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hey OP I just wanted to say I appreciate how hard you're working to reintegrate into modern society after waking from a coma after a 2009 car crash, keep at it bud
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Mar 22, 2024 03:14
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 11:02 |
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Trying to be remotely productive, I'm thinking of books that do this whole Critique of the Emptiness of Capitalism well and I keep coming back to Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendys (available for free via IA!), a poetry collection about a man so alienated by capitalism that he sees "we care!" on a feedback form and takes it 100% earnestly and proceeds – over the course of a year – to write 365 poems that each fit on a Wendys customer feedback form, of increasing derangement when his dear friend Wendy doesn't answer him. Look, he's alienated by the big food place!   He thinks he's better and smarter than the other customers!  It's very Gen X fiction, parts of it haven't aged well, but it hits the snarky cynical wry iconoclasm that OP seems to be aiming at, and I think core to it is that its protagonist only THINKS he's the smartest person in the room and the collection knows it. Like he talks up how much better and smarter he is while spending every day for a year sitting in a Wendys leering at the employees and writing erotic poetry about shoving sandwiches up his rear end. He's a pretty horrible dude, but it becomes increasingly clear that he's a product of the world around him, he's traumatized and alienated, and the critique of the modern world emerges from that. If he were actually as smart and cool as he thinks, there'd be nothing here. There's pathos because he's pathetic. He's a weird little guy who makes an allusion to Greek mythology then goes to jerk off while making GBS threads in the toilets of a fast food restaurant. You get a really strong sense of character from him, his ego and his insecurity and his pain, and he's often repulsive to read but it's also kind of fascinating and despite everything you feel bad for the dude. It's not a book for everybody but I think it succeeds at everything OP fails, and could be instructive.
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Mar 22, 2024 23:37
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Also like ... Anti's right that our relationship to food is a huge part of our lives and tremendously revealing of both character and world. How does a good writer handle that? Here's a sample chapter from a satire of modern capitalist society that involves a sardonic, nihilistic protagonist going to the supermarket. Alice (our protagonist) sucks. One of the first things we see her do in the entire book is (despite intense food precarity) spill a bunch of sauerkraut on a random dude on the bus because he gives her bad vibes and she doesn't like sauerkraut. In this chapter, she's started dating a wealthy man and he's given her money to go food shopping for his daughter. Look how much worldbuilding and character-building the sample chapter does just by having her walk around in the supermarket. What is it saying about this society? What is it saying about her? quote:As I moved my trolley around the other shoppers, avoiding eye contact, another feeling in me gathered mass like a storm at sea. I remembered why I never went to the fancy supermarket, even back when Nick and I were together and food wasn’t weirdly priced. What had made me come now? Was it simply that I had $1000 burning a hole in my pocket? Was my conscience actually weaker than I thought? Sociopathic-shopper weak? Was $1000 the threshold at which I could suppress my loathing of this place? SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Mar 23, 2024 |
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Mar 22, 2024 23:50
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