#ann manov

[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.

[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.

[iishtar]

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.

Ann Manov, Star Struck

[elialbert]

“the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot”

[imanes]

this is such a funny review... i might even have gasped at some point. never have i read a lauren oyler book nor will i probably ever because they sound mean-spirited and self-absorbed but to be honest she brought this upon herself by tearing books and authors to shreds in her capacity of literary critic or, as ann manov says in her own review of oyler's no judgment, "it turns out that No Judgment displays many of the flaws Oyler once so forcefully identified in others."

[canidaery]

it sticks out to me that this takedown takes the tolentino takedown as containing legitimate criteria as grounds for hypocrisy. like yeah that's nagl obviously but a juicier piece would cast oyler's own terms in fundamental doubt. the thing is that both oyler and manov are using the former's words as shorthand for a contemporary diagnosis, and it's tiring! i want concepts of reflexivity and tendencies thereabout that exist beyond that context to be explicated! that's one thing that the adler piece on kael does masterfully and centrally

[frances-baby-houseman]

Love it when an article breaks a niche corner of the internet. Worth a read even if you aren't familiar with Lauren Oyler and just like people being taken to task.

[le-fils-de-lhomme]

Cackling.

[nototherwisespecified]

this concludes with the summary "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"

[thedpu]

"Lauren Oyler is tired, y’all, as we said a few years ago but don’t really say now. Why did people think the narrator of Fake Accounts was her? Why did her ex-boyfriends think they were mimicked in the novel’s chorus of ex-boyfriends? Why, when she set out to write the definitive essay on autofiction, expanding on the 2,500-word footnote her editor so unjustly insisted she cut out of her novel, did all these people have the audacity to suggest she do research? Autofiction, she states, has “a history so long and international it’s tiresome even to mention: look, say critics with perspective, at the I-novels of early twentieth-century Japan, at what Russian formalists said about genre, at gay literature of the 1980s and 1990s, at anything happening in France in the past 120 years.” That is a joke, of course (it always is), but the message is clear: can’t she just talk about herself?" - Ann Manov

[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.

[grandhotelabyss]

Do you have any "must-read" literary magazines/book publishers/blogs, etc.?

I think the best literary coverage in magazines these days is in Compact and Tablet, because whoever's putting up the money and whatever their agenda has evidently and wisely decided to keep the cultural coverage much more free of overt politics than other venues. I'm not only talking about "wokeness" here but also the nonsense we find in the "anti-woke" venues, like, just to give an example, this tacky "Zombie Reagan" complaint in Quillette that English departments are dying because they teach, and I quote, "Foucault, Judith Butler, Kant, and Gloria Anzaldúa," yes, I repeat, Kant. Whereas Compact gives Gasda free rein to take it to the Oxfordians (not least Yarvin), and let the tech-adjacent neoreactionary politics fall where they may, just as Tablet lets Blake Smith chart the uncharted middle course in subtle essay after subtle essay on queer theory and politics, the very subtlety itself guaranteed to offend activists of all camps. Not to mention that both venues publish interesting free agents like Valerie Stivers and Naomi Tanakia. In the same vein, Unherd is good for political and cultural commentary—pretty unpredictable, if convergent upon what we might call the new center. The Mars Review of Books also seems interesting, but it's too soon to tell. There's still good material in the usual places like LRB, NYRB, The Nation and Harper's—Will Self almost (almost!) persuading me to read a book I've privately been calling Adenoid, for example—but it's been more mixed since the commanding heights crudely tried to requisition the whole of humane culture in reaction to Trump. (Full disclosure: I've written for Tablet a time or two myself.)

In our agitated and ever-shifting media environment, one would have to cover Twitter accounts, Substack and other newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels too, across the cultural and political spectrum, so I have both too much and not enough to recommend. I've always thought Katherine Dee had her finger on the pulse of the culture, so her work in various venues is a longstanding recommendation. The renegade and provocateur Justin Murphy is always interesting if often silly or willfully offensive. The aforementioned Matt Gasda's Substack "Writer's Diary" is always compelling. Lately I've been admiring Emmalea Russo's tour of the Divide Comedy with reference to cinema and astrology and modernism and theory and what have you, also on Substack. The collected 1990s-era YouTube lectures on great books and intellectual history by Michael Sugrue and Darren Staloff are also recommendations of long standing, and Sugrue and Staloff also now produce new material, if more casual. My favorite podcasts specifically for literature and the arts are Manifesto! and Art of Darkness.

Favorite book publishers? Not exactly. The go-to answer is NYRB Classics; they publish a lot of stuff that interests me, including things I didn't know would interest me until they published it, especially their nonfiction catalogue, whether Simon Leys's collected essays or Simone Weil on the Iliad or Gillian Rose's incomparable Love's Work, and their attention to major world fiction neglected by other publishers (Platonov, Jünger, Salih). But as I believe Ann Manov once Tweeted, some of those midcentury novels might have been deservedly forgotten; hate me if you must, but I never did finish Stoner. They should reprint the whole of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, though who knows what the copyright situation is there. Another publisher recommendation: you'll rarely go wrong reading a classic in the Norton Critical Edition.

[gnatswatting]

• We are surrounded by strange and complicated people, enigmas even to themselves, and we resort to stereotype to make sense of it all. —Ann Manov

The New Statesman The New Statesman (captured at archive.today)

[iishtar]

So the only history Oyler is concerned with begins in 2010, with Brown in a jean jacket on that purple-lit stage. How could Oyler have known about that other stuff, anyway? Brown’s talk is the only subject discussed under “Emotional” on the Wikipedia page “Vulnerability.” 

Ann Manov, Star Struck