Literary Clusterfucks 2013

In the above image, a commenter reports that Fall is a trans woman who has requested that her story be withdrawn, wants her payment donated to charity, was trying to subvert anti-trans rhetoric, and is withdrawing all future work. A later comment says that she's not doing well.

— whistling in the dark (@M_L_Clark) January 14, 2020

I read it, am very certain it was intent on deconstructing that association.

I have no idea why people write anything other than transparently unequivocal first-person sentences they'd abide by in a court of law.

You can read it archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20200115052857/http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fall_01_20/

Writing where the genres identify as 'communities', such as YA, sci fi, romance, are always the ones that go apeshit.

The conclusion: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fall_01_20/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/books/american-dirt-jeanine-cummins-book-tour.html

Victorian poet Michael Field was nominated as poet laureate: then it was discovered he was actually two lesbians writing under a pseudonym.

Literature academic @drsarahparker explains. https://t.co/unYQ2uRhrs

— The Conversation (@ConversationUK) February 3, 2020

https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2020/02/harriet-beecher-stowe-lord-byron-incest-atlantic

xpost -- funnily enough, I was just thinking of Michael Field the other day -- read a biography about their life and work some years back.

https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/representation-matters-penguin-diverse-editions.html

This week, Penguin Random House and Barnes & Noble announced their collaborative effort to, as they put it, “champion the need for diversity in literature.” Timed to Black History Month, the “Diverse Editions” initiative, would have sold a “reimagined collection” of classics “re-outfitted” with covers featuring non-white protagonists. The insides of these books, which includes titles such as Romeo and Juliet, Alice in Wonderland, Moby Dick, and Frankenstein (in which not Dr. Frankenstein, but his inhuman creature is rendered as a black masculine Neanderthal with a fade), were to remain as is. According to the press release, the works were selected with the assistance of an A.I. tasked with mining the text of “100 classic literature books” in order to pick out occasions in which a main character’s race is kept opaque — “assumed” rather than stated plainly. Diverse Editions was rightfully ridiculed for thinking canonical exclusion ought to be remedied cover-first. Days later, after a public backlash, the effort was scrapped.

actually i have read in thomas dunn's 'loneliness as a way of life' an argument that ishmael is pip therefore ishmael is black

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/world/europe/gabriel-matzneff-pedophilia-france.html#click=https://t.co/hmXrZY3yQY

Only in France...

You thought Dennis Cooper was fiction huh

Still talking about Matzneff on the 11th of February 2020? Damn, the NYT is late af.

To clarify: The Guardian published an article about it not too long after the news broke in France.

According to the press release, the works were selected with the assistance of an A.I.

glad to see tay is still getting work

j. do you have a copy of the ishmael-is-pip piece, it sounds my kind of thing but i can only find firewalled copies of it

(pausing only to note that its author is called not dunn but dumm) (so even more my kind of thing amirite)

Yeah, pom, but NYT got an interview with Metzeff. It's a good article. Delves into the network surrounding him a bit.

Ah, fair enough. I'll check it out then.

Surprised the American Dirt fiasco hasn't cropped up here yet

I brought it up via a NYT link some time ago but nobody felt like discussing it. Old hat by now, I suppose.

mark: haven't read the article but i snagged a copy of the book for you, check fb dms.

ooh thank you :)

the entire romance writers of america board of directors has now resigned

I find myself wondering if this mass resignation was due to ethical considerations or because what they thought would be a prestige citation on their CV wasn't fun anymore.

xpost -- funnily enough, I was just thinking of Michael Field the other day -- read a biography about their life and work some years back.

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, February 4, 2020 9:15 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

reading about Michael Field and their milieu is very interesting, i mean even if you ignore the whole incestuous auntie/niece victorian poetry duo aspect. their family were southcottians with links also to radical politics, which can take you down some interesting rabbit-holes

oh aye, they ended up converting to catholicism also iirc?

probably first use of "paranormal MPreg romances" in the nytimes

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/business/omegaverse-erotica-copyright.html

I am sorry I was not aware of "cockygate" until now, that sounds like a good one.

The story of H.G. Carillo, wow. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/cuban-american-author-hg-carrillo-who-explored-themes-of-cultural-alienation-died-after-contracting-covid-19/2020/05/21/35478894-97d8-11ea-91d7-cf4423d47683_story.html

Yeah, that's wild.

https://www.startribune.com/book-critics-circle-officials-resign-citing-privacy-breach/571253712/

The president and five other board members of the National Book Critics Circle have resigned amid allegations of racism and violations of privacy.

Laurie Hertzel, who had served as president since 2019, announced over the weekend she was leaving the 24-member board. Her departure came two days after another board member, Ugandan-American writer Hope Wabuke, posted redacted screenshots on Twitter of an email exchange that included correspondence from Hertzel and board member Carlin Romano. The NBCC had been crafting a response to the worldwide protests against police racism and violence.

This is the email I wake up to from one of the longest sitting board members of the national literary organization I am in. This is why #publishingsowhite #PublishingPaidMe #bookcriticismsowhite #BookReviewingsowhite pic.twitter.com/H8HyYSOp5C

— Hope Wabuke (@HopeWabuke) June 11, 2020

The National Book Critics Circle Has Imploded

carlin romano sounds like a real piece of work

Romano, who once made headlines for writing a review in which he imagined raping the author of the book, has intermittently sat on the board since the mid-’90s.

hm yeah i think this guy shouldn't have been on the board

There's one happening here in Canada where one of the country's most important and outspoken trans writers, poet Gwen Benaway, has been confronted by friends and peers who are publicly asking whether she has lied about her claim to indigeneity.

This is a collective call for Gwen Benaway to be accountable to the Indigenous communities she has claimed. It was written with deep consideration, caution, care and love for community. Please read the entire letter, and be mindful of how you respond. pic.twitter.com/feLuUS1IKg

— GB2020 (@GB20209) June 15, 2020

'apologize for the space she has taken up in the indigenous literary community'

writers sure do know how to cut

The squabbling over the crumbs of patronage afforded to that particular corner of the Canadian literary scene is pretty toxic. Benaway's apology should be one for the ages.

i guess i first encountered the concept of the national book critics circle on the back of some book that won their award in the late 70s (probably song of solomon in fact)

my feeling was whatever the late 70s uk translation was of "lol they sound like dorks" so i guess revenge cometh in the evening

(i shd reread song of solomon tho)

@everything

Yeah, I guess. But I feel an acute sorrow and anxiety about it - several of the people involved already wrestle with psychological liabilities.

I feel like this is something we will continue to see in Canadian lit

Is literature an intensification of identity or an escape from it, discuss (not really but I am a little unsettled by the 1 to 1 correspondence we tend to assume exists between the author and ‘their’ text in 2020).

My cousin is white but her husband and kids are Alaska Native, and she writes kids' picture books about Alaska Native families, and her bio in the back of at least one of the books is super carefully worded to let people think she's Native without actually saying so.

Tbc the ‘their’ was meant to indicate ambivalence towards the notion that a text fully belongs to its author, mostly because I think there is much value to the oracular/shamanistic idea according to which it is not the ‘I’ of subjective and/or social identity that speaks when poetry happens.

xp

identity isn't stable but an imaginary fluid thing that evolves/adjusts/reacts + even within a particular identity in a moment in time where it could be said to be fixed there's multitudes + contradictions + internal arguments occurring etc even if they are quickly repressed/integrated i think a text emerges obv from an author but it isn't bound to that author's biography bc their text can betray their identity instead accidentally giving voice to those repressions or flights of fantasy and ultimately maybe writing can act as a transformative force where the author is different once they finished than when they began (and maybe the reader too)

dude

periods

nah

All of that is undeniably true to my mind but it doesn't always square with the political and/or ethical requirement that we refrain from substituting a position of (relative) social privilege for one of disenfranchisement and oppression. My sense is that we ask too much of literature if we expect it to guide us through these thickets: in some cases, it merely exists to make them darker and more inextricable still, and no amount of moral policing can tame a compelling literary work's penchant for equivocity, for better or for worse (e.g. Dostoevsky's 'identity' as a writer was less reactionary and clear-cut than the one he espoused in public towards the end of his life).

xps to Mordy

ducks, mordyport