Games People Play

[Clinamenic]

Making it difficult to settle the ego, in order to see through it once again.

 

[sus]

"tell all the boys" but also "keep it low"

Woops, failed that one

 

[sus]

Clinny, you start a Substack?

 

[version]

Clinny, you start a Substack?

He's blogging his ascension.

 

[catalog]

He's got a sex blog? I thought it was about Ted talks?

 

[version]

It's a digital Carcosa.

 

[catalog]

He's half man half computer it's true. All serial killer.

 

[catalog]

When William Kent and I met up the other day we discussed various board conspiracy theories but we both agreed young starb is very special

 

[Clinamenic]

Clinny, you start a Substack?

Yeah a sporadic documentation of the Modular Generalist Program, and any projects stemming therefrom.

 

[version]

Games of Taste

“My enjoyment of Bolaño wasn’t quite real, my new acquaintance said, and the part of it that felt real was a function of American ignorance,” writes David Kurnick.

www.theparisreview.org

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.

 

[luka]

omg what a tedious article

 

[version]

That's why I clipped out that quote, so people wouldn't have to read the whole thing. It's just some guy handwringing over being embarrassed about being an American who likes The Savage Detectives.

 

[sus]

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.

 

[sus]

The sense you got was that it was embarrassing to be caught liking Bolaño, even if it was hard to say why.

It's not hard to say why though, is it

It's because Bolaño is very popular right now. Obviously. And because he's very readable.

 

[sus]

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

 

[version]

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

You mean Murakami?

 

[sus]

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?”

Very transparently, this is self loathing projected onto the other. Note that first line: "Mexico City native living abroad in the United States."

 

[sus]

You mean Murakami?

No I mean Miyazaki!

 

[sus]

Very transparently, this is self loathing projected onto the other. Note that first line: "Mexico City native living abroad in the United States."

Who did you displace, Nícolas

Who did you leave behind

What keeps you up at night is it your treachery against your home, your people, your race

This line of thinking is, truly, tedious

 

[sus]

Medina Mora doesn’t say Bolaño’s novel is bad. But he suggests that it’s peculiarly liable to being liked in bad ways.

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 are