down low

I called myself, jokingly, a “literary it girl” on the internet and someone I used to know through work apparently got really mad about it. I don’t know which part was upsetting. If anything it seemed like an opportunity to cultivate a sense of private superiority over me for calling myself an “it girl,” an embarrassing thing to call yourself, especially when it has “literary” tacked onto the front of it.

I was thinking about literary it girls not in terms of being a young woman who both writes and is feminine and likes to party which is a boring and irrelevant issue that I have already written about on this newsletter. Marlowe Granados, a bona fide literary it girl if there ever was one, remarked on her Substack simply that “People love to seethe over very feminine women.” Personally, I am happy for anyone that is both good at writing and also good at enjoying their life. I don’t think there are many such people. A lot are trying at one or the other.

Where the weird gendered aspect emerges is insofar as an “it girl” requires an audience. That audience is not necessarily a readership and in fact is sometimes at odds with it. The it girl herself is a product. She exists to be consumed. Natasha Stagg writes that in the ‘90s the it girl was generally accomplished but “someone who was more recognized for her personality than for her career […] “Today, the term has come to stand in for a word not yet invented, one that loosely means ‘famous first’.” Chasing fame would seem to belie the ethos of the it girl, effortless, cool, sought after, not overly available. But Stagg points out that the tension has always been there to some extent, rereading “Chloe’s Scene” Jay McInerney’s 1994 New Yorker profile of Chloë Sevigny:

She chooses modeling for indie magazines over Vogue Italia, since, as Mclnerney describes it, “‘Down low’ is a cherished concept: secret, alternative, not commercial—everything one wants to be. Except one also sort of wants to be famous, and here is the contradiction at the heart of Chloe’s world, the dilemma of subcultures that ostensibly define themselves in opposition to the prevailing commercial order.”

Modeling, obviously, is the purest form of “it girl” status. It literalizes the association between girl and commodity. Models have nothing to sell but themselves. Actresses and singers and other kinds of performers have a craft but one that is generally indistinguishable from their embodiment. Writers, on the other hand, are expected to be disembodied. Their work is cerebral. So to be a literary it girl requires a kind of balancing act between the demands of intellectual work, which is solitary if not isolating and ethereal, and the demands of a social scene. At a sort of literary it girl party I went to, I met a man who works in finance and had no literary aspirations of any kind. He asked me what books were good and then cheerfully admitted that he didn’t read very much. I’m not like you, he said. I don’t have to read.

Many such cases. I wonder though what you absorb from just hanging out with a lot of people with literary aspirations—nominally of the counterculture kind, though like Chloe, I think everyone wants to be a little bit famous. There’s something counterintuitive about attaching to identity markers or cliquishness to try and produce creative work. A scene is just a group of people but it’s also a group of people who are hyperconscious about self-branding, about self-mythologizing, about self-production. You need a scene to be an it girl. But you perhaps cannot fully belong to a scene and really truly be an artist.

This may sound like a rationalization or to put it more bluntly, a cope. But I’ve been thinking about how much cultural critique I’ve read recently reads like a scene report. It’s hinged to the news cycle, voided of politics, inflected with pointless insider gossip. New York Magazine, which excels at turning serious news and social commentary into scene reports, ran two such articles today alone, both related to Israel’s war on Gaza. In the first, the writer stages a fracture between relatively obscure intellectual writers on “the left,” describing their thoughts (and tweets) bombastically as “schools of thought.” In the second, the lead in to a round up of New York articles ranging from coverage of the 92Y and Artforum debacles to a lot of pseudo-anonymous Jewish and Muslim New Yorkers describing their feelings about posting on Instagram or feeling out of sync with their friends, the editors write that “the war in Gaza has shifted something in the psyche of New York […] Friend-group chats that were once warm and boisterous are turning bitter and quiet.”

If the difference between news reporting and scene reporting is in significance and objectivity, the difference maybe between a culture essay that opens into a personal essay and a culture essay that opens into a scene report is the extent to which the author is interested in excavating their own subjectivity. I like the former better, if only because it is the way I know how to write and to read. But the personal is also both hyper specific and universal. The psyche can expand outwards like a balloon, containing capacity for recognition, for witnessing, for understanding. A scene is also hyper specific but it tends to collapse when you try to scale it. A scene report is written not so much for those who belong to the scene but for those who wish they did, for the fans. This kind of writing betrays the aims of cultural critique which are explicitly to dissect, to reveal, to be rigorous.

And if in a literal sense party reports are written for those who didn’t attend a party but wish they had (I know lots of people read party reports for parties they did attend but would prefer not to think about that), writing cultural criticism for those are not in the room suggests a weird kind of categorization. Readers, after all, are readers. Writing criticism aimed at a non-reader is facile if increasingly common. Writing criticism aimed at your friends is also facile and evidence of a sterile culture. A well-known writer tweeted long ago that they thought you should be able to write reviews of your friends’ books. Not in the way in which many people do now, where they try to obfuscate their personal or transactional relationships, but in an open sense where reviews function more like love letters. It seems obvious why this is a bad idea but I have often wondered in the time since I saw the tweet who the intended readership for such a review would be. Surely readers, broadly. But readers who are positioned like fans, as the reviewer is. But where the reviewer is a fan and a friend, readers are offered a kind of parasocial connection to a work, one predicated on someone else’s friendship. The book is subsumed to the writer. Everyone becomes suddenly it girl adjacent.

In other words a lot of writing that is not on the face of it prurient or gossipy has the same structural aims as a scene report. It substitutes ideas or analysis for markers of self-identification with certain kinds of groupishness or success or clout. The more referential the writing to the literary or artistic worlds or to New York or to any actual scene, the worse the problem becomes.

It’s like that joke about acknowledging your privilege which devolves from being say a cis straight white middle-class woman as I am to invoking pretty privilege, being cool, being talented, being successful, being skinny, being popular, all the way down until it becomes a brag. You can see how this goes. A true it girl would never humblebrag. She has too much going on for one thing.