I hadn't considered the possibility that Freddie is a conscious troll in the ogged vein. I'm still skeptical. He just seems like an asshole to me.
I meant that if I'd left things about Coates as stated in my first paragraph, it would have been trolling.
I would have put Freddie down as a conscious troll, but not one whose work bears comparison to ogged's. No comparison in terms of either technique or attitude.
I like TNC's writing, but I have no taste, so that doesn't really prove anything.
You know who's just straight up not a good writer, despite his superficial fluency with the language? Yes, that's right, Freddie de Boer. Is he, perhaps, the anti-Coates(-as-perceived-by-ogged; I don't really have an opinion about the quality of Coates' writing) in that regard? Shitty temperament, inability to gauge his audience or modulate his tone ever, apparent total lack of self-awareness combined with preening self-concern.
Freddie is a "conscious troll" in the sense of "conscious hip hop". He's a troll for a cause.
I think I said "huffy sanctimony" the last time deboer came up, and this is the first I've read him since then. Seems right!
If he really did come in for condemnation for that first linked piece, though, that's pretty weird, since it's innocuous-to-positive on the subject of Coates.
The slap at Coates' commenters could not unreasonably be taken as a veiled slap at Coates. "Oh, I think you're a good writer. Anyone else who likes your work, though, they're all pathetic losers creepily seeking absolution."
It's not an explicit slam at Coates, but one wouldn't have to be terribly sensitive to take it as such.
I don't think I've ever read anything by FdB, I've only heard of him as someone who trolls LGM.
WTF, NYT just put Krugman's entire blog behind their firewall? Which is bullshit because I actually have free access through work but it means I have to non-split VPN to get to it.
Both reading a very positive review of Coates' latest book and seeing this here thing brought to mind your lament about a missed opportunity for your return-to-the-blog FPP:
I wanted my first post back to be something like TNC Sucks and It Says Something Horrible About White People That He's So Prominent, but it was too much work to do right, which is how it would have to be done. I guess I settled for Obama Sucks. Both of which I believe, but both of which are "trolling" as it's defined here.
WTF, NYT just put Krugman's entire blog behind their firewall?
Wait, what? That's the only part of the NYT I make an effort to read. Boooo!
What he has is a first-class temperament
First Obama, now Coates. "First-class temperament" might be the new "articulate."
So, should I read some James Baldwin?
I must have at some point, but not a whole novel.
Second me. But I'm articulate and have a first-rate mind.
Freddie is great at the unpopular task of pointing out when people whining about being oppressed, especially in the world of pop culture, are in fact in a position of dominance and just love the idea of being oppressed. However, as he gets more of a following by doing this, he has corresponding spent more and more time whining about being oppressed. The moral is that imagining yourself as a brave iconoclast is a basic moral failing that we can all fall prey to, like envy or sloth, and it becomes more of a risk the more people know your name.
apparent total lack of self-awareness combined with preening self-concern
Exactly.
If he really did come in for condemnation for that first linked piece, though, that's pretty weird, since it's innocuous-to-positive on the subject of Coates.
Someone can articulate a position that I am broadly sympathetic to, but still do so with a total lack of self-awareness combined with preening self-concern.
For instance:
Though I am one of the only writers I can think of who has publicly criticized Coates,
Freddie is one of the only writers he can think of, period, full stop. Coates catches plenty of flak. Jon Chait is only the most obvious example.
I think you should take a writer for his writing, and I think if you want the comparison to mean something, you've got to say whether you think Coates the writer is like Baldwin the writer. Otherwise, you're left with a pretty cruel kind of abstraction.
The prick expends 800 words on the subject of Coates as a writer, and on comparing Coates to Baldwin, without ever departing from abstraction or actually comparing Coates in any substantive way with Baldwin.
De Boer expends more words on AO Scott's tweet than AO Scott did, and still says less than Scott, and does so more clumsily.
I find his essays interesting and engaging, but unlike AO Scott, I don't find it as essential as water or air.
I dare you to find me the the antecedent for "it" in that sentence. Scott, of course, is expressing his admiration for a specific essay, but de Boer incoherently suggests that Scott is talking about all of Coates' work. (Or, incoherence being what it is, maybe de Boer himself is talking about that one specific essay, and not "his essays.")
Christ, what an asshole.
15, 17: But FDR passed as white.
the unpopular task of pointing out when people whining about being oppressed, especially in the world of pop culture, are in fact in a position of dominance and just love the idea of being oppressed.
Unpopular task? You need to get out more, Pauline.
I feel like I just missed the moment when Ta Nehisi Coates went from "nice, earnest, genial guy who has a pleasingly humble writing style, good childhood anecdotes, and is teaching himself about the Civil War" to "next James Baldwin, the great pessimistic voice of black America." Like, I like him and his work and this isn't in any way a bag on him. But it just simply would never have occurred to me that anyone at all would put him in the latter category. Until this latest round of stuff came out I honestly had no idea that people thought of him in that way. I guess I've mostly read his blogging and not his longer essays, and not the new book.
I'm not going to comment because I feel so guilty about what I might comment. Racism is bad.
I guess part (maybe most) of it is that we're in a moment where there's been a sudden upsurge in worry about black America among whites, and Coates doesn't really have any serious competition right now in the explaining-black-America-to-upper-middlebrow-whites game. That sounds like a condescending slam on Coates but it's really not, it's genuinely extraordinarily hard for a black person to write about black America in a way that's effective for and attractive to upper-middlebrow whites and Coates (for reasons that I think Ogged identifies pretty well) has hit on a good formula for doing so.
I didn't know James Baldwin, and you, sir, are no James Baldwin, or maybe you are, I don't know.
That FdB character seems like an tosser of the "Every day is Freshman Week somewhere, so let's get into a 'You haven't read ____, have you?' contest" sort. Not to be confused with the "Have you been to ____?" asshole of Freshman Weeks the world over, of course.
My impression is that the recent flurry of interest is due to well-received Between the World and Me coming out after a year or so of increasing notice starting with his "Case for Reparations" article . I assume the Baldwin stuff has come in part from BtWaM very consciously referencing Baldwin.
Though I am one of the only writers I can think of who has publicly criticized Coates...
Freddie is one of the only writers he can think of, period, full stop.
So true.
Who the hell is comparing Coates to James Baldwin, other than his critics, namely Deboer, who then find him wanting. But then Baldwin was pretty much sui generis and so Coates doesn't quite measure up. No kidding, who does? Show me something useful and interesting. Though I would venture that Coates comes closest here as as an African-American thinker and essayist in relation to his own community in his atheism.
The profile that Freddie links in his first post says that TNC (or his editor) asked Toni Morrison for a blurb and she made the Baldwin comparison (in strong terms: "I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.").
Book-blurb praise is so inflated that probably just means "better than average."
Anecdotally, I have a (black) FB friend who has described Coates as "our generation's Baldwin."
Fair enough. He certainly plays that role though he doesn't exactly fill it out, but then who can is my point.
Off to work.
Yeah, I think his point was similar to yours in 30.last regarding Coates's relationship to his own community as well as the larger society.
I endorse nosflow's shitty temperament, inability to gauge his audience or modulate his tone ever, and apparent total lack of self-awareness combined with preening self-concern. No that didn't come out right. You know what I mean. I'm not a good writer.
de Boer made that fantastic pass to Bergkamp, I'll give him that.
I have a (black) FB friend who has described Coates as "our generation's Baldwin."
He may have meant Stephen.
Fair enough, but I'm pretty sure he didn't.
I think the Baldwin comparison picked up steam when Toni Morrison made it.
Personally I like Coates because I'm know that if I were ever introduced to him he'd recognize the family name. Not that I'll ever be introduced to him.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has really made me reconsider my views on race from a different perspective and I haven't even read any of his articles. He's that good.
I don't want to give the impression by what I said above that I think little of Ta-Nehisi Coates. I think he's probably one of the most important American public intellectuals writing today.
In prior Coates/deBoer history, Coates points out on Twitter that back in 2008, when Coates got the Atlantic gig, deBoer called him out as "not ready for the majors."
The majors, I will note, being a magazine that at the time employed McMegan.
Whatever you say about Coates (IMO very good writer, both in being engaging and in bringing forward information and a POV I don't see enough of elsewhere, but yes, not the Messiah) bitching about a black writer getting a high profile gig because you think they're imperfect is pretty awful. DeBoer has a 'whoops, my bad' up on his blog, but still, the current flap isn't his first slam at Coates.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has really made me reconsider my views on race
I realize bjk is having fun with us, but Coates has prompted me to reconsider my views on race.
It's hard to defend Coates in this fashion because ingenuous expressions of admiration earn you the disdain of sophisticates such as ogged and deBoer,* who might tell you that they appreciate Coates, but the other folks who praise his work are "creepshow commenters" or "a weird groupie following."
My first draft of this comment started with the sentence, "Yeah, sure, some of the praise for Coates is overblown." I, too, struggle to keep from looking down my nose at people for their sincere good intentions and lack of guile.
*My comment at 1, and this comment, may not be clear on the fact that I view the categories of "assholes" and "oggeds" to be distinct and separate, despite their superficial similarities.
Having been fortunate enough to have been at dinner with TNC once, let me second the positive parts of what Ogged says: he is--or rather his presentation-of-self around the dinner table is very like--how he appears to be on the weblog screen. One of his great advantages is that his Sokrates-fu--knowing what he does not know, and being very eager to learn, and understanding how tentative his conclusions are--is very great. (Another is that he does not succumb to the Sokratic vice of trolling everybody all the time about everything.)
45 - And, when called on this, FdB said he was "only 26". (He apparently repeated the line on his blog in 2011; we can only presume he then judiciously stroked his beard and jauntily chuckled into his brandy snifter.)
We were all very young in 2008. Now we're all old.
Anyway, I probably read The Atlantic more than any other news source these days. Coates has a lot to do with that. Him and the now-canceled news breaking news feed.
52: You weren't lured by the Asperger's prose stylings of Conor Friedersdorf or the suffering saintliness of Noah Berlatsky?
Seriously, I like James Fallows but the Atlantic hosts a lot of droning hobbyhorsewhippers.
Well, the buttchugging article was great.
It occurs to me a person who doesn't read much below headline level on the Internet could carry the vague impression that TNC and Amy Schumer were fighting with Donald Trump about Iran.
That's what they mean by "ignorance is bliss."
Who is the James Baldwin of the 2010s?
Probably somebody whose reviewers don't parrot his/her tone and vocabulary with eerie uniformity.
Meanwhile, Freddie should really know better than to fuck with hilzoy.
We were all very young in 2008. Now we're all old.
deBoer was so much older then
he's younger than that now
Whatever you say about Coates (IMO very good writer, both in being engaging and in bringing forward information and a POV I don't see enough of elsewhere, but yes, not the Messiah) bitching about a black writer getting a high profile gig because you think they're imperfect is pretty awful.
I second LB's comment. ("_____ is doesn't write or think nearly as well as Baldwin." that is still a compliment.)
Also, sometimes I forget how good ogged is at trolling. Before blogging became a thing, what did someone with that skill set do? (Not counting aol chat rooms.)
Wrote letters to newspaper columnists, I guess.
Sorry about the lack of posting. My Mac crashed and I'm running all those checks. Grrrr
I just finished TNC's new book on the bus this morning. I recommend it highly.
I didn't even know he wrote about public transportation.
I'm pretty much a charter member of the Golden Horde, you can see my handle on some very early posts on TNC's blog. I don't really do Twitter at all, I think the format brings out the very worst in people. I like discussions in paragraphs, not sentences with lots of abbreviations.
So it's possible you aren't talking about me at all. But if you are ...
The thing that attracted me so much to Coates was an affinity I recognized between us. He grew up playing D&D and loved games like Civ 5, and comic books and so on. And he wrote about them. And about race. And anything else he cared about. But it was the affinity that seemed so impossible, and yet existed that drew me to Coates, and brought me back daily.
And it is this exact flirtation with the "weird" that has all the snobs put their noses in the air, it seems to me. D&D has always borne that label, and Coates credits it with showing him what writing can do - it can create whole new worlds.
I've always been under this stigma - of liking things that aren't quite acceptable in "polite" society. I did math. I played with computers. I watched Star Trek incessantly. I've always been a figure of mockery, in spite of being a white, cishet male.
I lose the Oppression Olympics pretty much every time in any comparison, but Coates didn't hold an Olympics, he held a dinner party, a place where we could connect. And that's what drew me there - not some search for absolution.
Civ V is great. Comic books are stupid.
66: I was an early poster on TNC's blog -- I even commented on his pre-Atlantic blog. For a while I was emailing him frequently with spelling corrections. I mostly stopped because my work browser didn't interact well with Disqus, and I realized he wasn't going to be my friend. I really am that pathetic.
@peep, your handle seems familiar. Yeah, that's a common failing, I think I had a similar inclination.
@Moby Hick. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I'll cut you for yours.
66: Yeah, the nerd/race man combination is a lot of what makes Coates' personal perspective interesting.
I did not understand the overwhelming praise Coates' Case for Reparations article. Mostly because I thought it was an outstanding essay on the economic consequences of historic and continuing racial injustice, but that it basically failed in its titular aim of building a compelling case for reparations. (Proving the economic consequences of racial injustice does not alone create a compelling case for reparations.)
The long excerpt from his new book that was posted everywhere recently was very good. We should read and discuss that book instead of Transformative Experience.
@Moby Hick. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I'll cut you for yours.
I'm drawing a blank on your pseud -- have you been around here before? Because clearly you fit right in.
God, it just struck me that the way to connect with contemporary upper-middlebrow white America is, quite precisely, to self-present as a "nerd." Something Ira Glass something.
I would join a reading group for the new book.
Here's TNC talking about Keep on the Borderlands, if you're not afraid of Le Tigre giving you an Indian burn and taking your lunch money.
I would join a reading group for the new book.
I was thinking this also.
66. Agree. One of the things I enjoy about TNC is that he started out liking "weird" stuff like D&D and hasn't put on a hair shirt about still liking it, even while doing a lot of catch up reading and "explain like I'm five" writing and responding to learn about "serious" things he doesn't know much about.
There are a lot of people out there who would give him the "if you hadn't wasted time on D&D you'd be better educated now" dismissal if he wasn't so open about wanting to learn stuff.
Also, nerds hate to ever admit they don't know something, so he's a breath of fresh air on that, too.
I like the reading groups myself. Say we get through being transformed by experience, take a few weeks off, and launch into Coates?
Actually, addressing Bob Le Flameur's point in 74, I enjoy TNC (and, e.g., Jamelle Bouie. Or, for that matter, MF Doom) talking about their love for D&D and comics and videogames, because it is a reminder to me that just because my mental image of "who digs Spider-Man?" is Comic Book Guy, that excises a lot of readers. I'm not sure if there's something related between the degree to which Coates and Bouie want to foreground this stuff and the ways it gets, as you noted, used as a shibboleth for being a member in good standing of the tech industry, (which is a thing that drives me batty), or it's just that nerds like talking about nerd things.
74: I sometimes think that there is an interesting conversation to be had regarding the downsides of the massive mainstreaming of nerd culture since ~2000. And not just from the point of view of out loud and proud nerd haters like R. Tigre, but also from the perspective of nerdly types themselves.
Unfortunately, bitter misogynist trolls (g/a/mer/g/aters and suchlike) have sucked up all the oxygen surrounding that subject.
I would definitely participate in a BTWAM book group.
71.1: I kind of agree with this. TNC really isn't one for policy solutions at all, and despite all the evidence to the contrary I don't think he's entirely serious in advocating for reparations. It's more a way of saying -- hey, white people, if you really were so concerned about us, here's something you could do (but I know you won't)
I think there's something interesting to be said, that I am not the person to say at all, about the overlap between nerd culture and communities of color and how nerddom reads differently within an urban minority space.
I've spent a lot of time listening to the In The Heights soundtrack (Sally and Newt love it as being exactly their world) and there's a lyric where one character calls another "Mr. Baggins of the Shire" when they're talking about how they'd spend lottery winnings, and it hit me as signifying something different than it would in a whiter context. I'm not sure exactly what I mean, or if I'm right, but something about nerdiness of the D&D/comicbook type being less in opposition to a presumed norm than it is among white people. Like, nerd signifiers don't make you Comic Book Guy in the same way at all.
70. I've known a fair number of "nerd/race man" people (both men and women) over the years, so that aspect isn't quite so unusual in my experience. It's certainly unusual for an Atlantic writer though.
Come to think, of course, that'd be in Coates' wheelhouse exactly. I don't think I've seen him hit exactly the point I'm interested in, but if there is anything real there, it's just the sort of thing he could talk about.
I actually wasn't making my usual anti-nerd point, it was just an observation. It's interesting that liking D&D or whatever is now the equivalent of what, I dunno, liking James Joyce or Flaubert was for an earlier generation, in that it grants membership into a cross-class cross-racial empathetic community of high-middelbrow America. That's not necessarily a a bad thing (if true) because D&D is far more easily accessible* than Flaubert.
*though much more stupid, not ready to give up on the nerd wars completely.
86: No, I'm pretty sure he has talked about how the whole separation of the nerds is a white thing - that he never felt different or odd because he liked D&D and comic books.
Yeah, and you're probably right that it something that makes Coates easy to relate to for a lot of his audience. It just struck me that nerdiness is sort of a synedoche for a whole constellation of attributes (being in good standing with the tech industry, all the peculiar gender tenseness around nerdhood), and I think that almost completely breaks down for nerdiness in a not overwhelmingly white context.
I was nerdy when nerdy wasn't cool.
As the whitest of white nerds in my long-ago youth, I was recently gratified to walk into a game store where dozens of kids were playing and maybe 10% were white.
In my day, I was deep enough into nerd-dom that I think I can say with a reasonable level of authority that this didn't happen back then. The culture wasn't NASCAR or anything, but it was pretty darn white.
I think I should be able to actually get my hands on Coates' book here in time for a reading group so count me in as well.
I'd be in for the book group. I like the idea of an ongoing reading group here. (But I would, wouldn't I?)
"Bob le Flameur" is great but I had assumed it was going to be McManus.
Freddie often has uncharitable interpretations of others writing, but always thinks everybody is misreading him. He also has a bit of the "even the liberal new republic"-ness about him.
This from De Boer is a good observation:
For the record: Baldwin did not earn his (deservedly) sainted reputation until after his death. During his life, he was considered by many not to live up to his potential. He wasn't taken for a definitive voice on race; in fact he had a difficult, contested, frequently unhappy relationship with the various civil rights and racial justice movements of his time. He was crabby and liked being crabby. He was difficult and liked being difficult. I doubt he would have enjoyed the venerated esteem we now hold him in.
I happen to have read quite a LOT of Baldwin, actually - he's one of my very favorite essayists and I've read many though not all of his novels. Baldwin was, in some respects, pretty middle of the road - he wasn't seen as a radical, although he gets read that way because this is a far more right-wing era. He socialized with, like, JFK (who was rude about him behind his back) and Gore Vidal and various wealthy and connected people of that general ilk.
I think "Ta-Nehisi Coates - Baldwin II or not?" is a pretty stupid question. What illumination does one get out of arguing it? I suppose you could compare Baldwin's and Coates's work point for point, but they're both writing for very different audiences in different media, they're from different backgrounds and see their tasks as different...obviously those things are going to produce different styles of writing.
I would be a bit sketched out by a white person who felt it necessary to have that particular debate in any seriousness, actually, because it seems to suggest that it is somehow important that white people establish the Finest Black Essayist Of All Time.
4: Absolutely. It's also really surprising that a grown man who positions himself as, like, a serious speaker of truth to power gets all het up about someone saying something trivially rude or critical about him on the Tumbs or on Twitter.
@LizardBreath Your handle definitely is familiar to me, but I haven't spent much time here at all. I'm pretty sure I saw you on Brad DeLong's comment section, though. The style, though, I learned from the Golden Horde.
@Frowner 97: I agree at some level. Debate about whether or no TNC is the New James Baldwin is dumb. That's a terrible way to engage with art and/or writing.
And, Baldwin exerts a powerful influence on TNC. Coates quotes him all the time. Coates introduced him to me. Coates tries to emulate the way that Baldwin is both uncompromising and loving. I imagine that's what Toni Morrison had in mind.
Between the World and Me is clearly modeled on The Fire Next Time. Reviewers have good reason for making this comparison.
I don't share any of TNC's nerdly interests really, but Baldwin was one thing we have in common. My mother (he said, proudly) translated a book of Baldwin essays into Hebrew.
"prophetic":West::"plunder":EastCoates
101: The true HNIC, and #1 Intellectual has spoken!
96: I like understatement.
But there's a big difference between saying "this is influenced by Baldwin thusly, which works/does not work in these ways" and saying "and Ta-Nehisi Coates is / is not Baldwin-worthy".
I mean, I can say that Timmi Duchamp is deeply influenced by Samuel Delany (to take an example where I'm sure I know what I'm taking about) without turning immediately to whether she is as good as Delany.
Baldwin's influence on the early development of Dungeons & Dragons has been woefully neglected by historians.
Did the Coates-Baldwin comparison come from Morrison initially, or were people throwing it around before that?
If only Coates had rolled a 9 or higher on 2d6 in his throw for a save against the damaging effects of being unfavorably compared to a deceased legend.
107: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/james-baldwin-in-paris/
On the subject of, um, race and nerdness, this documentary on Afro-futurism, Last Angel of History, is the most kitschy, mid-90s-era cyber-punk thing I've seen in a while.
97 I happen to have read a lot of Baldwin as well though it's been very many years. Also a lot of the 60s civil rights-black nationalist lit. The thing is that Baldwin may have been middle of the road at the time but he's aged very well. Baldwin saw things very clearly and spoke it straight without a lot of the typical 60s radical posturing. Read him now and he's still fresh and timely. At one time I really fell under the spell of Malcolm X, I think doing the Islamic studies thing at the time had a lot to do with that, that and listening to too much WBAI, but listen to his debates with Baldwin now and Baldwin really comes off so much better.
101: De Boer wishes he could troll like that.
101. Shorter Cornel West: "Kids today! *sigh*"
Cornel West: Tony Morrison is a dude and I've never read Coates.
I read his Atlantic bog from the beginning and was a sometimes commenter. I loved the mad men discussions. Totally up for a book club.
That's not a good typo, metaphor-wise. Especially for British people.
Walter Mosley does more than Ta-Nehisi can
to justify blacks ways to the above-median white man...