some people i follow on twitter were doing an "append 'Harry Potter and' to the title of the nearest book near you" and uh
Harry Potter and An Introduction to the Theory of Point Processes
@er1n "Harry Potter and The Art of Game Design"
or "Harry Potter and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", they're on top of each other the same distance from me
@lycaon @er1n oh man, I really really loved Wallace's nonfiction when I was at university, but then I read his maths book, which was so wrong in many places that it made me question how much he actually knew about the other things he wrote about and now I'm a bit wary.
(The fiction's still great though. Good Old Neon is one of my favourite stories ever)
@tomharris @er1n having read A Supposedly Fun Thing recently, i think most of it holds up? really the biggest problem i have with it is wallace's frequent use of the word "females" but that's basically water under the bridge. like i think "e. unibus pluram" was dead-on about how the internet wouldn't actually make us more free or less beholden to corporate control than tv just by virtue of being more interactive
@lycaon @er1n Yeah, looking back I think my comments apply more to Consider the Lobster than A Supposedly...
The journalism pieces there I like a lot, and I feel like I can trust him in e. unibus pluram because, y'know, postmodern US fiction is something he genuinely is an expert on. I really liked the grammar essay in Lobster when I was at uni, but now I find it pretty insufferable.
My favourite thing in Supposedly was the piece about Michael Joyce
@tomharris @er1n god yeah that essay is great. i cannot stop thinking about the part where he's like "try to imagine being one of the best 100 people in the world at something, anything."
@tomharris yeah lmao
i find a lot of his work valuable, but i can totally see why someone wouldn't like him. but also "some people i don't like like this thing" is always a terrible reason to hate something
@lycaon
> "some people i don't like like this thing"
Internet 2017!!
@lycaon I've been meaning for some time to write a short essay on how I feel about Wallace. His reputation is on a bit of a downturn at the moment, less because he was insufficiently woke by present standards (although he could undoubtedly be a bit problematic), but more because he has been held up so high in the culture by a certain kind of nerdy, privileged Sensitive White Guy ( i.e. people like me). But the essay would probably just be me going "look, I like this guy, but in the RIGHT way"