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listen i got nothing against age diff relationships many partners of mine have had at least a decade on me but i just think its just so fucking boring that all the fmcs are like young 20 year olds and the mmcs are 500+ or some shit

and for what? ur ass been alive for half a millennia and u still dont have ur shit together omg

#YOU HAD ALL THIS TIME #TO DO NOTHING #useless men #i hate them #more older milfs pla #tyty #acotar

i wasn't gonna post this bc it's truly just Me Being A Hater buuuut ya girl has a migraine and is praying the meds finish kicking in before i have to expose myself to sunlight to make it to PT so what else am i gonna do atm. it's Hater (contemporary lit edition) which i say only to help you decide if you care enough to click read more (not advised) [note from the future: ok i finished this post PT bc by that point i was committed lmao]

ok so you may remember that despite like many people being a huge fan of brandon taylor's extremely good and well written substack, and also that one story "prophets" in joyland, i bounced pretty hard off his story collection (that did not contain "prophets") and in particular was like truly enraged by a scene where this one chick is like "nobody in the whole world ever talks about this but i think actually eating disorders are about control" which still makes me mad to think about lmao. anyway despite that i was thinking of reading his upcoming novel for a set of reasons: (1) i like The Novel as a form better than The Story as a form generally and certainly some authors are just way better at writing one than the other (2) he's written two whole books since most of the stories that appeared in filthy animals and i know from having gone back and read the early work of authors whose later books i loved that sometimes writers with very unspecial early work can actually mature into very beautiful and compelling writers (3) this one is not about grad students (4) it really is very hard for me to wrap my mind around the notion that someone could have so many good ideas about writing and yet not have that result in actual good writing. like to quote frank o'hara on disease it feels like "it simply must not be able to happen." anyway. but in his most recent newsletter he published the opening of his new novel and um well maybe not bc i mean:

like..... what are we doing here. as i think i've mentioned before i tend to dislike the deployment of the word "pretentious" bc 99% of the time what its speaker really means is "this made me feel insecure." but i would maybe call this pretentious because of how it reaches for the affect of Saying Something but is really... quite banal (beyond - in the interests of fairness - the pretty good three word phrase "savoring their doubts"). now, he does also say there's some kind of trick to this opening revealed immediately after it in the book itself so.... perhaps.... this is on purpose? but idk bc here's his own words on what he was trying to achieve:

now, i haven't read tolstoy or zola. i haven't even read much dickens tbh. but i have read the beginning of a tale of two cities, which is such a banger it has stayed with me despite the fact that the novel itself defeated me in that attempt when i was twelve lol. and, i mean, it's possible there's some other thing he's directly cribbing (cribbing not inherently a bad thing ofc!!!) that i'm not familiar with. but peep the second paragraph of that book:

to me this seems......... quite clearly to be a very direct inspiration for what we have going on here....... which again itself is fine and how art works...... BUT........... you will notice...... that when dickens does it, he is being playful and funny. two features absolutely completely absent in this excerpt, and perhaps most acutely absent in the sentence "there was a president in washington and nine supreme court justices." which sentence drives me crazy bc (1) in washington as opposed to where? (again you can see that the similar construction in dickens is part of a fun little bit of playing around, not a fourth grade civics lesson) (2) "president in washington and nine justices on the supreme court" was right there (3) this describes the united states consistently since the year (i checked) 1869. so... it's not great as historical scene setting. now, given that one general theme of the passage is "nothing was really new here," perhaps that is on purpose.... except that i don't think (could be wrong!!) there has been a war in europe every single year since 1869, and i KNOW there were not zero wars in america after 1869 bc the indian wars went at least into the 1870s. so... like.... again i ask, what are we doing here? do you see what i'm saying about pretention? it's a series of statements selected to sound important and knowing that instead is either too devoid of content to mean anything or aiming for a specificity that comes out too generalized and muddled to land.... i mean whatever. maybe i'm overthinking it. again i did say i was being a hater. (ok also, most countries prefer to fight their wars elsewhere.... europe is a continent which is why--never mind)

anyway. but all that stuff is honestly secondary to the reality that i just hate the ear of this, the rhythm or lack thereof, the flow or total lack thereof. it just Sounds Bad. "but was this cynicism not merely an excuse for a lack of resolve?" clunks so hard, especially in context where it feels like the interjection of a whole new and differently bad voice. i hate that comma after "so" so much. and again i am just sitting here like.... ok congratulations you revised your way into a novel that speaks to social context, i..... guess. but who gives a shit if the opening paragraphs of your novel don't offer any evidence that it will be in any way aesthetically pleasurable to read? and if you can't do that, then how much can your thoughts on craft really be worth?

#migraine meds having caffeine is funny bc like #well i can't focus enough to do Something with my brain but once it penetrates the bloodstream sufficiently it becomes quite stressful #to do Nothing #hence: being a hater online.

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