Literary Clusterfucks 2013

p much the same as every artist who links to a negative review

well yeah, which is corny and shld generally be beneath most artists above age 18

from her TL it looks like dessen intially ID'd the woman then thought better of it and deleted the tweet and replaced it with the one w/her name redacted, too late for her fans (and ppl who called her out for bullying)

There’s also the thing with her responding “I love you” to another YA author’s “Fuck that fucking bitch.”

I love that the quote in question begins "she's fine for teen girls", which is now The Worst Cruelest Thing you can possibly say to an author of books for children in 2019

That’s a lousy thing. I am sorry you had to see it. People have strange and inflated ideas about their taste level

— roxane gay (@rgay) November 12, 2019

"i am sorry you had to see it."

Regardless, the university's apology is truly pathetic. It's not even their apology to make.

i don't care what ppl read but honestly every time i encounter one of these stories i come a little closer to just saying seriously fuck the cult of modern YA fiction and the ppl who are so goddamned precious about it

'had to see it' because dessen is a die-hard reader of the aberdeen (south dakota) news

"People have strange and inflated ideas about their taste level" = 2019 USA in a nutshell. "People who act like they prefer adult things over childrens things are obviously lying phonies."

Peak populism tbh.

my gf really loved that roxane gay book hunger and i was like "that's cool" but i was also like "how can that book possibly be good? i have seen roxane gay's tl"

the second part was interior monologue

i mean, i think there's a case for students to study and think about literature written for teens and children as well as literature for non-teens and non-children (which presumably at some point wd entail reading them): there are a whole bunch of interesting aspects to think abt and discuss and explore, which might well illuminate issues in other modes of literature

and when clowns like martin amis mouth off abt kidlit they can fuck right off (where the wild things are >>> any martin amis yet written or to come)

but this doesn't seem to be about that at all: if yr arguing that good writing aimed teens is exactly as demanding and challenging to write as good writing aimed at non-teens -- which may be true, good writing is hard -- then surely part of what's claimed as demanding and challenging is that you've achieved successfully aiming yr book-for-teens at teens rather than at non-teens, why so enraged?

(writing posts on ilx that make the point i intend to make with any clarity: also hard)

Mainly this story has fucked me up because by my count we weren’t due for a reset of the “someone somewhere says something mild and accurate about a piece of children’s entertainment and the creators and consumers of same shit their pants in protest” infinite loop until this coming Monday at the earliest

roxane gay got that NYT twerp slapped down so she's not all bad (this is bad tho)

the roxane gay tweet isn't too bad -- seems more 'support for a friend' than 'fuck this fucking bitch' at least

There's a lot about Roxane Gay I like, but she also has a tendency to pick out random tweets she doesn't like from nobodies and sending her base after them, so it's kinda in character.

I've always felt that both Sarah Dessen and Roxane Gay pretty much suck, and this news has done nothing to change that.

I think the thing that pisses me off the most is the hypocrisy of Dessen and her supporters acting like they're defending the literary tastes of teen girls, and by extension Women's Literature in general, when Dessen has in fact made a career out of writing down to teen girls. The problem with her books isn't that they're for teens, it's that they don't respect the audience they're written for. They're the caramel macchiatos of YA literature, cheap imitation books by someone who assumes teen girls will swallow any old slop as long as it's sugary enough.

If you’re not willing to defend your work in a principled way, you shouldn’t be writing. The whole “writers pour their hear and soul into their work etc” trope is simply manipulative.”

Gay's "I'm sorry you had to see it" alone makes it a terrible, terrible tweet. You say that to someone who had to witness a terrible accident, gore or running into Trump or something. C'mon. A teenager doesn't like your books, that's it. The rallying around of bestseller authors with huge audiences going 'it's so unfair! it's so mean and cruel!' in public is nagl and laughable. Perhaps not as bad as Northern State U ruthlessly throwing one of their own students under the bus, but still really bad.

tbh “I’m sorry that happened to you” and variants have become so ubiquitous and deployed so readily after any old shit that I have trouble not reading it as sarcastic most of the time, so the disconnect barely registered there

I hate everyone involved in this besides the one woman who had an opinion about one YA writer. I read a lot of YA and never heard of Dessan so obv I read the better/wrong YA.

This is so shitty and Dessan whoever needs to get her shit together and BE BEST.

Northern State U ruthlessly throwing one of their own students under the bus

Seriously, why did they even think they had to say anything at all?

It's baffling. Them going out of their way, basically saying "sorry our student didn't like your book, we're sorry she was thinking critically and was thinking for herself. We sure wouldn't want to teach our students thinking for themselves!"... It's so weird.

hate to simplify things when everyone is in the middle of re-establishing gender dynamics but this is some Lena Dunham level reactionary bad bullshit. And she would only complain if it was happening to a friend.

there's a case for students to study and think about literature written for teens and children as well as literature for non-teens and non-children

english departments already do it, for pretty sound reasons, too—a significant portion of their students are bound for careers where they will be working with this lit and its primary audience—but just impressionistically it seems like the reactions of fans of the author, and of the college, have something to do with the capture of some segment of the higher ed faculty by people who have a professional stake in the commercial side of YA lit. there are a lot more niches for 'creative productivity' for lower-tier academics to fill now, and common-read initiatives are part of colleges' plans for marketing themselves to prospective students, which gives them incentives to appear commercially friendly to authors who can sweeten the pot with personal appearances and whatever.

My main thought about the latest YA thing is that it seems like another example in pop culture of folks making pop products - YA novels, comic book movies, pop music - expecting a level of critical deference that would've been unthinkable 20 years ago.

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) November 14, 2019

Happens in poetry, too. All these people whom I respected fucking bawling over Mary effing Oliver when she passed, and 15 years ago anybody who knew anything didn't give a fat fuck about Oliver or anything she wrote. Faux populist outrage is just a huge thing, it will forever remain annoying.

Relevant insane tweet for this thread: pic.twitter.com/WRzFvEniok

— Lincoln Michel (@TheLincoln) November 14, 2019

Jennifer Weiner is utter trash, but that is totally insane whether you like her or not.

i mean we also have to think about who these writers are, though. they're mostly upper- to upper-middle class women whose feminism extends only so far as representation— the VIDA list means everything to them, but the content of what is on that list is negligible. it's a retrograde style of feminism that women of their class status engage in because to engage in serious, on the ground work with other (blacker, browner, more poor) women would be to betray their class status.

bleh, haven't had my coffee yet, sorry for word soup.

basically:
these women engage in simple representational feminism because to do otherwise would make them traitors to their class, and requires nuance. dunking on a student from small school in the Dakotas because she didn't get with their program is part and parcel of their whole schtick.

And I will piggyback in what Jodi said, with a reminder: when we tell teenage girls that their stories matter less — or not at all — there are real-world consequences. https://t.co/WlYoALXW9H #MeToo https://t.co/stYfTJd0qZ

— Jennifer Weiner (@jenniferweiner) November 13, 2019

Not. Making. It. Better.

Back when I was a teacher I’d routinely accuse students of being complicit in abuse when they ventured an independent thought. It’s good pedagogy and good praxis.

Also love the fact that this woman joining the committee is held up as some out-of-bounds form of harassment - how dare this young woman engage with the system and advocate to see her views represented in the decisionmaking process! Doesnt she know she should just talk shit on Twitter all day? What a bad ally!

There is some truth to the marxist analysis tabes put forward but i wonder if there is a more fundamental problem of moral incoherence. The worldview of these authors seems thoroughly political—albeit a shallow kind of politics—so they can’t see more basic principles, like don’t sicc your fans on a defenseless young person over a slight. This situation is not an ideological battle, it’s not a metoo scenario, it’s a student finding their voice (she’s a grad now but was a junior at the time) and i don’t know if ya twitter can understand a thing like that.

so the author's from chapel hill (not originally, but based), and growing up I read basically all her books that were out at the time. what is getting lost in all of the discourse is that the books are YA, but that's not their defining trait. their defining trait is being extremely preppy WASPy southern sorority belle; they're either explicitly set in the south, in at least one case a very specific north carolina town, or set somewhere ambiguous that resembles it, and the world of them is very upper middle class, not-religious-but-evangelical-adjacent, polished and put-together even when they are dealing with Big Issues. they're day-planners in lowercase pink and green lettering, a string of pearls, and devotionals in a vera bradley bag; they're the taylor swift "fifteen" of books, essentially. which is not to say they aren't well crafted (obviously early taylor swift has a lot of defenders; they do similar things), nor that they don't deserve to be taken seriously or close-read (maybe if people did then they might pick up on this), but that they are part of this whole milieu that can feel very stifling, to the point where someone absolutely might go to college and never want to deal with it again. if anything the "it's fine for teenage girls" struck me as an attempt to be tactful.

so the people saying "it's misogyny!" are missing the point; there just isn't a male equivalent to this kind of thing. (ready player one definitely isn't it.) there's a lot of people saying "oh well it condescends to teenage girls," which I don't believe (didn't then, at least); and even compared to teen YA romance this is a separate axis (twilight, for instance, is also not the same kind of thing, though it has a similar defining trait of being extremely mormon). nor is it a YA thing, either -- I also read the whole princess diaries series and it's remarkable how a book full of new york private schoolers and literal royalty nevertheless presented a less suffocating world

also this student wasn't advocating for Ready Player One. she was advocating for a book about criminal justice issues written by a black author.

yeah, it was what the writers closed circles on though

(the YA thing really is muddying the point a lot; you can think this is an extremely bad look for the writer without getting your ed ch*mpion on about how awful “people who read young adult fiction” are, as if that were a monolithic group that reads a monolithic genre and nothing else ever) (general “you” based on takes I’ve seen, not directed at anyone)

(also, jodi picoult and jennifer weiner and roxane gay... don't write YA?)

True. It does seem like most of these situations begin with YA though. There is something about that milieu.

Btw in the oswita nwanevu thread tweeters are mentioning ‘poptimism’ a lot. I forget—was that originally an ILM coinage?

Yes.

Cool.

revising my statement, am now directing it at those tweeters (clearly they have never read small press or self-published authors replying to randoms on goodreads)

didn't simon reynolds coin poptimism? the word generally used here back in the say was "popism" (coined by warhol lol but not on ilx)

and before that, 'popery'

even older, "poppycock"