alt lit, media millennials, and the "far center"
Do we need god or just more personal essays to guide us?
Do you think this winter is so long and punishing bc it’s…….the last one? Just a thought!
Andrea Long Chu’s evisceration of Pamela Paul and her politics, in light of the NYT columnist’s exit from the paper’s opinion section, is such a great one-stop shop explainer re: what ALC calls the “far center” movement, which you and I have most likely encountered in the form of confusing contortionist stances around free speech and picket-fence “decency.” I liked learning about political theorist Corey Robin’s ideas about reactionary movements (“The conservative says, “You too can be superior.” The reactionary liberal says, “I alone am average”), and very much enjoyed this paragraph in particular:
It is a great dream of the reactionary liberal not to be reached. Paul will freely admit, for instance, that it is immoral for Israel to kill tens of thousands of civilians. Yet it is no less immoral for student protesters to erect an ugly encampment in the middle of the quad and hurl slogans at the police. This is because political action is an unacceptable snag in the continuity of bourgeois experience. One gets the sense that politics has gone off, like a cell phone, in the darkened theater of Pamela Paul’s mind. It is worse than wrong: It is rude … That is the entirety of Pamela Paul’s political vision: It’s bedtime again in America.
You don’t have to recognize or care about any of the scene-y names/novels in Sam Kriss’s review of the state of alt lit in The Point mag to find it worth reading (spoiler: As it turns out, downtown darlings and mainstream MFA princelings alike are all doing our best trading in the coin of the realm: confessional authenticity).
Sam also said what I think has needed to be said for a while, which is that mmmm neither writing about the online experience nor reading about it in literature feels particularly revelatory anymore. Treating the sensation of onlineness as a novelty isn’t just well-trodden earth; it might as well be salted over:
It’s weird that the alt-litterateurs think there’s something radical in all this authenticity stuff, but it’s downright baffling that they think there’s anything remotely subversive in being online. That’s the whole of contemporary literature! … It’s giving Jia Tolentino. It’s giving all the hundreds of books of essays about growing up online by people in their thirties. There’s no lack of mainstream fiction doing the same general thing, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection. But really that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Everything that’s published now is shaped by the forms and concerns of online, whether it’s explicitly about the internet or not …
Nobody would read a story on the internet that’s about being on the internet, how crazy it is that we’re all online, wow, floating around in the delirious stream of it all, visiting various websites and using apps, so cool, so now. That stuff only ever comes up in print. Maybe the best thing you can say about the internet is that it still has the capacity to occasionally refer to things other than itself.
And how are the media millennials hitting the adulting+ life stage doing? Well, Hayley Mlotek investigated opening her marriage via a friend sharing her boyfriend (now that’s outré); Olga Khazan investigated whether having a baby would change her personality (seems yes), and Ilana Kaplan grappled with her personal + our generational ambivalence on motherhood. I mean this sincerely when I say: One can really take such enormous comfort in knowing that every subsequent life stage experienced these days will at least arrive padded heavily with the enterprising first-person content of one’s digital forebears…
Of course Plum Sykes, who you’d recognize most easily as that über-chic Vogue staffer, has a newsletter now, if you think you can handle a deadly lifestyle porn and prose combo that will absolutely lead to much gnashing of the teeth. All last week I’ve been wandering around snowy Brooklyn and calling it my own personal “ski moment”...what can I say…it’s infectious…
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