lolita is a fairy tale told by the monster who has almost convinced himself he is the hero in an epic romance
unfiction is the new(er) hotness but that begins to stray from pure wordsmithery
afaict imago was expressing distaste for a subgenre most recently rep'd itt by a male writer, & they then offered a work by (what sounds like) a female author as a superior alternative? spill-yr-guts lit is often more girl coded since there's still so much ambient pressure on guys to not feel/talk about their feelings, so dismissal of gossipy confessionals risks aligning itself with misogynistic cultural mores that hurt everybody, but it's also possible to just not like stuff and be irritated that there's a lot of it.
― Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers, P.S.C. (cat), Sunday, 10 December 2023 09:23 (six months ago) link
Bandit sounds like The Red Parts - there was concretely something to write about, and apparently written well? I like the sound of it. My problem isn't with memoirs per se, especially ones that shine the light of strange experience, but with precisely this kind of knausgaardian life-becomes-the-work piffle with a side-order of This Is How We All Live Now-core idk maybe they and their ilk are great, I am skeptical
someone like Hollinghurst at his peak turned personal and collective experience into something transcendently literary, sublimated everything into masterfully fresh and luminous narratives, where's the stuff like that coming out nowadays
― imago, Sunday, 10 December 2023 09:44 (six months ago) link
or going back further, The Bell Jar or Good Morning Midnight etc etc
― imago, Sunday, 10 December 2023 09:48 (six months ago) link
The good dead women lol.
In any case I wouldn't say those are autofiction. As I see it, this is much more of a memoiristic mode rather than re-setting certain things the writer has experienced. Autofiction feels less created, so Molly in Ulysses -- whether good or not -- feels like a novelistic creation.
I am often irritated by autofiction myself but this genre of books is mostly written by women today. I'd say it's good it's having a run.
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 10 December 2023 10:14 (six months ago) link
my memoir hate is walled-off and has an abundance of exceptions (="any memoir that seems more interested in the book than in its subject," highly subjective criterion obv but I get sent 4-5 US-published memoirs a month for blurbing and I'm comfortable with this standard). autofiction isn't autoficiton discourse imo, two different things. autofiction honestly strikes me as a non-category or a marketing opportunity, so much 19c fiction would satisfy the requirements, so would Defoe for that matter, "autofiction" = "fiction" and it only gets irritating when you enter the "here's something in this category" discourse
― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Sunday, 10 December 2023 12:02 (six months ago) link
enormous trigger warning but this piece by blake is... one of the roughest things I’ve ever read https://thevolta.org/im-bbutler.html― flopson, Thursday, December 3, 2020
― flopson, Thursday, December 3, 2020
fwiw for people saying they aren't going to read it because of his tweets, things written in a british tabloid, the fact that its subjects are bad people who have affairs etc, ymmv but personally i am going to read molly on the strength of this piece
― flopson, Sunday, 10 December 2023 20:07 (six months ago) link
There are certainly formulaic things marketed as memoir, which in the more mass-marketed/"universal" approach, can come off as what were once called "made-for-TV-movies," AKA "disease-of-the-week movies" (a 70s reviewer term, don't get mad at me, or "novelistic," but either way with sharply cut Scenes! And omg Dialogue! Arcs of pacing and pacing of arcs. Can be pretty obvious, but the appeal is to realness, to belief---with a sometimes equal extreme of anger following debunking, as w James Frey. Who might have been a decent novelist, but dunno, haven't read him. In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr shows her class the Holocaust memoirs of Primo Levi and someone whose name I'm blanking on, who was eventually exposed, denuded, as a possibly delusional fraud: she asks them to say which account is real, and many of them pick the bogus one. It has dialogue! Scenes! Arresting imagery! None of your freeze-dried TV rations. The guy could write, but (as I think his psychiatrist said, quoted by Karr), if only he'd said, "These are my visions of the Holocaust," in effect, "this is fiction," he would have been alright (as an author; otherwise he was very messed up, and I think the debunking was probably fatal for him). But memory has its own art, retelling and resisting, even in this little post regarding something I read a few years years ago, so how can there be razor clarity of dialogue and shit from so many years ago, in your life, in the rest of history?Karr then discloses that she too had fallen for obvious bullshit in the fraudulent testimonial, which she didn't realize 'till the debunking was well underway--because she too wanted to believe, to have it both ways: here is a well-told, fortifying story, which is also reallll.She also discusses how she wrote her own memoirs, in a succinctly forensic way, though not clinical. The only one I've read is Lit, which seems exemplary in references to previous volumes and in non-exploitational use of some pretty hairy material., regarding birth family life, solo treks, incl. unlikely success and more likely crack-ups,"then marriage-motherhood-divorce: "I think it's clear who the asshole was," not meaning her husband or son. Not that she flogs herself; she's too busy, what with rehab and teaching and parenting and so on.But she's still not satisfied with that part of Lit, or of some other relationship narratives in even the most appealing memoirs of others. The Art of Memoir can be engrossing, maybe even motivating, encouraging, in a cautionary. challenging way, but it's clearly not meant to be inspirational. (Really good book list too, and she's not anti-fiction at all, as long as it's presented as such.)
― dow, Sunday, 10 December 2023 20:28 (six months ago) link
"Autofiction"! When I first saw it, thought of automatic writing and autohypnosis--and the sort of singer-songwriter-bandleader who had already had me thinking, "What does he need me for? His system is so complete." He needs me to buy his music, dummny, and/or post the kind of reviews that reinforce his self-regard (and yes it usually was a he). Solipsism as a selling point, for the vicarious womb appeal, reinforcement of audience navelgazing and collector's studies (not saying I'm immune).But I'd rather think of say In Search of Lost Time, say, as "autobiographical fiction." though certainly there's deliberately a lot of projection and mirror play along with the observation of others: his point, fair enough, but also why it can sometimes get too zoned-out-in in a long-ass way, for me.
― dow, Sunday, 10 December 2023 20:44 (six months ago) link
i am going to read molly
https://i.redd.it/69noq5ciya581.jpg
let us know if he ever reins in his endless awful similes
― Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers, P.S.C. (cat), Sunday, 10 December 2023 22:23 (six months ago) link
tbf Marilynne Robinson did exactly that between Housekeeping and Gilead. fervent support for all those fighting simile addiction
― imago, Sunday, 10 December 2023 22:30 (six months ago) link
Ulysses is basically autofiction, although he splits himself up into two characters.
uh no
― a (waterface), Monday, 11 December 2023 15:32 (five months ago) link
debut 'romantasy' author dropped by agent, publisher after goodreads-bombing the competition; blamed 'a friend' at first, then a mental breakdown, then the meds for the mental breakdown
https://www.themarysue.com/cait-corrain-goodreads-controversy-explained
bonus: i learned the term 'reylo'
― mookieproof, Tuesday, 12 December 2023 21:31 (five months ago) link
autofiction
Way back when I was in grad school, we called it "reflexive fiction."
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, 12 December 2023 21:35 (five months ago) link
xp I taught my mother this term when we went to see whatever that last SW movie was where they kiss and she (not having seen any of that series) had been wanting them to get together the whole film. She was so happy when they kissed and I was like…My mother’s a reylohttps://i.postimg.cc/wvn2rqZB/IMG-2921.jpgYeah anyway reylos have been ruining these kinds of spaces for like a decade
― mojo dojo casas house (gyac), Tuesday, 12 December 2023 21:51 (five months ago) link
At the risk of breaking the internet with banality... As someone who can't get their shit together to write a shopping list, and for whom each of these stages feels utterly insurmountable, imagine having a coherent idea or series of ideas, getting a book written, finding an agent, getting a publisher, something approaching an advance and a set of dates for publication, and this is what you dream amounts to. Yes, capitalism but also, Jesus the world is full of cunts.
― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Tuesday, 12 December 2023 22:17 (five months ago) link
Literature will die out and stupid poetic phrases will remain to drift over the world.Milan Kundera
― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Tuesday, 12 December 2023 22:18 (five months ago) link
People who treat book publishing like getting into the college of their choice
― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Tuesday, 12 December 2023 22:18 (five months ago) link
That article gave me a headache. Also, it reads like it was written by a teenager or AI.
― Expansion to Mackerel (Boring, Maryland), Tuesday, 12 December 2023 23:12 (five months ago) link
lol gyac
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, 12 December 2023 23:31 (five months ago) link
The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion
tl;dr: because the 2023 science fiction world convention was being held in chengdu, the hugo awards selection committee privately disqualified anything that they even vaguely suspected might upset the chinese government
On June 6, Kat Jones wrote an email to the administration group titled “Best Novel potential issues.” In the email, Jones raised concerns about the novels Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Jones wrote that Babel “has a lot about China. I haven’t read it, and am not up on Chinese politics, so cannot say whether it would be viewed as ‘negatives of China’” while adding that The Daughter of Doctor Moreau talked “about importing hacienda workers from China. I have not read the book, and do not know whether this would be considered ‘negative.’”
― mookieproof, Friday, 16 February 2024 13:18 (three months ago) link
Ahh thanks for this. I haven't been following the stooshie, but that explains why (as a Glasgow Worldcon 2024 attendee) I got this email the other day:
As Chair of Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for Our Futures, I unreservedly apologise for the damage caused to nominees, finalists, the community, and the Hugo, Lodestar, and Astounding Awards. Kat Jones has resigned with immediate effect as Hugo Administrator from Glasgow 2024 and has been removed from the Glasgow 2024 team across all mediums.I acknowledge the deep grief and anger of the community and I share this distress.I, and Glasgow 2024, do not know how any of the eligibility decisions for the Hugo, Lodestar and Astounding Awards held at the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention were reached. We know no more than is already in the public domain.At Glasgow 2024 we are taking the following steps to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the Awards.The steps we are committing to are:1) When our final ballot is published by Glasgow 2024, in late March or early April 2024, we will also publish the reasons for any disqualifications of potential finalists, and any withdrawals of potential finalists from the ballot.2) Full voting results, nominating statistics and voting statistics will be published immediately after the Awards ceremony on 11th August 2024.3) The Hugo administration subcommittee will also publish a log explaining the decisions that they have made in interpreting the WSFS Constitution immediately after the Awards ceremony on 11th August 2024.Glasgow 2024 will continue to address this matter as we go forward as a Worldcon.
Kat Jones has resigned with immediate effect as Hugo Administrator from Glasgow 2024 and has been removed from the Glasgow 2024 team across all mediums.
I acknowledge the deep grief and anger of the community and I share this distress.
I, and Glasgow 2024, do not know how any of the eligibility decisions for the Hugo, Lodestar and Astounding Awards held at the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention were reached. We know no more than is already in the public domain.
At Glasgow 2024 we are taking the following steps to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the Awards.
The steps we are committing to are:
1) When our final ballot is published by Glasgow 2024, in late March or early April 2024, we will also publish the reasons for any disqualifications of potential finalists, and any withdrawals of potential finalists from the ballot.
2) Full voting results, nominating statistics and voting statistics will be published immediately after the Awards ceremony on 11th August 2024.
3) The Hugo administration subcommittee will also publish a log explaining the decisions that they have made in interpreting the WSFS Constitution immediately after the Awards ceremony on 11th August 2024.
Glasgow 2024 will continue to address this matter as we go forward as a Worldcon.
― Ward Fowler, Friday, 16 February 2024 13:50 (three months ago) link
this blew up and...idgi, is she trying to say that she literally invented the term 'hanging out', or is she trying to say that his article was so similar to her book she should have been cited? idk
I actually cite @DKThomp in my book about … wait for it … Hanging Out. Which his magazine, @TheAtlantic, published an excerpt from in December 2022 (and never paid me for). But @DKThomp didn’t manage to cite me or my work. Interesting. https://t.co/OMB8PcEX0B— Sheila Liming (@seeshespeak) February 14, 2024
― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal), Saturday, 17 February 2024 21:16 (three months ago) link
Feel like I only ever hear about the Hugos because of blunders and controversies, maybe they should scrap them.
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Saturday, 17 February 2024 21:18 (three months ago) link
Was that the focus of the "sad puppies" dustup a few years ago?
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, 17 February 2024 21:19 (three months ago) link
is she trying to say that his article was so similar to her book she should have been cited?I presume this, although there are lots of people writing about this sort of thing lately (the loneliness epidemic, the friendship recession, etc.) that it seems churlish to complain about this article just bc it uses the phrase "hanging out."That said, The Atlantic should pay her for that excerpt.
― jaymc, Saturday, 17 February 2024 22:13 (three months ago) link
Yikes...https://i.ibb.co/pPjgyP4/Screenshot-20240217-162149-Chrome.jpg
― jaymc, Saturday, 17 February 2024 22:24 (three months ago) link
lmao
― flopson, Saturday, 17 February 2024 22:34 (three months ago) link
the editors probably should have clued him in, but lol at her owning “hanging out”
― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Saturday, 17 February 2024 23:38 (three months ago) link
I teach a research methods class for nonfiction writers. Just let me know if you’d like to sit in and I’ll be happy to share the Zoom link! https://t.co/9I1NYKd8wo— Sheila Liming (@seeshespeak) February 15, 2024
I seriously can’t tell if she’s doing a bit
― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Sunday, 18 February 2024 02:00 (three months ago) link
She seems like a pretty typical high on their own supply tenured writing prof
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Sunday, 18 February 2024 02:02 (three months ago) link
pretty sure no one who started instructing or even got to associate prof since 1998 has ever gotten tenure but you’d know better!
― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Sunday, 18 February 2024 02:59 (three months ago) link
I think she probably views it as publicity
― jaymc, Sunday, 18 February 2024 03:38 (three months ago) link
twitter-beefing that is
― jaymc, Sunday, 18 February 2024 03:39 (three months ago) link
Honestly, I'm kind of on her side here -- she ran the piece in the Atlantic, she feels that Thompson, a staff writer there, probably read it there, forgot he read it, then borrowed her phrasing; it would be incredibly irritating to run a piece, not get paid, then feel like the guy who is getting paid is making use of your phrasing without even remembering where he got it from! I don't think that's churlish really.
That said, I think Thompson handled it as well as he could have.
Also I am not so convinced there's anything wrong with human life today and I think the ability to have low-key text conversations constantly with people far away is a feature of modern life that pushes the other way from diminished face-to-face interaction and for all I know even outweighs that diminishment.
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, 18 February 2024 03:56 (three months ago) link
isn’t associate prof typically tenured?
― flopson, Sunday, 18 February 2024 04:06 (three months ago) link
He claimed he hadn't read it in a tweet and she said he should have googled since he called it Hanging Out
― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal), Sunday, 18 February 2024 04:33 (three months ago) link
The idea someone should have Googled a phrase that's been in common use for half a century or more is ridiculous.
― papal hotwife (milo z), Sunday, 18 February 2024 04:42 (three months ago) link
i’ve spent most of my life hanging out all the time and still manage to do it a fair bit, but i now have some friends who don’t hang out at all. it’s interesting. for them any social gathering must be a planned activity with a well-defined beginning and end, and almost always needs some intrinsic function to justify it. like i once met up with this guy for a movie and we met up outside the theatre 5 minutes before and then as soon as the movie was over he caught a cab home, didn’t even do the “so what did you think of the movie?” chat. another time my partner and i went to dinner with him and his wife on a saturday night, we met at the restaurant at 6 then they went home promptly at 7:30. not even a hint of a consideration that we’d grab a drink or walk around a bit. the restaurant was a block from their place; they could’ve invited us over. and they don’t have kids. for the longest time we thought they just didn’t like us, but then at one point he told my partner he considered me his best friend. he does text me a lot. it was really confusing, but i think for some people the idea of idly spending time with your friends because you enjoy their company is just not a concept they are aware of. so i could see Sheila Liming thinking she invented “hanging out” if she’d previously exclusively lived amongst these kinds of people. like to her she’d unearthed some kind of lost tradition. the subtitle of the book calls hanging out “radical” which is consistent with that
― flopson, Sunday, 18 February 2024 05:33 (three months ago) link
that’s kind of foreign to me, too. I guess the main difference between now and when I was younger is I’m just hanging out at a friend’s place less than I used to. part of that is the shared urge to get out of the house and we’ll bounce around a bit before going back to our respective homes. people in my sphere also have tighter schedules when you figure in kids, different work hours, etc. so things can seem time-boxedobviously most of humanity’s greatness comes from just chilling
― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Sunday, 18 February 2024 14:24 (three months ago) link
Man that is disappointing when people don’t want to engage in the post-movie stroll and chit-chat. Weather permitting of course.
― The Ginger Bakersfield Sound (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 18 February 2024 15:11 (three months ago) link
The whole idea of hanging out at a friend's house is dead for almost app my friends but two.
One of them now can't really have me over as much because he's promised not to drink in front of his kids anymore and most of the time we'd be drinking fancy whiskey or beer and watching football.
The other sometimes has me over or comes over but ALWAYS wants to go out while simultaneously saying she needs to save money.
But there is no activity more enjoyable to me than just hanging at a friend's pad or having them over mine. Don't gotta worry about "finding parking", or feeling overwhelmed in public which happens often to me lately.
And then more money to do more substantial things with these friends, like the road trip to see Snoop Dogg with this same friend and her boyfriend last year, which was an amazing two day trip
― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal), Sunday, 18 February 2024 15:34 (three months ago) link
*all
yeah kids change the calculus. but my friend from the above post is childless and both he and his partners have jobs with very flexible schedules—so no excuse
― flopson, Sunday, 18 February 2024 15:35 (three months ago) link
Feel like I only ever hear about the Hugos because of blunders and controversies, maybe they should scrap them.Feel like I only hear about widespread efforts to remove books from libraries as the result of organised campaigns by a tiny coterie of right-wing creeps, maybe they should scrap libraries.Fuck sake.
― bae (sic), Sunday, 18 February 2024 16:55 (three months ago) link
tbf, removing books from libraries is done by external, (mostly) right-wing forces, and the Hugos shot themselves in the foot, thigh, and sternum during the 2023 awards, based on the details that have just come out
― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal), Sunday, 18 February 2024 17:07 (three months ago) link
one thing im a bit confused by with the hugo stuff—isn’t babel by rf kuang quite widely acknowledged to be terrible? everyone i know who attempted reading it basically threw it across the room, and the excerpts ive read were awful
― flopson, Sunday, 18 February 2024 17:13 (three months ago) link
yes but that book throwing helped people increase muscle mass
― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal), Sunday, 18 February 2024 17:27 (three months ago) link
shot themselves has tipsy been hearing about the 2024 awards since 2013 or was it something else
― bae (sic), Sunday, 18 February 2024 17:32 (three months ago) link
xpost I haven’t read the book, but it won the Nebula so apparently not everyone agreed it was terrible
― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Sunday, 18 February 2024 18:01 (three months ago) link
With respect, this might be a you problem, it's kept on being one of the two big awards (which is why the Sad / Rabid Puppies went after it, though they never really got very far) - if you don't follow sci-fi awards, where would you expect to hear of it?
xp also the Blackwell's book of the year for fiction (also my wife loved it)
― Andrew Farrell, Sunday, 18 February 2024 18:55 (three months ago) link