Dark Academia Grows Up

I quite like _The Secret History_ too.

I think in _Babel_ (and _Katabasis_ as well), Kuang is a bit more prone than Tartt to showing off legit academic tidbits, which gives a nice scholarly glint (the illusion of high-brow? authenticity, dare I say?) to the environment, while not compromising the easy fantasy reading. More details than vibes, perhaps?

(When she gets details wrong, it does break the illusion. Like a small tangent on the etymology of the Greek word for truth in _Katabasis_.)

Oxford also simply has a certain aura for me, being from the US. All in all, I think Kuang's books are great "binge" or "airplane" reads with a smack of academic authenticity.

I saw _Possession_ mentioned elsewhere, which I think does academic vibes _and_ details very and IMO resides in a more refined literary category than either of the two other books. I should reread it!

Babel is a story structured like a certain YA wizard series with very clear antagonists that are not remotely good people with very little in terms of shades of gray. Kuang has very clear themes and ideas that she wants to convey, and she leaves little to the imagination in terms of plot arcs and motivations and morality.

On the other hand Babel has interesting characters that have a realistic representation of what it's like to have grown up in a cross-cultural context and how it can feel like you're betraying someone no matter what you do, which is not something I see in much media at all. She also starkly portrays and analyzes a trap that minorities can fall into where they are complicit in their own oppression.

Also, I appreciate Kuang's refreshing approach to having the bad people be bad people as opposed to misguided or misunderstood people with good intentions. Some kinds of bad-ness really shouldn't be excused, or perhaps have been explored to death already.

I read The Secret History at an impressionable age and arrived at university grossly misinformed. I love it anyway.

I read babel this year. Not the most memorable book, but an easy one to finish regardless. Nothing so off-putting they I couldn’t finish it.

But taste does vary, no reason to push it if you dislike it. De gustibus et coloribus..

Yeah, Babel had an interesting premise that didn't ultimately coalesce into a good book. I stuck with it, but only because I'm a compulsive book finisher.

My experience has been that a large majority of books that get hyped on social media and make the rounds as a hot book-club sort of read… are terrible. Whatever process causes a book to reach that point appears to have no connection to how good it is.

Taste, ah, varies.

Did you like the rest of Donna Tartt's work as much as Secret History?

These are the common complaints about all of kuang's books and I think even the people who like her work generally acknowledge they are well-founded. Her stuff clearly resonates with people despite those weaknesses, but if they don't for you then why push. There are a lot of books.

Besides, in many fields, lots of interesting research is now being done at industrial labs. So there's no reason to cope with the abuse the article describes so well, e.g. "[...] a celebrity scholar who enjoys seeing his advisees suffer, plays them against each other, and likes to remind them that without him, their careers are nothing".

As an Oxbridge academic, I can confidently state that lots of things done by e.g. Isomorphic Labs, GSK AI, or Altos Labs are better than the stuff we do in the exact same subfield. Furthermore, they pay better, there is less drama, the workplace is much more professional and, above everything, they don't suffer from the power imbalance that has made academia so toxic.

You still have more freedom than most any job in the United States at that compensation level. Yes you have to get a grant approved, but you can literally pivot to all sorts of topics within your domain if you just make a reasonable enough proposal. You can craft a class to your own liking and teach whatever you come up with. And if you have tenure you are basically set for life and don’t have to worry about the macroeconomy. You can die in office still engaging in interesting intellectual pursuits. Ageism actually goes in your favor in academia where wisdom is celebrated unlike private sector where you look like a cost center with your paygrade and liable to retire and screw up your team at any moment.

Yes there are responsibilities but you’d be hard pressed to find a tenured professor who feels like they are really very onerous, especially considering how much they had to work their tail off in grad school, postdoc, and tenure track years with little to no ability to delegate any of that. Even as department chair, you will probably get assigned an admin assistant to manage that and you will pass that torch to a colleague before long.

Unalienated labor doesn't exist. It is one of many fairy tales leftists like to tell themselves, like the idea of an objective fair universal price. The tale promises that work wouldn't be laborious and draining if it wasn't for those damn capitalists they would all labor happily in some kind of utopia. It would be comical except people actually believe it. Notice their ears remain firmly plugged to testimonies of life as a worker under communism which would tell them their framework is fatally flawed.

Of course, operating under such ideological blinkers it is no wonder why so many leftist grad students toil for the promised land. Others merely do the same for believed good hours and prestiege with no such delusions.

I don't think it fits in the genre particularly? Been a while since I read it though.

The bigger omission is Byatt's Possession, predating The Secret History by a couple years and I think possibly being the type specimen of what is now called dark academia.