What I don’t get is, why do people feel so happy to talk about themselves endlessly like this? It makes me cringe with embarrassment just to watch it – I can’t begin to imagine actually doing it.
What I don’t get is, why do people feel so happy to talk about themselves endlessly like this? It makes me cringe with embarrassment just to watch it – I can’t begin to imagine actually doing it.
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19 responses to “With no croutons”
This isn’t insanity, it’s learned behavior. This is one of the downsides of social media, the idea that feelings and moods are attributed to gender-feels. It’s just her being her, and it wouldn’t even have occurred to her if not for the continued cycle of tumblr-recycled trash.
It’s MAJOR downside of social media, I tell you what.
Which is ironic because it’s social media. Social means no you can’t talk about yourself 100% of the time. The payoff is other people can’t either, so everyone gets to talk about things of general interest. It all works out so nicely as long as people obey the rules.
That was an incoherent mush.
It was very noticeable to me that for someone so young she has a very prominent (as a friend used to call it) ‘I want line’ on her forehead.
I went to a poetry event last year with some friends, which I really didn’t enjoy – I explained to these younger friends that all I heard the entire evening was the participants’ detailed description of their own inner states which, ironically, sounded pretty similar to each other and to pretty much everyone else (I mean, we all have a pretty standard range of internal states and emotions). What I wanted from the participants, and from art in general, was the experience of seeing the world around them as they saw it, to enhance and augment my own perceptions.
It seems like if you introduce a weird idea to some people, that their brains can’t handle it. It becomes an intoxicating trap that they can’t extract themselves from. Like a deep hole with unscalable walls, but also with an exit that they never bother to look for.
Are we sure this isn’t satire?
I was struck by guest’s comment about her view of the poetry event she went to. I regularly reviewed contemporary poetry for some years for a good poetry magazine in Britain, wrote also for other magazines and reviews in Britain, Australia & the US, and contributed to the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English. There are of course still good poets around, but there is now a mass of wholly inferior work which is concerned solely with describing, in banal and unmemorable ways, the not very interesting emotional states of the poetaster. I think it was in one of the philosopher Karl Popper’s books that I read the story of the 18th or early 19th century French drawing master who was asked to teach drawing to the spoilt daughter of a rich family. ‘But, sir,’ exclaimed the girl, ‘ if you make me draw this way, I can’t express my feelings!’ ‘Mam’selle,’ replied the drawing master , ‘nobody but Maman is interested in your feelings.’
For a brilliant and harrowing sequence which addresses, with wicked wit, the (real) loss of a son, and what it does to you in all its complexity, I recommend ‘A Part Song’ which appears in ‘Say Something Back’ by Denise Riley , who is one of the finest contemporary British poets. It is very far indeed from being the mere description of callow internal states.
“a mass of wholly inferior work which is concerned solely with describing, in banal and unmemorable ways, the not very interesting emotional states of the poetaster”…or the “activist.”
It’s as if a two-dimensional character suddenly learned there were three—no four!—dimensions.
What will really blow her mind is when she realizes just how conformist she’s being. She’s like the crowd in Life of Brian shouting “We’re all different!”
The real non-conformist is the one mumbling “I’m not.”
That made my head hurt.
@7 thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check it out. I’m about as ignorant of poetry as any overeducated middle-class person can be.
guest#12. Please read it. It is a brilliant, wonderfully written, and profound exploration of grief
Riley also wrote an extraordinary essay about ‘the altered condition of life’ that is grief: ‘Time Lived, Without Its Flow’ (published alone in a small book) – an essay that I infinitely prefer to Joan Didion’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’.
@14 the book I got has both of these.
guest#15. That was quick! Wonderful! I hope you like them.
Actually, I kind of know how she feels. I find myself becoming a void quite a bit lately.
“…most of the time, I’m […]. Other majority of the time, I’m […].”
Most of the time means at least half. Likewise majority of the time. I therefore conclude this woman is …capable of time travel I think? Either that or it’s all nonsense. Hm, tough call.
No, no, no, Holms, you’ve got it wrong: she doesn’t actually travel in time, but manages to be in two different times at the same time – it’s a disorder with the name of synchronosis. Then the question arises, where – when, rather – she is during those times when she is not in the ‘most of’ or ‘majority of’ times. But I suspect that in fact she is zoned out whenever she is, and suffering from a permanent state of desynchronosis. She certainly comes across as though she does.