what do we think of marie calloway

it seems to me that her writing is not very good, and this gets lost because the discussion is about many things that are not actually her writing.

also if we accept marie calloway as doing something important, does that mean we also say the same about thought catalog more generally?

I read that Adrian Brody story and feel like I kind of need to read it again to decide what I think. It's the kind of thing that's very easy to have a knee-jerk (huh huh) reaction to, and also it was presented to me as "look as this abominable crap" so I wasn't able to give it a fair chance.

i think it would be very very difficult to write well about what calloway is trying (?) to write about -- it seems like a good project to me. her interviews are smarter than her stories, so maybe she's figured out what she should have been writing about, or should have intended to write about. is it possible to make this sort of stuff interesting in a literary sense, as opposed to interesting in a national enquirer sense?

I'm not really sure about this tao lin guy either. I don't know how I feel about this newfangled deadpan confessional style that has come about lately.

i like marie calloway's writing a lot and don't think it has much to do with the majority of stuff published on thought catalog, which is glib and flatters its readers, much like any lifestyle magazine. calloway's writing seems to be the opposite of that. i would describe her work as existentialist, in the sartrean sense, because her narrators seem thrust into a world -- into an identity, a performance -- that they don't understand but nevertheless must live. like, especially in the piece about when she worked as a sex worker, and in her google docs pieces, the major theme seems to be that she is a young girl in over her head, who has a lot of skepticism about capitalism, about the way her sexuality (wrenchingly, her masochistic fantasies) were informed by systems external to herself, that she views as hostile, but who can't really find a way out of the labyrinth, or a way to be the person she wants to be and not the person she feels she is in spite of herself. or something. the main thing with her is that she lives in the midst of critical theory but hasn't gotten to the place where she has determinate positions about how she wants to live her convictions. it's easy to just read her work from a feminist lens -- and i think there is a lot of interesting criticism to be done in that vein -- but ultimately i think it is just about the awful impasse of adolescence, about being in the midst of this moment of self-invention, which outsiders might see as narcissistic but is actually a terrible painful period to be in.... the worst, really.

in terms of tao lin, i think he is a very original, important writer. he is the reverse of what s.clover said about marie calloway because his interviews are about 1,000,000x less interesting than his books, which mine very strange and uncomfortable emotional territory. i wrote a review of taipei for a really small online lit mag that was published today, and i think i stand by the things i said in it. his major theme is alienation -- from society, but also more pertinently, from the kind of emotional logic that would lead him to view alienation as something to overcome -- but saying that doesn't do his work justice, really. anyway, his alienation resolves itself, it seems, in this extreme form of relativism that becomes a sort of self-parody -- "everyone's actions and beliefs are based on equally arbitrary assumptions" <- a tao lin quote -- and lends his work a surrealist bent. like kafka, i suppose. he can also, like kafka, be very funny when he wants to be, but more often he seems to want to skirt the abyss.

also his descriptions, in this new novel, of his relationship with his mother in high school is as devastating as literature gets, if you are into books about depression.

so yeah, hurting, if you are interested in reading one book from this deadpan confessional group, it should be taipei, not the calloway book. but the calloway book is worth reading too.

...i hope i didn't kill this thread.

ok, I just read "Thank You For Touching Me" -- is that just a thought catalog piece or is it a "short story"? My problem with it is that it reads very bloggy, but not bloggy-as-literary-device, just straight up bloggy. And as a blog post it's not that interesting, or at least it's uneven. She's better when she doesn't start making her Thoughtful Observations About Her Experience, because those tend to be pretty cliched and to spell everything out a little too clearly.

i can understand that criticism, and that's not one of my favorite pieces by her. i think part of the appeal of her, though, is the extent to which her work borders dangerously on just ordinary, confessional blog writing... the naivete, feigned or not, is part of the appeal. i think what puts her ott is the extent to which she is able to create an effect of discomfort, and sometimes true confusion... the "transparency" often seems to be a response to the fact that she has failed to spin her experiences effectively into a narrative. not everyone's thing, i understand, but i like it, and think her work has a knack for evoking uncomfortable questions.

I guess I'm suspicious of that explanation where her work features so much sexual self-exploitation. Like do male readers really like her style or do they just like reading about easy threesomes and blowjobs in her style. Granted I don't think the appeal is purely pornographic for male readers -- I think they (we) are also just curious about a woman's unsentimental depiction of her feelings and thoughts in these scenarios.

But other than that, I don't find that she writes especially well about these things. I actually thought the "Thank You For Touching Me" piece started out pretty well and had a good flow and built nicely as a narrative, with good but not too heavy-handed foreshadowing of where it was going, and some good subtle, non-spelled-out insights. But when it got bloggy/essayistic it lost me.

xp that could be a factor, but if male readers' interest in her work is really the latter -- gaining an unsentimental, unguarded portrait of a woman's point of view re. her sexuality -- is that really exploitative? or is it just part of why we read in general, which is to "encounter other minds"? i guess it is interesting, for me, to read about how sex is such a minefield for her, but then again i don't think it is all that distant from my own experience with sex, which is a thing people tend to start doing before they really know what to think about it.

i haven't read the thank u for touching me piece in a while, so i am going to re-read it and then get back to you on your specific criticisms.

i've read a couple of her stories and i def think she has some talent but, like, not notably more talent than a lot of young writers who write about things besides getting laid. my feeling about the 'adrien brody' story was that it was just too long and shapeless, it felt more like a livejournal entry than a work of fiction. the one about being a sex worker was much more succinct and punchy. it's interesting that she cites the joyce maynard book 'at home in the world' as an influence because maynard's persona in that book is very similar to the way calloway presents herself as a narrator in her stories, but with calloway it seems deliberate and affected, whereas maynard seems sort of traumatized and un-self-aware of how she's coming off.

I wrote this piece for VICE that got pretty HUGE in the alt lit community. They all hate me now:

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/alt-lit-is-the-worst-thing-to-happen-to-literature

oh, good article. i remember reading that when it came out. i agree with you that most of the writing that falls under the heading of "alt lit" isn't very valuable, but i think marie calloway, along with tao lin, is interesting. if it's not taboo to plug stuff on i love books i am going to go ahead and link my review of taipei. http://www.tottenvillereview.com/vontinuing-ahead-tao-lins-taipei/