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

[Bookwork]

Did we know that Joe wrote a novel about the Cornish independence movement? Well, now we do. Also, right now he's writing an eco horror about the West Midlands. You can take the spotted dick out of England but you can't..... etc.

Spoiler: Text

Sheila Liming @seeshespeak
19h
That is a very generous offer and I would love to take you up on it!

Grace Lavery @graceelavery
11h
dope! send an email any time you would like—my work email is on the dept website (i don’t mention it on here directly because of the Horrors)

Sheila Liming @seeshespeak
20h
The talk was part of a seminar so the topics weren’t in the program. But this is part of a bigger wip (I hope!) on the contemporary gothic (and the relevance of the Cornish language, etc. to that idea)

Grace Lavery @graceelavery
20h
oh wowwww this is very much my shit. a couple of years ago I wrote a novel about the Cornish independence movement and I’m currently working on an eco horror about the West Midlands. can’t wait to see where you go with Kernovian—and lmk if you’re looking for hyped up readers!

Yes, he refers Shiela to Berkeley's English Dept. page for his email. Like he's there forever.

Joe's wife is in Madison, preparing for this afternoon's book chat.

Spoiler: Text

Daniel M. Lavery @daniel_m_lavery
6h
I cannot describe how unreal Wisconsin commercials are. I've been in this hotel for 20 minutes and I have already seen two different Jews for Jesus infomercials plus an ad for the STIRMAX, "the pot that stirs itself"

Grand Moff Snarkin, Bearified @N7IRL
6h
But if it stirs itself, does it watch itself?

If it watches itself, does that mean it never boils?

Daniel M. Lavery @daniel_m_lavery
6h
it does have a "boil" setting

 

[monstrous bubo]

right now he's writing an eco horror about the West Midlands.

Queer families into fermentation most affected.

 

[monstrous bubo]

Apologies for the double post… what do we make of this? It appears to be on a subway, which neither East Lansing nor Madison have. Perhaps they all went to NY for Tard Baby’s promo trips this week, but the parents stayed while the manny went on to Wisconsin for the Saturday gig. If so, you gotta love the conditional support - we’ll support you only in the fun places.


link

Not a fan of the bow tie on Bobby Joe, and I’m surprised Joe and Lily did it. It seems much more Mal’s aesthetic.

 

[Bookwork]

Yeah, looks like NYC. He could have posted the pic after returning to the House of Lily, though, I guess. I hadn't noticed before how stubby his manfingers are. No wonder he doesn't play the lute.

 

[TheMeanOne]

Grace Lavery @graceelavery
11h
dope! send an email any time you would like—my work email is on the dept website (i don’t mention it on here directly because of the Horrors)

I attended a Canadian university. All the British people there were trying to be American & particularly using AAVE type slang. The whitest people ever, who listen to the least hip-hop, but everything was "dope." All the Canadians & Americans were sort of aggressively fake-British, signing emails "Cheers" and saying "full stop" not "period." Also, at the time all the Black kids were in rock bands but all the white kids were trying to rap.

Oh my God I just HATE Joe without even meeting him. He is a 40 YO white ugly British man cosplaying as a girl while using 80s hip-hop slang because he thinks it's still cool. Joe this was sad when you were doing your undergrad and 90% of the equally ridiculous people outgrew this.

I hate this man so much and it doesn't even feel irrational, I believe I'm totally justified here.

 

[Wonderland foster child]

Women's Hotel non-review
Chapter 0: Author's note

Remember my earlier post with the opening of the novel, about the end of the continental breakfast? That was a lie, it turns out. Here's the actual opening:

"The women’s hotel left no lasting mark on the American city. It was born in the nineteenth century, then briefly prospered and died within the compass of the twentieth."

This all should have been an afterword. Anything relevant to the novel could have been worked in by a skillful writer, rather than front-loaded.

"informal arrangements between women had a habit of falling apart under even mild external disruption" - yes, I think the KF over/under is when Rocco hits the terrible twos.

"Let this book be taken for no more than what it is" - not sure if I'm more annoyed that she's instructing me how to read her novel, or attemping an Austen-style didactic narrative voice as a set up for social commentary masquerading as a novel.

Edit: here's that entire paragraph, which is the end of the chapter:
Let this book be taken for no more than what it is: a diffuse sketch of a short-lived, patchwork commonwealth, a few impressions of a manner of living that was briefly possible for a small group of women in the middle decades of the last century. It is a story of provisional, often unwilling, cooperation between people with no real allegiance to one another, the diary of some women, and a few men, who occasionally found themselves sharing the cells of unheaded and deconsecrated abbeys, and were sometimes glad of it.

 

[Bookwork]

"Let this book be taken for no more than what it is"

Mal, how - even in the Austenverse - would that be possible? What is it to be taken for that would be more than a novel? You'll be lucky if it's taken for even that.

Need to see an ophthalmologist stat to stop my eyes rolling so much, dammit.

 

[Dick Johnson]

That was so good you should be concerned: a flabby britbong might want you for the polycule.

I don't believe Joe would be looking to increase the Mallory quotient of his household.

I would buy this in trade paperback; consider finding an agent.

Thanks! Though I don't think there's a big audience for an action-heavy gear-fetishizing travelogue-esque spy thriller that's written in wordy, overly precious navel-gazing prose. If there were though, I'm imagining the conversation with a prospective agent: "This is a very...unusual combination of subject matter and style. Where did the inspiration come from?" "I wrote it to make fun of a stranger's gender identity in the most roundabout way possible."

(I did have a lot of fun writing this, and I may well post more of Reginald's adventures. I like to think they're more enjoyable to read than the Cronenbergian body horror of 'amhole erotica' that shows up in Kevin Gibes' thread from time to time.)

@Dick Johnson that was so good it spiked by blood pressure just like authentic Joe writing.

I don't think I could even approach trying to imitate Joe's impenetrable comma-heavy nonsense without giving myself an aneurysm.

I loved this line with its little call-back!

Twee + technothriller: two (great?) tastes I didn't think would taste great together.

Coming from the user who wrote the sentence "It was only with difficulty that she turned away from the crib and began the trudge to Joe's room, where the two semi-academics had intended to perform graphic and forlorn acts with, beside and in spite of one another." that means a lot, thank you!

And if you come up with more Lavery Throuple fanfic please write it and post it. That was hilarious and absolutely brutal.

 

[Larry David's Opera Cape]

You know who I'd like to see beat Mallory up?

Helene Hanff.

She'd chew her up and spit out the macerated seeds.

 

[Potatis Salad]

Mobilefagging but I've said many times how much I detest Joe's disgusting """feminine""" lip-flapping duckface he does in every picture. It triggers a visceral revulsion deep inside of me.

It's so rare to see a natural smile of genuine happiness on this preening, prancing dickhead's face, I forgot that he's a normal unattractive British bloke and not actually difficult-to-impossible to look at:

AGP: not even once.

(Side note: I have no evidence for this but it's 100% certain that he's smiling at Lily.)

 

[Trianon]

"Let this book be taken for no more than what it is" - not sure if I'm more annoyed that she's instructing me how to read her novel, or attemping an Austen-style didactic narrative voice as a set up for social commentary masquerading as a novel.

Same thing she did with her website. "Don't look at this, I know it's bad, and therefore any criticism you give above what I have already given myself is just RUDE." It's .....ugh.

 

[Wonderland foster child]

Women's Hotel non-review
Chapter 1: The End of Breakfast

You know that cliché in writing workshops about how the setting is a character? Much of this chapter is about women's hotels, with a loooooong detour into tearooms (actual tearooms) where the Beidermeier doyenne gets her start. It's social history plus backstory. Eventually, characters are introduced, but there's no real plot apart from the elevator man gouging all the residents on Moving Day (#teamelevatorman) but even that is mostly griping about it.

I am firmly on the side of Don't Have Characters Named Katherine and Kitty. Even more horribly, sometimes Kitty is called Kit and Katherine is called Kat. WHY. Novels with groups of same-sex characters are already difficult enough to keep track of without a scorecard, and I cannot make notes upon a flyleaf. This isn't the 16th century where it was all Anne Catherine Mary Jane; there were plenty of period-appropriate names to choose from.

Katherine Heap is the first-floor director. She is supposed to keep men out of the hotel.

Spoiler: It's loooooong

Whether Katherine had a particularly discouraging frown, or whether the kind of men likely to try breaching the inviolability of the Biedermeier were an especially easily dismayed bunch, she could never be quite sure. There was something slightly thrilling about the possibility that she might possess a forbidding aspect. Men so rarely told her anything about herself, and it was wonderful to think this might not be the result of unremarkable features but rather attributable to certain grim and austere offices of her scowl. But she could hardly chase after the men who wandered nearly into the elevator bay before catching sight of her, conspicuously looking at their watches, then turning around to ask, “Did you really forget you were due somewhere else before just this minute, or were you really afraid of me just now?” (Wonderland Foster Child note: I had to read this sentence multiple times because it is so badly written it implies the men are asking the question.) This was too bad, as Katherine very much wanted to ask them.

And, she had thought, I think I could be happy with any answer they might give me, even if it were a conspicuously gallant lie. Because if on the one hand a man had been frightened of me, I would be enormously pleased with myself, and if on the other hand he hadn’t been frightened of me, he might have found my desire to be found frightening (which is not the same thing as being frightening, I think) charming, and that would be its own kind of pleasure. Or, if he had found me frightening to begin with, but had easily recovered by the time I stopped him, then I would still be formidable without his having to be a coward, and that might be best of all.

As Katherine did not bother wondering whether women found her intimidating, and did not dare ask men, she remained in a constant state of necessary ignorance of her own ferocity, a condition that seemed likely to persist indefinitely.

 

[monstrous bubo]

@Wonderland foster child. One character in and we’re already in Tard Baby’s neurosis swamp. You’re braver than me.

Gender guesser text analysis results


source

 

[Anasa Tristis]

Whether Katherine... blah blah blah... persist indefinitely.

Even if I didn't hold the author in contempt already, Mal's high brow meandering and convoluted prose is simply difficult and annoying to read. Fiction readers want to be smoothly guided into a transcendental imagination zone, not forced to stop and reread every other sentence to be sure that they understood what they just read. Or be forced to stop and reach for the dictionary regularly. Did Mal have some indulgent fangirl as an editor who didn't dare do her job?

Writing and editing interior monologues are a tricky business. And unless you're James Joyce doing groundbreaking work, it's best done in reasonable, complete sentences. Stringing together 63 words in a single run on sentence and having a clever but self effacing parenthetial aside right before the end? That shit needs work. Give your readers a break and use a few well placed periods, ya retard.

 

[Bookwork]

Last night I tried to persuade a friend known earlier in her life as the author of homoerotic Star Trek fan lit (Gender Guesser: Female) to script an episode called, "The Trouble With Throuples."

The original Enterprise was to be swarmed by duck-faced men in swirly skirts, squat pube-fuzz-faced women in cargo shorts, and brittle horse-toothed art teachers in athleisure sliding out of the ductwork and tumbling out of the overheads to demand Scotty beam them down to low-cost architecturally interesting boho housing near rarified restaurants and second-hand designer rag and bone shops.

My entreaties were rebuffed until my friend felt intellectually stimulated enough to smooth out a crumpled napkin and write in Sharpie:

Spock, overriding an unexpected longing in his svelte, muscular loins, whispered to McCoy, "Fascinating." The End.

While that was disappointing, if Mal could write with that kind of precision, I would be looking forward to Chapter 2 more than I am.

 

[Wonderland foster child]

Women's Hotel non-review
Chapter 2: A Promise to Kitty

Actual plots developing! Three residents protest the ending of breakfast delivered to their rooms, and Katherine promises to talk to Mrs. Mossler (who runs the hotel)! Katherine also lets herself get roped into doing jury service on Kitty's behalf - if the similarity in names is the setup for a farcical misunderstanding, I may forgive Mallory (but I make no promises). Mrs. M. also asks Katherine to assign two new girls to rooms, and there is a hell of a lot of discussion about possible suicides from higher floors, which is weirdly intrusive and if doesn't lead to an actual suicide is pointless.

When I say discussion, I mean description. That's one of the major problems with this book. Characters need to do and say more. The author is doing a lot of standing back and describing, which is not making me feel invested, even if it's meant to be the character's own thoughts. The amusing (?) diversions are not supposed to be the primary narrative.

Katherine's previous experience of applying to live in a residential hotel: "They had wanted to know when she would be coming and when she would be going, whether she had any boyfriends, whether she had any friends whose surnames were difficult to pronounce, what sort of jobs she planned to apply for, at what time she planned to eat dinner each evening. Fireproof maple furniture, stiff wing chairs, lamps of false pewter, narrow Murphy beds —the beds folded, the girls didn’t — schedules arranged in cast iron, and mandatory group lectures on physical and moral hygiene held in the lobby on Tuesday nights."

+1 for the subtle racism indicator (difficult surnames)
-1 for the aside about the Murphy bed (I know what it is, but not what joke Mallory is trying to make about the girls not folding)

 

[WalterWhitesTidyWhities]

Fireproof maple furniture, stiff wing chairs, lamps of false pewter, narrow Murphy beds

I hate this tic--and granted, a lot of authors rely on it--of just listing out what looks like a Wikipedia-generated list of "old-timey" furniture attributes instead of actually taking the time to develop a cohesive setting; the implied effect is that the average reader, bug-eyed and gape-mouthed though Mal's may be, will see a litany of esoteric furniture descriptions and go "ooh, this book takes place in the past and thus must be important!"

I'm still laughing over what I believe @AirdropShitposts pointed out a while back, that during the wartime era rent wouldn't have increased due to the glut of affordable housing, and how Mal couldn't have gleaned this quite basic factoid about the era from her (clearly) perfunctory research, I guess because the priority was focusing on period-appropriate lamps to name drop and not, y'know, economic facts that would've actually contributed to the overarching setting and thus justified the book being a period piece.

That's part of why her obsession with Austen has always seemed so inauthentic to me--she just wants to ape the sometimes overwrought language from a 21st century perspective to be fucking TWEE, a mode of style that should've died out with the end of Zooey Deschanel's show, instead of possessing any genuine interest in the historical and cultural context that makes novels from that era read in a particular manner.

also, am I correct in seeing that she really used the word "conspicuously" in two consecutive paragraphs? You can really tell dear Mal has never developed a steadfast identity beyond being the annoying kid trying to impress her English teacher by dropping mid-tier SAT words in every sentence.

 

[AirdropShitposts]

I'm still laughing over what I believe @AirdropShitposts pointed out a while back, that during the wartime era rent wouldn't have increased due to the glut of affordable housing, and how Mal couldn't have gleaned this quite basic factoid about the era from her (clearly) perfunctory research, I guess because the priority was focusing on period-appropriate lamps to name drop and not, y'know, economic facts that would've actually contributed to the overarching setting and thus justified the book being a period piece.

That was just one of the obvious reasons, there were also price controls and it would have been unpatriotic to raise rent during the war. (Which wasn't long enough to get landlords to want to raise rent.) The rent would have been stable during the war, then the problem would have been after the war when the severe 1920 depression occurred. I'm skeptical she's aware that this depression occurred and how it helped contribute to the 1920's boom excesses when the United States was the only country that immediately recovered.

I also noticed another error just from that earlier sample, she couldn't get the political or demographic context in NYC correct:

There were price controls during the war, that's why you had to substitute Postum, rent wouldn't have risen. Especially not nearly doubled. Then factor in the reduction in demand for housing.

Tammany Hall's political power was based on immigrants, DeSapio also was more liberal than his predecessors, his not being Irish would have been irrelevant because he was more intertwined with the new classes of immigrants that followed the Irish and is the exact reason an Italian became a head of it.

Revise and resubmit.

The rent thing is a good example of being ignorant of something perhaps technical and you could give a pass, I don't think the other thing is forgivable because it seems to inform the underlying narrative and the events of the story. 1920's New York should be informed by the massive demographic changes happening, especially as the boom happened, as the old immigrant classes moved into middle and upper classes in the city while the new immigrants replaced them. (And the Blacks coming up from the South!) Al Smith's rise to power in New York is for the same reasons as DeSapio's, he connected with the changing voter base. This would also be when the "old money" of NYC was moving out of the city into building all those mansions to the North and out on Long Island. That whole Northern enclave of the city that's now so major started during this era. The car was a major change because you could motor into the city rather than have to live in it. (It's also when the rich built highways on Long Island so they could race their new cars.) I have zero faith that Mal researched any of this and that the NYC in the book is based on a sort of early 20th Century pastiche she's gleaned from other media that falls apart when you specify the actual time and location in history.

I got these just from that one sample from noticing things that seemed off that I wouldn't have to think about or research any deeply. Others pointed out the weirdness of the continental breakfast idea. Imagine how many others are in the book. It won't matter because the main readership doesn't really care, they want what she delivers, but it does put some mockery to the more extravagant media/publisher claims being made about the novel, its setting and Mal's historical brilliance.

 

[tiny pickles]

Katherine also lets herself get roped into doing jury service on Kitty's behalf - if the similarity in names is the setup for a farcical misunderstanding, I may forgive Mallory (but I make no promises).

Yeah, I think my gripe with the two Katherines is Chekhov’s Gun-esque. If it’s part of the plot, ok fine, it better pay off. If not - you really couldn’t pick out one more name? Distracting.

Not to earnest-post, but I do kinda hope you end up liking the book. It’d be a nice surprise, for one, and part of me is rooting for Mal. I still believe Joe is The Main Villain here and I hope one day she can escape (and make amends for all the terrible things she’s done). I will accept my rainbows now.

 

[Wonderland foster child]

Yeah, I think my gripe with the two Katherines is Chekhov’s Gun-esque. If it’s part of the plot, ok fine, it better pay off. If not - you really couldn’t pick out one more name? Distracting.

Yes, and this is also my feeling about the suicide interlude (I will spoiler if this does amount to anything - based on a Goodreads review, I think it might). I feel as though a deliberate muddling of names by the characters could have been used to foreshadow something, if that was intended, but then, I was also expecting a semblance of a plot....

I've just realised Mallory never bothers, for all her exposition, to pin down when the story takes place. My best guess is early 1960s, based on a search for dates which reveals several "back in 195x"-type remarks. Wait, record scratch: chapter 3 reveals Katherine comes to New York in 1955 and has been there ten years, so it's 1965. This book does not feel like mid-60s to me; there have been references to the old ways changing (Mrs. M. laments the closure of an Automat) but no hints yet of the impending social explosions of the late 60s.

Her chapters average over 20 pages each. Far too long. And the fact that I'm midway through chapter 3, but nothing has actually happened yet, is making this seem an endless slog. I shall carry on.