Miranda July is an excellent writer.

She's a defining artist of the 00s in the sense that her work is grounded in this decade in a way that's opposite to the 1990s. Me and You and Everyone We Know and Brokeback Mountain are the opposite of Fight Club and Pulp Fiction. She's less detached and more intense than Saunders and Moore, and Carver and Barthelme for that matter. (To make huge generalizations on the way to bed.)

this time you've gone too far!!
xpost

I can see her being "less detached and more intense" than Moore -- or at least she's more directly visceral than Moore, less constructed -- but I don't agree, Saunders-wise: most Saunders is so very not detached! (Just, again, more constructed, maybe.)

can we critique her taste in clothing?
http://parkcity.indiewire.com/ipop/archives/images/MirandaJuly2_iw.jpg

i think she's really cute

i really like her writing, which is weird because i HATED me and you and everyone we know

the story she had in the new yorker a few weeks ago about meeting famous people on planes was terrific and funny and totally captivating

thanks max. We all really wanted to know (ironic sarcasm). I was really into this track she had on the K records Selector Dub Narcotic comp when I was 15 or 16. It was called co-star. I liked Me and You and Everyone We Know a lot when I saw it the first time, but it was kind of cloying when I watched it again recently on DVD. Haven't really read her fiction, for fear that she's gotten less "punk"? i don't know...

dont fuck with me freewheel, im crazy

The only thing I've read of hers is that short story published in the Guardian Review the other week (it's here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2104152,00.html). I though it was pretty poor. "Vincent was on the shared patio. I'll tell you about this patio. It is shared." And then she goes on to repeat the words "patio" and "shared" another 50 times. Maybe you can get away with it if you're Hemingway. "Vincent was on the shared patio. I'll tell you about Vincent. He is an example of a New Man. You might have read the article about the New Men in True magazine last month. New Men are more in touch with their feelings than even women, and New Men cry." New Men???? I remember that magazine meme from about 20 years ago! I don't know, the story didn't do much for me.

She looks a lot like my girlfriend in that picture.

I do like her, even though the sum total of her work I'm aware of seeing extends to Me & You & Everyone We Know. It made me feel uncomfortable. In a good way.

Ah, the shared patio story kinda kills, though! Zelda, the repetitions are surely there to communicate that the narrator is pretty seriously damaged, given that (FICTION SPOILER!) she watches the guy have a seizure and then curls up with him and goes to sleep. There's actually a great trick in it, the way that narration feels like a stylistic thing until the guy's wife comes bustling in and supercedes it with normal, frustrated behavior -- it's kind of a sudden reveal on that narration being massive psychic damage and not just style. The prose sparks a lot better in some of the other stories.

My only issue is that like 100% of her artwork has to do with people who are so lonely or craving connection with other people that they do or submit to strange things to get it -- that's a pretty wide field with a lot of variations, but still.

I loved the book, devoured the thing in like two days, but after I finished every story I thought: "Was that really as good as I thought it was?" I really want to read the collection again. "Something That Needs Nothing"--was that the long story in the New Yorker? Holy shit, that story was good. And then the short stuff was really amazing, too, like the one about the party? "This Person," I think it's called.

I think you're right Nabisco about her themes, I don't know it might get old after three collections of the same stuff, but who knows. Her voice is so interesting, her voice so engaging, it may never get old.

i didn't care for me and you and everyone we know but i really adore the short films she made before that

))<>((

i hated me you and everyone we know, but i can still imagine her being a pretty great writer. i haven't read any of her stories but that one website she did for her book was pretty rad.

She looks a lot like my girlfriend in that picture.

She looks a lot like my babysitter from when I was 5 in that picture.

And I'm looking forward to reading this collection. I dug the story in The New Yorker, although one thing that bugged me is that the narrator says she's sat next to two famous people on airplanes: the first was Jason Kidd and the second was this other dude, which sort of implies a chronological order, no? Because by the end of the story, it's clear that the flight with the other dude happened many years ago, like before Jason Kidd became famous. (Although I just checked, and I guess Kidd has been in the NBA for like 13 years, but still, she made it seem like at least 10 or 15.) I know, that's very picky.

i've had her recommended to me several times - my first encounter with her writing was that guardian short story, which i found rather offputting. there's something very sterile about it, something a bit too deliberate and obvious and careful about the way she uses language - i appreciate that she's very adept at using linguistic techniques to capture the narrator's particular mental state but there's still something a bit vacuum-packed about it, she doesn't make me feel anything for any of the characters.

i really don't think an order is implied. anyway - the story doesn't necessarily take place in the here and now, does it?

xpost to jaymc

a strict order, i should say. perhaps she sat next to jason kidd on the way to wherever she was returning from... who knows?

yeah that was kind of weird, but I just kind of went with it. jason kidd is "famous" but not massively famous, so it was a good fit for the story. and yeah, isn't there a huge jump in time at the end.

So the story takes place in ... THE FUTURE?!?!?!

yep

that's the way i read it

that one website she did for her book was pretty rad.

yeah

MW, you have blown my mind.

But that's kinda cool.

here's that site:

http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/

nest of tens is a seriously creepy short.

so was me and you and everyone we know a commercial success?

Me and You and Everyone We Know is as close to unbearable as a movie gets. I haven't read her fiction yet.

(this post turned into a bit of a sampler, actually)

I don't know about this flying thing, but the one NYer-published story in the collection is terrific, if you want something formally regular. She has a pretty good way of neatly condensing familiar thought processes:

We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired---as furniture sanders---we could not believe this was really what people did all day. Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone's job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit.

And loads of that Saundersy pathos, where the humor somehow springs out of sadness and patheticness, like after these two characters do something unpleasant to cover their rent:

Pip stopped to get a bag of chips on the way home, and now we had $1.99 less than our rent. It seemed obvious now that we should have charged more.

I think Lex is kinda right, though, insofar as it gets a little harder to fully empathize when so many of the characters are totally damaged by loneliness, and she walks that border a lot. I'm still trying to figure out which side this one goes to (and this is someone in a room with a child):

I straightened my brush on the dressing table and quietly slid my hair gel in a drawer. I didn't want him to see I was the kind of person who wore hair gel, because I'm not, really. A friend left it here. Wouldn't that be nice? If I had a friend and she brought her hair gel over and she left it here?

But that seems divided story by story, really, and when the narrators aren't somewhat damaged-seeming, and the prose lets itself jump up from that level, it can get really great:

We could smell each other's shampoo and the laundry detergents we had chosen, and I smelled that she didn't smoke but someone she loved did, and she could feel that I was large but not genetically, not permanently, just until I found my way again. The snaps on our jeans pressed into each other and our breasts exchanged their tired histories, tales of being over- and underutilized, floods and famines and never mind, just go. . . . We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget out impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.

The "flying thing" is in the Summer Fiction issue.

I think Lex is kinda right, though, insofar as it gets a little harder to fully empathize when so many of the characters are totally damaged by loneliness, and she walks that border a lot.

i'm also a bit uncomfortable with the way she conflates damage with childlike attitudes in the guardian story, everything spelt out as if for a primary school child and the infantilisation of the narrator, who barely seems to have any agency.

that said, of the passages nabisco posted, that last one is brilliant.

I've not read very much - just one of the opening stories, and half of the piece in the New Yorker, - but I'm surprised at this reception. (I really enjoyed <I>Me, You & Everyone We Know</i>.) To me her writing feels listless, unsparkling, at rest. There's none of the intermittent breathlessness or rightness-of-word/image that electrifies the prose of similarly unshowy writers. Its poignancy seems to be conveyed in the what-happens-and-what-doesn't, the particular happenings and spelled-out-thoughts; but for me the moods & revelations (including, and perhaps especially, in the excerpts nabisco quotes) are dull ones, obvious the moment after you read them.

In a lot of ways it's the total <I>absence</i> of the twee that disappoints me.

Oh, apologies for the HTML there.

And I'm extremely conscious of the danger of condemning the writing of someone you've scarcely read! (Part of what frustrates me is how the little I've seen so seriously dissuades me from reading more.)

the flying story is called "Roy Spivey," btw, and it seems to be the only short story from the fiction issue not up online for some reason.

if miranda july were my friend i would not be alone...

And I'm extremely conscious of the danger of condemning the writing of someone you've scarcely read!

;)

I find her conversational writing style refreshing. It's very readable, natural and doesn't feel labored - which is not easy to do. The "Roy Spivey" story was ultimately rather light-weight, but it was fun to read, with many diverting feints, red herrings, and shaggy dog stories tucked into its concise running time. She seems to be good on the internal monologue, the way the brain jumps from thought to thought, and she can summon vivid and perceptive flashes of social observation.

the internal monologue, the way the brain jumps from thought to thought

Agreed, though this is one of the things about her writing that seems REALLY Lorrie Moore, and thus REALLY mannered. (But I am possibly biased by writing workshops in which too many people pick up on exactly this tic of Lorrie Moore's.)

I don't really think that it is mannered - or if it is, then it's a mannerism which has been maintained for so long that it's stopped being a persona and just become part of who she is. I'm not claiming that the jumping from thought to thought is particularly novel or original - lots of writers have done it - going back to at least Carver, but it's the particular details that she includes that make it fresh. Lots of people do collages, but some people's collages have more interesting tidbits glued into the page. Little details stand out - like the aside in "Roy Spivey" that the other famous person she met on a plane was Jason Kidd - seemingly a random choice but it sticks in your mind like a burr. You think, is this woman a basketball fan, or perhaps her boyfriend is one? The image of the lanky Kidd folded into a coach-class seat passes into your brain almost subliminally.

i liked the movie

I liked her story in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. I'll have to read a couple more to be able to tell the diff...

not a good dancer.

I liked the New Yorker story too, although I don't like this theme she has of people doing bizarre, quirky and mostly unbelievable things to express love.

i like her and the movie and her old stuff/film-performance pieces (got to see a few years ago when living on west coast) and that website with the stuff written on the fridge and stove, but haven't read many of her stories. the loneliness thing is both endearing and eerie, hence i wld never call her work twee, too unnerving even if apects of it are warm&fuzzy. it is good to be unnerved by art though sometimes, if in that kind of mood.

I ate near her once - I think she was on a date or with a sig. other, and she was making the same faces she makes in her movie.

Hurting, I read that as "I ate her once"; i was confused.

Oh, wait. I just discovered from a review in the Times that a very good story about two girls that appeared in the New Yorker a while ago is by her and now I am in complete agreeement.

so 'the future' is excellent?, i just saw it, it's excellent

would like to hear what conrad &c didn't like about it, upthread; anything that might in description be labelled 'quirk' was well integrated and naturalistic enough to just seem totally appropriate to me.

loved this anyway

my central problem with this movie is that it was totally and unbearably shit

so you're saying it's better than me and you and everyone we know

I've only seen the poop back and forth cut together on youtube kinda funny while nothing in this movie could be cut together kinda funny on youtube so no it's worse

it wasn't really meant to be a funny movie, i don't think (this one). & i think a strength of it was that everything she & him were saying wasn't particularly focal, was kinda irrelevant, but that their relationship dynamic was really delicately sketched out. idk how to hit you back if you just hated it, i thought it was v moving & immediate, & mj was great in it, she looked riven w/concern w/o seeming indulgent or pitiful or anything.

its def better than me, you

yeah. i just think the 'show not tell' thing was so apparent in her direction, & in the power of the quieter scenes (most prominently the one w/the shirt, but really just in everything that was mood more than point - the kid digging, the bright moments outside, &c). it was v poetic & expressive along very delicate lines, in different moods. the ageing scene on reception was really beautiful also - that's the kinda thing which i think a comic reading of would not do justice to, it being more of a kinda expressive, sensory, human thing like w/what kaufman was doing in synecdoche ny, re: compression of time, &c&c&c.

if anyone has any geeky input about the making of this film, btw, i am all ears, i assume it was some kinda new red-esque digital camera thing?

didn't think it was trying to be funny and failing btw but for me trying to be insightful and expressive and evocative and failing and trying to be quirky and succeeding in heavy-handed rubbish ways. synecdoche a natural comparison thematically but obviously v different scope and style and also just found the future very very very grating and when it wasn't grating boring and also ugly with no interesting observations about its idea and yeah just hated it.

ha, okay. ty for the explanation. i feel like we could maybe expend some posts on 'ugly', but the rest seems fairly set in stone. did anyone else love this

another thing i liked about this was that it felt v present; it leant on these different dualities and realities that feel very everyday but i haven't really actually seen expressed elsewhere - using the computer as a familiar, reflexive, comforting opt-out from the thing you want to do (pull it into bed in the morning); the binary of internet vs outside; some of the depressive consequences of setting goals and not realising them. & little of that stuff was concretely fleshed out, or traded off, but just there, familiar to us.

there were these details, too - the packing scene at the end, the guy turning back a page in his book bc it's so evidently one of those situations you'd *intently read* through and yet utterly fail to read through.

loved the future, so much. and u&me was great too, and her collection of short stories.

hi 5 (re: the future & to some degree the shorts, too)

reading over this thread, i marvel at this entry:

I do like this comment:
Can anyone say, pretentious? This made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.
— Posted by eric

― Bill in Chicago, Thursday, 6 September 2007 16:45 (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

and am glad that i am of the portion of ILX that thinks miranda july is awesome and is not impressed by the use of the tired phrase "This made me throw up in my mouth a little bit" which to me is infinitely more twee and pretentious than anything miranda has written or will ever write.

actually, maybe that's excessively dickish. but i think nabisco is typically OTM throughout here.

*pats self on back*

xp!

My restlessness from The Future was mostly just structural (they turn off their internet, which leads to consequences, but they don't turn it back on) and that the lead guy didn't work for me as well as John Hawkes in the first one.

So I left the theater unsatisfied. That said, there are parts of it that stick with me longer and more vividly than recent movies that have left me satisfied. I remember this one vividly, and can't remember a thing about The Lincoln Lawyer.

Where the storyline of the cat goes is also audacious and worked well.

The old guy reminded me of the people playing themselves in Last Days (the Yellow Pages salesman, etc.), and I didn't know until afterwards that he wasn't an actor and that's what he was doing.

he died before seeing the movie, she said at the screening i saw

on balance better than dying after seeing it

(Hey, maybe we were at the same screening at the ArcLight.)

i don't think so - i saw it in london at the london film festival last month

saw a screening in london in august

i think i am going to see this movie

comes out for home consumption at the end of Nov

am intrigued by the turning off of the internet idea as it seems like connectivity is more precious than food in my house

My restlessness from The Future was mostly just structural (they turn off their internet, which leads to consequences, but they don't turn it back on)

idg this?, could you expand a lil? it didn't really seem like this was an untied thread, to me - just that they turned it off & things proceeded, their lives beginning to be overtaken by the various consequences of their investment in having an active month? perhaps it was, but tbh i think a lot of it - the pennysaver guy, the daughter - was left hanging, and neatly so, the things happening more to signal an effect on MJ than as narratives in themselves. when i think 'structure' i think how well it was put together, on account of how well planted everything was - from the pennysaver guy's marital wisdom, which i guess was the most overt kinda thematic-plant, to the existence of the shirt, &c&c&c.

and that the lead guy didn't work for me as well as John Hawkes in the first one.

yeah i agree w/this, & think that some of his solo monologues were more grandiose and sweeping than they needed to be. i'm generally hesitant to criticise the-attractive-guy in a movie couple because i wonder if i just partially forgave a simiarly-attractive-woman similar flaws, though i don't think that was the case here. not so much comparing to john hawkes, but he was a lil more one note than mj, though good in his solo/moon thing, largely, good at looking ravaged & lost, &c.

So I left the theater unsatisfied. That said, there are parts of it that stick with me longer and more vividly than recent movies that have left me satisfied. I remember this one vividly, and can't remember a thing about The Lincoln Lawyer.

not tryin to be a genre snob but wait isn't this a matthew mcconaughey movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0Y_8faXKnA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqoIdib8jHY

The Future was really excellent. I thought it's visual language was very creative and subtle. I only liked about four new movies last year and this was one of them.

the other film i liked as much as The Future was The Tree of Life and they seemed surprisingly similar to me. Partly because I sat down expecting to dislike them and party because they seemed audacious and took the most surprising turns. They also both seemed to be really exploring the medium. Both seemed very cinematic.

ty

the future was wonderful

Miranda July called before Congress

http://on.aol.com/video/miranda-july--motherhood-517311870

lol @ AOL On

PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY: PLANNING SPACE FOR A FAMILY
VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Schlafly's hope for young women today trying to balance their careers and home lives

this is great imo, the story and the ensuing commentary:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/fiction-podcast-david-sedaris-reads-miranda-july.html

David Sedaris read a short story by Miranda July, “Roy Spivey,” and
afterwards, Deborah Treisman asked Sedaris why he thinks July is so
divisive. People are either rabid for her work or they can’t stomach
her quirky tweeness.

“I think that people who don’t like her are just jealous,” Sedaris
replied. “She’s so talented.”

i really dislike miranda july but i'm into this as a project idea?
http://wethinkalone.com/about/

and i'm not jealous

I love her writing, and I still think about The Future a lot.

“I think that people who don’t like her are just jealous,” Sedaris
replied. “She’s so talented.”

I like her short fiction a lot but it's completely plain to me that there are reasons people might not like it which don't involve jealousy of her talent. I do think she's a lot more talented than David Sedaris.

I did not much like The Future, but I thought H Linklater's enviro-door-knocking "no, this is probably too late" scene was great.

the first bad man is p good, not done w/ it yet but is like ben marcus when he was good x helen dewitts lightning rods

new film (Debra Winger!)

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6799-miranda-july-s-kajillionaire

Oh sweet.

i often listen to the new yorker fiction podcast when i'm trying to fall asleep, and found it very difficult to sleep (in a good way) while listening to emma cline read "the Metal Bowl". i got a copy of her short story collection No one belongs here more than you. Along with Me and You and Everyone We Know, these are the only things I know about Miranda July. Most of them are from the mid-to-late 2000s, but i have to say, the ending of the Metal Bowl is very much of a kind with her earlier work. she is very consistently interested in people watching other people get off. she's also very funny (i realize some may vehemently disagree, very self-absorbed. there is the normal kind of self-absorbed where the person clearly is but doesn't try to attract attention to it, and then there's the July kind where it is very much a known fact by all parties that it's going to be very self-absorbed. i find it refreshing when people just state the obvious and then see what else that opens up. of course, sometimes that's very annoying, too. depends on whose self you're temporarily getting absorbed into

here is my second nabisco reference of the day:

seriously, I understand exactly why Miranda July is annoying/lame to people, honestly, I'm with you, but then she does work and often the work just ... works. maybe I'm just impressed that she's incredibly single-minded about her theme(s), and manages to bring them into various media like that. maybe 10 years from now this thread will be revived and I'll find myself recanting because she's stuck single-mindedly with the same themes for another decade.

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Saturday, July 3, 2010 1:05 AM (twelve years ago)

i'm curious what nabisco or others would say to that now, 12 years later, when the same themes are definitely still there. Is that bad, even? Maybe it becomes a matter of personal tolerance of how many stories like that you want to hear. And also, of course, given that i'm familiar with like 2% of her creative output, is there something in her more recent work that departs from those themes? (didn't seem like it from this thread but who knows)

I don't know that much about her work, saw her in Madeline's Madeline, which was surprisingly great

Just watched Me and You and Everyone We Know, which also was really enjoyable

I'm pretty sure "The Metal Bowl" is the only work of hers I've read (heard). I found it brilliant, subversive and disturbing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/05/style/miranda-july-all-fours-profile.html

Miranda July Turns the Lights On https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/20/miranda-july-profile

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/style/miranda-july-all-fours-group-texts.html

a friend texted me in the middle of the night to tell me to read this book but idk

i agree w your friend