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Showing posts with label cult of celebrity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cult of celebrity. Show all posts

Wednesday, 14 December 2022

This Post-Enlightenment Era of Post-Trust, Post-Truth, Post-Rationality, Post-Honour, and Post-Chivalry

We are so far down the wrong rabbit hole here, people

There's something gravely amiss with, and missing from, a post-Enlightenment society that elevates rich, charismatic, unempathic and sometimes sociopathic, narcissists to positions of power in society, even though that might risk a fall into a rigid, divisive, violent and authoritarian regime. This often employs viral iconography and near-deification of a supposedly 4D-chess-playing pseudo-messianic cult figure come to save us all – or at least come to save the Real Patriots or True Believers who surround the leader and form a protective thought-bubble around the beloved leader, insulating him or her and themselves from a more objective and realistic reality. What makes matters worse is that this movement is feeding into religious narratives such as the fight between good and evil during these Christian End Times – at the very time that benevolent communion with traditional establishments such as the Church is most needed. And what makes matters far worse is that such leaders find themselves advised by people who really want to “bring it on!”: not only keyboard warriors but self-appointed and zealous Agents of Chaos, sometimes backed by adversarial foreign states. This, on top of the influence the latter or the leader's regime have on compromised public figures.

Hope in a Prison of Despair / Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919) / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.

Monday, 15 July 2013

JK Rowling and the Secret of The Cuckoo's Calling

JK Rowling: What's in a name?

In April 2013, an ex-military policeman, Robert Galbraith, published his debut crime novel, The Cuckoo's Calling. Though critically-acclaimed, according to the New Statesman it only sold a little more than 1,500 copies. Then something spectacular happened.

Richard Brooks, the Sunday Times' arts editor was of the opinion that the quality of the writing was too good to be that of a new author. Later, a columnist at the Sunday Times received a tip-off that the book had actually been written by JK Rowling; and finally JK Rowling admitted that it was indeed her work. Rowling told the Sunday Times, "I hoped to keep this secret a little longer because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience. It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback from publishers and readers under a different name."

Before this news broke, according to an article in the New Statesman, The Cuckoo's Calling was ranked #4,709 at Amazon. Within a couple of days, it had hit the top of the charts at #1, and journalists have been falling over themselves to write-up this extraordinary event. Again by the New Statesman's reckoning, at the time it hit the #3 slot at Amazon, the book had made a 150,000% "increase in sales over just one day."

Sunday, 9 September 2012