Your comment made me laugh but I had a similar experience. It felt almost voyeuristic with how far I am from whoever they’re trying to reach, like I’m reading someone’s private journal.
Isn't it good? On one hand, the world is more rich than you (and I) had thought. On the other hand, the people who would go for a Communist revolution do not surface near you as prominent media figures, at least, not yet.
This happens to me every time I take a quick look at the “high culture” world, be it literature, art, music, or general intellectualism. I have a minor in philosophy and consider myself reasonably well-read, but today’s avantgarde is nothing like that of the past, and seems above all else designed to be exclusionary.
Exclusionary isn't the term. I'm not sure there is one specific term in English, but today's high culture all seems to be predicated upon feigning enlightenment, or pretending to have a deep understanding.
My wife's sister did an art degree, for example, and she and her friends wouldn't stop gushing about purposefully-inscrutable postmodern nonsense like Derrida, who was an absolute hack.
All that aside, N+1 sounds like it's the sort of thing I would enjoy read. I didn't get the sense that it was written to be exclusionary, but maybe I just didn't get the full picture from TFA.
Naomi is an awesome writer and she's been doing many of these deep dives into literary journals. She's also reviewed entire historic genres (like old westerns), IIRC. She has a really unique ability to plainly grasp what's special about a group of related writing.
You can cultivate an aristocratic attitude even if you never had that much money by USian standards. I mean, as much as we complain about medicine as a kafkaesque nightmare and nexus of inequality [1] it is a miracle not least vaccines, antibiotics, statin drugs, dental implants were never available to the richest people in the Ancien Regime. A character in a 18th century novel might spirit his lover away to Paris from the backwaters of France, now for the rest of us there is Ryanair.
It's quite a healthy way to deal with elite overproduction.
I discovered I live in a parallel universe from the author, having heard nothing about anything this article references.
Your comment made me laugh but I had a similar experience. It felt almost voyeuristic with how far I am from whoever they’re trying to reach, like I’m reading someone’s private journal.
I almost mistook the article as a work of fiction
Isn't it good? On one hand, the world is more rich than you (and I) had thought. On the other hand, the people who would go for a Communist revolution do not surface near you as prominent media figures, at least, not yet.
This happens to me every time I take a quick look at the “high culture” world, be it literature, art, music, or general intellectualism. I have a minor in philosophy and consider myself reasonably well-read, but today’s avantgarde is nothing like that of the past, and seems above all else designed to be exclusionary.
Exclusionary isn't the term. I'm not sure there is one specific term in English, but today's high culture all seems to be predicated upon feigning enlightenment, or pretending to have a deep understanding.
My wife's sister did an art degree, for example, and she and her friends wouldn't stop gushing about purposefully-inscrutable postmodern nonsense like Derrida, who was an absolute hack.
All that aside, N+1 sounds like it's the sort of thing I would enjoy read. I didn't get the sense that it was written to be exclusionary, but maybe I just didn't get the full picture from TFA.
Naomi is an awesome writer and she's been doing many of these deep dives into literary journals. She's also reviewed entire historic genres (like old westerns), IIRC. She has a really unique ability to plainly grasp what's special about a group of related writing.
Issue 4 is incredible, I bought a damaged copy for a buck and it was the best literary dollar I have ever spent!
You can cultivate an aristocratic attitude even if you never had that much money by USian standards. I mean, as much as we complain about medicine as a kafkaesque nightmare and nexus of inequality [1] it is a miracle not least vaccines, antibiotics, statin drugs, dental implants were never available to the richest people in the Ancien Regime. A character in a 18th century novel might spirit his lover away to Paris from the backwaters of France, now for the rest of us there is Ryanair.
It's quite a healthy way to deal with elite overproduction.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM5kKqUETbE&list=RDmM5kKqUET...