"death in venice" and self and stuff

I read Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" yesterday. It's terrible; don't bother reading it.

But there was one interesting bit that struck me. The story's about a stiff, studious, German novelist (read: Mann's blatant self-insert), and the story's divided into five acts. The second act gives us an extended bio of the novelist's life—he was born in such-and-such town, he craved fame at a young age, he published his breakout hit in such-and-such year, his works focused mostly on blah-blah-blah, he was given such-and-such award for his most recent novel and lived in Munich. It's the sort of blurb you might see on the back of a book, describing the author.

The rest of the book involves him wandering around Venice, getting a bizarre obsessive crush on some preadolescent boy, and eventually dying of cholera due to not GTFOing out of Venice when he should have.

And it did strike me, during the very last few pages, where he's wasting away, that—okay, it is a really cute ironic thing that we're given the man's bio in part 2, and we're supposed to feel satisfied that we basically know who we're dealing with, only to spend the rest of the book being shown a man that you never could have guessed based on that bio.

I often look up the bio for authors after I finish a book, as I'm curious about "where the book came from"—but "Death in Venice" twists that around in the most blatant sort of way.

* * *

There was a somewhat popular tech blogger a few years back who posted a lot on tech culture and a bit of functional programming evangelism. The latter I found "eh", but the former I found genuinely interesting; he had a charismatic (if bombastic) writing style, and had some keen insights with regard to stuff like the perverse incentives of venture capitalist culture, arguments for unionization, and so on and so forth.

On message boards (crucially, not on his blog posts), the blogger would often rail about specific companies he'd worked for that were terrible, or specific terrible experiences he had in tech. And since I personally know people who have had awful experiences of such things, I shrugged and believed it to be mostly-true; people run into shit managers and shit luck all the time.

Then I went to work at one of the companies he bitched out.

I wasn't worried about working for the company; it was large enough that culture varies hugely from team to team anyway.

But, curious to see what he'd done while he was there, I searched his name internally and was surprised to discover that—well, he came across as an insane person.

The paper trail was very long and I don't think I missed anything important. Essentially, this guy had spent hours and hours spilling thousands and thousands of words on the internal version of Reddit (and, yes, having an internal version of Reddit is about as bad of an idea as you'd expect), shouting loudly about what THE COMPANY DIRECTION SHOULD BE!!! and those MORON VICE PRESIDENTS JUST WON'T LISTEN TO HIM!!! and he CLEARLY HAS DIRECTOR-LEVEL VISION!!! ...all this from a dude just barely out of college, who had joined the company two months prior.

Coworkers on internal-Reddit tried to be nice to him, and suggested that maybe he could wait a little longer than two months before trying to shake everything up? or maybe figure out a more productive forum for change than basically-internal-Reddit?

Dude did not take any of the coworkers' advice, and proceeded to spend many more months bolstering further claims of his own grandiosity, his overlooked technical brilliance, etc etc. Then he got his first little performance review thingy—and yes, I hate performance reviews more than anyone, but this dude fucking hit the roof over a performance review that rated him above-average!, i guess because it didn't rate him "supergenius" or something. Then he screamed about it on internal-Reddit for another many more thousands of words before ragequitting the company.

Um. Ummmm.

Honestly, his messages read untreated-bipolar-disorder or something similar, to me. I felt bad for him and hoped he got help (though his more recent posting doesn't really suggest this is the case).

Having this weird insider knowledge makes it a trip to go back and read his old blog posts. Like, yeah, he wants tech workers to unionize, and he has some nice arguments for it. But you can bet damn well who he thinks the union boss should be. You know damn well how he reacts to slights.

(A similar case of this is Shanely Kane, who writes really cogent and interesting lefty stuff for Model View Culture, but acts kind of unbelievably vicious on social media. Sorry, I am just super not onboard with the "unchecked fury is the answer to all slights" strain of lefty activism.)

* * *

That's the funny thing about meeting people online. I'm not talking OKCupid or whatever, I mean meeting people on online—in internet communities, in places where your socialization is first and foremost in a constructed realm, with no particular aim to ever meet up "IRL." People have more power to mediate what image they present of themselves.

Not that I want to say the internet's categorically different, in the scaremongery way old fuddy-duddies do. No one knew the protagonist in "Death in Venice," either, and that was way before the internet.

And neither am I saying that people present themselves falsely particularly often. I've met a handful of online friends in person, and they all were basically the person I expected. Usually there's an upfront shock of quirks that didn't translate through the keyboard—"oh wow, I was not expecting you to have this thick Valley Girl accent" or "you are way shorter and less imposing than I expected" or whatever, but nothing that changes who they fundamentally are, who I know them to be. (And recognizing that always brings a little thrill—here is my friend, come to life more brilliantly than I could ever have imagined!)

The internet's just one layer of possible indirection. But it's a particularly potent and prevalent layer, nowadays.

I sometimes wonder how I come across on Tumblr and Dreamwidth and whatnot. I know in many ways I'm more open here than IRL, but in some crucial ways I'm more closed off. I feel like I'm full of both more blistering bombast and abject despair on here, because I tend to be vent-ier here—what do people imagine me to be, based on that?

And sometimes I scroll through the Twitter or Tumblr feeds of writers or artists I admire, and imagine I know them. If they live in my city, I'll sometimes wish there were some non-awkward way to ask them to meet up for coffee, because of course we could be awesome friends, if we just had some way of meeting each other...! (Creepy, I know; I blame the 21st century.)

But of course I don't know them. Scrolling a feed is not knowing someone. The artsy side of me seems to like to think that my work says something deep about me, about the kind of person I am—but in practice, I think, if your work says anything about you at all, it's often buried so deep it's hard for anyone but you to see the important bits. It seems there has to be some mutuality, conversations where they learn about you as you learn about them.

And anyway, last time I asked someone for coffee solely because I'd admired their online work, they turned out to be a pompous asshole who forced a kiss on me in the back of some mediocre bar I've never returned to.

I'm pretty sure this is one of the posts where I'm basically describing "the human condition" and puttering out for lack of novel things to say on the topic, so let's just end it there :P