Loved this piece, and thank you for your words of encouragement.
To jump off on something you said here in critiquing the autofictional tropes of alt-lit and its derivatives - I think the creative energy in solely delivering persona-based cleverness has been more or less exhausted in the literary sphere, and the alt-lit/Dimes Square Lit space in general. I'm optimistic that, as you identified in Haywire's piece, a new kind of sincerity is going to come through and (hopefully!) drive more and more readers into a miniaturized wordcel renaissance. There's nothing wrong with cleverness, but it works best if it's mixed in with real feeling and substance.
I love this. With alt lit, which I love too, I just don’t understand why so much of lit has to have a bohemian setting? So many of us are in corporate jobs, we get at best two hours a day of freedom to read and write something not work related. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a big importance (for me at least) placed on style and form as well as content that is quality of writing, and working at it like the craft that it is. Dilettantes, yes, but no less serious that those that are able to have the privilege of doing this professionally.
I’m not sure I want to read more about the internet, it’s important no doubt but I already spend hours a day online, I don’t need that part of life “explained” again? (This is very much my personal take)
I’m very glad to read this just as I’m working on a short story of everyday corporate insanity, but inspired style-wise by lit mags such as “Heavy Traffic”.
The problems you describe with reading fiction about the Internet is the same problems people have reading corporate fiction: it already takes up the majority of one’s waking hours.
Here’s what I’d like to see someone attempt: the Sisyphean struggle of the cubicle manacled artist to achieve their creative actualization in the two hours a day allotted to do so. Sort of like a Ulysses that takes place in two hours instead of 24, the hours when we’re allowed to be humans. I don’t think I’m up for such a massive literary task personally but maybe someone is.
Yes! I think of how much of the post WW2 lit canon has a university as a setting, with characters in tenured positions. Why can't a corporate setting, or a hospital or a warehouse for that matter, not provide a rich vein to mine for literature?
Also, regarding fiction that has corporate as a backdrop or as its subject still permits a very broad palette for narrative and characters. Trad lit is written almost exclusively by professionals who don’t work at other jobs. They don’t know how to write about the constraints and fears that working people operate under, or the about the human weirdness of corp culture that is the pure material of fiction
i have a question about the basic premise of this. are most people on the internet that much? i feel like the majority of my friends aren’t. most of them have locks on their phones that give you 30 min of social media a day. the only time i run into the terminally online is when i open substack.
are we just outliers here? am i in some weird silo?
for what it’s worth, I did read Honor Levy’s book and enjoyed it, even though i had no idea what she was talking about at least half the time. felt like reading about an alien. which i think speaks well of the book, bc it was engaging despite being written in what was basically a foreign language to me
Have not read the entire book but I had the same response. It reminded me how’s there’s no singular internet buts internets. Or more viscerally reminded of a dance venue I used to frequent where in each room a DJ played a different genre of music. Whatever room of the internet Honor Levy is in, it’s not the one I’m in.
Love the piece. It really resonated with this working stiff. I re-watched a theatrical screening of the anime Paprika. My close, dear friend described it best: “We’re still catching up to Satoshi Kon (the director).” A character says something to the effect, “Technology without a (conscious) philosophy is dangerous.” If no technological creation is neutral but is infused with the persona of its creators, the question around AI (or more broadly the social matrix of Silicon Valley) is: what is the conscious (and unconscious) POV infused into it? I have passionate, amateur interest in math. It’s a beautiful art form. But I’m also an avid dancer who’s spent most of his working life in hospitality. There’s something about AI that has no respect for the singularity of ppl. Honor Levy has a ton of charisma. It’s in her writing and her as a person. Think of the number of smart successful math or literary ppl you’ve met who have no charisma, that is, there’s no magnetic charge to them that attracts ppl. It’s like the difference between a great talker and a great writer. They’re two very different kinds of ppl. It seems to me alt. lit and Lit has a similar difference from a high modernist sculptural concept of lit about impersonal transcendence.
I was just thinking how unclear that sentence was hahaha. High-classical modernism aimed for perfect, transcendence that could endure across time. It’s in how they talk about the canon. Bach or Shakespeare or Joyce are forever timelessness beautiful. Ted Gioia in one his substacks wrote about a Stanford poetry professor who thought of poetry in terms of marble sculpture. A cold brutal lifeless beauty. Alt. lit is all about the eccentrics of that particular person. It’s the person at the poetry who can hold an audience with jokes and their aura. Thinking about your idea around lit 2.0, I wonder if it’s a fusion of the two. It’s less clickbait and thoughtful but doesn’t slip into the attention-seeking of the former or the inhumanity of the latter. Not sure if this clearer. Your piece has really got me thinking.
I made a lot of typos here. I’m on my iPhone. I meant to write “party” not poetry. I also meant to write lit 2.0 is less clickbait and more thoughtful.
Yeah. It's elevated Internet - style, informal writing. But it cannot be compared to the formal mastery of traditional literature. I will probably keep returning to the analogy of Mozart and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Jefferson is great, but he is not as complex as Mozart. Does this make more sense?
This metaphor makes perfect sense to me. What I’m thinking is that when you combine Mozart and Blind Lemon Jefferson you get Jazz. You get the raw emotional power of the blues combined with the formal mastery and theoretical depth of classical music. The question I’m wrestling now using your Lit 2.0 metaphor is what would be the parallel in literature. The name that comes to mind as a precursor is Dana Tartt. You have the media fame but also an aura of enigma. She’s a deft performer as well. She’s good enough to have been an actor judging from reading of The Secret History. (How many writers could do a professional grad performance of their novel?) You get the formal mastery but also the popular form of engaging Dickens-inspired storytelling. Also she was “rediscovered” by the internet generation and inspired the internet subculture of dark academia. Also Honor Levy attended Bennington colleges, her Alma mater b/c she wanted a literary career. It’s interesting to think about how the internet absorbed and transformed these currents like how Jazz did the same with music.
Loved this piece, and thank you for your words of encouragement.
To jump off on something you said here in critiquing the autofictional tropes of alt-lit and its derivatives - I think the creative energy in solely delivering persona-based cleverness has been more or less exhausted in the literary sphere, and the alt-lit/Dimes Square Lit space in general. I'm optimistic that, as you identified in Haywire's piece, a new kind of sincerity is going to come through and (hopefully!) drive more and more readers into a miniaturized wordcel renaissance. There's nothing wrong with cleverness, but it works best if it's mixed in with real feeling and substance.
Agreed. It would still be the BEST of Internet writing, not the usual yap, as Kyle Fitzpatrick would say
I might write a counter manifesto in the coming months. “Against the Internet Novel” ;)
I love this. With alt lit, which I love too, I just don’t understand why so much of lit has to have a bohemian setting? So many of us are in corporate jobs, we get at best two hours a day of freedom to read and write something not work related. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a big importance (for me at least) placed on style and form as well as content that is quality of writing, and working at it like the craft that it is. Dilettantes, yes, but no less serious that those that are able to have the privilege of doing this professionally.
I’m not sure I want to read more about the internet, it’s important no doubt but I already spend hours a day online, I don’t need that part of life “explained” again? (This is very much my personal take)
I’m very glad to read this just as I’m working on a short story of everyday corporate insanity, but inspired style-wise by lit mags such as “Heavy Traffic”.
The problems you describe with reading fiction about the Internet is the same problems people have reading corporate fiction: it already takes up the majority of one’s waking hours.
Here’s what I’d like to see someone attempt: the Sisyphean struggle of the cubicle manacled artist to achieve their creative actualization in the two hours a day allotted to do so. Sort of like a Ulysses that takes place in two hours instead of 24, the hours when we’re allowed to be humans. I don’t think I’m up for such a massive literary task personally but maybe someone is.
I imagine huysmans and Kafka were. 😊 clerks by day, obsessed writers by night.
Exactly. Literature was so much more open then paradoxically
Yes! I think of how much of the post WW2 lit canon has a university as a setting, with characters in tenured positions. Why can't a corporate setting, or a hospital or a warehouse for that matter, not provide a rich vein to mine for literature?
Also, regarding fiction that has corporate as a backdrop or as its subject still permits a very broad palette for narrative and characters. Trad lit is written almost exclusively by professionals who don’t work at other jobs. They don’t know how to write about the constraints and fears that working people operate under, or the about the human weirdness of corp culture that is the pure material of fiction
I got you bro: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53780642-the-employees / https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2026701.Personal_Days
I’ve been wanting to read that author for a while now. I’ve heard “Same Bed, Different Deams” was fantastic. Have you read that?
i have a question about the basic premise of this. are most people on the internet that much? i feel like the majority of my friends aren’t. most of them have locks on their phones that give you 30 min of social media a day. the only time i run into the terminally online is when i open substack.
are we just outliers here? am i in some weird silo?
A growing number are like you and your friends. I would guess it's still a minority though
for what it’s worth, I did read Honor Levy’s book and enjoyed it, even though i had no idea what she was talking about at least half the time. felt like reading about an alien. which i think speaks well of the book, bc it was engaging despite being written in what was basically a foreign language to me
Have not read the entire book but I had the same response. It reminded me how’s there’s no singular internet buts internets. Or more viscerally reminded of a dance venue I used to frequent where in each room a DJ played a different genre of music. Whatever room of the internet Honor Levy is in, it’s not the one I’m in.
Love the piece. It really resonated with this working stiff. I re-watched a theatrical screening of the anime Paprika. My close, dear friend described it best: “We’re still catching up to Satoshi Kon (the director).” A character says something to the effect, “Technology without a (conscious) philosophy is dangerous.” If no technological creation is neutral but is infused with the persona of its creators, the question around AI (or more broadly the social matrix of Silicon Valley) is: what is the conscious (and unconscious) POV infused into it? I have passionate, amateur interest in math. It’s a beautiful art form. But I’m also an avid dancer who’s spent most of his working life in hospitality. There’s something about AI that has no respect for the singularity of ppl. Honor Levy has a ton of charisma. It’s in her writing and her as a person. Think of the number of smart successful math or literary ppl you’ve met who have no charisma, that is, there’s no magnetic charge to them that attracts ppl. It’s like the difference between a great talker and a great writer. They’re two very different kinds of ppl. It seems to me alt. lit and Lit has a similar difference from a high modernist sculptural concept of lit about impersonal transcendence.
Thank you. Can you tell me more about your last sentence? What do you mean?
I was just thinking how unclear that sentence was hahaha. High-classical modernism aimed for perfect, transcendence that could endure across time. It’s in how they talk about the canon. Bach or Shakespeare or Joyce are forever timelessness beautiful. Ted Gioia in one his substacks wrote about a Stanford poetry professor who thought of poetry in terms of marble sculpture. A cold brutal lifeless beauty. Alt. lit is all about the eccentrics of that particular person. It’s the person at the poetry who can hold an audience with jokes and their aura. Thinking about your idea around lit 2.0, I wonder if it’s a fusion of the two. It’s less clickbait and thoughtful but doesn’t slip into the attention-seeking of the former or the inhumanity of the latter. Not sure if this clearer. Your piece has really got me thinking.
I made a lot of typos here. I’m on my iPhone. I meant to write “party” not poetry. I also meant to write lit 2.0 is less clickbait and more thoughtful.
Yeah. It's elevated Internet - style, informal writing. But it cannot be compared to the formal mastery of traditional literature. I will probably keep returning to the analogy of Mozart and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Jefferson is great, but he is not as complex as Mozart. Does this make more sense?
This metaphor makes perfect sense to me. What I’m thinking is that when you combine Mozart and Blind Lemon Jefferson you get Jazz. You get the raw emotional power of the blues combined with the formal mastery and theoretical depth of classical music. The question I’m wrestling now using your Lit 2.0 metaphor is what would be the parallel in literature. The name that comes to mind as a precursor is Dana Tartt. You have the media fame but also an aura of enigma. She’s a deft performer as well. She’s good enough to have been an actor judging from reading of The Secret History. (How many writers could do a professional grad performance of their novel?) You get the formal mastery but also the popular form of engaging Dickens-inspired storytelling. Also she was “rediscovered” by the internet generation and inspired the internet subculture of dark academia. Also Honor Levy attended Bennington colleges, her Alma mater b/c she wanted a literary career. It’s interesting to think about how the internet absorbed and transformed these currents like how Jazz did the same with music.
Write your own manifesto
Much like yourself, this former Uber-driver is starting to feel his own mimetic desire to start writing on Substack lol