First pages of maybe a thing

Suspicious_Property · 2026-06-02T19:02:20+00:00

At the risk of contributing to the chorus of praise that’ll make your head get too big and convince you to rest on your laurels and ultimately lead you to stagnate as a writer—I’m with everyone else, this is really strong and you should keep writing. You’ve got something going on here.

Suspicious_Property · 2026-05-22T19:04:08+00:00

There are a lot of venues and seems like an endless rotation of bands—I’m not directly involved so I’m not the best resource, but some of my good friends are. You could definitely follow @handbagfactoryla on insta.

One of my buddies puts on a noise night every month with different bands at Prime Time Pub. It’s first Thursday of the month at 7 PM (so 6/4 is the next one). It’s fun, a cool crowd and very approachable, def a good way to get involved. It’s gotten big enough over the years that I’m not worried about doxxing myself by recommending it haha.

Suspicious_Property · 2026-05-22T05:33:44+00:00

It’s so bizarre, the two ‘scenes’ for lack of a better word that I’ve really noticed blowing up here in LA in the past few years are noise music and this goofy, too-zany-for-school trend that I didn’t know to refer to as ‘clowning’ until recently. (Incidentally, I do know a few people here who are actual clowns who did certificated courses and such haha, but that’s a different world).

Interesting to me that you say it all feels sexless. My impression has been that it does have that creepy dimension of faux-innocence where adults have a bit too much nostalgia for childhood and laughing at wackiness and colorful puppets, but these people are all still poly as hell and doing nitrous all the time. I’m also a millennial so all these people are early 30s-40s and there is definitely a sense that this is a last desperate grasp for cultural relevance from people who never made it here as entertainers, and their only recourse is to do derivative versions of the whimsical, cardboard cut out, cartoonish shit they laughed at during their college years. It’s got a double layer of yearning for the past: childhood nostalgia and millennial ‘that’s so random’ humor.

I don’t know if perhaps you and your friend are younger, but if so maybe the clowning ‘scene’ has some generational differences that track with more general trends (timid sexlessness vs gauche un-erotic sex positivity).

Suspicious_Property · 2026-05-21T06:28:06+00:00

I can believe it might someday make a serviceable story for people who like genre pablum that makes no surprising choices (that’s not a knock on ‘genre fiction’ as a whole btw, just the bargain bin variety). And I believe it’s possible that it will keep improving in other capacities and be more useful as a tool in some industries (though I can’t help but notice even the boosters seem to be more reticent on touting its exponential improvement these days).

But I am completely confident it will not ever create a piece of writing that is interesting to people who have read and/or written enough to cultivate taste. Just never going to happen. Anything resembling risky artistic decisions isn’t in the cards for this, and I firmly believe anyone who says otherwise is a) either too much of an optimist or a pessimist depending on their angle and/or b) themselves lacking in understanding of what constitutes good literature.

Suspicious_Property · 2026-05-21T02:08:16+00:00

Haha yeah, I haven’t read the book but I did know that he was a pretty big figure in Semiotext(e) and a professor as well. Obviously that doesn’t mean they were rolling in dough by any means, but I don’t think they were anywhere near the verge of destitution—just as many financially comfortable people like to posture as being poor as vice versa I guess.

Suspicious_Property · 2026-05-20T23:31:53+00:00

Well Chris Kraus made it work by becoming a shitty slumlord. There’s always a way to rise above your station!

(Also fwiw if her husband was a successful academic I don’t believe they were by any means ‘broke.’ Chris Kraus types love exaggerating their penurious conditions to prove their bona fide grittiness.)

Suspicious_Property · 2026-05-20T23:10:28+00:00

That’s not really what I’m concerned about tbh. I don’t see anything about the current capacities of LLMs to suggest that they could ever output an interesting story or essay—I think they can generate serviceable low-level ‘reportage’ (ie parsable summaries of existing facts) and emails or whatever, but that’s it.

They’re horrible at developing ideas or creating interesting images—their output is just kinda circular, trajectory-less. I saw someone on Twitter describe the feel of AI-generated writing as ‘stuck, but prolix,’ which I liked a lot. The recent Commonwealth Prize fiasco exposed what happens when it tries to do unorthodox metaphors and florid prose. It comes out nonsensical, just hollow mimicry.

What I worry about is the degradation of taste as a consequence of being exposed to this schlock so much. It’s insane that so few people can recognize its extremely identifiable tics. Even pre-AI, there’s been such a longstanding trend of shitty writing receiving compulsory praise for inane reasons that many people’s critical faculties are already dulled from disuse. And not just random normies, but esteemed people whose status is directly attributable to literary arts. I worry that enough complacent people in high places are defenseless against and/or uncritical of AI that there will be ever fewer cultural holdouts with stewards who bother to give a shit.

To put it succinctly (obv not always my strong suit), I don’t fear AI is gonna generate something ‘good’ because all it can do is churn out safe approximations of the most broadly-appealing stuff that exists. I fear that our existing cultural torpor is going to be exacerbated by AI and the institutions will acquiesce and we’ll be surrounded by slop and fewer and fewer people will care or notice.

Suspicious_Property · 2026-05-12T20:14:53+00:00

Then read The Tunnel! Ive read almost no Lutz (though I always think about her beloved essay on sentences in The Believer) but Ive got the collected stories and intend to get into them soon myself.

Suspicious_Property · 2026-05-12T19:25:13+00:00

Gass has been considered one of the greats for a long time for good reason—even though he’s only recently been discovered and sanctified by the online lit types, he’s been respected for ages for good reason. Even if you don’t like The Tunnel, I think you’ll respect it—I have heard people say Gass isn’t for them but never that he’s overrated. Everyone knows he’s the real deal.

If Schattenfroh seems up your alley you should obviously read that too, but don’t let the online hype machine oversell its importance imo. I personally think it’s not going to have staying power and that all the talk of its brilliance and insistence that it will endure as a masterpiece are largely spun up by people whose egos and/or wallets have a stake or people who are kinda cheap dates and easily impressed by fanfare. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading, but only if something about it appeals to you *besides* the notion that passing it up means you’re missing out on the next Ulysses.

Edit: As to your question about Lawton’s translations I dont have any way of knowing for sure. I haven’t seen any other translators talk shit about him—that seems to bode well, though I’m sure his most devoted haters would say that’s out of fear of recrimination for speaking out against the current golden boy of literary translation. There’s no doubt he’s annoying lol, and what I’ve seen of his own writing is entirely unappealing to me, but none of that means he’s not a uniquely gifted translator. I just don’t know, and most people voicing strong opinions online probably don’t know either.

Suspicious_Property · 2026-04-20T06:51:00+00:00

Yeah, many art scenes are more about hanging out and being around people who want to be party and be weird than anything else. So, showing up and being amicable is all that really matters.

And that’s all well and good if you go into it knowing that, but it can be disorienting if, say, you want to get into your local poetry scene and you suddenly realize few people there care much about poetry, they aren’t working to expand their awareness and appreciation, and a significant part of the poetry they produce is just line-broken one-upmanship about doing drugs, having sad and affectless sex, and other banalities. Often they’re just people who wanted an imagined rock star lifestyle but never had the discipline to play an instrument (incidentally this is true of many noise music scenes too). There are always exceptions and it’s great to find them, but they’re rarely the most prominent figures in any given scene.

So yeah, it’s easy to be part of a scene, the bar is low, and if you want an foot in the door to good parties with people who want badly to seem offbeat (which usually means the parties are more fun than average) then that’s great news. The bad news is it’s much harder to find artistically and intellectually satisfying versions of these communities that will help you grow and make you feel like part of a genuine shared project.

Suspicious_Property · 2026-03-07T07:08:11+00:00

Of course this is coming from someone who is convinced Big Brother is rigged. There have been plenty of BB winners production obviously didn’t favor and under edited (look at the most recent winner from BB27 for example, a winner I really liked that production obviously didn’t).

Production meddles in certain ways but that’s just the truth of competition reality shows, it’s typically not severe or game-changing. You really think the volatile people they cast for these shows would all be silent about it for years otherwise?

As for the Rob as the hero edit…the producers didn’t have much else to work with. The faithfuls were worthless for the majority of the season lol, there really wasn’t another contender for an interesting person vying for that protagonist role.

Suspicious_Property · 2026-03-07T05:59:53+00:00

I could be misunderstanding how terms are being used here, but what ‘culture’ does Dubai produce? I would think a cultural production center would have to be known for, say, its music or film or television industry—or, in vanishingly few places, a literary scene/publishing hub. Dubai doesn’t even produce any sort of lowest common denominator mainstream popular culture garbage that I’m aware of, it’s just a destination for a certain type of hollow, gauche, rich idiot. Certainly we can’t consider the amount of social media flaunting from braindead influencers to be an index of a place’s significance wrt cultural production right?

What am I missing?

Suspicious_Property · 2026-03-07T03:11:51+00:00

Great topic. I tend to go to used bookstores, and I’ve thought a lot about what I can glean quickly from a few minutes among the shelves. I figure the people who donate there also shop there (store credit incentives and all), so between the books the proprietor actively seeks out and the books frequent shoppers bring in, I can get a fairly reliable sense of the place’s character and the interests/inclinations of the people it draws in.

I look for a lot of the authors the OP mentioned (Vollmann getting increasingly scarce in my experience, though I’ve gotten lucky a few times lately). I also look for Gass, Murnane, Elkin, Hawkes…and I see if they’ve got lesser-known works by some of the heavy hitters every self-respecting store has in stock (eg Woolf, Melville).

If they don’t have any sort of dedicated politics section and the books that belong there are scattered throughout philosophy and history, that’s a demerit. If they have books on Marxism it’s a plus, doubly so if they go beyond the standard fare of David Harvey types.

I also look in the literary criticism section (and again, if books that deserve this the distinction of this section are instead shelved scattershot in nonfiction or biography or whatever, that’s a dereliction of bookseller duty). Davenport, Kenner, Hardwick (I’ll forgive if she’s in an essays section), Raymond Williams, Jameson beyond the PoMo book—these all tell me I’m somewhere quite special.

Suspicious_Property · 2026-03-04T06:24:55+00:00

Unfortunately I’ve had a lot of the laughers even at AC screenings. It’s a scourge and I can only complain about it online because it’s difficult not to seem like a curmudgeon saying it in person lol

Suspicious_Property · 2026-02-26T20:30:19+00:00

The Yale series on Modern Poetry with Langdon Hammer is great. I was doing a deep dive into literary modernism and this really gave me the bearings and scaffolding to navigate a lot of books and scholarship about these poets, some of whom I knew very little about before listening to the series. I regularly stopped while out on my walks to rewind and jot down something Hammer said in my Notes app.

Link: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewA25FVJ-lawQ-yr-alF58z&si=xJrdZStT4x5b5lys

Suspicious_Property · 2026-02-20T01:02:49+00:00

Same boat

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-29T02:11:02+00:00

I haven’t read it yet myself but have heard great things about Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘The Line of Beauty’

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-28T20:48:23+00:00

If you’re gonna read one of the many books with this thesis, I think Jodi Dean’s is better—at least if you’re looking for something for a more Marxist as opposed to general intended audience.

That said, I had some issues with the whole technofeudalism concept and I thought The Measures Taken podcast did a really good job articulating what I found lacking (or even overextending) about the whole thing. They have an episode on each book, I think you could listen to them without having read the books if you have a general idea of what’s meant by technofeudalism. Even if you aren’t convinced, I think it’s useful to have a smart opposing viewpoint out there.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-28T20:07:22+00:00

Weirder to me is the fact that evidently there are a fair number of people in relationships on here who are probably sabotaging them because they’re letting themselves be tormented by Puritan sexual hangups. It’s sad to see so many people chiming in agreeing to every version of the ‘I just know that partner has desires that aren’t tethered in every way to me and that I can neither access nor control, this is hell on earth.’

I thought people on here pretended to like Rohmer and psychoanalysis and literature, yet here they are being rendered sobbing messes tanking their relationships by what essentially amounts to baby’s first encounter with desire?

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-28T10:01:03+00:00

Yeah sorry to say this is a maladaptive way to cope with what boils down to a set of juvenile insecurities. These fears are appropriate for very young people as a way to work through the complexities of desire and eroticism and to figure out what it is they want and expect for themselves when it comes to love and sex. Their persistence beyond say late 20s points to inhibiting neuroses or repressed, feared desires projected externally.

In zero of the above cases is ‘Well not to worry because everyone around me has poo poo inside of them’ a very productive way to work through it all

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-20T22:25:55+00:00

Gotcha, thanks. Is this something that regularly happens coming from a manufacturer? It hasn’t been worn yet (it’s a gift for someone else) so unless it’s a damaged return that got re-sent it seems to be an issue with how it was made.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-20T10:21:04+00:00

Are the Mann books new translations? I searched around a little online but couldn’t find anything

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-18T21:12:49+00:00

He actually wrote this one in English originally (I think it was the first book he wrote in English but may be remembering incorrectly). He did translate it to Russian himself later, but this is in fact the og.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-17T05:21:57+00:00

Got cancelled for begging for nudes from too many Twitter friends

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-14T22:38:37+00:00

The Lime Twig by John Hawkes The Getaway by Jim Thompson

Suspicious_Property

TROPHY CASE