Reading the news the last couple days has meant wading through all the hysteria and told-you-so’s and angry yelling about Biden’s performance during the debate. It’s exhausting and it does no one any good for middling Substack writers (I include myself here) to hold forth on What Went Wrong or suggest replacements for Biden or plea for an open convention. (Bill Maher is in the opinions section of the New York Times, trying to help steer our nation back on course? We are fucked.) Anyway, I thought of the Edith Wilson episode of Drunk History, watching that is as helpful as reading the 18 op-eds that have been published since I started writing this paragraph.
I need to clear out some tabs, sweep out the dust bin that is my brain, etc etc, so here are some things that are happening:
Andrea Long Chu wrote about Rachel Cusk. Truly I have no biases here, I feel pretty lukewarm about Cusk. I see why it’s good and interesting and people credit her with reinvigorating the novel, but I can’t, without being paid for it, spend that much of my life thinking about the creative endeavors of the upper classes. As soon as someone mentions a kitchen renovation I am looking for an exit. It’s much like the spiritual ennui of a fictional university professor — “gee, sounds tough, is that the time I gotta go.” But I thought on the whole that Chu’s essay was not great but worth considering.
We’re getting to the point where we’re seeing how limited Andrea Long Chu’s ability to write criticism is. She’s only really interested in figuring out how a novel expresses and reveals its author’s underlying political ideology — politics is not necessarily an illegitimate way of reading literature, but Chu consistently relates that ideology back to the author’s personal failings. Zadie Smith’s failings as a novelist relate back to her failure to support the Palestinian cause and that is an ethical failing, etc. And that’s fine, everyone needs a shtick and moral superiority is really popular right now. But every now and then I try to remember a book or author that Chu does like, because all of her New York pieces have been “takedowns,” and I fail. Which is kind of the sign of a not very good critic. Assassin, not critic.
All her criticism sounds a bit like her essay on Avita Ronell. Let’s find the defect in the person and in the work and link them together, and if we just fill our culture with people with the right politics, the right ideology, the purest souls, we will have a better world. I think that is silly. (And I think we mistake Chu’s work for profound because our critical culture is so reluctant to criticize big figures like Smith, Cusk, Moshfegh, etc. Sometimes, a Chu “takedown” is the first piece in a major publication that even bothers to say “hey some of this is not great.”) Again: I don’t think this is the wrong approach, just that it’s very limited. Everyone has their angle of attack — and god knows with a lot of critics their angle is just “look at how smart I am!!!” and that is definitely worse.
Chu has a book of essays coming out next year, and I’m curious to see if the reviews will turn into a kind of blood sport. This happens when a prominent critic releases a book, everyone wants to take a shot at the throne etc.
Related: some critics need to get off social media. There is a certain type of critic who is just fueled by resentment that they are not recognized as the heir to Sontag or Trilling, that the kids don’t fanboy over reviews and longform essays, that the critic is not a person of authority in the culture. Which is how, I assume, you get someone who is very quick to lay out all their very impressive intellectual credentials declaring that Lolita is a “moral test” and not a fucking novel!
Every six months or so, someone recreates Lolita discourse, either by saying we should ban it because it promotes pedophilia or for saying that it’s a love story actually, and then people who came out of this university system life of the mind nostalgia work themselves into a snit posting excerpts from letters and critical essays to win the argument about what Lolita is really about. And at no point do they get some perspective and think, huh, I am probably arguing with a 15-year-old right now. Or, I am yelling about ART at a lady who writes Christian romance novels for the amusement of her knitting circle. This is not healthy behavior, and it is best dealt with personally, with some introspection on their attachment to external markers of success (university degrees, book deals, publishing credits) as a way of masking internal vacuity. I think there are some novels about this?????? Maybe they could help.
I was listening to a soul-deadening podcast discussion between two former academics turned general interest writers and novelists, who were celebrating the distribution of people with advanced degrees outside the university system. Now that academics can’t get jobs in universities, they’ll use their wisdom to heighten the discourse and participate in conversations about art, politics, and history with people without access to elite institutions. But to me, this is not going to create a more intellectual space, it’s just going to be failed professors yelling at people online because they don’t get Lolita.
Eileen Jones’s film reviews increasingly feel like they are not about the film in question but are instead attempts to win an argument that started on twitter with teenagers who have seen five movies outside of the extended Star Wars universe. Nothing else explains the bizarre digressions. Get off social media! For your own good!
The New York Times fucked up so bad they had to write one of those passive aggressive maybe the real problem is your expectation that we know what we are talking about pieces.
If you haven’t been following the controversy about White Rural Rage, it is basically this: the New York Times wrote some extremely positive coverage of this book that says small town white folks are going to destroy democracy because of their sense of entitlement. But the academics whose work is cited in the book, critics who actually know how to read, and smart people who live in these regions and don’t simply observe and judge from afar have been tearing the book apart for months now.
Because the NYT does not like to admit that it is ever wrong, the mea culpa article says these critics just want more empathy for poor white people — rather than the real problem of the book which is its misinterpretation of data and wild logical inconsistencies. Like, if you don’t know how to define the word “rural,” maybe don’t write a book with rural in the title. It’s somehow even worse than What’s the Matter with Kansas, which fundamentally misunderstands the economic foundation of American agriculture (among other things), doesn’t engage with the history of the state, and makes wild speculative leaps to support Frank’s thesis. That book is also beloved by people who have no idea what they are talking about and have never been to the places they want to write off.
Did you know the USPS has a podcast? I guess you do have to expect at this point that every company in America has asked themselves at one point, Should we have a podcast? Someone at some tiny real estate firm in St. Louis, Missouri, has probably had to watch YouTube tutorials about how to start a podcast at the behest of an Adderall and protein shake-fueled supervisor.
This is part of the Cult of Creativity curse. No one can just be typing anymore, because it’s not creatively fulfilling. And god knows we all must be constantly creatively fulfilled.
The reason I mention this is because I ended up listening to one of their episodes about a fraud investigation into a fake psychic, and it was pretty fascinating. But it reminded me of how annoying The Eyes of Tammy Faye was, with Jessica Chastain’s revisionist history of Tammy Faye Bakker being some kind of victim/hero, rather than a person whose empire was built on spiritually and financially defrauding the lonely and the naive and manipulating them into writing a never ending stream of checks. I would much rather see a story about that than another Oscar bait biopic.
Also reminds me of Shirley Jackson’s “The Possibility of Evil.”
And in case you missed it, Meagan Masterman’s essay about how we are living in the world that reality television created from last week is worth your time:
Andrea Long Chu is a really interesting case to me in that the first essay by her I ever encountered was her n+1 essay about Valerie Solanas, the anti-trans tendencies in some second wave feminism, and her own relationship to feminism - and I thought it was brilliant and witty and illuminating and personal in a way that wasn't cloying or overly precious. But she sort of lost me with her "takedown" of Moshfegh's Lapvona. Lapvona was actually panned by a number of critics, most of whom just seemed to find the novel deeply unpleasant, but Chu's specific critique - that she thought the book's grotesques and quasi-religious themes were ultimately just the hoary parable of a self-righteous church lady - didn't really sit with me. I kept thinking, "Does Chu think this about Graham Greene or Flannery O'Connor too?" I mean she very well might, but I don't know if she'd find as little pushback for saying so than she would with Moshfegh, who's incredibly successful in a landscape where a lot of fiction writers are struggling.
Eileen Jones, likewise, lost me when her review of Asteroid City characterized Wes Anderson thusly: "a friend of mine said that Wes Anderson seemed like somebody who, as a kid, was dressed by his parents in a miniature seersucker suit, as worn by desiccated Southern gentlemen, just to see how precious he’d look. Then he never stopped wearing it, having larger and larger seersucker suits made until he developed a kind of seersucker suit of the soul." Is she saying his soul is ... breathable & unfussy enough to skip the dry-cleaner's? What does such an observation have to do with the film? Why make up a caricature of a child to heap scorn onto? She clearly found the film vacuous, but instead of explaining why, she just inserted a cartoon-y southern stereotype alluding to the director's Texas roots (even though he clearly lives the life of an expat aesthete in France now) instead of where she found voids in the substance of the movie - which was directed by, y'know, an adult man.
Long Chu is looooooooooooooong (winded)