there’s a big ragebait piece on here that’s been doing the rounds, in which the author, who is notionally a black woman, writes about hating virginia woolf. the argument for why virginia woolf is bad essentially boils down to “she’s white, i’m not, therefore her books exclude me.” deeply silly stuff, and hundreds of people have got very predictably upset at it. but the reason i say that the author is only notionally a black woman is that whoever published this stuff, it was actually written by chatgpt. you know how i can tell? because this is what the machine has to say about woolf’s orlando. meanwhile, in the very first paragraph of the book itself, we meet the sixteen-year-old orlando “slicing at the head of a moor which hung from the rafters,” which “orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck from the shoulders of a vast pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of africa.” later the owner of the head is referred to with a racial slur. not long afterwards orlando sees a racially charged performance of othello. i can’t say for certain, but i suspect that all of this is the kind of thing a black reader, especially one deliberately seeking out any trace of antiblackness in literature, would pick up on! but because it’s not written by a black person, or any kind of person at all, there’s just this generic, stereotyped complaint that woolf’s most riotous, lively, earthy text “floats” and is “detached.” such a shame that nobody can even be bothered to be annoyingly woke any more, and instead we get this inferior product churned out by a machine