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

[Free the Pedos]

The verbose language and the wish for the novel to “ferment” a little makes me suspect Joe is the writer, given his recent experimentations in the culinary, ahem, arts. Seems like the kind of thing he would do, too.

I think it’s a female writer impersonating Joe, which is appropriate given, well, everything.

 

[Zemblan Physics]

I think it’s a female writer impersonating Joe, which is appropriate given, well, everything.

Well, now you’ve convinced me: it’s one of you lot and I’m an idiot.

 

[Constellationzero]

The fuck?
View attachment 6382766
@Potatis Salad I’ll pay you fifty bucks to eat this.

Imagine getting this shit on a plate. Is it chocolate shavings? Campfire detritus? Oh it’s… burnt garlic? What are you even supposed to do with it— roll the chicken in it? Eat it with the rice? Imagine downing a forkful of playground wood chips.
Yum yum.

It's the stuff used to throw down AirSoftFatty's outhouse to keep the smell down.

 

[monstrous bubo]

You'd be better off spending a year writing about Al Bundy and the American sitcom than this kind of novel.

Utterly savage. Despite putting Al and Peggy on the cover, Joe actually only mentioned them once in his book.

Spoiler: Don’t do my girl Peggy like that

Yet if the sitcom’s renegotiation of public and private spheres of economic activity seems to transpire within the domain of woman, one could not conclude that the genre upholds any more general
feminization of labor. Indeed, perhaps perversely, several sitcoms have treated the domestic sphere as, properly speaking, the space of patriarchal governance par excellence. Such stoical reterritorializations can transmit from an armchair, in which one might find an Archie Bunker; from a couch, on which the browbeaten Al Bundy (same initials) resists the sexual advances of his glamazon wife, Peggy, and the (trans- ?) feminization threatened by her uncastreated desire; or from the shed, in which men’s toys and tools, the instrumentation of masculine reproductive labor, can be exhibited in all their violent glory. From the shed, Tim Allen in Home Improvement deploys a militant offensive to smash asunder domesticity and femininity, in the name of a barbarian, redcap masculinity. Be it co-
incidence, prefiguration, or glitch in the matrix, an alarming proportion of the audience in Tim Allen’s 1990s show- within- a- show seems to be sporting our own epoch’s armband, and one of them
looks unmistakably like Tucker Carlson.

 

[Free the Pedos]

Spoiler: Don’t do my girl Peggy like that

undefined

Jesus Christ, is this an excerpt from his book? It's unbearable to read.

 

[A Sentient Cloud]

The fuck?
View attachment 6382766
@Potatis Salad I’ll pay you fifty bucks to eat this.

Imagine getting this shit on a plate. Is it chocolate shavings? Campfire detritus? Oh it’s… burnt garlic? What are you even supposed to do with it— roll the chicken in it? Eat it with the rice? Imagine downing a forkful of playground wood chips.
Yum yum.

Garlic ash is a real thing, albeit with limited applications. That, however, is just a pile of charcoal.

Joe's attempts at cooking piss me off in a way I normally reserve for child or animal abusers. At its heart this is simple - chicken with rice and a side salad - but because Joe has to be la haute intellectuelle at all times, every individual item is this baffling pastiche of expensive, bougie ingredients and obscure ethnic preparations, prepped by the steady hand of a 9-year-old who is just starting to learn how to make mashed potatoes, all without any understanding of what might actually taste good together. He's like academia's answer to Jack Scalfani.

 

[Potatis Salad]

When I looked at the negative Goodreads reviews, this one stood out. Whoever put this up (whether one of our Kiwi friends or another fan of the Laverys from reddit or elsewhere), I'm shocked the censors even let this happen. Does anyone know if Goodreads takes reviews down at author request?

I'd think Mallory would be the kind of author to monitor her reviews like a hawk. But maybe she's the kind who can't stand to look at them.



Full text below. Archive is limited (only shows the first half of the first paragraph).

Here is an archive of the full text of the review.

10/10 this was written by someone familiar with this thread. I would normally disapprove of interacting with cows even at this degree of remove, but this is fucking hilarious.

 

[Trianon]

Moe tells some fellow gender blob on X that she knew what they told her already! She ain’t no dummy. Why, that was just absolutely a bit unnecessary to quip about any idea Moe should happen to bumble upon at any given moment because, of course, she knows anything they could possibly ever deign to imagine telling her about a subject she had dawdled about. She ain’t dumb, she just plays that way on social media, & the Chatner, & in her dreary shared marriage. It’s Moe’s schtick & just how dare you unnecessarily say a word or even condescend to hint that she may not know things about topics she breaches. Moe comes off rather touchy on the subjects of babies & teeth:
View attachment 6374026
Link | Archive

Moe's thing is to be an uwu lil guy who acts completely retarded and then the second someone treats her as the child she acts like, she tries to pull on the big-boy britches and insist she be treated with respect she has not earned.

joe ne sais quoi

shut the thread down now, no one can top this

Guarantee Joe's book tour was self-funded (bookstores will put on an event for basically nothing if the author is willing to pay their way to show up). Mal is now broke, she can't afford trips to go and do readings at Indie bookstores in Oregon or whatever.

And publishers do not pick up the tab for this anymore. Almost all book tours are self-guided nowadays.

Does anyone know if Goodreads takes reviews down at author request?

They do not, and authors getting caught fucking with their Goodreads reviews (sockpuppeting, review bombing, harassing, even passive-aggressively crying about a negative review on Twitter) is one of the few consistent ways of getting anyone canceled, regardless of gendered or racial preciousness. Goodreads users want there to be a bright red line between authors and readers, and the amount of drama that this generates is delightful.

But, my goodness, whoever wrote that review is a Farmer. "Joe L." The sitcom book dig. "Ferment." WHO DID THIS???

 

[Autistic Nonetheless]

Gender, spook. Innocence, spook!, Fair trail, SPOOK!, Schizophrenia, SPOOOOOOK!!!!.
Spooks everywhere, as fearless Joe demolishes another boundary. Why if he is allowed to keep going, at this pace the foundations of our very society may well crumble beneath our feet.

. Joe’s book tour was funded by Mallory’s house sale and their substack advances (the only reason Joe had anything to do with substack was Mallory forcing him to be part of her deal. Wonder if swearing to advance and fund Joe’s writing career was part of their marriage vows?)

Throwing parties and promotion for his terrible book was probably one of the top ten reasons they are broke and living in Lansing now.

Just a reminder that last time Mal had a book out, despite the dreaded rona, there were live readings, special events, and she was interviewed by Natalie fucking Portman of all people. (There was also the sight of attention starved Joe preening himself and being generally insufferable all the way thorough — but ya know, fish swim.)

She still has some cachet and even good will so unless the book is suddenly deemed offensive I expect plenty of people to roll out the red carpet for her.

 

[Nothing To See Here]

Spoiler: Don’t do my girl Peggy like that

Yet if the sitcom’s renegotiation of public and private spheres of economic activity seems to transpire within the domain of woman, one could not conclude that the genre upholds any more general feminization of labor. Indeed, perhaps perversely, several sitcoms have treated the domestic sphere as, properly speaking, the space of patriarchal governance par excellence. Such stoical reterritorializations can transmit from an armchair, in which one might find an Archie Bunker; from a couch, on which the browbeaten Al Bundy (same initials) resists the sexual advances of his glamazon wife, Peggy, and the (trans- ?) feminization threatened by her uncastreated desire; or from the shed, in which men’s toys and tools, the instrumentation of masculine reproductive labor, can be exhibited in all their violent glory. From the shed, Tim Allen in Home Improvement deploys a militant offensive to smash asunder domesticity and femininity, in the name of a barbarian, redcap masculinity. Be it co-incidence, prefiguration, or glitch in the matrix, an alarming proportion of the audience in Tim Allen’s 1990s show- within- a- show seems to be sporting our own epoch’s armband, and one of them looks unmistakably like Tucker Carlson.

In case anyone thinks this pile of unbearable bullshit is an inevitable result of attempting to write about gender politics in sitcoms, rather than Joe being uniquely bad at writing, here's a translation:

Spoiler: Rewriting Joe's bullshit (into something still bullshit but readable)

"The sitcom's [hard to simplify "renegotiation of the public and private spheres of economy" without additional context as to what he means by that] would seem to happen within the 'woman's domain' (i.e. the home). But that's not to say that the sitcom genre promotes the feminisation of labour - far from it. Several sitcoms instead do the opposite: they treat the home and the domestic sphere as a place of male power, where the patriarch reigns supreme. The location of the patriarch's seat of power within the home may differ depending on the sitcom, though. Consider Archie Bunker, commanding the household from his armchair. Al Bundy, on the other hand, resists his wife's sexual advances (and the attendant, implicit threatening undertone of male feminization and castration) from the couch. For Tim Allen (Home Improvement) and many others, the 'man shed' is his throne, where he surrounds himself with DIY tools which - via their association as 'boy's toys', and their visual similarity to torture instruments or weapons - form an implicit threat to the home's domesticity and femininity. In an eerie coincidence, a large number of the audience in Tim Allen's 1990s show-within-a-show seem to be [I have no idea what "sporting our own epoch's armband" means without additional context]; one audience member looks remarkably like Tucker Carlson."

[note: The paragraph divorced from context makes condensing some stuff down a bit difficult because I'm not 100% sure of the context he's making these arguments in. And I've never seen these sitcoms, either, which means I've lost additional context, and Joe's not kind enough to assume some readers won't have seen all of these sitcoms and therefore provide a bit of that context.

Also, some of this straight-up doesn't make sense - what does a man being aggressively sexually advanced upon by his wife have to do with patriarchal governance? Maybe something, but it's impossible to tell because you haven't explained to us how this supports your point. You know, that thing they teach you to do in first-year undergraduate essay-writing classes? Anyway. Those are my excuses if this is a bit shit: I'm not a bad writer, Joe just has nonsensical arguments that become even more obvious when you strip out the blathering.)

See, Joe? It's easy to write about complex topics in a way that's accessible to general audiences, provided you're not an insecure retard trying to hide behind long words to make yourself look smart.

 

[monstrous bubo]

Nice translation from ponce to prose, @Nothing To See Here

[I have no idea what "sporting our own epoch's armband" means without additional context]

He does not elaborate, but slyly adds this picture and caption so we can all make the connection between two gentlemen of German extraction who are interested in politics.



It’s just like Nuremberg.

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

That little fragment that includes Married With Children is unintentionally revealing. He thinks Peggy is somehow coded as transfeminine because she is sexually ravenous. This means to some degree Joe sees himself as Peggy and his own marriage as the Bundys. You'd think that would make Mal Al, but she's obviously Bud.

 

[Friend of Dorothy Parker]

Utterly savage. Despite putting Al and Peggy on the cover, Joe actually only mentioned them once in his book.

Spoiler: Don’t do my girl Peggy like that

Yet if the sitcom’s renegotiation of public and private spheres of economic activity seems to transpire within the domain of woman, one could not conclude that the genre upholds any more general
feminization of labor. Indeed, perhaps perversely, several sitcoms have treated the domestic sphere as, properly speaking, the space of patriarchal governance par excellence. Such stoical reterritorializations can transmit from an armchair, in which one might find an Archie Bunker; from a couch, on which the browbeaten Al Bundy (same initials) resists the sexual advances of his glamazon wife, Peggy, and the (trans- ?) feminization threatened by her uncastreated desire; or from the shed, in which men’s toys and tools, the instrumentation of masculine reproductive labor, can be exhibited in all their violent glory. From the shed, Tim Allen in Home Improvement deploys a militant offensive to smash asunder domesticity and femininity, in the name of a barbarian, redcap masculinity. Be it co-
incidence, prefiguration, or glitch in the matrix, an alarming proportion of the audience in Tim Allen’s 1990s show- within- a- show seems to be sporting our own epoch’s armband, and one of them
looks unmistakably like Tucker Carlson.

He is a walking self-parody.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

Nice translation from ponce to prose, @Nothing To See Here



He does not elaborate, but slyly adds this picture and caption so we can all make the connection between two gentlemen of German extraction who are interested in politics.

View attachment 6387150

It’s just like Nuremberg.

Joe is just so fucking dumb. When you a dressing extras for wardrobe you have to carefully chose colors depending on what you want to be noticed. Extras get tossed all the time just because something they are wearing bleeds into a frame or stands out too much. They wanted to portray “average working guys” in the audience, and a great way to visually symbolize average American working class, that you only see from chest up, is putting ballcaps on them. Red makes sure you notice they are wearing ball caps in a way that dark colors do not. Dark colored hats can easily be missed. Other bright colors aren’t masculine or normal for average guys, so the one sure bet for a bold color where you notice it and yet believable that a man would wear it, is fucking red.

Same reason Trump like red MAGA hats - stands out yet still considered a masculine color.

When I looked at the negative Goodreads reviews, this one stood out. Whoever put this up (whether one of our Kiwi friends or another fan of the Laverys from reddit or elsewhere), I'm shocked the censors even let this happen. Does anyone know if Goodreads takes reviews down at author request?

I can’t tell if the person actually read the book or Mallory’s prose is so predictable and insipid nobody would be the wiser if they had not.

Even though the reviewer was being critical I hate Dawn Powell’s name positioned alongside of crappy female writers. This reviews made proper use of her, but her name is drug through the mud in hopes of adding gravitas to far inferior writers far too often.

Spoiler

Powell and Jane Bowles easily hold their own against the best 20th century writers, but unlike more famous female authors, I only see their names trotted out when vastly inferior writers are being written about. They probably would have been better off using male pen names to avoid the future degradation of getting mentioned alongside insipid chic lit authors. Sadly it’s almost the only reason I see their names mentioned in the media in recent years.

 

[Potatis Salad]

English prof extraordinaire posts some English prof shit:


Fun game! Several people respond:


Aaaand Joe reveals he's crowdsourcing for the latest writing project he's shitting out:

Spoiler: text of the exchange

:

Sylvie: hi Grace! sorry, know you asked for profs, but I hope you'll excuse a Lear-loving candidate's contribution!

Joe: lol. purely to prevent people with better things to do from getting into the boggy swamps of the Folger website! I love Lear too. I’m writing a little series of reflections on waking up, and there is a bit on R+J, and I just wonder if i’m missing a big piece of Shax.

Sylvie: the other one that comes to mind is Christopher Sly in Taming of the Shrew, although i don't *think* he technically wakes up on stage. His waking up into a different reality is the whole gambit of the frame narrative.

Joe: ah yes, interesting! also drunk, so (like Juliet and Bottom) the waking is related to being hungover

This lazy moron. He's writing "a series of reflections" but he needs ideas for what he's supposed to be "reflecting" on. I'm sure the resulting "reflections" are going to be super deep and worthwhile. Great job.

(I also love the little window into his retarded ideas. Juliet Capulet was totally hungover lololololzzzzzzz Joe himself was also hungover therefore Joe is Juliet???? Joe is a true and honest woman, confirmed once and for all through rigorous scholarship!!!!)

 

[jvgjtidk]

Mal wrote an article for food and wine magazine that is pretty cute but reading between the lines is completely devastating... sorry I'm a lazy idiot and don't have an archive link to share

 

[A Sentient Cloud]

Mal wrote an article for food and wine magazine that is pretty cute but reading between the lines is completely devastating... sorry I'm a lazy idiot and don't have an archive link to share

First words are "my son." Oh dear.

 

[Anasa Tristis]

First words are "my son." Oh dear.

And "His mothers and I..." comes right after. Gotta get the gender specialness and polycule status right out there in the first two sentences!

For those Food & Wine readers who don't already know the formerly famous Brooklyn Power Throuple currently exiled in Nowheresville, that's gotta be confusing.

Mal wrote an article for food and wine magazine that is pretty cute but reading between the lines is completely devastating... sorry I'm a lazy idiot and don't have an archive link to share

https://archive.ph/jJAry

Cute? Overwrought and tedious would be my 2 cent review.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

But deBoer persuasively argues that it was actually leftist/liberal coalitions who had worked for years to give psychotically ill people their "freedom".

Fiscally conservative republicans and leftists found common cause when it came to the federal and state hospital system closure, which spelled its destruction. Republicans hated all the money being spent on useless eaters, leftists saw it as an infringement on rights and actually it was society that was sick, not people! They don’t need to be locked up!

Spoiler

Don’t forget Scientology who created The Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights in 1969 as a lobbying group to fight psychiatric institutions and interventions. The CCHR suckered all kinds of lefties pretending to be a civil rights org.

The fact a cult run lobbying group, with money to spend, was fighting against something that spent a lot of federal dollars on non-taxpayers made it an easy sell to republicans. The individual dignity and rights argument made it easy sell to democrats. The patients who needed the care of these places the most certainly weren’t able to advocate for their own care and they weren’t going to advocate being locked up if they could. All the veterans of mental health care facilities were demonized for suggesting that long term institutionalization played an important and vital role in mental health care.

A lot of mental health rights advocates from the 1970’s and 80’s now admit they were idiots to almost totally destroy a well established, functional, govt funded hospital system in favor of some vague concept of “community mental health care” They didn’t listen to their elders who had run these hospitals for decades and demonized them as the enemy or part of “the system.”

As always the advocacy for mental health always brushed aside, or ignored, the severe cases because they were inconvenient to the narratives.

First words are "my son." Oh dear.

I love that she has uniquely positioned herself to require the goodwill of Joe and his baby mama to have continued access to “my son.” She’s such a fucking rube.

She admitted in the hilarious power throuple article that she didn’t bother with any adoption paperwork to make Rocco her son. She has zero legal rights to him. Guess it was bad company manners to press the issue of her rights over Joe and Lilly’s offspring. Now she has to stay in their good graces if she wants to play any role in “her son’s” life because legally she has no say.

Rocco making her shriveled ovaries pang in despair doesn’t hold any legal weight. Then again she, and Joe, have been bereft of any original writing content for a long time. Maybe just like a tired sitcom they decided to cast a “cute kid” to provide story ideas because they have run out long ago. Rocco seems to be the central character in all her new writing work for magazines. Mallory finally had a fresh story angle to pitch and she’s making maximum use of it.

 

[A Sentient Cloud]

And "His mothers and I..." comes right after. Gotta get the gender specialness and polycule status right out there in the first two sentences!

It's not even an exaggeration to say that this woman's role is that of a domestic employee, not a spouse or co-parent:

As is often the case with parents of a new baby, our own mealtimes are a rolling, informal affair, like a medieval Royal Progress. By the time I’ve finished breakfast, Lily is just getting ready for hers, and Grace usually takes her first meal sometime after I’ve finished washing the dishes from lunch. The two of them often have their supper around the time I start going to bed.

Also, this article also is a great example of why I can only pay so much attention to this particular set of cows. Gendershit and obvious emotional abuse aside, their writing style is like nails on a chalkboard to me. Agonizingly precious and inkhorn and *so* *very* *goddamn* impressed with its own cleverness. It feels like every single sentence went through multiple drafts.