[swatcoder]

Honesty is not what the author is going for here. This is genre autofiction following a throughline of slumming, marginal artists that carries back through punk, beat, flapper, and la boheme writers.

It's entertainment, not true confession or activism, and it delights in getting under the skin of squares who can't tell.

No need to push back on the people reactively criticizing the character or writer -- that's the point.

[strken]

I really enjoyed it and it didn't get under my skin in the slightest, but the gloating about squares and true hackers on HN is annoying the hell out of me. I don't think the work delights in getting under the skin of squares, I think you delight in being cooler than the largely fictional squares you believe are being gotten at.

[mycologos]

Deliberately making art that people think sucks seems like kind of a low bar?

[NoboruWataya]

It don't think the aim was to write a piece that people think sucks, it was to write about a person who people think sucks. There is a difference, or at least there used to be: I feel like increasingly people are unable to separate the literary value of a piece from the moral value of its protagonist. This piece reminds me of Charles Bukowski's books about the "lowlife" Hank Chinaski. Another more extreme example of a good book with a shitty protagonist is Lolita, which IMO couldn't be published today or Nabokov would be shunned and ostracised as a paedophile.

(None of this is to say you need to like the blog post, you might hate it on its own merits, but I definitely think there are a lot of people here who think it's a bad piece because they disagree with the choices the protagonist makes, which I think is a very limiting view.)

[tomcam]

> It don't think the aim was to write a piece that people think sucks, it was to write about a person who people think sucks.

You're right, and it's what edgy teenagers can do in their sleep, aka middle school math class. I would much prefer he created actual art (written or visual) I could care about.

[mycologos]

Fair point. I think a lot depends on how "real" the protagonist is. I have read and enjoyed several works with protagonists who make choices that extremely different from my own. Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson comes to mind. Hardly any character in it is good or admirable, but it is written well enough to illuminate why they behave that way, and the rewards that offers. IMO, TFA doesn't pull that off.

[selimthegrim]

Disgrace got published and it wasn’t much better from that standpoint

[hackable_sand]

We're meant to judge the character in the story, but the story might suck for some as well. I personally did a double take and skimmed the unimportant bits because I loathed the character.

Imo the story could have easily been a piece of poetry and I would probably have enjoyed it more.

[swatcoder]

Yeah, unless you can get the cool kids to think you're cool for doing it. This kind of art is a social game, not an technical craft.