{"id":5703,"date":"2022-06-17T05:54:44","date_gmt":"2022-06-17T12:54:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5703"},"modified":"2022-08-15T06:32:43","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T13:32:43","slug":"new-yorker-the-cracked-wisdom-of-dril","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5703","title":{"rendered":"New Yorker: the cracked wisdom of Dril"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Benjamin Franklin\u2019s admirers have to acknowledge certain embarrassing truths about the man, not least that, were he alive in the twenty-first century, he would almost certainly be big on Twitter. As the dulcet narration of Ken Burns\u2019s two-part documentary \u201cBenjamin Franklin\u201d explains, Franklin\u2019s achievement of \u201csuch remarkable success\u201d that would lead him to be \u201chanded down for generations as the embodiment of the American Dream,\u201d began with publishing a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, at the age of twenty-three. Franklin included \u201ccrime stories, notices of fires and deaths, a moral advice column, funny tales he concocted that flirted with sexual innuendo, and letters from readers, including some he wrote himself, under tongue-in-cheek pseudonyms like Anthony Afterwit and Alice Addertongue,\u201d creating a reading experience not entirely dissimilar to scrolling through one\u2019s timeline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also engaged in a now common social-media practice by using the Gazette to promote other, more commercially viable projects, including, in 1732, the one that would make his name: \u201cPoor Richard\u2019s Almanack.\u201d The yearly volumes, according to Burns\u2019s documentary, were \u201costensibly written by the hapless Richard Saunders, who claimed he was writing his almanac simply because his wife threatened to burn his books if he didn\u2019t earn something from them.\u201d It was in this fictional persona that Franklin composed the \u201cAlmanack,\u201d the popularity of which brought him considerable wealth. Essentially an information-dense calendar, the Almanack was pitched not to the American book-buying class but the larger, less refined, more practical-minded public beyond, offering a mixture of useful (or at least fascinating) facts, generously seasoned with poems, recipes, and improving proverbs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or, as another, highly un-Burnsian telling puts it: \u201cPoor Richard\u2019s Almanack\u201d was \u201cfilled to the brim with relatable Quotes, stuuff about the ocean tides, information on vinegar prices, and other good shit of that nature.\u201d These words, and their typos, come from \u201cThe Get Rich and Become God Method,\u201d the second book by the comic-absurdist Twitter personality known as Dril. He describes Franklin\u2014calling him, with characteristic garbledness, \u201cBen Franken\u201d\u2014as \u201ca fellow wise man and publisher of astute witticisms who I have often modeled my brand after.\u201d Indeed, Dril continues, \u201cif famous \u2018Ben Franken\u2019 were alive today he would read every page of the Get Rich and Become God Method, and say, \u2018Yes, this is what I was ultimately setting out to accomplish all those years ago.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the New Yorker<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Benjamin Franklin\u2019s admirers have to acknowledge certain embarrassing truths about the man, not least that, were he alive in the twenty-first century, he would almost certainly be big on Twitter. As the dulcet narration of Ken Burns\u2019s two-part documentary \u201cBenjamin Franklin\u201d explains, Franklin\u2019s achievement of \u201csuch remarkable success\u201d that would lead him to be \u201chanded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5703"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5719,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5703\/revisions\/5719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}