Death Disco 2012

[koganbot]

Embedding this just because I think it's brilliantly great, and to see if it gets a rise out of arbitrary_greay. Also, the Dead Lester thread is getting close to where LiveJournal does that horrible thing of collapsing subthreads on us, so if you have any more responses to what's on that thread, I suggest you do so on this one.

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Comments

[maura.livejournal.com]

For real. That argument basically = "How dare time be a limited resource," which is a topic you might have to take up with a higher power.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

You're both misunderstanding what I meant, though perhaps I was unclear.

"Sustain an intellectual conversation," as I understand it, is a concerted individual and collaborative effort that in part requires incentives and in part requires the right "space" and "rules," both in quotation marks. What's missing is not only the incentives (rent-paying), but also a consensus for how such conversations can happen, which may be lacking because so few people can get together in a way that makes "sustain an intellectual conversation" a priority. There's no "field." There's no

Maura and Katherine, it is not either of your "jobs" to sustain an intellectual conversation. Nor are either of you personally incapable of doing it, not by a long shot, and if this is how you've interpreted what I've been saying, then I should re-phrase it or reiterate my meaning. But it is true that there aren't models of sustained intellectual conversation within rock criticism, and the question is "why not?" -- "because no one will pay me" might be a valid reason, but the question here is whether it is the only reason.

[katherineonlj.livejournal.com]

Why are you telling me what my job is? I think that's something more suited to my boss, editor or -- if it concerns what semblance I have of spare time -- myself.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

I don't quite see what was wrong with the original statement? I come home from a regular workday, plop down in from the of the computer, browse through my usual fandom haunts, and perhaps someone's started a new discussion, or a reply has been made to something I said in a discussion.

And usually in the case of a regular workday's aftermath, I read through the discussion/reply, and some thoughts may even start churning in my brain in response, but most of the time I will lack the energy to organize them or track down the references I'm thinking of, much less start writing down the thoughts with wording to my satisfaction.
At least, not while there's more immediate gratification aspects of fandom still out there. (ie consumption of fandom materials rather than producing) Not to mention the good replies usually take an hour to write and even more to track down the references as I let myself wiki walk during the latter. Three to five hours on a single response while the rest of fandom marches on? I'll leave it to the weekend. And then the weekend arrives, and I've got non-fandom activities planned away from internet, and then fandom has marched on and there's even more material to consume...

[petronia.livejournal.com]

(Responding in this thread because I know you and Frank both can see it this way, standard disclaimer re: awfulness of conversing on Tumblr etc.)

I think the problem is the assumption that if you don't have the time/resources, you must not be "getting enough out of the intellectual conversation" (joy in discovery, etc.) to prioritize it over your current use of time/resources, and thus you can't really be taking it seriously. Which, yes, can come across as pretty condescending. I don't think it's what Dave means, although it's a standard way academics and un-/under-employed deep thinkers can condescend to the employed. :P

Personally, I make no bones about it: I'm very scattered in my interests and have a remunerative and time-sucking day job. Nine times out of ten, I do deprioritize intellectual conversation because relatively speaking, there's less in it for me than something else I could be doing. But I barely play a critic on the Internet, let alone am one - I've merely reached the point where I want to measure my non-fiction writing against pro standards rather than amateur ones. The only thing I feel bad about is leaving the other person(s) in the conversation hanging, not whether I'm taken seriously.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

'Course I said the opposite of that -- that lots and lots and lots of people in my orbit consistently take music criticism seriously, but that there are other issues about what to do with all of those people taking things seriously without any sense of going somewhere with it. (I still feel comfortable blaming context and lack of time/resources, though. It's been the thing that's pushed me out of conversations, when I'm pushed out of them.)