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A review by keight
Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole
4.0
This collection of essays is divided into three sections — “Reading Things,” “Seeing Things,” and “Being There” — and for me they progress from the least cohesive to the most cohesive. Many of the literary essays feel more like sketches than fully fleshed out essays, and I slowly worked through these over the summer before lulling out when I was partway through the “Seeing Things” section. When I came back to Known and Strange Things, I found myself in the middle of an essay about the photographer Gueorgui Pinkhassov, which is mostly about his work on Instagram, though Teju Cole broadens the lens to inquire what photography means now that the barrier for entry has essentially disappeared:
All bad photos are alike, but each good photograph is good in its own way. The bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer and where we have to suffer through each other’s “photography” the way our forebears endured terrible recitations of poetry after dinner. Behind this dispiriting stream of empty images is what Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia. According to Nabokov, poshlost “is not only the obviously trash but mainly the falsely important. the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” He knows us too well. Read more on my booklog
All bad photos are alike, but each good photograph is good in its own way. The bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer and where we have to suffer through each other’s “photography” the way our forebears endured terrible recitations of poetry after dinner. Behind this dispiriting stream of empty images is what Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia. According to Nabokov, poshlost “is not only the obviously trash but mainly the falsely important. the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” He knows us too well. Read more on my booklog