Brodernism

trying to write more bits in < 20 minutes, apologies to those who are getting regular emails from me

When someone put me onto the LARB piece about 'brodernism' I was expecting the usual literary hot-take essay, some confection of traits particular to a cohort of literary works - disembodied narration, unnamed locales, no punctuation - next to a facile list of The Sort Of Thing A Man Who Likes This Stuff Does. Inventing broad categories while giving off an air of: 'oh. *sorry*. did I just slay all your sacred cows? 😏' is a kind of cheat code for making people think you're worth listening to and it's an awful symptom of what appears to me to be so compromising about online platforms as they currently function that I've fallen victim to this incentive before I'm out of the first paragraph.

Turns out the author is not making the case that The Untranslated or Dalkey or New Directions are cringe - an alarming number of people I meet in my day to day regard the idea of reading a book as, at best eccentric, at worst an implicit judgement on their intelligence, I think going after the few (for now) sustainable outlets responsible for disseminating works outside the norms of commercial literary fiction is kicking over a sandcastle - rather he's going after a subsection of the contemporary literary critical ecosystem that does not know very much about Soviet and post-Soviet history and a tendency to regard things published outside Western Europe as 'world literature' and I think this is fair enough, we should all know more about Soviet and post-Soviet history.

I haven't read the new Krasznahorkai. I thought Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance were fine, a bit overwrought, but I think Tarr's adaptations are really brilliant and you should watch them and not think about it what it says about you as a person as you do it.