Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I’m intrigued by academism. It’s a forgotten bureaucratic, institutional, “scientific” style but a) more historically important styles like Impressionism defined themselves against it b) It was the form of European art that got exported to Asia, leading to fusion with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I strongly suspect modern unreadable “program lit” similarly serves as a foil to more vivid stuff that actually gets read, including genre https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n18/elif-batuman/get-a-real-degree
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I’m going to bet AIs will nail both high literary program-lit and extremely tropey pulp stuff before they nail the middle, if they ever do.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Academism eventually failed because it got disrupted by photography to craftsman-kitsch. Program lit fails because it is in futile competition with tv and movies. This is the lesson I draw from DFW’s E Unibas Pluram. We mistake tv and film for visual media but they actually disrupted evocative text media.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Screen media are not really descended from theater. There’s a reason they drifted away from theatrical past to prose fiction sources. The live stage is good training for actors but an actor’s job is actually to replace evocative text. And camera replaces novel author’s point-of-view (playwrights don’t have pov)
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