New Yorker magazine alert thread

I found the NY'er excerpt to be both interesting and emotive on one level but also sort of hilarious on another level. Like I feel bad laughing at a real story with such darkness in it (hey, I did't invent the creative non-fiction industrial complex) but some of it felt so voguish and was accidentally funny as a result, just the way it seems to obliviously yet perfectly capture people stuck in a very particular modern milieu. Including the author herself.

*didn't ffs

I think that’s fair. I also have some gripes with the interview and its framing. I think Gould’s emphasis on certain aspects of the NYer story aren’t inappropriate per se, but definitely push her own preconceptions to the front.

and kate’s right to draw the comparison to the other short story we’ve mentioned on here, albeit in another thread, lately. I think using phrasing like “a little more queer” does come from the sort of liberal mindset other works attempt to satirize but Gould’s not going to ask about that because of where she’s situated! So the interview concentrates on where she saw herself in the story she did read, and the bit that’s outside of her experience.

I wish the interview delved into more of the book. kind of a so-so interview.

i read "the last rave".

even last night, even as i posted it, i felt bad writing the thing i did, my thoughts about that interview. when someone writes a memoir, they're making themselves extremely vulnerable to the judgements of others. others who see them not as who they are, but through the lens of their own preconceptions. i believe that when someone writes about themselves, even if it's mediocre writing, even if it's _bad_ writing, a lot of different things come out, and we don't always know what they are, and we choose which ones to focus on.

and i do that, i think, more than most. i have a tendency to make people's writing about me that's not about me. i try really hard to avoid that. not always totally successfully.

i've read a lot of "new york" writing, and it annoys me to no end. "new york" writing seems so convinced of the specialness of new york, the uniqueness of new york, but what comes out is empty references, name-drops of places i've never been to.

the thing about "the last rave" is this terrible transformation that takes place within it. it starts out as banal and irritating as the writing of any self-absorbed new yorker. well, really, it's just journaling. it's how i started journaling, privately. "i went to x restaurant and ate x food with x person". it's actually good, i think, to write like that privately. to be aware of the facts, what happened and when. because we forget, all of us.

i dated someone briefly who wrote down everything someone said to her, in a notebook. i understand why she did it. she needed to know what was real and what wasn't. what someone had said and what someone hadn't. because of the way one of her exes had treated her. because she had been abused.

the later part of the excerpt i skimmed, but not for the reasons i skimmed the later part of _the feminist_. i don't know if witt's writing is good writing or bad writing. maybe it is like her writing on _new york_, references, not explanations. i just... i know the territory she's describing. i've wanted to write about it, but i don't know how. so much of it can seem banal. so much of it leaves her open to judgement. "you were upset with him for _smoking pot_?" "jesus, you _kicked down the door to his room_?" it's hard to say because she's heard it - she talks about it - she's heard it from andrew, over and over again, how _she's_ the abuser, _she's_ gaslighting him, he doesn't _appreciate_ how she's going around town calling him an "abuser".

and one internalizes that. god knows, over and over again i have to tell this story to myself, to convince myself that i'm not the person that person i loved, that person i trusted, that person i lived with - i'm not the person that other person said i was. that it's not my _fault_, what they did, even if i kicked down a door or punched a wall.

i'm afraid to talk about it because i never know when my ex could be reading, because of the ways they could argue, the things they might say about me. this is the only place i talk about it in public, the only place they _could_ say anything, and they haven't, but it's still so terrifying, every time. i'm terrified of them. i'm terrified that they might have been _right_. like if it's not inappropriate, i'm legit proud of witt, for opening up the way she does, for saying the things she does, even things that make her look superficial and banal. just because i know the territory.

covid was me trapped alone in a house with that person, and seeing them _change_. seeing what isolation did to them, seeing them act differently towards me, say things, do things, and just... not understanding why. i still don't understand why. i was in the phase where i was hanging out with younger people, where i was wanting to party, where i was wanting to live an exciting life and do lots of drugs. i didn't, and in retrospect i don't regret that. i'm trying to live some semblance of a normal life, like i have so many times before, and it's not going to take, i know it. but god, those people, that scene, is so fucked up. i don't want to live there. i don't know where else to go. i can't actually stay here, though.

i'm glad witt isn't afraid now in the way she was back in '20. i'm glad she's been able to find peace, confidence, strength. i'm glad she can speak up, even if she comes off as banal, irritating, entitled at times. i thought often during covid that i couldn't be the only one. i couldn't be the only one who was left trapped, isolated, with someone who'd changed, someone who'd turned terrifying. she's the first person i've seen who talked about having a similar experience to mine. there have to be lots of us, but it's so hard to write about. i'm glad she wrote about it and that she comes from a background that gave her the opportunity to get published, to tell her story. covid enabled a lot of fucked up shit, a lot of abuse. covid was scary for everyone, but it was, i think, scary for me in a way that it wasn't for a lot of people. i haven't seen a lot of people talking about those sorts of experiences. if anybody is gonna talk about that, it's gotta be someone who was affected by it. someone who was a victim.

reading ganz's book on US politics in the 90s (good so far) and delighted / unstartled to see current NYer editor david remnick quoted saying something v smugly vacuous abt h. ross perot lol

lol I bracketed that bit too.

I'm curious what you think of the book when you finish it.

I am blissfully unaware of most of what appears in the NYer, but I honestly don’t give a fuck what any rich white person has to say about partying or raving. At least she isn’t trying to do theory like that abysmal Wark book from a few years back, which was astonishingly embarrassing to read.

(I mainly follow this thread in case anything actually good comes up— once or twice a year, it happens!)

is Emily Witt rich?

I mean maybe not, sort of seems like it tho. I also just assume that anyone who has been able to “support”
themselves writing articles and has an obvious PR machine behind them has some amount of wealth

I didn't know the Wark book you meant but I looked it up and lol no thank you. "From k-nights spent on Brooklyn’s and Berlin’s junkspace dance floors, McKenzie Wark abstracts a life practice of ressociation in a dance of autoconceptualization and allotheorization. In crossing toward the stranger’s gift of ‘letting go of ourselves as private property,’ Raving is nothing less than Wark’s femmunist manifesto, her tractatus on techno’s blackness, her treatise for a twenty-first-century trans ethics.”

the new yorker pays its writers enough money to live in new york without them qualifying as rich (tho it doesn’t give them health insurance)

Maybe a decade ago (?) I remember reading that staff writers were paid $90k a year — which seemed fine but not exactly luxe. (That's why they all write books or take TV gigs like Toobin.) Presumably it's gone up since, but maybe not as much as you'd think. Conde Nast has not been flush.

Once again I remind everyone that some people on this board have rarely, if ever, broken the 50k mark. 90k would be a lifechanging amount of money.

As far as the Wark book is concerned, it’s pretty basic: it completely elides the Blackness of techno in favor of a queer erotic auto theory. it’s nasty shit.

ok but…. 90k does not qualify you as rich in any major american city these days certainly including new york. you can say she has the privilege of a good steady salary (and i have no idea what her family background is)… but the word rich does have meaning

i maybe know one person who makes that much money. and i don’t know any writers who make that much money. maybe back off

literally have no clue what that has to do with the definition of rich by the standards of 2024 living but i don’t intend to engage in this convo any further. just gonna post what i had typed before this

there are plenty of rich white collar gay guys who go to the parties she writes about — much fewer than at parties in manhattan, so it’s not like your instinct is of. there’s all sorts of finance ppl and architects and creative directors and senior marketing executives crawling around bushwick raves. they all make way, way more than $90k a year

is off*

whatever J0rdan

I’m rich, bitch

they all make way way more and they all deserve the guillotine

I was there for a good amount of places/times/parties she writes about and am glad she did. I didn’t. I never knowingly crossed paths with her but she gets right the lived feel of Bushwick then. This thread reminds me of the Pfork guy who boasted of some dumb high salary plus bennies.

fwiw Emily Witt’s father was endowed chair of a journalism department at a state school in Georgia.

(also i know that my personal metrics for what “rich” is don’t line up with actual figures, but i have been struggling financially for long enough that i see any number over 60k and my mouth starts watering, so sorry if i come off as an asshole, it’s because i have deep class antagonism even toward people who arent making that much money in the grand scheme of things; in fact, this probably explains much of my crabby demeanor on here in general.

i do apologize. hopefully this will get better when i get a better job in the next few years, fingers crossed)

I am blissfully unaware of most of what appears in the NYer, but I honestly don’t give a fuck what any rich white person has to say about partying or raving. At least she isn’t trying to do theory like that abysmal Wark book from a few years back, which was astonishingly embarrassing to read.

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

respect to that. thinking about it, yeah, i guess i do give a fuck what traumatized rich white people have to say about partying or raving. i'm a white trans woman without much in the way of social skills or life experience living in a notoriously white city, and a lot of my social circle is navigating parties and trying to make sense out of myself and my world while surrounded by other white trans women with trauma who do a lot of drugs and partying. i read wark critically, but i do read her. all my life people have treated me like a Clever White Boy. god, if i could've been the Clever White Boy they wanted me to be. and the only thing i failed at was "boy", so now i've got clever, though not as clever as i was taught to _think_ i was... or at least not clever in the _ways_ i was taught to think of myself as clever... and "white", which exists, which constantly affects me and the people around me, whether i will it or not, and which isn't something i feel like i can meaningfully speak about. for good or bad, the writing of people like wark does inform how i try to make myself socially intelligible.

I mean, I don’t hold Wark’s prior body of work against her, fwiw, and even like a bit of it— but that book was really horrible, just glaringly bad in its dilettantism and erasure.

I think that's the heart of the matter: if it was good then we might not even consider the part that wealth had to play in sustaining the writer.

I think that's the heart of the matter: if it was good then we might not even consider the part that wealth had to play in sustaining the writer.

― xyzzzz__

i think for me that is the heart of the matter! i haven't read the work in question by wark, so i guess my main consideration is witt - the new yorker excerpt and that interview. like, is witt's writing bad writing on a _moral level_. like, does she have an essential duty as a writer that she's failing to fulfill. table, that's kind of what i hear in what you're saying about witt's writing on dance music and drugs. if that is what you're saying, i accept that!

and at the same time i accept that as true, i also believe that in a different sense, her writing is _good_ on a moral level. i say that because i'm a woman and an abuse victim, and witt is a woman and an abuse victim writing about her experience as a woman and an abuse victim. none of that excuses or mitigates any ways in which her writing fails. i think her writing is _worthy_ of publication, though. i'm glad i had the opportunity to read it.

there are some people who... i think it's bad that they have a public voice. that they get paid to say the stuff they do. matt walsh, for instance. and i'd differentiate that from wark and witt. when they do erasure, it's important for that to be addressed. and i still think it's good that they can have careers as writers. i don't think that should be at the expense of other people's careers as writers, people who can write about the things they write about without being _bad_. but even if witt's writing is bad, even if she's a _bad writer_, i think it's good that she can make a living as a writer. because to me, she's also a good writer.

fwiw you can get a good sense of new yorker salaries at their jobs page https://www.newyorker.com/about/careers

seems like high five figures to low six figures is the norm

What a good Wark book to start with?

What a good Wark book to start with?

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

honestly i just know her as a journalist

her wikipedia article says this:

Both these studies grew out of Wark's experience as a public intellectual who participated in public controversies, mainly through her newspaper column in The Australian, a leading national daily. She developed an approach based on participant observation, but adapted to the media sphere.

i'm deeply skeptical of the figure of the "public intellectual". i mean nowadays that's called "discourse". she does "discourse". she was one of those, you know, wired magazine people in the '90s. i actually wouldn't defend any of her work. i more defend her as a person. she's a 61-year-old trans woman who transitioned later in life, just a little before i did. i mean me as a trans woman, a lot of the role models i have are shitty role models, in a lot of ways. being trans _is_ diy... i don't know if i mentioned it or if i took it out, but the piece of hers that had the most impact on me is her review of grace lavery's _please, miss_, where wark talks about autodidacticism as a "trans fetish". i think wark, for better or worse, does sort of embody the trans autodidact, someone who makes it up as she goes along despite having shitty role models. that one sentence of hers, it also resonates with me because it acknowledges that fetishism _does_ play a role in transness, just not the one people think it does, not in the way people think it does.

mostly, though, if you look at trans people, we're fucked up people in a lot of ways, fucked up people who do fucked up shit. i mean elagabalus is a trans role model but she was also a genuinely awful emperor, perhaps genuinely The Worst Emperor. reed erickson, a crucially important figure in trans history, was a literal fucking cult leader. trans people's work, _particularly_ white trans people's work, is just filled with really bad takes. julia serano's "whipping girl" is really influential on me, was really influential on a lot of trans people, but she _doesn't_ have a humanities background, she's a biologist, and the limitations of that are _very apparent_ in her work. whipping girl has a lot of bad takes. "whipping girl" erases non-binary identities, erases gender non-conformity out of the constructed category of "trans". i think that's a problem. i don't think that's an excusable problem, and at the same time i _do_ think whipping girl is worth reading, worth reading critically. on the other side of the equation, kate bornstein, her writing on gender treats non-binary identity like it's _better_ than "binary transness". i think that's bad too, and i still think her work is important.

to me, i think the best writer, the writer who i think has had the most positive influence on me, is someone like jules gill-peterson. i would recommend _a short history of trans misogyny_. i think it's best and least, uh, _problematic_ book on transfem theory i've read. it was also published this year, haha. _histories of the transgender child_ was published in '18, and i didn't hear about it, and the last time i tried to read it it wasn't intelligible to me. _a short history of trans misogyny_ is an academic book and as such it was hard for me to read, since i don't have an academic background, but it was worth it.

having said that, i mean, i don't think the entire weight of intersectional transness _should_ fall on people like gill-peterson. as a white trans person, i have tried to learn from gill-peterson, have tried to take on experiences outside the specific area of "trans woman". at the same time, "trans woman" is a culturally coherent and meaningful identifier, an identifier that carries with it a unique experience of marginalization, and so yes, speaking as a trans woman, the writing of other people who also describe themselves that way, belong to that group, has a unique importance to me.

unfortunately the way that it's often used, the shit that trans women, particularly white trans women, sometimes talk, what happens is that Discourse happens, systemically i think it's encouraged for marginalized groups to be put in situations where we're competing with each other. and i fucking hate that. for me, not doing that is hard fucking work. sometimes my interests as a member of a marginalized group _do_ conflict with the interests of people who are marginalized in different ways from me. those conflicts cause a _lot of trouble_.

the thing that vexes me the most, the thing that causes me the most trouble, is that Discourse often involves conflict between transfems and transmascs. this is on my mind because i was just playing this interactive fiction game, LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST ... by the way i'm only through act II but i'd recommend playing that game more than i'd recommend reading mckenzie wark. if you're ok with absolutely filthy writing with a transmasc protag. because, i mean, to really understand trans people, i feel like it helps a lot if to be willing and able engage with the absolute filthiest, kinkiest shit in a totally non-judgemental way. (it's even better if you engage with it and say "well shit this is super hot"). that loops back to wark because i do know that wark published her correspondence with kathy acker in 2015 as _i'm very into you_, and apparently there is a lot of sexual content in those letters. and personally LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST interests me more than those letters.

damn i wish i could deconstruct the walls of discourse between transmascs and transfems do the way valentine and artemis do. by which i mean laughing at how stupid it is and then doing kinky shit to each other. but instead, i start hanging around transmascs and i get super insecure, i get hung up on the stupid shit some transfems say and the stupid shit some transmascs say and gah.

but they're going to say stupid fucking shit. like it's an important part of it, trans people say stupid fucking shit sometimes and it doesn't invalidate the stuff we say that isn't stupid fucking shit. it's just, like. hard work. i don't know what i'm doing, most of us, i get the sense, don't really know what we're doing here.

so tl;dr, don't read wark, read jules gill-peterson's _a short history of trans misogyny_ and/or play the interactive fiction game LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST and recognize that a lot of us fuck up and we're trying not to.

fwiw you can get a good sense of new yorker salaries at their jobs page https://www.newyorker.com/about/careers

seems like high five figures to low six figures is the norm

― 龜, Tuesday, September 24, 2024 9:47 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

none of these are staff writer positions though

big dawg dunno what to tell you https://i.postimg.cc/tJdGXPgH/shrug2.gif

looks promising (is there a better thread?)

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/say-nothing-fx-first-look-awards-insider

loved the book

IN SOLIDARITY NEWS: 100 of our 101 New Yorker union members unanimously voted YES (one abstained) to authorize a strike should the bargaining committee deem it necessary

— “holden” “seidlitz” (@jock__derrida) October 3, 2024

Who was the one

This guy

https://newyorkerstateofmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/5179758-2011_02_14.jpg

no resistance libbo but if anyone is looking for something to maybe pull themselves out of post-election despair, i enjoyed reading alexei navalny's prison diaries that were published earlier this month. there is a lot in there about why people should continue to summon the energy to stand up to despotic leaders, if that's your bag today, but his writing on the purpose and methods of essentially choosing happiness even in the face of grave darkness (and he faced some of the gravest) really rang a chord w/ me, for reasons not related to politics, but today kinda works for those purposes too

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/alexei-navalny-patriot-memoir

the greg jackson short story this week strongly was reminding me of something that i couldnt place… until i did… the beginning of novel explosives by jim gauer.. very similar conceit of a man w/o memories trying to piece things together in a hotel / isolated setting

https::/twitter.com/parul_sehgal/status/1857464284462109039?s=46&t=XlsbhgknQH65_CH00_uPqw

this is a bummer for me — she’s probably my favorite popular literary critic

I am afraid to ask about this new Ideas Franchise

what’s this in reference to?

the thing that Sehgal is returning to the NYT for

The world does not need another Aspen Ideas festival. It does not need even need the one Aspen Ideas festival

it's not a festival. it's just the name of a weekly feature in the paper: https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/ideas

idk why they call it a "franchise."

Once again marveling at the fact that Calvin Tomkins is still publishing reported features in the magazine. (The latest is a profile of artist Rashid Johnson in the Dec. 16 issue.) He has been on staff since 1960 and turns 99 tomorrow.

yep everytime i see his byline im awed

I read the Rachel Aviv article about Alice Munro and her daughter’s sexual abuse. Phew. Great story, told with clarity and sensitivity. It can’t really answer its most urgent underlying questions, because it sees that there aren’t good answers to them, only bad ones, partial ones — and in a way, that becomes the answer. The first way to understand HOW this happened is to accept that it DID. (Which of course could be an insight from one of Munro’s own stories.)

I skipped it because, while I like aviv's work, I'm unfamiliar with munro's. silly reason and https://buttondown.com/lastweeksnewyorker/archive/last-weeks-new-yorker-review-december-30-january-6/ makes a good case that it's worth reading regardless.