“A new sentimental age is upon us,” warns Christian Lorentzen on Bookforum.
If his warning was applied to pop music, it has already come to pass in Lorde’s new song. Gone is the spectre of death hanging over her in Melodrama, as are her disenchantment, her melancholic loneliness at the party the record narrates, the sadness infecting her every movement. Perhaps they were never there to begin with [did we reflect the way we felt on this record as we tore through London on our violent breakdowns in 2018?].
Our Struggle got the Vanity Fair treatment, courtesy of Lauren Mechling, who traces the beginning and sensationalist rise of the podcast. Lauren Teixeira and Drew Ohringer weren’t in the literary zeitgeist, but twitter is free and authors tend to go on twitter to promote their work and they also tend to keep their DMs open. That Knausgaard was old news was irrelevant. The duo were determined to bring their Knausgaardian mayhem to life. Mechling considers what they’ve created the podcast equivalent of being in the presence of someone who stimulates you intellectually. I’ll put it down to being back into the world now that bars are open that I wasn’t aware they landed Daddy Dyer and were then forced to pull the plug on the episode [I will never unsee Dyer dressed like St Vincent, thanks Lauren!]. I guess, they could go for Rob Doyle next just to piss Dyer off even further.
Morbid Books’ Lev Parker wrote an explosive missive for his second Edgelord column on Safety Propaganda. He sees Ambit as a “vehicle for bland, ineffectual vanity” on par with the majority of literary magazines. If it is to ever become better, he says, the people behind it would need to engage in a drastic project of erasing the “dross” from their archive, suggesting there would be very little left when they were done. He has an utterly different view of Ambit Pop, dreamed up by Kirsty Allison [anyone with an ARC of PSYCHOMACHIA hit me up]. Under Allison’s helm, Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi, an “old friend and antagonist”, was enlisted as guest editor of Issue #1. That Allison offered Saoudi, who is engaged in an ongoing self-reinvention project to become “a man of letters”, seems to be part of his argument she’s taking the magazine somewhere else. He considers the relaunched publication to possess “more style and spirit” than its competitors. Ambit before Pop is a distant past that has no connection to the magazine’s phoenix-like recovery and new future.
MuubTube has wrapped its first season, but the real tragedy is that one half of the pod, Owen Vince, was in Acton in 2009. Anything west of the RA is considered a no-go, soz. To tie things over till MuubTube 2.0, Vince has published a blockbuster essay on post-war Soviet cinema (and bodies, living and dying and everything in between).
Eliza Clark was inspired by the aesthetics of a music video to write Boy Parts, according to a recent interview. On Dirt, Jason Diamond fangirls over Paul Newman. “On Twitter, it’s almost all about sex,” he notes. Pretty much sums up the last 11 years. Somehow I never knew Newman and James Dean fucked, but now all the threesomes pale in comparison now.
“I’m not xeroxing my own books in my basement but I want to feel like I am.”
Ottessa Moshfegh dropped by Selected Prose. She wouldn’t choose to return to New York now. She was “mostly a boring sober person” when she lived there and when she left she was “excited to be moving on.” She’s never been shy, she tells host Jon Perry. Advice from her sister propelled her to seek out both the people and the experiences that would help her live the life she was after. She became “email friends” with Garielle Lutz when it was “novel” and was consequently obsessed with “grammar in a Lutzian way.” Her side gig is screenwriting but nothing she’s written so far has been released, although an adaptation of Eileen, co-authored by Moshfegh and her husband, may be shooting this winter. Perry moves the conversation forward with skill. He considers Moshfegh’s switch from first to third person the literary version of “method acting.” A question on their shared Croatian heritage seems like it will become the background to Moshfegh applying for citizenship. Towards the end, the discussion turns to god, who Moshfegh increasingly believes is real. “Maybe technology hypnotises you away from those big questions.”
Moshfegh went semi-viral on Twitter even though she’s not on it by contributing to a Bookforum feature on “risky books” she’d like to read. Leo Robson, Sarah Nicole Prickett and Rachel Kushner (who tends to return to works of fiction she loves including those of Duras and Proust) were also among those who contributed. “Art is not media,” Moshfegh said, but works of art are born to “expand consciousness.” She defends two books in particular: American Psycho and Lolita [why she chose to single out those two isn’t clear]. She calls for the separation of art from the political and the moral, specifically stating she hopes in the future writers will not write “for the betterment of society.” It isn’t clear if she has a particular writer in mind, or if she has observed a shift in writers who she perceives to have conformed to the mob.
Sam Pink had some thoughts on the subject.
I recall a BOMB Magazine interview, where he said “to decide why a character is acting a certain way would mean I have a moral objective in mind, and I don’t really, not with writing,” before naming Scott McClanahan as a writer who deliberately creates flawed main characters [as an antidote to the flawless narrators that have become norm].
Back Patio have been asking the real questions in literature.
Allie Rowbottom got Jon Lindsey drunk on tequila and on coke and K at a hotel before she interviewed him for Hobart. Cat Marnell had an “enchanted as fuck” summer - in 2011 [have I missed the goss on The Bold and The Beautiful?]. Life of the party Tea Hacic-Vlahovic has embarked on a book tour across Italy. I recently texted a fashion friend that Prada should have her open one of their shows reciting passages from her book and later double this with a performance art exhibit at Fondazione Prada. She hasn’t responded yet.
“You can't make art without hurting other people/yourself.”
Elizabeth Ellen pulled no punches when she discussed autofiction in her interview with Hello Author. She draws a distinction between autobiographical fiction, the realm of male writers that tend to be celebrated, and autofiction, a term applied to female writers as a way of diluting their artistic merit. If autobiographical fiction stands for the great works of literature, autofiction, she suggests, reflects musings akin to keeping a diary [where would Anais Nin fall between these categories? Perhaps the wider argument should be correcting the assumption that a diaristic work is void of artistic merit]. Books are supposed to make readers uncomfortable, she says. Ellen believes the tunnel vision, black and white thinking plaguing the cultural landscape has “dulled” the arts but feels free to speak her mind as she has already been cancelled.
Quinn Roberts has also been preoccupied with autofiction. Via Kate Zambrino and his inability to choose between being an essayist or a critic [precipitated, it seems, by his decision to join Substack], he interrogates what he refers to as hybrid books, in which writers are critics, essayists, novelists, theorists, poets, and beyond. “These authors fashion themselves as outsiders, and they certainly seem earnest in their professions of alienation.” But they’re not, he posits, they’ve already been embraced by the establishment. The work they produce “comes off as strangely conservative.” Books about writing books. The new avant-garde, if it is to ever emerge, needs to disentangle itself, let loose, and write from instinct and with “no constraints” to [as John Belknap put it in Flash Art] “arrest readers with tales of novel living.”
Patrick Nathan is writing another novel. Thomas Moore’s second book with Amphetamine Sulphate (which follows a young man whoring it up in Paris) has been sent to printers. Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi is out January 25th, 2022.
In Twitter news, I broke the story that Rob Doyle’s next book will be published in the autumn. Autobibliography is his first work of non-fiction. I guess he wasn’t kidding when he said his Irish Times gig formed and deformed him.
If Lorentzen’s thesis is the warning, Justin E. H. Smith [resolutely in favour of “decadent romanticism”] presents the antidote: “human beings, have always been doing hardcore shit, and it is a purpose of art to lay this bare, and compel us to meditate on it.”