Till I finally found a way to turn it off, my phone decided to give me its own version o’ Mozilla’s beloved Pocket with its own mountain o’ trash clickbait & 1 website whose idiotic titles kept catching my eye was a website called “Literature Hub”, so let’s take a look @ its greatest hit:
It’s been months since I’ve liked anything I’ve made, or since I’ve felt much pleasure in making it.
Wow, nobody else in the universe has felt this way. It’s too bad there’s not a million cliché advice ’bout it. Better make your own, too.
Obviously, it can’t be that they’ve managed to grow a li’l bit o’ better awareness o’ literature & have come to realize that what they’ve been writing sucked & obviously “study literature, specially literature I’m not familiar with, including critiques & commentary ’bout other literature, ’cause I take writing seriously & want to be always improving” isn’t the solution, but moping round hoping for that right sparkle to strike you is.
In July, a friend of mine died, and his widow asked if I would take his dog. Although I’d known this dog for many years to be a calm, assured, stately fellow, our beginning in California was proving rocky. He whined in the doorways, keened into the empty air, paced through the nights. I could find no cause of his discomfort. I reached out to a writer friend, a woman who knew about dogs, wrote about dogs, had taken in dogs of all kinds her whole life. I needed help.
If this is how you write, I can definitely see both why you haven’t liked anything you’ve written or why you don’t derive pleasure from it, since this is a terrible way to start a novel. Love how they just casually mention their friend dying & then goes on to, “anyway, let’s talk ’bout his dog, the real star o’ the story”.
To clarify: when I say “writer friend,” what I really mean is “writer in whose workshop I was a student at a conference exactly once and who, for whatever reason, took a bit more of an interest in my work than was strictly required by her position, and who now, on very slim occasion, emails me, and who I, on very slim occasion, email as well.” She is advanced and successful, has published many excellent books and won prizes for them, makes her living writing, teaching, and lecturing.
So by “friend”, you mean “someone way out o’ my league”.
She is what I’ll call here a Made Writer…
Ah, now I understand: by “friend” you mean “business associate”, & by “business associate” you mean you’re part o’ some mafia o’ writers. ¿Why aren’t you writing ’bout that? That would be far mo’ interesting.
…and I call her a friend too not because we’re friends exactly, but because I was writing to ask her about my life, and about my dog. We were speaking of human things, not of writerly things.
¿You ask her ’bout your life & your dog? ¿Why would she know mo’ ’bout it than you?
All right, I’ll quit boring you with this banal tripe. You want to get to the meat o’ this article. Here you go:
I opened the file, twitchy with that particular thrill of finding oneself proximal to the famous; a video of Michael Ondaatje’s dog!
Cool, I guess…
We get interrupted by this giant-ass red text that’s super meaningful:
There is a kind of freedom in divorcing the maker from what is made.
This is clearly just the writer o’ this article trying to justify continuing to listen to R. Kelly.
Anyway, back to our feature presentation:
Of course, I thought, this is Michael Ondaatje’s dog, by which I meant, of course Michael Ondaatje, brilliant writer, would have a brilliant dog. And it might be true that Michael Ondaatje does in fact have a dog with these (or other) particular talents, but what I’d come to understand shortly (after paging through the exchange a second time) is that nothing actually suggested this was Ondaatje’s dog. Sure, he sent the video, but that was all. I’d made the leap of ownership on my own. I’d equated Michael Ondaatje’s singularity and success in writing with Michael Ondaatje’s singularity and success in dogs, which is to say, singularity in life, in self. He was his writing, and his writing was him.
99% o’ you readers are probably thinking, { ¿Who the hell is Michael Ondaatje? }. I actually read 1 o’ his books in high school — tho I don’t remember much ’bout it other than that he had that trite habit o’ trying to make e’ery bowel movement into a deep metaphor for life, which I think the writer o’ this article is trying to do with fucking dogs. What I do remember is my teacher introducing Ondaatje as the man who wrote a book that inspired a movie that became a part o’ a Seinfeld joke. It must be so lonely for Michael Ondaatje @ the top.
Before we continue, and to clarify: I am not a Made Writer.
That means Ondaatje can kill them & there’s nothing they can do ’bout it — real greaseball shit.
I am, at best, a writer in the middle-beginning of her career, a writer who finds herself in the anxious, hand-wringing early-success-place of having seen some of her work recognized, but not yet knowing what that will mean.
Anyone who e’er considers themselves “in the middle-beginning of their career” & isn’t in the middle-beginning o’ their life isn’t going to do well, since great artists always strive for improvement, regardless o’ how ol’ they are — e’en “Made Writers”, @ the risk o’ finding Brandon Sanderson’s head in my bed next morn.
After piddling away in obscurity for a decade and earning an MFA, and after seeing two or three publications during that decade in journals that either do not exist anymore or have little to no footing in the literary world, my career has accelerated. I was granted a scholarship to a high-profile conference, and then another; I was awarded a residency, and landed a story at a lit mag you would recognize, and then another, and another.
“& nowhere in any o’ that time did I write a single sentence o’ decent prose. ¡The system works!”.
As a result of some of this, I started to get emails from agents, and although no one who’s read it thinks my manuscript is a book, it’s become clear to me that if there is a path to having a book, I am on it, or one iteration of it, or anyway I am Doing the Writer Thing.
Yes, I guess you could describe panically typing word after word without any concern for whether or not they combine into coherent sentences some vague sort o’ uppercase “Writer Thing”. Personally, I would try writing an actual book rather than some vague Schrödinger’s Book Manuscript. Maybe they’re referring to the Marxian belief that labor’s social value can only be understood @ the marketplace. “Nope, sorry: it’s a mud pie”.
That I feel this way only by the measures of these externalities is, of course, and like Ondaatje’s dog, part of the problem.
Also, it would help if you stop getting distracted by niche-famous authors’ dogs.
After a brief and thrilling few months in which my productivity seemed to flourish with all this newfound external support, I’ve come to hate this part of my career.
¿What part? ¿The actual fucking writing?
I am not writing as much, and what I do write is by any measure flatter, more predictable, and emotionally more wretched to come by. I have stopped reading almost entirely (the last book I read was The Beet Queen, and it took me four months to finish it). I watch endless hours of television, a lot of which I’ve seen several times already. I turn my mind off whenever possible, which is one of the swiftest ways I know to poison any hope of meaningful work.
There’s this weird popular phenomenon ’mong people my age & younger to indulge in what I will now call “pitybrag”, which is where they essentially brag ’bout how useless they are. As someone who has this natural Darwinian avoidance to flaunting my failures ’less I can make it funny — & if this is an attempt @ comedy, well, it’s ’bout on the same level as a mentally-insane blog writer — I don’t understand why someone would want to do this, just like how I don’t understand the appeal o’ going on reality TV shows or Jerry Springer.
I do this for a reason, of course. That reason is: the experience of being in my own mind is uncomfortable.
¡Well, then quit fooling round in there & get back to your writing desk & get writing!
My mind is, when allowed to rest, at odds with itself. Languishing in it is the last thing I want to do.
The tragedy in all this is that if this writer were born a bit earlier they could’ve thrived as a writer for nu-metal artists like Papa Roach.
I am sure this reality comes from many places, and that some of those are personal to me, but I recently had a conversation with another writer —
We discussed everything: the pressures of the externality, how hard it was to resist the value system of prestige that permeates the literary world, how much it seemed that what mattered in that world (our world?) was not the quality of the work as we understood it, but the determination of the value of that work as offered by external sources.
They’re definitely talking ’bout the Marxian conflict ’tween labor value & use value as expressed thru exchange value.
Mo’ big-ass red text:
The reality of being an artist means, first, that one endeavors to express authenticity; the seed of that authenticity definitionally begins in a private place.
Worst economic theory e’er. ( Well, maybe not as bad as Milton Fucking Friedman’s “F-twist” ). Shigeru Miyamoto doesn’t express authenticity when he has Italian plumbers growing big & jumping on giant turtles — & if your definition leads to the conclusion that Super Mario Bros. isn’t great art, then it’s already falsified itself. & the last part seems to imply that “authenticity” is insularism, when one could argue that obsessing o’er one’s own “deepness” is, in fact, a very artificial phenomenon o’ modern western societies & much less authentic than humanity’s natural proclivity toward social interaction.
*
My favorite line from Ulysses.
I don’t think this pattern—in which the complex, interested, curious self creates interesting writing, which in turn garners recognition, which in turn buries the once-curious mind in a value system that hinders the creation of interesting writing—I do not think this is limited to the beginning-middle writer.
Personally, I don’t think it means anything ’cause it’s a jumble o’ superlatives. It sounds like they’re saying, “I’m such a genius, but I write shit. ¿Where is the synthesis to this dialectical conflict?”.
In fact, at that same conference where I met my despondent kindred writer friend, I saw it in a Made Writer as well. He was a faculty member at the conference, had seen enormous success with his first book, and was working toward a second. If my last few years feel fast to me, I cannot imagine what his trajectory felt like to him, in which he rocketed from a non-writing life to national acclaim in a few short years.
¡Yes! ¡Anonymous faculty member at the conference! ¡My favorite rock star writer! I loved his most recent book, .
A lot has been written about art and madness.
A lot better stuff, to be quite frank.
The general theory proposes a link between the predilection of a mind to create—art, music, writing, whatever—and the predilection of that same mind toward collapse.
No, the general theory proposes that laissez-faire economic policies can’t sustain full employment. ¿Did you e’en read Keynes?
To my read, the reality of being an artist means, first, that one endeavors to express authenticity; the seed of that authenticity definitionally begins in a private place.
God damn it, it’s that bad economic theory ’gain.
Which is why I started writing this essay in the first place.
¿To babble on ’bout trite philosophical musings?
I am afraid that, having stepped into the public eye (even a little, at 34), I won’t ever escape my current arrest.
I can assure you that nobody cares ’bout you, much less the police, who have mo’ important people to arrest, like Michael Ondaatje & his dog, who recently made a local book store that moved his latest book from the front window in favor o’ “yet ’nother fucking Stephen King doorstopper” have a “surprise fire” in relataliation ( he did give them a “fair warning” ). This is like that joke where some office drone draws a picture for slide #37 in some powerpoint presentation & 1 coworker mildly praises it & then the office drone goes round in shades offering autographs for their “masterpiece” to the bemusement o’ their coworkers.
Fears are not reality. I know this. Or, I repeat it to myself in the effort that it might become something I know.
This makes no fucking sense. You can’t make a statement & then claim you don’t know that statement after you just stated it — ’less Ondaatje’s genius dog snuck in & wrote that 1st sentence.
If there is a solution to this—to my assumption that Michael Ondaatje’s writerly genius extends to his dog —
It’s to stop smoking a whole bowl o’ Presidential Kush on a Saturday afternoon.
to my beginning-middle friend’s self-loathing
I thought you were the “beginning-middle” writer.
to the Made Writer’s struggle with his second book
How ’bout he struggles to get a name for himself & any o’ his books.
I think it has to lie somewhere adjacent to the New Critical view of literary criticism.
¡What a twist! ¡This was ’bout some outdated theory o’ literature this whole time! ¡Fooled you fuckers! They might as well have legitimately brought up a fucking Marxian or Keynesian theory & it would’ve made as much sense.
That there is a kind of freedom in divorcing the maker from what is made.
Shit, that’s what this line is ’bout. I’m reading “Sirens” from Ulysses.
At yet another literary conference, at which I met yet another Made Writer (yes, probably I should just take a break from these) —
Maybe you should spend mo’ time sitting your ass down & writing or studying writing ( probably more o’ the latter ). That’s what helps me write — less talking to idiots with no talent & mo’ writing so I can actually hone my own. It’s no guarantee — I mean look @ this blog post — but it’s better than any alternatives.
I heard the only piece of advice that I’ve found practical in these struggles of the last year.
Blood scrawled on the wall: “¡Practice, you idiot!”.
I was sitting with this writer in a one-on-one meeting, on Zoom
Wait, ¿You were sitting next to them but talking to them on Zoom? That’s some Boomer’s joke o’ a millennial.
She was an older writer, had come up decades ago, and told me that she had, certainly, but also that in some ways, it was just easier back then: no internet, no social media.
Actually, the internet is incredibly useful if you don’t waste your time reading idiotic nonsense from social media ( which… I’m doing right now, admittedly ). T. S. Eliot & James Joyce could’ve written all those foreign language parts in a snap with Google TranslateTM. ( Rock o’er London, rock o’er Chicago; Google Translate: Please Translate, you bastard ). Yes, it would’ve been inaccurate… but it’s an open secret that many o’ genius Eliot & Joyce’s translations were inaccurate — specially their gaijin attempt @ Japanese.
I can’t believe how long this article is going. ¿How does it end?
My new dog is doing much better now, thanks in no small part to the emails of the Made Writer. He no longer keens at the doorways, although he does sometimes seem to look around for something that is not there. This is a product of his circumstance, I think, a discord between a life he knew before and the life he knows now. It is an understandable madness.
Nope, sorry: tho this be madness, there’s no method in’t.
So, I just read o’er 2,000 words — tho it felt like 8,000 — o’ some rando meander thru several mixed metaphors ’bout their obsession with being a writer & nowhere do they talk ’bout anything they’ve written or have been writing or any mechanics o’ writing that they particularly like or dislike or anything that could prove that they e’en know what writing a book is. I think that “manuscript that may not be a novel” is 80,000 words o’ this meandering without a plot, setting, or theme & its characters are just writers & their dogs. ¡Today Scooby-Doo & the gang meet John Updike!
Actually, that sounds like it’d actually be funny. There’s my solution to your writer’s block ( I think that’s what they’re saying they have ), rando writer who will ne’er read this: write a book ’bout Michael Ondaatje & his dog solving mysteries. ¿Wasn’t that a plot point in Bojack Horseman?
As someone who has written a review or 2, I’m fascinated by the art o’ reviewing in & o’ itself: not just the conclusions they set out, but also, specially, the arguments they set forth to try & back up those conclusions & how persuasive they seem to me. This is why I’ve written a few attacks gainst reviews in which I agree with the conclusion, such as an inane praiseworthy review for my favorite video game, Wario Land 3. This comes from my schooling, which ( probably to avoid getting sued for potentially violating freedom-o’-speech rights ) was openminded ’bout just ’bout any kind o’ conclusions, no matter how revolting, so long as one made a sophisticated attempt @ backing one’s arguments.
Thus for today I will go all the way & look @ reviews for a book I’ve ne’er read, some 2021 books called “Sorrow & Bliss: A Novel”. Yes, it really has “A Novel” as the official subtitle, & no, I have no idea why.
In case so many of the rest of the books on this list haven’t given readers enough anti-science egomania, this idiotic, carpingly condescending story of a woman with a “mental illness” that mainly seems to turn her into a too-online Twitter-hole ought to make up the difference.
This is an all-too-common example o’ 1 o’ my least favorite types o’ terrible reviews: 1 that focuses so much on conclusive opinions & not ’nough on textual evidence or examples &, worse, is so vague in its criticisms that e’en after reading the review I have no idea what kind o’ book this e’en is. Granted, less than 50 words is way too short for an adequate review for anything worth reviewing, since it leaves no room for detail. I think, ironically, the person who wrote this review is “too-online”, as he assumes I’m familiar with whate’er Twitter bullshit he’s vaguely alluding to. Unfortunately, beyond copypasting the poems I post on this blog into Twitter with a grunt & then leaving ( which I’ve stopped bothering to do now that I’m convinced Musk will be the death o’ it ), I don’t do hardly anything on Twitter ( & I suspect hardly anyone will within the next 5 years thanks to Musk ), so I have no idea how this “Twitter-hole” ( ¿why is there a hyphen there? “Hole” is a separate word, not a suffix ), nor what “anti-science egomania” this book has or why this reviewer puts scare quotes round “mental illness”. ¿Does this reviewer who tries to imply that he’s pro-science deny the existence o’ mental illnesses — which is to ask, is this reviewer a psychology-denying crank, which is certainly not what I or any civilized human being would consider “pro-science”?
Ultimately, this review is just a bunch o’ cursing disguised as intellectualism by the use o’ vaguely-alluded implications. Being “anti-science”, an egomaniac, carping, condescending, & “too-online”, do, indeed, sound bad, but one can’t be sure if they truly are bad without understanding how they are these things & what the reviewer thinks makes this book “anti-science” or what he interprets to be an example o’ the vice o’ being “too-online”. This is a common tactic for people with unpopular opinions who want to disguise their unpopular opinions as general-held sentiments. Thus, “believes that depression is a real mental illness”, which is something with which all civilized people agree, is turned into a generally-hated dog-whistle “anti-science” much in the way rightwingers turn “treats black people humanely”, which, ’gain, all civilized people think is good, into “woke”, which sounds bad & ridiculous, e’en if most couldn’t tell you what it’s s’posed to mean.
Tier: D
So intrigued by this antireview that failed to give me any information, but, ironically, made me mo’ curious to see what kind o’ book would inspire this vague mess o’ ideas, I had to look up the book on Amazon — specifically its blurb.
In this reviewer’s defense, while I must emphasize ’gain that I have not read this book & cannot adequately review it myself, the blurb doesn’t inspire confidence in me. I can definitely say that the blurb is poorly written:
Martha Friel just turned forty. She used to work at Vogue and was going to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content for no one. She used to live in Paris. Now, she lives in a gated community in Oxford that she hates and can’t bear to leave. But she must now that her loving husband Patrick has just left.
A common vice o’ modern literature ( that is literature o’ today, not modernist literature, which is some o’ the best literature out there ) is relying on childish choppy sentences. This paragraph is particularly fragmentary, since the different sentences don’t e’en connect. Most o’ this paragraph is empty details stripped o’ any importance. “She used to work at Vogue and was going to write a novel”. Cool. ¿Who cares? E’eryone is “going to write a novel”, & writing a book ’bout a tortured “genius” middle class white person struggling to become an uppercase-A “Artist” is the most cliché & uninteresting concepts for a book. Meanwhile, bringing up that our protagonist used to live in Paris, but now lives in a gated community, which she hates, but can’t bear to leave, is some unironic 1st-world-problems & exhibit #200,000 o’ how detached from reality upper-class Americans are. That said, there’s no indication o’ “anti-science” in this book so far; & honestly, the concept o’ a book ’bout someone who “creates internet content for no one” is the least uninteresting part o’ this blurb & could be an entertaining topic for a book if done with self-effacing humor & without the bathos-inducing melodrama that this blurb is so far exhibiting.
The blurb continues:
Because there’s something wrong with Martha. There has been since a little bomb went off in her brain, at seventeen, leaving her changed in a way no doctor or drug could fix then and no one, even now, can explain—why can say she is so often sad, cruel to everyone she loves, why she finds it harder to be alive than other people.
This paragraph just insults the reader’s intelligence, pretending that hardly anyone has e’er heard o’ this concept o’ “depression” before. So far it seems like 1 o’ the 47 words o’ the previous review was right: “egomania”. This blurb tries to pass off our protagonist as the world’s only sufferer from depression, e’en tho that is far from the truth. Usually books ’bout depression are written for others with depression in a way o’ creating resonance & understanding, making them not feel ’lone; but this blurb’s use o’ alien diction to depict depression as this 1-o’-a-kind mutation o’ the protagonist does the opposite: as someone who does have depression, it turns me off, & it feels mo’ like an exotic exhibitionist performance put on to thrill people who don’t have depression — which is a gross, dehumanizing thing to do. I can’t tell, since the previous review was so vague, but maybe this was also what Donaghue meant by “condescending”: it certainly feels condescending to people with depression.
With Patrick gone, the only place Martha has left to go is her childhood home, to live with her chaotic parents, to survive without Ingrid, the sister who made their growing-up bearable, who said she would never give up on Martha, and who finally has.
Speaking o’ vague language: ¿what does it mean for Martha’s parents to be “chaotic”? ¿Is that a euphemism for “abusive”? Also, I certainly hope this Ingrid person literally abandoned Martha & didn’t “abandon” her in a metaphorical way by dying, since the protagonist would look like a selfish asshole for complaining ’bout how she suffered for someone else’s death.
It feels like the end but maybe, by going back, Martha will get to start again. Maybe there is a different story to be written, if Martha can work out where to begin.
“It feels like the end but maybe”’s missing comma is a legit grammatical error in an official blurb for a mass-published book.
I’m sure many o’ the hot-shot commercial publisher types I’ve read from would say that this is a well-written blurb, but I disagree. Then ’gain, I think their perspective is that the obnoxiously intelligence-insulting way this blurb is written is “attention-grabbing” to the masses o’ idiots in the same way jingling keys would be, whereas as someone who doesn’t find jingling keys particularly fascinating, I find it, well, obnoxiously intelligence-insulting, so this is probably why I wouldn’t make a good publisher, since my instinct is to criticize the masses for being idiots, which isn’t liable to make the masses o’ idiots want to buy my stuff, whereas the effective way to fleece them is to pat them on the back for their idiocy & indulge them.
But we haven’t gotten to the bottom o’ the swamp yet: that would be the editorial reviews.
“Sorrow and Bliss is a brilliantly faceted and extremely funny book about depression that engulfed me in the way I’m always hoping to be engulfed by novels. While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realized that I wanted to send it to everyone I know.” — Ann Patchett
Drinking game: take a drink e’ery time we see “brilliant” or [insert adverb] funny. Enjoy that coma from alcohol poisoning.
But this review doesn’t just spew clichés, but also mangles them: ¿what does “brilliantly faceted” mean? Nobody uses that phrase. The phrase is “multifaceted”, not just “faceted”. “Faceted” by itself doesn’t mean anything in this context, & it isn’t made any mo’ meaningful by the addendum o’ an empty superlative before it.
We also have laughably exaggerated metaphors, making it sound like the reviewer has an online fetish for being “engulfed” by literature.
The most shocking thing is that this blurb was written by a real writer & the daughter o’ 1 o’ the most imaginative writers who had a very distinct voice to his writing. I guess you can’t inherit literary genius. My only hope is that Ann crapped this out in a minute for whate’er quick buck they were offering.
Tier: E
“Completely brilliant, I loved it. I think every girl and woman should read it.” — Gillian Anderson
This reviewer judges this book to be “completely brilliant”, as opposed to those which are merely partially brilliant. Then we get a comma splice, & after that redundant padding: Gillian doesn’t just think e’ery woman should read it, but also e’ery girl. ¿Why stop there? Maybe e’ery female, lady, gal, lass, miss, madame, femme, & any other synonym you could find should read it, too.
Tier: F
“An incredibly funny and devastating debut. . . . enlivened, often, by a madcap energy. Yet it still manages to be sensitive and heartfelt, and to offer a nuanced portrayal of what it means to try to make amends and change, even when that involves ‘start[ing] again from nothing.’” — The Guardian
It says something bad when a newspaper as shoddy as The Guardian provides 1 o’ the least inane review o’ the pack. There’s still plenty o’ trite, empty phrases ( “madcap energy” ) & empty, repetitive superlatives ( “sensitive & heartfelt” ), & the reviewer fails to describe this book in a way that distinguishes it from millions of other books, that could also be described as “funny & devastating”, or the many books that vaguely involve “try[ing] to make amends & change, even when that involves ‘start[ing] again from nothing’.
Tier: D
“Exploring the multifaceted hardships of mental illness and the frustrating inaccuracy of diagnoses, medications, and treatments, Sorrow and Bliss is darkly comic and deeply heartfelt . . . Martha’s voice is acerbic, witty, and raw.” — Booklist (starred review)
This is the closest a review came to having anything resembling a specific example from the book to make it stand out from any other book, the conflict o’ struggling with “inaccurate” diagnoses & medications — tho this does make me rethink my earlier interpretation o’ our 1st reviewer’s criticism o’ “anti-science” & makes me wonder if, quite the opposite, he was criticizing this book for exhibiting depression-skepticism or skepticism toward the efficacy o’ antidepressants ( I don’t feel bad for the misinterpretation, since, as I said, he refused to give a concrete example to back up their vague criticism o’ “anti-science” ).
Tier: C
“Meg Mason’s unflagging comic impulses drive this novel about the havoc a woman’s mental illness wreaks on her marriage.” — Shelf Awareness (starred review)
A common vice o’ reviews, specially editorial reviews, which are far too short to give useful information, is trading meaningful critique based on examples o’ the text with empty but poetic ( & that poetry is mo’ William McGonagall than Kobayashi Issa ) diction. If this reviewer wrote “This book ’bout a woman’s depression ruining their marriage is funny” ’twould say ’bout the same thing, but they try to hide such an empty conclusion with laughably o’erwrought purple prose as if they were describing Conan the Barbarian wrestling the ermine-orbed serpent or Moses parting the red sea with his rod aloft: this book isn’t just funny; its writer’s “unflagging comic impulses drive this novel” like a school bus.
Tier: D
“Brutal, tender, funny, this novel—a portrait of love in all of its many incarnations—came alive for me from the very first page. I saw myself here. I saw the people I love. I am changed by this book.” — Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes
’Nother common design pattern for automated review generation: “[adjective], [adjective], [adjective]…]. & if that wasn’t ’nough, we end 1 o’ the tritest, most ridiculous exaggerated praise e’er: claiming that the work “changed” the reviewer. Unfortunately, these works ne’er change these reviewers into people with any form o’ imagination or critical skills o’ analysis.
I mean, I love Donkey Kong Country’s music, too, but I can’t remember any philosophical epiphanies or major life decisions I’ve come to that were inspired by the bubbling melodies o’ “Hot Head Bop”.
Tier: E
“A truly comic novel about love and the despair of depression. It’s a rare and beautiful thing when an author can break your heart with humor; it’s also the quality I admire most in a writer.” — Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest and Good Company
This novel is truly comic, as opposed to those fake comedic posers. This review is notable in that it makes a point specific ’nough to be outright wrong: tragicomedy is, in fact, not rare @ all, but goes all the way back to e’en The Bible, & probably earlier ancient literature, too.
Tier: D
“A quiet and achingly beautiful love story. . . . LOVED it. Masterfully written. And powerful.” — Elin Hilderbrand
More o’erwrought prose. I hate it when a book is so beautiful it gives me aches. To wrap up our bathos, we have the high superlative “masterfully written” followed by the much weaker “also, ’twas powerful, too”. “This book is genius & also pretty darn swell”.
Tier: F
“Sorrow and Bliss is hilarious, haunting, and utterly captivating. Meg Mason has created a heroine as prickly as Bernadette in Where’d You Go, Bernadette. Her humor is as arch and wise as the best work of Joan Didion and Rachel Cusk, yet completely original. What a thrilling new voice!” — Amanda Eyre Ward, New York Times bestselling author of The Jetsetters
The other cliché to add to our bingo card is comparing a work to ’nother work — tho I love how this reviewer twists 1 o’ her comparisons by addending, “yet completely original”. Yes, this completely original work that can only be described by saying it’s like other works. I’m also not sure what “arch” humor is & have a sneaking suspicion that this reviewer doesn’t know, either.
Tier: E
“Funny and tragic.” — Jojo Moyes
Give Jojo credit: this says what all the other reviews say in just 3 words.
Tier: D
“I really loved Meg Mason’s SORROW AND BLISS, which is sometimes very sad and often very funny and ultimately hopeful.” — Linda Holmes, New York Times bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over, via Twitter
OK, to be fair, this 1 adds “& hopeful”, too.
Tier: E
“So dark, so funny, so true. You will see your sad, struggling, triumphant self in this deeply affecting novel. What a debut.” — Laura Zigman, author of Separation Anxiety
Calling a book “deeply affecting” is like describing my chair as “strongly sittable”: it may be true, but doesn’t mean much.
Tier: F
“A gorgeous, heart-rending book.” — Flynn Berry, New York Times bestselling author of Northern Spy
¡YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, SORROW AND BLISS!
Tier: F
“SORROW AND BLISS is brilliant. A comic gem that will also break your heart.” — Julia Claiborne Johnson, author of Be Frank With Me and Better Luck Next Time
I’m surprised it took this long to encounter a review describing the work as a gem or some kind o’ jewelry.
Tier: F
“Evocative and hopeful.” — Book Riot, “5 Contemporary Literary Fiction Books That Are Game-Changers”
Generic & meaningless. That’s a great way to describe a book that is purportedly a “game-changer”. Nobody’s e’er written a book that’s evocative or hopeful till Meg Mason invented the concepts o’ evocation & hope in 2021.
Tier: F
“Sorrow and Bliss is a thing of beauty. Astute observations on marriage, motherhood, family, and mental illness are threaded through a story that is by turns devastating and restorative. Every sentence rings true. I will be telling everyone I love to read this book.” — Sara Collins, Costa First Novel Award-winning author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton
¿Why do you abuse the people you love?
Tier: E
“Sharp yet humane, and jaw-droppingly funny, this is the kind of novel you will want to press into the hands of everyone you know. Mason has an extraordinary talent for dialogue and character, and her understanding of how much poignancy a reader can take is profound. A masterclass on family, damage and the bonds of love: as soon as I finished it, I started again.” — Jessie Burton, New York Times bestselling author of The Miniaturist
“Spicy, yet sour, & nose-pickingly readable, this is the kind o’ review you will want to shove into the mouth o’ e’eryone you know. Jessie has a spectacular skill for adverbs & using commas, & her understanding o’ how much zestiness a reader can take is insightful. A Raid: Shadow Legends on drama, diction, & the love triangle o’ adjectives: as soon as I ate it, I ate it ’gain.” — J. J. W. Mezun,The Mezunian bestrepelling author o’ A Year o’ Yuppie Inanity with Mozilla’s Pocket ( An Unpublished Classic ).
Tier: D
“Patrick Melrose meets Fleabag. Brilliant.” — Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures
¡Irrelevancy, your honor!
Tier: F
“Examines with pitiless clarity the impact of the narrator’s mental illness on her closest relationships. . . . Mason brings the reader into a deep understanding of Martha’s experience without either condescending to her or letting her off too easily. . . . An astute depiction of life on the psychic edge.” — Kirkus Reviews
They’re not surprising, but these god damn adjectives still get me. You can’t just have regular ol’ clarity: it has to be the “pitiless” kind, like it’s a stronger palette swap in the latter half o’ Dragon Quest. Since we’ve established that the blurb a’least thinks Martha is the only person in the universe with this exotic mutation as-yet unnamed & undiscovered by all the brightest scientists, I’m doubtful o’ the “without either condescending” part. & since Martha apparently complains ’bout how agonizing it is to live in a gated community that they just can’t bear to leave, ’less Martha is given the guillotine by the proletariat by the end o’ the book, I think the author probably does let her off too easily.
Tier: D
“The book is a triumph. A brutal, hilarious, compassionate triumph.” — Alison Bell, cocreator and star of The Letdown
¿Was this review written by Lionel Fanthorpe? “This review is repetitive. A repetitive repetition that repeats & repeats & says the same thing they say ’gain & ’gain & doesn’t say anything else but that which has been said before & nothing mo’ but what was said before”.
Tier: F
“This is a romance, true, but a real one. It’s modern love up against the confusing, sad aches of mental illness, with all its highs, lows, humour and misery. Comparisons to Sally Rooney will be made, but Mason’s writing is less self-conscious than Rooney’s, and perhaps more mature. Her character work is outstanding, and poignant—the hairline fractures, contradictions and nuances of the middle-class family dynamic are painstakingly rendered with moving familiarity and black humour, resulting in a combination as devastating and sharply witty as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.” — Bookseller+Publisher
I’m glad that the reviewer alerted me that this book is a “real” romance, as opposed to all those fake romances that are truly ’bout martian conquerors. I always hate it when I buy a book with some sexy shirtless man on the cover & it’s just blasting cyberpneumatic cannons @ the Xythnians from Kyklocks. ¿How will my cyberpneumatic cannon shoot off then?
& they let you know that this is a modern love, involving mental illness, which didn’t exist before 2021. ¿Virginia Woolf? ¡Ne’er heard o’ her!
Despite all this, this is 1 o’ the mo’ in-depth — a’least as in-depth as any o’ these Hallmark card reviews get — reviews. Note how it makes a comparison to ’nother writer, but qualifies it by noting specific differences ( which is mo’ meaningful than just saying “but also completely original”, which is just straight-up contradictory ). Granted, it’d be better if the claims o’ being “less self-conscious” & “more mature” were qualified with examples & elaboration, since we’re still taking the reviewer on their word & they’re still relying heavily on vague superlatives. & the rest also devolves into a list o’ superlatives, with the hint that it this book s’posedly goes into greater depth into the complications o’ middle-class families than some unnamed general standard being the closest to what we might call actually giving meaningful information. Still, based on our now subterranean standards this is up on the higher tiers.
Tier: B
“Improbably charming . . . will have you chortling and reading lines aloud.” — People
( Laughs ). E’en the reviewers are vague: we don’t e’en get a specific person cited for this review, but some vague “people”.This gives a new perspective to the phrase “¡The people have spoken!”.
I like how “People” starts by laying out their expectations that this book would be shitty, setting up the gravel-level standards this book apparently surpassed. Presumably, these low standards were based on reading the blurb.
This review carries out the impressive feat o’ being both vague & clearly wrong: it libels me by claiming that I will “chortle” — ’cause our failed poet reviewer can’t use a basic word like “laugh” — & read lines ’loud, which I would ne’er do for e’en the funniest book, simply ’cause reading lines ’loud while laughing noisily in public is something only a peak douche bag would do, & reading lines ’loud & laughing to yourself while ’lone is something e’en a deranged lunatic like me would consider too bedlamite.
Tier: F
Below these reviews my eye caught the author bio, &, well…
Meg Mason is a journalist whose career began at the Financial Times and the Times of London. Her work has since appeared in Vogue, Elle, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sunday Times (UK), and the New Yorker’s Daily Shouts. Born in New Zealand, she now lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two daughters. [emphasis mine]
So we can confirm that Sorrow & Bliss: A Work o’ Literature Comprising Abstract Latin Letters that Combine to Form Abstract Concepts Physically Bound in the Form o’ a Codex is an author self-insert book so transparent that the author couldn’t e’en be arsed to change the name o’ the magazine they worked for to 1 o’ its carbon-copy competitors.
Bonus: Mo’ Bad Reviews
Our 1st reviewer, Steve Donaghue, also wrote a list o’ worst 2021 nonfiction books, & it starts pretty funny:
10 The Chief’s Chief by Mark Meadows (All Seasons Press) – On January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection to attack the US Capitol, overthrow the US government, and install himself as an unelected dictator. Mark Meadows publicly endorsed this attempted coup. Shame on All Seasons Press for giving him a book contract.
Kind o’ low-hanging fruit for a worst-book choice, — specially since the rightwing grift machine pumps out these doorstops e’ery year — but I can’t disagree, & it’s only #10. ¿What’s next?
Tier: B
9 The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley (Regnery Publishing) On January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection to attack the US Capitol, overthrow the US government, and install himself as an unelected dictator. Josh Hawley publicly endorsed this attempted coup. Shame on Regnery Publishing for giving him a book contract.
I mean, I can’t disagree…
Tier: B
Unfortunately, Donaghue gives ’way the game when he makes a mistake copy-pasting the review for the Peter Navarro book & using for the Jim Jordan book, as he blames Peter Navarro ’gain. Or maybe he just really hates Peter Navarro & decides he wants to blame him a 2nd time just to be sure.
Some o’ the other items are weirder, tho…
6 The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro (Broadside Books) – Very smart and very lazy Ben Shapiro takes a legitimate social issue – the rise of the authoritarian Left – and lavishes pan-shallow unoriginal platitudes on them while cloaking the whole mess in the fascists talking points of the very monsters who consider him a useful idiot.
1 o’ the great thing ’bout using these vague superlatives or invectives is that I have to play guessing games regarding what the person is trying to e’en say. Now, from Ben Shapiro that’s no surprise, since like most fascists he deliberately communicates in shibboleths to disguise bigotry as profound, complex thought. But Donaghue, who portrays himself as vaguely antifascist & spent half his reviews criticizing what many fascists considered to be a feather in their cap, seems to have different goals. One may expect him to be o’ the Enlightened Centrist™ tribe who feels the need to balance out their outrage @ a Republican attempt to outright o’erthrow the US government by manufacturing an imaginary leftist equivalent. Perhaps he portrays the “Black Lives Matter” riots as the equivalent, despite the fact that these riots presented no threat to the US government beyond being an international embarrassment — & if that’s the case, then we’d have to consider nearly e’ery American who vacations to other countries as an equal evil to the Trump Putsch. ¿But, anyway, would e’en an Enlightened Centrist™ consider Shapiro to be “very smart and very lazy”? I’m hoping Donaghue takes his brilliant “rap isn’t music ’cause my daddy told me it isn’t” & the way he embarrassed himself in front o’ a BBC conservative by being too crazy e’en for him — which adds him to the list o’ Americans who are an international embarrassment — as examples o’ him just being too lazy to unleash that intelligence that he’s keeping very well hidden.
It’s not that I’m in denial that there exists an authoritarian left; but when I think o’ “authoritarian left”, I think o’ Leninists, & I don’t see any big Leninist movement on the verge o’ seizing the US capitol & setting up the American Neobolshevik Communist Party as the dictatorship o’ the proletariat, no matter how many jokes ’bout guillotines I make. As we’ve established here before, we can’t e’en get Biden to do something as symbolic as raising his fist & shouting, “¡Down with the bourgeoisie!”, while still doing their bidding, no matter how funny ’twould be. Maybe Donaghue took some downers & fell asleep while watching a Russian Civil War documentary just after US news & mixed them up in his mind. It happens to me sometimes, too. But given some o’ the other things he’s written, I get the sneaking suspicion his idea o’ “authoritarian left” is just some irrelevant few randos on Twitter calling him a racist ’cause he refused to capitalize the B in “black people” — which is to say that he is “too-online” & needs to stop spending so much time on Twitter & mistaking the idiots on it as relevant to greater society.
Complaining ’bout the “rise” o’ the authoritarian left also really undermines Donaghue’s attacks gainst Trump as a fascist — a clear rightwing authoritarian. ¿Is it reasonable for him to be alarmed that the left should become authoritarian as a counterbalance to the right’s growing authoritarianism, or is Donaghue 1 o’ the many delusional Americans who thinks reality spawns from dreams & wishes & not power & that sternly protesting people willing to use violence & underhanded tactics will magically make these tyrant-wannabes no longer a threat? After all, when fascism rose as a threat in Europe, the allied powers acted in many ways that almost anyone would consider “authoritarian” — far worse than a few randos calling other randos racist for not spelling “latinos” “l@t!n%”, like any progressive L33tspeaker should. ¿Would not Donaghue consider FDR, who interned Japanese Americans & heavily censored newspapers, radio, & e’en letters, an example o’ the “authoritarian left”? ¿Would he say the same ’bout Winston Churchill, who also censored media while the UK was fighting fascists? Also, ¿didn’t Donaghue outright call for publishers to refuse to publish works by Trump supporters? ¿Isn’t that censorship, & thus “authoritarianism” — a far greater form o’ authoritarianism than calling other people bad names, which, in fact, is not authoritarianism, but merely using one’s freedom-o’-speech rights to express their opinion of others? It seems reasonable that in an America where violence gainst minorities is on the rise that jokes ’bout black people go from being harmless edgy comedy to a means to recruiting mo’ fascists, & that it’s a reasonable reaction by the left to feel added urgency to employ whate’er means don’t full-on violate freedom o’ speech, or e’en defacto suppression o’ speech thru economic means, to try & stifle & undermine this tactic, which, ultimately, is for the goal o’ subverting e’en the pseudodemocracy that the US has. But I guess it’s mo’ important that Donaghue ne’er has to fear being called a racist, which is literally lethal to white people, than it is for white people to endure the slightest inconvenience to prevent fascism from coming to power. Expressing one’s disdain for fascism is all one needs to do to make it topple @ its foundation in the fantasyland o’ people who live purely in the world o’ books & not political reality.
But it gets worse…
5 Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm by Robin DiAngelo (Beacon Press) – I wouldn’t have thought it possible that the author of White Fragility could write a book more virulently racist in just one lifetime, but this noxious volume – in which she makes clear that all white people are racist genetically, regardless of upbringing, education, or outlook (Klan members will find such claims familiar-sounding, only in a slightly different context) – does the trick.
This review devolves into outright malicious lying, & one can easily see this simply by reviewing the Amazon blurb:
In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explained how racism is a system into which all white people are socialized and challenged the belief that racism is a simple matter of good people versus bad. [emphasis mine]
Dr. DiAngelo — who is a white person, & so can shit-talk crackers just as much as I can, just like black people can use the N-word — nowhere blames genetics for racism, but white people’s social conditioning. This makes sense when you consider that Dr. DiAngelo is a sociologist, not a biologist. Mo’ importantly, she distinguishes it from the bitter hatred o’, say, a Klansman, as a different kind o’ racism caused by an unintentional harm caused by ignorance. It is Donaghue who decides to be triggered by being called a well-meaning accidental racist, as if this “offense” is anywhere close to the kind o’ spiteful, actually threatening speech that hardcore racist white people spew ( ¿does DiAngelo recommend harassing white people with depression & urging them to kill themselves in her book, which is what white supremacist groups like Stormfront actually did to people after Trump won the election? ), & rather than do what a smart person with any dignity would do & just shrug it off & say, “¿What are you gonna do?”, he stupidly gives in to the bait & reacts in the most extreme, idiotic way possible, literally reacting to the accusation o’ being racist with the schoolyard comeback, “¡No, you are! ¡In fact, you’re such a superultramega racist that you’re just like those Klansmen who murdered & intimidated black people for decades… ’cept, you know, you haven’t actually murdered anyone or intimated anyone or have done anything but make a few white people feel a li’l queasy”. It shows an amazing lack o’ self-awareness that a white person would unironically attack without e’en the slightest sense o’ humor a book called “White Fragility”. “¡Can you believe these bullies called me a whiny bitch!”, he whinily bitched. I would venture to argue that the idiocy that Donaghue portrays here is mo’ racist gainst white people like me since it does far mo’ damage to our reputation than some guilt-fetishing honkey, whose worst crime is actually probably annoying black people with her constant Jesus-like faux-humility, as if constant apologies & longwinded treatises on made-up jargon acronyms like BIPOC help black people with real problems, like being shot by white supremacist police or poverty — albeit, none o’ which are on the same level o’ enormity as people on Twitter calling Donaghue mean words.
Donaghue could’ve gotten sympathy by merely calling this book dumb & useless; but portraying it as an extreme form o’ racism comparable to Klan lynchings is a ridiculous form o’ both-sidesism that helps the very fascists he pretends to be fighting gainst. Trying to conflate minor misdemeanors gainst white people as equal to the worst acts o’ racist terror gainst black people is the precise tactic that fascists use to justify white supremacist terror as “defense” gainst “the authoritarian left”.
Anyway, this review o’ reviews has gone on way too long. Get the fuck out o’ my house so I can take my pants off.
So ’twas no surprise when looking o’er The New York Times’s list for the best books in the last 125 years ( that seemingly random # is due to it being a celebration for their own book reviews section ) that they also have terrible tastes in terms o’ literature. During the initial preliminaries we had a bizarre hodgepodge: Ulysses right next to“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” ( not only does The New York Times stupidly insist on using the inane US title made up by ignorant executives ’cause they thought US readers would be as dumb as them, they also picked 1 that hardly any Harry Potter fan would pick o’er, say, The Goblet of Fire or The Order of the Phoenix ), The Great Gatsby next to Charlotte’s Web. ( If they were going to include a kid’s book, ¿why the hell would they pick a book that mo’ people probably know ’bout due to the Hanna-Barbera cartoon rather than something like Alice in Wonderland, which has actual literary value & is 1000-times mo’ influential? ). Meanwhile missing are À la recherche du temps perdu, which is regularly put up there with Ulysses; no The Magic Mountain; no Gravity’s Rainbow; no Moby Dick; no Petersburg by Andrei Bely (admittedly an underrated gem e’en outsidethe New York Times ); nor a single book by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Falkner, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Umberto Eco, Borges, Yukio Mishima…
But since then they’ve narrowed it to 5 choices. Let’s see what these choices are:
5. Beloved
This isn’t a bad choice, tho NYT readers probably only know ’bout it now thanks to the brilliant marketing assistance Republicans are giving Toni Morrison by banning it from schools for making white kids feel queasy, a common character-building exercise schools employ ( Republicans, as everyone knows, are disgusted by the idea that their children might build mo’ character ’bove their own feebleness ).
I want you to keep in mind this entry’s ranking for later, tho…
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude
Also a solid book, tho I can’t imagine anyone truly familiar with Latin American literature ranking this as higher than much o’ Borges’s work ( indeed, it’s a post on r/unpopularopinions ), which was much mo’ experimental & arguably mo’ influential. Granted, this is probably the only Latin American work these honkeys know.
3. 1984
& here’s where it all goes downhill. This book is dogshit. Isaac Asimov wrote a famous devastating review gainst this book & its cynical attempt to half-assedly exploit science fiction without understanding an iota o’ that genre & all its nuances as a tool for pure political propaganda by a man who, howe’er great his politics were ( a’least before he started McCarthying people he suspected were communist, gay, “too anti-white” — read: opposed to racism gainst black people — to the UK’s IRD ), ne’er had any respect or understanding for art as art itself, who saw it as nothing beyond a tool for propaganda, as everything else. Beyond politics this book has no value: its characters are 1-dimensional strawmen, its language is basic, & the world-building is shallow & inane — a whiny teenager’s idea o’ how e’en totalitarian societies operate, which is why teenagers ( & those whose politics is mentally adolescent ) love it so much.
But e’en as propaganda, this book is an utter failure: it’s an amazing self-own that such a vociferous democratic socialist created the greatest tool o’ propaganda gainst socialism, used primarily by alt-right hacks like Ben Shapiro, which is easy thanks to this book being so broad & vague — which is precisely why it “resonates” with everyone: it allows everyone to fill in the “evil” side with whate’er they want. That the man who warned ’bout the emptiness o’ terms like “democracy” & “fascism” would write a book with heroes & villains so empty is a shocking failure. His nonfiction, specially his essays & Homage to Catalonia, are far better than this waste o’ time.
2. “The Fellowship of the Ring”
The New York Times are such morons that they don’t e’en realize that this isn’t a book, but part o’ a book: mistaking The Lord of the Rings as a “trilogy” ’stead o’ a single, unified book separated into volumes by the publisher gainst Tolkein’s wishes for crass business reasons is a classic amateur move. For anyone else it’d be nitpicking, but it’s hilarious to me that an organization that prides themselves on s’posed honest integrity would make a basic mistake that you’d get roasted for on fucking TV Tropes, the website that lets anyone add whate’er conspiracy theory they want without citations & calls themselves a “buttload mo’ informal” than Wikipedia ( which also wouldn’t let such a sloppy mistake slide ). This is pretty much exhibit A evidence that it’d be safer to get your news from Wikipedia than The New York Times ( which is not to encourage getting one’s news from Wikipedia ).
They also lose points for not using the kickass psychedelic book covers they used in the 60s official US editions as their image:
Some might expect me to laugh @ The New York Times for putting a mainstream fantasy work @ the #2 spot; but while I myself would not consider The Lord of the Rings the 2nd best novel o’ the last 125 years, or e’en in the top 10, I can see some reasoning ’hind its inclusion: it’s unquestionably the most influential book on this list that pretty much created the modern fantasy genre as it exists. That deserves some props. It also has a lot mo’ literary value than people give it credit: it has finely-crafted worldbuilding that pays attention to details down to the moon cycles with believable fantasy languages ( helped by Tolkein being a legit linguist ). While the characters can be hokey sometimes, there is mo’ moral nuance than one might remember: it’s a clever twist that the ring is vanquished not by the nobility o’ the heroes, who it turns out, are not so heroic that they can o’ercome the ring’s power, but by the pitiful Golem, who accidentally drops it in the volcano trying to steal it — & is only able to ’cause earlier in the book the heroes decide to spare him. Granted, it’s just conservative Christian “turn the other cheek” slave morality; but genuine Christian morality is mo’ refreshing than the might-makes-right white-&-black morality that conservatives oft erroneously pass off as Christian morality. Moreo’er, tho, this book has excellent prose, specially its scenery descriptions, which is a rarity in a lot o’ contemporary literature, both “literary” & “genre”.
It’s better than Harry Potter & certainly several leagues ’bove 1984, as well as the next book on this list…
1. To Kill a Mockingbird
This choice for #1 book o’ the past 125 years is such an amazingly bad choice — & yet so perfect for The New York Times’s main demographic. Its o’errated mediocrity is merely a reflection o’ The New York Times.
Much as 1984 is only beloved as juvenile political propaganda, To Kill a Mockingbird is mainly beloved as a weak white-centric attack gainst racism — which is specially bad when you consider Beloved, a much better book in every way that’s much mo’ devastating & unsentimental in its criticism o’ racism, was 4 books below. That none o’ Ralph Ellison’s books made it on this list or e’en the preliminary list is criminal. These fuckers thought god damn Charlotte’s Web is better than Invisible Man. What toilet paper o’ a newspaper.
& yet, it can’t be a surprise that the multitude o’ self-indulgent white liberals who read The New York Times would prefer this self-masturbatory tract o’ the noble middle-class white lawyer who tries to save a black man, who is treated mo’ as a prop to demonstrate our white savior’s greatness than as a real person, from the savage poor whites. Mixed in this book is a ton o’ classism: only the upper-middle-class lazy-libertarian Atticus, who opposes systems o’ racial inequality but praises systems o’ economic inequality that are just as racist, & Tom Robinson’s rich employer are depicted as anti-racism ( the book doesn’t acknowledge that both these people — the Atticuses have a black servant — exploit their racist society to get cheap labor out o’ black people ). It legit reads like a South Park episode, & is a twisted view o’ the real world: tho there are definitely racist, dumb, & repulsive poor white people, rich white institutions are the leaders in exploiting racism for their gains.
In addition to its weak-ass politics, this book doesn’t have all that much literary value. Compare Beloved, with its anachronistic chapter order & its greater use o’ imagery, color, symbolism, & just o’erall much better prose. To Kill a Mockingbird is a thoroughly unexperimental book with prose so basic & repetitive it becomes tedious to read real quick & makes hardly any use o’ the large gamut o’ tools the English language & structures put @ the writer’s disposal. Ironically, Truman Capote’s friend hardly did a better job o’ writing rather than typing than Jack Kerouac.
Here’s an example o’ the stellar prose in this book:
The Radley Place fascinated Dill. In spite of our warnings and explanations it drew him as the moon draws water, but drew him no nearer than the light-pole on the corner, a safe distance from the Radley gate. There he would stand, his arm around the fat pole, staring and wondering.
The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. Walking south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot. The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long agodarkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away. The remains of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard— a “swept” yard that was never swept— where johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco grew in abundance.
& that was me trying to find a relatively good part o’ the book. It’s hardly the worst prose in the world — ¿but this is the kind o’ prose in the best book o’ the past 125 years? ¿Better than the flowing detailed descriptions o’ À la recherche du temps perdu? ¿Better than the haiku-like sharp details & experimental subjective perspectives o’ Virginia Woolf’s The Waves? Give me an hour & I could probably find 100 books with better prose than this book, which hardly has any better prose than your average Stephen King or James Patterson. I think Brandon Sanderson probably has better prose & unquestionably Lord of the Rings does.
Meanwhile, most o’ the prose is tedious dreck like this:
Mrs. Merriweather seemed to have a hit, everybody was cheering so, but she caught me backstage and told me I had ruined her pageant. She made me feel awful, but when Jem came to fetch me he was sympathetic. He said he couldn’t see my costume much from where he was sitting. How he could tell I was feeling bad under my costume I don’t know, but he said I did all right, I just came in a little late, that was all. Jem was becoming almost as good as Atticus at making you feel right when things went wrong. Almost—not even Jem could make me go through that crowd, and he consented to wait backstage with me until the audience left.
I know some people take the “show, don’t tell” thing too far & demand that everyone “clench their fist” & bark like dogs rather than just be pissed off, but “She made me feel awful, but when Jem came to fetch me he was sympathetic” might be 1 o’ the most sterile way to describe something, specially since the sentence right after already shows how he shows sympathy, so this sentence is redundant filler. I refuse to believe this isn’t rough draft material.
& I know this is s’posed to be a child narrating ( ¿tho is it s’posed to be a child now or an adult reminiscing ’bout their childhood? ), but e’en children aren’t this dull, & it’s not as if children are this grammatically correct, anyway. Contrast with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is also from the perspective o’ a child, which has much mo’ character to its hick talk — not the least o’ which ’cause Mark Twain put much mo’ care into the various dialects. Also, Huckleberry Finn is a comedy, so its plain talk works better than when To Kill a Mockingbird tries to use it for s’posedly profound speeches.
Here’s an example o’ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s much better prose:
We judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble.
Well, the second night a fog begun to come on, and we made for a towhead to tie to, for it wouldn’t do to try to run in a fog; but when I paddled ahead in the canoe, with the line to make fast, there warn’t anything but little saplings to tie to. I passed the line around one of them right on the edge of the cut bank, but there was a stiff current, and the raft come booming down so lively she tore it out by the roots and away she went. I see the fog closing down, and it made me so sick and scared I couldn’t budge for most a half a minute it seemed to me—and then there warn’t no raft in sight; you couldn’t see twenty yards. I jumped into the canoe and run back to the stern, and grabbed the paddle and set her back a stroke. But she didn’t come. I was in such a hurry I hadn’t untied her. I got up and tried to untie her, but I was so excited my hands shook so I couldn’t hardly do anything with them.
As soon as I got started I took out after the raft, hot and heavy, right down the towhead. That was all right as far as it went, but the towhead warn’t sixty yards long, and the minute I flew by the foot of it I shot out into the solid white fog, and hadn’t no more idea which way I was going than a dead man.
Note that when this book’s telling, it just tells in short sentences, saving its long, multi-clause sentences for mo’ detailed description. Also note how the hick talk is done thru a much livelier dialect, rather than just sounding like it’s coming from an uneducated robot.
Keep in mind, most wouldn’t say that Huckleberry Finn has anywhere near the best prose o’ all literature — it’s just 1 o’ hundreds with better prose than To Kill a Mockingbird.
While this book is relatively short @ 96,000 words, its main plots — Tom Robinson’s trial & the mystery o’ Boo Radley — are e’en shorter. So short, in fact, that this book could probably be a novella if not for all the padded-out dialogue of ordinary people doing ordinary things. There’s 1 scene that goes on for several pages wherein Jem tries to give a note to Boo Radley, which just goes back & forth with filler dialogue, only to end on a shaggy dog story when Atticus stops him. This kind o’ stuff isn’t inherently terrible: Ulysses, widely considered 1 o’ the best works o’ English literature, is mostly just ordina — well, people doing ordinary things. But that book plays a dozen literary tricks as it does so, which is why there are entire books dedicated to footnotes for every few sentence o’ that book, while there’s nothing to say ’bout e’ery “Thank you” & “No, sir” in this book. Plus, e’en its prose is better: nothing in this book will compare to the lavish way Bloom describes the uses o’ water in the “Ithaca” chapter.
’Nother contrast. Here’s 1 o’ the dozen or so pointless scenes in Mockingbird:
One afternoon a month later Jem was ploughing his way through Sir Walter Scout, as Jem called him, and Mrs. Dubose was correcting him at every turn, when there was a knock on the door. “Come in!” she screamed.
Atticus came in. He went to the bed and took Mrs. Dubose’s hand. “I was coming from the office and didn’t see the children,” he said. “I thought they might still be here.”
Mrs. Dubose smiled at him. For the life of me I could not figure out how she could bring herself to speak to him when she seemed to hate him so. “Do you know what time it is, Atticus?” she said. “Exactly fourteen minutes past five. The alarm clock’s set for five-thirty. I want you to know that.”
It suddenly came to me that each day we had been staying a little longer at Mrs. Dubose’s, that the alarm clock went off a few minutes later every day, and that she was well into one of her fits by the time it sounded. Today she had antagonized Jem for nearly two hours with no intention of having a fit, and I felt hopelessly trapped. The alarm clock was the signal for our release; if one day it did not ring, what would we do?
“I have a feeling that Jem’s reading days are numbered,” said Atticus.
“Only a week longer, I think,” she said, “just to make sure…”
Jem rose. “But—”
Atticus put out his hand and Jem was silent. On the way home, Jem said he had to do it just for a month and the month was up and it wasn’t fair.
“Just one more week, son,” said Atticus.
“No,” said Jem. “Yes,” said Atticus.
( “‘Come in!’ she screamed”, followed immediately in the next paragraph, “Atticus came in”, is some prime bathos ).
Anyway, here’s the far better “boring” scene from Ulysses:
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
( This is also bathos, but intentional, & much mo’ interesting & obviously took much mo’ work to conjure up than the filler dialogue before ).
OK… but all these problems would be… acceptable, I guess, for the best book e’er if the plot & characters were jaw-droppingly well-written. Well, they’re not. The story is average @ best, but the characters are straight-up terribly written. This book stars not 1, but 2 Mary Sues: the aforementioned noble white middle-class lawyer, who has no flaws, & his spoiled brat o’ a narrator who’s not like all the other girls & spends most o’ the book praising her flawless father. I should add that this book is heavily based on Harper Lee’s own upbringing, so it’s a shock that the characters who represent the author & her beloved father are depicted as perfect. This legit reads like a bad fan fiction or webcomic.
There are 3 types o’ characters in this book: the perfect anti-racist white heroes, the vile racist poor white villains ( so vile that the main villain has to stoop to attacking the Finch children, e’en tho racist people rarely go round killing the white children o’ e’en antiracist white people, ’cause apparently killing black people isn’t evil ’nough ), & the black people, who are all peaceful, servile Uncle Tom 2ndaryprops to warm all the white liberal hearts. 1 sickeningly sappy scene depicts a large community o’ blacks giving food to their white Jesus, Atticus. The 1 time a black person does anything resembling active resistance is when Tom Robinson tries to flee from jail & is shot to death, which is considered foolish by our noble whites & worth mo’ noble pitying. In this book black people are worthy o’ nothing beyond pity. That’s why they’re symbolized by the titular mockingbird that’s killed: they’re cute li’l pets to make rich white liberals feel good ’bout themselves ( to be fair, the other “mockingbird” is a shy abused child, who is also a pet for well-off people, & his abuse is ’nother example o’ the evil o’ poor people ). Heaven forbid this book depict actual struggle — ¡perhaps e’en with violence! — as that would make this book’s white audience squeamish & they would probably turn round & root for their white supremacist society. This book’s outdated relic o’ racial ( & specially economic ) politics is perfect for an outdated relic that is The New York Times, whose own politics are consistently early-20th-century.
Special note should be given to their critic note for this book. In addition to acknowledging their idiocy in missing a basic fact stated plainly ( since subtlety was beyond Harper Lee’s literary skills ) in this book when they 1st read it, they @ 1 point brag ’bout how New York is so much better than the savage rural lands ’cause they know how to leave people ’lone ( said the airbag who probably supported “Stop & Frisk” for “improving law & order” ), leaving e’en an urbanite elitist like me wishing to Allah that Al-Qaeda would bomb these fuckers ’gain.
’Ventually you’ll be able to stitch together a book from this garbage, & in this literary environ o’ “dump all my shit onto Amazon”, that’ll work great. After all, it’s the sucker reader who’s too dumb to know they can get Shakespeare & the English languages’ greatest classics online for free that has to sift through all this shit, not you.
2. Write said words @ the same time, in the same pretentious coffee shop
In conjunction with the previous rule, the less convenient your means o’ writing is, the mo’ you’ll be able to trick yourself into thinking you’re a serious worker, e’en though you’re still not producing anything o’ any worth to soceity.
3. Write your rules for writing in curt, simplistic demands
This will totally convince readers & not make them want to punch you in the face through the screen in annoyance.
Also, make sure you tell readers they have “no ’scuses” not to follow your advice, like a lack o’ actual evidence o’ its quality. This is mathematical proof.
4. Use the same language everyone else uses
Nothing turns readers off mo’ than anything new. After day-after-day o’ hearing the same cliches like “turns readers off” that have lost all meaning, nothing gives them mo’ joy than to hear this same mediocre-minded speech in the literature they buy in the hopes o’ ’scaping dull reality. But a’least now they’ll get to see a spunky teen fight off dystopian tyrants & Ancient Greek mythological creatures while spewing hashtags, LOL.
Don’t e’en think ’bout touching such dirty concepts as internal rhyme, alliteration, or similies, or your reader won’t take your made-up stories seriously.
5. No, you can’t e’en use these things in poetry anymo’
¿’Cause who e’er cared ’bout playing with language in poetry?
Only cliche Marxist drivel from someone too dumb to have e’en read Das Kapital & choppy, navel-gazing pretentiousness for you, son.
As mentioned constantly, readers are utterly sick o’ originality. ¿Somebody else already made a successful trilogy out o’ “average teen fights gainst evil dystopian totalitarians by dressing in fancy costumes”? ¿What’s that? ¿You mean there’s multiple series ’bout that? ¿What’s 1 mo’? If the market’s proven that people’ll buy 1 book ’bout that, surely they’ll buy mo’, e’en if they have much less creativity.
8. Ne’er use semicolons
I just don’t like them, OK.
9. Carefully plot out your book & write the beginning after the end
That way things won’t happen as natural outcomes o’ what happens before, like in silly realistic worlds, but acts as if ’twas conspicuously planned out by some author deity. It’s not as if you can go back & rewrite the beginning, anyway — once something’s written, it’s set in steel.
10. When writing rules, make sure you talk with faux tough-guy language like you’re some schmuck on Shark Tank
Make sure you talk ’bout “nailing pitches” & making “slam dunk proposals” so as to emphasize that you care purely ’bout gouging suckers who don’t know any better rather than anything resembling a creative process.
The general theme is, you want the reader to want to punch you in the head while reading your work as much as possible.
11. If you’re on Something Awful, you have to talk ’bout how much you love Cormac McCarthy, & if you’re on TV Tropes, you have to lavishly praise Terry Pratchet & call him by a stupid name.
It’s law, fineable for up to $500.
12. Warhammer 40,000 books are some o’ the greatest sci-fi literature
Meanwhile, no Asimov, no LeGuin, no, uh… I actually don’t read that much sci-fi, so I wouldn’t know who else.
¡O! ¡Ray Bradbury! He did sci-fi, & some o’ it was quite great, like “All Summer in a Day”. Too bad his most popular novel was kinda crappy. Seriously: the fact that that dystopian hand-me-down gets so much attention & not his October-themed stories or Something Wicked this Way Comes or Death is a Lonely Business is a greater crime than that guy who listed some crappy Warhammer 40,000 books as the best sci-fi.
You know, that reminds me o’ this 1 site I was reading that had this same dipshit advice so they could peddle some mindless advice book, & the idiot was praising fucking Issac Asimov for writing that amazing story. After screaming @ the monitor, I was thinking, ¿How the hell do you expect me to trust your advice on writing when you can’t e’en tell the difference from the guy who inspired the “Laws of Robotics” & the guy who always bitches ’bout how technology is ruining the world & how photographers gotta get off his lawn, they can’t steal his house’s soul, god damn it?
I’d post a link, but I can’t find the article, ’cause I think the person replaced all her posts with the same advertisement. Might as well get straight to the point.
13. The only 2 important literary lenses for writing are “plot” & “marketing”
14. Just get a degree in business
Since you clearly despise writing as anything but a chore you can pimp out as a marketing tool, you might as well do so in a way that’s much mo’ profitable.
15. Don’t fucking do it
The secret reason you spend mo’ time reading ’bout Pokémon glitches is ’cause it’s actually mo’ enjoyable than puking out 400 words o’ day o’ mindless busywork.
16. Get a real job, asshole
I’m serious. I know ’twas cute when we said that chapter book ’bout Pikachu & Squirtle was great when you were 7, but you’re 26 now & they’re hiring up @ Burger King.
I’ve been becoming increasingly mo’ jaded with literature in the past few months years, & the philosophy that infests the apparent mainstream views o’ writers — as well as the slew o’ schlock that seems to be published — only worsens this.
It seems that such concepts such as creativity & emotional connection have been replaced by the advice that you should puke out as many words as you can. ¿How many blog posts have I seen wherein writers brag ’bout how many words they write per day? ¡Look, they’ve already beaten those slouches Harper Lee & Bashō!
I read this article from Pretentious Title1 & shivered. I’m sorry, but if you write 10,000 words a day, I’m certain that mo’ than 90% o’ that is garbage. That’s almost as long as an entire Shakespeare play — longer than some. I’m quite certain Shakespeare didn’t write his plays in a day — probably ’cause he wasn’t a fucking hack. (To be fair, “The Spirit War” sounds like it’ll be an immensely innovative novel that’ll revolutionize literature. It’ll truly be genre-bending.)
I’d go as far to say that this insinuation that all words can be measured equally shows in itself an utter ignorance o’ literature. ¿What if one’s writing is in verse or iambic pentameter? ¿What if one needs to do research for some parts?
What annoys me the most are these inane metrics applied to writing, as if it’s a science one can apply consistently for excellent results. ¡Just do so & so every hour & instant Tolkien! See, these are “professional” writers, as opposed to actually good writers who may write any # o’ books, stories, poetry ( yeah, try applying this rule to poetry, by the way ), & such. ’Cause they care mo’ ’bout looking like good writers than actually creating good writing in itself, they reach for the quickest method they can find — any way to avoid doubt or having to think critically ’bout what makes good literature in the 1st place or having to think ’bout the million complexities involved in storytelling; so long as one writes [ insert # ] o’ words, e’en if those words are just “really” repeated, one is a “professional” writer as opposed to those lazy people who waste time thinking ’bout the words they write.
Not only are these people who brag ’bout how much garbage they spew pretentious, they’re not e’en competent pretentious people. They’re the equivalent o’ someone bragging to their literary professor that they can read Clifford the Big Red Dog. I can respect brilliant pretentious writers like James Joyce or humble writers who admit they’re just bullshitting for fun, like your average fanfic writer; but idiots who brag ’bout how smart they are are the target most deserving o’ being mocked & ignored.
The fact that this article was on Wired makes me wonder if they programmed a highly sophisticated robot write it. ¿Can we have a flip-side to the Turing Test? — the test to see if a work is so dumb you can’t e’en tell if ’twas written by a human or a robot.
It starts out fair-’nough, albeit with questionable assertions:
Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.
Somebody’s ne’er heard o’ translation.
Society has always been polyglot — hence why translation has existed for centuries. E’en in Shakespeare’s time English would be mixed with French, Latin, & e’en Greece ’cause o’ how big an impact those cultures had on English culture.
Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.
Solution: don’t print the text.
¿How is this a problem for literature? ¿Why does literature need to be printed? ¿’Cause printing feels good?
Literature is quite great @ moving into cell phones, social networks, & e’en streaming videos. In fact, social networks are primary build up o’ literature, & half o’ most streaming videos involves textual chat. E’en as video builds up popularity online, text is still supreme. In fact, society’s probably mo’ literate now than it’s e’er been thanks to text’s supremacy o’er the web. Maybe in the past we could worry ’bout some dystopian future wherein everyone’s a mindless slave in front o’ the flashing colors o’ their screen, blissfully free from reading a single word; but nowadays, while the dystopian future o’ people being mindless slaves in front o’ technology may still be a prospect, you can bet it’d involve reading reams o’ text.
No, in a world where the leading country in art production still keeps works copyrighted 90 years after its creator’s death, & wherein international laws like TPP threaten to push stronger laws on the rest o’ the world, copyright is still ’live & well, despite the existence o’ a few mo’ online pirates.
If anything, literature is hindered mo’ by the increasing attention given to profitability o’er quality, leading to lowering standards o’ literature.
Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.
Which is always terrible in markets.
So now rather than authors relying on busy big businesses to market their work, they have social media, where they can do it themselves mo’ effectively. I think by “destabilized”, you mean “made easier & mo’ effective”.
Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.
Which is why it’s a good idea it’s becoming less prevalent.
¿How is this a challenge? ¿Would it kill these writers to just once not contradict their own core theses?
Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population.
( Laughs ). No, that’s physically impossible. Nobody can “age” faster than anyone else. Aging is simple existing in time. ’Less print readers have time traveling devices to make them go forward in time mo’ quickly, I don’t think so — & I find the prospect that the least technologically sophisticated people would have technology centuries beyond what’s possible now to absurd to chew.
I think you meant the less weaselly words ( though still fragmentary ), “Core demographic for printed media is dying off mo’ ” That’s mo’ depressing to consider, but mo’ accurate.
Maybe 1 o’ these “challenges” should’ve been the devolving quality o’ diction as online writing succumbs mo’ & mo’ to sterile & vague businessese.
Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.
No, that’s just Republicans.
So… ¿The failure o’ print is affecting those who use it the least the most? I’d think it’d be the oldest people who are still unable to use popular technology competently that’d be most blocked from success in the industry. Young people familiar with new technology should feel in bed with… well, new technology.
¿Or is he trying to claim that literature cannot continue without print & newspapers & that young “apprentice” writers are becoming less literate? I’ve already ’splained why that’s obviously false.
Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.
& now we degenerate further into meaningless buzzwords.
¿What the fuck is “economically rationalized ‘culture industry’”?
I certainly don’t think conglomerates being actively hostile to vital aspects o’ humane culture is anything contemporary. We’ve been calling that kind o’ thing “capitalism” for the past 2 centuries, & it’s probably 1 o’ the only things certain in this world, other than maybe death & tax loopholes.
Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.
& now we’re delving into outright fantasy. I don’t know what creature “Long tail” is, but I do hope the Good Wizard Whitebread stops him with his Shape Spells before that foul beast can “balkanize” the audience with its 4th-wall-breaking powers.
¿Whose literary reputation is hurt? This writer couldn’t go the whole way o’ pretending there’s only 1 reputation that exists by giving that phrase an article, so we’re just going to have to figure it out ourselves.
Maybe this is an attempt to recreate the strengths o’ modernist literature through blog posts. You have to dig into deep analyses to understand what this loon’s trying to say, just like with James Joyce.
Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.
¿By making it mo’ accessible? Yes, nothing is a greater challenge to literature than the fact that mo’ people can indulge in it.
¿Remember when we used to fear that we’d lose literary classics — those ol’ dystopians like Fahrenheit 451? That’s ol’ news: now we worry ’bout too many people being able to get access to Shakespeare, apparently.
Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.
I’m almost tempted to rewrite these quotes in all-caps to emphasize how much they sound like some hokey ol’ computer. “BEEP BOOP. COMTEMPORARY LITERATURE NOT CONFRONTING ISSUES OF GENERAL URGENCY. ERROR CODE 728”.
Yes, ’cause no fantasy, romance, or teen book could e’er confront modern problems. I could see the assumption for the 1st for someone immensely ignorant & shallow ( A Song of Ice and Fire could tell you a lot mo’ ’bout the complexities & corruptions o’ political forces that is just as applicable to modern society as medieval than some lit fic that dicks round with word structure & takes place entirely within a literary professors head ); ¿but romance & teen books are irrelevant to contemporary problems?
Considering the author ne’er bothers to specify what he considers to be “issues of general urgency”, we’re left with yet ’nother blanket assertion that has li’l backing, & is probably mo’ wrong than right.
Here’s ’nother better problem for modern literature: “Dumbs down complex issues into simplistic listicles”. If only there was a way to write anything with any semblance o’ depth online. But that’s impossible, ’course. I mean, you can put the entirety o’ Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs online; but you can’t write anything that intelligent online. Those are the rules.
Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.
Just like this 1.
Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.
’Cause collaboration has ne’er created anything valuable, artistically. Nor can anyone hope to do anything individualistic online. Contrast this with, say, Shakespeare, who ne’er worked with anyone else & ne’er had anything to do with the cultural currents o’ his time. He was just some isolated crab in a cave, writing everything from his pure invention, with no inspiration from anyone else @ all. That’s how true writers write. Or how ’bout T.S. Eliot, who filled his poetry with references to ancient literature that everyone in his literary club knew — what we might call “literary memes” today.
As for algorithms & social media replacing the work o’ editors & publishers, that’s false — not the least o’ which ’cause algorithms & social media don’t have any self-consciousness to make decisions independent o’ their fleshy masters. A mo’ accurate statement would be that all 4 o’ these things are guided by profit, which has been the guide to the literature industry since… well, ’twas an industry. As it turns out, industries are always guided by profit, ’cause if it’s not selling for the purpose o’ making money, it’s not called an industry. ’Gain, this is called “capitalism” & has existed for centuries.
If he were making the point that profitability & quality are diverging, that’d be a coherent argument; but he ne’er comes close to proving it. If this writer were half as knowledgable o’ the history o’ literature as he pretends to be, he’d know that the literature industry has been glutted with profitable but low-quality crap fore’er. ¿Know how I always liked to call shitty online writing Boon & Mills 2.0? Yeah, there’s a reason: it’s to emphasize that this is a modern version o’ an ol’ form o’ pumping out cheap, mindless literature. The corollary is that there was a traditional means that existed since the early 1900s. This writer might be pleased to know that back in the 1930s Hemingway, too, bitched ’bout the proliferation o’ cheap romance literature — ’cept he didn’t blame new technology so much as those bitchy womenfolk. As it turns out, the idea that investing a lot o’ money in truly intelligent writing is less profitable than investing less money in convincing lots o’ people that crap is gold was conceived by companies centuries ago.
“Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.
1. I won’t e’en pretend to understand what “ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises” means. Well, I do know: it means nothing. It’s just something the writer thought sounded cool. I would imagine that any franchise would be “pro-fan”; Shakespeare certainly didn’t write his works with the intent that people would hate them. I’m also not sure if it’s s’posed to be the literature that’s ancillary or the merchandise. In context, it seems as if it should be the literature, since I can’t imagine someone complaining ’bout the problem o’ literature being that they don’t care ’nough ’bout selling Mr. Darcy action figures; however, its connection to “merchandise” with a hyphen seems to state that it’s the merchandise that’s ancillary. The meaning o’ what he actually wrote directly contradicts what makes sense in context — which is no rarity, e’en in this short post.
2. How dare you mix your filthy lesser media in my literature. Classic literature sure ne’er mixed with other mediums. Ne’er mind that Shakespeare’s plays were “ancillary” to literature & were made primarily to be performed in essentially an older version o’ television; that didn’t apparently hurt its stature as the highest point o’ English literature. Meanwhile, that hack James Joyce would love to mix in songs, advertisements, & e’en camera techniques from early cinema into that dumb piece o’ pop-culture pollution known as Ulysses.
3. People who can’t e’en bother to use “/”s consistently shouldn’t be judging others on their literacy.
Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.
Let’s ignore the fact that his denigrating comparison o’ different window sizes changing literature to creoles is racist & hilariously worded in the most pretentious way possible & ’stead focus the fact that he seems to think literature falls apart if put in a different-sized rectangle. This is in contrast to books, which have always had the same standard size for all published books fore’er.
I’m actually not e’en sure I interpreted his incredibly vague diction correctly. I’m not sure what part o’ computer & cellphone interfaces are “unstable”, since an “interface” is just any way you use them, which is a large problem domain.
Also, love the redundancy: he could’ve just said that “computers are becoming world’s primary means of cultural access”, since cellphones are, by definition, computers & interfaces are, by definition, the way you access computers. Nothing’s mo’ literate than using mo’ words just for the sake o’ mo’ words. That’s what Strunk & White always said, a’least.
Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.
With the context o’ this writer / robot’s stuffy language, I can’t imagine him saying “the disciplines” or “jack-of-all-trades” without quotation marks. “These scholars — always be steepin’ in those disciplines, ¿you know what I’m saying?”
This 1’s actually coherent, but not relevant to literature. Also, he doesn’t provide any evidence that it’s true or e’en a bad thing. He basically just asserts something ’gain with the stupidest o’ diction & leaves us, as if his profound li’l fortune cookie o’ wisdom were ’nough.
Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.
Wired listicle plagiarizing The Economist headline.
I had to rewrite that sentence to make it closer to the terribleness o’ the original, since my natural proclivity gainst English atrocities made me neglect the participle. I in my silliness wrote “plagiarizes” in simple present tense, which is far too concise to be good.
¿How the fuck can an education system have inflation? I guess this writer is trying to say that there’s too many colleges & not ’nough demand, said in an inane mixed metaphor with currency & economic bubbles ( ¿Why both? ’Cause the writer had to fill what was still a much shorter word requirement than e’en this post I’m writing & couldn’t fill that word demand with substance ). With how expensive colleges have gotten, I doubt that.
Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.
( Pause for laughter ).
All right: this is the line that inspired me to do this whole post. This deserves to be enshrined. Forget those wimps who read Eye of Argon without laughing; I’d like to see them read this sentence with a straight face.
1. ¿A polarizing war? ¡You don’t say! That’s right up there with “wet water” or “crappy shit”.
2. ¿Is the “civil cold war” some fantasy hybrid he’s writing ’bout in some novel he’s writing? ¿Do those evil commie Soviets develop a time machine & conspire to use it to go back & force the north to lose the civil war in hopes o’ debilitating the US’s global power, allowing the Soviet Union to be dominant? ’Cause you’d probably do much mo’ for contemporary literature by writing that amazing plot than writing this dumb listicle.
3. Sentence fragment is harmful to Hulk brain.
4. After making all these jokes, I’ve realized that I still have no idea what this crackpot is talking ’bout. Stop trolling: everyone knows it’s the Worldwide Mad Deadly Communist Gangster Computer God™ that controls everything, not some dumb civil cold war. Leave the insane ramblings to the experts, please.
The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.
Looks like you failed to copy that headline from World News Weekly & still had that line from that emo poetry you were composing in your clipboard. Oops.
I’ll give this article 1 thing: usually I feel a bit soul-sick reading these listicles, just rolling my eyes & thinking, Not this vapid shit ’gain. This article was a’least refreshingly creative in its insanity, making me slap my forehead & think, ¿What the fuck? ¿Where’d you e’en come up with that garbled mess o’ words? I’m still not sure that these lines didn’t all just come from the Chomskybot.
It’s truly the greatest threat to our present society — much mo’ than Hairpiece, fascist corporatism, or Google searches that give me stupid listicles ‘stead o’ useful info.
Oddly, I have the opposite conclusion: the word “unique” has no logical meaning ’cause nothing could truly be described as “unique”.
¿Want proof? ¿Can we describe something with English words? Then it can be put in a set o’ multiple things that can be described with English words, & therefore can’t be “unique”, ’cause it shares something with an infinite # o’ other things. The paradox o’ “unique” is that if it’s possible to describe something as “unique”, then by definition, it can’t be. It’s like the sentence, “This sentence is false” or, inversely, a set o’ all sets that don’t contain themselves.
If one were to argue that “unique” only means 1 o’ some kind, not all kinds, then the argument that “unique” can’t be modified is obviously false: something that is 1 o’ a kind in mo’ kinds than something else is unquestionably mo’ “unique” than that something else. ‘Course, “kind” is so vague that there could be infinite #s ( indeed, a kind is a thing itself, which should please Lisp fans immensely ), & thus it’d be impossible to test all o’ the kinds something could be ‘lone in, & thus it’d be impossible to prove that anything is mo’ “unique” than anything else; but we’re simply talking theoretics, not facts.
A better grammar rule is to avoid the word “unique” ’cause it invokes a different bad habit o’ writing: sensational language & o’eruse o’ superlatives &mash; ‘specially since it’s so oft invoked in a narcissistic way to describe oneself. After all, there’s nothing mo’ trite than calling oneself unique.
A common dictate in literature is that one should avoid referencing current events to avoid “dating” one’s literature.
There’s 2 problems, the 2nd being the most major:
Dating a work isn’t inherently bad. In fact, sometimes people enjoy works swimming in their era, not just for nostalgia, but also for people too young to have lived in that era. I’ve known young people who enjoy black & white films simply ’cause they enjoy the quaintness.
Mo’ importantly: it’s impossible to avoid. Society changes so much & so rapidly — ’specially now — that decades from now, e’en works trying to be as timeless as possible will look indecipherable.
We can see this in literature by looking @ many classics & seeing how steeped they are in their times. People praise Shakespeare for making “timeless” stories when many people have trouble understanding them ’cause o’ how starkly language has changed since then. Dickens tales take place in a time when almost nobody had electricity, when nowadays we view the power going out for mo’ than a couple days is a serious danger. In fact, in connection to what I said before, people oft praise Dickens ’cause o’ what he said ’bout the society in which he lived; we count its use o’ pop-culture as a feather in its cap, not a black eye.
The idea that one can make a work that’s “timeless” assumes that we can predict the future — that we know what will be considered “current events” in the future & what we’ll think resonates1.
Perhaps a better rule is that art should be mo’ than just current events & that it should actually say something ’bout them. The main feature in common examples o’ bad pop-culture references is that they’re just copy-&-paste references without any analysis or commentary. But then, that’s just a symptom o’ a far direr artistic crime: a lack o’ creativity.
Speaking o’ trends, it’s a habit o’ business-oriented (¡eww!) writers to tuck self-promotion into opening paragraphs o’ articles any way they can. I s’pose the average reader—ha, ha, ¡what vulgar dopes!—doesn’t notice, but, ahem, experts such as myself are quite aware, & annoyed by it. & nothing’s worse than writing that makes me feel slightly pinchy. Ugh.
Point is: I know that blogs can lead to book deals.
However, I want you to think twice before you decide this is your path.
Here’s the prime problem: we see here that the article title doesn’t actually match the thesis o’ the article. The title says, “don’t,” but the article itself merely says, “think ’bout it 1st.” It’s like how the writers o’ newspaper articles oft don’t get to control the name o’ their article, oft leading to contradiction, such as that fucking dweeb Noah Smith mentions. But in this case, the writer obviously chose the title herself, so it doesn’t apply @ all.
Her 1st point is that “blog writing isn’t the same as book writing.” If she defines these by their specific mediums (“blog” defined as a series o’ articles online & “book” defined as a physical collection o’ paper pages bound together), then this is obvious. In fact, to treat 1 as the other would be physically impossible. Thus, that’s not what she’s saying @ all.
’Stead, she makes assumptions o’ content from form, for arbitrary reasons.
Blog posts, to live up to their form, should be optimized for online reading. That means being aware of keywords/SEO, current events/discussions, popular online bloggers in your area, plus–most importantly—including visual and interactive content (comments, images, multimedia, links).
“To live up to their form” is as valid a reason as “’cause I said so.” The SEO point is only necessary if one is shallow ’nough to be obsessed with hits that they’re willing to sacrifice any artistic decisions for them, which is no different than saying that writing books in a way that doesn’t perfectly fit market studies is “wrong.” My blog does fine without caring ’bout anything but the bare basics o’ SEO; only current events (I do talk ’bout current political issues sometimes; but I also write ’bout ol’ issues, like video games from the 90s); popular bloggers in my area, which is a ridiculous criteria, since the whole point o’ the internet is that it’s international—¿Who the hell e’er cared ’bout whether a blog was written in their locality?; & visual & interactive content, which usually distract from useful content mo’ than it actually adds anything. For example, this article’s trite photo o’ a stamp that says “blog” on it: this is not only cliché to the point o’ being annoying (& therefore not entertaining), it adds no info. It’s neither interesting nor informative, & therefore it is useless & shouldn’t be included. She only included it ’cause it’s a mindless tradition that bloggers follow; & that’s what her reasoning for her argument that blogs must be written a certain way goes: it’s mindless tradition, as is the usual guiding line for marketing types who despise, ’bove all, independent thought.
To be fair, I do agree with her defense o’ blogging as an art in itself & that people shouldn’t use it as a shallow way to market their “real” writing. Not only is it “almost silly to have to state” this, but it’d be almost silly to have to state that trying to get attention to art through inferior art is counterproductive. I don’t know ’bout other people, but I’m not one to respond to crappy art with the thought, Hmm… I bet this person’s other work is actually good.
But she goes on to contradict her own arguments in the 2nd point. She labels it, “Blogs can make for very bad books,” but then develops this argument by saying that stories written without editing or care will likely be bad. That’s true, whether in blog form or book form—we have plenty o’ examples o’ the latter to prove that. But e’en she adds the qualifier, “unless, of course, you wrote the book first and divided it into blog posts,” which is the equivalent o’ saying, “Blogs can make very bad books, ’cept when they don’t.” The existence o’ counterexamples debunks the claim.
@ the end o’ the point, she argues that books with visuals could be put in blog form well, for no reason. Indeed, I find this counterintutive: if any type o’ book would suffer from being put in online form, it might be that with visuals, which require mo’ detail, & thus lose quality in the conversion from high-resolution print pages to low-resolution online images that must also be compressed into somewhat blurry JPEGs or pixellated GIFs & PNGs & also take much longer to load. Meanwhile, text, being so abstract, will be just as good on a computer screen as in a book. Indeed, text could be made better online than in book form: rather than having to bother with the tedium o’ flipping through pages or keeping bookmarks, one could use anchor links or search for specific text. For a real-world example, for the article I made wherein I joked ’bout some funny parts o’ the Bible, e’en though I had a hard copy o’ a Bible, which was what I actually read, since I needed those brilliant footnotes to tell me a million times that God was a rather nifty guy, I also used an online copy when writing the article to help me find passages I lost in the hard copy, since I could just hit Ctrl+F & type in the passage I was looking for, rather than flip through thousands o’ pages, paying attention to every sentence. Computer monitors also don’t need to be held open like many books, which is useful for those who like to read while eating, such as gluttonous swine like me.
The 3rd point gets close to the argument she’s obviously trying to make with this article, muddled by the title & the vagueness o’ the rest o’ this article: if one wants to sell a book to big publishers, one shouldn’t publish it in blog form. That’s specific, though. She defends this generalization based purely on evidenceless experience; furthermo’, she admits that there’s exceptions to e’en this specific example.
Also, ¿are there truly people so ignorant o’ the publishing world that they honestly ask, “¿Would it be good for me to release my book online for free, where it’ll compete with any paid version, before selling it to a big publisher? ¿Would big publishers find it professional for me to hurt their sales by doing the equivalent o’ intentionally pirating my own work that I hope they’ll invest money to sell for me?”? I thought that the “no prior publication” condition for selling to big publishers was common knowledge.
& point 4 is just the article writer pushing her own opinion on what makes “good” books & blogs, which may be relevant if one wants to sell one’s book to just Jane Friedman, but not particularly useful for the vast majority o’ writers.
The assumption that web literature—including blogs—must be a “simplified, keyword-driven, ADHD world” is just an arbitrary generalization, & one that, like all the rest, she contradicts herself by noting that books oft do this now, too. This is not a symptom o’ the internet technology, which has no relevance to any o’ this @ all, but to the increasing commercialization o’ literature. It’s what capitalism does to all art: dumbs it down to the lowest common denominator. If she paid attention to book sales, she’d see that most o’ the hard-copy books that sell the best are those that “mimic the online world by chunking the content so the book reads “faster.” It’s certainly not Ulysses that’s on the New York Times bestseller list—though you certainly can read Ulysses online, & there’d be nothing to stop someone from splitting it into chapters & posting them as blog articles, or doing the same for a modern story written like Ulysses.
Maybe it’s that most o’ these articles are written by ol’ people not used to computer monitors, but I don’t have any trouble reading “meaty” literature on a computer screen; & the popularity o’ eReaders & web literature like Worm shows that this isn’t an isolated experience. So I ne’er understood this implicit connection ’tween internet technology, which should be content-agnostic, & simplistic writing.
What I love most is that @ the end o’ the article, she has a list o’ ways blogging books may work, which gives examples such as frivolous rules, like that it be “nonfiction,” “generating buzz,” & “expanding audience,” with 1 li’l point, “solves a problem for people,” being so open-ended that it could include everything. What isn’t focused @ all is that it creates work that people actually enjoy reading or that is actually creative or interesting.
But if you do want to “blog your book,” some guy has some article called, “279 Days to Overnight Success.” I want you to read o’er that title a few mo’ times & savor its juicy paradoxical diction. But then, I guess when you’re “single-minded in marketing” (¿aren’t most in marketing?) & have “the mind and heart of an entrepreneur,” you don’t need to worry ’bout such frivolous concerns as coherency.
But then, this shouldn’t be shocking @ all. ¿You know who this guy is? Why, he’s the very creator o’ our favorite waste-creation facility on the web: ¡Problogger!
Perhaps a better rule for writers than “don’t blog your book” is “don’t write your book like an entrepreneur.”
