the lauren oyler of it all

or, the dissolution of mass culture

what a horseshit cover

If you’re a certain kind of person, you’re likely aware of what will be considered a seismic takedown of a writer known for and who rode her path to prominence on takedowns of well known writers.

If you’re any other type of person, you have no idea who Lauren Oyler is.

I suppose I straddle these lines, at least in this instance. I’m a hopelessly literary idiot who reads books compulsively and vomits out opinions sometimes with copious word counts (I’m aware people never click links but I cannot help but link you to examples of other things constantly—such is my internet curse—but I choose one of these specifically to highlight that I am not above the literary takedown) but I’m also blithely unaware of most of what happens in the literary world because I don’t live in New York and amn’t addicted to twitter.

Those of you who suffer in New York glued to your smartphone, there are cures, though it means you may eventually become happy, which is its own curse, I know.

Personally, I had never heard of Lauren Oyler because I don’t read book reviews written by anyone besides me, but also because I just don’t care about the literary world anymore. And so when she began making a name for herself, I was off doing whatever it is I do with my days.

Almost against my will, however, I was made to read a long essay she wrote last year about being paid to go on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Cruise (like almost everyone, Goop Cruise meant nothing to me and I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about had you tried to make me care about this unusual and revolting combination of monosyllabics with too many vowels).

I don’t recall any longer if the reaction was positive or negative, though I’ve come to understand that dancing on that fine line of disgust and praise is how Oyler’s made her particular and peculiar career.

I do remember some people calling it a response to David Foster Wallace’s (in)famous essay about being paid to cover a cruise ship (I have been aware of him for most of my life but only ever read half of Infinite Jest [I liked it! but not enough to finish, I guess] and the back copy of all his other books and maybe an introduction he wrote to some book—who can remember).

And so I did the work and I read David Foster Wallace’s essay, then Oyler’s, and then about 500 pages of other David Foster Wallace essays, and I meant to publish an essay about how Oyler or her audience misunderstood Foster Wallace to an almost backbreaking degree, and as I prepared to shatter my keyboard with furious typings, I also looked at my calendar and realized that if this were to mean anything to anyone it should’ve been published weeks ago already. By the time Oyler’s Goop Cruise landed on my screen, it had already been out for a week or two, and when you add the extra week or two it took me to read all that David Foster Wallace (he’s pretty good, I must admit, though I’m deliberately not using footnotes because I don’t want people to think I’m trying to imitate him while I criticize someone else for doing a poor job of reinvigorating a topic he already cemented into stasis thirty years ago), the impermanent memory of the internet was already a hundred controversies past whatever everyone was saying about the Goop Cruise and Oyler’s fascination with herself¹.

I write this now because she’s back to being the topic of the week (but really just the day, and that day was yesterday) now that her essay collection is out and people are writing their own takedowns of the takedown artist.

I bring this all up because I am genuinely curious how many of you, dear readers, have ever even heard of Lauren Oyler.

Like I said, I am an unusual freak who spent time in the literary world and personally know way too many writers in real life, and even I didn’t know who she was until the knowing was thrust upon me.

So my assumption is that most of you have never heard of her.

Which is fine. Good, really. Why would you care about someone who writes negative reviews about books you’ve never heard of (for the record, I like Sally Rooney a lot and have been meaning to write something about her since before this newsletter began, but life goes on and I suppose I said what I had to say in this podcast)?

But I think this highlights the growing ways culture has not simply bifurcated between High and Low, but has absolutely shattered to pieces, giving all of us, each of us, our own curated prism for culture to the point that a Very Important Person may be someone you’ve never even heard of before.

For example, I had never heard of Sidney Sweeney until about six or eight months ago (I had seen her in The White Lotus previously, though I didn’t think she was someone who was already famous). I suppose you won’t believe me, but I also don’t think I’d heard an entire Taylor Swift song until a few months ago (when my wife told me Taylor Swift was a billionaire, I asked her For what? with my real question being: Is she still famous?) and I probably couldn’t tell you who most of the famous people are on TV anymore or who all those voices on the radio are. I just watched Poor Things and the only famous people I recognize are ones who have been famous for most of my adult life already.

And while I’m maybe strangely immune to popular culture and its many tentacles, I also think I’m mostly aware of a great many things.

But the way the internet has cloistered us all into a seemingly infinite number of separate and nonintersecting cultural hallways makes for a strange type of existence, especially when something notable happens in one of these hallways.

The only way you’re likely to hear about something from beyond your hallway is because some absolute freak you somehow know in real life opened a window and screamed some arcane knowledge about Kpop or whatever, and now you’re stepping into their hallway—an unwelcome yet beguiling experience—full of tableaus and sonicscapes you have no reference for, and when you finally extricate yourself from that strange bridge, that alternate reality, you look around and become that freak for someone else, as you open a window in their hallway and whisper Get a load of this weird shit and because it comes packaged without context or even consensual interest, it becomes all the more baffling, all the more enraging and enthralling. But at the end of our voyeuristic trek through the freak shit of other people’s prismatic realities, we return to our own comfortable hallways full of 90s sitcoms and anime and Fiona Apple with only the faintest hint of where we’ve been, what we’ve seen, the hours we spent mired in the filth of another world, and hopefully we can scrub it from our algorithm so you stop getting recommended viral tiktoks about people you’ve never heard of doing things you can barely understand for an audience of hundreds of millions.

There’s a freedom in all this, yes, in being allowed to privately be the little freak you’ve always been, but there’s a sort of terror to it as well, where you stare into the darkness, the impenetrable blackness of existence, and find that it is not staring back but that the algorithm is.

Watching you. Studying you.

You little freak, you.

The monoculture had many obvious problems that people bemoaned for generations, and so we all welcomed its dissolution (which I’d say happened, officially, in April 2020, as soon as Tiger King ended, though it had been on a gradual and accelerating collapse since the Arab Spring), but I’m not sure this alternative is better.

A physical reality that we all share, yet a psychic one where we are all alone.

Utterly and completely unmoored from one another, where some people believe the world is flat or maybe they don’t but who can even tell, where our shared sense of reality and the rules that govern literal physics are up for debate, where a solar eclipse is treated the same way it would’ve been in the year 1000 by people who spent generations watching their land overrun by Vikings who raped or killed or enslaved (why not all three!) everyone they knew, where the logic of mirrors has become a mystery to millions of people on the world wide web, as we all descend into a state of horrifying unknowing while all the information accumulated for thousands of generations is freely available to anyone with thumbs unless they get the gobbledygook spat out by a hallucinating artificial intelligence.

We hold the Tower of Babel, Borges’ Aleph, in our hands, yet we have become Iron Age peasants, blinking at the sun.

And so while it matters very little that I know who Lauren Oyler is or that now you do too (kind of), I find the larger sense of alienation and collapsing community terrifying enough to try to make you laugh at my histrionics while I string together words for your Thursday morning.

For something completely different check out this review of Lauren Oyler’s book. Also, see my novels lsited below. Through the weekend, each will be on sale for $0.99.

Judge Now, Judge Quickly!

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• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King

1. Okay, so a little bit I lied but I’m writing this footnote hours after writing the rest of the essay so take that for whatever it’s worth. It’s Wednesday night and you’ll be reading this in twelve hours and I suppose I must at least play with the conceit because it’s there to be batted about like I’m my own sweet kitty and this essay is me trying to sleep. But my problem with the Oyler essay’s relation to Foster Wallace’s essay is that Oyler seems continually turned inward and yet she uses this to only ever look inward at herself. And perhaps, by example, she’s demonstrating the generation who was given social media and asked to perform their entire lives for every second of that stupid life, but I think that if this was the point she was trying to make about millennial culture and this generation of staring at ourselves in our camera lenses, she did a fairly pisspoor job of it. And while Foster Wallace was certainly turned inward, agonizing his anxieties as its own performance (in contrast to Oyler’s affected disinterest), this was all in service of satirizing and critiquing society itself, beyond him, and even beyond his generation, assuming anyone could ever really and truly be the voice of a generation. But I suppose this is what grinds my gears a bit about the comparison. Foster Wallace was interested in the world and interested in engaging with it, understanding it. And so when he writes about this cruise and how he’s spending a terrifying amount of time inside his little capsule of a room, he’s also discussing the class stratification within the ship itself and also, by extension, the class dynamics back on land. Does Oyler do any such thing? No, not really, and not with any real interest or verve, because, as far as I can tell, she’s uniquely disinterested in sneering at the people of the Goop Cruise and basking in the glow of proximity to fame. Or maybe I’m the wrong one here and I don’t understand anything. It’s been many months since I read all these essays and I don’t have the patience or heart to read these cruise ship pieces again because, really, who has the time or energy for these literary types and their compulsion to clack along their keyboard, spewing every thought.