no one is talking about this patricia lockwood

Lockwood is a member, a co-creator really, of a group that some people (although none of the people in it) call “ weird Twitter”-a loose collective that swaps surreal and satirical aphorisms, wordplay, and jokes, often late at night. But the accelerator of her fame is Twitter. Every poem Lockwood had published before “Rape Joke”-as she mentions in her 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy-was fished out of a slush pile by some enterprising young editor. That led to book contracts, a profile in the New York Times Magazine, and a review in the New Yorker, which is pretty impressive for any poet, and especially one who did not enjoy formal academic training or the connections that come with it. Lockwood herself went viral in 2013, with a considerably more substantial poem, “Rape Joke,” published on the late lamented website the Awl. The main character-which is what I’ll call this young Midwesterner for the sake of simplicity-went viral with a one-line post: “Can a dog be twins?” This has earned her a “certain airy prominence,” leading to constant invitations to “speak from what felt like a cloud bank, about the new communication, the new slipstream of information.” She is fully aware of how absurd her career as a public intellectual is, but she also loves it. She calls the internet “the portal,” and it’s the source of her own fame and the force that carries her from Dublin to Sydney to Berlin and many points between.

As the nameless main character of Patricia Lockwood’s first novel, No One Is Talking About This, walks into Stephen’s Green in Dublin, she thinks, “the communal stream of consciousness began to flow toward the rigid bust of Joyce.” Joyce may have mastered the early 20 th-century version of stream of consciousness, but, as she asks an audience during one of the many public appearances she makes in the novel, “what about the stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?”

The splintered, multivocal, interactive flow of social media feels inimical to the single, sustained voice of the novelist, intoning for page after page, unretweetable and impervious to our DMs. Slate has relationships with various online retailers.īut note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change.Īll prices were up to date at the time of publication.ĭepicting how the internet has changed our lives isn’t unusual in fiction and memoir anymore, but replicating on the page how the internet has changed the way we think is another matter.

No one is talking about this patricia lockwood