Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Several hours of thought.
He is talking about an ice skating image where they are skating on flowing water, without skates. https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/gene-wolfe/suzanne-delage/2023-10-28-gwern-midjourneyv5-germanexpressionistlinocutofsinisternewenglandtowninwinter.jpg this image. It is supposed to evoke the idea of a declining town under draculas influence.
(Imagine if had just spend those hours on something else and paid an artist the same hours to make something. Or if he had grabbed a pencil or charcoal himself).
God I looked into the article this is meant to illustrate, and I have feelings. The idea this mysterious, evocative short story is something to be solved, and that heās somehow cracked the code. And it must be precisely about Dracula. Donāt ask yourself why the name comes from Proust, and why the style and themes are so heavily proustian. Proust is not genre literature, it isnāt in communication with the literature of ideas, which means it is of no value. Gene Wolfe is genre literature, so the story must be about vampires, and nothing else. Any literary depth is mere distraction, a ruse meant to mislead you and have you fail the test. Canāt wait for the rationalist Pale Fire remake!!!
From Gwernās āsolutionā:
Dafuq?
Yes, two different stories both alluding to the most quoted work in English goddamn literature canāt be a coincidence. Itās not like the line āthere are more things in Heaven and Earthā¦ā has been repeated so often that even Wolfeās narrator calls it āhackneyedāā¦ Hold on, Iām getting a message, just let me press my finger to my imaginary earpieceā¦
I would say myself that Wolfeās alluding to a line rather than quoting it exactly serves to call up the whole feel of Hamlet, rather than a single moment. It evokes the Gothic wrongness, the inner turmoil paired with outer tumolt, the appearances that sometimes belie reality and sometimes lead it. You could take this as suggesting that Susie D. is the Devil in a pleasing shape. Or, with all the Proustian business, and the lengthy excursus about historical artifacts hanging on as though the past lies thick in the present and refuses to liftā¦ Perhaps the secondary Hamlet allusion behind the obvious one is āthe time is out of jointā. Maybe Suzanne is a notional being, an idea tenuously made manifest, a collective imaginary friend or dream-creature leaking out into our reality. She looks the same from one generation to the next, because the dream of the girl next door stays the same. Perhaps the horror is that our reality is fragile, that these creations are always slipping in, and we only have a stable daylight world because we refuse to see them.
Also, the illustration sucks.
Thanks for pointing me to this. I hadnāt read the Wolfe story and I appreciated it. I skipped most of the gwern fluff, precisely because while his preferred interpretation is one possible of many, what I like about Wolfe is that the story can be about multiple things beside that.
And the illustration sucks.
Goddammit now I actually have to credit Gwern for something unambiguously positive in directing me to this story.
I found myself appreciating it a lot even just on a relatively surface level. I must confess to having no experience with Proust or some of the other references it makes, but it sent my mind back to my own time in school and struck me with a very particular kind of social vertigo, thinking about all the people I vaguely knew but havenāt spoken to or about since we were classmates. Like, people talk about the feeling that everyone around you is a full person with their own inner life and all that, and it feels similar to think how many people, especially in childhood, live their lives almost parallel to ours, intersecting only in passing.
Also given how many rationalists seem utterly convinced that many of not most people are just NPCs who donāt meaningfully exist when āoff screenā Iām not surprised that theyāre excited to have this mess of an interpretation that sidesteps that whole concept.
Ed: Also, the illusion sucks.