Honor Levy at the end of the wor(l)d

Can we escape the clutches of twee adult baby memery?

Burroughs was right, the word is a virus. Reading Honor Levy’s stupid fucking book, the nauseatingly-titled My First Book, gave me something akin to Long COVID. I used to think most people who said they had Long COVID were often just attention-seekers, which is why they so often overlap with the non-specifically “queer” and with people who self-diagnose mental disorders off of TikTok—you can always identify these people because they’re always coming up with extraneous identifiers of their fake identities; “queerness” becomes more than just “not exclusively liking the ‘opposite’ sex” or “complicated relationship to gender” but instead means “drinking iced coffee” (an extremely popular drink that almost everyone drinks) or “sitting in chairs different,” while having ADHD means… literally anything at all I guess, and this is all because these people so obviously lack the fundamental diagnostic criteria and so have to invent secondary attributes to establish any inkling of “family resemblance” in the Wittgensteinian sense. You can get mad at me all you like but I’m coming at this from an Indigenous perspective: if people are willing to pretend to be Indians in spite of how fucking easy it is to prove otherwise just to make themselves seem interesting, do you not think they’d obviously be willing to do it for identities where there’s no actual way of proving otherwise? I, meanwhile, don’t have to worry about any of that, I get to be “interesing” inherently because my grandfather looks like this:

Anyways now I have Honor Levy Stupid Fucking Asshole Syndrome (HLSFAS).

Okay but how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? Or, rather, how was the book, Eris? Oh I don’t know. Meme-y garbage, obnoxiously online, obnoxiously twee, obnoxiusly trend-chasing, DDLG adult-baby soother energy, and one chapter is literally just one giant near-plagiarization of the already stupid fucking “Cool Girl” monologue from Gone Girl? I think my experience can come across pretty simply by taking a look at the annotations I made along the way on my e-reader.

I acquired my copy of the book through “non-conventional internet means” because I feel as though it best fits Levy’s whole aesthetic. Granted, I also read Cervantes and Goethe this way, but when I do it with them it’s um… idk postmodern or something.

On the subject of reading old shit, Levy reminded me a lot of Maria Dhavana Headley’s translation of Beowulf, a book I have complicated feelings about but ultimately does a much better (and more thought-provoking) job of providing a sort of palimpsest of the English language the way Levy tries to do, with her ostentatious and shitty use of meme-speak contrasting with more “traditional” literary forms. I might also think of Michael Robbins’ merging of samples from canonical poetry and hip hop, or maybe you could look to the entire history of “vulger” or “vernacular” writing, writing in an expressly modern idiom, often nearly or explicitly politically so like Mark Twain or Dante. Petronius contrasted vulger everyday speak with high-falutin prose in The Satyricon two millennia ago in a way that was probably not dissimilar to Levy at the time, and Manzoni’s The Betrothed has a really funny gag early on where his affected high-literary prose falls away to reveal something a lot more casual. So yes, there is a legitimate “tradition” here that Levy is in dialogue with. It’s just that she does it so badly.

You know how writing literature about Donald Trump feels really hack-y? Why doesn’t it feel the same when people did it about Nixon? Why is it that I love Coover’s The Public Burning and yet hearing about something like Kramer’s Death of the Great Man makes me gnash my teeth through visceral cringe response? Cultural production as it is under such hypermodern auspices feels almost immediately dated the second it is produced, and this merely accelerates. Brian Joseph Davis’ Portable Altamont is a book I took a while to realize is expressly commenting on this as an object in decay, mashing topical pop culture references into the poetic canon, demonstrating how these references begin to wear away so quickly as the references become stale (gestured at more deliberately in the book’s ending eulogy to the dead—now literally as opposed to merely figuratively—celebrity of Luke Perry). Levy does not stick this landing. Rather, I don’t think Levy is even trying to—I think she’s actually just pilled on it. She’s writing about the fucking tradcath thing, she’s on Red Scare, she’s on that Dimes Square beat—

K lemme just take a minute once again to talk about the fucking “Dimes Square” thing. I feel like every five fucking minutes someone is either saying that “Dimes Square is over” or maybe that “Dimes Square didn’t even exist,” or else they’re anxiously obsessing over what is or is not coming out of Dimes Square, or whether Dimes Square really is “the thing,” or if its too late to jump on the bandwagon, or whether it’s even POLITICALLY DANGEROUS!!!!! Just look at this fucking DM I received last year! I didn’t even know how to respond to it!

This endless neurosis about Dimes Square—denying it, envying it, loving it, fearing it—is driving me fucking mental, and don’t you fucking dare try to jump in and tell me that it’s “so late” to be talking about Dimes Square because you people are STILL DOING IT ALL THE FUCKING TIME!!! Fucking Dimes Square neurosis is so palpable it rocketed this piece of shit book to being named the year’s most anticipated book by like a dozen publications! She’s being called the “Voice of Gen Z” ffs! Now here I am, having tried to not talk about that boring “Dimes Square” thing for years, and the buzz around this book makes me feel like I literally can’t ignore it. Can’t you people take a fucking tip from Paul Anka?

I feel like a giantess Honor Levy is smooshing me under patented Gen Z overpiced pre-distressed Golden Goose sneakers, and I’m not even one of the freaks who’s into that fantasy. I simply have no choice now but to write about a writer who makes references to TikTok and JUUL™. See, even that fucking “haha so ironical” trademarking thing is so fucking dated, I was even posting cringey Facebook shit with that schtick a fucking decade ago. It’s as stale and embarrassing now as it was stale and embarrassing back when I was doing it. Take a look!

It is not an insightful comment on consumerism, it’s just lukewarm leftovers from tired Gen-X consumerism obsession—Adbusters, their own Blackspot Unswoosh, No Logo, Douglas Coupland, half of Radiohead’s output, the unbearably stupid “Subsidized Time” gag in Infinite Jest—and even all of that was just a transposition of the Boomers’ brains warped from anti-communist propagandizing into having a mental block keeping them from processing the only possible escape from their suffering and turning it into a deranged belief that, I don’t know, signs are fascist?

But at least the Gen-X interpolation brought it’s own idiosyncrasies to the table with it. Levy’s presumptuous title, My First Book, twee-ly gestures at—perhaps “ironically,” but who fucking cares—a long and illustrious literary career. What it really represents is the breaking of the first seal, the first rider, the very last book, the coming and the seeing and the reading thereof. What are we left with? Where is fiction “going”? A pantomine, a pastiche, children playing in the afterbirth of “alt lit” after it succumbed to SIDS. Where is literature “presently”? What future is there? What does Levy represent and can we escape from under it? I will address these questions and more soon in a follow-up post in due time, tentatively titled: the Death and Afterlife of the Novel.

EDIT: I eventually did a semi-follow-up on Levy and TradCaths, which you can read by clicking right here.