“Liveblog” and the Limits of Autofiction

[Anonymous No.13359737]

>It makes some sense that the writers most devoted to detailing life’s mundanity would seek to escape from that same grinding everydayness. In fact, the drug narrative arises around the beginning of modern self-disclosure. Consider Thomas de Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater,” which was published in the eighteen-twenties, and which frames a tell-all account as an instructive, morally edifying story. Today, de Quincey’s project endures, on the Internet, as the trip report, a form that was often incorporated by Alt-Lit writers in their work. Reading about the warped experiences of others, we reconsider whether our own perspective is natural or fixed. Old ideals of art suggest that we should work for such revelations—that there’s something too easy about a chemically induced heightening. The value of “Liveblog,” and books like it, is to help us view that judgment with suspicion.

>If autofiction provides the thrills and little voyeurisms of immediacy, if the trip provides a possible guide to transcendence, then perhaps Boyle’s work is an attempt at synthesis. The result could be called a fiction of the Internet—a representation of an infinitely extending and seemingly available world. The idea that the private lives of others are accessible online, transparent and ready to be clicked into, is a commonplace in our culture. “Liveblog” is a new kind of story, about how we arrange those lives for public inspection. It pushes that inspection to an extreme, in the hopes that, by choosing to give over everything, it might be possible, for a moment, to regain a sliver of agency. Writing it all down isn’t a new consciousness, exactly, but it might allow you to see yourself in a new way. All you have to do is open a document and begin.

>www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/liveblog-and-the-limits-of-autofiction

[Anonymous No.13359867]

>by choosing to give over everything, it might be possible, for a moment, to regain a sliver of agency
t. someone who wants to steal my data

[Anonymous No.13359896]

>>13359867
w-what are you saying, target-kun... w-we only want to share your spontaneity with the world...

t. not the NSA

[Anonymous No.13360008]

>12:22AM: bathwater is running. i’m just going ot do this until forever. ate half of some kind of pill, 1 mg Xanax ithink. ate other one […]

>foamy soapy bubbles keep avalanching down my toes back into the tub

>Candlelight makes the bath arguably more than the source of bubbles or your choice of crackers

>my feet are most fetching when in low light like this. They look like a molecular gastronomy dessert with the bubbles spooned atop my dark blue toes. I need to feed them to someone.

>ookkk anoth athter xaanxn at some e oo==ibe, ijay sruffl is going to better e=vetter i know

>1:12AM: woke in mostly empty bathtub. very cold. drain wouldn’t close so i just sat on it and refilled tub with hot water. when i woke felt obsessed with finding candy i had been eating but i guess i ate it all. flopped around trying to always be covered in hot water, thinking ‘sexy seal’ and ‘sprinkle princess’ and pictured someone tossing me a fish and this is what would get me into the maxim top 100 hottest women or whatever. because enough seals voted me in.

[Anonymous No.13360015]

>12:22AM: bathwater is running. i’m just going ot do this until forever. ate half of some kind of pill, 1 mg Xanax ithink. ate other one […]

>foamy soapy bubbles keep avalanching down my toes back into the tub

>Candlelight makes the bath arguably more than the source of bubbles or your choice of crackers

>my feet are most fetching when in low light like this. They look like a molecular gastronomy dessert with the bubbles spooned atop my dark blue toes. I need to feed them to someone.

>ookkk anoth athter xaanxn at some e oo==ibe, ijay sruffl is going to better e=vetter i know

>1:12AM: woke in mostly empty bathtub. very cold. drain wouldn’t close so i just sat on it and refilled tub with hot water. when i woke felt obsessed with finding candy i had been eating but i guess i ate it all. flopped around trying to always be covered in hot water, thinking ‘sexy seal’ and ‘sprinkle princess’ and pictured someone tossing me a fish and this is what would get me into the maxim top 100 hottest women or whatever. because enough seals voted me in.