Literary Clusterfucks 2013

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

With Benaway, considerations such as that are not particularly relevant. The literary scene in questions would barely exist without a network of government-funded grants, appointments, awards, media coverage etc, specific to intersectional identity. "Taking up space" really means sucking up the $$$ and exposure meant for indigenous people.

They're relevant insofar as much of contemporary anglophone poetry explicitly seeks an authentic converge between marginalized authorial identities (ethics) and their linguistic representation (aesthetics). That cultural institutions have evolved over time to financially support this particular literary quest above all others is bound to engender precisely this kind of clusterfuck.

did Joseph Boyden ever recover from when he was found out?

"Recover" - lol, he's getting tens of thousands of euros/USD to appear there as an Indigenous authority. but no, he's (rightly) not welcome in mainstream cdn literary society

@everything
not sure whether there are any literary scenes on earth (besides "people who are already famous") that would flourish without media coverage or awards.
if you're claiming that the success of authors like Benaway or Al3cia 3lli0tt is illegitimate on an artistic/commercial level, i think that's bullshit - they've both published good work, and AE is a bona fide bestseller.

"Recover" - lol, he's getting tens of thousands of euros/USD to appear there as an Indigenous authority. but no, he's (rightly) not welcome in mainstream cdn literary society

hoo boy. that's unfortunate (the first sentence)

I don't see how it's in any way controversial that funds allocated to marginalised cultures shouldn't be given to people who have no connection to that culture. It's not about the work or the reception of the work or even the authenticity of the work, it's about a person benefitting from something that isn't for them.

Also I feel like that letter sean posted was very carefully written to reflect this, and shouldn't really be seen as a clusterfuck.

Benaway's adversaries are just sharpening their knives.

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

I agree but one's political identity is not the same as personal internal identity and these public disputes and wrangles are always political, not literary per se.

if you're claiming that the success of authors like Benaway or Al3cia 3lli0tt is illegitimate on an artistic/commercial level, i think that's bullshit - they've both published good work, and AE is a bona fide bestseller.

― sean gramophone, Tuesday, June 16, 2020 1:44 PM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Alicia Elliott is a bestseller? If true, colour me surprised. Clusterfuck is only so because stakes are small. Boyden survives because of genuine popularity. But I'm curious, what are her sales?

Carlin Romano's wiki summary throws up a bunch of bbcode errors so it can't be quoted but what an enormous fucking asshole

xp
Elliott's essay collection was a "#1 national bestseller" according to the publisher:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/588523/a-mind-spread-out-on-the-ground-by-alicia-elliott/9780385692380

Alicia's book has appeared very regularly on the non-fiction bestseller list since it was published.

Kind of unrelated, but does anyone even pretend to care about Québécois literature at all in anglo Canada?

juries do: translated works by C4therine Leroux, Eric Dup0nt, S4muel 4rchibald, etc, have all been shortlisted for the Giller. but they go relatively unread. the same is true in reverse: even several young, biliingual quebecois writers i know had never heard of miriam to3ws until a year and a half ago.

the same is true in reverse

I'd never heard of her either so QED.

It's also worth pointing out that Leroux was Toronto correspondent for Radio-Canada and Dupont teaches translation at McGill, so they've already got one foot in the ROC, so to speak.

(The sociology of literary scenes is by far the worst thing about literature.)

truly the national book critics circle is a circle