Literary Clusterfucks 2013

i'll stay thanks

President Keyes, are you Jennifer Weiner?

I think president keyes has a valid point—trying to construct this former student into the “perfect victim” falls into the same kind of trap the YA twitter mob does, exaggerating power discrepancies for emotional effect

i'll take that, sure, but it's not like she was "wrong" or insulting in her original statements.

these Ashleys or Heathers or whatever, well, they're all wrong. Period.

i dislike this popular girl framing

where is ed champion when we need him

(j/k!)

The “popular girl” thing feels like a dodgy take imo I think it just seems like your typical twitter callout/pile-on/fallout that happens pretty frequently in a lot of different contexts for reasons both legit and dumb.

I think it’s more to do with the cannibalistic mob atmosphere of Twitter we all love so much than it does “popular girls”

So yeah otm.

I absolutely messed up. When I responded to Dessen’s tweet I didn’t read the article just the screenshot. I related to a fellow author feeling the sting of criticism. I had no idea the young woman was not anonymous or was being harassed. I apologize for my part in all this.

— roxane gay (@rgay) November 15, 2019

lol oh shit gotta protect the brand

I feel like there is some overcorrection too.

Like some in that thread speculated that the girl who was piled on lost professional opportunities because she was piled on by prominent authors.

I doubt it to be honest. No one will remember this.

It just seems in all directions the discourse is unhinged and out of control.

"The Callout, The Pile-On, The Apology"
fave Jodeci album

Social media is just dumb

I doubt it to be honest. No one will remember this.

― treeship., Friday, November 15, 2019 3:41 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

pretty sure the college kid will remember this!

Sure but it won’t ruin their employment prospects, which is what people were speculating on that thread.

She didn’t do anything wrong.

Tangentially related to "Twitter justice" and celebs unleashing their fans on people, Lizzo is now getting sued by the Postmates driver that she blasted on Twitter along with the girl's name and photo(!) for supposedly stealing her food. Allegedly, the driver just couldn't reach her by phone to confirm her hotel room, so she gave up trying to deliver it.

Bringing it up here since it seems like one of the first(?) high profile examples of a celebrity potentially facing consequences for stirring up their fans via Twitter.

Is YA indie twee infantilism in book form? Discuss.

https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/sarah-dessen-ya-books-authors-brooke-nelson-social-media-attack.html

pretty sure the college kid will remember this

lol she is studying this phenomenon in grad school, it will probably turn up in a chapter in her thesis

ahaha maybe she engineered this knowing exactly how it would play

call the IRB!! IRB!!!!!!

Something important I’d like to say. pic.twitter.com/3MIhe5rxxH

— sarahdessen (@sarahdessen) November 15, 2019

in roxane gay's replies there are still all sorts of sycophants who think she's so amazing for being able to do this; in dessen's replies it's merciless scolds

hahahaha

if a literary clusterfuck is not amusing, it amounts to nothing in the end

that is a remarkably non-specific apology

she's framing it as a learning experience for herself moreso than a terrifying experience for this young person

i mean she's not even spelling out what she did wrong, let alone accounting for what the college grad must have gone through. was the issue really that she was not "aware of what I put out there"?

dessen wasn't aware that this would generate negative PR for herself. and she is deeply sorry. in the future, she will make sure to tweet stuff that will make people like her more.

Eh, she apologized. Seems okay enough to me.

many people are bad at apologies. they seem incapable of understanding why their apologies are bad, so they never learn. because contrition requires feeling bad and people resist feeling bad.

I'm sure dessen did not intend to cause this clusterfuck and feels remorse, I just enjoy the non-apology apology genre

I think she absolutely did intend the initial consequence of her tweet, obv she did not intend the backlash lol

Even if the apology showed real self-reflection (it doesn’t) there would still be a healthy scepticism that someone petty & unhinged enough to namesearch & go after a rando who said something innocuous and true 3 years ago would suddenly develop a true emotional maturity two days later

many people are bad at apologies. they seem incapable of understanding why their apologies are bad, so they never learn.

yes. And I think it's good that you are generalizing this here as "people" as opposed to what seems to be a tendency here on ilx to somehow revoke the "personhood" of artists, musicians, writers, etc. because they are "professionals" or "celebrities" like they should totally separate their work from themselves.

Also this focus on "professional responsibility" or something like that, w/r/t fans or social media followers -- it's not like fans are the equivalent of the weird deformed rage children from Cronenberg's "The Brood" that go out and murder people their parent is mad at. These fans and followers, for the most part, are mentally competent adults who are responsible for their own actions.

apology fetishism is a weird one but v interesting to me

These fans and followers, for the most part, are mentally competent adults who are responsible for their own actions.

this account one of Jennifer Warner's books makes it sound deranged (apparently it's about an evil book reviewer who gets her deserved comeuppance because she only likes literary fiction and not the kind of stuff Jennifer Warner writes)

https://sittinginthedinosaur.home.blog/2019/11/16/on-jennifer-weiner-criticism-and-what-makes-a-woman/

my god, who on earth is that goon anyway

roald dahl wd never

seriously though -- the people that participate in pile ons like this with no personal stake are an aspect of humanity that scares the shit out of me. I don't really want to invoke Arendt's "banality of evil" but I feel like there are similarities

apology fetishism

I am unfamiliar with this term, deems. What kind of thoughts or behavior does is it meant to describe?

I just wanna say I admire the pessimism of this thread title which seemed to conjecture there would be so many literary clusterfucks we'd need a new thread every year.

I would argue that it is optimism -- that we would be so on top of all the literary clusterfucks and have high-minded, thoughtful things to say about them, and also the optimism that national politics would not totally eclipse the literary in clusterfuckery

We did spend much of the first week of impeachment hearings complaining about some YA authors though. Hope for the world after all.

*hi-fives ilx*

xp aimless oh yknow, when ppl hear of an apology theyve been clamoring for and start apology lawyering it as if it was genuine or as if there was a standard that could ever have been met that wouldve placated them, neither of which ever seem to be the case

apologies should be delivered but never opened, the sum of the parts never total the whole, the apology that the villagers cut the goose open for turned out not to have been the source of infinite golden eggs

look i think ive been clear on this, and if not, im sorry if you feel that way

public apologies are a fake idea anyway

public anything

the only people who should be concerned about an apology are the apologizer and apologized to. Onlookers have bugger all to do with it and may be safely ignored as irrelevant to the process.