Words

This New Yorker blog review of Patricia Lockwood‘s book reads like delightful nonsense to me.  It reminds me of writing bullshit papers for English classes.

Take this sentence

Lockwood is famous—more than thirty thousand people follow her on Twitter—but the source of her fame is almost entirely owing to her tweets and not to her poetry.

1) Does that count as “famous”?  I have no idea what famous is anymore.  My cousin Mike has fifty-seven thousand followers, is he famous?  Coffee Dad has 125,000 followers, is he famous?

2) “Lockwood is famous – look at how many Twitter followers she has – but the source of those Twitter followers is almost entirely owing to her tweets and not to a thing that is not her tweets.”

3) isn’t her whole point, the whole reason to write an article about her, that the separation between her tweets and her poetry is kinda porous?