tbh I don't hate it as much as the first time I read it. Like I understand where she's going with it. and idk, this is like one page, maybe things get better. My main issue is that it reads like if you ran the prompt "Beat generation but gen z" through an AI model trained exclusively on fascist blue check tweets. Like if you don't have a phD in terminally online right-wing culture, you'd have to look up every other word and the sense in which it is used. I get that it's trying to use modern lingo, but it's just doing way too much, it's as if she crammed every sort of youth internet culture signifier she could think of into one page. I had to read this one page multiple times to see that no she actually is writing a story here and it's not just some nonsense Burroughs-esque cut-up novel made up entirely of new right dogwhistles and the most obscure gen z slang.
It's far from the worst thing I've ever read, but as a former Beat worshipper I wrote far better free associative wannabe Beat prose when I was in high school. I can't believe something like this got published, it needs a lot of work.
I think you have to be extremely online in specific ways for it to be clear and evocative.
Like the first line, I'm not sure what giving knight errant means. He looks like the kind of guy who's on a quest? Maybe with plate armor? Also organ-meat eater, so he looks like Liver King? Fuck that strongly contradicts my previous impression, which is impressive because that was already kind of vague.
Then we move onto he's like a byronic hero. This is another archetype that contradicts the Liver King heavily, what with him being an exuberant grifter and the byronic hero being a brooding but deep emo guy and then finally he's giving Haplogroup R1b, which I assume is some skull measuring Nazi adjacent nonsense.
EDIT: I still hate it but it kinda reminds me of something Jenna K Moran (who rules) would right if she were an extremely online right wing teenager, so I feel weirder about hating it
It’s interesting how more modern writers use much shorter sentences in their paragraphs. I’ve been reading novels from the early 1900’s and they have some of the longest run-on sentences I’ve ever seen
Adam Smith in the beginning of Wealth of Nations has looooooong sentences with tons of commas. I added the breaks, this is actually one paragraph:
Among the
savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to
work is more or less employed in useful labour, and endeavours to provide,
as well as he can, the necessaries and conveniencies of life, for himself,
and such of his family or tribe as are either too old, or too young, or
too infirm, to go a-hunting and fishing.
Such nations, however, are so
miserably poor, that, from mere want, they are frequently reduced, or at
least think themselves reduced, to the necessity sometimes of directly
destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people,
and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to
be devoured by wild beasts.
Among civilized and thriving nations, on the
contrary, though a great number of people do not labour at all, many of
whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times, more
labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the
whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly
supplied; and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is
frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and
conveniencies of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.
"The savage societies are sometimes reduced by shortage to leaving people to die, unlike our enlightened land of plenty where leaving people to die is standard procedure"
Run on sentences area awesome. For twelve years my teachers told me not to use them but I defied them all and continue to string together sentences with the wrong uhh... mark thingies to this day!
I hate long sentences; they make me angry... were I to purge one group of people in my socialist utopia, it would be those pretentious, self-appointed guardians of whatever outdated "style book" first instilled into the eager mind of an innocent child the notion that communicating in emojis (noble word! ) was unacceptable, and who like the Old Testament serpent feed to their sycophantic followers the old lie -- what lie, you ask; well, the lie that if you but speak intelligently, you will be as gods, that if you eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Case Endings and Suburdinate Clauses, you shall know both good and evil, and your writing will be immortal; that if you stop using verbalizations like "lmao" and "skibidi" and "many such cases," people will respect you and love you and worship you all your days, for you now see things sub specie aeternitatis (more like sub specie LOL); and that generally, you have performed a sort of discipline for the mind analagous to cleansing the body in a shower-bath, which latter is obviously a bourgeoise and counter-revolutionary act. I hate tankies so fucking much.
There was some book I had to read over the summer in preparation for AP English my senior year of high school, and it was all just page length stacks of nested clauses where it would just stop in the middle of a sentence, elaborate on some aspect of it, interrupt to elaborate - at least once, usually more - some more, then continue to keep doing this out to an absurd depth, only to meander back to it most of a page later and then either finish it or start another pile of nested clauses. Like look at how I structured that sentence and imagine something ten times worse, and then imagine it happening at least once in every single paragraph and at least once per page.
Also the story was awful in its own right, terrible prose aside. All I can remember of the plot was that the POV character was a dumbass and killed someone by being a dumbass and it all hinged entirely on inscrutable 19th century superstitious sensibilities.
At the end of the year I gave the book to a junior in one of my classes who was going to take AP English the next year and who had to read that same story over the summer.
I think a part of it is the homogenisation of the industry. People tend to write novels that publishers want to publish, and a part of that involves doing what is thought to make people more likely to read, like starting off with a hook and shorter, more direct sentences. A novel is a product first and foremost these days, not something someone writes solely as a creative endeavor.
I've been reading Tanith Lee books recently and really enjoying them, and read that her career was pretty emblematic of this.
She wrote weird fiction. Fantasy, scifi, horror, thrillers, etc. She hopped from genre to genre and would write books that had a very ambiguous genre (if a story is scary and has the story beats of a horror novel but it takes place in a traditional sword and sorcery setting is it horror or fantasy? Or both? I think Tanith Lee found this question very tedious.). In the 70s and 80s she was writing an absurd number of books and getting them published, but in the 90s paper became much more expensive and as this reduced the profit margins on books and increased number of copies sold to be profitable she started to get more and more pushed out of traditional publishing.
Nobody wanted to publish a ton from an author who wouldn't stay in one lane to build a dedicated fanbase of "fantasy fans" or "horror readers" and they definitely didn't want to risk selling a fantasy novel that wasn't clearly a fantasy novel. She got a bit published during this time but mostly her rejected manuscripts just piled up. It's not even that her books hadn't been profitable, they're just didn't fit into the neat categories that publishers now wanted. Blacklisted due to falling just outside of risk management guidelines for writing books that people would just call "dark fantasy" now probably.
it's built on like 20 layers of in-jokes and is completely inscrutable to anyone who hasn't spent their entire lives in the deepest corners of internet culture, it's full of new right dogwhistles, and it sounds like a gen z parody of 60s beatnik jazz writing by an AI trained exclusively on fascist blue check tweets. Tbh it's nowhere near the worst thing ever been put to paper but I don't think this should exist as a published book.
it's built on like 20 layers of in-jokes and is completely inscrutable to anyone who hasn't spent their entire lives in the deepest corners of internet culture
... that's how all culture works. You're not going to get most of the in-jokes and cultural references of some other country's culture immediately because you didn't grow up in it. Doesn't mean it's bad.
This is hilarious! I love it unironically, though if the whole book is like that I'd have to read it in parts. YouTube poops are usually very short for good reason
He wanted to tell the whole World Wide Web how he felt: She's so hot I want to clean her room, rescue her, white knight defend her in comments and battle. He was in his /a/ poster arc, Why Is She So Perfect? but he'd have to play it cool, chill sigma, no simping. Alcibiades, that's me. The last samurai, I'm him. I'm literally him. I'm Ryan Gosling in Drive. I'm American Psycho. I'm Joker. I'm Taxi Driver. He'd stand above her, tall and strong. She'd stare up at him with her shining anime, no her shining animal eyes, her real eyes, realize real lies. Wondering what he was thinking. He'd stare into them and then he'd sit beside her, very close, take a breath and say, Damn Bitch, You Live Like This? like Max to Roxanne from A Goofy Movie (1995) from the meme (2016).
They would smile. There would be butterflies. She'd kiss his cheek, his real cheek, not the marble one, the pink one with the acne scars.
He was a handsome boy on the subway. She was sitting across from him. He had spiky hair. She didn't have a nose. They were transitory, unreal in their realness, MSpaint mouse-drawn lineart. She smiled towards him and he had to look away. Because she was not like other girls? Because she was still a virgin at her age? He couldn't face her. He didn't even go to clubs. FTGA.
But it was all a fantasy. The wall was too high, as you can see. And he had brainworms. She said see you later boy. But I don't want to make it anymore ovbious.