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

[WalterWhitesTidyWhities]

Anyway, I have two recommendations if anyone enjoys vignettes and is looking for some interesting reading.

Ah Kiwifarms, where you come for tranny gossip and stay for the top-shelf literary recommendations. I guess us bigots really are the most intellectually stimulated of all

Possibly a swipe at Lily

Oh my god, after rereading that paragraph, that really does seem like a calculated dig at Joe and his sartorial neuroticism...Mal's writing still bores me to tears, but I give her props for getting her kicks in where she can. After all, it's not like she can be expected to quit her free nannying gig for her husband's love-child or anything.

"I do not have much to say about it because there is not much to it."

"So not funny."

"Not really a lot of plot happening. Mostly it’s just characters vibing, which sometimes works but I was hoping for more from this book."

This seems to echo the BPT's life since moving to flyover territory. It's like Joe had a child and scaled back the narcissistic Twitter ramblings at least halfway...C'mon Joe, your loyal KF fans will give you the feedback you so desperately crave much more than little Rocco can ever give you.

There's very little diversity

We can't expect a straight white male author such as Danny boy Lavery to be sensitive to these matters, to be fair. On a side note, I'm wondering if Danny's doting wife Grace is perhaps beaming with joy at the slightly middling reviews her husband's debut novel is receiving?

 

[Anasa Tristis]

There's very little diversity.

Would you say that there's a bit of backhanded misogyny too? The descriptions and excerpts you've provided make it seem like it's loaded with flighty and/or shallow female characters who can't keep a straight thought in their heads for more than half a second. Some arrived with too many clothes, others are neurotically self conscious about how they look when they venture out into the city and judge other women for not being that way, still others obsess about their hall monitor girl power and whether they're taken seriously or not. Mothers sniff over and harshly judge their wayward, disappointing daughters. There's second guessing, the cutting and styling of hair, the snubbing of poor men, and the interpreting of dreams. Maybe (hopefully!) there are other female characters who balance those things out, but I'm not seeing a female character that's savvy, smart and confident. Or particularly mature or admirable, really.

For a story that's solely about women and how they thought, felt and acted in an isolated female space the 1960s, it seems to me that they're not being presented in a very flattering light.

 

[Wonderland foster child]

Maybe (hopefully!) there are other female characters who balance those things out, but I'm not seeing a female character that's savvy, smart and confident. Or particularly mature or admirable, really.

Hmm, let's see. Josephine, poor at 70 and getting no help from her older sister, decides to start stealing cash as a way to survive. Pauline the anarchist becomes the person who organises assistance and bail for a friend in need, so that was positive character development. And the lesbian who works in a bar has her act together and subverts her idiotic boss. But really, I wouldn't say there were any heroines. The characters were mostly boring, and I didn't care what happened to any of them.

Mallory cited Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything as an influence, and I see why, but she completely missed out on the characterisation that makes that book good.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/28/best-everything-rona-jaffe-review

 

[Dick Johnson]

Would you say that there's a bit of backhanded misogyny too? The descriptions and excerpts you've provided make it seem like it's loaded with flighty and/or shallow female characters who can't keep a straight thought in their heads for more than half a second.

I think it stems from Mallory not being a practical-minded person who is able to plan things out in life and not able to put herself into the mindset of someone who is.

 

[Dr. Butt]

a taxiful of clothing

That's not very much clothing. Is Mallory trying to imply that it's a lot? Most attractive, social, and party-enjoying young ladies in their 20s could pack a taxi's back seats and boot with clothing no matter how broke they are.

I think it stems from Mallory not being a practical-minded person who is able to plan things out in life and not able to put herself into the mindset of someone who is.

I think she's envious and resentful towards all women who manage to make their own choices instead of accepting whatever passive role may have been forced on them in their old country or religion. Edit: on further reading, I think she is also envious of and angry at any woman able to be thin and/or look cute.

 

[Wonderland foster child]

That's not very much clothing. Is Mallory trying to imply that it's a lot? Most attractive, social, and party-enjoying young ladies in their 20s could pack a taxi's back seats and boot with clothing no matter how broke they are.

This was me using shorthand and not giving full details, sorry. It's a taxi full of her trunks, hatboxes, etc. and she's in another taxi (probably with more possessions). I already returned the book so can't check, but if I get it back I'll quote it. (Or maybe one of the other people on the thread can help me out, ta!) There's also a reference to the elevator guy moving all her stuff.

 

[Dr. Butt]

This was me using shorthand and not giving full details, sorry. It's a taxi full of her trunks, hatboxes, etc. and she's in another taxi (probably with more possessions). I already returned the book so can't check, but if I get it back I'll quote it. (Or maybe one of the other people on the thread can help me out, ta!) There's also a reference to the elevator guy moving all her stuff.

Mallory thinks a taxi can hold more than one trunk? Maybe two since it's the 60s. Even if that's the case, that's actually even less clothing than previously implied since it would take up less space once packed into boxes.

Why is everyone having so much trouble typing "women's hotel daniel lavery"?

Spoiler: I expected better of you all

https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=149910881

ETA: Tried reading it, can't. Excerpt:

“No,” agreed Gia easily.

ATM machine.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

I think it stems from Mallory not being a practical-minded person who is able to plan things out in life and not able to put herself into the mindset of someone who is.

I think saying Mallory Ortberg, the NYT best selling author who received a mid-six figure substack advance a few years ago, but now lives the attic of her husband’s baby mama’s 900 sq foot house in Lansing isn’t “practically minded” is too kind. I think chump and fool are more appropriate adjectives.

 

[TheMeanOne]

I think saying Mallory Ortberg, the NYT best selling author who received a mid-six figure substack advance a few years ago, but now lives the attic of her husband’s baby mama’s 900 sq foot house in Lansing isn’t “practically minded” is too kind. I think chump and fool are more appropriate adjectives.

She really is a mess. I just - even if she'd stashed a quarter of it in treasuries, she'd be in a better spot than she is now. To blow it all on stupid designer crap was so foolish.

And then to get basically a minimum wage job, instead of trying to do speaking gigs at churches, book clubs, any place that would have her...just not the best use of her time.

What a mess.

 

[Wonderland foster child]

Women's Hotel non-review
Chapter Nine: A Fair Day’s Wage for a Fair Day’s Work

""Muzzle not the ox who treadeth out the corn, dear hearts” was his only response to such complaints." - 1 Timothy 5:18. I'm sure there are plenty of Biblical references I'm not picking up, but it always fascinates me how people raised in Christianity still quote it even when they've spurned religion. Embed it in their minds before they turn seven....

But then later in the chapter: "A good woman, to Lucianne’s mind, was both valuable and rare, like in the thirty-ninth Proverb" - uh, the 39th? This is at the end of Proverbs, chapter 31, verses 10-31. Where does 39 come from? If it's a deliberate error to show something about Lucianne, it isn't working.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2031:10-31&version=KJV

"Sudden wealth has a habit of breeding dissatisfaction." Probably not shade at Nicole, but it amuses me anyway.

Stephen, the hotel's elevator operator, makes bank on Moving Day but is unable to convince Mrs. Mossler to give him a raise to minimum wage. Then the chapter meanders. Pauline hates coziness, as well as a list of other things, including the police (proto-#acab).

"And what was the point in living all together, if only to continue to live so decidedly apart?" Probably not shade at Mallory's polycule, but etc. etc. Interesting perspective on a women's hotel, though, so she gets credit for exploring the idea.

"Dolly was enormously cheerful and Nicola was conspicuously well adjusted. Dolly’s last name was O’Connor and Nicola’s was Andelin; Dolly worked in a bar and Nicola worked in the back room at Loehmann’s. They were also lesbians." Shocker.

"They were not lovers, or if they ever had been, Stephen thought it must have been over between them some time ago." #malegaze

Lucianne's take on lesbianism: "It was like trying to make a living as a poet or something: possibly all right for a girl with a lot of money, who didn’t especially care about other people." This is partly based on concerns that men will buy you dinner but two girls with no money can't do much for each other (as opposed to doing things TO each other...).

Lucianne needs employment and tries to get an old proofreading job back. There are discussions about George Sand (the hotel eldress is writing a biography of her) versus George Eliot, and bonus points for including George Egerton. And then we get the backstory of the eldress, JD, because heaven forbid Mallory lets us get to know characters by watching them in action and drip-feeding any relevant information as needed.

 

[Coo Coo Bird]

My favorite is the one from that tranny clinic in Israel, where the man doctor is surrounded by 6+ footer "women" and 5- footer "men" he has treated. But I can never find it when I want it.

This one?

 

[David Glowie]

View attachment 6573834
This one?

It looks like an Ames room illusion.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

She really is a mess. I just - even if she'd stashed a quarter of it in treasuries, she'd be in a better spot than she is now. To blow it all on stupid designer crap was so foolish.

And then to get basically a minimum wage job, instead of trying to do speaking gigs at churches, book clubs, any place that would have her...just not the best use of her time.

What a mess.

If she had just added a basic book on financial planning to her stack of fictional reading material she’d been much better off.

I’m really curious if she took a loss, or at least no profit, on the sale of her Oakland house by selling it to some BPD POC GFM loony troon. She apparently sold it during her militant woke phase while castigating elderly landlords, while knowing the SS advance was in the works, so she seem primed for doing something incredibly stupid.

 

[TheMeanOne]

militant woke phase while castigating elderly landlords,

Having an individual as your landlord is often SO MUCH BETTER for renters than a faceless, nameless company. W/O giving too much away I know an RE broker who owns some rental properties. During the pandemic stuff he didn't evict anyone he just settled with them for 33% of what they owed when they moved back in with their parents. He was like, "Well shit it's an act of God."

I mean, Mallory selling her house isn't going to make the buyer not rent it out. It's not going to make the housing market more equitable. What it would have done was give someone in a wildly unstable field (writing in the time of AI) some base of income to move forward from. She's so mental.

But yeah I'm sure she was trying to tell her broker it was mean to accept asking price and they had to give the buyer 20% off for some bullshit reason. Mallory would've been a great landlord for a terrible renter with any sob story TBH.

 

[Bookwork]

Made it through the first hour of that podcast. It was recorded before WH was released.

No Joe cameo or references to his booklet about Freud - or any other of his booklets. Mal mentioned him when acknowledging one of the hosts describing WH as modernist, saying "I'm going to tell Grace I'm a modernist now. I think she's going to like that."

Mal seemed to bait the hosts twice with Rocco, once saying she re-read a lot of Austen on her phone right after "we had a baby" and a bit later apologizing if the audience could hear "my baby" yelling in the background (when no yelling could be heard). Each time she paused as though waiting for the hosts to ask about Having The Baby. But they didn't.

At one point, she describes herself as "an avoidant cold person when it comes to conflict, so I'm drawn to boisterous arguments," which may say something about how she gets along in a throuple with cranky Joe. She thinks her attitude toward conflict derives from novels she read as a teen. "We weren't a jovial argumentative family [like those in the books] but we sort of wanted to be."

She refers to the film While You Were Sleeping's scene in which the family squabbles. "I didn't say Cesar Romero was tall. I said he was Spanish." (I will re-engineer that to read "I didn't say you were a pedophile. I said you let your pedophile son loose to abuse children." Her essential family conflict went unmentioned, of course.)

Mal talked a lot about employing Alcoholics Anonymous as a "new technology" at the time of WH that affects characters' concepts and actions. She based a lot of Katherine on AA's "Big Book." The male host said he found Katherine's thought when she takes a drink that "This is life and they have kept it from me" as very expressive of his own experience.

Both hosts have read Mal's work over the years and were big fans before reading WH. They describe the book in what to me, after sampling it, are incredible terms like "never is showy at the cost of the characters."

The male author read WH twice. He grew up near the Turtle Bay area where WH is set and went on at length about memories WH evoked. He praised the book for being "invested in human decency rather than depravity" (no small trick for an author married to Joe, I gotta say, even in their post-orgy days).

The host also vamped for a while about how WH "screams prestige-ish acting opportunities" in a mini series, which he says, "speaks to the cohesion of the work." Mal said no showrunner's come calling.

Mal discusses the nature and origins of some of the characters, which might interest you if you're reading the book. No tea like she based Lucianne on her mom or anything like that.

 

[monstrous bubo]

Joe shares some more of his Big Thoughts. This time, he contemplates the evils of liberal democracy.


link | archive

Spoiler: genuinely shaking

It’s hard to know what voting is for, how to direct desire towards it. Elections site up dozens of primary, “expressive” affects that are easy to understand—disgust, terror, horror, love, delight—as well as transitive desires that make sense, for validation, revenge, punishment…

… but it’s harder to understand what any of these affects have to do with the actual mechanics of elections. I’ve heard people saying that “we deserve Trump,” and I guess the desire to be punished (to be punishable, to be *worth punishing*) is central to Trumpism’s appeal.

There’s a wounded attachment, an inverted desire to punish the “system” for not being another, different “system.” This too resolves into masochism: I will submit myself for punishment in the place of those who should be punished; if I cannot be a hero, let me be a scapegoat.

For myself, I am absolutely terrified. Genuinely shaking with fear. I do not fool myself that I am at risk in the same way as others in this country, nor that any of us are at risk as those subjected to genocidal violence in Gaza. I do not know what to do with the terror.

The “system” is disgusting, indefensible, designed to protect white supremacy and imperialism. It works remarkably well given its age. Withdrawing one’s consent from one’s government only provokes that government to extract consent with violence.

Perhaps the reason why the wounded attachment exerts so much force on us—both the “hold your nose and vote for Harris” and the “don’t vote, it only encourages the bastards” parties—is because it is the only thing capable of protecting us from our own powerlessness.

Nothing we do will make a difference. Somehow, though, a difference will have been made. This is a difficult position to find ourselves in. Obviously the world would be *marginally* better if one or other of these candidates won. Obviously it would be a marginal difference.

it’s that marginality that is unbearable. in a world so fundamentally, grossly, cruelly unfair, a world in which the bodies of women, men, and children are broken violently apart to slurp up the last drop of surplus labor power, where genocide is cheerfully praised by liberals…

I don’t know. I’m scared. Maybe that’s a good thing. I love my family and my community and I hold my baby tight. I don’t know what acceptance would look like in this context but I continue to believe it is the first step.

I’m not American. If I were, would I vote for Trump? No. He doesn’t match many of my key policy positions or personal standards. Neither does Harris particularly either, BTW. But when I see this sort of utter hysteria, I totally get why some people would vote for him just to make insufferable clowns like this reee themselves into an autistic coma. Fuck, I would too. What’s especially noteworthy is that Joe here thinks the system is fundamentally corrupt, despite keeping him and his mistress employed. He would be quite happy for someone equally dismissive as Trump of constitutional norms and niceties to be in power if they parroted Joe’s retarded views on economics, justice, and public displays of demeaning sex.

 

[Zemblan Physics]

There’s a wounded attachment, an inverted desire to punish the “system” for not being another, different “system.” This too resolves into masochism: I will submit myself for punishment in the place of those who should be punished; if I cannot be a hero, let me be a scapegoat.

Gah, he’s to psychoanalysis what that neckbeard in high school who had “read” Das Kapital was to communism. Smugly spouting a bunch of buzzwords trying to apply a deeply flawed theory and expecting to be told what a deep thinker he is.

Well, maybe Joe is a deep thinker, I wouldn’t know since I don’t understand anything he writes. Mostly because I’m asleep by the second paragraph.

 

[Potatis Salad]

The “system” is disgusting, indefensible, designed to protect white supremacy and imperialism. It works remarkably well given its age. Withdrawing one’s consent from one’s government only provokes that government to extract consent with violence.

wat

This pompus dipshit lives in a battleground state. If he's so scared of Trump, he could vote and actually make a difference. But he can't vote because, despite being eligible for naturalization for years and years, he has not bothered to apply. He remains a green card holder and not a citizen. No, he'd rather sit there gEnUiNeLy sHaKinG, twiddling his wiener, and tweeting about "one's government" than actually participate in the democratic process.

 

[EBS76]

Christ, Joe pisses me off. No, voting in the election won’t make a difference to you (nor to anyone in Gaza). But it will make a difference to women who want reproductive freedom and who don’t have the money to go elsewhere to find it. And that’s more than a marginal difference, Joe.

 

[Trianon]

Withdrawing one’s consent from one’s government only provokes that government to extract consent with violence.

I love when dipshits like Joe start to lose power and suddenly become deeply principled libertarians who somehow still can't imagine why one might like to keep a gun around, just in case. Or cannot imagine why one might wish the election process were cleaner, more transparent, or that they had been allowed to go to their jobs during the pandemic. They can say the government is irredeemably corrupt, but Trump voters expressing the same throws them into hysterical fits. It's just SO childish and the worst possible rhetoric to deal with the problem they're trying to solve. Just pointless, useless navel-gazing while stronger men and women just get to work and act as though things matter without wringing their hands about it.