Literary Clusterfucks 2013

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.

no, which is why the lack of follow-up is so maddening

but it appears that only our little corner of the internet seems to give a rat's

xp

Also: It will not be up to the author whether to recall or scrap or amend the books, most likely--that will be up to the publisher.

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'm sorry, what country do you think you live in?????

this is the most believable/least surprising portion of this whole thing; institutions react to bad new by attempting to bury it

xxxxp

emil.y, if we say that this woman's words and actions throw her into a very poor light, entirely apart from whether what she said about the man is true or false or somewhere in between, then we are only pointing out the obvious. Trying to justify her known words and actions, based on some hypothetical set of facts about which we know nothing, is an interesting thought, but a rather insubstantial one.

I'd ask you to notice that 98% of the story that we know so far has been completely under her control and put before us by her choice. So, it is not accidental that she became the subject of our discussion. If we have been misled about her, she must bear some responsibility for that.

DJP otm, for pete's sake, don't you think that's why we all have legal departments?

If she had brought this to their attention earlier I would think they'd rather scrap the book than have a scandal waiting to happen. Publishers like this publish a lot of friggin books - they're not going to be so attached to a single one (which, incidentally, did not exactly debut on the bestseller list it turns out) that they'd take that kind of risk.

she doesn't actually accuse him of rape - although it's clearly implied in her description of the situation

For what it's worth (per goole's comment) we aren't the only ones to be talking about this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/the-real-cowboy-the-real-feminist/267053/

Her Gallagher takedown: http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2008/03/gallagher-es-muy-mala.html

Hmm. How to put this delicately? We'll simplify: Mime-like, stringy-haired man in black hat smashes food with mallet on stage for living. Man, who no espeakey no Spanish, hears Spanish, thinks Spanish good, Spanish muy muy dinero. Man spends one month learning important Spanish words such as cerveza, caca and culo (butt). Man invents Spanish words, such as "sperm-o" and "embarazamante." Man decides this is enough Spanish to put on show for Latinos. Man smashes pinatas, wears giant sombrero and shakes keg-sized maracas. Man mocks Jews and gays and women and constipated old people. Man thinks he is muy funny comedian-o.

"There was the time we had an argument, the time I dared to challenge him and insist that I was right about something, when he, furious with me and so much bigger than me, simply dragged me down the hall to the bedroom, bent me over, and took me, telling me as he did so that I must never forget who was in charge, that I must learn to be nicer, that I must learn…to obey."

she doesn't use the r-word, but that is a rape accusation plain as day

Ned published the link yesterday afternoon. It was gone by the time I ambled along to see it early this morning. I don't find it hard at all to believe that the publishing house crossed their fingers and hoped that 10 or 15 hours of internet exposure might be salvageable. What I find truly odd is the timing of her post given that she could have torpedoed the book some time back before it went to the printers, if she had misgivings but now that it's out or almost out (unsure about the exact timing here) she's thrown a massive wrench into the book's very reason for being.

I don't think Valdes' post really changes my reading of the book—though it does make that reading significantly more depressing. The fact that the abused often identify with their abusers isn't news, of course. Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman in Father-Daughter Incest (one of those second-wave feminist treatises Valdes says she's moved beyond) talk about how victims of incest often admire the "competence and power" of their fathers. The identification is part of the abuse—and, of course, enables it.

In comments on her post, Valdes insists that she still rejects the feminist ideology that prevented her from trusting men. She insists she still stands by her claim that "feminism stole my womanhood."

As I admitted in my review, there is something to the argument that feminism doesn't sufficiently respect femininity. But...good lord. Surely the answer to that is not abusive relationship as growth experience. Valdes's stereotype of feminism may not be right that all men can't be trusted, but clearly this asshole shouldn't have been. Can't there be some kind of reconciliation between feminism and femininity that doesn't involve women being terrorized by controlling, violent cowboys?

careful guys, some of you are coming pretty close to sounding like men's rights activists, i mean do you really have to bring up the spectre of the false or opportunistic rape allegations to make your point

the situation is fucked up for certain but nobody here has all of the facts so maybe stop being gross

just let the disappointing human frailty and misery wash over you, shit is fucked up and always will be

I have no opinion on whether she is making a false accusation or not but it's kind of fucked up that objecting to the idea of a false accusation of rape automatically makes you a men's rights activist

like, you should be able to voice the opinion that a specific person may not be trustworthy without being painted as a woman-hating dick

just let the disappointing human frailty and misery wash over you

solitary posts that effortlessly sum up etc

I think the accusation of rape is generally accepted here as well within believability, but that Valdes's actions make it difficult to see much integrity in her handling of... the whole situation. The most charitable explanantion is that she is extremely confused and that her confusion inevitably leads us all into a similar confusion about her motives. All we can do is point to the multitude of contradictions that are painfully apparent around her behavior. She is the only one who could possibly clear them up.

There's a lot of anger at the author as a person and a comment about her appearance and way too much animosity coming to the surface from some ppl itt. Gotta tell you, it makes me really uncomfortable about continuing to talk about it (more than I already was/am from the sheer distastefulness of the whole spectacle).

I don't want to make any judgments about Valdes. Her level of objective accuracy doesn't concern me w/r/t each individual event depicted, if she used the "r-word," if she writes over-dramatically by my estimation, if I would want to be besties irl, because to me the absolute most convincing parts are the most banal:

I was so beaten down by then, from the constant daily criticisms, from the constant erosion of my self esteem, that I just took it, and wept, and apologized, and promised to do better. I did not think I would become someone like that. And there was a part of me hidden away inside, kept safe, that watched it all and waited for my chance to escape…

when I tried to say I was sorry, when I tried to stop the inevitable stonewalling, he glared, called me a mouthy cunt, told me to get to my side of the bed and not touch him, told me that he couldn’t stand the sight of me, told me that if I really wanted to impress him then I’d be a good girl and just shut the fuck up, and his finger poking me in the chest, and then wagged in my face, telling me that my biggest problem, the reason he would never marry me after all, was that I was a woman who just didn’t know when to shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up, and me saying I would, that I would be quiet, and turning my back to him so he wouldn’t hear me cry, and him feeling the bed shake anyway and yelling at me that I was pathetic, that if I wanted him to stay then I better stop fucking crying, and me running into my closet with my phone to fall in a heap on the floor and text myself so that in the morning I’d remember that this was NOT okay, that this was NOT love, and him pretending the next morning that nothing had happened.

I don't get the impression that anyone in this thread is angry. I'm certainly not angry.

You may be projecting a little bit.

Very interesting -- so that Atlantic article I linked? She's RT'd the announcement of it and replied:

Alisa Valdes ‏@MizAlisa

@hoodedu I find this piece very even-handed, compassionate, and spot-on, and suppose that will get me sued or something.

and a comment about her appearance

Alright, despite my disliking her highlights that was merely a lame attempt at levity and if she wants to call me a mincing, fasetto-voiced sheep fucker, I'll take it in good stride.

All I can say, is that if my guy called me a mouthy cunt, they would pretty much be the last two words I ever heard from him.

Addendum: Because Valdes wants us to accept her book as full of insight, beauty and wisdom about how women should think and act toward men, this obviously tortured clustefuck pretty well discredits any pretensions she had about that, which at the very least means the book is full of crap.

Man, what if goole's worst scenario is true?! *Sigh*

Final addendum, I would hope.

Perhaps, as several here have said, we ought not judge her, but it is fairly clear to me that she had no problem judging feminists and feminism and stating those judgements in clear, harsh, outspoken terms. So, if we choose not to repay her in kind, it is a courtesy she was disinclined to extend to others.

All I can say, is that if my guy called me a mouthy cunt, they would pretty much be the last two words I ever heard from him.

It's pretty easy to say what you would do in an abusive situation until you're in one. I'm not comfortable making judgements on what I would or wouldn't do.

I don't know this lady or know that she was someone I would have found convincing BEFORE the cowboy incident, but being abused changes you even if you thought you were done becoming yourself or defining yourself or w/e. Even if you like to think that who you are is done now, that you have a firm basic nature that can't be swayed...it can. And it takes a while to dig out afterwards. You're not, like, cured from the time you decide to walk away.

Oh boy the part of the ilx clusterfuck where make judgment call on other ilxors, awesome.