Literary Clusterfucks 2013

lol i just realised that the new yorker piece abt the so-called "famous" (ilx: LET IT GO MARK) novelist is i4n p4rk3r so everyone saying biting the story as a let-down now has my support

backstory: he turned down a couple of my proposals in the late 80s and then joined the new yorker staff so he is cancelled for all time, this beef will nevah die

It’s a bad piece! Picks the wrong targets, only scratches the worthwhile ones, and sidelines the victims. It’s a vanity fair feature at best.

Another YA author "self-cancellation": https://slate.com/culture/2019/03/ya-book-scandal-kosoko-jackson-a-place-for-wolves-explained.html

I have to think this level of self-defeating has to burn itself out at some point? Alternatively, YA as a genre could be reexamined--that piece points out most YA readers are adults and these outrage drives are led by them too.

it's probably true that this kind of second-hand outrage is a far more pernicious bourgie indulgence than using an ethnic war as a setting could be

I say we cancel fiction altogether just in case.

Is anyone writing a dystopian YA novel about the dystopian YA community

— Elisa Gabbert (@egabbert) March 5, 2019

lol

(independent of anything i love elisa gabbert)

otm

“I have to be absolutely fucking honest here, everybody,” the review opened, in the hyperbolic voice of its genre. “I’ve never been so disgusted in my life.”... (The reviewer nonetheless gave the book two stars out of five because “it was ownvoices and well done.”)

sO dIsGUsTeD!

The issue in this one is that black queer authors shouldn’t write about the kosovo war?

Or is it that war stories shouldn’t be love stories? (This is about two young men that fall in love during the kosovo war).

Seems like a good premise honestly

Why are people who exclusively consume culture made for children always so angry about it

It’s not about the fact it’s YA. They have an ideology they’re promoting. It just took root in this community in an especially uncompromising way.

so why did it take root in THIS community in an especially uncompromising way? seems like it is about YA to some degree

it fully is about YA and the kind of adults who are into YA

maybe YA tends to be more about identity than other types of literature

maybe YA has to be morally uncompromised because it is for children, who are less capable of parsing ambiguity and contradiction

(not my perspective, the theoretical perspective of YA critics)

i guess. and also young readers are in a phase of life where they want to see people like themselves reflected in stories, so the critics want to make sure they're encountering "authentic" representations.

In his statement, Jackson invoked his young readership by mentioning the “responsibility that comes with introducing readers to certain topics.”

these people are wildly self-important

i think the idea of promoting diverse stories so young readers don't feel marginalized is 100% laudable, btw, which is why i think the idea of a war book with gay protagonists who fall in love sounds great. what is insidious is the constant policing of who has the right to tell what story

considering how difficult it is to get a book published, i can't even fathom the amount of pressure a person must feel from this "community" to the point where they'd willingly cancel their own book

bury goodreads in the sea imo

can authors (first time authors no less) really unilaterally cancel publication? do they have to pay back advances? reimburse the publisher for costs accrued to that point, etc?

maybe ppl who've never been so disgusted in their lives as when they were reading a book they still gave TWO STARS on goodreads should rethink their life decisions

does anyone here know much about what the cultural revolution was like in china? was the vibe similar? obviously the stakes were extremely different

It’s the forced public apologies that creep me out.

YA does have a legacy of addressing more serious social issues. But now it seems to be hamstrung by that tradition, exacerbated by this reductive identity politics that no one can speak for any person, even fictionally, with an identity they don't have direct experience with. Having been indoctrinated in the 90s "race/gender/identity is a social construct" school of thought, this new determinism is pretty shocking to me. I don't want to play naive, but I think it's bad to imply that imagining the lives of others is basically impossible and in fact a form of violence.

people that YELP GOODREAD are scumbags

It is an incredibly destructive mindset that seems mostly attractive to bullies

xp

so why did it take root in THIS community

it took root in that community because it's a venn diagram of
- adults who think they're aspiring writers and want to create work in a book type that's optioned for a lot of whiz-bang film franchises (Hunger Games, Divergent, Twilight, whatever) and are busy policing what the *wrong* approaches are so that people accept them as authorities
- adults who do spend much more time on social media and review sites than actually reading, and their time constraints/attention spans/actual interests are such that they are incapable of reading or relating to anything other than YA literature

or at least, this is what I gather from having read a few articles on the clusterfucks and personalities involved

call all destroyer's quote is also key: YA lit by design has a lot less moral ambiguity than adult lit, or makes a point of explaining why it is ambiguous, leading people to become completely pedantic about approach and structure

as readers, some of these people want clean resolutions and their preconceptions enforced -- it just happens that their new set of preconceptions are lined up with a social justice-oriented modern morality

the content of their arguments are nearly 180 degrees from the science fiction award douchebags who insist their genre is being ruined by social justice, but the tone and structure of their arguments are very, very similar

i agree w/ rob.

one argument that came to mind was "so, like, shakespeare shouldn't have written about othello?" but i assume the YA twitter/goodreads response would be "NO HE SHOULD NOT HAVE I CAN'T EVEN"

xp man that's a great point

ppl love to be inflexible :\

I agree with all your points except the last one. The reactionary sci-fi and video game fans are protective of their niche culture and hostile to outsiders. They don’t demand that much from people in their own community. The YA morality policd are on a crusade and the people they go against most fiercely are those who are already part of their community—like this author—but who were perceived to have slipped up. The idea is to enforce orthodoxy among their own ranks.

xp mh

It’s the difference between a pub (slovently right wing video game fans) and a church (YA identity politics people)

From the outside, this is starting to look like a conversation focused less on literature than obedience.

I’m kind of ?!? at premise of the book but having not read it, that’s it. I seriously doubt any of the GR reviewers were Kosovans or connected to the conflict in any way. GR has been a cesspool for bullying for ages as well.

the choice of the kosovo setting does seem a little arbitrary but idk

Actually the more I think of it, the more obviously it seems to be targeting the author for not “staying in his lane” - aka knowing his place & the things he should be allowed to write about. Ugh.

i just don't understand why there is so much drama in this community of people who write books for teenagers

Are sensitivity readers a thing outside of YA?

Is this where I once more try and proselytise tt's greatest invention - the 'noun'*? I think so. YA people are ultranouns. The nouniest. They absolutely depend on the ability to vainglorify the smallest differences and assert their cultural supremacy in an already-saturated marketplace of alt-mainstream orthodoxy and third-hand ideas. Gaiman and Palmer are their king and queen.

*derogatory term for quirky normies, name derived from their predilection to go by common nouns like 'spoon' or 'biscuit' on webforums circa 2008

It also reminds me of old LJ drama and this particular books community that was dedicated to reviewing & discussing the works of woc, and how that low-key space went to shit due to bullying. It doesn’t matter that the books themselves are for children, online it can be anything and there doesn’t even have to be money involved.