[HN Gopher] Did This Writer Know Tennessee Williams?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Did This Writer Know Tennessee Williams?
        
       Author : samclemens
       Score  : 17 points
       Date   : 2023-06-12 04:24 UTC (18 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
        
       | zabzonk wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | Aloha wrote:
         | Americans are not long winded by nature - _The New Yorker_ is
         | long winded by nature. Particularly when interviewing a long
         | winded man, who is supposed to have met and written about
         | another long winded man.
        
           | zabzonk wrote:
           | i wouldn't consider williams to be long-winded, though some
           | of his plays could do with a little bit of editing - but
           | who's couldn't (looking at you, WS)?
        
       | majormajor wrote:
       | It's interesting to think about how quickly it becomes hard to
       | verify or disprove things.
       | 
       | The evidence appears to be on the side of "no, he did not" but in
       | a generation or two, if there's a published book claiming he did
       | and just some articles and ephemera of a small group of scholars
       | that don't believe it... it's doubtful that the contradictory
       | evidence will be as easy to find in archives as the book itself.
       | 
       | Makes me wonder about internet preservation attempts. In this
       | case, the "he didn't" evidence seems to be less available to any
       | future researchers than the "he did" claim in the published book.
       | But is that the general trend, or will generally preserving
       | online discussions dis-proportionally preserve erroneous, non-
       | verified information compared to preserving published books? I'm
       | generally in the camp of "let the internet be forgotten, like how
       | most conversations have always been forgotten" but this is a
       | curious counter-case. Perhaps if all the people he claimed to
       | talk with had more online footprints, it would be easier to
       | disprove the claims. Or perhaps it would in the future enable
       | someone to make an even more convincing fraud - GPT to generate
       | fake conversations in their actual voice; publicy-available date-
       | and geo-stamped information about travels, all details that could
       | be used to slide yourself into their story.
        
       | Jtsummers wrote:
       | https://archive.is/L87gS
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-06-12 23:02 UTC)