holy shit, it’s Ready Player One for race scientists
He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiii.
Here’s The Cut puff piece on Levy which just mentions in passing her podcast with Curtis Yarvin.
anyway, nice to know they’re still trying to make Dimes Square a thing
I have now read a number of her short works, among others a daring piece titled Cancel Me and I can report that it’s, shockingly, vapid baby shit.
See also from The Cut
She tells me that she reads lots of mass-shooting manifestos and jokes that incel should be included in the LGBTQ+ acronym.
Wow no way that’s so wacky
The ceilings are so high, pre-war or something like that, and in the lobby there’s a mirror that makes me feel like we’re at Versailles.
“His voice is warm and husky, like dark melted chocolate fudge caramel … or something.”
What is a voice of a generation?” Honor Levy asks me at Corner Bar on Canal Street. “Is it the most controversial voice? The first person to write in the way that everybody writes? The person that most people hate or love?” She’s not quite sure she qualifies as a VOG, as she calls it (rhymes with dog), though, as a 26-year-old writer with a lot of hype around her first book, titled My First Book, which she has been tweeting about since she was at Bennington College, she knows that is part of the reason people might read (and write about) her.
cringing so hard my soul leaks out of my ears
In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort. She deals individual cards rather than handles an entire deck. Her stories are vignettes, and the observations whoosh past your ears: “We wouldn’t be collectivizing the Adderall sector”; on drugs, “I could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs”; “Ronan Farrow is the only person who could truly relate to him”; “No one wants a Holocaust comparison, but isn’t this what we learned on those field trips we all had to take to museums of tolerance?”; “I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now”; “Last night, Ivan and I were texting about all the hot art-world-adjacent millennial girls he knows who have been diagnosed with autism.” There are jokes about taking Greta Thunberg’s and Barron Trump’s virginity.
The lesser work in “My First Book” sinks to high school graduation speech level. “We are the future of the planet” and “I wonder if we will ever get to where we are going” and “Time has never moved faster than it is moving right now” and so on.
I’m sorry, “lol girls with mustache fingers” is high literature but “we are the future of the planet” is stupid? Did the author flip a coin on each of those to decide where it’d go?
Also what the fuck is this about Adderall, I don’t even understand what it would mean to collectivise “the Adderall sector”, but wasn’t there a shortage of ADD medication not so long ago where people who needed it couldn’t get it? Wouldn’t we want to collectivise this??
Levy is rarely boring.
[citation needed]
She talks incredibly fast and doesn’t finish most of her thoughts but is a fabulous conversationalist anyway because sometimes she says something that might not make any sense if you stop to think about it, but she does it with so much manic bluster you can’t help but nod along. Like “TikTok is a psychological-warfare weapon invented by China” or “If I was a guy, I’d probably be an incel or an evil gay.”
Oh my god this is mortifying. Imagine being such a tryhard yet such a fucking bore. Congratulations you sound like a thousand fucking tweets.
also, remember that the TikTok national security scaremongering is cos a Thiel consortium wants to buy it. Levy’s dogwhistle drops are carefully selected.
Strange how the 26-year-old VoiCE of A gENerAtion sounds exactly like a politician who rails against the evil of TikTok while owning stock in Facebook.
To be honest I’m mortified that there exists a person who interacts with that and calls her a “fabulous conversationalist”. Ah yes, gish gallop personified, exactly what I want in the person I talk to. What the fuck is the purpose for which you engage with a conversation if this is the “fabulous” outcome??
What pushes Levy’s stories beyond being merely on the level of smart magazine essays is the empathy you can sense below the starkness of her sentences. A typical observation: “When I’m at a party and I look across the room I can see everyone holding their red Solo cups and hurting.”
“When I am at a party, I feel like nobody understands me,” said the voice of a generation.
One character is nearly canceled when, on a college radio station, she says, “Trigger warnings trigger me.”
2014 sent a Vine; they want their joke back.
Generations no longer understand one another because we haven’t been injected with the same memes.
“Marvy. Fab. Far out,” deadpanned Calvin’s father.
I’m imagining a Dorothy Parker review of Honor Levy. “It took gumption to call this My First Book, in the face of the inevitable riposte, ‘And it should be your last.’”
Monday. Cold pizza and a vape around 2 pm. The Adderall at the Urbit meetup last night was too revolting, but what can you do? You can’t stay up til 5 posting nrx thirst traps on just nothing. They had those divine dubstep remixers in the green coats, and Mike Crumplar was perfectly scathing, angling for a hate-fuck, and it couldn’t have been funnier. Absolute VOG unit!
— from “Diary of a Dimes Square Lady (during Days of Panic, Frenzy and World Change)”
Tuesday. Found a cigarette butt in my Solo cup. Couldn’t have been more overwhelmed with the existentialness of it all. Perfect generation moment, absolutely hilarisad. Uwu! Got two tickets to Cancel Me Harder, You Motherfucking Bitch. Playing at the best basement in the whole D-Square, can you believe it? Called up some completely wonderful numbers, but couldn’t find anybody to go with except Roger. Wouldn’t be seen dead with him after that business with Mike, but what can you do?
Wednesday. Cancel Me Harder, You Motherfucking Bitch was the definitive worst. Laugh riot from end to end! Couldn’t have had a better time, even if Roger does still post to X when he should know that Nostr is the future.
Thursday. Found another cigarette butt in last night’s Solo cup. Truth bomb time: what gives, yo? Rode the subway, thought hard about how everyone’s face is just a mask for their true self. Thinking I need to upgrade my avi. It’s completely the season for pixel art! Gotta ask Kevin about the best prompts, so I don’t get something absolutely dreadful.
Friday. Oopsies! Turns out I’ve been leaving the cig butts in my own Solo cups! I couldn’t be more embarrassed, but ChatGPT says that the benzos can’t cause memory loss.
Saturday. Rode the subway to CVS. Bought myself an absolutely dismal new eyeliner, took a selfie with The Bell Curve. Hashtag totes not sponsored, hashtag unfiltered!
Sunday. Oopsies! Those cig butts? Turns out I’ve been leaving them in my own Solo cups! I couldn’t be more completely mortified. I really came in a fluffer that time, but what can you do?
@blakestacey “divine dubstep remixers” LOL.
