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This will be all art in fascist USA
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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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I mean this actually pretty good lol, it captures what it's going for perfectly while being genuinely evocative
It's slurry of highly topical Twitter references that will be as inscrutable as Linear A script in like 5 years
So?
I prefer my art to not be disposable fash garbage that has extremely limited currency
Like 90% of what gets called literature and art is exactly that: a disjointed pile of references that are intentionally inscrutable to anyone not familiar with whatever niche thing the author was. Those references being to terminally online cultural signifiers and memes instead of to the cultural and historical curriculum that an educated person is expected to have studied in school doesn't change that.
If this were just a shitpost mocking that sort of overly referential prose it would be fantastic, but reading a bit more about it it sounds like it was part of an earnest attempt at creating high art, that it's trying to be like that insufferable prose, not mock it. It also sounds like the rest of it is run through with reactionary undercurrents, so in that light the references to terminally online right wing nonsense come across as less a scathing mockery of them and more just as lighthearted irony.
What the hell kind of literature have you been reading
Every time something like this filters out of the weird high art literature scene it's something like this, and most of what I remember from English in high school and college was the same. Anything that's "prestigious" literature seems to be insufferable dreck built from allegory and references that make modestly educated journalists feel like smart little lads when they get the reference. I hate it so much and I'm saying this as exactly the sort of educated-person-who-reads-too-much it's supposed to appeal to.
Like I genuinely prefer absolute garbage to anything the New York Times would praise.
Someone else linked a NYT article that while stopping short of being a glowing review of the book in question did praise the worst things about it.
I kinda really like
its funny
tbh I don't hate it as much as the first time I read it. Like I understand where she's going with it. and idk, this is like one page, maybe things get better. My main issue is that it reads like if you ran the prompt "Beat generation but gen z" through an AI model trained exclusively on fascist blue check tweets. Like if you don't have a phD in terminally online right-wing culture, you'd have to look up every other word and the sense in which it is used. I get that it's trying to use modern lingo, but it's just doing way too much, it's as if she crammed every sort of youth internet culture signifier she could think of into one page. I had to read this one page multiple times to see that no she actually is writing a story here and it's not just some nonsense Burroughs-esque cut-up novel made up entirely of new right dogwhistles and the most obscure gen z slang.
It's far from the worst thing I've ever read, but as a former Beat worshipper I wrote far better free associative wannabe Beat prose when I was in high school. I can't believe something like this got published, it needs a lot of work.
I think you have to be extremely online in specific ways for it to be clear and evocative.
Like the first line, I'm not sure what giving knight errant means. He looks like the kind of guy who's on a quest? Maybe with plate armor? Also organ-meat eater, so he looks like Liver King? Fuck that strongly contradicts my previous impression, which is impressive because that was already kind of vague.
Then we move onto he's like a byronic hero. This is another archetype that contradicts the Liver King heavily, what with him being an exuberant grifter and the byronic hero being a brooding but deep emo guy and then finally he's giving Haplogroup R1b, which I assume is some skull measuring Nazi adjacent nonsense.
EDIT: I still hate it but it kinda reminds me of something Jenna K Moran (who rules) would right if she were an extremely online right wing teenager, so I feel weirder about hating it
I hate it.