The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for enjoying the second heatwave of the year, but what are you going to do outside if not read? Exactly, so read these.

Aftermath interviewed video game trailer maker Derek Lieu for his take on the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer and why it’s not very good.

“[The game] looks amazing. It looks great,” Lieu told Aftermath. “A trailer is designed to do this thing well, which is to incite our emotions and show a bunch of stuff from this new thing that we haven’t seen before. This trailer, or a bunch of B-roll with music over it, can kind of achieve the same thing. But that doesn’t make it a good trailer. Just because people get hyped, doesn’t mean it’s a good trailer. If this was a better trailer, then people would be that much more hyped. They would feel, they would care.”

Pioneer Works published a transcript of a moderated discussion between Lauren Oyler and Brandon Taylor, two book critics known for writing scathing reviews. (Oyler wrote a famously critical review of Jia Tolentino’s otherwise universally praised Trick Mirror.)

It’s fine to make enemies, but make sure they’re the right ones. If the people you disagree with dislike your work, or you, as the case may be, that’s probably good. It’s not the only metric, but it can be an indication that you’re on track.

Linked within, I enjoyed this takedown from 1980 of the movie reviews of Pauline Kael (paywalled) by Renata Adler. I read Kael’s I Lost It At The Movies as a teenager and did not enjoy it, so this is on one level catharsis, but it’s also more relentless than almost any review I’ve ever read. Every criticism is illustrated with quote after quote of Kael’s writing, as if attempting to overwhelm the jury with the weight of evidence.

She has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words, which occur several hundred times, and often several times per page, in this book of nearly six hundred pages: “whore” (and its derivatives “whorey,” “whorish,” “whoriness”), applied in many contexts, but almost never to actual prostitution; “myth,” “emblem” (also “mythic,” “emblematic”), used with apparent intellectual intent, but without ascertainable meaning; “pop,” “comicstrip,” “trash” (“trashy”), “pulp” (“pulpy”), all used judgmentally (usually approvingly) but otherwise apparently interchangeable with “mythic”; “urban poetic,” meaning marginally more violent than “pulpy”; “soft” (pejorative); “tension,” meaning, apparently, any desirable state; “rhythm,” used often as a verb, but meaning harmony or speed; “visceral”; and “level.” These words may be used in any variant, or in alternation, or strung together in sequence—“visceral poetry of pulp,” e.g., or “mythic comic-strip level”—until they become a kind of incantation. She also likes words ending in “ized” (“vegetabilized,” “robotized,” “aestheticized,” “utilized,” “mythicized”), and a kind of slang (“twerpy,” “dopey,” “dumb,” “grungy,” “horny,” “stinky,” “drip,” “stupes,” “crud”) which amounts, in prose, to an affectation of straightforwardness.

The Bee is a new online magazine, based in the UK, which states its mission is “to nurture, publish and promote the best new working-class writing by new and established working-class writers and visual artists.”

Robin Sloan wrote one of my favourite novellas, Annabel Scheme, and has published several other novels since. He recently opened an online store for selling tiny zines: deliberately disposable, single-sheet, riso-printed works which can be cheaply mailed anywhere in the world. I bought his first, and his second sounds more interesting: The Secret Playbook contains imagery and writing that current AI models cannot interpret.

This is epochally weird stuff, & anything could happen in the decade ahead. The value & values of art are never static; reconsideration sweeps in like rain. The Secret Playbook isn’t about defense (though there is some defense in here) but rather about where to go next. It’s a map towards higher ground.

Everyone is yearning for the old, good internet, as I write about damn near every week. In a recent blog post, Cal Newport wrote about Talk Nats, a baseball site with a small community, which sounds like my kind of place.

Boutique sites like Talk Nats, by contrast, offer something closer to the original vision for the internet, which was more focused on connection and discovery; a place where a baseball fan from Canada could spend an afternoon delighting with a few dozen of his likeminded brethren about a lazy afternoon baseball game in Florida.

Chris Plante, former editor-in-chief of Polygon, is spinning up a new podcast called Post Games. No episode yet, but you can signup to the newsletter to follow along for now.

Music this week is the playful soft pop of Pearl & The Oysters, who I heard for the first time on Tuesday and bought tickets to see live on Friday. Start with Side Quest. Find this and other Sunday Papers music picks in a YouTube playlist.