Literary Clusterfucks 2013

the most promising young american author is TAO LIN

The tagline on the cover of RIchard Yates is "what constitutes illicit sex for a generation with no rules?"

― Treeship, Thursday, October 2, 2014 8:26 PM (Yesterday)

ugh this is gross; can't we all just consensually enjoy poppers

yeah

pretending there is such a thing as "a generation with no rules" is just silly

Think that was the original tagline to _Story of the Eye_

The fact that it's my generation he's describing is very weird. Nihilism as a central preoccupation, even as an adversary position, seems so 19th century.

i think it's back. this david foster wallace essay appealed to many people:

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day
trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is
no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice
we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing
some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be
it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or
some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything
else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if
they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have
enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body
and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time
and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally
grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified
as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great
story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will
need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid,
a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing
about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that
they're unconscious. They are default settings.

as a secular person, i am uncomfortable with the appeal to the supernatural. but i think what lin's books do at their best is describe what it's like for people who, through arrogance or confusion, have rejected all given values and try to fashion new ad hoc codes for themselves. his early blog writings are all like, ethical treatises, and books like richard yates describe the monstrous ways these ideas found expression in his real life. so yeah, i think this is nihilism... the idea that you can just make it up as you go along, and stay true only to your own "conscience," which doesn't mean anything if you don't have moral intuition which i guess lin might actually not have.

i feel like david brooks writing this shit. but really, there's still such a thing as feeling lost and right now people are more reluctant than ever to steer lost people back on correct paths. this is probably a net good, as nothing is more dangerous than certainty. but uncertainty carries dangers too.

it's hard to formulate this, but i think this question is relevant now than other times because people are offered more choices on how to think, how to live, etc. i am thinking of kierkegaard and the idea that the moment of choice (which discloses our freedom) is a moment of anxiety. while it's probably good that there isn't set patterns for life, firmly established for us -- a fact that is constricting -- the nightmare described in taipei of spending so much fucking time absorbed in one's thoughts and choices is also constricting.

<3 dfw but that's bullshit, or at least extraordinarily one-sided, regarding a side he's projecting

i can't really speak to your connection to lin's books -- i've not read them and am unlikely to now -- but why is it so difficult to simply treat people well? it doesn't take religion. the fact that modern society sucks and the internet is alienating doesn't make it impossible.

i've been taking (prescribed) mind-altering drugs for more than half of tao lin's life and can almost certainly drink him under the table. yet i've managed to refrain from fucking (and fucking up) 16-year-olds. it's simply not that difficult to be a decent person, no matter how often one cries nihilism and alienation.

yeah, i wasn't excusing him morally and don't want to be seen even minimally to be doing that. this whole thing though has been a wake up call for me to remember that artists are people and don't just exist in some sort of hypothetical space where they can explore the extremities of the human condition without consequence. like, i read richard yates in 2011 and just thought it was a novel, even knowing it had "autobiographical elements", and wasn't as disturbed as i should have been.

but anyway, i think there is a lot to that dfw quote. everyone's responsible for being a decent person, but our responsibilities to others can become occluded when we spend too much time absorbed in ourselves, which is really easy to do now. i wouldn't blame any of lin's irl actions on this, but in the book there is a connection between the characters' sense of moral vertigo and their sense of alienation and i think this is why his work was described as "nihilistic", a term jmm found to be a strange buzzword in 2014

lol that is some srs half ass shit dfw

it's cfw in his c.s. lewis mode, it's all right, it's got a tang to it

dfw, even

He went to Amherst, after all.

i don't think what he is saying is too different from this:

yeah its interesting me an mordy are two of the more religious regulars around here thinking the same abt this, i feel like a lot of the time religion can lean a lil too heavy on the personal morality plays while ignoring or reenforcing structural/societal issues but at the same time we all do have an internal life that we have to relate to and our contemporary culture is so massively extroverted that it does a poor job of dealing w people on that level and often makes them feel like they dont matter or arent good enough or w/e

― lag∞n, Thursday, October 2, 2014 3:32 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fu

lol

on the one hand, Treeship otm, OTOH, Wallace is p clearly wanting to SAY SOMETHING WISE whereas lagoon hedges his bets and preemptively defends against charges of self-seriousness with an "or w/e" style which does age a little better than grafs with lines like "it's the truth"

artists are people and don't just exist in some sort of hypothetical space where they can explore the extremities of the human condition without consequence.

His being an abusive and cruel person/partner has nothing to do with anything as elevated as EXPLORING THE HUMAN CONDITION. Abusers are much alike no matter how heady and academically admired: narcissistic, anti-social, self-centered, manipulative, the lot.

lagoon wasn't giving a commencement speech xp

io, obviously. i was talking about not really taking the "autobiographical" stuff seriously beyond just being a marketing pitch. it's one of the grimmest books i've ever read.

"haley joel osment" -- the lin stand-in -- is clearly a vile predator. nobody who read it would think differently. but i and a lot of people liked to believe in a separation between author and character, even though dating a person that young is by itself very much out of line in my opinion

The only choice we get is what to worship.

But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

Hmm.

I don't feel much provoked by DFW's thing since it seems to me his "pretty much everything else" hardly covers anything. He discards a couple of clearly not very good sources of meaning, but those he mentions hardly begin to exhaust the space of possibilities. It's a big universe out there.

http://liferoar.wordpress.com/2014/10/02/stop-denying-and-unseeing-rape-subculture/

Rape subculture in “alternative” communities is often doubly insidious because our individual and group identities are molded precisely around an idea that we are not that. We are not dumb jocks; we’re poetry freaks! We’re intellectuals! We know the language of feminism! We voted for Barack Obama! We’re vegans! We’re artists! We’re anti-authoritarians! We’re liberal hippies! We’re Buddhists! We’re alternative! And it is precisely this psychological investment people have in being “different” and “alternative” that makes rape subculture all that much more important to be aware of.

i dunno in my limited experience dfw seems pretty otm there
granted the rhetoric is commencement speech but what am i missing?

If you're referring to my post, I picked out those two quotes because they seem to contradict each other. Do we have a choice of what to worship or don't we?

"worship" is a loaded term and DFW asks it to do some heavy lifting but it seems pretty clear he's saying we can choose the object of worship once we acknowledge that we don't get to opt out of the behavior

psychoanalytic types might say "fetishize" w/e

RS publishes the The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Report on its botched process on the UVA rape story:
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-what-went-wrong-20150405

As at other once-robust print magazines and newspapers, Rolling Stone's editorial staff has shrunk in recent years as print advertising revenue has fallen and shifted online. The magazine's full-time editorial ranks, not including art or photo staff, have contracted by about 25 percent since 2008. Yet Rolling Stone continues to invest in professional fact-checkers and to fund time-consuming investigations like Erdely's. The magazine's records and interviews with participants show that the failure of "A Rape on Campus" was not due to a lack of resources. The problem was methodology, compounded by an environment where several journalists with decades of collective experience failed to surface and debate problems about their reporting or to heed the questions they did receive from a fact-checking colleague.

Yet the editors and Erdely have concluded that their main fault was to be too accommodating of Jackie because she described herself as the survivor of a terrible sexual assault. Social scientists, psychologists and trauma specialists who support rape survivors have impressed upon journalists the need to respect the autonomy of victims, to avoid re-traumatizing them and to understand that rape survivors are as reliable in their testimony as other crime victims. These insights clearly influenced Erdely, Woods and Dana. "Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim; we honored too many of her requests in our reporting," Woods said. "We should have been much tougher, and in not doing that, we maybe did her a disservice."

Erdely added: "If this story was going to be about Jackie, I can't think of many things that we would have been able to do differently. … Maybe the discussion should not have been so much about how to accommodate her but should have been about whether she would be in this story at all." Erdely's reporting led her to other, adjudicated cases of rape at the university that could have illustrated her narrative, although none was as shocking and dramatic as Jackie's.

Yet the explanation that Rolling Stone failed because it deferred to a victim cannot adequately account for what went wrong. Erdely's reporting records and interviews with participants make clear that the magazine did not pursue important reporting paths even when Jackie had made no request that they refrain. The editors made judgments about attribution, fact-checking and verification that greatly increased their risks of error but had little or nothing to do with protecting Jackie's position.

wld not have been hard to write a solid story abt campus rape, the allure of the sensationalistic frat gang rape did them in

a solid story abt campus rape w/out the frat initiative rite gang rape hook would not be their most-read non-celebrity article ever

yeah well obvs theres a tension there that got the best of them

even if it were true it prob wouldve been less instructive of the structural issues that allow assaults to happen just via not being a typical example

also is indicative of our need to make criminals monsters so as to distance ourselves from them, this fantastical story was the perfect appeal to people who dont have that much interest in seeing how common and embedded in our culture rape really is

i think probably some of these gang rape cases do occur on campus (i haven't read this book on the subject). in one sense erdely was pretty unlucky to get such a complex, contradictory story when there are probably other more easily reported campus gang rapes (assuming that you want to peg yr story to something like that). on the other hand the report makes pretty clear that she did a pretty bad job fact-checking this story and that even cursory independent research would have brought up questions about its veracity.

their explanation that they were just trying to protect the victim is pretty convenient, yeah and obviously gang rapes do happen

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/04/06/rolling_stone_uva_rape_story_shock_that_no_one_is_fired_for_journalistic.html

CNN’s Brian Stelter points out that what some might see as a failure to hold anyone directly accountable, “others might call a show of loyalty and a second chance for the staff.”

Too bad, though, that Rolling Stone didn’t seem to have that same loyalty toward other staff members who had been forced out of the magazine for offenses that seem downright minor—if offenses at all—in comparison with the UVA rape story debacle. In 1996, Wenner fired senior music editor Jim DeRogatis after he wrote a negative review of Hootie and the Blowfish, which was replaced by a positive review. When the New York Observer asked DeRogatis whether Wenner was a fan of the band he answered: “No, I think he’s just a fan of bands which sell eight and a half million copies.”

Bad party planning can also apparently get you in hot water. Steven DeLuca was fired in February 2006 after a two-year stint as the magazine’s publisher after he got into a tiff with Wenner about a party to celebrate the 1,000th issue. Wenner apparently thought the location that DeLuca had selected for the party was too expensive and changed it. “Mr. DeLuca objected to the move, they argued and Mr. Wenner fired him,” according to the New York Times story from the time.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/rolling-stones-sensational-failure/389718/

Said Rosen, "None of those schools felt quite right. What kind of 'feel' is this? It’s feeling for a fit between discovered story and a prior—given—narrative." What if, he argued, "a single, emblematic college rape case" does not exist? "Maybe the hunt for such was ill-conceived from the start," he wrote. "Maybe that’s the wrong way for Rolling Stone to have begun." And I think he is correct that searching for confirmation of a preexisting narrative is a common problem in narrative journalism generally and a factor that led Rolling Stone astray here.

Still, there is one sense in which Erdely's account of her process seems dubious to me. The story of a fraternity that used gang rape as an initiation ritual for pledges would obviously be worth exposing if it were true. But no one familiar with the reality of rape on college campuses should've construed such a story as emblematic of the problem. Gang rapes absolutely happen. As Robby Soave notes, Rolling Stone could've easily written a story about one that happened at Vanderbilt.

But according to the Justice Department's December 2014 report on the rape and sexual assault of college-aged females, fully 95 percent of rapes and sexual assaults are committed by a single perpetrator. Just 5 percent involve two or more perpetrators—and a fraction of those, if any, involve premeditated, institutionalized rape carried out as part of a formal, ostensibly recurring initiation rite. There's nothing objectionable about a journalist highlighting a highly atypical rape so long as the specific incident actually happened. But any journalist doing so should acknowledge that they're telling the story of a sensational, unrepresentative case, not a case emblematic of campus culture at large.

Isn't this sort of the broader function of the "rape culture" meme? To associate a wider range of acts/speech w/ the more heinous associations we have of the term?

this is sort of the opposite of what the concept of rape culture id attempting to point out in that it went looking for a horrific sensational conspiracy instead of examining at the everyday culture thats all around us

Yeah, it's exactly the opposite.

I meant that it's the ideological kernel of the idiom, and the reason why it could be simultaneously a "horrific sensational conspiracy" as well as being emblematic of "everyday culture."

but its not emblematic of everyday culture, its not even real!

Like when you see people oppose the term "rape culture," they tend to oppose it on the grounds that it is gathering "everyday culture" under the rubric of something most people consider a heinous crime. Here it's the logic in reverse whereas the most horrific crime becomes symbolic of other less horrific crimes, and of the college "culture" itself.

I meant from the POV of the author who went out looking for a sensational story to peg a broader study of the way colleges treat rape. Part of it is "if it bleeds it leads" sensationalist journalism where RS just wants clicks or whatever, part of it is dramatizing poor college responses to rape by showing something horrific (and clear-cut in a way a lot of these other college stories aren't) and directing yr outrage at the institutional response. But I also think part of the issue is the general collapse of distinctions - that W (this story) = X (other college rape stories) = Y (college culture in general) and of course ultimately = Z (our culture at large).

I guess what I'm trying to figure out is how someone could take an uniquely horrifying story as emblematic, and I don't think Erdely misunderstands the meaning of the word "emblematic." I think there's a weird ideological thing going on.

i mean if it were true that there was formally institutionalized group sexual assaults at a fraternity then that wld be very emblematic of rape culture but to get to the point where you believe that you have to not understand how rape culture really functions, or at least be lead astray by yr desire for a good story

The people who want to talk horrific single examples are most often the opposite of people who want to talk about broader, everyday issues. Like, take the Walter Scott situation. What is going on there? Is that an example of a single horrific racist who straight up murdered an innocent black man? Or is it the logical outgrowth of municipal policing focusing on punishing broken taillights and back child-pay to get money for small cities without raising taxes? I think a lot of the people who will begin painting the officer as a horrific unique monster are reactionary people trying to avoid North Charleston gets exposed by the DOJ the way Ferguson was.

In the same way, the RS story was always confused. But it doesn't seem to me to be an outgrowth of the ideology surrounding 'rape culture', more like the opposite. More like old fashioned conservative mass scares, complete with the ritualized aspect.

But it's kinda interesting how the two issues can intersect, the left-oriented struggle to shine a light on damaging structural issues, with the right-wing outrage media machine.

It's weird that the emblematic case had to be sought solely at 'elite schools', too.

I agree that mass hysteria is often associated w the right but no one thinks RS published this to be reactionary. They obv thought it was a public service.

their motivations seem pretty muddled