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.
> today's high culture all seems to be predicated upon feigning enlightenment
That must be the marker of "high" culture throughout history generally, right?
I like this quote about philosophy from a Youtube video (although I'd probably be less amused by the layers of nonsense if the people around me were deep into it):
> Philosophy is known for being equal-parts Pretentious and Needlessly Confusing, and that’s definitely true, especially after Descartes shows up, but there is one thing that Philosophy is not, and that is “Boring”, because it is WAY too stupid. Anybody who tells you that Philosophy is the unflinching pursuit of objective truth is lying to you and to themselves — Philosophy is a mess where everyone is competing for the most galaxy-brained take on the world, and that’s why I Love It, dammit.
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.
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.
That must be the marker of "high" culture throughout history generally, right?
I like this quote about philosophy from a Youtube video (although I'd probably be less amused by the layers of nonsense if the people around me were deep into it):
> Philosophy is known for being equal-parts Pretentious and Needlessly Confusing, and that’s definitely true, especially after Descartes shows up, but there is one thing that Philosophy is not, and that is “Boring”, because it is WAY too stupid. Anybody who tells you that Philosophy is the unflinching pursuit of objective truth is lying to you and to themselves — Philosophy is a mess where everyone is competing for the most galaxy-brained take on the world, and that’s why I Love It, dammit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9ve3BARdFI
It's quite a healthy way to deal with elite overproduction.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM5kKqUETbE&list=RDmM5kKqUET...