It's like 1984 but worse — maybe 1985 or even 4000.
March 29, 2021 6:42 AM   Subscribe

Danny Lavery at it again. I’m waiting for my interview subject with a certain degree of trepidation. We’re both early, and neither of us are here yet, but Sarah Hagi (a former chess reporter who studied interpretational technique at Zaytuna College and used to date the Duolingo owl) is used to being on my side of the table, asking hard-hitting questions and describing other people’s lunches (today: Irish beef salad, hold the soup, turnip milk). You might have listened to her podcast, Recant and Deliver, which she runs out of her boyfriend’s mother in Brooklyn.
posted by snerson (57 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
I was gently and confusedly chuckling until I reached the transphobic part, then NOPE.
posted by signal at 6:47 AM on March 29, 2021


(Daniel Lavery, the author, is trans.)
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:56 AM on March 29, 2021


Tags
...
satire


of what?
posted by thelonius at 6:57 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


Interviews, I think! I laughed, but it's a lot of "in jokes", some of which I do not get.
posted by wellred at 7:06 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


Finally someone has the courage to call out the Fearless Flyer. Can’t it be something more than encomium to popcorn?
posted by vorpal bunny at 7:06 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


I tried to read the first paragraph and gave up; I have no idea what was going on there.
posted by octothorpe at 7:08 AM on March 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


I just finished Lavery's memoir Something that May Shock and Discredit You, and I highly recommend it. I've been telling all my book-reading friends about it for the last two weeks. The various ways he interprets and reinterprets his gender transition are fascinating, and I'm only six months younger than him so our cultural touchstones are super similar. It was such a surreal experience reading a book where every cultural reference fell so squarely in my hit box, especially the long reimagining of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations that's dropped in the middle.

I enjoy the surrealist feeling of Lavery's humor writing; he weaves in non sequiturs so tightly that I always spend the first half of the piece just trying to get oriented. Once I find which way is up I have to start over so I can appreciate it more fully. Something that May Shock and Discredit You has much longer sections of serious introspection, so if this piece wasn't your style I'd suggest starting with that work instead. But if this feeling of "what is even happening right now" was totally your jam, consider The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror if you haven't already. Every chapter a new short story of a classic fairy tale with some unsettling surrealist twist.
posted by lilac girl at 7:10 AM on March 29, 2021 [5 favorites]


It's also ungrammatical often enough that's it clearly part of the voice. Is this part of Lavery's style?

which she runs out of her boyfriend’s mother

Or just loves to sunglasses?

The whole thing seems like a satire of online personality deification with a bit of James Joyce thrown in, which makes it incredibly hostile to a reader dropped into it cold.
posted by fatbird at 7:11 AM on March 29, 2021 [10 favorites]


Cliff Notes: Media outlets trying to normalize transphobia by proffering a transphobe who's a member of another marginalized identity.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:12 AM on March 29, 2021 [9 favorites]


of what?

I read it as making fun of a specific genre of puffy interviews with alt right "thinkers," where the fawning tone (words like "dapper" are used) doesn't match the fact that, uh, they're Nazis.

On preview: agree lilac girl, Something that May Shock and Discredit You is a phenomenal read.
posted by snerson at 7:12 AM on March 29, 2021 [15 favorites]


which she runs out of her boyfriend’s mother

Taun-taun style?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:16 AM on March 29, 2021 [11 favorites]


Satire of unnecessarily validating interviews with alt-right "celebrity." See, e.g.
posted by praemunire at 7:17 AM on March 29, 2021 [12 favorites]


Is this part of Lavery's style?

He tries, I think, to capture a sort of vague associational sublogic in people's thought processes. I must admit I don't get "boyfriend's mother," though.
posted by praemunire at 7:18 AM on March 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


alt-right "celebrity."

Of course, I should have gotten that from "a former chess reporter who studied interpretational technique at Zaytuna College and used to date the Duolingo owl"
posted by thelonius at 7:19 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


When you're surfacing the ridiculousness of a text, the result tends to be...ridiculous.
posted by praemunire at 7:21 AM on March 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


This is a Madlib, right?!?
posted by Drab_Parts at 7:21 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


The odd grammar made me think this was written using Talk to Transformer or some other AI text generator
posted by Morpeth at 7:22 AM on March 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


Look, you either grok Danny Lavery's mouth-music, or you don't.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:23 AM on March 29, 2021 [24 favorites]


Yeah, it feels like it's a parody of the breathless articles about (or by) the cancel culture crowd where they complain about stuff like being "oppressed" by trans people existing, while the interviewer either throws softball questions about their personal style or nods along with obvious white nationalist canards like "critical race theory is antisemitic".
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 7:24 AM on March 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


I enjoyed that a lot.
posted by Gadarene at 7:29 AM on March 29, 2021


I interpret the word weirdness here as... kind of like someone trained a neural network on a data set of this sort of interview, and then had it generate one. So the word weirdness might be interpreted as an artifact of how replaceable everything is within the context of these vapid interviews.

... I might be slurping the Lavery kool aid too hard though. My brain also interprets the mental trip over the phrase "which she runs out of her boyfriend’s mother" as a reason to cackle loudly.
posted by snerson at 7:32 AM on March 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


For the style applied to a subject people may be more familiar with, which may help, I Am the Horrible Goose That Lives in the Town.
posted by praemunire at 7:36 AM on March 29, 2021 [11 favorites]


I thought it was exceptionally surreal-funny even for a Lavery piece. It reminded me a tiny bit of some Robert Benchley. I mean, it's a satire of puff pieces and puff pieces about the alt right, but it's also sort of a weird deconstruction satire of how we use language online.

It calls up a bunch of nighs and less-nighs - "out of her boyfriend's mother" (in addition to being a weird/creepy/funny image) is something our brains fill in as "out of her boyfriend's mother's luxury real estate rental office" or something. We can then imagine it being "out of her boyfriend's mother's damp garden studio apartment where she and her boyfriend also live", except that we know that this type of person is never poor and their apparent success is always predicated on family connections, etc. So it sort of foregrounds how our brains fill in cliches, what the cliches suggest and don't suggest, etc.

It also suggests to me the weird babble susurrus of the internet, the way there's all this almost meaningless flow of language that creates an effect by its very flow and endlessness. Endless semi-meaningless content produced by poorly paid and contingent writers to be read with half-attention by people at work or on their commute, full of half-articulated bad ideas and non-ideas.
posted by Frowner at 7:38 AM on March 29, 2021 [38 favorites]


It also suggests to me the weird babble susurrus of the internet

Yeah, very much so. "The Bari Weiss of Liz Bruenigs, the Ayaan Hirsi Alis of Andrew Sullivans" really does capture the nonsensical reference juggling that's often deployed for seemlingly sophisticated filler.
posted by fatbird at 7:42 AM on March 29, 2021 [13 favorites]


I kept waiting for the reveal that this was written by an AI trained on a bunch of breathless Twitter slapfights, or the entire corpus of The New Yorker, or something, and it just... never came. What actually is this?
posted by Mayor West at 7:47 AM on March 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


"Did you know it’s a crime to now?" is another great example of that elision Frowner pointed out, where your brain just sort of skips over it because it doesn't even matter what it's supposedly a crime to do now, because the details aren't the point and they're a lie anyway, it's just pure entitlement and persecution.

I'll throw in another recommendation for his fantastic memoir.
posted by theodolite at 7:48 AM on March 29, 2021 [15 favorites]


It’s a dangerous cocktail of emotions and rational thinking.

(Excellent!)
posted by ropeladder at 7:48 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'm assuming this like "Messages of support, but also messages of concerned." are pointed references to the lack of copyediting apparent even in big sites like the Washington Post. There rest is pretty funny, though quirky is always an acquired taste.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:01 AM on March 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


If you hate read a lot of praise pieces for awful people, I think this would be very funny. If you don't, it fails to hit.

(I am in the second category, but I can imagine this being hilarious if I were in the first.)
posted by lesbiassparrow at 8:04 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


Kind of envying the people for whom it doesn't make sense.
I have been getting so many emails. So many people have been emailing me about so many things, Danny. They’re scared. They whisper messages of fear they can't say out loud. The thing is, they are scared and worried. They don't know if their thoughts are allowed. Did you know it’s a crime to now? It's like 1984 but worse — maybe 1985 or even 4000. Where Big Brother Woke is going around, and you can’t see, or think about, or can and can’t. You can’t even do that anymore. Literally just when I walked in here, someone whispered to me that they’d just been fired for thinking about what if someone hated something?…It’s absurd, and it’s dangerous, and nobody’s talking about it.
It feels to me like every centre or right-wing news or opinion site posts this kind of thing several times a day.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:18 AM on March 29, 2021 [22 favorites]


I just finished Lavery's memoir Something that May Shock and Discredit You, and I highly recommend it.

I generally have liked Lavery's work a lot but I will mildly give the counterpoint that I found the style that I enjoy on the Internet so much a little overwhelming in book form.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:23 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


Not knowing the author at all, the gapped and otherwise surreal language struck me as a neural network at play:

"You might have listened to her podcast, Recant and Deliver, which she runs out of her boyfriend’s mother in Brooklyn....
'Italy is his cage, and he should stay there'. But there’s a kind of pride lurking just behind the sheepishness, like if a sheep were also secretly an enchanted king. That’s the word, anyway, about the 27-year-old star finance writer for Martha Stewart Living that the left increasingly loves to can of worms. She’s become something of a poster child for several different social media firestorms — a poster child, if you will...
Naive? Or just loves to sunglasses?"
posted by doctornemo at 8:55 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


Frowner: "it sort of foregrounds how our brains fill in cliches, what the cliches suggest and don't suggest, etc."

I suppose, if the cliches are available to the reader. For example, I get the hipster Brooklyn cliche, but have no idea about "loves to can of worms," unless that's referring to the much older can of worms cliche. "like if a sheep were also secretly an enchanted king" makes sense to me only as fantasy or surrealism.
posted by doctornemo at 8:58 AM on March 29, 2021


I wouldn't analyze it too carefully - the nonsense is kind of the point. Pseudo-intellectualism is full of non sequiturs like this.
posted by Think_Long at 9:08 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


If this article doesn't make sense to you, it's because you are giving the benefit of the doubt to something that is nonsensical duckspeak. This is the same mistake many people make with interviews with or thought pieces about horrible alt-righters (and, let's face it, right-wing liberals). The kind of national article that talks a lot about the "canceling" these spotlighted personalities and never touching on the, you know, actual horrible opinions and policies they advocate.

It compares the "intellectual" thought pieces of right-of-center American media to Trumpian word salad. It's also a note on what AI-generated journalism would look like, and how a lot of what passes for journalism today already does look like that. And even centrists and liberals will eat up content that is catered to them. It's not only Trump supporters who, like dogs, listen to tone and not words. You are not immune to propaganda.

I loved it. Especially the "maybe 1985 or even 4000" gag. It reminded me of the opening joke from a Dresdan Codak comic:

This was a scene from 'The Collected Works of Shakespeare: The Movie', seventh in a series of literary adaptations by independent filmmaker Ronnie Awning, who famously claims to have never read any of the works upon which his films are based:

"They are adaptations, just not in the literal, pedestrian sense. I adapt essence. I've been told that Othello is a Moorish captain, but in my mind he's a magical, talking cello with a lisp. Who is right? Is there a right? *pauses* For that matter, is there a left?"
posted by AlSweigart at 9:14 AM on March 29, 2021 [7 favorites]


If you've ever been in a room full of people who are better dressed than you and sound smarter than you but you also suspect they're all blithering idiots, this is the article for you. I half expected bitcoin advertisements in the sidebar.

I lived in silicon valley for the past decade. A lot of naked emperors there.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:26 AM on March 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


Danny is a freaking genius of a writer. As another someone the same age with the same set of internet + liberal arts + Christian upbringing reference set, I'm just so damn excited I'll get to keep reading whatever comes out of his brain as we both get older and presumably even weirder.
posted by heyforfour at 9:44 AM on March 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


I must admit I don't get "boyfriend's mother," though.

This read to me as both a ding on sloppily edited interviews, and a knock on NY real estate, as well as just being a weirdly hilarious mental image.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 9:46 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


Robert Benchley is a great referent, Frowner. Good call. A little S.J. Perelman as well.
posted by Gadarene at 9:57 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


Thanks O.P., tasty plate of beans.
posted by Lyme Drop at 9:57 AM on March 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


So sick she doesn’t even finish her toast. Her sickness and her self-discipline are one and the same, which is something the left simply can’t understand; she’s so thin because she’s so right, and the more wrong everyone else is, the thinner she gets, which is so important.

Sarah, would you kindly purse your lips in an adorably determined moue that emphasizes the slightness of your frame somehow? I'll be sure to emphasize the slightness of your frame.

Yes, how is this?

So thin!!!


NOTE. PERFECT.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:59 AM on March 29, 2021 [5 favorites]


This is HI-larious. Thanks for posting it.
posted by medusa at 10:38 AM on March 29, 2021


Her sickness and her self-discipline are one and the same, which is something the left simply can’t understand; she’s so thin because she’s so right, and the more wrong everyone else is, the thinner she gets, which is so important.

Just seconding that this is so utterly perfectly on-point I have to go lie down now and breathe deeply.
posted by kalimac at 10:38 AM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


it is heartbreaking how much of this thread is occupied with attempts to explain jokes, especially when the "this is like an AI wrote a fluff interview" comments are 95-98 percent of the way to already perfectly well understanding the joke

(to participate though: "Disarming anecdote." for whatever reason struck me as the best joke in here in terms of encapsulating the tired laziness of the form, also made me choke-laugh)

anyway this piece is wonderfully loopy and funny and pointedly mean and, as with everything Danny Lavery, makes me re-miss the toast desperately
posted by Kybard at 10:39 AM on March 29, 2021 [12 favorites]


In addition to the above I took some of the weirder-sounding phrases to be hypthetical online shorthand. Similar to how "milkshake duck" began as a deliberately weird phrase in a tweet, quickly became an in-jokey descriptive for somebody when they were outed for being terrible, then became a generic noun for people who are outed for being terrible, to becoming a verb for the process of getting outed for being terrible, and now we have phrases like "Bean Dad got milkshake ducked" which make complete sense to many people you personally interact with online but are probably just word salad to the vast majority of the English-speaking US.
posted by ardgedee at 11:25 AM on March 29, 2021 [7 favorites]


The Bari Weiss of Liz Bruenigs, the Ayaan Hirsi Alis of Andrew Sullivans, the Upper Upper West Side (Canada) meets Cruella de Vil. Or is she?

I am kissing my fingers like a chef over here.
posted by mhoye at 12:35 PM on March 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


Another reason people might be nonplussed by this is because they're not familiar with the IDW "discourse," wherein white people are the real victims, racial IQ is real, there are two genders, they're just asking the questions, nobody talks about it, free speech is under attack and a weekly show on HBO, a recurring gig at the NYT or a million Twitter followers is tantamount to suppression.

Which... well, I envy them. This piece captures the essence of it but the reality is annoying as fuck.
posted by klanawa at 12:49 PM on March 29, 2021 [5 favorites]


>>which she runs out of her boyfriend’s mother
>Taun-taun style?
It could be with the piss-and-vinegar of a kombucha scoby mother.
posted by k3ninho at 1:28 PM on March 29, 2021


I love Danny A LOT and recommend his memoir to anyone who will listen, and met him once and he was a total sweetheart, but ... I don't love that the subject of this satire is a Muslim woman of color. Not that women of color can never be problematic in the way this fictional person is, but it feels much more like he's lampooning a certain kind of white woman - someone like Katie Herzog or Elizabeth Wurtzel, who has signifiers and even a history of liberal hipsterism but is now as much of a right-wing troll as any white boy who writes for the NRO. Maybe he just didn't want to be that "obvious" but I feel like there's something I'm missing in that choice.
posted by lunasol at 3:24 PM on March 29, 2021


Sarah Hagi is a real person, and as far as I can tell this was either done with her blessing or in collaboration with Lavery.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 4:11 PM on March 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


Thanks for the explanations. I guess the piece went over my head.
posted by thelonius at 4:20 PM on March 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


Sarah Hagi is a real person, and as far as I can tell this was either done with her blessing or in collaboration with Lavery.

One or both, looks like.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:49 PM on March 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


Danny Lavery is wholly himself, but when I think of his writing I think of James Joyce, in that each sentence is multi-layered, can be read in many different contexts and people could spend their careers analyzing his work. The fact that Lavery is only in his 30's (I believe?) and will hopefully spend his life crafting literature makes me so excited for what's to come. A lot of what he writes goes over my head but it always leaves me thinking about it weeks and months later.
posted by rogerroger at 9:36 PM on March 29, 2021 [5 favorites]


Danny is so ridiculously talented a writer that sometimes I think he gets a bit lost in the invention of unusual forms of essay.

This isn't one of those times though - this piece is destructively brilliant.
posted by zymil at 1:26 AM on March 30, 2021 [3 favorites]


All right, fine, I'll crack open the copy of "Something that May Shock and Discredit You" that's been sitting in my To-Be-Read pile. You could've just said, rather than inundating me under a firehose of Lavery's brilliance.
posted by kyrademon at 9:45 AM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]


Oof, I should have googled first. Thank you.
posted by lunasol at 10:10 AM on March 30, 2021


The first amazon review for "Something that May Shock and Discredit You" says:

A mash-up of a transitioning memoir and an “I was a lit major, so let me show you how well read I am” essay collection, the result is nearly unreadable.


And I kinda want to click "Helpful" because, honestly, this review makes it clear that I will love this book.
posted by selfmedicating at 9:59 AM on April 1, 2021 [3 favorites]


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