• drolex@sopuli.xyz
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    5 months ago

    Frankly the whole article is just bizarrely defining metrics to fit the narrative.

    • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
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      5 months ago

      Well, you’re just stating your narrative, with 0 metrics; why is that any better?

        • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
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          5 months ago

          Just looking down the list of academy members and grabbing some at random I see:

          • Claude Dagens, 84-year-old priest
          • Dany Laferrière, working writer who lives in Miami
          • Jean-Luc Marion, retired professor
          • Andreï Makine, working writer
          • Christian Jambet, philosopher, IDK what he does to pay the bills but his last published work was an essay in 2016

          It looks to me like 20% of the part of the list I examined is made up of working writers in France, i.e. one of five. So extrapolating out, we know somewhere in France there are 8 well-known people in this one group who make a living just on writing. I don’t know that that means that it is hard to make a living as a writer, but it definitely isn’t an argument that it isn’t hard to any particular level to make a living as a writer.

          Again: The argument is not that writers don’t exist, it is that it is a real difficult (like astronomically difficult) field to break into and make a full-time living at. I don’t know why that statement is provoking this incredible level of resistance – maybe because he phrased it so provocatively, I guess, and ignored some plausible ways you can work as an academic and also do writing and the two can support one another, which okay, fair play – but regardless of that if you didn’t like that guy’s fairly detailed metrics, and instead are holding up this as your argument, I think you need to try again.

          • drolex@sopuli.xyz
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            5 months ago

            You’re really getting out of your way to miss my point. The number of professional writers is some orders of magnitude bigger than the number of billionaires, so much so that taking some arbitrary subset of writers of approximately the same size is easily done.

            Another counter example (because I’m really nice like that): some contemporary French writers, just from memory:

            • Annie Ernaux
            • JMG Le Clezio
            • Amélie Nothomb
            • Michel Houellebecq
            • Erik Orsenna
            • Virginie Despentes
            • Patrick Modiano
            • Christine Angot
            • Jean Echenoz
            • Sylvain Tesson
            • Marie Ndiaye
            • Virginie Grimaldi
            • Marc Levy
            • Alain Finkielkraut
            • Michel Onfray
            • Mélissa da Costa
            • Andrei Making
            • François Cheng
            • JC Rufin

            Yes I know, it’s not 43, but I could easily go to my local bookshop and find 180 more, and again 43 billionaires is a lot for 70 million inhabitants. In any case the number of 500 writers in the article is laughable.

            But that’s not the main point. What gets on my nerves is that the author of the article is cherry picking facts to entertain an idea. I could deliberately try something like “but you know there are more astronauts than true painters” and refute everything opposed to this with No true Scotsman fallacies.

            The article proves absolutely nothing and the author makes a mess of logical thinking, while managing to blur what the wider perspective is supposed to be.

            • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
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              5 months ago

              How many of those people are making more than $50k per year at it though?

              It’s not “no true Scotsman” if there’s a defined dollar value that makes someone, so to speak, a Scotsman. I mean for all I know you are right and there are plenty who are supporting themselves doing it- but the point is not that writers don’t exist; it is that the number of them who are making a living without some other means of support is way smaller than it should be.

            • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
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              5 months ago

              Come on, have another go! It’s fun to critique things and tell people they are wrong; I wanted to have a turn.