Bad Art Friend

sus

sus

Moderator
Still, they’re not so different, Rose and Chuntao. “I think they both confuse love with worship,” Larson told me. “And they both see love as something they have to go get; it doesn’t already exist inside of them.” All through “The Kindest,” love or validation operates almost like a commodity — a precious elixir that heals all pain. “The thing about the dying,” Chuntao narrates toward the end, “is they command the deepest respect, respect like an underground river resonant with primordial sounds, the kind of respect that people steal from one another.”
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I see this as almost a confession—or at least, that's how the Times article means it, I think. The respect that people steal from each other. A game that Dawn and Larson play: one worships, the other is worshipped.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
From Traldi over at ArcDigital
It won’t come as a surprise to most people—though it did to me—that in conflicts like this, the better-liked person, or more generally the person with more social cachet, tends to come out on top, no matter the actual events that transpired. Like Tolentino, Larson had people around her—the people she texted with to complain about Dorland. Like Nicholas Rombre, the poet in question, Dorland was alone. The roles of writer and subject matter less than the statuses of well-liked and unknown. So it was when the much-wealthier Chrissy Teigen got food writer Alison Roman suspended from The New York Times for critical comments about how Teigen had developed her income stream. Like Larson, who is half-Asian, Teigen accused Roman of imbuing her comments with some sort of racial overtone; like Larson, she was able to frame her success and interpersonal viciousness as politically courageous.
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sus

sus

Moderator
suspended said:
Yeah, they're both clowns, but you get the sense Larson is a smooth-operating borderline-mean girl, while Dawn is needy-confused but ultimately sincere
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“What do you think we owe one another as writers in community?” she would wonder in an email, several months later, to The Times’s “Dear Sugars” advice podcast. (The show never responded.) “How does a writer like me, not suited to jadedness, learn to trust again after artistic betrayal?”
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That snarky parenthetical. The Times author is vicious, but subtly, presenting only the facts (and a tidal wave of implicature). You hate when it's mobilized against your own; you love when it's mobilized against others.
 
entertainment

entertainment

Well-known member
suspended said:
I see this as almost a confession—or at least, that's how the Times article means it, I think. The respect that people steal from each other. A game that Dawn and Larson play: one worships, the other is worshipped.
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they really do write in the language of couples therapists don't they

that was aimed at this:

Still, they’re not so different, Rose and Chuntao. “I think they both confuse love with worship,” Larson told me. “And they both see love as something they have to go get; it doesn’t already exist inside of them.” All through “The Kindest,” love or validation operates almost like a commodity — a precious elixir that heals all pain. “The thing about the dying,” Chuntao narrates toward the end, “is they command the deepest respect, respect like an underground river resonant with primordial sounds, the kind of respect that people steal from one another.”
 
sus

sus

Moderator
woops said:
Might read this if it's not long, can't be as bad as that "cat person" story
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Trying to think what else is in this genre

Short fiction that hits a cultural pressure point and goes viral

(When was the last time a short story had such clout? The 60s?)

Probably that N+1 piece, "The Feminist"
www.nplusonemag.com

The Feminist | Tony Tulathimutte

His friends, mostly female, told him he was refreshingly attentive and trustworthy for a boy. Meanwhile he is grateful for the knowledge that female was best used as an adjective, that sexism harms men too (though not nearly to the extent that it harms women), and that certain men pretend to be...
www.nplusonemag.com www.nplusonemag.com
 
W

william kent

Well-known member
I avoided Cat Person and The Feminist. I get a terrible feeling from anything like this, where people start saying shit like "the Cat Person discourse," on Twitter.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
it reminds me though of the much more outrageous 'borrowings' and elisions and lies WG Sebald was guilty of.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've not read the thing but

Is there a bigger appetite nowadays than before for nasty depressing stuff?

Like Squid Game is the biggest show in the world and it's (so far) pretty bleak, horrible, grind the injustice of the world in your face stuff.

Game of Thrones was mostly horrible.
 
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Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
And I really like watching Squid Game myself, and relish the nastiness of it.

I suppose it's cathartic? To think yes it is shit isn't it.

Black Mirror, another big cult show, constantly bleak.
 
entertainment

entertainment

Well-known member
I think the appetite for something like this article Bad Art Friend is more about the sense of superiority it produces in the reader over these obviously delusional and shitty but more importantly miserable and unfulfilled people. What propels you through an otherwise boring and inconsequential story is the validation of the animus your harbor towards some vague cloud of the social layer they represent. It is obviously teased up to a perverse degree by the journalist.
 
entertainment

entertainment

Well-known member
It makes sense that the default feeling an average person will have towards a writer before reading any of their work or getting to know their character is a sort of unnamed distaste.
 
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