notes on style and authority
tim’rous beasties
I try not to write cranky posts about the state of modern letters on here for a number of reasons, which I could (will) sum up thus:
These pieces tend to get a lot of attention, but people who come for that sort of thing mostly only like that sort of thing. That is, they do not want Evangelion, Taylor Swift, reviews of random books and movies, perfume, or dog pictures, they just want to hear about how everything sucks now. That’s their right, obviously, but a big uptick in attention followed by a big downtick can be destabilizing. And also I don’t think everything sucks now.
Any statement that is true of some part of a large category, like “people who write about arts, literature, and ‘ideas,’” will not be true of all of it. If it’s true of, let’s say, even a third of it, that would be significant, but one could also say (truthfully) that it is not true of the majority. “What are you talking about” is usually a reasonable …