To Be Dry and Cutting Your Writing Has to be Good First

This Washington Post piece by Rachel Tashjian has been buzzy, principally because it makes fun of a group of people who are already unpopular. This is a time honored way to get eyeballs on something that you write, and I don’t begrudge that particular part of the hustle.

I’m afraid though that the actual essay, as a piece of writing, is bad. It’s bad in very specific ways related to the tone it intends to inspire and its fumbling efforts to get there. It’s not the worst thing I’ll read this year, or particularly egregious at all; it’s just a good teaching tool for a moment when too many writers are attempting particular moves in their work without having the juice to pull them off. Like a lot of what gets published these days, the piece amounts to Potemkin provocation, cargo cult bravado, a relentless effort to appear dry and superior that fails to cohere into anything meaningful. The problem is that in the composing process the pursuit of the desired tone outran the organic observational material, the bones of the essay. This is always a good way to get into trouble. You can write to an argument, you can write to a metaphor, you can write to an emotional target, you can even write for the purpose of achieving a particular formalist effect. But you cannot write to tone. You must craft the thing itself and then you must be good enough to imbue that thing with the tone you choose. Tashjian’s piece is an example of a writer pursuing a tone, imagining all of her peers laughing at how brutal and witty that tone is, and then absently looking for the actual piece as an afterthought, as though clutching around blindly in the dark for a cellphone.

The difficulty here is that in criticizing this piece of reportage - Style section reportage, always the best and worst! - I’m going to be accused of writing to protect the targets of it. I’m sure some will assume that I write this out of an urge to defend the people or practices poked at (sometimes to effect, sometimes not) in Tashjian’s piece. That is not the case. I did not know who Elena Velez was before I read the story in question. I really know very little about the “Dimes Square” scene; a couple years ago I was invited to attend a play by that name, Dimes Square, and thought it was pretty good, but the broader culture was and remains inscrutable to me. I’m not friends with anyone associated with that world, as far as I know, and have no social allegiances there or anything to gain in defending it. It is the case that I have an ideological interest in an aspect of the piece; Tashjian stabs around at vague questions of problematic art, given that the hook is some nerd Gone with the Wind costume party Velez threw, and you may assume that my problem is with Tashjian’s attitude towards those questions. But I’m gonna set that aside here. It’s sufficient to say that it is and has always been easy to hold opinions like “Gone with the Wind obviously exhibits racism and evinces awful politics, which I reject, but the story has a good deal of verve and character, though it’s often poorly paced.” I don’t know why people pretend that sort of thing is hard, these days.

The other problem is that people are going to say that I’m being mean and personal here, but I’m being neither. This piece was professionally published in a high-profile newspaper by a veteran writer and editor who does not need to be shielded from the criticism of the likes of me. My actual motivation here lies in the fact that I care very much about the craft of writing, of a particular kind and for a particular purpose, and I think a lot of contemporary writers are going wrong in their pursuit of a kind of writing that is, admittedly, very entertaining to read when done right. But to do it right takes the correct subject and circumstance, and you have to have the juice. Tashjian very well may have the skills in other pieces about other subjects. Here she’s slip-sliding around like an 80-year-old on an icy New York sidewalk.

For the record, the term, the place, the subculture that is “Dimes Square” - most people have no idea what that refers to, even most people who live in the Lower East Side. Which is fine, really, because that’s what a counterculture is supposed to be, a world unknown to the other world. The pressing issue for Tashjian is why she would write about a social culture she repetitively suggests is not worth writing about. She states flat out that this microculture has begun to die and isn’t important, but as happens habitually in her essay, the insult reflects back at her - darling, you’re the one writing thousands of words about it for one of the country’s biggest newspapers. She calls Dimes Square over-explained, as a means to explain Dimes Square. There’s a real sense of internal struggle in the piece, driven by the social and professional pressure on Tashjian to show disdain towards the widely-disliked tryhard social club she’s covering and her tacit but obvious feeling that there’s something happening going on down there. This is kind of like the feigned inability to understand that Gone with the Wind is simultaneously racist and entertaining: I promise it’s OK to reject the implicit or explicit politics of a “scene” while acknowledging the energy that has attracted attention. Your attention! You are writing this piece!

Anyway - I’m not gonna complain about the whole thing. Let me show you just one brief paragraph that exemplifies what I find so unfortunate about this too-common grasping for restrained derision in contemporary essay writing. First, though, the windup.

Equally as odd was the unoriginality of the argument that O’Hara is a feminist icon — a position so committed to trolling that its instigators failed to realize they were simply arguing for Mitchell’s original intention. The book and film paint O’Hara as a pillar of strength, and in many parts of the South, she’s still thought of as such. (She’s a popular inspiration for attendees of southern sorority balls.) This is one of the best-selling books of the 20th century — not exactly a suppressed work. It has not been a part of the current wave of book banning, which has mostly focused on LGBTQ+ literature and books by non-White authors. HBO temporarily removed the film from its streaming site in 2020, but then restored it with trigger warnings, and last year, the book’s publishers rereleased it with similar warnings about its racist content — in other words, it remains accessible.

OK. I have thoughts. But OK. That leads, somehow, directly into this.

And it’s long been trendy in pop-intellectualism to reframe the villain as the hero — a framework in everything from the musical (and forthcoming film) “Wicked” to “Breaking Bad.” Giving intellectual heft to flaky subjects has been a familiar if smooth trick for roughly two decades, since media outlets like Gawker and n+1 were founded.

I’m gonna keep it real with you, dog - I got no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Let’s take a look.

And it’s long been trendy in pop-intellectualism to reframe the villain as the hero

… has it? I guess I can’t sufficiently parse the meaning of “pop-intellectualism” to say. Yes, people write pieces where they consider whether the ostensible villain of some piece of narrative art is really the hero, and they have for a long time. Whether “long-term trend” is a contradiction in terms is worth considering, but certainly Tashjian isn’t to blame for its use, which is common. My soul does cry out for a little more sense-making about what pop-intellectualism is, what specifically is reframed and how, and who in particular these heroes or villains might be. I might be inclined to ask, for example, whether arch trend pieces in the Washington Post Style section constitute pop-intellectualism or if those enjoy some sort of ADA exemption. Either way, I’m afraid my hunger for meaning does not go on to be satiated.

a framework in everything from the musical (and forthcoming film) “Wicked” to “Breaking Bad.”

That is not precisely what I was looking for; I’m actually struggling to think of who it might satisfy, other than (apparently) the editors at WaPo. There’s something to be said for deploying an exaggerated contrast between two dissimilar examples, for the Vine. But there has to be a degree of windup to indicate to the reader that you have in fact chosen that juxtaposition rather than landed on it at 2AM when your standards are low enough to say “that’ll do.” As it stands, Wicked and Breaking Bad are too dissimilar to generate sense but not a sufficiently strange pairing to work to comedic effect. More troublingly, as examples of what Tashjian is trying to get at, they’re mystifying. And not in a cool punk rock way.

Wicked, I mean, OK, yes, it’s about seeing things from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West, formerly the villain. I find this a somewhat inappropriate comparison when making a point about apologia for chattel slavery, but OK. Breaking Bad? What? Who? Walter White is a villain that’s being reframed as a hero? Reframed from what? Walter White in Breaking Bad was an original character; there’s nothing to reframe. I guess you could say that the reframing of Wicked is taking a villain and making them a hero, while the “reframing” in Breaking Bad is of an original character changing their ways within the plot of their story. This is both confused and confusing, and would entail implying two separate meanings for what are meant to be paradigmatic examples, but legally speaking you can do it. Then again, Walter’s progress over the course of the show is the exact opposite of going from bad to good, so I’m at a loss. But that’s small potatoes compared to the deeper question, which is what on earth either that play or that show have to do with “pop intellectualism.” My brain, what’s left of it, wants very much for Breaking Bad and Wicked to be the referenced pop intellectualism, on account of my genetic endowment has imprinted an underlying architecture for syntactic processing deep into my being. But no, I’m afraid I can’t stretch that far, no matter how I strain; AMC prestige crime drama Breaking Bad and the hit Broadway musical Wicked starring Idina Menzel are not, in any universe, pop intellectualism. Brother, I am stumped!

“A framework IN THE ANALYSIS OF everything from the musical (and forthcoming film) ‘Wicked’ to ‘Breaking Bad’” bears a certain greater degree of greater intelligibility here but, I'm afraid, also collapses on inspection.

I’m not (just) being a dick, here. Put yourself in my shoes. This brief passage purports to reveal a connection between vape-addled NYU grads doing antebellum cosplay and some such thing as pop intellectualism, which entails reframing villains as heroes and furthermore can be better understood through reference to a show where Bryan Cranston makes meth in his underpants and to a Tony award-winning family musical inspired by the source material being conveniently in the public domain. I confess that I remain bereft. Perhaps six years of grad school were too few for me, I don’t know.

Giving intellectual heft to flaky subjects has been a familiar if smooth trick for roughly two decades

I guess. I would say though that giving intellectual heft to flaky subjects has been going on for a lot longer than two decades. But let’s concede this one in the spirit of aloha. The rest, I just… familiar if smooth, you say. Familiar if smooth. I turned these three words around in my head so many times, without achieving comprehension, that I began to fear I had become trapped in samsara. Familiar if smooth. Familiar if smooth? Familiar, if smooth? Familiar… if… smooth. My friends, I ask you to summon the spirit of Cedric the Owl and lend me assistance - I do not have the slightest goddamn idea what those words are doing together in that sequence, in that sentence, in that paragraph, in this piece. It feels like trying to decipher the Voynich Manuscript. Traditionally, a conjunction contains denotative information about the relationship between the two words it conjoins. “If,” in this context typically synonymous with “albeit,” asserts some sort of a contrast between the former and the latter. What is the contrast here? The trick is familiar, but smooth? Giving intellectual heft to flaky subjects is familiar, but smooth? Familiar, OK, there are way too many dissertations written about Harry Potter, granted, though the connection to the preceding sentence remains deeply mysterious. But how is familiar contrasted with smooth? Smooth, how? What does this have to do with some annoying edgelord fashion designer’s plantation party? What is this? Where am I? Who am I? I feel like I’m in that Radiohead video where Tom Yorke whispers in your ear and you just lay down to die.

I’m trying. I swear to God, I’m trying. The trick of giving intellectual heft to flaky subjects, in pop-intellectualism, is familiar - people have done it a lot - if - in contrast with that last part - smooth - despite being familiar it’s smooth, as in… cool? Suave? Placid? I guess the idea is that it remains a smooth thing to do, to give intellectual heft to flaky subjects, despite the fact that it’s familiar, as in overdone, common. It seems to this me that “smooth if familiar” would make a lot more sense, and yet still would not make much sense. Nor do I know how Scarlett O’Hara factors into this, beyond the sense that someone is reframing her from the role of villain into the role of hero, never mind that she’s already the protagonist of Gone with the Wind, though perhaps not the hero. I’m tired.

since media outlets like Gawker and n+1 were founded.

Now, call me a stickler, but when you say “giving intellectual heft to flaky subjects” and then connect it to “media outlets like Gawker and n+1,” I’m going to go ahead and assume that you think it’s common knowledge that Gawker and n+1 gave intellectual heft to flaky subjects. Like every other pretentious soul of my generation, I checked Gawker obsessively for years and I’ve read hundreds of essays in n+1. (You’re welcome, Keith!) This appellation applies to neither of them, or at least, not to any degree more than any other publications that run essays for creative types who are underemployed in creative fields and overemployed in the food service and call center industries. My best guess is that these two publications are mentioned so that the reader might go, “yep, those are a couple sites.” But this is reference totally indifferent to referents, signifiers that are apathetic towards the signified. I will pay you $5 if you can tell me why Gawker and n+1 are mentioned here, why that’s the reference and not (spins wheel) The New Yorker or (rolls dice) The Baffler.

I will concede that Gawker and n+1 were created to service the same basic need - giving post-collegiate smart kids tools with which to manage their desperate, sweaty insecurity and palpable need for attention. But they went/go about it in very different ways, Gawker by making fun of everything in such a way that kids who grew up lonely could feel like the joke was on someone else for once, n+1 by making them feel like they were part of a select few smart enough to get the joke. Either way, though, I just cannot decode this reference. Not in this context. I can’t do it. “Giving intellectual heft to flaky subjects” is not something that I can ascribe to either Gawker or n+1 in any exclusive or tangible sense, nor can I connect this diversion into reframing the villain as the hero, or explain what exactly any of this shit has to do with a party for trust fund dickheads themed around Gone with the Wind. Such sorcery is beyond your fallible host.

Surely this is all explained in the following paragraph! It is not. The writer pivots immediately to talking about the clothes. (Did I mention that the event in question was also a fashion show of some kind? No? Forgive me; my efforts today have resulted in a confusion-derived traumatic brain injury.) The good news is that it’s here that sense returns, along with genuine authorial confidence and compositional ease, instead of a simulation of them. It’s just unfortunate that this sense does not apply retroactively.

The night amounted to a boring distraction from the clothes, which were actually really good. They tell the story Velez wants to tell, but better: the femme flourishes of Khachiyan’s gown were disturbed by its muddy color; a secretly not-simple button-up frock looked like an expert sewer used the saddest, plainest, last resort material for a desperately needed dress.

“Each look is both an insistence on glamour in the face of apocalypse, and a repossession of a time in women’s history when the sharpest weapon in her artillery was a red dress,” Velez said. Interesting! If the fashion powers that be ignore or don’t care about her misplaced edgelord act, you could imagine one of her pieces would make a great look for the Met Gala.

I would probably substitute “seamstress” for “sewer” here, but otherwise, this is all on the money; it stands in sharp contrast with the immediately preceding portions of the essay. I will be presumptuous enough to suggest that this is because Tashjian is actually interested in the fashion, the clothes. That’s where the spark in the piece lies. And as someone who has just rather rudely taken a close look at a short example of what I don’t like in the piece, I feel bad that she has been pressed, or pressed herself, into writing a catty gossip piece that simultaneously dismisses and mythologizes an obscure social cohort. When a piece like this gets printed in a venue like that, it’s a failure of editing first. And, look, who cares. There will be more pieces. Or maybe there won’t be; it certainly occurs to me that it’s a little pointless to do this kind of analysis while our shared industry crumbles under our feet. But I am a true believer in the value of arranging words on a page and, even more, arranging the right words into the right places. Too often these days the desire to provoke a particular affective response in the reader is pursued independent of understanding the fine stitching that’s required to achieve it, stitching just exactly like the kind that Tashjian admires in the clothes she likes, worn by people she doesn’t. So, you know. Let’s all do better at that. We’ll get ‘em next time.

“Fashion is a powerful medium because it isn’t didactic,” writes Tashjian. That’s wise. I would suggest that this wisdom applies to our own medium as well, if only we have the courage to write carefully. I’m the opposite of a conservative about this craft; I hate lists of rules, I despise the cult of American minimalism, I think writers who fetishize concision are the ones who can’t sustain good writing for as long as they need to, I think elegance always comes before sense. But this is all to say that you must write the words, first. And the good news is that I think a lot of people out there have the chops, if only they slow down and think.

Also please don’t use the word “unoriginality.”