When a Self-Declared Genius Asks You to Read His Masterpiece
lithub.com
lithub.com
America used to be more tolerant of this kind of social stupidity. In an earlier time, Alan could have found many friends among his community. For lack of better things to do, these friends would have filed off his rough edges and given him probably-bad, but well-meaning advice on his writing, which would have helped him out much more than this journal article will.
But no, all of our dance cards are full, it's so difficult to find meaningful relationships in our daily lives. The socially adept can easily insulate themselves from the unwashed masses and never have to learn how to respond appropriately to someone like that. So recluses become even more reclusive, hiding away in their rooms and developing this kind of ego complex. So very sad.
Since duels are extremely risky, you would only demand one when something more important than your life is at stake. Like your honor, or that of your beloved. To put honor at stake, the insults must be issued in public, with a specific goal of that besmirching. Even then most reasonable people will take steps to allay the situation before it gets too bad.
And that was only something the nobility did. Everybody else just started a fight. Taking a few swings provides everyone around with entertainment while letting you work out your anger in a relatively safe way.
i would say the writers response is very helpful though, it contextualizes alan for himself. could it be more helpful and less insulting? sure, but its pretty good overall, especially when you compare it to how little effort alan put forth in the communication.
After some back and forth on that I would have started asking him more about his life. I'd gently guide him towards courses of action that would naturally guide towards better health and success, like exercising, talking to real people, anything but whatever it is he does for 100+ hours every week.
I'd keep it to 30 minutes a week to put a cap on it so he doesn't start running my life. But you'd be amazed at what you can do for someone just with that small amount of time.
On the contrary, it is very likely. His site encourages readers to contact him.
He's a Shakespearean conspiracy theorist, who spends inordinate amounts of time on this one thing.
It's just a bizarre thing that most people could not make heads or tails of. I don't believe that no one wants to be his friend. I just don't think anyone knows how to be his friend.
Thanks for the kind words, though!
There have always been loners and misfits and "stay away from that house, kids", and always will be. You say that on the one hand, we don't have the relationships we used to, but on the other hand, with technology and travel, tons of people are forging new relationships that they otherwise wouldn't. Gay people are able to find friendly communities and move to them where in the past they couldn't risk showing themselves.
I don't think it's as easy as saying it's hard to make relationships in these modern times - the picture is shifting and complex. Higher populations paradoxically offer more opportunity for anonymity, but conversely being an outcast in a small community is worse than being anonymous.
He's also a clinical narcissist. I don't pay much attention to what psychologists think, but narcissists are easy to spot -- as far as they're concerned, everyone else is a refractory, inert obstacle standing in the way of their richly deserved public recognition as the greatest genius who ever lived.
More on this topic: http://arachnoid.com/ChildrenOfNarcissus
One professor had an idea. Every time a crank wrote to him, he would send them the contact information of the last crank. He said he was too busy to read it right now, but this other person might help him. Instead of getting angry letters back, they wouldn't write back again, or even sent nice letters thanking him for the referral.
That might have helped in this case. This guy might not have time to read these people's works, but surely they can help each other.
I'm honestly surprised 40 people in 2 hours found it worthy of HN frontpage.
It was written as a blog post because we were the true audience, not Alan.
Alan wants to bypass all the long-term give-and-take investment in the writing community and somehow still become well-respected and famous within that same community. I think we've all come across those types.
Alan has problems, but Jeff is a dick.
But books (usually) only go one way - the author speaks, the reader listens. This allows strong power-laws to take hold, so that a small handful of speakers take up a very disproportionate amount of people's attention.
This is another argument for Alan to make some friends, with whom he can practice the more balanced language-art of conversation.
As an aside, this reminds me of my fantasy of parsers becoming sophisticated enough that instead of books, authors can write chat-bots that allow readers to feel "heard" by the author.
Why do power laws necessarily follow?
IBM's Watson is not representative of the progression of consumer-grade web chatbot technology, unfortunately.
Now that I have some experience with this, I'm not so quick to judge others.
To finally have someone who would both read and reply to such an exploration would be amazing, to have that person reply in such a way that turns my masturbatory ranting into a real discussion would be bliss.
tl;dr, I am sorry I can't read your unsolicited manuscript because I am a humble writer with a humble background with a duties to my humble college students in creative writing class.
Let me mention all of my friends who are really humble, from middle-upper class who have earned an inheritance to travel and write from their experiences; but not all of them are white lest you get the wrong idea about me, in fact one of them is colored with such a interesting background you should hear about because he gets confused for either being "Black" or "Arab"; so in closing, I am a really humble person who have lots of humble friends who value friendship; wait, by the way did I mention that I am really humble?
My commentary is just how reading the author's explanation; he came off as so many people I've known previously at liberal arts colleges and then later at parties/cafes college towns. The "conscientious" type who likes the idea of pursuing something "pure" and "artistic," but ultimately their lives lead them to nothing beyond the wording on the marketing on a college brochure, "think deeply, be worldly, travel!"
I'd love to go into a in-depth analysis of the original author's text, and how every single of his example of his friends he upheld is a stereotype that is in the wheelhouse of a New York City MFA class or Lena Dunham's "Girls".(Unfortunately, I am trying to debug Docker to run a compute cluster job. )
I am deeply disappointed that the author didn't try to use the opportunity to try to appeal to the craft of writing as a daily discipline, a joy, a pain, a biological compulsion for people who persist regardless of prestige nor fame; or why writing in particular means so much to him, and revealing his own egotism and follies; instead, he wrote a rant that is a thinly-veined guise about he and his circle of friends are the "truer artists" with "much more interesting life experiences" than Alan.
However, perhaps you have a more nuanced reading than I did, I'd love to hear what was your takeaway from the author's article?
I didn't read the author as being about "pure" and "artistic" writing. Given limited time, he's investing it in people he has some reason to care about, not in some random "you must pay attention to me because I'm a major literary figure even though you stupid mundanes haven't realized it yet" type who demanded the author's attention.
The author decided to explain that he'd rather read articles by people he knows and by his students who allow him to make a living. He doesn't read things as part of an imagined "profession." He reads things relevant to his own life.
It's about the ability to freely associate, and the ability to decide what is relevant to you, with regards to the "profession" of writer.
Your interpretation seemed somewhat uncharitable. I don't think you're being particularly nice, either.
* The amount was not revealed to us. But take it as a hypothetical anyway.
nothing beyond ... "think deeply, be worldly, travel!"
If this guy values travel, biographical writing, and friendship, and you value eccentricity, uniqueness, and nonconformity, that's just a difference between you.
He's describing his friends to show that he has actual relationships with actual people who write actual things that are on his actual desk... which is the reason he can't be reading everything strangers send to him.
Beyond that, he's making a larger point about how it is rude, selfish, and immoral of Alan to make claims on his time and energy, because it's a failure to let him have his own life and choose his own activity.
And then also he's saying he values friendship over genius. Even if Alan's Shakespeare research were truly groundbreaking and fascinating, he'd still choose to read his friends' books, because for him that's the value of literature: empathy, connection, civility, etc.
You might find his values banal or uninteresting, and that's fine.
A lot of the writers I know say they write to understand and refine their ideas. So maybe it just started as a personal thought and then he decided to publish it, maybe because he hears similar questions often?
He even fell in love, in a famed torrential affair with the celebrated seductress Lou Salome.
Nietzche's philosophies grew not from the pain of loneliness, but from the bitterness of being denied the things he wanted, mostly by events out of his control. He had a promising career in the army, until an accident forced him to return to academia. Salome did not believe in marriage and turned Nietzche's proposals down three times. His anti-Semitism eventually made him unemployable by academia.
He did break off with many of his friends at this point, mostly for philosophical reasons, he kept a few around and even made new ones. He was never a true recluse, at least, not any more than anyone else of the time period.
Did you mean atheism? Contrary to popular belief Nietzsche was not an antisemite nor would that have made someone unemployable in the 19th century.
> He was never a true recluse, at least, not any more than anyone else of the time period.
Given the inaccuracy of your previous statement I'd be interested in a source to support this. Below is from beginning of Ecce Homo (I selected a work at random -- it's really been a while since I've read any of his works, but I'm sure all the prefaces begin in a similar fashion -- save probably A Birth of Tragedy, since he was at that point still an academic and not actively hostile to the entire world for ignoring his writing).
>> Seeing that shortly I must confront mankind with the heaviest demand ever put on it, it seems to me indispensable to say who I am...But the disparity between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that one has neither heard nor even seen me.
That's why they need our help. I don't know a good answer to that problem.
(In this case, what if the professor had contacted Alan and tried to talk him into seeing a therapist? Alan might find that offensive.)
And very much related - does anybody know why quoted strings are often written by writers as:
... foo "bar."
and not:
... foo "bar".
? It doesn't parse, does it?
http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/british-versus-american-s...
Long answer: Depending on the region, if the quoted string itself is a complete sentence, the fullstop belongs as part of the quote. Example:
"My mother," he said, "is not going to accept your invitation to the party." This left me upset.
If the quoted string is a sub-section of a sentence, then the punctuation belongs to the parent sentence. Example:
My father often said that my mother "didn't have time for the bother" of cooking, which explains why I don't have a very sophisticated palate.
It's pretty easy to find him if you search Google with the following:
"by far the most succinct, simple, and common-sense explanation" alanI get stuff like this all the time. Anyone with an academic email does. Sometimes I print out some of the more entertaining maths and physics proofs and hang them on the wall. I have a pretty good time machine schematic on my desk atm.
It might as well have been titled "Top 5 Books to Read Before Responding to a Self-Important Jerk Who Threatens You".
It's hard to become successful and encouragement or even negative direct feedback help people. Instead of raising that up as a value the author tells a story about his own snark. It's not pretty and it isn't anything anyone should congratulation him on.
If he actually doesn't make a single mistake that you can find, it's time to hop a step up the chain of command at your local university and do it again.
The article's point is that, while the author does technically have the time, he has places he'd rather spend it than on some random internet dude who just insulted him.
I like that expression :-)