I dunno RC, is it bad that I've never read Ulysses? Probably. But as for Apocalypse Now -- well, I doubt you would experience it as dull and dated. It's pretty powerfully dark, and sometimes powerfully darkly funny, in a way that stands the test of time, I think. And it might scratch some irritated-at-Teach itch in your still-healing post-Teach-reading neural pathways. And if it did then watching it would enable us to snark together about Teach. Dunno whether all that adds up to enuf reasons for you to watch the thing though.
Not that we can't snark at teach, but I think you are basically right in guessing my teach neurons are pretty bare right now. I need a break for teach-esque things.
Re: book club emails, you could check out what Freddie DeBoer does, he has multiple types of emails (including a book club) and you can opt in to the ones you are interested in receiving, so you could receive only regular posts, only book club posts, or both.
Might be a better experience than having people check the site manually.
Wait, you agree that the experience of this book is "Slowly getting beat to death spiritually"? It's rare for someone to align with me on that cleanly.
I'm going to be honest: So am I. But as your humble servant, I'll do my best to explain what I'm seeing.
So to set the stage, imagine you are reading this book, and you are only at page 138 or so. You already aren't having a good time, but you come across this line:
** "Your analysis is anachronistic, back then infanticide was far more acceptable than incest. And can you not call people retarded?" I'll stop calling people retarded if you stop calling your condiment bucket a salad. **
And it's not the first time TLP has insulted the reader in the book, but it IS the first time that he's taken a stab at how they eat salad specifically. You note it as an odd thing, but at the same time you don't have any way to tell what he's actually pissed about here. Does he think people are fat, and this is a jab at that? Is he a foodie, or just hates salad dressing? You can't know, so you move on.
Something like a month of suffering later, you get to page 828. You are exhausted, because Teach has been grinding the same unsupported (not necessarily untrue, mind you, just merely asserted) concept for 800 pages. He's written the same book four times. Your very soul is desperate for him to do something different, anything at all.
And then he gives you a salad recipe. It looks fine. It's a salad. It's literally a salad recipe, I don't want to type it out but just imagine a normal salad of the type that might have canned beans, herbs and cheese in addition to the leafy stuff. It has cheese, avocados, meat and olive oil (all fatty, note), and it has a ton of herbs for flavor. But note that despite having a bunch of the stuff you put in salad dressing, it doesn't have a dressing in the sense that you'd squeeze it out of a bottle.
He then calls you fat again.
He then slips in that, yeah, this is sort of a lot of salad, but bear in mind if you must know he lifts weights:
** I need to eat a lot, I deadlift. Two times my body weight for 10 or eight times my age for 2 if I want to impress my reflection. Double overhand, no straps, I don't want a bicep tear and I need the grip strength for strangling. **
Note that my best friend is a powerlifter; I myself am more of a power typer, but I've hung out with him enough to know this is legitimate lingo, Teach probably does actually lift weights. And he needs you to know it.
He then goes on to say he used to eat a processed lunch, then got wise to it:
** No person reading this description will think this is a delicious lunch. You won't want to make it, let alone eat it. I was the same way. I used to want something tasty, prepared by an expert, whose ingredients I could disavow. I always got what I paid for, nothing more, nothing less. **
He then says the secret to eating this and enjoying it is never snacking, says if you don't snack it's good and you love it but if you eat a snack you won't be able to eat it at all.
If this is getting long, I apologize.
So anyway, after this he launches into a long explanation of why selected every single ingredient, all the spices and herbs and stuff. This is weird-ish, but the weirder part is this: he has various spices, herbs, cheese, and olive oil in the salad. He justifies
You might note that this part of his list sounds a lot like a recipe for salad dressing; he's made tasty fatty fat-juice. If you count the half of an avocado he has in there, what he's made is actually technically dip. I'm not getting down on it, it's salad dressing, it's relatively normal to have it. But then he says this:
** I don't use condiments except lemon, it has to work on its own. You can make something taste better, but you can not make it better. Most sauces are added to things that are terrible or terribly prepared, stop drowning your apathy in flavors. **
And you realize, all the sudden, that what he's done is decided he's better than you (the hypothetical literary you, the one TLP's narration speaks to) because you eat salads with dressing; he, on the other hand, eats salads with dressing *that he makes himself*. Boom. He's gotcha.
Note that the whole recipe thing wouldn't be that big of a deal if he wasn't such a dick about it. It would almost be a pleasant short detour of sorts. But then you realize he's not sharing his life with you or trying to help you - he's trying to flex on you. With salad.
Then it gets into the part I quoted about concerts. It seems almost completely random, until you realize that he thinks he's just spent a chapter impressing the hell out of you with the fact that he makes his own lunch and eats it by himself instead of in the cafeteria or something.
Inside of that context, it isn't random anymore; he just spent several pages explaining how special his salad is, and now he's really grinding in the point of what a free-thinking rebel that proves him to be because he approaches concerts with all the uncomfortable stand-offishness of me in Jr High refusing to swim if I wasn't wearing a shirt.
The normal disclaimers apply here. There are a lot of people coming to me and asserting some variation of "listen, you don't understand - this is obviously some kind of genius misdirection, such as Machiavelli himself could only dream of pulling off". So your mileage may vary.
I'm here far too late (got linked by a link in ACX "links for June") to make this point but having read everything I can about Sadly, Porn (without even considering buying it) I am positively appalled to find that this comment about salad makes more sense on a surface level than anything else I've heard from it -- the kind of people who like to deadlift overlap to some extent with people who know that the thing that's bad about bottled salad dressings is the emulsifier, not the fat. They also significantly overlap with the people who have intentionally reprogrammed their food preferences so as to be able bulk and cut more easily. Part of this reprogramming is rotating through different combinations of a restricted set of relatively-inexpensive ingredients.
Suddenly reimagining TLP as a deadlifter who cares about his gut microbiome leaves me shocked.
There's no "far too late" when I get email notifications - I'm there for it.
Needed context for talking about the salad thing: People will (or would, back when I wrote this) often internet-approach me and explain very slowly that I was dense, and had missed the real and obvious interpretation of Teach's work, which is X. And then the next day someone would come and tell me I had missed the real and obvious interpretation, which was Y, where X /= Y AT ALL.
My response to all these claims was always "Well, maybe; it's possible". It had to be, because his work is so meaningless/garbled/impenetrably that literally nobody knows what it's about - I suspect including Teach himself.
Then I got to the salad thing.
The salad thing is just as you say - it's something any powerlifter might have written. It's in the same basic prose style as Ted Nugent talking about his wife cooking things. It's jock-poetry. It's about salad, it's tonally presented as a weird flex, and it has no bearing on any other part of the book at all.
I have no idea what to make of it. If I was absolutely gun-to-my-head forced to guess, I'd say he probably wrote it for some other purpose, added it in while high, and then forgot it was there. But there's absolutely no telling.
I'm confident that eventually someone will come in and tell me that it's clear and obvious that Teach was talking about salad for obvious kaballistic reasons that I just missed - I'm sort of hoping there will only be one of them, and I can just arbitrarily decided to believe that one explanation.
I've kept the notification of this reply of yours in my inbox for over a year. Meanwhile, I have made a genuine effort to equate myself more closely with Lacanian thought. I got a bit distracted the last nine months or so mining a much more fruitful vein of psychological inquiry.
My briefest possible summary is that I am fairly sure that Teach was more right about the nature of desire than I was willing to admit last year.
Do you think perhaps that this is all a really excessive illustration of the thing he was always saying on his old blog "Who I am doesn't matter"? Like, the idea is to rile people up over personal disclosures that may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the reality of who he actually is, just to show how butthurt people can get over even the concept of someone else acting like they are better than the reader? Or acting as though their assessments of his personality could possibly have anything to do with the truth value of what he's saying?
Even if that's so, it's an absurdly counterproductive thing to do that just muddles everything, because even then, if it's all supposed to be about how profoundly unimportant his actual identity is over the quality of his arguments, it's still on the same level as the arguments he's making--spurious and uncited and reliant on imbuing all he says with a certain attitude. Therefore, utterly, irredeemably worthless to anyone actually interested in any form of what could be considered self-improvement.
"There are a lot of people coming to me and asserting some variation of "listen, you don't understand - this is obviously some kind of genius misdirection."
On Astral Codex Ten somebody's recently put a post up saying you have to read Lacan first to *really get* what Teach is saying. I grumbled back that Lacan was a Gaussian blur that made Teach look better.
The most confusing part about that is that if you take it all as true and face value, what you are left with is this thing where Teach wrote a book that doesn't have all the gears it needs to make the clock turn.
"This book isn't something you can understand unless you've read a bunch of obscure books nobody has read" isn't a good look! It means you didn't do your one job!
I think there's a class of person for whom "difficult" means good, by default. And difficult isn't necessarily bad, but I sort of want to lock them in a room with an NES and a copy of Rygar (or whatever) until they realize that sometimes difficult is just "should have been easier, shame it's not".
I think that "difficult = good" when you want/need to challenge yourself (e.g. if you want to be better at something, then at some point you will have to do a not-easy version of the thing) but otherwise I can't think of any instances where difficulty is unambiguously good rather than, at best, "not bad."
(I exclude cases where people find difficulty to be enjoyable for its own sake, since this belongs to a general class of "things which aren't generally good but which people can come to enjoy for their own sake." Stabbing yourself is not virtuous, but some masochists find joy in stabbing themselves and, so long as they're stabbing themselves in a safe and informed manner, I don't really have a problem with it. But we shouldn't take that to mean that stabbing ourselves is great after all, and to the extent that we enjoy a thing solely because it is difficult, and not because we're excited about improving or whatever, this is basically just stabbing ourselves with our brains.)
I don't actually know how to make salad anymore, to be honest. I married a really talented woman and then we both got really, really into efficient division of labor in a comparative advantage way. I can no longer make a grilled cheese. If she dies I die.
Clearly, the "Astral Codex Ten" guy hates you.
My review of the book in question might be shorter: "Sadly, not porn".
Do you mean because he compelled me to finish writing the thing, and thus having to read it again?
Yes.
As far as I know any suffering Scott inflicted on me was on accident, but yeah, this book burned my soul.
You only say that to convince yourself you can take action.
(I can feel the residual heat.)
Figured out who Teach reminds me of: Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.
Is it bad that I've never actually seen that movie?
I dunno RC, is it bad that I've never read Ulysses? Probably. But as for Apocalypse Now -- well, I doubt you would experience it as dull and dated. It's pretty powerfully dark, and sometimes powerfully darkly funny, in a way that stands the test of time, I think. And it might scratch some irritated-at-Teach itch in your still-healing post-Teach-reading neural pathways. And if it did then watching it would enable us to snark together about Teach. Dunno whether all that adds up to enuf reasons for you to watch the thing though.
Not that we can't snark at teach, but I think you are basically right in guessing my teach neurons are pretty bare right now. I need a break for teach-esque things.
Re: book club emails, you could check out what Freddie DeBoer does, he has multiple types of emails (including a book club) and you can opt in to the ones you are interested in receiving, so you could receive only regular posts, only book club posts, or both.
Might be a better experience than having people check the site manually.
That's a good idea. I think I even know how to do that; I'll try to work it out before this launches.
Wait, you agree that the experience of this book is "Slowly getting beat to death spiritually"? It's rare for someone to align with me on that cleanly.
I'm going to be honest: So am I. But as your humble servant, I'll do my best to explain what I'm seeing.
So to set the stage, imagine you are reading this book, and you are only at page 138 or so. You already aren't having a good time, but you come across this line:
** "Your analysis is anachronistic, back then infanticide was far more acceptable than incest. And can you not call people retarded?" I'll stop calling people retarded if you stop calling your condiment bucket a salad. **
And it's not the first time TLP has insulted the reader in the book, but it IS the first time that he's taken a stab at how they eat salad specifically. You note it as an odd thing, but at the same time you don't have any way to tell what he's actually pissed about here. Does he think people are fat, and this is a jab at that? Is he a foodie, or just hates salad dressing? You can't know, so you move on.
Something like a month of suffering later, you get to page 828. You are exhausted, because Teach has been grinding the same unsupported (not necessarily untrue, mind you, just merely asserted) concept for 800 pages. He's written the same book four times. Your very soul is desperate for him to do something different, anything at all.
And then he gives you a salad recipe. It looks fine. It's a salad. It's literally a salad recipe, I don't want to type it out but just imagine a normal salad of the type that might have canned beans, herbs and cheese in addition to the leafy stuff. It has cheese, avocados, meat and olive oil (all fatty, note), and it has a ton of herbs for flavor. But note that despite having a bunch of the stuff you put in salad dressing, it doesn't have a dressing in the sense that you'd squeeze it out of a bottle.
He then calls you fat again.
He then slips in that, yeah, this is sort of a lot of salad, but bear in mind if you must know he lifts weights:
** I need to eat a lot, I deadlift. Two times my body weight for 10 or eight times my age for 2 if I want to impress my reflection. Double overhand, no straps, I don't want a bicep tear and I need the grip strength for strangling. **
Note that my best friend is a powerlifter; I myself am more of a power typer, but I've hung out with him enough to know this is legitimate lingo, Teach probably does actually lift weights. And he needs you to know it.
He then goes on to say he used to eat a processed lunch, then got wise to it:
** No person reading this description will think this is a delicious lunch. You won't want to make it, let alone eat it. I was the same way. I used to want something tasty, prepared by an expert, whose ingredients I could disavow. I always got what I paid for, nothing more, nothing less. **
He then says the secret to eating this and enjoying it is never snacking, says if you don't snack it's good and you love it but if you eat a snack you won't be able to eat it at all.
If this is getting long, I apologize.
So anyway, after this he launches into a long explanation of why selected every single ingredient, all the spices and herbs and stuff. This is weird-ish, but the weirder part is this: he has various spices, herbs, cheese, and olive oil in the salad. He justifies
You might note that this part of his list sounds a lot like a recipe for salad dressing; he's made tasty fatty fat-juice. If you count the half of an avocado he has in there, what he's made is actually technically dip. I'm not getting down on it, it's salad dressing, it's relatively normal to have it. But then he says this:
** I don't use condiments except lemon, it has to work on its own. You can make something taste better, but you can not make it better. Most sauces are added to things that are terrible or terribly prepared, stop drowning your apathy in flavors. **
And you realize, all the sudden, that what he's done is decided he's better than you (the hypothetical literary you, the one TLP's narration speaks to) because you eat salads with dressing; he, on the other hand, eats salads with dressing *that he makes himself*. Boom. He's gotcha.
Note that the whole recipe thing wouldn't be that big of a deal if he wasn't such a dick about it. It would almost be a pleasant short detour of sorts. But then you realize he's not sharing his life with you or trying to help you - he's trying to flex on you. With salad.
Then it gets into the part I quoted about concerts. It seems almost completely random, until you realize that he thinks he's just spent a chapter impressing the hell out of you with the fact that he makes his own lunch and eats it by himself instead of in the cafeteria or something.
Inside of that context, it isn't random anymore; he just spent several pages explaining how special his salad is, and now he's really grinding in the point of what a free-thinking rebel that proves him to be because he approaches concerts with all the uncomfortable stand-offishness of me in Jr High refusing to swim if I wasn't wearing a shirt.
The normal disclaimers apply here. There are a lot of people coming to me and asserting some variation of "listen, you don't understand - this is obviously some kind of genius misdirection, such as Machiavelli himself could only dream of pulling off". So your mileage may vary.
I'm here far too late (got linked by a link in ACX "links for June") to make this point but having read everything I can about Sadly, Porn (without even considering buying it) I am positively appalled to find that this comment about salad makes more sense on a surface level than anything else I've heard from it -- the kind of people who like to deadlift overlap to some extent with people who know that the thing that's bad about bottled salad dressings is the emulsifier, not the fat. They also significantly overlap with the people who have intentionally reprogrammed their food preferences so as to be able bulk and cut more easily. Part of this reprogramming is rotating through different combinations of a restricted set of relatively-inexpensive ingredients.
Suddenly reimagining TLP as a deadlifter who cares about his gut microbiome leaves me shocked.
There's no "far too late" when I get email notifications - I'm there for it.
Needed context for talking about the salad thing: People will (or would, back when I wrote this) often internet-approach me and explain very slowly that I was dense, and had missed the real and obvious interpretation of Teach's work, which is X. And then the next day someone would come and tell me I had missed the real and obvious interpretation, which was Y, where X /= Y AT ALL.
My response to all these claims was always "Well, maybe; it's possible". It had to be, because his work is so meaningless/garbled/impenetrably that literally nobody knows what it's about - I suspect including Teach himself.
Then I got to the salad thing.
The salad thing is just as you say - it's something any powerlifter might have written. It's in the same basic prose style as Ted Nugent talking about his wife cooking things. It's jock-poetry. It's about salad, it's tonally presented as a weird flex, and it has no bearing on any other part of the book at all.
I have no idea what to make of it. If I was absolutely gun-to-my-head forced to guess, I'd say he probably wrote it for some other purpose, added it in while high, and then forgot it was there. But there's absolutely no telling.
I'm confident that eventually someone will come in and tell me that it's clear and obvious that Teach was talking about salad for obvious kaballistic reasons that I just missed - I'm sort of hoping there will only be one of them, and I can just arbitrarily decided to believe that one explanation.
I've kept the notification of this reply of yours in my inbox for over a year. Meanwhile, I have made a genuine effort to equate myself more closely with Lacanian thought. I got a bit distracted the last nine months or so mining a much more fruitful vein of psychological inquiry.
My briefest possible summary is that I am fairly sure that Teach was more right about the nature of desire than I was willing to admit last year.
Do you think perhaps that this is all a really excessive illustration of the thing he was always saying on his old blog "Who I am doesn't matter"? Like, the idea is to rile people up over personal disclosures that may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the reality of who he actually is, just to show how butthurt people can get over even the concept of someone else acting like they are better than the reader? Or acting as though their assessments of his personality could possibly have anything to do with the truth value of what he's saying?
Even if that's so, it's an absurdly counterproductive thing to do that just muddles everything, because even then, if it's all supposed to be about how profoundly unimportant his actual identity is over the quality of his arguments, it's still on the same level as the arguments he's making--spurious and uncited and reliant on imbuing all he says with a certain attitude. Therefore, utterly, irredeemably worthless to anyone actually interested in any form of what could be considered self-improvement.
It's especially interesting to compare this with the old TLP blog posts where he hates on foodie hipsters.
I'm going to have to go find this now. I swear if someone says this is evidence that he's pulling a double-bluff I'm going to scream.
"There are a lot of people coming to me and asserting some variation of "listen, you don't understand - this is obviously some kind of genius misdirection."
On Astral Codex Ten somebody's recently put a post up saying you have to read Lacan first to *really get* what Teach is saying. I grumbled back that Lacan was a Gaussian blur that made Teach look better.
The most confusing part about that is that if you take it all as true and face value, what you are left with is this thing where Teach wrote a book that doesn't have all the gears it needs to make the clock turn.
"This book isn't something you can understand unless you've read a bunch of obscure books nobody has read" isn't a good look! It means you didn't do your one job!
I think there's a class of person for whom "difficult" means good, by default. And difficult isn't necessarily bad, but I sort of want to lock them in a room with an NES and a copy of Rygar (or whatever) until they realize that sometimes difficult is just "should have been easier, shame it's not".
I think that "difficult = good" when you want/need to challenge yourself (e.g. if you want to be better at something, then at some point you will have to do a not-easy version of the thing) but otherwise I can't think of any instances where difficulty is unambiguously good rather than, at best, "not bad."
(I exclude cases where people find difficulty to be enjoyable for its own sake, since this belongs to a general class of "things which aren't generally good but which people can come to enjoy for their own sake." Stabbing yourself is not virtuous, but some masochists find joy in stabbing themselves and, so long as they're stabbing themselves in a safe and informed manner, I don't really have a problem with it. But we shouldn't take that to mean that stabbing ourselves is great after all, and to the extent that we enjoy a thing solely because it is difficult, and not because we're excited about improving or whatever, this is basically just stabbing ourselves with our brains.)
I don't actually know how to make salad anymore, to be honest. I married a really talented woman and then we both got really, really into efficient division of labor in a comparative advantage way. I can no longer make a grilled cheese. If she dies I die.