Meta-jealousy

I’m jealous of an article about something that I am jealous about.

When I read No one Belongs Here More than You by Miranda July, I thought, “Hey, I was going to do that.” I wanted to write like that. I wanted to make those precious observations. I’ve got that in me and I wanted to get it out and put it down on paper, but I never got around to it. And she put it down on paper and she put it on film and did so much else with it. And I haven’t really tapped into whatever it is I think I have in me. Well, good for her. I decided to enjoy her work rather than resent her. At least someone’s doing something with what they’ve got in them.

And now here’s this New York Times Magazine article with all sorts of well-crafted observations on the various responses to Miranda July.

Here are some excerpts:

To her detractors (“haters” doesn’t seem like too strong a word) July has come to personify everything infuriating about the Etsy-shopping, Wes Anderson-quoting, McSweeney’s-reading, coastal-living category of upscale urban bohemia that flourished in the aughts.

The urban bohemian irks precisely because his or her quirky individuality is just part of a different kind of uniformity, where the uniform happens to be a bushy beard or Zooey Deschanel bangs rather than country-club khakis. Twee fascinations with childhood innocence can mask an unwillingness to tackle life’s darker quandaries. Who wouldn’t be annoyed by a guy who, say, finds a cracked milk bottle, makes a film about it, then silk screens it on a T-shirt and names his band Milk Bottle? The stakes are low. The results are soon forgotten.

It’s odd that she has come to represent, for some, a kind of soulless hipster cool, because in July’s work, nobody is cool. There’s no irony to it, no insider wink. Her characters are ordinary people whose lives don’t normally invite investigation. So her project is the opposite of hipster exclusion: her work is desperate to bring people together, forcing them into a kind of fellow feeling. She’s unrelentingly sincere, and maybe that sincerity makes her difficult to bear. It also might make her culturally essential.

She admires directors like Baumbach and Wes Anderson, but she said: “All those men are also personal. I don’t mind that, but I do mind that it’s not really questioned, whereas I or another woman is looked at as so self-obsessed. Men are just not being judged in the same way. They’re never going to be annoying in the same way.”