Thursday, February 17, 2011

fuck and run

2 comments:

JMF's fashiony sketch journal said...

what sort of guitar is that?

Y. Dubois said...

Oh, man.

When your article on Seung-Hui Cho for N+1 came out, I was thrilled that I'd found a writer who was managing to say what I'd always indistinctly thought about Korean-American youth, ugliness, and loserdom. By the way, I UTTERLY AGREE that the function of personal immiseration, while constitutive of loserdom's dialectic, is ideologically mystified by American indie films of the 1990s and 2000s, taken as they are with the apolitical and consequentially false freedom of youthful "quirkiness," by which means the meek in high school shall inherit an adult world appreciative of winning oddity. MAIS NON !

Then, when your review of Neil Strauss's books on commidified seduction came out, I got a little teary at the thought that I wasn't the only Korean dude out there reading critical theory to assuage his loneliness. Also, the history of the Game is fascinating.

Then, you wrote "Paper Tigers." Well, I don't know, shit: I thought that you very deftly isolated the subtle hindrances to career and sex that an Asian-American upbringing or Asian values (whether really practiced by a dude or just reflexively presumed at work in him) will often pose. It was stirring. Most of the folk who criticized the article reproached you for being insensitive, for not loving yourself, for being disrespectful towards your parents (basically), for insufficiently relativizing your positions, for generalizing, or for failing to see how awesomely successful they were for attending Ivy-tier law schools and earning upper-middle-class-type money. Basically, people faulted you for making an argument. Cool.

But none of that would have brought me to write to you, to thank you for writing intelligently about interesting topics. A shared love of EXILE IN GUYVILLE just did, though. Huh. Well.