This is basically just American Psycho transliterated into modern language
Yeah I was gonna say, someone fed Brett Easton Ellis and Joyce through an LLM salted with groyper speak from /b/
Man no one is going to know what the fuck we're talking about in 100 years. : |
I mean this actually pretty good lol, it captures what it's going for perfectly while being genuinely evocative
It's slurry of highly topical Twitter references that will be as inscrutable as Linear A script in like 5 years
I prefer my art to not be disposable fash garbage that has extremely limited currency
Like 90% of what gets called literature and art is exactly that: a disjointed pile of references that are intentionally inscrutable to anyone not familiar with whatever niche thing the author was. Those references being to terminally online cultural signifiers and memes instead of to the cultural and historical curriculum that an educated person is expected to have studied in school doesn't change that.
If this were just a shitpost mocking that sort of overly referential prose it would be fantastic, but reading a bit more about it it sounds like it was part of an earnest attempt at creating high art, that it's trying to be like that insufferable prose, not mock it. It also sounds like the rest of it is run through with reactionary undercurrents, so in that light the references to terminally online right wing nonsense come across as less a scathing mockery of them and more just as lighthearted irony.
Like 90% of what gets called literature and art is exactly that: a disjointed pile of references that are intentionally inscrutable to anyone not familiar with whatever niche thing the author was.
What the hell kind of literature have you been reading
Every time something like this filters out of the weird high art literature scene it's something like this, and most of what I remember from English in high school and college was the same. Anything that's "prestigious" literature seems to be insufferable dreck built from allegory and references that make modestly educated journalists feel like smart little lads when they get the reference. I hate it so much and I'm saying this as exactly the sort of educated-person-who-reads-too-much it's supposed to appeal to.
Like I genuinely prefer absolute garbage to anything the New York Times would praise.
Sure nyt garbage is trash but that won't this trash in the post is good though. This is like one page. If this is way its gonna convey whatever for a book length, then good luck reading that. I can't.
Like this is literally on those wattpad incest script level writing. Not to mention the whole creepy infantlizing.
I don't care for prestigious books or whatever. Not every book is doing references every sentence.
Sure nyt garbage is trash but that won't this trash in the post is good though.
Someone else linked a NYT article that while stopping short of being a glowing review of the book in question did praise the worst things about it.
I kinda really like
He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness.
its funny
tbh I don't hate it as much as the first time I read it. Like I understand where she's going with it. and idk, this is like one page, maybe things get better. My main issue is that it reads like if you ran the prompt "Beat generation but gen z" through an AI model trained exclusively on fascist blue check tweets. Like if you don't have a phD in terminally online right-wing culture, you'd have to look up every other word and the sense in which it is used. I get that it's trying to use modern lingo, but it's just doing way too much, it's as if she crammed every sort of youth internet culture signifier she could think of into one page. I had to read this one page multiple times to see that no she actually is writing a story here and it's not just some nonsense Burroughs-esque cut-up novel made up entirely of new right dogwhistles and the most obscure gen z slang.
It's far from the worst thing I've ever read, but as a former Beat worshipper I wrote far better free associative wannabe Beat prose when I was in high school. I can't believe something like this got published, it needs a lot of work.
I think you have to be extremely online in specific ways for it to be clear and evocative.
Like the first line, I'm not sure what giving knight errant means. He looks like the kind of guy who's on a quest? Maybe with plate armor? Also organ-meat eater, so he looks like Liver King? Fuck that strongly contradicts my previous impression, which is impressive because that was already kind of vague.
Then we move onto he's like a byronic hero. This is another archetype that contradicts the Liver King heavily, what with him being an exuberant grifter and the byronic hero being a brooding but deep emo guy and then finally he's giving Haplogroup R1b, which I assume is some skull measuring Nazi adjacent nonsense.
EDIT: I still hate it but it kinda reminds me of something Jenna K Moran (who rules) would right if she were an extremely online right wing teenager, so I feel weirder about hating it
then finally he's giving Haplogroup R1b, which I assume is some skull measuring Nazi adjacent nonsense.
IYKYK
It’s interesting how more modern writers use much shorter sentences in their paragraphs. I’ve been reading novels from the early 1900’s and they have some of the longest run-on sentences I’ve ever seen
Adam Smith in the beginning of Wealth of Nations has looooooong sentences with tons of commas. I added the breaks, this is actually one paragraph:
Among the savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to work is more or less employed in useful labour, and endeavours to provide, as well as he can, the necessaries and conveniencies of life, for himself, and such of his family or tribe as are either too old, or too young, or too infirm, to go a-hunting and fishing.
Such nations, however, are so miserably poor, that, from mere want, they are frequently reduced, or at least think themselves reduced, to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts.
Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do not labour at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times, more labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied; and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.
"The savage societies are sometimes reduced by shortage to leaving people to die, unlike our enlightened land of plenty where leaving people to die is standard procedure"
Run on sentences area awesome. For twelve years my teachers told me not to use them but I defied them all and continue to string together sentences with the wrong uhh... mark thingies to this day!
I don't think there's any legal system in the world where "no normal human being would ever guess that's against the law and I had no idea" is a defense.
Reading fucking Dostoevsky and there are almost as many subordinate clauses per sentence as there are nicknames for the characters.
I hate long sentences; they make me angry... were I to purge one group of people in my socialist utopia, it would be those pretentious, self-appointed guardians of whatever outdated "style book" first instilled into the eager mind of an innocent child the notion that communicating in emojis (noble word! ) was unacceptable, and who like the Old Testament serpent feed to their sycophantic followers the old lie -- what lie, you ask; well, the lie that if you but speak intelligently, you will be as gods, that if you eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Case Endings and Suburdinate Clauses, you shall know both good and evil, and your writing will be immortal; that if you stop using verbalizations like "lmao" and "skibidi" and "many such cases," people will respect you and love you and worship you all your days, for you now see things sub specie aeternitatis (more like sub specie LOL); and that generally, you have performed a sort of discipline for the mind analagous to cleansing the body in a shower-bath, which latter is obviously a bourgeoise and counter-revolutionary act. I hate tankies so fucking much.
There was some book I had to read over the summer in preparation for AP English my senior year of high school, and it was all just page length stacks of nested clauses where it would just stop in the middle of a sentence, elaborate on some aspect of it, interrupt to elaborate - at least once, usually more - some more, then continue to keep doing this out to an absurd depth, only to meander back to it most of a page later and then either finish it or start another pile of nested clauses. Like look at how I structured that sentence and imagine something ten times worse, and then imagine it happening at least once in every single paragraph and at least once per page.
Also the story was awful in its own right, terrible prose aside. All I can remember of the plot was that the POV character was a dumbass and killed someone by being a dumbass and it all hinged entirely on inscrutable 19th century superstitious sensibilities.
At the end of the year I gave the book to a junior in one of my classes who was going to take AP English the next year and who had to read that same story over the summer.
Literally how I write. The run on sentence is my kingdom and each semicolon and parentheses a province.
Did it have the tiny font too? That’s another thing about those older books is how small the font is.
The book itself was a modern reprint, and one of the larger paperback sizes - maybe 10" or so, whatever the specific standard size around that is - so the font wasn't particularly small so much as there was a lot on each page. I got it at a used bookstore, and IIRC what I managed to find specifically was an anthological collection of the author's work which happened to include the novella I actually needed to read.
I think a part of it is the homogenisation of the industry. People tend to write novels that publishers want to publish, and a part of that involves doing what is thought to make people more likely to read, like starting off with a hook and shorter, more direct sentences. A novel is a product first and foremost these days, not something someone writes solely as a creative endeavor.
I've been reading Tanith Lee books recently and really enjoying them, and read that her career was pretty emblematic of this.
She wrote weird fiction. Fantasy, scifi, horror, thrillers, etc. She hopped from genre to genre and would write books that had a very ambiguous genre (if a story is scary and has the story beats of a horror novel but it takes place in a traditional sword and sorcery setting is it horror or fantasy? Or both? I think Tanith Lee found this question very tedious.). In the 70s and 80s she was writing an absurd number of books and getting them published, but in the 90s paper became much more expensive and as this reduced the profit margins on books and increased number of copies sold to be profitable she started to get more and more pushed out of traditional publishing.
Nobody wanted to publish a ton from an author who wouldn't stay in one lane to build a dedicated fanbase of "fantasy fans" or "horror readers" and they definitely didn't want to risk selling a fantasy novel that wasn't clearly a fantasy novel. She got a bit published during this time but mostly her rejected manuscripts just piled up. It's not even that her books hadn't been profitable, they're just didn't fit into the neat categories that publishers now wanted. Blacklisted due to falling just outside of risk management guidelines for writing books that people would just call "dark fantasy" now probably.
Idk why this is in the dunk tank. This is genuinely good writing and very funny.
it's built on like 20 layers of in-jokes and is completely inscrutable to anyone who hasn't spent their entire lives in the deepest corners of internet culture, it's full of new right dogwhistles, and it sounds like a gen z parody of 60s beatnik jazz writing by an AI trained exclusively on fascist blue check tweets. Tbh it's nowhere near the worst thing ever been put to paper but I don't think this should exist as a published book.
it's built on like 20 layers of in-jokes and is completely inscrutable to anyone who hasn't spent their entire lives in the deepest corners of internet culture
... that's how all culture works. You're not going to get most of the in-jokes and cultural references of some other country's culture immediately because you didn't grow up in it. Doesn't mean it's bad.
I keep telling people the bible is hilarious but all the dick jokes don't translate out of Aramaic!
but this isn't trying to talk to someone in another culture, this is a literary work. The writing is clunky due to the excessive memespeak and every sentence mostly just serves as an amassing of a bunch of obscure internet references, most of which do nearly nothing for the story and in many cases actually obscure the meaning of what she's trying to say. There's an idea here but it's not pulled off well.
"My First Book" by Honor Levy. Found it due to my sick fascination with Dimes Square.
In June 2024, she appeared on the podcast Red Scare, whose hosts, Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, are closely affiliated with Dimes Square.
Lol
Ah yes, I remember when this was making the rounds due to the New York Times' mission to profile every single loser fail child of this scene
Dimes Square
Link for the curious: https://archive.ph/mFH0d
from that article:
In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort. She deals individual cards rather than handles an entire deck. Her stories are vignettes, and the observations whoosh past your ears: “We wouldn’t be collectivizing the Adderall sector”; on drugs, “I could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs”;
who the fuck is this person. They suck.
If they could have, they would have blushed
even our chatGPT twitterslop has wokeness in it now
This isn't satire that managed to get by the publishers. It just fucking sucks. Stop pretending it doesn't.
This is hilarious! I love it unironically, though if the whole book is like that I'd have to read it in parts. YouTube poops are usually very short for good reason
Why would i, other pyramid schemes are at least more exciting.
Catholicism is honestly a pretty mid religion, as far as the Abrahamics go
this is satire right
that's what i thought too
