Pillow book crap

[petronia]

An episode of Nana talks about close friends and lovers picking up speech patterns from each other, and how this can be disconcerting sometimes. It's one of those moments of emotional realism that make the manga. There's the process of differentiation whereby A becomes the [insert social role] of the group and B the [other role], but at the same time your friends work their way into your habits of speech - as much to say, your patterns of thought - so that A finds herself saying (and thinking) what B would say (and think). To some extent you become one another, like bacteria swapping memetic material in lieu of genetic.

Obviously this happens on LJ too. XD I was thinking about this because the honesty meme told me a couple of times that I was pretentious. I don't particularly worry about this but it made me remember that I used to feel a number of people among my flisters were pretentious. It never made me stop reading anyone permanently, I think, and eventually I stopped feeling that way, which is interesting because I don't think any of the people in question changed their blogging style appreciably. It could well be that I started to blog more like them (hence the intro paragraph). It was truly a subjective feeling, and very difficult to define. I don't think it's that I perceived the persons to be self-aggrandizing or snobbish, or even that I felt personally excluded because they were posting re: "difficult"/intellectual/obscure topics I hadn't swotted up on. But there was a sense that they were being disingenuous - that they knew, or ought to know, that their audience weren't going to engage with what they were saying (it's much more a question of engaging than understanding), and that that being the case they were being selfish by going on the way they did. That the dishonesty is of someone pretending to engage you in dialogue, when they're really not, and are aware they're not. Of course an LJ nearly always has multiple audiences, and sometimes a given post isn't for one. But some people can natter on about obscurities ad infinitum without triggering that sense of alienation. The only sure way of telling whether you've engaged your audience is if they talk back, but one can't formulate posts as if artlessly expecting a deluge of comments no matter what the topic - that makes it worse. Conversely maybe it makes it better if one baldly prefaces with a "I'm basically rambling to myself now, but..."

I'm sensitized to the above because I don't hopefully imagine that I'm not a recidivist offender in this, but it's a variable after which I grope blind. I don't know how I sound to other people, and the more people friend/read me the more tone-deaf I get. ^^; For instance sometimes I reread my old posts and comments and am horrified because I sound so smug and condescending in them, and sometimes they're fine. I'm never even conscious of feeling condescending toward anyone, but then it's not so much an emotion as an effect on others (the emotion is defensiveness, probably - this sounds very Mr. Darcy). I can also be pretty insensitive but that conversely happens in cases where I'm trying to tread lightly and say the right thing. I've never said the right thing. orz One day, but not today. I should learn to keep my mouth shut but I do enough of that already, and sometimes it's not the right thing either.

Back to the topic, anyway: it's not unrelated to the anxiety of the null set post, or maybe it is the anxiety of the null set post - you're going on and on and not only does nobody know what you're talking about, no one cares. Or maybe you're having too much fun, so much so that you don't even care anymore whether anyone else cares, and that's when people start thinking you're pretentious. Pageblank, my favorite blog du jour, notes this as the fundamental difference between geeks and hipsters - hipsters are geeks grown socially adept to the extent that they internalize "whether other people give a shit" as a tracking variable and have strategies for outflanking it, including but not limited to the preemptive attack of (the infamous hipster) ironic distance, i.e. it doesn't matter if you don't give a shit because I don't give a shit either, even if I clearly do - and everyone else knows this but it's okay because we are all in the same boat, being giant geeks, lulz and eksdee. By this metric a lot of the self-identified geeks I know are really hipsters, and some of the self-identified - not hipsters, no one self-ids as a hipster, but sophisticates - are really geeks. But I think this is, well, true. XD I sounded considerably geekier in the dawn of the Pitas age, even if I was often posting on less stereotypically geeky topics, because I had that oblivious geeky certainty that anything I thought was awesome was objectively as awesome as I thought it was. And intermingled with a lot of fangirl Japanese.

ON A RELATED TIP: if you've friended me recently (i.e. within the last several months), please say hi and tell me what you're here for! If you haven't yet and feel like it, anyway, it's not a demand. XD

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Ah, I don't think I was as clear as I could have been. XD My definition of pretension (or perceived pretentiousness) is that - by my own experience - it's a perception on the part of the reader, based at least in part on what they themselves bring to the table, regardless of what the intent or level of sincerity of the writer really is. Because you're right, in most cases there's no way of knowing for sure.

I think in situations online, many of these concepts get conflated into the one word: the bores, the snobs, the people who put on a show - they all get called "pretentious". (One of my honesty meme commenters said, "Either you're very pretentious or I'm not smart enough to understand your fic," which is not a true dichotomy. XD But what s/he means, I think, is "Either you're being deliberately obscure for the sake of perceived intellectualism, or it's not deliberate on your part and thus the fault of failing to engage rests with me." The onus falls on the intent, as it were, even if IMO there's no "fault" to be assigned when a reader fails to engage with a text.

Though, I don't even know how it's possible to write fic to be obscure for the sake of snobbishness - obscurity for the sake of covering up one's own known weaknesses as a writer, sure, but.)

When I say the only way of knowing if you're engaging your audience is if they comment back, I meant from the POV of the writer: if three people have a constructive response to your post, then at least three people out of [however many] don't think you're being a pretentious twat, which is reassuring. XD Someone else may be lurking and thinking all four of you are pretentious twats, but you can only worry about so much in life.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Eh, well, if it's perceived pretentiousness, then of course it matters what the reader is seeing, but what is it that the reader believes that they are seeing? That's what I find unclear. They believe that they are seeing an intent or a level or sincerity, in my opinion.

Wouldn't be the first time that people online have conflated these words. But IMHO, given this thread and the varying responses, I am not sure others share your idea of pretension. For example, considering that commenter, she didn't say "and I knew she was being pretentious because no one else commented on that story." So therefore in terms of the perception from the reader's POV, the fact that other people engaged was not meaningful. From the author's POV, maybe yes, but IMHO that doesn't change the situation, especially because there are other reasons they might not have commented. (Simply because you don't understand something and thus don't want to comment, does not mean you think it is pretentious... )

I think it is possible to be obscure for the sake of snobbishness in writing fanfiction.... why wouldn't it be?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Have to run but - yes, that's exactly what I'm saying, whether other people engage/comment is not meaningful from the reader's POV. It's not part of my "definition" of pretension. I'm only talking about the writer's kimochi, there. XD

Eh, I just think from a practical point of view it's introducing difficulties I can't imagine any fiction writer would want to deal with!

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

I see, but I guess I don't see it because when I don't get comments, it usually can be most reasonably traced to an issue that I don't consider has anything to do with pretension. For example, have you tried reviewing books that no one on your flist has read or has ever heard of? Then people have nothing to say because they a) have not read the book, b) were not considering reading it. Whereas, I could write something much more out there about a book that everyone knows about, say HP. But this has no bearing on how pretentious I was about either. I could write the most workman like thing about the obscure book, and still no one would respond.

? Do you mean that no fiction writer would want to be obscure for snobbishness's sake, or no fanfiction writer would? I can see it. If they are trying to write only for a select group, or if they want to have the satisfaction of those they see as the hoi polloi be unable to understand it.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yes, but in that case you wouldn't even be worried about seeming pretentious, unless you objectively think that the reason no one in your audience would consider reading the book is that it's more difficult/obscure/literary than they would enjoy. Actually, you wouldn't worry about seeming pretentious anyway unless you were prone to second-guessing yourself, and I don't think you normally do. XD (What _debbiechan_ refers to above, "smart people who hide their Proust behind the Ladies Home Journal".)

See, my point isn't so much that this is what "pretentiousness" means to everyone - I was trying to define what it means to me, or rather what it is I experienced on the occasions when I felt someone was being pretentious. And it's a very solipsistic, irrational thing, along the order of:

1) I feel that I'm representative of your target audience (for whatever reason - I'm in your current fandom and your LJ is primarily fannish, I'm in the social circle you often address, etc.).

2) Your post is overly difficult and/or obscure for your target audience, i.e. me. And since I am your target audience, you ought to know this - oughtn't you?

So you know - "Christ, Code Geass is a sparkly crack-filled mecha anime, why do you talk about it with words like Derrida and post-colonialism that mean nothing to me in this context?" Like, the person may actually be full of hot gas, or they might have a theory on Geass that legitimately invokes Derrida etc. in their head and it makes sense to them, but it makes no difference to you because as far as you're concerned, they've failed to communicate. And someone who talks without communicating is either a bore or trying to make themselves look good.

Of course, faced with this same situation someone else could just as well have an opposite emotional reaction, which is "OMG, I feel so dumb compared to this person and unworthy to comment on their LJ, they'll just think I'm stupid." And people say this to me too, in honesty meme-type contexts. XD;

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

I have to say, my natural reaction is to think that someone who posts on and on about something without an interlocutor, if I bother to have any opinion, is a bore rather than pretentious. XD If they were pretentious, they'd have some regard for their audience and would be entertaining. Isn't there a group of people whom the pretentious wish to impress and thus garner comments from? It just seems... an awful lot of work to write a gigantic post that is simply designed to overawe the target audience who won't understand what it means anyway.

I suppose with me it's that I feel that I can never accurately believe that I am the target audience (unless I know all people on their flist); after all, often posts that don't make sense tend to be from discussions on other LJs or chats. (So would 'I was talking to soandso about blah blah, and so I wrote this post after thinking about it..' also be a prophylactic?) But then you're saying that in that situation, if someone else commented, you would then have proof that you were in fact not the target audience of that post.

(But now I am vaaaastly curious as to who just these people are so that I can see these baffling posts for myself to see what reaction I would have. )