Taylor Swift is a "Pentagon asset"

[Celerity]

24. The Multiplying 'Philip Roths'

Has the celebrated author become better known for his persona than for what he wrote?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-multiplying-philip-roths/ar-AA1mtcAk



In “Borges and I,” a classic page-long story by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer presents the reader with a conundrum: How are we to distinguish between Borges, the living, breathing human being, and the affected and somewhat dandyish persona his writings have helped create? Although the two do share certain tastes and characteristics, it’s “the other one” who has a “perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things,” Borges writes.

Ultimately, the author concludes that, though he is mortal, this writerly projection of himself is the one that will endure.“I do not know,” the essay concludes, “which of us has written this page.”

Something of this strange dilemma—untangling who an artist actually is from the inflated version of himself he creates on the page—comes to mind while reading Julius Taranto’s How I Won a Nobel Prize. His novel is a gleefully irreverent satire of so-called cancel culture, virtue signaling, and early-21st-century hypocrisy set largely on the campus of the Rubin Institute, a fictional center of higher learning staffed by an intellectually gifted but morally bereft faculty that has been shunned by former employers and at Rubin can pursue both research and perversions with impunity.

Here, Helen, a brilliant young physicist, arrives with her skeptical and performatively “woke” husband, Hew, to work on a superconductor project alongside her graduate adviser, Perry Smoot, who was exiled from Cornell after violating the university’s code of conduct, i.e. sleeping with a student. Though indisputably a genius, Smoot, Taranto writes, “was as dumb as anyone, apparently, when it came to sex.” For her part, Helen is guilty only of the crime of remaining in the academy, doomed to follow her adviser to the one suspect institution still willing to employ him.

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