lauren oyler: it is a joke, of course (it always is)—and links

[celltheory]

Does anyone have thoughts about Lauren Oyler?

This whole Bookforum drama has been kind of funny and I really do think it was just a perfectly timed storm of causing A Problem because Rothfeld's review was posted before and IMO did a better job of actually analysing the essay collection instead of Oyler herself. But I do not want to admit how long I have been thinking about Lauren Oyler and how long she's been driving me nuts and her specific brand of slightly confusing but also idiotic writing that basically comes down to her making sure you /know/ she is smarter than you. I keep reading the interviews and the reviews that are recent and it is just...very funny to me. Twitter has already done a 180 and is now saying anyone who is anti-Oyler is worse than she is which LOL. But it was a fun two days of waiting for it to drop...

Anyway here are some links of things I've been reading.

• A Sense of Agency: A Conversation with Lauren Oyler By Sheila Heti
• One thing that distressed me in your collection was the sense that someone as obviously intellectual as you are nevertheless does not carry around in her head a library of references and quotes from decades of reading and remembering what she read. It seemed clear that many of your references came from Google Books searches or internet searches. It made me feel the relative shallowness of the contemporary mind that many of us share, compared to the intellectuals of the past who had a world of references inside them. Is this something you feel, or are bothered about in any way? Let’s first please allow that I am thirty-three years old, so I’ve had only about a decade of reading that actually counts. It’s probably true that I read the way a “digital native” reads, which is to say broadly and not as deeply, because of the way our technologies of reading work.
• Confidence, certainly, but I don’t know where that comes from, and I don’t like to use the word that often because it implies little connection to the convictions that might produce the confidence. I’m confident in my criticism because I am pretty certain of both my interpretations and my stylistic choices by the time I write. A sense of agency? A democratic sensibility, or maybe just a sense of proportion? I don’t think many of the people who call themselves writers actually care about literary form or style or ideas expressed in writing. They care about being called writers. So my attitude about this is, fine, if you want to be a writer, I will treat you like one—I will assess your writing on the level of form and style and idea. I’m as qualified to do this as anyone else, and anyone else is welcome to do it to me. If you’re a serious writer, you should be able to withstand criticism and determine which criticism is legitimate and which criticism is made in bad faith, even if it stings.
• Lauren Oyler Wishes You’d Fact-Check Your Reviews By Steven Phillips-Horst
• Lauren Oyler thinks she’s better than you by Becca Rothfeld
  • Who, exactly, is she mocking when she tags a metaphor as such? She is so desperate to demonstrate that she is in on the joke that she neglects to ask if the joke is even funny.
  • Of course, she is sort of joking — she is always sort of joking, if also often sort of bragging
• Star Struck by Ann Manov
• But Oyler is contemptuous of disagreement, quickly bores of research, and rigidly attempts to control the reader’s responses. As a result, the writing is cramped, brittle. Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things—the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot—but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so.
• Having been a teaching assistant in the department Oyler is so proud to have matriculated at, I am familiar with the less-than-Herculean intellectual labors needed to get an English degree from Yale. But I digress. Beyond the literal meaninglessness of the claim to “value style over voice,” the sophomoric airs of saying one “enjoys an unfamiliar vocabulary word,” the absurdity of claiming to be able to “identify a decent percentage of the permanent collection” “at the museum” “by sight” (the Met has almost two million items in its permanent collection), the half-hearted allusion to “opera,” the boast about seeing an adaptation of a Kafka novel—beyond this arch guilelessness, this churlish, half-ironic catalogue of her accomplishments, there is something greater here: the way Oyler conceives of her own claim to cultural elitism as a series of adolescent signifiers flung on with the pride of a Goth teenager donning her first Hot Topic belt. “I despise a happy ending”? If she’s so highbrow, I advise her to try out the ending of War and Peace.
• Holding Court by Gene Seymour
• Though Cleveland’s heart was broken, Abdurraqib says he understood why King James did what he did. “I’m not immune to the desire for exits. I’ve said already that I once believed my salvation would be found in another place.” Still, as the book recalls, the manifestations of the city’s heartbreak were, to say the least, intense—most especially, the setting of fires to replicas of James’s Cavaliers jersey. Then T-shirts and, “for some reason, a pair of Adidas sneakers.” He recognizes these fiery rituals as a stage of heartbreak. Still, as he notices, “so many of the people with microphones pushed into their faces in the aftermath of The Decision were white, and so much of the language affixed to that moment, out of those mouths, revolved around death, around burial.” (“He’s dead to me,” they said of James after he’d left Cleveland behind.) Abdurraqib can’t help seeing in these flames a reminder of Black urban riots in Los Angeles in 1992, in Oakland in 2009, in Miami in 1980—“in any place where black people have been conductors to a symphony of fire”—and how often these Black rioters were asked why they would set fire to “their own place.” Abdurraqib retrieves a welter of emotional responses, “about how none of this shit is ours & you have mistaken being in a place for having control over it.” Implicit in his analogy is another one of his wishes: that people who set fire to LeBron merchandise understand that their reactions are just as irrational, yet just as understandable, as the inevitable outcome of heartbreak.
• I Need The Senators To Sit Down And Explain To Me What’s Acceptable To Do To An Empty Net And What’s Not By Barry Petchesky
• ESPN’s Win Probability Graphic Wants To Give You Gambling Brain By Kathryn Xu
• How South Carolina Got the Storybook Finish That Caitlin Clark Was Chasing By Seerat Sohi
• ‘The Rest of the World Disappears’: Claire Voisin on Mathematical Creativity by Jordana Cepelewicz
• She sees math as an art — and as a way to push at and play with the very limits of language.
• There’s the magic of a proof — the emotion you feel when you understand it, when you realize how strong it is and how strong it makes you. As a child, I could already see this. And I enjoyed the concentration that mathematics requires. It’s something that, getting older, I find more and more central to the practice of mathematics. The rest of the world disappears. Your whole brain exists to study a problem. It’s an extraordinary experience, one that’s very important to me — to make yourself leave the world of practical things, to inhabit a different world. Maybe this is why my son enjoys playing video games so much.
• Doing mathematics, most of the time I have to sort of fight against myself, because I am very disordered, I’m not very disciplined, and I also tend to get depressed. I don’t find it to be easy. But what I discovered is that at some moments — like in the morning over breakfast, or when I am walking through the streets of Paris or doing something mindless like cleaning — my brain starts working by itself. I realize that I am thinking about mathematics, without having intended to. It’s like you are dreaming. I am 62, and I have no real method for doing good mathematics: I still more or less wait for the moment when I get some inspiration.
• You could compare a mathematical theorem to a poem. It is written in words. It’s a product of language. We only have our mathematical objects because we use language, because we use everyday words and give them a specific meaning. So you can compare poetry and mathematics, in that they both completely rely on the language but still create something new.
• Rachel Cusk, the novelist on the “feminine non-state of non-being” by Merve Emre
• Character is a very difficult thing to believe in or to assert the existence of in anything other than a very static set of circumstances, where character can confirm itself all the time. But now I think slightly differently, certainly, about the question of time. I wonder why I have never used my ability to slow down time and why, in the Anglophone novel, it’s a rare thing for anyone to do—to make time go very, very, very slowly in a book. I’ve moved to France, I’m reading French novels in French all day, every day, and this is the thing that I’m most struck by: They go much more slowly. Time pauses. The book’s location in time is completely different.

© A.V. Marraccini