boring books and the people who write them (a response to neo-passéism, which he will never read, thank god)
weather: 🌤️ tropical storm mario approacheth
critters: black phoebes
TIL substack has an embedded twitter clone. i guess one cannot entomb oneself in one's ouroboral metacognition without a microblog where one may type one's smaller thoughts for the judgment of one's public.
neo-passéism is usually interesting even when i don't know what the fuck he's talking about. i share his and other internet dudes' feelings that most current year literature is boring. barring reactionary stances (i am not a reactionary in any sense other than the butlerian), i think we would broadly agree on many of the reasons for this: deprioritization of literature in the culture, homogenization of style and technique, dominance of autofiction and hesitance to invent or imagine, pseudo-authenticity, rent-seeking publishers demanding identity tokens but still only publishing writers who are already rich.
i would add that the dominance of NYC is also a problem, but that's a vibes-based stimulant-fueled manifesto for another day.
the other day mr. passéism, um, substeeted:
Amazingly good and moral and woke people with super nifty consumption choices aren’t going to produce interesting literature.
And this has nothing to do with concrete political stances of the civic/economic kind.
It has to do with what kind of person you are. And if you can’t work this out, you’re going to fall even further behind.
No one whose primary life experience consists of attending school and consuming corporate media products is going to produce books that anyone will care about in the future. If you graduated school and then went back to school so you could become a teacher, all the while having “great” taste in music, film, “fandoms,” etc…then you are a dully doddering dinosaur and you need to look in the mirror. . . .
By all means, go to your therapy and deal with your trauma and share the right things on Bluesky. Write thinkpieces and attend events. Puff yourself up as an authority. It’ll still work, for a while.
But really, there’s nothing at all to what you’re doing, and we can all see through it.
yes, sure, neurotically conformist MSNBC progressives write boring books because they have socially-induced cancellation OCD, and their john green ben lerner earnestness and therapyspeak are too painful for the viciously sensitive hearts of gen Z book bros. but i don't think these anti-establishment guys are giving other types enough credit for boring writing.
a tour in no particular order:
aspiring screenwriter who's never sold a script and has had to settle for writing extremely bad thrillers
poet who started doing a beats thing after a traumatic life experience and now cannot stop
ivory tower university alumnus who will accuse you of bourgeois condescension if you suggest the american working class mostly doesn't know or give a shit about leftist theory
rightoid 'thinker' who has never had an original insight and can barely form a sentence, but still makes bank advocating for a return to divine-right feudalism
gray eminence whose entire reason for being died with the berlin wall--or, if slightly younger, the war on terror
dude from the 00s skeptic community writing books that appeal to a predictable cross-section of angel investors, social-climbing engineers, and unfuckable nerds
elderly academic who's been irrelevant for decades trying to go out on a high note but going out confusing and maudlin instead
finally, a male novelist! still only writes about online and bad sex and feelings of emptiness
extremely online dimes square WASP whose primary life experience consists of attending school and consuming corporate media products, but, like, ironically
what do all these people have in common? rich dads. that's it. i'm sorry.