"No one is reading WBE and thinking, “ah yes, I too quit my job and drive across the country on a regular basis, he is so much like me, I enjoy seeing my petty habits reflected back at me, how familiar and comfortable!”"
Your belief that WBE is unique and breaking trends just highlights how sheltered your own views are. The United States of America is chock full of men just like WBE: vagabonds, drug addicts who drive around to fuck women and enjoy a life entirely full of immediate stimuli. The only difference WBE has from these men is that he writes about his experiences.
These men are repulsive not just because they violate social norms and taboos, but because a carnie is just a inherently repulsive character. Someone who refuses to live in one place lest their actions give them a poor reputation, who lives off of donations from equally repulsive people trying to live out a fantasy of hurting their enemies, is just hard to like. Not equivalent to an ugly bag boy, but very similar.
"So long as WBE annoys the floofy normal-one-havers, I stand with him."
This is the kind of approach that inspires and elevates the insipid banana taped to a wall, Duchamp's urinal, the performance art of fat, ugly women screeching while blood drips from their legs, every worthless Banksy of the world . If your moral compass is solely aligned with pissing on the mean, stodgy conservatives, rather than The Good, The True, and The Beautiful, then guys like WBE is all you will get: people with no real artistry who are praised precisely for having no real artistry.
Criticism of WBE seems to be rooted in the belief that his readers are too simple/stupid/evil to understand what they are reading. Instead of letting WBE be its own “thing”, to exist purely a book and to be read purely from the POV of experiencing the author’s writing, they twist themselves in knots by taking to so seriously and trying to explain their discomfort.
Many people who know me would be surprised that I enjoyed it and consider one of my favorites of the year, but I also just WBE be its own thing and appreciated his need to reject social norms however both from an innate hunger for the ill defined “something” and pure selfish laziness.
I don't read WBE because I find his stuff boring and eye roll inducing. It's like listening to someone overshare all the mundane, embarrassing details of their petty lives. You meet these psychological casualties everywhere and you give them false encouragement and a wry smile and move on without ever thinking about them again. Maybe it's because I rolled off of a mountain in an ATV a few days ago, maybe its the countless other times I have faced death without consequence, but I find stories about straddling defenseless women and the trauma of self depreciation neither morally outrageous, stomach turning, nor titilating.
"No one is reading WBE and thinking, “ah yes, I too quit my job and drive across the country on a regular basis, he is so much like me, I enjoy seeing my petty habits reflected back at me, how familiar and comfortable!”"
Your belief that WBE is unique and breaking trends just highlights how sheltered your own views are. The United States of America is chock full of men just like WBE: vagabonds, drug addicts who drive around to fuck women and enjoy a life entirely full of immediate stimuli. The only difference WBE has from these men is that he writes about his experiences.
These men are repulsive not just because they violate social norms and taboos, but because a carnie is just a inherently repulsive character. Someone who refuses to live in one place lest their actions give them a poor reputation, who lives off of donations from equally repulsive people trying to live out a fantasy of hurting their enemies, is just hard to like. Not equivalent to an ugly bag boy, but very similar.
"So long as WBE annoys the floofy normal-one-havers, I stand with him."
This is the kind of approach that inspires and elevates the insipid banana taped to a wall, Duchamp's urinal, the performance art of fat, ugly women screeching while blood drips from their legs, every worthless Banksy of the world . If your moral compass is solely aligned with pissing on the mean, stodgy conservatives, rather than The Good, The True, and The Beautiful, then guys like WBE is all you will get: people with no real artistry who are praised precisely for having no real artistry.
Real
How does WBE compare to David Foster Wallace or Chuck Palahniuk? I stopped reading his stuff because it was repetitive and I was bored by it.
Stumbled across this article. He seems to be Redscare Tucker Max.
Criticism of WBE seems to be rooted in the belief that his readers are too simple/stupid/evil to understand what they are reading. Instead of letting WBE be its own “thing”, to exist purely a book and to be read purely from the POV of experiencing the author’s writing, they twist themselves in knots by taking to so seriously and trying to explain their discomfort.
Many people who know me would be surprised that I enjoyed it and consider one of my favorites of the year, but I also just WBE be its own thing and appreciated his need to reject social norms however both from an innate hunger for the ill defined “something” and pure selfish laziness.
God dammit DLA, now I have to re-subscribe to WBE 😡
I don't read WBE because I find his stuff boring and eye roll inducing. It's like listening to someone overshare all the mundane, embarrassing details of their petty lives. You meet these psychological casualties everywhere and you give them false encouragement and a wry smile and move on without ever thinking about them again. Maybe it's because I rolled off of a mountain in an ATV a few days ago, maybe its the countless other times I have faced death without consequence, but I find stories about straddling defenseless women and the trauma of self depreciation neither morally outrageous, stomach turning, nor titilating.
Nice, now do Nutcrankr.
Sometimes DLA just has to get the coal out of his system