Yeah I was gonna say, someone fed Brett Easton Ellis and Joyce through an LLM salted with groyper speak from /b/

Man no one is going to know what the fuck we’re talking about in 100 years. : |

It’s slurry of highly topical Twitter references that will be as inscrutable as Linear A script in like 5 years

I kinda really like

He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness.

its funny

tbh I don’t hate it as much as the first time I read it. Like I understand where she’s going with it. and idk, this is like one page, maybe things get better. My main issue is that it reads like if you ran the prompt “Beat generation but gen z” through an AI model trained exclusively on fascist blue check tweets. Like if you don’t have a phD in terminally online right-wing culture, you’d have to look up every other word and the sense in which it is used. I get that it’s trying to use modern lingo, but it’s just doing way too much, it’s as if she crammed every sort of youth internet culture signifier she could think of into one page. I had to read this one page multiple times to see that no she actually is writing a story here and it’s not just some nonsense Burroughs-esque cut-up novel made up entirely of new right dogwhistles and the most obscure gen z slang.

It’s far from the worst thing I’ve ever read, but as a former Beat worshipper I wrote far better free associative wannabe Beat prose when I was in high school. I can’t believe something like this got published, it needs a lot of work.

I think you have to be extremely online in specific ways for it to be clear and evocative.

Like the first line, I’m not sure what giving knight errant means. He looks like the kind of guy who’s on a quest? Maybe with plate armor? Also organ-meat eater, so he looks like Liver King? Fuck that strongly contradicts my previous impression, which is impressive because that was already kind of vague.

Then we move onto he’s like a byronic hero. This is another archetype that contradicts the Liver King heavily, what with him being an exuberant grifter and the byronic hero being a brooding but deep emo guy and then finally he’s giving Haplogroup R1b, which I assume is some skull measuring Nazi adjacent nonsense.

EDIT: I still hate it but it kinda reminds me of something Jenna K Moran (who rules) would right if she were an extremely online right wing teenager, so I feel weirder about hating it

I hate it.

you’re in the right country for it

Adam Smith in the beginning of Wealth of Nations has looooooong sentences with tons of commas. I added the breaks, this is actually one paragraph:

Among the savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to work is more or less employed in useful labour, and endeavours to provide, as well as he can, the necessaries and conveniencies of life, for himself, and such of his family or tribe as are either too old, or too young, or too infirm, to go a-hunting and fishing.

Such nations, however, are so miserably poor, that, from mere want, they are frequently reduced, or at least think themselves reduced, to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts.

Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do not labour at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times, more labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied; and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.

Run on sentences area awesome. For twelve years my teachers told me not to use them but I defied them all and continue to string together sentences with the wrong uhh… mark thingies to this day!

Reading fucking Dostoevsky and there are almost as many subordinate clauses per sentence as there are nicknames for the characters.

There was some book I had to read over the summer in preparation for AP English my senior year of high school, and it was all just page length stacks of nested clauses where it would just stop in the middle of a sentence, elaborate on some aspect of it, interrupt to elaborate - at least once, usually more - some more, then continue to keep doing this out to an absurd depth, only to meander back to it most of a page later and then either finish it or start another pile of nested clauses. Like look at how I structured that sentence and imagine something ten times worse, and then imagine it happening at least once in every single paragraph and at least once per page.

Also the story was awful in its own right, terrible prose aside. All I can remember of the plot was that the POV character was a dumbass and killed someone by being a dumbass and it all hinged entirely on inscrutable 19th century superstitious sensibilities.

At the end of the year I gave the book to a junior in one of my classes who was going to take AP English the next year and who had to read that same story over the summer.

I think a part of it is the homogenisation of the industry. People tend to write novels that publishers want to publish, and a part of that involves doing what is thought to make people more likely to read, like starting off with a hook and shorter, more direct sentences. A novel is a product first and foremost these days, not something someone writes solely as a creative endeavor.