Literary Clusterfucks 2013

"what I actually wrote was a handbook for women on how to fall in love with a manipulative, controlling, abusive narcissist."

just what the world needed. like a poke in the eye.

jesus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FORoSB5JxCU

"Cowboy up."

none of these people are really writers

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, June 4, 2010 1:18 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wtf @ that whole story

polo shirt under a jacket, tho

I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.
You see by my outfit that I'm a cowboy, too.
We see by these outfits that we are all cowboys.
If you buy a cowboy outfit, you can be a cowboy, too.

damn nm I just actually read this shit how f'd up

i keep reading her name as alida valli

jesus

I don't know if we do this around here but there's some srs abuse and sexual assault triggers in Ned's second link

it's probably a good thing that she's posting a picture of her rapist on the internet, now we can watch out for him

man that's a tough read

cowboyfucks

How much you wanna bet that Mr Cowboy is gonna be a MRA talking head

In 2001, Valdes emailed a 3400-word resignation letter to her superiors at the Los Angeles Times. The letter was widely circulated on the Internet[ and reprinted in the St. Petersburg Times. In the letter she accused the newspaper of racism and discrimination, especially in its synonymous use of the word "latino" with "Spanish-speaker", a practice she equated to genocide.

buzza are you suggesting that alisa valdes is hysterical or otherwise to be dismissed

this is not the elizabeth wurtzel thread

And so, even though I was 43 years old and have Lupus

WHY DO THESE FANFICCY CRAP ROMANCE NOVELISTS ALWAYS HAVE LUPUS OR FIBRO WTF.

hm prob should have read the whole post of hers before making light. still, this shit brings the whole 50 shades bullshit into its awful, true light.

Considering Valdes wrote one of the single most amazing demolitions of a horrible person ever, reading/seeing all this...yeah.

okay that was awesome. thanks for linking that Ned

still cannot get over her story with the cowboy. so fucked up. I mean, just that it reads so familiarly, is so sad to me.

this is not the elizabeth wurtzel thread

oh, okay then

“An irresistible, post-feminist Taming of the Shrew. Don’t be scared by the premise. This is not a story about a woman relinquishing her identity. Quite the opposite. It is a riveting tale about how a brilliant, strong-minded woman liberated herself from a dreary, male-bashing, reality-denying feminism.”

– Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys; How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men

a practice she equated to genocide

ugh fuck this, there is like a 100% chance she was referring to cultural genocide, a term used for decades and not meant to imply the actual murder of a group of people

http://www.sptimes.com/News/110300/Floridian/The_language_of_genoc.shtml

buzza idgi are you trying to damage the credibility of the woman who basically just announced she wrote a book about a man who raped her

apparently so?

it's tough when you can only speak in the form of revived threads

seemed like zachylon wanted the context of the wiki quote so i provided it?

thank you for posting it

she does make a clear distinction between the two types of genocide tho she doesn't mark it with "cultural" or something similar. she does 'equate' the two but that's sort of the idea, while the wiki editor left out any of that context and framed it like "she compared this one tiny linguistic choice with the holocaust", fuck wiki

"literary"

I have a lot of thoughts about this whole thing and also some feelings but none are organized enough to share except for, Jesus, Lady--at least when I did that I didn't write a book about it.

considering that one of the major goals of feminism was to protect women from the power imbalances present in domestic relationships, it's not super surprising that valdes' paean to how feminism got romance wrong and how there's something special about a real man turned out to be about an abusive asshole. i don't mean to suggest that she deserves what happened in the least, but there is a sort of irony that the very political principles she decried in the context of this relationship turned out to be especially relevant to her needs.

xp On second thought that makes it sound like my experience was as extreme as hers: it was not. I also didn't put it in those terms of submission etc or posit that it revealed anything about how feminism has failed us. And I didn't have to jump out of a moving truck although after getting hit by an actual car frankly I'd take another one of those accidents over another of those relationships.

there is a sort of irony that the very political principles she decried in the context of this relationship turned out to be especially relevant to her needs.

It's not like that's a coincidence. She decried them because she was being told to.

really want some blogger to try to get a reaction out of christina hoff summers

I usually assume "How I did X and Changed My Life" memoirists are flighty, superficial and unrealistic people, because shit just doesn't work like that. This is a particularly egregious example.

This is a horrible horrible story.

btw, I regret my above post, having apparently made it without really reading most of the story in her blog post.

However, the blog post is now gone.

?!

this just got a little clusterfuckier

without the followup blog post this is kind of incoherent

she wrote a fluffy romance novel that seems to spend half its time scolding modern feminism, then revealed that the man she was writing about raped and abused her and (this is where things are fuzzy to me) the whole novel was a double-feint?

it's a memior!

ergh

so, replace "romance novel" with "memoir"; is the rest accurate?

Yup.

huh

Given some of the things she was also saying about her publisher I wonder if that had something to do with it.

Was just wondering the same thing.

not really a double feint in my reading; the now-gone blog post says the memior was written a couple years ago while still under the heavy influence of the guy and (i think?) before the most egregious instances of abuse had happened

And the Logies thing was my point.

Logies have only been open voting for a decade or so, you used to have to spend $2.95 on the form and 37¢ on the stamp, at least

(so they were rigged by publicists instead of the public)

Any organisation’s membership giving awards, contrarily, is a completely normal and reasonable process for awards. And rarely results in a significantly more demented slate than one which has juried noms and attendee voting tbf.

(I have no opinion about the recipients of any of them in the last 8 years except that two went to a friend and those ones are, unrelatedly, good and justified. if tipsy wants to call for the awards to be scrapped bcz he has now heard of them four times, not twice, in eleven years, go ahead tho)

all awards are bad

thread winner

Historic Hugos (and Nebulas) award winners still a dece enough guide to the best in the genre for newbies.

if tipsy wants to call for the awards to be scrapped bcz he has now heard of them four times, not twice, in eleven years, go ahead tho

I dived into the whole sad puppies thing when it was going on — which ran for like five years, didn't it? — and now obviously this whole China debacle. All of which suggest — to, yes, somebody who doesn't pay much attention or attach any particular significance to the Hugos — that there are some organizational/structural issues or vulnerabilities. I don't care if it gets scrapped or not, but it looks like they're going to have some work to do to re-establish whatever credibility they had.

There are probably 50 different awards for SF writing given out yearly, but the only ones most people know of or care about are the Nebulas and the Hugos. That's why the Sad Weirdos tried to hijack the awards in the first place. It makes more sense to replace whoever was making censorship decisions in this case than to get rid of a fan voted award entirely.

all awards are bad

NY Times is leaning toward mean takedowns: Alexandra Jacobs on Anne Lamott and Ducks, Newburyport's Lucy Ellmann on Danielle Dutton.

where's the takedown of Ducks?

no the author of Ducks (Ellmann) published a much-maligned takedown of Dutton

Ducking A!

well I read that punctuation incorrectly. I thought everyone loved Ducks! (The Canadian graphic novel)

just because you can write a book doesn't mean you can review a book

^underrated REO Speedwagon album

jfc the quotes in this thread

I read the book. It is on Kindle Unlimited, which I already have a free trial of, so I didn't pay money for it. Strap in, this is going to take a while. To start with, a big chunk of the book is Sam recapping Black Like Me & other journalists who did Blackface. https://t.co/8so85Wzk7O

— Shayna 🇵🇸✡️🏳️‍🌈🏳️ @shaynaa.bsky.social (@greycoupon) June 1, 2024

"I am a visionary writer"

this dude is a fifth-tier journo who wanted to make a splash and then jumped into the ocean without knowing how to swim

"In Chicago, good writers don't take the L"

oh you're taking the L alright

he deleted all of the inflammatory shit he tweeted at the NAACP

oh my goooooooooooood

Institutional racism (the anti-Black variety) is effectively dead," Forster concludes in the book. "Most of what's left of racism in this country are the few, socially narrow opportunities for soft interpersonal racism: shoulder racism."

Holy crap I'd heard about this book but the content is risible. Unless it is one massive troll at the left or wokism or something?

perish the thought

https://www.twitter.com/HotCommieWife/status/1796300427702485492

it reads like an extremely blunt parody of a delusional culture warrior, but also not a funny one.

Thanks to this book, I now fear picking up hitchhikers, worried they might be narcissistic white men in disguise.

— Lana Del Gay (@HotCommieWife) May 30, 2024

everything about this book sounds terrible ofc, but that tweet isn't great either

Go on, then...

That tweet is great, wtf?

This is a lazy and bad tweet

this 'clusterfuck' seems almost precision-engineered to symbiotically feed the cycle of unfunny drag his white ass twitter-voice twitter while elevating its admittedly pathetic progenitor to minor notoriety, all of it is worthless

clusterfucks of worth: that ellmann review of dutton seems pleasingly pointed. i will have to fish my copy of Ducks, Newburyport off the shelf soon

Clusterducks

The blackface book was already notorious before that tweet thread. It was just confirming that the writer was a right wing troll.

exactly, just ignore this shit. so how about that Ellmann eh? eh??

Alexandra Jacobs is a great reviewer (with both stuff she likes and stuff she doesn't) and it's good to see her get noticed on this thread

Super bleak out of Samoa - poet/academic Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard murdered by novelist Sia Fiegel:

https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/06/03/author-charged-with-murder-the-inside-story/

fucking hell :/

That feels a little too big for this thread. Horrible.

awful.

And the murdered poet was Tulsi Gabbard’s aunt?

Sort of pissed me off that in that news story about her brutal murder there was a big color picture of her niece, like please, at this moment, let her be herself and not Tulsi Gabbard's aunt??!?!?

Anyone give a shit about this baillie gifford thing, me neither

So many melts trying to shame the protestors.

Yeah the observer aka melt central is handwringing about it today

We have a bg-sponsored literary festival here in Cambridge, it’s basically shit like “David walliams in conversation with nick clegg” I’m sure literature will survive this lads

I have many publishing friends/colleagues who are making very anxious ‘look at what you stupids did, now nobody will subsidise our festivals and they will dieeeeeeee’ but at all of these festivals they seem to have forgotten (probably because most of them are in salaried jobs) that everyone is making bank but the authors, who are usually not paid despite attracting audiences, and fobbed off with dinner and a hotel room instead of an appearance fee. Priorities!

You have to be pretty morally decrepit to be like "oh no the genocide/climate disaster enablers won't fund our festivals anymore" with a straight face. So much for engagé literature I guess.

To the people that go to these the important thing is being able to go to a debate on whether genocide is in fact good or bad, and also tote bags

Looking at this and from twitter I am inferring that a lot of transphobic talking points are given respectability in literary fests.