I feel called out by Hotel Concierge, but at the same time, I’m starting to see through HC’s and Scott’s respective writing...
I feel called out by Hotel Concierge, but at the same time, I’m starting to see through HC’s and Scott’s respective writing styles.
HC is easy. HC is channeling TLP.
Scott writes in fits and starts, and in the latest flurry he started to cut corners that laid bare the ever-same skeleton of his essays, and then he wrote posts that were just a single idea, without any additional scaffolding.
Once in a history test I wrote a nested outline at the beginning of my essay on the causes of World War One. I should have completely erased it, because I did not finish the structure in time, so I just crossed out the outline and skipped two sub-headings. My teacher knew what I had left out, and deducted points accordingly. To this day, I’m certain if the outline had been completely unreadable, not just crossed out, I would have gotten a B instead of a C. I’m not bitter about this after all these years, but there was a lesson to be learned, and I learned it: Do not make the negative space in your concept map too obvious if you want to impress people. The systematising mindset is not your friend here.
HC has ten good ideas in five posts, but only six if you don’t count duplicates, and none of these are new, not even the duplicates. I think I’m being so hard on these people because the quality of their ideas fluctuates wildly, while their writing stays the same. My writing fluctuates too. I am not a wooden persona. I am a real boy.
I think there’s a lot of similarity in the writing styles of hotelconcierge, kontextmaschine, raggedjackscarlet, TLP, and to some degree balioc (though quality varies widely.) bal said it could be called “working class intellectual”
It’s writing that’s completely secure that the author has no need to convince you, you’re here to listen or not and that’s not their problem. It’s cynical about almost every political movement, and looks at internal sources of happiness rather than external. And it’s built on a foundation of a lot of non-topical knowledge, that makes for entertaining stories and feels less caught up in the current culture wars.
Man thinking of myself as “working class intellectual” feels all kinds of wrong, not least ‘cause in cultivating this highhanded writing voice I always thought of it as aristocratic
Though university graduate/Wikipedia-dwelling essayist Karl Marx was pretty much this exact type and if that guy doesn’t count
The concept of the “organic intellectual” might come closer, distinguishing self-selected types analyzing things as they are experienced (particularly from their structural position in society) from the credentialed intellectuals committed to The Discourse as an interpretive lens and peer group
Honestly though, “accumulating a broad store of non-topical knowledge from here, there, abroad and ago, so that you can bring it to bear on society today” really was the point of the liberal arts tradition and the public intellectual, and if it seems so alien today maybe there was something to all the fears of their decline