New Yorker magazine alert thread

i used to read the main articles in every issue but let most of my 2010 issues pile up without reading anything.

if you read something good in a new issue of the New Yorker, post about it here.

The review of the new Mao biographies.

Denby's Joan Crawford essay.

A trick to not letting them pile up: if you're a subscriber, read a couple of articles online at work.

Man I've thought abt starting this thread a few times

this is why i don't have a subscription

Subscription to the print version: $39.95
Subscription to the iPad version: $234.53

http://runawayjuno.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/thumbs-up-low-res.jpg

AYYYY WE MAKING INTERNET MONEY

http://www.gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs/490177_o.gif

alright enough

Anything related to Mexico in the past year's issues has been pretty compelling, mostly by William Finnegan and Alec Wilkinson. The Jane Mayer article about the Koch brothers and the discreet establishment of the tea party is definitely worth reading. This week's Gopnik piece on postmodern desserts is a good read, too.

Date and month/description of the cover of the issues you're referring to would be helpful!

George Packer's essay on the decadence of the Senate was illuminating.

Oh, and, both from around August, the profiles of Gil-Scott Heron and John Lurie.

A trick to not letting them pile up: if you're a subscriber, read a couple of articles online at work.

― Gus Van Sotosyn (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, December 31, 2010 3:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^otm

links would be nice too

recent fire:

Joyce Carol Oates, Personal History, “A Widow’s Story,” The New Yorker, December 13, 2010, p. 70

David Owen, Annals of Environmentalism, “The Efficiency Dilemma,” The New Yorker, December 20, 2010, p. 78

only abstracts are online for nonsubscribers for those i think

Some articles are popular enough to remain accessible to all (e.g. the Packer article on the Senate to which I linked above).

here's the one abt the koch bros - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

A thread like this for all (literary/current event) magazines would be pretty cool.

Joyce Carol Oates article devastated me.

John Lurie article blew my mind.

dessert article was excellent, thanks for the recc

so john lurie is insane huh

The review of the new Mao biographies.

seconded

Gopnik's desserts article was like a magazine version of the No Reservations episode in Spain.

Which is not meant as a negative at all! They make good companion pieces.

dessert article was good but gtf outta here w/ this

Finally, the server arrives with the Messi dessert, as Jordi fusses anxiously in the background. He presents half of a soccer ball, covered with artificial grass; the smell of grass perfumes the air. On the “grass” is a kind of delicately balanced, S-shaped, transparent plastic teeter-totter—like a French curve—with three small meringues on it, and a larger white-chocolate soccer ball balancing them on a protruding platform at the very end. A white candy netting lies on the grass near the white-chocolate ball.

Then, with a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile, the server puts a small MP3 player with a speaker on the table. He turns it on and nods.

An announcer’s voice, excited and frantic, explodes. Messi is on the move. “Messi turns and spins!” the announcer cries, and the roar of the crowd at the Bernabéu stadium, in Madrid, fills the table. The server nods, eyes intent. At the signal, you eat the first meringue.

“Messi is alone on goal!” the announcer cries. Another nod, you eat the next scented meringue. “Messi shoots!” A third nod, you eat the last meringue, and, as you do, the entire plastic S-curve, now unbalanced, flips up and over, like a spring, and the white-chocolate soccer ball at the end is released and propelled into the air, high above the white-candy netting.

“MESSI! GOOOOOAL!” The announcer’s voice reaches a hysterical peak and, as it does, the white-chocolate soccer ball drops, strikes, and breaks through the candy netting into the goal beneath it, and, as the ball hits the bottom of a little pit below, a fierce jet of passion-fruit cream and powdered mint leaves is released into your mouth, with a trail of small chocolate pop rocks rising in its wake. Then the passion-fruit cream settles, and you eat it all, with the white-chocolate ball, now broken, in bits within it.

You feel . . . something of what Messi must feel: first, the overwhelming presence of the grass beneath his feet (he’s a short player); then the tentative elegance of acquired skill, represented by the stepladder of the perfumed meringues; and, finally, the infantile joy, the childlike release, of scoring, represented by the passion-fruit cream and the candy-store pop rocks. I saw Jordi watching us from the kitchen entrance. He had the anxious-shading-into-delighted look that marks the artist.

David Owen, Annals of Environmentalism, “The Efficiency Dilemma,” The New Yorker, December 20, 2010, p. 78

Would not recommend this one! People have been arguing about Jevon's Paradox for a century now, and the article doesn't really advance any significant new ideas. As a primer on the "debate" around energy efficiency, however, it's alright.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all

^ totally recommend that

yeah i read that one the other day, great stuff

it was interesting, lol scientists

i liked this one, seemed like a great premise for movie: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_collins

Haven't finished it yet, but I'm digging the Freud, psychiatry, and mental health in China article (subscription needed): http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/10/110110fa_fact_osnos

The Patel story was amazing.

yeah needs a good 3rd act tho.

he only contributed a couple of articles this year but i always enjoy atul gawande's stuff: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande is probably his best piece this year

if anyone subscribes then feel free to webmail me the china/freud article kthx

I would, but I can't figure out how to turn it into a pdf or another webmail suitable file.

just copy and paste the text? or is it a different viewer thing.....no worries if that's the case

the lehrer article is indeed pretty good and supplies ~evidence~ for my distrust of falsificationism and the inability of some ppl to think of scienctific 'knowledge' subjunctively, tho it does show science self-correcting so i don't read it as a total excoriation of the method

The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

The recent one on the Vatican Library was pretty sweet: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/03/110103fa_fact_mendelsohn

I really like Toobin's diptych on JP Stevens and... the other guy.

nakhchivan, FYI, digital subscription gives you access to this weird applet-y, un-C&P text.

Oh, and that review of the new biography on Sergei Diaghilev was A+++++++ and really wish it was available to all humans: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/09/20/100920crbo_books_acocella

you can c+p articles from an library institutional subscription, but the evan osnos china thing is from the jan 10 issue which is not on the library wires yet. if you can't get it nakh, bump this thread in a week or two and i'm sure someone from what the fuck am i getting myself into with this grad school stuff will help you out.

Lamp, thanks for the Gawande link.

ive been using a friends login for the subscriber stuff for a while and the interface is just so poor i dont usually bother to fuck w/it - seems theyd much rather you read the actual magazine - lol

^agreed. kind of why i started this thread so i knew which actual magazine to pick up and start reading.

p interesting follow-up of sorts on the recent duchenne muscular dystrophy activism article -- they just had a spot f/ clay matthews sponsored by cadillac during the orange bowl

OK a TA I had in college had a poem published a few issues ago, woah.

the whole Jan. 11 issue is worth picking up, the aforementioned freud in china article is amazing and hilarious, and it also has decent articles about belgium and why stieg larsson is so fucking popular

i know the concept of 'worth picking up' is still valid, even for subscribers, in translating to 'worth retrieving from the well-intentioned pile of unread NYers', BUT in general it's still worth remembering how insanely valuable subscribing to the magazine is when compared to buying a newsstand copy. like forty bucks, for a year, for it to be mailed to your house, which is the cost of like seven newsstand issues.

Instead, she started out writing an elegy for the Bushwick-based rave-culture scene,

I'm out.

i liked the book excerpt as personal memoir — i also lived 5 mins from bossa for many years, have been to all the same parties etc so there was something of personal interest there. i liked that her prose is clear-eyed and direct tho

i will say that gould’s implication that there is something profoundly dissonant about the experience of protesting by day and partying by night feels pretty ignorant of how politics and clubbing have functioned symbiotically for decades now. it’s fair to say witt isn’t writing a cultural history — and it’s obv where gould is connecting with it based on her own recent writing — but i think probing her experience with BLM protests & the brooklyn club scene of that time w/in a historical context would’ve been a lot more interesting as an interview topic than framing it in a way where witt is like “um yeah my friends were kinda older so they didn’t get the party scene and then i found younger friends” … not exactly hugely revelatory. but anyway

I definitely think that if this book about covering Trump rallies and doing massive amounts of drugs with younger people was written by a guy we would all be rightly telling him to go fuck off

writing about drugs didn’t feature very prominently in the excerpt, that feels like a red herring to me. the book (from all appearances) is about her encouraging her boyfriend’s political activity post george floyd which leads to them going to a protest together, him getting assaulted and arrested and then spiraling out mentally, which leads to them breaking up etc. the partying is context for that, it’s how they met, but i think your description is a bit of a caricature

Probably. Mostly basing my feeling on the interview’s description:

In Health and Safety, Witt has created a historical record of a moment in time that feels real and human in addition to containing a virtuosically detailed depiction of what a night out on LSD, ketamine, MDMA, cocaine, weed, and alcohol feels like.

This is paywalled now but I remember it being very eye-rolly.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n14/emily-witt/diary

I did think it was funny how the best version of the boyfriend (before going full psycho) was stoned all the time and a "music producer" who never seemed to make anything, and somehow (gee I wonder how) didn't have to work for a living. Would love his soundcloud url.

I definitely think that if this book about covering Trump rallies and doing massive amounts of drugs with younger people was written by a guy we would all be rightly telling him to go fuck off

I wont weigh in on that, but on a related note I thought the excerpt was a perfect example of the kind of story that, if it was exactly the same but took place in Pittsburgh or San Jose, it would not be a forthcoming Penguin memoir excerpted in the New Yorker. Not that shes not a very good prose stylist but being an NY story makes it inherently interesting to the solipsistic NY publishing world. Getting too old to party, breaking up, and coming into political consciousness are not exactly unexplored terrain, as good as her sentences are I didnt think she had anything interesting to say about the overgrown rich babies she was writing about

I definitely think that if this book about covering Trump rallies and doing massive amounts of drugs with younger people was written by a guy we would all be rightly telling him to go fuck off

― There’s a Monster in my Vance (President Keyes)

maybe this is me drawing parallels where they aren't there, but i feel like if she was a guy she'd have a lot in common with the protag of "The Feminist" by Tony Tulathimutte

particularly the bit where - to paraphrase - the protag sleeps with a girl and then ghosts her because she's "crazy"

anyway i'm reading the article and god who came up with that headline? "the first great memoir of the trump years". you gotta ignore a lot of memoirs to say that.

i will say that gould’s implication that there is something profoundly dissonant about the experience of protesting by day and partying by night feels pretty ignorant of how politics and clubbing have functioned symbiotically for decades now.

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.)

i think it's unintentionally revealing. it's dissonant for _her_, certainly. she goes to these parties and then she goes back to hang out with her "respectable" friends and write "respectable" articles about rittenhouse. and then, you know, she walks away. from kenosha, from the party scene. or tells herself she's walking away, at least.

this sentence strikes me:

So when I met Andrew, his friends were, compared to the writing scene, all a little younger, and a little bit more culturally diverse, and a little more queer, and definitely less patriarchal.

"a little more queer". like... how does one reconcile a statement like that with her saying:

When I came back to New York at the end of my 20s, I was hanging out mostly with writers. And I just didn’t find it to be that healthy of a place to be. I never got a real relationship out of it. I never got a romantic relationship. I definitely felt a lot of gender stuff there.

she felt a lot of "gender stuff" (what does that mean? i don't know what she means by that), she didn't think it was a healthy place to be, so what? she quits her wellbutrin and does all the drugs, molly, cocaine (not fent, of course, not fent) and goes and hangs out with queer people (though she herself doesn't seem to be queer) and dates a younger man who has a violent manic episode, because dating writers wasn't a _healthy place to be_?

the sense i get is that in her head, she was just taking a walk on the wild side, and when shit gets too real she goes back to her writer friends, who maybe aren't quite as respectable as she'd like to think them to be? she plays this role at work and i mean... really, _none_ of her co-workers have issues with substance abuse? _none_ of them could understand where she's coming from? the lady interviewing her is emily gould, "a novelist, critic, and features writer for new york magazine", and in her role as an interview... this idea of "respectability", when gould talks about herself in that interview, about her life, she's comparing herself - quite accurately, i'd say - to people in the party scene, people gould sort of relegates to the demimonde. not like _her_. not really.

there's this really revealing bit of the interview where emily gould, the interviewer, talks about her own mental health episode. she's reading about witt's boyfriend andrew's mental health crisis, asking her husband "was i that bad", and he says "yes". and i've had episodes like that, all my life, and they were that bad, and i try to deal with the reality of it. and gould asks, hey, do you think writing about andrew that way was maybe, you know, a little bit not cool? and witt answers:

This is how life is. I didn’t want to pretend like it was something else. And I guess I, as a reader, don’t like when things are hedged out of some idea of what’s polite or of propriety. It’s like, Why bother writing anything if it’s not going to be a true thing?

and the thing about memoirs, you know, is that one is writing about oneself. and perhaps she doesn't understand what it says about _her_.

there's a phrase that gets used in a queer context that's really interesting to me, and it's "dual-role". you pretend to be one thing for public acceptability, but in private, you're something else. it's not something that applies only in a queer sense. i have held, for a long time, a corporate job, performed respectability. and i've worked hard to bridge that gap. it's not feasible for me to pretend that the stuff i have had to deal with is something i can walk away from. being queer is part of it, sure, but emily gould does also deal with the reality of it. doesn't other those experiences the way witt does. being with someone who's behaving like andrew behaved - like gould apparently behaved, like i behaved - is fucking real, is fucking scary, will fuck a person up, in the long-term. and one has to learn to live with that. and i guess one way of doing that is treating it like a "phase".

thinking about it more, she doesn't come off as someone superficial. she comes off as someone in denial. she's telling herself, you know, my parents paid to have my eggs frozen, i can have a nice normal relationship and a family and a white picket fence and. girl. that's not who you are. that's not _ever_ who you were, that's not ever who your nice "respectable" writer co-workers are or were.

I still go to parties, and I sometimes do drugs, but more than that, they continue to be an intellectual interest.

an _intellectual interest_? fucking... really? "oh sure i still do cocaine and spend all night partying but it's just an intellectual interest, i can stop at any time."

when i think of memoirs about people who party and do drugs, the one i think of is "trans girl suicide museum" by hannah baer. it's complicated in a lot of ways but she does at deal with partying is desperate and maybe sometimse kind of fucked up. one's scared. one has to deal with that fear. and with witt, when she talks about fear, she does seem to have a complicated attitude.

Now, I think we’re all a little bit embarrassed about how scared we were during the pandemic, even though the fear was totally justified and so many people died. But when we remember all the scolding and stuff from that time, I think everybody’s a little embarrassed and doesn’t really want to think about it too much.

we aren't _all_ a little bit embarrassed of being scared. i'm still scared. i'm more scared. and witt, she talks in her memoir about being scared. gould quotes it to her:

A middle-aged solitude I had always been scared of was happening and I saw the loneliness of the years ahead and it terrified me. I was wrong about a lot of things at that time but I was right to be scared about that.

you know, is she _embarrassed_ about being scared? or is she, maybe, still more scared than she wants to let on, still trying to convince herself that she's _normal_, that she's not _like_ the people she parties with out of, uh, "intellectual interest".

thinking about it, she really doesn't have anything in common with the protag of _the feminist_. ultimately she _is_ a real person, at least.

I definitely think that if this book about covering Trump rallies and doing massive amounts of drugs with younger people was written by a guy we would all be rightly telling him to go fuck off

― There’s a Monster in my Vance (President Keyes), Monday, 16 September 2024 bookmarkflaglink

But its also truthful about that class...maybe it needed someone who wasn't a guy to serve this up but most people will more than survive another Trump presidency. They will go to parties and have a good time. Like if Harris wins people will do the same.

The people who find their life difficult and a struggle will also find little change on that score.

That interview had a bit more awareness: she knows she is walking away, that her journalism won't change anything that much, that the private matter in her life may not turn out at all the way it should for someone like her. And she is v otm on COVID, its not talked above it anymore, it has been completely been a thing that happened, that we have 'moved on' from.

Its not a book I am keen on reading though idk if it will be that bad.

I found the NY'er excerpt to be both interesting and emotive on one level but also sort of hilarious on another level. Like I feel bad laughing at a real story with such darkness in it (hey, I did't invent the creative non-fiction industrial complex) but some of it felt so voguish and was accidentally funny as a result, just the way it seems to obliviously yet perfectly capture people stuck in a very particular modern milieu. Including the author herself.

*didn't ffs

I think that’s fair. I also have some gripes with the interview and its framing. I think Gould’s emphasis on certain aspects of the NYer story aren’t inappropriate per se, but definitely push her own preconceptions to the front.

and kate’s right to draw the comparison to the other short story we’ve mentioned on here, albeit in another thread, lately. I think using phrasing like “a little more queer” does come from the sort of liberal mindset other works attempt to satirize but Gould’s not going to ask about that because of where she’s situated! So the interview concentrates on where she saw herself in the story she did read, and the bit that’s outside of her experience.

I wish the interview delved into more of the book. kind of a so-so interview.

i read "the last rave".

even last night, even as i posted it, i felt bad writing the thing i did, my thoughts about that interview. when someone writes a memoir, they're making themselves extremely vulnerable to the judgements of others. others who see them not as who they are, but through the lens of their own preconceptions. i believe that when someone writes about themselves, even if it's mediocre writing, even if it's _bad_ writing, a lot of different things come out, and we don't always know what they are, and we choose which ones to focus on.

and i do that, i think, more than most. i have a tendency to make people's writing about me that's not about me. i try really hard to avoid that. not always totally successfully.

i've read a lot of "new york" writing, and it annoys me to no end. "new york" writing seems so convinced of the specialness of new york, the uniqueness of new york, but what comes out is empty references, name-drops of places i've never been to.

the thing about "the last rave" is this terrible transformation that takes place within it. it starts out as banal and irritating as the writing of any self-absorbed new yorker. well, really, it's just journaling. it's how i started journaling, privately. "i went to x restaurant and ate x food with x person". it's actually good, i think, to write like that privately. to be aware of the facts, what happened and when. because we forget, all of us.

i dated someone briefly who wrote down everything someone said to her, in a notebook. i understand why she did it. she needed to know what was real and what wasn't. what someone had said and what someone hadn't. because of the way one of her exes had treated her. because she had been abused.

the later part of the excerpt i skimmed, but not for the reasons i skimmed the later part of _the feminist_. i don't know if witt's writing is good writing or bad writing. maybe it is like her writing on _new york_, references, not explanations. i just... i know the territory she's describing. i've wanted to write about it, but i don't know how. so much of it can seem banal. so much of it leaves her open to judgement. "you were upset with him for _smoking pot_?" "jesus, you _kicked down the door to his room_?" it's hard to say because she's heard it - she talks about it - she's heard it from andrew, over and over again, how _she's_ the abuser, _she's_ gaslighting him, he doesn't _appreciate_ how she's going around town calling him an "abuser".

and one internalizes that. god knows, over and over again i have to tell this story to myself, to convince myself that i'm not the person that person i loved, that person i trusted, that person i lived with - i'm not the person that other person said i was. that it's not my _fault_, what they did, even if i kicked down a door or punched a wall.

i'm afraid to talk about it because i never know when my ex could be reading, because of the ways they could argue, the things they might say about me. this is the only place i talk about it in public, the only place they _could_ say anything, and they haven't, but it's still so terrifying, every time. i'm terrified of them. i'm terrified that they might have been _right_. like if it's not inappropriate, i'm legit proud of witt, for opening up the way she does, for saying the things she does, even things that make her look superficial and banal. just because i know the territory.

covid was me trapped alone in a house with that person, and seeing them _change_. seeing what isolation did to them, seeing them act differently towards me, say things, do things, and just... not understanding why. i still don't understand why. i was in the phase where i was hanging out with younger people, where i was wanting to party, where i was wanting to live an exciting life and do lots of drugs. i didn't, and in retrospect i don't regret that. i'm trying to live some semblance of a normal life, like i have so many times before, and it's not going to take, i know it. but god, those people, that scene, is so fucked up. i don't want to live there. i don't know where else to go. i can't actually stay here, though.

i'm glad witt isn't afraid now in the way she was back in '20. i'm glad she's been able to find peace, confidence, strength. i'm glad she can speak up, even if she comes off as banal, irritating, entitled at times. i thought often during covid that i couldn't be the only one. i couldn't be the only one who was left trapped, isolated, with someone who'd changed, someone who'd turned terrifying. she's the first person i've seen who talked about having a similar experience to mine. there have to be lots of us, but it's so hard to write about. i'm glad she wrote about it and that she comes from a background that gave her the opportunity to get published, to tell her story. covid enabled a lot of fucked up shit, a lot of abuse. covid was scary for everyone, but it was, i think, scary for me in a way that it wasn't for a lot of people. i haven't seen a lot of people talking about those sorts of experiences. if anybody is gonna talk about that, it's gotta be someone who was affected by it. someone who was a victim.

reading ganz's book on US politics in the 90s (good so far) and delighted / unstartled to see current NYer editor david remnick quoted saying something v smugly vacuous abt h. ross perot lol

lol I bracketed that bit too.

I'm curious what you think of the book when you finish it.

I am blissfully unaware of most of what appears in the NYer, but I honestly don’t give a fuck what any rich white person has to say about partying or raving. At least she isn’t trying to do theory like that abysmal Wark book from a few years back, which was astonishingly embarrassing to read.

(I mainly follow this thread in case anything actually good comes up— once or twice a year, it happens!)

is Emily Witt rich?

I mean maybe not, sort of seems like it tho. I also just assume that anyone who has been able to “support”
themselves writing articles and has an obvious PR machine behind them has some amount of wealth

I didn't know the Wark book you meant but I looked it up and lol no thank you. "From k-nights spent on Brooklyn’s and Berlin’s junkspace dance floors, McKenzie Wark abstracts a life practice of ressociation in a dance of autoconceptualization and allotheorization. In crossing toward the stranger’s gift of ‘letting go of ourselves as private property,’ Raving is nothing less than Wark’s femmunist manifesto, her tractatus on techno’s blackness, her treatise for a twenty-first-century trans ethics.”

the new yorker pays its writers enough money to live in new york without them qualifying as rich (tho it doesn’t give them health insurance)

Maybe a decade ago (?) I remember reading that staff writers were paid $90k a year — which seemed fine but not exactly luxe. (That's why they all write books or take TV gigs like Toobin.) Presumably it's gone up since, but maybe not as much as you'd think. Conde Nast has not been flush.

Once again I remind everyone that some people on this board have rarely, if ever, broken the 50k mark. 90k would be a lifechanging amount of money.

As far as the Wark book is concerned, it’s pretty basic: it completely elides the Blackness of techno in favor of a queer erotic auto theory. it’s nasty shit.

ok but…. 90k does not qualify you as rich in any major american city these days certainly including new york. you can say she has the privilege of a good steady salary (and i have no idea what her family background is)… but the word rich does have meaning

i maybe know one person who makes that much money. and i don’t know any writers who make that much money. maybe back off

literally have no clue what that has to do with the definition of rich by the standards of 2024 living but i don’t intend to engage in this convo any further. just gonna post what i had typed before this

there are plenty of rich white collar gay guys who go to the parties she writes about — much fewer than at parties in manhattan, so it’s not like your instinct is of. there’s all sorts of finance ppl and architects and creative directors and senior marketing executives crawling around bushwick raves. they all make way, way more than $90k a year

is off*

whatever J0rdan

I’m rich, bitch

they all make way way more and they all deserve the guillotine

I was there for a good amount of places/times/parties she writes about and am glad she did. I didn’t. I never knowingly crossed paths with her but she gets right the lived feel of Bushwick then. This thread reminds me of the Pfork guy who boasted of some dumb high salary plus bennies.

fwiw Emily Witt’s father was endowed chair of a journalism department at a state school in Georgia.

(also i know that my personal metrics for what “rich” is don’t line up with actual figures, but i have been struggling financially for long enough that i see any number over 60k and my mouth starts watering, so sorry if i come off as an asshole, it’s because i have deep class antagonism even toward people who arent making that much money in the grand scheme of things; in fact, this probably explains much of my crabby demeanor on here in general.

i do apologize. hopefully this will get better when i get a better job in the next few years, fingers crossed)

I am blissfully unaware of most of what appears in the NYer, but I honestly don’t give a fuck what any rich white person has to say about partying or raving. At least she isn’t trying to do theory like that abysmal Wark book from a few years back, which was astonishingly embarrassing to read.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

respect to that. thinking about it, yeah, i guess i do give a fuck what traumatized rich white people have to say about partying or raving. i'm a white trans woman without much in the way of social skills or life experience living in a notoriously white city, and a lot of my social circle is navigating parties and trying to make sense out of myself and my world while surrounded by other white trans women with trauma who do a lot of drugs and partying. i read wark critically, but i do read her. all my life people have treated me like a Clever White Boy. god, if i could've been the Clever White Boy they wanted me to be. and the only thing i failed at was "boy", so now i've got clever, though not as clever as i was taught to _think_ i was... or at least not clever in the _ways_ i was taught to think of myself as clever... and "white", which exists, which constantly affects me and the people around me, whether i will it or not, and which isn't something i feel like i can meaningfully speak about. for good or bad, the writing of people like wark does inform how i try to make myself socially intelligible.

I mean, I don’t hold Wark’s prior body of work against her, fwiw, and even like a bit of it— but that book was really horrible, just glaringly bad in its dilettantism and erasure.

I think that's the heart of the matter: if it was good then we might not even consider the part that wealth had to play in sustaining the writer.

I think that's the heart of the matter: if it was good then we might not even consider the part that wealth had to play in sustaining the writer.

― xyzzzz__

i think for me that is the heart of the matter! i haven't read the work in question by wark, so i guess my main consideration is witt - the new yorker excerpt and that interview. like, is witt's writing bad writing on a _moral level_. like, does she have an essential duty as a writer that she's failing to fulfill. table, that's kind of what i hear in what you're saying about witt's writing on dance music and drugs. if that is what you're saying, i accept that!

and at the same time i accept that as true, i also believe that in a different sense, her writing is _good_ on a moral level. i say that because i'm a woman and an abuse victim, and witt is a woman and an abuse victim writing about her experience as a woman and an abuse victim. none of that excuses or mitigates any ways in which her writing fails. i think her writing is _worthy_ of publication, though. i'm glad i had the opportunity to read it.

there are some people who... i think it's bad that they have a public voice. that they get paid to say the stuff they do. matt walsh, for instance. and i'd differentiate that from wark and witt. when they do erasure, it's important for that to be addressed. and i still think it's good that they can have careers as writers. i don't think that should be at the expense of other people's careers as writers, people who can write about the things they write about without being _bad_. but even if witt's writing is bad, even if she's a _bad writer_, i think it's good that she can make a living as a writer. because to me, she's also a good writer.

fwiw you can get a good sense of new yorker salaries at their jobs page https://www.newyorker.com/about/careers

seems like high five figures to low six figures is the norm

What a good Wark book to start with?

What a good Wark book to start with?

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

honestly i just know her as a journalist

her wikipedia article says this:

Both these studies grew out of Wark's experience as a public intellectual who participated in public controversies, mainly through her newspaper column in The Australian, a leading national daily. She developed an approach based on participant observation, but adapted to the media sphere.

i'm deeply skeptical of the figure of the "public intellectual". i mean nowadays that's called "discourse". she does "discourse". she was one of those, you know, wired magazine people in the '90s. i actually wouldn't defend any of her work. i more defend her as a person. she's a 61-year-old trans woman who transitioned later in life, just a little before i did. i mean me as a trans woman, a lot of the role models i have are shitty role models, in a lot of ways. being trans _is_ diy... i don't know if i mentioned it or if i took it out, but the piece of hers that had the most impact on me is her review of grace lavery's _please, miss_, where wark talks about autodidacticism as a "trans fetish". i think wark, for better or worse, does sort of embody the trans autodidact, someone who makes it up as she goes along despite having shitty role models. that one sentence of hers, it also resonates with me because it acknowledges that fetishism _does_ play a role in transness, just not the one people think it does, not in the way people think it does.

mostly, though, if you look at trans people, we're fucked up people in a lot of ways, fucked up people who do fucked up shit. i mean elagabalus is a trans role model but she was also a genuinely awful emperor, perhaps genuinely The Worst Emperor. reed erickson, a crucially important figure in trans history, was a literal fucking cult leader. trans people's work, _particularly_ white trans people's work, is just filled with really bad takes. julia serano's "whipping girl" is really influential on me, was really influential on a lot of trans people, but she _doesn't_ have a humanities background, she's a biologist, and the limitations of that are _very apparent_ in her work. whipping girl has a lot of bad takes. "whipping girl" erases non-binary identities, erases gender non-conformity out of the constructed category of "trans". i think that's a problem. i don't think that's an excusable problem, and at the same time i _do_ think whipping girl is worth reading, worth reading critically. on the other side of the equation, kate bornstein, her writing on gender treats non-binary identity like it's _better_ than "binary transness". i think that's bad too, and i still think her work is important.

to me, i think the best writer, the writer who i think has had the most positive influence on me, is someone like jules gill-peterson. i would recommend _a short history of trans misogyny_. i think it's best and least, uh, _problematic_ book on transfem theory i've read. it was also published this year, haha. _histories of the transgender child_ was published in '18, and i didn't hear about it, and the last time i tried to read it it wasn't intelligible to me. _a short history of trans misogyny_ is an academic book and as such it was hard for me to read, since i don't have an academic background, but it was worth it.

having said that, i mean, i don't think the entire weight of intersectional transness _should_ fall on people like gill-peterson. as a white trans person, i have tried to learn from gill-peterson, have tried to take on experiences outside the specific area of "trans woman". at the same time, "trans woman" is a culturally coherent and meaningful identifier, an identifier that carries with it a unique experience of marginalization, and so yes, speaking as a trans woman, the writing of other people who also describe themselves that way, belong to that group, has a unique importance to me.

unfortunately the way that it's often used, the shit that trans women, particularly white trans women, sometimes talk, what happens is that Discourse happens, systemically i think it's encouraged for marginalized groups to be put in situations where we're competing with each other. and i fucking hate that. for me, not doing that is hard fucking work. sometimes my interests as a member of a marginalized group _do_ conflict with the interests of people who are marginalized in different ways from me. those conflicts cause a _lot of trouble_.

the thing that vexes me the most, the thing that causes me the most trouble, is that Discourse often involves conflict between transfems and transmascs. this is on my mind because i was just playing this interactive fiction game, LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST ... by the way i'm only through act II but i'd recommend playing that game more than i'd recommend reading mckenzie wark. if you're ok with absolutely filthy writing with a transmasc protag. because, i mean, to really understand trans people, i feel like it helps a lot if to be willing and able engage with the absolute filthiest, kinkiest shit in a totally non-judgemental way. (it's even better if you engage with it and say "well shit this is super hot"). that loops back to wark because i do know that wark published her correspondence with kathy acker in 2015 as _i'm very into you_, and apparently there is a lot of sexual content in those letters. and personally LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST interests me more than those letters.

damn i wish i could deconstruct the walls of discourse between transmascs and transfems do the way valentine and artemis do. by which i mean laughing at how stupid it is and then doing kinky shit to each other. but instead, i start hanging around transmascs and i get super insecure, i get hung up on the stupid shit some transfems say and the stupid shit some transmascs say and gah.

but they're going to say stupid fucking shit. like it's an important part of it, trans people say stupid fucking shit sometimes and it doesn't invalidate the stuff we say that isn't stupid fucking shit. it's just, like. hard work. i don't know what i'm doing, most of us, i get the sense, don't really know what we're doing here.

so tl;dr, don't read wark, read jules gill-peterson's _a short history of trans misogyny_ and/or play the interactive fiction game LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST and recognize that a lot of us fuck up and we're trying not to.

fwiw you can get a good sense of new yorker salaries at their jobs page https://www.newyorker.com/about/careers

seems like high five figures to low six figures is the norm

― 龜, Tuesday, September 24, 2024 9:47 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

none of these are staff writer positions though

big dawg dunno what to tell you https://i.postimg.cc/tJdGXPgH/shrug2.gif

looks promising (is there a better thread?)

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/say-nothing-fx-first-look-awards-insider

loved the book

IN SOLIDARITY NEWS: 100 of our 101 New Yorker union members unanimously voted YES (one abstained) to authorize a strike should the bargaining committee deem it necessary

— “holden” “seidlitz” (@jock__derrida) October 3, 2024

Who was the one

This guy

https://newyorkerstateofmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/5179758-2011_02_14.jpg

no resistance libbo but if anyone is looking for something to maybe pull themselves out of post-election despair, i enjoyed reading alexei navalny's prison diaries that were published earlier this month. there is a lot in there about why people should continue to summon the energy to stand up to despotic leaders, if that's your bag today, but his writing on the purpose and methods of essentially choosing happiness even in the face of grave darkness (and he faced some of the gravest) really rang a chord w/ me, for reasons not related to politics, but today kinda works for those purposes too

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/alexei-navalny-patriot-memoir

the greg jackson short story this week strongly was reminding me of something that i couldnt place… until i did… the beginning of novel explosives by jim gauer.. very similar conceit of a man w/o memories trying to piece things together in a hotel / isolated setting