The lack of self awareness in this piece was entertaining.
Writing about impotent pretensions to cleverness on on the Internet on a site on the Internet hardly anyone will read, quoting Seinfeld, Raymond Chandler, a vintage movie script, and Kierkegaard, and name-checking Oscar Wilde and Einstein, all under the modest tag "Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture" is... quite a look.
Somebody here lacks self-awareness, but I'm not sure it's the author. To quote the article:
> Another way to redeem passive lurking is by making a clever joke that shows that you are above the whole thing. Twitter’s quote tweet function, especially, enables users literally as well as metaphorically to appear above the conversation and to cleverly one-up their opponents from this privileged position. The game, in effect, is this: Who can appear the most above it all? But the circumstances of posting—alone at the controls with no one around but everyone watching—all but guarantee that posts are alloyed with insecurity, however clever they might be. Like the too-clever detective whose need to exhibit command tends to result in more chaos, the clever poster’s attempt to stand above the medium’s stupidity merely reveals dependence on its meager pleasures. Cleverness devolves from the output of analytical acuity into a transparent show put on to allay the anxieties of passive consumption.
What an odd comment to make. His central thesis about "cleverness" allowed him to tie together a number of disparate elements. It is what writers do strive to do. If this was in the New Yorker would that confer legitimacy? That feels very elitist.
The flow of the writing reminded me a lot of Paul Graham's essays.
> tie together a number of disparate elements. It is what writers do strive to do
Very hopefully not. A game of associations ("first", "test", "try", "feel", "skin"...) is already «t[ying] together a number of disparate elements». But randomly, in idleness, possibly decadent.
Writers (should be supposed to) try to present a coherent complex idea - defending a thesis, modelling a description, disclosing potentially fruitful relations - by making its ideal structure explicit through some relatively fixed perspective form. That remains, structuring information (and in a loop of criticism checks), in a set of globally (as opposed to locally) strong relations (between the nodes). With a so implied Purpose in the statements.
Which by the way seems to have been an intended target of TFA. Compromising a lot with its enemy, though.
> Writers (should be supposed to) try to present a coherent complex idea - defending a thesis, modelling a description, disclosing potentially fruitful relations - by making its ideal structure explicit through some relatively fixed perspective form. That remains, structuring information (and in a loop of criticism checks), in a set of globally (as opposed to locally) strong relations (between the nodes). With a so implied Purpose in the statements.
I remember reading something similar from an old Ernest Hemingway interview.
Does anyone who knows what I'm talking about have a link?
I'd like just to specify that I composed that paragraph on the spot. Rem tene, verba sequentur.
If Hemingway said something similar, I'd say it is not specifically because great minds think alike - also that -, but because we described the same thing. There is an infinite number of ways to describe, say, a glass through «relatively fixed perspective form[s]», but a pretty limited number of «ideal structure[s]» pertaining.
Well, since I in fact have written it from scratch, as an original - though saying nothing new but an actual state of things -, please do find the exact quotation, so we will wonder upon the "magic" that allegedly happened.
Incidentally: I checked earlier, because I was intrigued - though probably "«for different reasons»", i.e. to compare the views - and I could not find it. I saw that there exists an "Hemingway on Writing", 2019. But I do not know. I admit I never read Hemingway (owing to queues). Though I can guess we have pretty different styles: syntactic vs paratactic.
Edit: but if that "magic" happened - /if/ -, I know the trick, and I can already tell you (rephrasing what written before): if, e.g., "a circumference is the set of points equidistant from a centre", the ways in which you can say that idea will collapse into that.
Further edit: although, if the equivalence were there word by word for that deontic definition of writing, I'd turn to the supernatural.
If it was in the New Yorker, it would be grounded much better. It would include an interview with an academic invested in the subject, or a profile on someone in the news (but not too popular!), or frame it through the writer's home life.
That confers legitimacy in a way that a frozen block of quotes does not.
Same thing with Paul Graham. He actually did things, and wove those experiences into his writing. The exact same thoughts coming from nobody mean a hell of a lot less.
Maybe it's embarrassing to interview a guy from down the street instead of a professor at Columbia, or have anecdotes from the local supermarket instead of a brownstone on the Upper East Side.
Still, anything is better than hiding behind a solid wall of references. Let a little light in! Reassure me that the author's not dead!
I don't think this is correct. You're conflating pretentiousness with cleverness, and also making the claim that quoting or name-checking a few pillars of western culture is pretentious. It's not: if you're writing a piece about culture, it's sort of par for the course. Whether it's being written on a "site on the Internet hardly anyone will read" is irrelevant to whether it's being clever or not, but it's certainly ironic, because you read it, and I read it, and it's on the front page of HN.
And, if you still think that it's trying to be clever, and you think that invalidates its point, doesn't that argue for its thesis?
If a thing is clever, doesn't that define it as essentially superficial and insubstantial? And isn't cleverness that serves only to elevate the author, pretentious? Given the meandering focus of the piece and the author's penchant for dropping names rather than making clear points and reinforcing them via reason or contrast, 'pretentious' seems apropos.
IHMO, cleverness always lacks substance; it's superficial, droll, better-than-banal — but never synonymous with brilliant or everlasting. Pretension is cleverness that serves only the author. Both apply here, I fear.
> If a thing is clever, doesn't that define it as essentially superficial and insubstantial? And isn't cleverness that serves only to elevate the author, pretentious?
That's probably one definition of clever, but not the only one. Describing those different meanings is the first thing the article does, and it sounds like you actually agree with where he ended up.
I think what you're describing as pretentious is really just the tone of the article, which is a function of the publication it's writing, for and what that audience expects. To me, it would be pretentious if he'd used examples that he wasn't actually familiar with, in order to seem more knowledgeable than he was. But the ones he chose seem fine to me: I would expect his audience to be familiar enough with them, and they helped make his point. People sometimes use pretentious to mean "high brow", but I don't think they mean the same thing.
There is nothing in it to indicate a lack of self awareness. Even if it is "clever", in the detached, above-it-all sense, it doesn't make the premise any less valid. Sometimes a piece can not escape being hypocritical if the object it is scrutinizing is so ever-present that includes the article itself.
It's like if you wrote an essay on the limitations of language, and then someone went "But you're using language to write it". Well that part is inescapable, isn't it? Just like you can't really scrutinize cleverness (in the sense the author intended), without being clever, without being above it all, at least for the duration of the article. You need that vantage point for any sweeping reflections on current culture.
Funny enough, I didn't consider quoting Seinfeld or Oscar Wilde as symptoms of the particular strain of cleverness the author is referring to.
I am afraid they did. I have seen quotes from that on the Spectator to defend a pro-abortionist stance, in a text where the actual argument was a pelvic taunting.
Maybe I don't understand what a pretension to cleverness is. I can believe that someone might misquote Seinfeld, or any cultural resource, to appear to lend support to an argument that it doesn't (although why someone would think even an argument actually supported by Seinfeld was made stronger thereby I don't know—the show is famously and intentionally about awful, shallow people). However, to me, a pretension to cleverness involves an attempt to signal some sort of cultural cachet—here, I think of cleverness as being synonymous with a sort of tricky or practical intelligence. Does Seinfeld carry that cachet?
> … in a text where the actual argument was a pelvic taunting.
I don't understand what this means, but I suspect that better understanding it would not make my life any better.
> I don't understand what this means, but I suspect
I interpret it that while afraid, you do not mind me explaining, also/at least for others that may not have understood.
Argument: "We adopt this stance, because it allows X and doing differently would cause Y and Z".
The Spectator, a few months ago: "It is like in that Seinfeld episode where she expressed her concerns and he replied that all [slur] are [slur]. Yeah, take that, [slur], because this [vulgarity] has met your [relative]".
Edit: and when I read that, I thought that the current decadence, each day more evident, is abusing boundaries.
Edit: ...although, I suspect that this type of articles that The Spectator has so horribly decided are acceptable, could actually be tolerated, under the circumstance that they are read and acted by Mike Meyers in a costume.
Lack of self! The author is a ghost. I read it as a cry for help. "I am lonely", he says. But it's worse than that, because there is no him to be lonely. His cognition is bound up in fragments of other people's fictional lives.
Writing about impotent pretensions to cleverness on on the Internet on a site on the Internet hardly anyone will read, quoting Seinfeld, Raymond Chandler, a vintage movie script, and Kierkegaard, and name-checking Oscar Wilde and Einstein, all under the modest tag "Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture" is... quite a look.