What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life

I've talked about Cat Marnell before. I don't particularly love her whole 'thing'.

Recently, I read Marie Calloway's What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life. Calloway is another internet 'star' of the new supposed alt lit scene.

Marie Calloway

It is all very New York in that sort of way where no one else but a teeny tiny group of New Yorkers care. That group is made up of other members of these 'stars'. Tao Lin, Frank Hinton, anyone involved in Vice. Their writing revolves around twitter, Facebook, and tumblr. It's purposefully seedy and exclusive.

And it is incredibly dull.

From 2001-2007 I kept a LiveJournal. I've had this blog in one form or another since 2007. I have obviously blogged fairly regularly for over 10 years. I get blogging. I really really do.

That old LiveJournal was full of woe-is-me melodrama and pseudo-philosophical nonsense. I certainly had silly relationships and fights with people online and I certainly blogged the hell out of it. I named the names and was as honest as I could be. And it was mostly boring to re-read when I opened it up this morning to check in.

But I got tired of it. Of the whole idea of pouring myself out like that in a public way. Tired of explaining it. It hollowed me out. Honestly, it lessened the experiences I had if I ran home to 'talk' about them online.

It is one of the reasons I now use initials for people when I talk about them. It's one of the reasons I no longer linger on the hyper-personal unless it relates to what I want to say.

This whole clique seem to only have things to say that are about themselves. It is self as commodity. And that is fine. But damn do I lose interest if the self being sold is vapid and only about the other people in that teeny bubble of a world.

Marie Calloway rose to 'stardom' in NY lit circles after MuuMuu House published Adrien Brody. A overly long journal-y 'story' about Calloway sleeping with an older writer. Most of the attention rose from her using 'Adrien Brody' as a stand in for the man's real name. And that interest was in the fact that the man was a sort of well-known NY writer.

That story is interesting. Calloway is a good writer. She just needs to come up with more to say. Which seems to be good advice for all of these writers. Find more to say than what happened in your apartment last night.

Tao Lin seems to have sort of attempted this with his new 'novel' Taipei. While it is still a thinly veiled memoir and the book is about drug and alcohol fueled late night shenanigans. There seems to be more there there. Will it stick? Is the whole new 'alt lit' thing just a bunch of kinda well-off people who think they are really amazing and want you to look at them to validate that? Probably.

That doesn't mean something good might still arise out of it. Let's all hold our breaths.

The $500,000 Deal

Photo by Tommy Mas for Vice

I don't know anything about Cat Marnell as a person. But I know a surprising amount about her.

I know that she used to work for xoJane in New York, was maybe fired for her rampant drug use, and then wrote about said drug use for Vice. She just signed a $500,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster for her memoir, How to Murder Your Life.

Along the way she has written about how she only uses Plan B as a contraceptive, how she sleeps with A LOT of people, and how she uses a TON of drugs. A lot has been said about her. The Atlantic alone has posted this, this, this, and today's announcement of the book deal.

I have no interest in slut shaming Marnell. She can sleep with whomever she wants. I don't really care about the drugs either. There have been great books and articles written by and about drug users.

My problem is that she just isn't a very good writer.

That Vice column, Amphetamine Logic, is a hot mess of barely coherent ramblings with little point. Her ridiculous final two posts were a shameless attempt to tack on meaning at the end of the column right as her book deal was closing. The first opens with her having lunch with her agent...

I honestly thought the drug-addict socialite was passe. Do people really enjoy reading about someone who clearly has money wasting themselves and then flaunting it?

Maybe she's a good example of the neo-yuppie that has taken over New York City. That hipsters have just turned into yupsters should surprise no one. They were halfway there. I guess my shock is that this tired old trope is somehow being dusted off at all.

Just because you put something in a slightly more gritty light doesn't make it less obnoxious. It's like she's living out some weird Chuck Palahniuk/David Foster Wallace hybrid.

The drug use? OK.
The sleeping around and not using protection in 2013? OK.
The glorification of all of it? OK.

Because she's being meta about it. She's winking as she does it. Or something else incredibly tiring. Didn't we get bored with this public self-destruction and class showmanship in the 90s? Is this what people complain about when generations recycle themselves because seriously. I was thinking it was going to just be clothes and TV and music.

Maybe I'm getting too old for this shit. Maybe it will play well on the twitters to her 20,000 followers. Or something.

I looked up her age. Marnell is 30. This is my generation. I'm supposed to understand this behavior, be able to somehow identify with it. I can't help but feel like she's trying too hard to still be a teenager. That somehow it's all an act.

But maybe she's an incredibly fucked up young woman who needs help not $$$. Maybe none of it matters and I take it too seriously.