Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Making it difficult to settle the ego, in order to see through it once again.
Woops, failed that one"tell all the boys" but also "keep it low"
He's blogging his ascension.Clinny, you start a Substack?
Yeah a sporadic documentation of the Modular Generalist Program, and any projects stemming therefrom.Clinny, you start a Substack?
Taste, precisely because it’s an intensely subjective matter we feel compelled to make others agree with, is awash in bad feeling. The buzzkill always has the advantage over the ardent fan, an advantage the literary theorist Gérard Genette called the “authority of the negative.” The question “How can you like this?” is, he noted, always more disturbing than “How can you dislike this?” The quickest way out of this bad feeling is to imitate your naysayer: surrender your taste, learn to despise, or to believe that you despise, what you had previously enjoyed. (More bad feeling, of a new variety, ensues.)
[...]
If aesthetic judgment is particularly vulnerable to “games of influence” (Genette), the game here seemed to be operating according to rules nobody wanted to state openly. The sense you got was that it was embarrassing to be caught liking Bolaño, even if it was hard to say why.
Omg what a tedious article
The buzzkill always has the advantage over the ardent fan, an advantage the literary theorist Gérard Genette called the “authority of the negative.” The question “How can you like this?” is, he noted, always more disturbing than “How can you dislike this?” The quickest way out of this bad feeling is to imitate your naysayer: surrender your taste, learn to despise, or to believe that you despise, what you had previously enjoyed.
It's not hard to say why though, is itThe sense you got was that it was embarrassing to be caught liking Bolaño, even if it was hard to say why.
You mean Murakami?And the "foreign writer popular among anglophones, that natives don't embrace with equal fervor" is a classic one too. You see it with Miyazaki all the time
Very transparently, this is self loathing projected onto the other. Note that first line: "Mexico City native living abroad in the United States."In a 2018 essay in n+1, Nicolás Medina Mora, a Mexico City native living in the United States, reported on a trip home during which he sat in a café listening to an expat gringo couple discuss plans to rent a house on Oaxaca’s beach-lined coast. Medina Mora invents their backstory: they’re bien-pensant gentrifiers, the kind of people who insist on calling their Brooklyn neighborhood by the Spanish name used by the Puerto Ricans they’ve displaced. Soon it becomes clear that their enclave is being overrun by finance types, and they decide to push on to fresh frontiers. “They were getting tired of going to magazine parties and gallery galas where they disliked most of the people. And then one day he stumbled on his old copy of The Savage Detectives and found himself thinking: Why don’t we just move to Mexico City?”
No I mean Miyazaki!You mean Murakami?
Who did you displace, NícolasVery transparently, this is self loathing projected onto the other. Note that first line: "Mexico City native living abroad in the United States."
The reason this article isn't tedious, Luka, is because it's a breathtakingly accurate documentation of so many tedious culturally en vogue arguments, which reveals how tedious they areMedina Mora doesn’t say Bolaño’s novel is bad. But he suggests that it’s peculiarly liable to being liked in bad ways.