Literary Clusterfucks 2013

So much more in the world to write about than cars

is there though

'Fromm mentions sex and the automobile as fundamental outlets of postmodern boredom.'

zzz @ autofiction discourse

otm, not that it will do us any good, the age of memoir is a cash cow

from Keeping up with books

poet molly brodak who died this year tragically at the age of 42, and who wrote an incredible memoir about growing up with a father who was a bank robber.O SHIT Molly Brodak died?! I felt like I knew her, from reading Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir, which was even more about her and her sister and mother than him and how he (maybe) got that way: pellucid and fluid and affecting---I haven't found my way into her poetry per se, but can see how her training and other experience w that came in handy prose-wise. Also some excellent tweets, her photos etc. O shit.
― dow, Saturday, November 28, 2020

In a feature on NPR's All Things Considered, Brodak described the ethical process of Bandit's subject, which detailed her experience as the daughter of a multiple felon bankrobber in Detroit, Michigan: "Every family has darkness and heaviness that people would prefer to not talk about. And when you choose to become the person who's going to bring light to the dark family secrets, you can sometimes be perceived as the betrayer."[5] An excerpt from Bandit appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016.[6] In 2018, she was a recipient of an NEA fellowship for prose.[7]

Brodak's poems appeared widely, including in Granta, Poetry, Fence, Map Literary, NY Tyrant, Diode, New Orleans Review, Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Bateau, and Hayden's Ferry Review.

Brodak was also the founder of Kookie House, a baking company that specializes in unique cookies and cakes. In 2018, she appeared as a finalist on the Great American Baking Show.

Death
Brodak died on March 8, 2020.[8] According to the New York Times, her husband, Blake Butler, gave the cause of death as suicide and she had struggled with depression since childhood.[9] I didn't get that kind of major depression from the book, maybe because the writing seemed such an exemplary way of dealing w such experiences, incl. thoughts. But now I almost feel guilty, like a friend who didn't see enough. I don't think of myself as naive about the curative powers of art, or anything else, but goes to show once again that you can never be too sure of these things. No great lesson learned, it's just another loss. But I'm gladder than ever for the book, that she was able to get that far (also w the relationship and baking).

― dow, Saturday, November 28, 2020
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
thanks for the link, flopson! It is a grueling read, but I think I understand better now. What a brave and eloquent writer. I'll check more of his, incl. the novel, Alice Knott.

― dow, Thursday, December 3, 2020 2:20 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

He's...okay.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Thursday, December 3, 2020 2:23 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

What he writes about Molly is more than okay.

― dow, Thursday, December 3, 2020 2:35 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

But if not for you, so be it.

― dow, Thursday, December 3, 2020 2:37 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

No, I like his writing on Molly.

His other writing is just okay.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Thursday, December 3, 2020 3:31 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I just want to put it out there that while this isn't the case with Butler's writing on Brodak, just because an established writer loses someone in a tragic way doesn't make them writing about it "good writing." Case in point: the J0yelle McSweeney book about losing her infant daughter, which is...really rigid, unfeeling, boring even.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table)

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.

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

or going back further, The Bell Jar or Good Morning Midnight etc etc

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.

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

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

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

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.)

"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.

i am going to read molly

https://i.redd.it/69noq5ciya581.jpg

let us know if he ever reins in his endless awful similes

tbf Marilynne Robinson did exactly that between Housekeeping and Gilead. fervent support for all those fighting simile addiction

Ulysses is basically autofiction, although he splits himself up into two characters.

uh no

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'

autofiction

Way back when I was in grad school, we called it "reflexive fiction."

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 reylo
https://i.postimg.cc/wvn2rqZB/IMG-2921.jpg

Yeah anyway reylos have been ruining these kinds of spaces for like a decade

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.

Literature will die out and stupid poetic phrases will remain to drift over the world.
Milan Kundera

People who treat book publishing like getting into the college of their choice

That article gave me a headache. Also, it reads like it was written by a teenager or AI.

lol gyac

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.’”

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.

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

Feel like I only ever hear about the Hugos because of blunders and controversies, maybe they should scrap them.

Was that the focus of the "sad puppies" dustup a few years ago?

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.

Yikes...

https://i.ibb.co/pPjgyP4/Screenshot-20240217-162149-Chrome.jpg

lmao

the editors probably should have clued him in, but lol at her owning “hanging out”

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

She seems like a pretty typical high on their own supply tenured writing prof

pretty sure no one who started instructing or even got to associate prof since 1998 has ever gotten tenure but you’d know better!

I think she probably views it as publicity

twitter-beefing that is

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.

isn’t associate prof typically tenured?

He claimed he hadn't read it in a tweet and she said he should have googled since he called it Hanging Out

The idea someone should have Googled a phrase that's been in common use for half a century or more is ridiculous.

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

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-boxed

obviously most of humanity’s greatness comes from just chilling

Man that is disappointing when people don’t want to engage in the post-movie stroll and chit-chat. Weather permitting of course.

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

*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

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.

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

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