What an odd comment to make. His central thesis about "cleverness" allowed him to tie together a number of disparate elements. It is what writers do strive to do. If this was in the New Yorker would that confer legitimacy? That feels very elitist.
The flow of the writing reminded me a lot of Paul Graham's essays.
> tie together a number of disparate elements. It is what writers do strive to do
Very hopefully not. A game of associations ("first", "test", "try", "feel", "skin"...) is already «t[ying] together a number of disparate elements». But randomly, in idleness, possibly decadent.
Writers (should be supposed to) try to present a coherent complex idea - defending a thesis, modelling a description, disclosing potentially fruitful relations - by making its ideal structure explicit through some relatively fixed perspective form. That remains, structuring information (and in a loop of criticism checks), in a set of globally (as opposed to locally) strong relations (between the nodes). With a so implied Purpose in the statements.
Which by the way seems to have been an intended target of TFA. Compromising a lot with its enemy, though.
> Writers (should be supposed to) try to present a coherent complex idea - defending a thesis, modelling a description, disclosing potentially fruitful relations - by making its ideal structure explicit through some relatively fixed perspective form. That remains, structuring information (and in a loop of criticism checks), in a set of globally (as opposed to locally) strong relations (between the nodes). With a so implied Purpose in the statements.
I remember reading something similar from an old Ernest Hemingway interview.
Does anyone who knows what I'm talking about have a link?
I'd like just to specify that I composed that paragraph on the spot. Rem tene, verba sequentur.
If Hemingway said something similar, I'd say it is not specifically because great minds think alike - also that -, but because we described the same thing. There is an infinite number of ways to describe, say, a glass through «relatively fixed perspective form[s]», but a pretty limited number of «ideal structure[s]» pertaining.
Well, since I in fact have written it from scratch, as an original - though saying nothing new but an actual state of things -, please do find the exact quotation, so we will wonder upon the "magic" that allegedly happened.
Incidentally: I checked earlier, because I was intrigued - though probably "«for different reasons»", i.e. to compare the views - and I could not find it. I saw that there exists an "Hemingway on Writing", 2019. But I do not know. I admit I never read Hemingway (owing to queues). Though I can guess we have pretty different styles: syntactic vs paratactic.
Edit: but if that "magic" happened - /if/ -, I know the trick, and I can already tell you (rephrasing what written before): if, e.g., "a circumference is the set of points equidistant from a centre", the ways in which you can say that idea will collapse into that.
Further edit: although, if the equivalence were there word by word for that deontic definition of writing, I'd turn to the supernatural.
If it was in the New Yorker, it would be grounded much better. It would include an interview with an academic invested in the subject, or a profile on someone in the news (but not too popular!), or frame it through the writer's home life.
That confers legitimacy in a way that a frozen block of quotes does not.
Same thing with Paul Graham. He actually did things, and wove those experiences into his writing. The exact same thoughts coming from nobody mean a hell of a lot less.
Maybe it's embarrassing to interview a guy from down the street instead of a professor at Columbia, or have anecdotes from the local supermarket instead of a brownstone on the Upper East Side.
Still, anything is better than hiding behind a solid wall of references. Let a little light in! Reassure me that the author's not dead!
The flow of the writing reminded me a lot of Paul Graham's essays.