another banger - watching the two linked TikToks one after the other gave me a deep sense of dread as even the aware critique collapses into just another identity marker
Great piece. Just saw a tiktok on Reddit today of a girl complaining about gentrification (hearing people say seed oils’ in public) on the lower east side of nyc, but - as everyone points out - she’s not a native NYC’er and is basically doing the same thing, very funny tbh.
Strange to read a few hundred words about the Maya and societal collapse without Joseph Tainter being name-checked. Still, it looks like Betty Meggers was there before him. So thanks for that.
I recall reading a short story, I thought by Borges but apparently not, about how we can't read Shakespeare, but only read through the layers of interpretation and reinterpretation of Shakespeare since the seventeenth century. And another story also, more directly relevant, about a man becoming a famous literary critic by writing coruscating reviews of nonexistent anthologies of poems by an imaginary author. Or perhaps it was the other way around: a failing author writes scathing responses to imaginary criticism of his work and becomes famous for those. Also not Borges, it seems. Has Donny ever seen a doner kebab, or has the doner backstory for his sandwich shop always been what everybody knows only since last Tuesday?
Anyway, time to re-read Borges since I seem to have got pretty hazy on what exactly he wrote. It'll be new again. Yay!
another banger - watching the two linked TikToks one after the other gave me a deep sense of dread as even the aware critique collapses into just another identity marker
Great piece. Just saw a tiktok on Reddit today of a girl complaining about gentrification (hearing people say seed oils’ in public) on the lower east side of nyc, but - as everyone points out - she’s not a native NYC’er and is basically doing the same thing, very funny tbh.
https://www.reddit.com/r/circlejerknyc/comments/1obq9mf/finally_happened_the_ues_is_now_being_gentrified/?chainedPosts=t3_1ok1q7t
Strange to read a few hundred words about the Maya and societal collapse without Joseph Tainter being name-checked. Still, it looks like Betty Meggers was there before him. So thanks for that.
I recall reading a short story, I thought by Borges but apparently not, about how we can't read Shakespeare, but only read through the layers of interpretation and reinterpretation of Shakespeare since the seventeenth century. And another story also, more directly relevant, about a man becoming a famous literary critic by writing coruscating reviews of nonexistent anthologies of poems by an imaginary author. Or perhaps it was the other way around: a failing author writes scathing responses to imaginary criticism of his work and becomes famous for those. Also not Borges, it seems. Has Donny ever seen a doner kebab, or has the doner backstory for his sandwich shop always been what everybody knows only since last Tuesday?
Anyway, time to re-read Borges since I seem to have got pretty hazy on what exactly he wrote. It'll be new again. Yay!
Wild how people are worried about AI creating fake narratives, when we've been doing it for hundreds of years.