flâneur

Scraping training data for your mind - by Henrik Karlsson

escapingflatland.substack.com · 2,771 words · saved by 15 readers

In a world of information abundance, how do you find good influences?

2432 pages into Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical novel My Struggle comes a pivotal plot point: the publication of a new Proust translation in Norwegian. Knausgaard, at this point in his mid-twenties, has spent nearly ten years learning to write. Without success, to put it mildly. His best friend, Tore Renberg, having read the results, in one scene comes over to Knausgaard’s flat, looking a little as if he has been drinking before he arrived to work up his nerve. “But Karl Ove”, Renberg says about his writing, “there is… nothing there”. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen how people…

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