR's site. unlike the interviews, you can actually read this column without subscribing. which is nice of them.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/columns/feminize-your-canon/

― scott seward

(note to self: do not use this as an excuse for a "trans joke")

as for parties, people still go to them.

― difficult listening hour

and still drink way too much and get into fights at them.

Not challopsing here, but I was starting the Ann Tyler novel 'Breathing Lessons, not having read any of her books. The writing was so poor, uninteresting, and pedestrian in the opening paragraph that my feeling was 'if you can't be bothered to write, I can't be bothered to read it'.

An example of the offending prose style:

Deer Lick lay on a narrow country road some ninety miles north of Baltimore, and the funeral was scheduled for ten-thirty Saturday morning; so Ira figured they should start around eight. This made him grumpy. (He was not an early-morning kind of man.) Also Saturday was his busiest day at work, and he had no one to cover for him. Also their car was in the body shop.

― Bob Six

i find that paragraph totally engrossing, but i'm fascinated by the mundane and quotidian. i wish there was more of that in my life. hell, i wish i was confident enough in my own writing to _write_ shit that mundane. that's part of the pressure i feel as a writer, you need a _hook_, you need to _sell_ yourself. there are so many books out there, and asking somebody to take the time to really get into the rhythm, the flow of a work, to breeze through something and get a larger impression rather than these tiny immaculately crafted jewels of sentences, crystalline in a way that makes you forget what you're reading... god, i couldn't read a whole novel like that. it's exhausting. please, tell me about what you heard on the radio, particularly if it's not going to be in any way meaningful later. ramble. that's what i want to hear.

that's what i miss about newspaper columnists - we miss out on the ephemeral. everything has to be important. blockbuster mentality. i wish there were more people like lewis grizzard writing today. do i like lewis grizzard? do i think he's a "good writer"? no. i still miss him. him and erma bombeck. not mike royko. i don't miss mike royko.

In the spirit of the thread I will say that the last book I put down without finishing was Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. To me that was bad writing, mainly because it seemed to be constantly trying to do too much but also in a different sense too little.

― o. nate

i've definitely heard of that one. i've heard some people trust say it's pretty cringe. :( you know, uh... i'm a big advocate of "write what you know".

The author decided to write Middlesex after reading the 1980 memoir Herculine Barbin and finding himself dissatisfied with its discussion of intersex anatomy and emotions.

wait what

this dude decided he _didn't like how an intersex person wrote about themselves and decided he could do better_?

i'm sorry, that is _peak cis dude_ right there

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

― scott seward

oh my god yes

one of my least favorite things to do is to read really good writing

because i read it and i say to myself "oh my god this writing is _so good_ i could never write as good as this"

i'm pretty sure i could write at least as good as _fuccboi_

possibly even better

i couldn't get _published_ but at least i could _write_ better

-

that madison smartt bell book makes me think of the cover of pink floyd's _meddle_

-

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!!

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

"mfa-core" as a writing style frustrates me _so fucking much_

like there's so much i appreciate and like about literary writing but god it is so fucking _gatekept_

i hear about the really brutal editing process that shit goes through (and i saw "shulie") and it's absolutely terrifying to me, i feel like some of those folks regularly tell that anecdote about jo jones throwing a cymbal at charlie parker's head

ha ha oops! there was even a part of me that thought "wait should I check there's not some other second novel I haven't heard about?"

I'd also add that ON BEAUTY was pretty good, but then if I took an EM Forster novel and did a search & replace on all the proper nouns I'd probably be able to write a pretty good book too.

On Beauty gets most favorable mentions on ilx, seems like.
I'm among the ILBers who have enjoyed Harry Crews's A Childhood, The Biography of a Place in recent years---still haven't checked out Larry Brown, but this thread still makes me think I should:
Obit: Larry Brown

Some reviewers who love A Childhood don't like his novels, but when I do see favorable mentions, A Feast of Snakes is usually in there (incl. on ilx, I think, not seeing it now).