Grace Lavery / Joseph Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery / Mallory Ortberg - "Straight with extra steps" couple trooning out to avoid "dwindling into mere heterosexuality"

[Paul Enwerdhoeven]

Ironically if you just changed the aesthetics it actually most closely resembles the lifestyle of Saudi Arabia or a FDLS sect member. I guess polygamy has bad branding, so just rebrand it as a throuple or polycule!

In an alternate universe where Mallory became an FLDS tradwife she'd actually have children of her own and she wouldn't have cut off her breasts or fucked-up her body with masculinizing hormones.

 

[Trianon]

IIRC Joe was pushing his students' boundaries in terms of content. We know he was making them read overly sexual passages aloud and bragging about it online, and that means it's likely he was talking about disgusting sex shit in class too. I had a professor like this in my lone classics credit 15 years ago and still remember how cringe he was and how uncomfortable female students looked when he would start one of these "discussions".
The drama might simply be that Joe was told to stop talking about cocks in lecture and now he's raging eternally at being told "No".

edit - ninja'd

I think this is a likely contender. Especially with Joe now saying that calling him "unfuckable" is sexual harassment. He is the one constantly bringing up sexual shit, but not participating is somehow evidence that you think he's one of Those Trannies.

She's working very hard to let us know how small and unambitious this book is. Nothing of any consequence. Hat buying. Compare to Joe's descriptions of his own forthcoming work (Please Miss): positively radioactive with grandiosity.

It sounds terribly dull only because the summary is just a rundown of themes we're supposed to pick up on after having read it. You did all the work for me, book jacket writer!

 

[AirdropShitposts]

Tbf, SF was hit pretty hard by the AIDS epidemic. I don’t find it particularly hard to believe that a gay academic at Berkeley in the 80s had a lot of friends die of AIDS. What I do find hard to believe is anything else Lavery writes.

I didn't want to assume about a professor I don't even know actually exists. But, yes, specific populations were very hard hit but I've wanted to push back against this increasing talk (mostly from troons, exactly in the way Joe used it) that there were bodies everywhere from AIDS because millions of gay people lived in SF and NYC having borderline anonymous sex with each other. It was in specific populations, I strongly doubt it truly affected even the majority of gay men in America. You wouldn't know that from the way it's culturally depicted because the history is dominated by a specific population which itself leaves out the drug addicts, donated blood receivers and heterosexual sex workers in the same geographic locations.

So I could further maximize offense at Joe's stolen valor attempt because he gets called a pedophile just like all the millions of gay men who were murdered by Reagan.

 

[AMHOLIO]

In an alternate universe where Mallory became an FLDS tradwife she'd actually have children of her own and she wouldn't have cut off her breasts or fucked-up her body with masculinizing hormones.

I can't say that would be any better since ther children would be miserable while mom is a baby making factory and yes man for dad and the other wives. The cut off from the outside world would be more extreme and I think this is sadly the better cult for her.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Chapter One: The End of Breakfast

“It was the end of the continental breakfast, and therefore the beginning of the end of everything else. For thirty-five years, every Biedermeier girl whose rent for the coming week had found its way to Mrs. Mossler’s crocheted lantern-bag could go to sleep secure in the knowledge that she would wake up with a breakfast tray slid into the recess of her door, delivered just as advertised, “silently and gratuitously, no waiting — no waiter!” During the war the fourteen-dollar rent was raised to eighteen dollars, then again to twenty-five[…] But the Biedermeier’s daily rendezvous between tray and door never failed, not even on Sundays, and aside from a wartime substitution of Postum for coffee, the menu had remained implacably untouched by time. One’s choice of either sliced grapefruit or tomato, a Vienna roll or brown buttered toast, a shirred egg, and a cluster of grapes sustained plenty until dinner (new girls learned quickly not to speak of supper within the walls), as lunch was not included in the weekly rate, and fewer than half the inmates were so reliably employed as to be able to comfortably commission a week’s worth in advance.”
I don't hate the cover:

The cover and the writing--someone watched three Wes Anderson movies in one sitting to drown out the sounds of Joe and Lily having sex in the next room.

 

[fkrding]

Why would a manly man man write a book about stereotypical women in the 60s? She almost seems more female as time goes on.

 

[monstrous bubo]

The cover and the writing--someone watched three Wes Anderson movies in one sitting to drown out the sounds of Joe and Lily having sex in the next room.

Confirmation from her husband


link

Mal is so Raleigh St. Clair

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

Why would a manly man man write a book about stereotypical women in the 60s? She almost seems more female as time goes on.

In the excerpt she’s oddly referring to meals being shoved through door slots and residents as “inmates” I’m going to talk a wild guess that the women’s hotel might be symbolic as a prison.

I can believe Mal would be uninspired enough to write a book using a 1960’s women’s hotel to bang home “gender is a fancier prison” motif. Not sure if she will include the YMCA as the men’s prison and the Bowery bum hotels where true equality is found among the sexes.

Good thing Mal has totally broken out of the gender prison by getting cucked by her own huswife and his girlfriend.

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

So much of the Mallory arc to me seems like "cornfed Midwestern girl easily bamboozled by anyone from fancier areas telling her she's a rube and needs to listen to them."

Chicago has a whole glut of this, because it's a city that has a permanent inferiority complex and deeply aspires to be something more than what it is. Chicagoans routinely gullibly adopt whatever they think is popular on whatever coast they think is cool.

If you look at Mallory's old potshots, she was always ragging on dumb college boys and professors at liberal arts colleges, but fundamentally she likes to make fun of people for being stupid and unobservant of others' thoughts and feelings.

One thing she never, ever engaged in was making fun of people from bigger or more prestigious cities, especially never with the biting humor that characterized her approach to less-cool targets. She clearly views the UK as highly romantic and even her mockeries of Austen and other Brits are shot through with absolute admiration.

To mock New Yorkers or Brits in anything but a self-deprecating "haha but actually you're better than us and we all know it" is, for a Chicagoan, to throw your lot in with that guy who says "here's your flag" and the rest of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. It's declaring that your place is with the country people who mock the New Yorkers and intellectual pretension, rather than the city people who mock rubes and shallow, popular interests.

The Joe thing can best be understood in this context. Mallory loves the affectations of this man who seems like he belongs in the SF Bay area, New York, and London, all places Chicagoans know are for wealthier, cooler people than they can ever hope to be.

Lily is the same type, originating in Colorado but choosing massively indie cool school UC Santa Cruz for her undergrad. Her history shows a lot of reaching and striving that focuses on getting to apex cool areas for the region.

Lily and Mallory, in spite of hating each other (and each of them seeing the other for the striving, insecure mess she is), are so happy to be a Brooklyn famous throuple. They don't care that they look like broodmares for aging, jowly Joe. They're wearing black t-shirts in Brooklyn and looking boldly at the camera. They're not regular flyover girls, they're cool flyover girls.

They were never pretty or talented or rich enough to get magazine coverage with photo shoots for normal person reasons, but they (like many women before them whose vanity eclipsed their dignity) can readily get attention by openly revealing intimate, salacious details of their lives to the public.

 

[Dromedary]

We know he was making them read overly sexual passages aloud and bragging about it online,

Not only reading them, Joe bragged about making them memorize and recite from memory a truly filthy Auden poem about tonguing another man's dirty asshole.
Joe's dumb asshole defenders on Twitter: "Grace just had them read a poem by a gay poet and conservatives are angry! Just because the poet was gay!"

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

She's working very hard to let us know how small and unambitious this book is.

It’s also the least masculine sounding novel ever described.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

Not only reading them, Joe bragged about making them memorize and recite from memory a truly filthy Auden poem about tonguing another man's dirty asshole.
Joe's dumb asshole defenders on Twitter: "Grace just had them read a poem by a gay poet and conservatives are angry! Just because the poet was gay!"

Even Auden referred to the poem as “purely pornographic” and it was basically him goading other gay writers to write dirty poems to each other. Only decades later was it published by gay literati in NYC mag "Fuck you" and Auden took a few more years to acknowledge publicly it was actually his poem.

So basically smutty writing for erotic purposes, among gay writers, gets turned into classroom fodder for Joe to get cheap thrills by making his students read, memorize and recite it. Auden has an amazing body of work so forcing students to read his private smut writings is just Joe’s personality disorder and coom brain writ large.

don't hate the cover:

I don’t either but at first glance, with the title, I assumed they couldn’t afford to license Ormond Gigli's “Girls in the Window” photo for the cover.

 

[Constellationzero]

Academic word salad psychobabble. Sideshow, like many "academics," is just throwing whatever shit covered scrabble tiles against the wall to see what sticks.

Remember that Berkeley hired this troon and Mallory has asspatters who make her think somehow she can string together a coherent sentence.

 

[cherrysour]

Please Miss (Cockney rhyming slang for “penis,” presumably?) was published in February 2022. Did he teach that fall? Maybe he tried to include it on a syllabus and Berkeley got all rapey by telling him no, you may not require students to read your first-person account of that time Mallory tongued your inguinal canal.

 

[expectant asshole]

I don’t think Please Miss is Cockney rhyming slang. But Joe is a complete James blunt.

https://happy2movelondon.co.uk/complete-dictionary-of-cockney-rhyming-slang/

 

[Tragon Dirtle]

...the superficial daily activities they perform in common — how they get in one another’s way, how they give one another space, how they try to impose upon others without being imposed upon in return.

This sounds exactly like her talking about being on 'company manners' with Lily for their first year of living together. I wonder if there will be a Significant Fight in the book involving a disagreement about recycling, putting out the trash, or yoghurt pots.

 

[Zemblan Physics]

New episode of Blocked and reported starts out with Katie Herzog hating on the throuple for a good ten fifteen minutes. It’s a premium episode, but it’s worth it.

 

[Mayhem]

The book sounds boring as fuck, and I’ve read way, way more Proust than average.

 

[Larry David's Opera Cape]

New episode of Blocked and reported starts out with Katie Herzog hating on the throuple for a good ten fifteen minutes. It’s a premium episode, but it’s worth it.

I would not pay for a podcast if I had all the money in the world. If you want to summarize, I'm sure others would also appreciate it.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

Confirmation from her husband

View attachment 5917253
link

Mal is so Raleigh St. Clair

View attachment 5917256

I’d also bet she was reading Paulina Bren’s “The Barbizon, the hotel that set women free” to distract herself from all the middle aged man moaning.

A non-fiction social history book about the old Laura Spelman Hall in the West Village, which was a women’s hotel for working class girls, would be more interesting than a fictional book about a “second rate Barbizon” imo.

The book sounds boring as fuck, and I’ve read way, way more Proust than average.

At least Proust was writing ad nauseam about the era he lived in and experienced first hand, unlike Mal.

Admittedly I’m not a fan of historical fiction, or whatever you want to label the novel Mal is writing with fictional characters from her grandmother’s generation, but I can appreciate there is a little variety and a great void of fictional and non-fictional reading material about the lives of pre-1900 people. However there is a bountiful selection about the 20th century social history and a veritable gluttony of written words for post-1950 lives

So if anyone is actually interested in the lives of women in women’s hotels residents in 1960’s NYC there is a wealth of material, first hand material, both fiction and non-fiction. Many notable and not so notable women writers lived in the hotels, the hotels were written about by women during the period, there are memoirs written later on by residents and interesting social histories written by authors who interviewed former residents and engaged in months of diligent social and archival research.

The publishing house is investing in a novel about fictional characters, in a women’s hotel in the 1960’s, as imagined by transcuck Daniel Lavery who was born in 1986. I’m sort of dumbstruck it is being pitched as just quirky chick lit fiction, instead of being pitched as some sort of insightful nonsense by a modern transman dissecting mid-century female stereotypes and oppression because they can’t pitch it using Ortberg’s name recognition.

If only they could erase the last six years of Mallory’s absurd gender rabbit hole and being rebranded Lavery. It would probably seem like a predictable novel for Mallory Ortberg and pitched as Mallory finally jumping ahead a century in the quirky female satire genre.

I mean, imagine if Mallory just decided to quietly butch out or live as a “man” and not make a giant public spectacle of herself and her ridiculous husband and marriage and getting cucked. Then again, if she wasn’t willing to be a public spectacle Joe would have never had any use for her.