Seeing some Honor Levy hate on the Notes TL. It is a curiosity of our cultural history that I wrote what I believe is the first critical response to Levy’s work almost exactly three years ago (see link below). I predicted that she heralded an eventual shift in mainstream literary culture from “woke” to “based,” now underway, somewhat belatedly. I’m neither a committed lover nor a committed hater of her fiction yet—I thought it had potential as prose-poetry if not as fiction proper; someone should send me a review copy of her self-styled first book!—but, as my own new book shows, I don’t think we can really make literature directly out of online discourse. We have to reassert fiction’s old right to narrate and describe social life, in this case internet social life, to produce an ekphrasis of the art of “online,” rather than trying to reproduce “online” itself in a reverse-skeuomorphism on the printed page.