sheila heti and the novel 'how should a person be?'

New story:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/26/sheila-heti-two-families-new-short-story

j did you finish i. this ii. knausgaard??

i. no
ii. no

i should finish the heti soon tho, it's hella breezy

plan to read novels to embiggen my spirit fell by the wayside due to spirit-crushing life : (

ㅠㅠ

indeed, just like that

that definitely gathers up a bunch of culturally-adjacent and contemporary attitudes, sensibilities, lifestyle practices, whatever, that have a feel of something suspect running through them. like, the spiritualized self-care wing of lifehackism; affiliated with morning-pages creativity stimulation exercise, the simplification movement, yoga, whatever. the ickiness of focusing so intently on making your life beautiful.

I haven't tried to read Heti yet but I like this post a lot. I suspect that some of the ickiness of it comes from the fact that behind each of these things is a man ready to sell you something.

hmm, yes. maybe that's why her own literary presentation engaging with so much of this has that artworldish… nonchalance about it, the kind you get where clearly everyone is swimming in money and the circulation of power and status and fashion games and it's all so hollow dahlink but of course that's just the way it is etc - i.e. any artworld phenomenon that's not accompanied by a (performance of a) really stringent critical attitude (not saying that this necessarily amounts to anything anyway) about the material conditions of its own existence or the material conditions of its milieu.

since her own performance has a kind of self-promotional, self-selling (because self-styling) quality to it, it can't help but imply an attitude, not an endorsement but kind of a non-non-endorsement, of the whole reigning idea of men being ready to sell you things. 'ok here i'll sell you something too'.

Well, let's say it's not a matter of anti-personality, but anti-review. So on Goodreads, if it turned out that every 1 star reviewer gave 5 stars to some other author, and vice-versa. The idea reduces personality to metrics and that's wrong. But if this theory were correct, how badly would you want to meet your anti-author?

Not badly.

Really?

I don't really feel like meeting people these days.

From this interview: http://www.0s-1s.com/thick-skin-i

just read the folded clock by heidi julavits and it kinda reminded me of this? maybe? altho i liked the folded clock WAY more

I met her yesterday! She visited my university to do a reading and a few of us got to have coffee with her beforehand. I brought up an essay she wrote about Annie years ago, which amused her--she mentioned that her father was a big fan of that piece. She read from her upcoming project (set to be published early next year) in which she arranges her diaries alphabetically by sentence. It was all very cool.