Honor Levy

I may be late to the party on this.

These days, I mostly read old things, often very old. Robert A. Heinlein and A.E. van Vogt, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. But I have this nagging feeling that there are good new things. There always are.

That impulse led me, a couple of years ago to discover Rachel Cusk, who is good (sometimes rising to brilliant) but not really all that new. Her next book, Parade, is coming out in June. That will be new new. I am eager to read it.

But, to get to the point, someone on Substack today mentioned Honor Levy, a new name for me, in a way that sounded promising.

I looked her up.

She has two stories online. Both are good.

One story is called Cancel Me

I don’t think I have to apologize for the first few things I said, but I will type it out, tell you anyways because if you think I should apologize I will. I was drunk, but I could see the hosts’ eyes flash. Their eyes said, “Be careful” and this made me angry. I didn’t want to be careful. I was so tired of being careful. I said, “Trigger warnings trigger me.” I was trying to be clever. I was on the radio after all. I said that internet radio was great because it has no laws, no rules, no censorship. I asked the hosts if they wanted to ask me if I thought trigger warnings were a form of censorship. I wanted them to ask and I wanted to tell them that I don’t. I told the hosts and our one listener that although I don’t think trigger warnings are censorship I do think they encourage self-censorship. I told them that self-censorship is counter revolutionary and anti-academic. I told them that I came to college to be as revolutionary and as academic as I could possibly be. I told them that while I was here I realized that there is no way to be both academic and revolutionary. I told them that trigger warnings trigger me because they remind me of this. I don’t know why I sneered. I was being sincere.

The other story is called Internet Girl

Simone Weil says, attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. Simone Weil starved to death. It was either anorexia or tuberculosis or too much Schopenhauer or in solidarity with the victims of war. No one knows. Not even Google. It might not even matter. Starving is starving and sometimes I starved. Through the immense possibilities for encounter and solidarity, I learned to look at photos of who I wanted to become, to stare at the empty spaces I wanted to have, to run to 7/11 and chug Diet Coke, to imagine maggots crawling through the birthday cake.

The stories are short and good.

These clips are teaser trailers.

I strongly suggest that you go read them both.

It won’t take long. You will like them.

She has a book of her stories called My First Book.

It appears that it was published TODAY.

So maybe I am not hopelessly late to the party.

I promptly ordered a copy of My First Book, and it is now winging its way to me in the U.S. Mail.

This interview is entertaining. It says this about Miss Levy, who is 26:

I was sent an advance copy and found it often quite adept at capturing our generation — there are lots of meme references, emojispeak, and a 54-page encyclopedia of zoomer lingo — without falling into blasé nihilism.

I cannot assess whether she captures her generation, one which came along much later than mine. But based on her two stories, she is indeed mercifully free of blasé nihilism. We don’t need more of that.

Here is another interview. This is nice:

During our first 90-minute Zoom, she mentions: Kathy Acker, H.P. Lovecraft, Dostoevsky, Stephenie Meyer, Eve Babitz, Dave Chappelle, Joan Didion, Yarvin, Robert Anton Wilson, Roberto Bolaño, Bronze Age Pervert, Cookie Mueller, Norman Mailer, Terence McKenna. The Bloomsbury Group and the Algonquin Round Table. Rookie mag.

Some of my own favorites are on there, Lovecraft, Joan Didion, Bolaño (his 2666), Norman Mailer — a name you don’t see very often these days.

An interesting mix of influences.

Ms. Levy’s story “Cancel Me” seems to challenge the notion of cancellation, without preaching about it.

But in the interview she says, about that story:

But there are bad people who deserve to be canceled. That story doesn’t take that into account at all. Reading it, I’m like, oh my God, I need to cancel this narrator.

Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.

Whatever backpedalling she may do, either out of conviction or prudence, the story is what it is, and like any work of art, the author’s assessment is one view, not an exclusive one.

It will be interesting to see if the book version and the online version are much different.

And whatever she may end up saying and doing, the two Honor Levy stories linked above provide a compact, forceful, and moving picture of one young woman’s early life in these strange current times.

So, brava for those.

I hope she can keep it up.

It will require some courage.

May God bless her and give her strength to follow her Muse, and to tell the truth as she sees it through her fiction, at whatever cost.

Honor Levy has a Substack, called My Blog, a play on My First Book. It is, so far, lightly populated. Three posts contain what looks like random junk. Maybe it isn’t even really hers? A parody of some kind? Who knows? She (or whoever) also provides two pages of Good Reads, other people’s stuff, some of which looks intriguing, and may merit further investigation.

Her two stories were published on the Tyrant Books website. Out of touch as I am, I never heard of it before. Looks like there is some other good stuff on there.

There is no shortage of stuff on the Internet … .