Literary Clusterfucks 2013

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

The curious thing is that half of her redacted post is about how her publishers are a bunch or jerks. This could mean a lot of things to us encyclopedia browns.

http://blog.shankbone.org/2009/02/13/alisa-valdes-rodriguez-bipolar-disorder-bisexuality-and-wikipedia/

http://www.afterellen.com/2009/2/visibility-matters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNjX3tQMygk

Hmm, methinks she's an immensely manipulative fabulist with a handy capacity to believe whatever bullshit she happens to be peddling.

Either that or I am just blinded with loathing for her highlights in that afterellen photo.

Um, yeah. I don't think this is helpful, guys. You're basically parading around a bunch of ad hominem crap in light of the fact that an alleged victim of serious abuse is not comporting herself *properly* in your own little worldview. There is a bunch of stuff none of us know about this story, and it would behoove you not to behave like utter utter wankers about it.

emil.y otm

there's more to this and anyone posting itt surely knows that

ppl who have suffered from abuse are likely not to act as predictably as others, so who knows really.

Thanks for the links, estella. xposts

We don't need to make any judgments about her claims of abuse to call bullshit on her and her publisher for bringing this opportunistic, anti-feminist memoir to market.

it's hard to believe this story of abuse, given how often this woman has opportunistically mined for attention by claiming membership to various vulnerable or minority groups.

Honestly I don't know which is worse - if she made up the abuse on the blog post to get some cheap, exploitive publicity or if she didn't make them up and is pushing this book despite knowing now that it's a narrative in which she defends an abusive rapist.

i hope it's not too lighthearted at this point to say i hope that her gallagher takedown was true

xp Hey now, easy on the publishing house/imprint. Only university presses and indie issue-specific companies can afford to only publish books by liberal people with liberal credentials who only like 20% of America has ever heard of.

Fine, coddle her emil.y. Did you read that afterellen piece? Maybe I'm an utter, utter wanker, but I smell narcissist rat, desperate for attention (publicity, whatever). I really do. If you claim to have squared some imaginary circle about feminists and thuggish cowboys and write a book about it and it's finally going to be published and then post that you were raped by your cowboy beau and then make that claim disappear and then, when confronted about said disappearance, say your publicist said to take it down and by the way my present boyfriend wrote and said, "Thanks for taming my shrew!" to your putative rapist and you want me to be more circumspect about ad-feminem wankiness when I feel like pulling my hair out and bewailing humanity even more than I did this morning, I apparently just don't get it.

Honestly I don't know which is worse - if she made up the abuse on the blog post to get some cheap, exploitive publicity or if she didn't make them up and is pushing this book despite knowing now that it's a narrative in which she defends an abusive rapist.

Yes, if only there was any other possibility between those two extremes.

It's hard for me to imagine that any self-respecting publisher, especially not an arm of a giant like penguin, would want to silence accusations of rape and try to preserve a sham narrative about a memoir all so it didn't have to eat a whopping $400,000 advance (which, let's face it, they are not going to get back from her even if they spend the money to take her to court)

Orbit, what would be one of those possibilites? I honestly cannot see how she could publish this w/o amendment at the very least if she stands by the rape charge.

If she doesn't stand by the abuse/rape charge, it's despicable that she made it.

the worst case, in my view, might be what's happening: it's possible that the cowboy was an abusive rapist, but valdes really does now believe all that crap about women being happier submitting to a real man, despite that.

but in general i don't like filling in with speculation what nobody has yet found out by asking.

Well first of all the release date was January 3 so the text has probably been final since sometime in November at the very least. And most of the first printing qty is probably already sold to distributors and amazon.com and bookstores and so on.

I mean it's out there, they can't get it back (except by a massively expensive recall which could happen I guess but is maybe a long shot).

I haven't seen where Valdes isn't "standing by" the rape allegations, there could be LOTS of reasons to take that post down. Has she issued some kind of 100% retraction of everything in it that I haven't noticed?

I guess the publisher could think "WE HAVE TO COVER THIS UP SO WE CAN SELL BOOKS" but it's hard for me to believe that the publisher would think that way, not least because it would be stupid of them. I'd think it'd make much more sense to get out in front of this and cut losses. But only after figuring out for sure what the heck is going on. So I don't see "please take this blog post down" as particularly nefarious under the circumstances.