really enjoyed this; such a funny and invigorating read and your opening (and closing!) paragraphs have undeniable verve…I want to agree except I totally missed the Good Days of alt-lit so feel totally unqualified to judge if we’re in the Degraded Present now…
thank you so much, celine! marie calloway is incredible, even if some of my neo-decadent homies disagree. love what blake butler is doing with WANTED! the shane jesse christmas piece in the latest issue is amazing
thank u for reading, matthew! you’re not the first person to find issue with my use of sprezzatura, but i do stand by my use of it, if only insofar as i believe good posting requires an immense amount of effort and study to come off as casually as it does. quick way to see it is to look at how wrong and laborious bad posting (most visibly by the earnestcels on here and bluesky) reads
I have a similar heuristic for sprezzatura. If I write a try-hard or questionable line, I ask, “which category of reception at an Irish pub does this fall into?”:
The novel in verse should make a comeback. It is ideally suited for audiobooks, which might reach more people than reading a physical book.
And before people diss me for listening to audiobooks, recall that orally told verse was the worldwide standard for fiction until the printing press. I am listening to Paradise Lost right now and the poetry only increases in power when spoken.
really enjoyed this; such a funny and invigorating read and your opening (and closing!) paragraphs have undeniable verve…I want to agree except I totally missed the Good Days of alt-lit so feel totally unqualified to judge if we’re in the Degraded Present now…
but I really like a lot of the pieces in WANTED
thank you so much, celine! marie calloway is incredible, even if some of my neo-decadent homies disagree. love what blake butler is doing with WANTED! the shane jesse christmas piece in the latest issue is amazing
Sprezzatura!
Hard agree to everything, even if it makes me uncomfortable (the use of “sprezzatura”, not the critique).
This was truly brat.
thank u for reading, matthew! you’re not the first person to find issue with my use of sprezzatura, but i do stand by my use of it, if only insofar as i believe good posting requires an immense amount of effort and study to come off as casually as it does. quick way to see it is to look at how wrong and laborious bad posting (most visibly by the earnestcels on here and bluesky) reads
Now I have to use “earnestcels”.
I have a similar heuristic for sprezzatura. If I write a try-hard or questionable line, I ask, “which category of reception at an Irish pub does this fall into?”:
- witty
- mildly amusing
- not good
- infuriating
- likely to get me beaten
I try to stay in the first two.
The novel in verse should make a comeback. It is ideally suited for audiobooks, which might reach more people than reading a physical book.
And before people diss me for listening to audiobooks, recall that orally told verse was the worldwide standard for fiction until the printing press. I am listening to Paradise Lost right now and the poetry only increases in power when spoken.
Just wondering - it’s great fun in the way toothpaste can be but doesn’t this piece do what it’s taking about? ‘tryhard as fuck’ comes to mind.
if you think this required any trying at all, that’s on you, buddy