Literary Clusterfucks 2013

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"

andy warhol was an ilxor

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)

I thought Ewing coined poptimism as a less awkward way to say popism. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but FT certainly embraced the word?

in the future everyone will be FP'd for 15 minutes

he only posted fifty times, but each of those posts begat a sub-board

i think FT embraced it yes but only after it had been thrown at us first? the little LJ community was called poptimists.

tbh i don't recall the actual order of events (nor does it matter terribly much)

I think Simon Reynolds coined it as a term of (mildish) abuse aimed at the FT end of the online pop discourse of the time, and it was embraced in the time-honoured tradition of the faavists, impressionists, stuckists and so on).

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

― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine), Friday, November 15, 2019 10:24 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

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

― treeship., Friday, November 15, 2019 10:29 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

For Weiner, at least, didn't this begin with her crusade against the Chick Lit label, or the NYTBR ignoring of writers marketed as Chick Lit?

It surprised me when mark said it started as an insult on the metal thread. I thought it originated with Tom's DJ night. xp

first use was by Steppenwolf in Magic Carpet Ride

Ha

I only know Roxane Gay from the one time Sarah Silverman interviewed her - she seemed alright. what's ppl's beef with her?

poor judgment

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/11/15/sarah-dessen-south-dakota-college-student-ya-novel-backlash-twitter/

Some of the authors who supported Dessen said they didn’t know the young woman’s name had been made public and denounced the harassment Nelson received.

“I thought she was anonymous,” Gay told The Post. “People shouldn’t be harassing her. That’s unacceptable.”

I love the idea that scribbling out a name is a guarantee of anonymity when the article takes five seconds to Google.

young woman's name was made public when she talked to the newspaper

author's work was made public when it was published by her publisher

The first Poptimism club night was in 2005, shortly before I moved to London, I think? I think it was called "Club FT" before that.

The second Jennifer Wiener tweet is completely OTM, of course - but that's poorly applied in this situation.

i don't think i have ever seen a reporter apologize for writing a story, at least when it didn't involve getting facts wrong:

Hey Sarah! I'm the writer of this story, and I definitely didn't mean to be cruel by including this quote.
I am so sorry.
Common Read has specific set of criteria, and many, many novels wouldn't make the cut.

— KatherineGrandstrand (@kgrandstrandAAN) November 12, 2019

lol then you haven't been reading the rest of twitter this past week

pretty sound ~take~

I would like to talk about this episode, in which several young adult fiction writers with huge followings collectively dunked on a college student who opined in a local South Dakota paper that college students should be reading at a higher level than YA. https://t.co/UojWCOCd06

— christmas cheer liz bruenig (@ebruenig) November 14, 2019

That was the article that bumped this thread ffs

something about a cultural ourobouros

i think j. was referring to the tweet thread

oh oops

Elizabeth Bruenig is great

Holy shit the north dakota journalist apologizing to the YA tyrant. xp

Someone in THAT thread accused the reporter, who was apologizing, of having “internalized misogyny” simply because she published a quote from a source.

this is all just popular-girl playground shit tbh

I would probably read a YA book about YA author drama.

sarah dessen is a really popular girl and some dork (who the fuck are you?) has dared speak against her. that dork shall pay!!!

that is literally all that has happened here

Dessen has 269,000 followers on Twitter, btw, just for those who might not know how popular her books really are.

I can understand how YA authors feel devalued by being labelled as writing books only fit for immature audiences. otoh, that YA label also helps them to acquire an audience and sell their books. if the YA marketing niche didn't exist and they had to simply compete for attention in the general fiction marketplace, the great majority of them would not have career to be defensive about. but, whatever you do, don't tell them that.

it really is just a bunch of privileged white women and their friends dunking on a recent college grad because she dared question the literary merit of their output. i'd say it's unbelievable that this is a national news story, but it isn't, because these ghouls will do anything to make a buck off their shitty pulp.

Apologies for the pvmic but it’s all so infuriatingly American to boot.

fuck why'd you have to take on the most popular girl in the school, daaaaamn

reckon there's cachet in this yet for young b nelson though, she's spoken up for Criticism and Real Literature, and gone viral doing so. a promising future awaits. maybe even a popular one

that said the aesthetics of s dessen sicking her gang onto this poor kid are monstrous, just like high school

It's all so dumb. Other writers group hugging Desser ("it's SO AWFUL and UNFAIR what this teenager said about your books"), journalists apologizing (wtf), others trying to make this about YA, about feminism/misogyny etc, about voices and stories not being heard... When, like LJ said, an overly sensitive highly popular person picked on an unknown teenager and reaped the cuddles and kind words that were sent to her en masse. Ugh.