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  #1  
Unread 03-26-2019, 11:24 PM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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Default Give the Nobel Prize in literature to @dril

https://theoutline.com/post/7245/giv...-prize-to-dril

Discuss. We already gave it to Bob Dylan; @dril would be a step up to be perfectly honest.
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  #2  
Unread 03-27-2019, 07:13 AM
Andrew Szilvasy Andrew Szilvasy is offline
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Relative to his media (Twitter) @dril is much better than Bob Dylan is to his.
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  #3  
Unread 03-27-2019, 03:08 PM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
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'Discuss'. As in seriously? Well, I've investigated and I conclude that if Sam and Michael are Statler and Waldorf, you two can be Beavis and Butthead. Maybe I'm getting old, but it sounds like the sort of thing my twelve year old giggles about in the back of the car when I drive him and his mate to Scouts. I don't care how 'meta' it is.

Edit: Ok, I chuckled a few times. I like this one:

'if your grave doesnt say "rest in peace" on it you are automatically drafted into the skeleton war'
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Unread 03-27-2019, 03:34 PM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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Yes, discuss seriously. I think there is a serious case to be made that he has helped to invent and more or less perfected twitter as a literary medium, and I do think his work has literary merit. His use of typos and grammatical mistakes is deliberate and calculated for effect. Yes, his humor is low, though no lower than someone like Joyce. But, most importantly, I don't think the case can be made for him simply by looking at a few tweets in isolation—it really is the total persona he has developed, the way his account covers so many aspects of modern life. Cumulatively, it is social satire as biting as Swift, just in a different literary medium. And, while you have to be on twitter to fully see it, the article's point about him shaping our language is real. He's even influencing political discourse—the linked tweet is a reference to this, a tweet still continually referenced more than seven years after he first tweeted it.

So, yes, I think there is a serious case to be made for him as an innovator and hugely influential figure in a new medium, as well as a cultural commentator on our times. I admit I initially posted this somewhat as a joke, but the more I think about it the more convinced I am.
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Unread 03-27-2019, 03:57 PM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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And even when I posted the thread, I absolutely agreed with Andrew's judgment that @dril's accomplishments as a tweeter are of greater literary merit than Dylan's as a singer-songwriter.
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Unread 03-27-2019, 04:03 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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I don't know this Twitter guy, so no reflection on him, but I don't see what it has to do with Dylan, whom I regard as a genius.
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  #7  
Unread 03-27-2019, 04:06 PM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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Dylan is relevant in that he signals that the prize awarders are open to non-traditional literary formats, and thus might in principle be open to giving the award for someone's twitter. (They won't actually be open to it, of course, but that's not the point.) Nothing really turns on a comparative assessment of @dril vs. Dylan, though I do believe what I've said on that front.
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  #8  
Unread 03-27-2019, 04:40 PM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
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Well, it seems quite a leap from thinking his work has some literary merit to him winning a nobel prize. And the idea of long-running persona-based satire mocking a particular social 'type' is hardly new. Private Eye magazine in the UK has been doing it for years. And I think you need more than the fact they both use 'low' humour before you start making comparisons to Joyce with a straight face. And deliberate grammatical and spelling errors for comic effect are hardly revolutionary either as any fule kno. And phrases becoming part of the national psyche? So what. Did Monty Python get a nobel prize? And in terms of subversive meta media satire it seems pretty tame and linguistically uninventive next to what Chris Morris was doing 20 years ago on TV in Brass Eye and The Day Today.
Hmm
Maybe I was mainly put off by the '15 reasons you HAVE to follow @dril' type list articles I read 'explaining' the humour to me in over-excited tones. The internet gets very over-excited it seems to me. Next you'll be telling me I have to take Rupi Kaur seriously because, y'know, the medium.

But yeah, he's pretty funny. That's all though, surely.

As for Dylan, what could be more traditional than folk song?
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  #9  
Unread 03-27-2019, 04:40 PM
Erik Olson Erik Olson is offline
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Side-note: What @dril does for our current moment strikes me as reminiscent of what Max Headroom did for his, the eighties.

Last edited by Erik Olson; 03-27-2019 at 06:40 PM.
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  #10  
Unread 03-27-2019, 05:11 PM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
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Quote:
@dril's accomplishments as a tweeter are of greater literary merit than Dylan's as a singer-songwriter.
Aaron

Quote:
Relative to his media (Twitter) @dril is much better than Bob Dylan is to his.
Andrew

This is like saying the world's best kazoo player is by definition a better musician than the world's third best concert pianist. It reminds me of the guy in the fake heavy metal band 'Bad News'

"I could play Stairway to Heaven when I was 12. Jimmy Page didn't write it till he was 23. I think that tells you something"

Last edited by Mark McDonnell; 03-28-2019 at 02:57 PM. Reason: Snipped the beavis and butthead joke which was barely funny the first time
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