House-sitting for a friend has been cast as somehow scandalous by our friends over at Valleywag. These seasoned journalists deserve props for not only being able to write rhyming headlines, but for also clearly understanding how to leverage post-structural theory to avoid libel. Their marvelously vague terminology (the “latest name linked” to someone) puts the reader, rather than the author, into the position of construing/constructing the narrative: “since meaning can’t come from the author, it must be actively created by the reader through a process of textual analysis.”
Glad that other people are reading Derrida and Barthes in Silicon Valley.
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“the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” - Roland Barthes 1977
And Ferdinand de Saussure
The “near-libel insinuation” is awesome. You can say just about anything if you add “allegedly” or something.