Literary Clusterfucks 2013

Well at least I know what one of our sister "big" houses is doing today--getting lots of emails from their CEO/publisher telling them not to talk to the press or offer any comment in a public place.

I think the publisher is evil because they agreed to publish this in the first place.

but agreed to publish this knowing how much?

The major difference I can see between this clusterfuck of a relationship and hundreds of thousands of similar clusterfucks is that one of the two people involved has written about it at great length and sold it to a publisher and founded a blog around it. The fact that she is a published author may carry a certain prestige, but it is no guarantee that she knows what she is doing, understands herself, or understands her lover. It only guarantees that she knows how to write declarative sentences.

I'm sorry her relationship with that cowboy turned out so horribly and his actions do not appear very creditable or kind, but I also can't say much in favor of her judgement, which seems to land her in an endless series of fuckups which she feels she must broadcast to the universe, first asserting then retracting many fundamental ideas with an equal passion and conviction of her rightness.

well, I mean, yeah xp

That night they disagree on nearly every subject, but “that kiss was so flippin’ good that I didn’t want to risk not getting another one by, you know, arguing or making unreasonable demands.”

So she holds her tongue. And gets in bed with the cowboy. “Angels sang arias. The earth moved,” she waxes on.

After only one night, she’s seemed to undergo an entire political change of heart.

“Maybe I didn’t know that I thought I knew. Maybe the world wasn’t as simple as they made it seem on the Rachel Maddow show,” she says.

With him, she’s in heaven, finally “free” of the feminist dogma that had defined her.

“The dirty little secret of feminism, I suddenly understood, was that it could never go as far as it aimed to, because we were, all of us, fundamentally shackled to our own biology,” she writes. “Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution could not be erased in one bra-burning decade, just because Gloria Steinem or Alice Walker said so.”

Now the idea that women are capable of doing anything that men can do — one that defined her earlier career — is almost overnight damned as mere “craziness.”

In man that's called thinking with his prick.

I have a lot of issues with serial memoirists, but this is just horrifying. And it'll probably only get worse when antifeminists pick up her book as a cause célèbre and ignore the context.

Ugh ugh ugh.

i think it's interesting that the 'cowboy' is also an actor

the whole situation, the handling of it...everything is really terrible

it'll probably only get worse when antifeminists pick up her book as a cause célèbre and ignore the context.

Or dismiss it as the crazy feminist being bitter and trying to get revenge for being dumped. The whole situation is really fucked up.

this whole thing is 10 kinds of fucked up - just from the excerpts available online, the relationship depicted in the memoir is clearly, unambiguously, abusive.

'the passion letters' are also super creepy and OTT

xxp Apparently per the radio interview some casting person was looking for a "cowboy, a real cowboy" type and kept asking around and ppl kept saying, "You've really got to meet {this guy}" and they did, and he got a bit part in something, and then more bit parts, etc, but when agents told him to move to LA to get more work he dissed them.

The Atlantic review: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/woman-rejects-feminism-continues-to-disdain-femininity/266889/

Valdes insists that through her relationship with the cowboy she grew and learned to reject second wave feminism, and to instead embrace the feminine. In practice, though, her book is suffused with a visceral loathing for the feminine. It's just that this loathing is mostly directed at men. She repeatedly sneers at the guys she's dated for being "emasculated," or, in one memorable phrase, for being "sniveling little boys, with crow's feet and online-porn addiction." She says that the reason her first marriage broke up was that she was the bread-winner and she couldn't respect her husband for staying at home and cooking and cleaning. And finally, in a remarkable display of homophobia, she sneers at pop stars from Prince to David Bowie for not projecting a sufficiently normative vision of masculinity. " A tiny little man with no body hair, running around in fucking thigh-high stiletto heels, singing in the highest falsetto in the world about how you were a 'Little Red Corvette'? Are you fucking kidding me?" Thus, before her transformation, she was a ball-breaking second waver who spent a lot of time verbally castrating men—and after her transformation, she's a ball-breaking non-second-waver who spends a lot of time verbally castrating men. The difference just doesn't seem that profound.

bam

obviously not reviewed by caitlin flanagan

Prince is the ultimate dude IMO

What kind of knuckle dragging heteronormativity do you have to buy into to deny this?

Her article in Huffpost last week: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alisa-valdesrodriguez/liberals-vs-conservatives_b_2397259.html

I was a city progressive who had managed to fall in love with a tall, stoic, smart yet very conservative cattle ranch manager from the rural part of my state. We were talking about maybe having my son meet him, and he was explaining to me his reasons for wanting my then 10-year-old to call him "Mr. Lane" and "sir."

"That's ridiculous," I told him. I had grown up with hippie academic parents on a college campus, calling all adults by their first names. "He's not used to having to do that. He should call you Steve."

"I don't care what he's used to," said Mr. Lane. "It's about respect."

So began our discussion about the meaning of "respect." To me, respect meant tolerance for differences. To Mr. Lane, it meant deference to authority. Same word. Totally different emotional meaning and reaction.

The more I listened, the more I understood that in spite of all the supposed "research" that says conservatives and liberals have brains that are wired differently (they, for "fear," we, for "shades of gray"), we might actually just be speaking different emotional languages with the same exact words.

I shared this idea with Mr. Lane, and watched his eyes light up as he understood.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said. "You might be on to something here."

It dawned on us both that day that we (and our sides) were much more alike than we were different, but that neither of us had ever taken the time to try to truly understand what the other side was saying in their own language. There weren't two kinds of brains out there, or two "kinds" of people, as our media would love for us all to believe in this most splintered time in American history. There were, rather, just... Americans... people who were all basically wired the same, who want the same basic things for themselves, their families and their communities, but for whom the same words and phrases symbolized something different. We simply could not connect because we were speaking different languages.

As the memoir I wrote about my love affair with this unlikeliest of partners for me hits shelves this week, The Feminist and the Cowboy: An Unlikely Love Story, I find people asking me how I was able to love a conservative cowboy for two years, given our enormous ideological differences. My answer is simple: Once Mr. Lane and I learned to speak to one another in each other's emotional languages, we got along great.

It's a lesson that I truly believe might be useful to our nation's leaders right now, too. Until we all learn to truly hear what the other is saying, I fear that we are all doomed to continue to misunderstand -- and by default loathe, mock and thwart -- one another.

I am legit grossed out that she referred to him as Mr Lastname right there.

I am pretty sure we figured this exact same thing out some time in high school

" A tiny little man with no body hair, running around in fucking thigh-high stiletto heels, singing in the highest falsetto in the world about how you were a 'Little Red Corvette'? Are you fucking kidding me?"

Nope.

http://culturepop.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/prince-extra-loveable-2011.gif

As the memoir I wrote about my love affair with this unlikeliest of partners for me hits shelves this week, The Feminist and the Cowboy: An Unlikely Love Story, I find people asking me how I was able to love a conservative cowboy for two years, given our enormous ideological differences. My answer is simple: Once Mr. Lane and I learned to speak to one another in each other's emotional languages, we got along great.

once democrats let republicans have their way w/ them and don't leave the car until boehner opens the door for them our country will do much better

"Well, I'll be damned," he said. "You might be on to something here."

sometimes plain-spoken actually means "idiot"

also in what universe does Prince have no body hair?

http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p294/cozikitten/My%20Prince/Princeshirtless.jpg

flood her inbox with lovesexy promo pics

"AH DON'T KNOW WHUT YOU JUST SAID"

(xp)

Veronica Saucedo @verosauce
@MizAlisa my friends and I can't get enough of your blog! And after today's post... We're buying the book. Love #love #neverblindagain
Retweeted by Alisa Valdes

No one has forced her to continue to support this sham of a book and that she continues to do so should tell you plenty about her character imo.

sadly at this point i don't feel entirely certain accepting the full truth of anything in the book OR in the subsequently removed blog post

not that i DISbelieve any of the things she has said happened, which are all horrible, just, well, who knows wtf is going on here at this point

mordy and goole otm

No one has forced her to continue to support this sham of a book and that she continues to do so should tell you plenty about her character imo.

Excuse me?? I'm sure her publisher is doing exactly that: they paid her a huge advance ($400,000 iirc from an earlier link???) and she's almost certainly contractually committed to a tour or tours, a certain number of speaking appearances and author signings and discussion groups and on and on. And not to libel her publisher in print, probably, also. Legal departments usually object to that kind of thing.

Her publisher is going to take her huge advance away if she doesn't retweet ppl's tweets? I doubt it.

yeah i don't think i agree with mordy there either. we have no idea what her continuing support of this book means or what motivation is behind it.

She doesn't have to lie during interviews either. She can say "It was a tumultuous love affair that ended poorly," and withhold publisher-unfriendly details. She doesn't need to lie. There is no "you must lie" provision in her contract I am positive.

It is mildly interesting how, in that HuffPo article, she casts herself as a heroine whose brilliant stroke of insight could lead to The Peaceable Kingdom among "our nation's leaders", and she gives every appearance of earnestly believing this scenario. This is more evidence, if any were needed, of the dismally low level of knowledge and experience required to set oneself up as a pundit and parade your ignorance about, garbed in bulletproof self-confidence.

OR in the subsequently removed blog post

Extremely cheap yet effective viral marketing

^^^

There is a definitely a way to sell this book for her publisher without defending + praising her rapist. "I've learned a lot over the last few years," "I am not the same person who wrote this book," etc there are thousands of writer cliches that she could trot out to create some distance between herself and her material.

garbed in bulletproof self-confidenceutter bullshit.

They can certainly take her to court to pay it back if they determine she's crossed over some line of unhelpful or libelous or unsupportive, which after that blog post and all this mishegas that line is probably already somewhere behind her if we're being honest.

Sorry, that's like xxxxxxxp somewhere, the phone rang.

Guys, I think she really wants to sell this book. I don't think that's necessarily in conflict with the truthfulness of her now-deleted post. Because of people are fucked-up.

I mean, would I have ever read her or bothered to spend one breath thinking or chatting about her w/o this? I don't know what her motivation(s) are, of course, but if it is a stunt, a cynical and ultimately malevolent stunt, it has most certainly worked.

the fact that, as i said, i "don't feel entirely certain accepting the full truth of anything", also means i'm not comfortable outright calling her a liar either.

i really wish someone out there would ask about the substance of her publisher's demands and follow up about the content of her blog post.

If the publishers were smart they'd have her write a new forward about what has happened since she wrote the book and market the fuck out of the new narrative.

yeah goole FYI I'm not arguing w/ u