#lauren oyler

[elwenyere]

"Since Montaigne, the best essays have been, as the French word suggests, trials, attempts. They entail the writer struggling toward greater knowledge through sustained research, painful introspection, and provocative inquiry. And they allow the reader to walk away with a freeing sense of the possibilities of life, the sensation that one can think more deeply and more bravely—that there is more outside one’s experience than one has thought, and perhaps more within it, too. These essays, by contrast, are incapable of—indeed, hostile to the notion of—ushering readers, or Oyler herself, into new territory, or new thought. The pieces in No Judgment are airless, involuted exercises in typing by a person who’s spent too much time thinking about petty infighting and too little time thinking about anything else."

If anyone ever wrote a review of my work that was this well-researched and this damning, I would simply. perish.

[romdocitizen]

- lauren oyler, no judgement

[weirdgirlification]

lauren oyler takedown that is all the talk of literary twitter

[grandhotelabyss]

Any thoughts on the Lauren Oyler controversy?

One of the reasons literature seems so moribund in this country is that it's entirely ceased to be fun. One of the things that made it fun in the old days was critical bloodsport. All the better if it could be backed up by genuine erudition, as in the cases of both Ann Manov and Becca Rothfeld, and the ability to wield this as a stiletto, as in Manov's case especially. (The stiletto can be slipped both ways, however, and already on X they're hoisting Manov on her own petard—mea culpa: a mixed metaphor!—for the undergradish allusion to Montaigne and the etymology of "essay." All's fair!) Naomi Kanakia has suggested that this is only Oyler's comeuppance for her own hatchet-jobs, but I doubt it's that exactly. The subtext, rather, as Manov's review hints, is that we perhaps tolerated too much sloppy thinking and writing in the attempt to back out of "wokeness." As long as someone wasn't saying such bizarre not-even-wrong 2012-era Tumblrana like "colonialism invented the gender binary" or "the police are slave patrols," the types of statements treated as holy writ by the literati in the preponderant atmosphere of DNC-NBC-CIA psyops of the Trump era, we were prepared to greet them as the second coming of Spinoza. Now that cooler heads seem finally to be prevailing (mea culpa: a cliché!), the actual substance of writers' thought can come under closer scrutiny again. But back to my first point: literature used to be fun because of the combat! You looked forward to going to Barnes and Noble and getting the latest New Republic or Harper's to see who James Wood or Christopher Hitchens or James Woolcott or Dale Peck or whomever would be eviscerating next! It wasn't destructive; it was discourse. (And there's no such thing as bad publicity.)[*] No one's ever been more wrong about anything than Wood was about Underworld, but still, what a magnificently withering essay. I enjoyed taking my own turn with it when I wrote about the novel. It's an honor for author to be taken up with such malign intelligence. I meant what I said on Substack: I imagine my bad reviews, too, and I appreciate them when they're intelligent. What panting nonsense Manov would think Major Arcana is; she'd be wrong there, but she'd write it up with such witty lucidity, and everyone involved would have a good time. Back to James Wood! Back, even, to Gore Vidal!—and to the vitality of gore, of goring everyone's sacred oxen.

_______________________________

[*] The early blog era retained this sensibility and Substack has lately resurrected it, as for instance in Sam Kriss's recent confrontation with Curtis Yarvin, not that these were book reviews.

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

What’s more, during the yearslong squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls; his reputation as both a misogynist and an author beloved by misogynists meant it was just sitting right there this whole time, waiting for anyone with grammatical flexibility and the courage to try... All I’d have to do was avoid footnotes, which would be too obvious, and getting sensitive about the evils of advertising, a moment that has long passed. (We call it branding or marketing now.) The point, remember, is not to imitate DFW, but to occupy his place—in a female way. “A supposedly moisturizing thing you’ll never do again,” suggested a friend. “A supposedly fun egg I’ll never put in my vagina again,” proposed another. “A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, because I’m dead,” Boyfriend 1 supplied. I would not be putting any jade eggs in my vagina, both because of my Didion-esque self-respect and because, after Goop settled a lawsuit concerning “unsubstantiated claims” made about the medical benefits of the yoni eggs in 2018, I assumed they had stopped selling them.

Lauren Oyler, I Really Didn’t Want to Go

[kitchen-light]

But these novels resemble performances more than tutorials. If the author was once God, creating worlds over which he had total control, the reader has usurped this position. Under the terms of popular, social-media-inflected criticism, she is now judge and jury, examining works for their political content and assessing the moral goodness of the author in the process.

Lauren Oyler, from her essay, “For Goodness’ Sake | The self-conscious drama of morality in contemporary fiction”, published in Book Forum, Summer 2020

[fairest]

SCENE INSPIRED BY A POPULAR MISREADING OF ANOTHER ESSAY BY ROLAND BARTHES

Clutching a late-model iPhone, a hand bursts through the earth, followed by a weird moaning. The weird moans are saying, "...first thing in the morning." What was that? "I try to write," the moans are saying, "first thing in the morning." Dirty, beleaguered, having lost a recent manuscript in a hard-drive crash that could not be reconstituted, mutteringly reminding itself of something it read somewhere that claimed both Hemingway and David Foster Wallace lost manuscripts at crucial points in their careers, the hand digs itself out. "I need new author photos," the author rasps. "Do you know anyone who takes good author photos?"

-- Lauren Oyler

[iishtar]

But I guess I would also say like, what is wrong with a myth-making project? I don't know that there's not necessarily anything wrong with like making a myth out of yourself as long as the myth is good, right? I would consider that almost sacrificing yourself for the benefit of the myth. 

But the way I see autofiction working is like the author sort of puts himself in the story and then uses their public persona in some interesting way, or that's the way that it should work.

Lauren Oyler [x]

[jurassicworldtieindrpepper]

Readings on Lauren Oyler

"Lauren Oyler Wishes You’d Fact-Check Your Reviews" by Steven Phillips-Horst for Interview Magazine

"Star Struck" by Ana Manov for Bookforum

"A Sense of Agency: A Conversation with Lauren Oyler" by Sheila Heti for The Paris Review

"Lauren Oyler thinks she’s better than you" by Becca Rothfield for The Washington Post

I am one of the many who fell down the rabbit hole on the twitter-main-character of yesterday. It was interesting! I admittedly had never heard of this critic before, save for (ironically) passing pans of her debut novel. When you get so far up the ass of someone who is generally an extremely typical person, it's hard not to feel some empathy. Still, man, some of these drags are more well put-together than a planet of RuPaul clones. Read'em if you've ever been scarred by what passes for prose in the Yale Daily News.

[ravenkings]

is it just me or are all the nasty, hatchet job literary book reviews that go viral these days always about women by other women

[grandhotelabyss]

In the controversy du jour, you can obviously count me on team Middlemarch. And, as I was saying the comments section to my Substack yesterday, the point is not to create a 19th-century pastiche in the 21st century, but to reinvent, reanimate, even (why not?) revolutionize still worthwhile aesthetic values for our new world. To reiterate my warning from the aforementioned comments section, you can't "make it new" without the "it." Otherwise, you're just on the planned obsolescence treadmill (aren't these avantists supposed to be anti-capitalist?). When Joyce waxed "auto," he looked to Homer, Ovid, and Shakespeare, and no less than George Eliot did he take account (not fake account) of the proverbial squirrel, though in his more urban case it tended to be a matter of dogs and cats: Mkgnao!

[holdoncallfailed]

i'm reading fake accounts by lauren oyler (continuing my tradition of showing up three years late to the twitter zeitgeist book club) and i actually like it despite the ultra self-aware tone which i ordinarily find irritating. however i'm perhaps irrationally bothered by a scene where a hasidic boy in south williamsburg asks the protagonist for directions (!!) and then as a gesture of thanks he kisses her hand because ummmmmm a hasidic boy would absolutely not do that so why include it? like what's the value. nothing about the interaction was accurate to how hasidic people act irl...what's the point... (shrek voice) she doesn't even know about shomer negiah

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

GP said that she doesn’t “have anxiety” but “can tip into overwhelm and stress.” Here is when I felt it all made sense. She is never distracted by a tangle of unspooled implications; she has the placid focus of someone who does not really suffer. We of the truth and beauty contingent would like to think such people don’t exist, that the fact of being human necessitates some kind of suffering, but I think the safer bet is that there must be people who manage to skate along the surface. Stress when you’re overworked, grief when your parent dies, nothing inexplicable, nothing too scary. It helps to be rich, surely, the coddled child of a famous actress and a television producer, the goddaughter of Steven Spielberg, but of course many rich people suffer. Just not, maybe, her.

Lauren Oyler, I Really Didn’t Want to Go

[wambsgansroy]

Who is your journalism or criticism nemesis. Mine is andrea long chu lol I think her literature takes are so asinine and willfully mean-spirited