Aaron’s Reviews > Both Flesh and Not: Essays > Status Update

"The sense I get from a lot of contemporary memoirs is that they have an unconscious and unacknowledged project, which is to make the memoirist seem as endlessly fascinating and important to the reader as they are to themselves."

I very rarely feel quite this connected to an expressed opinion.

... And (I claim) the metastatic efficiency with which is done so has, as cost, inevitable and dire consequences for the level of people's tastes in narrative art. For the very expectations of readers in virtue of which narrative art is art.

Man, I wish DFW was here to see TikTok. I imagine he'd feel lucky that he isn't.

And, even on a charitable account, television is a pretty low type of narrative art. It's a narrative art that strives not too change or enlighten or broaden or reorient--not necessarily even to "entertain"--but merit and always to engage, to appeal to. Its one end--openly acknowledged--is to ensure continued watching....