Literary Clusterfucks 2013

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

It looks like an indivisible dot when viewed from space.

Why are all the worst literary clusterfucks Canadian?

the stakes are so small

Shame on you.

(100% otm tho)

Seems to be dumpster fire season in the SFF writing community again. Good to see the squirming apologies from some of the most egregious pricks who've been called out. SF conventions sound like the worst place in the world to be even if you're not being serially harassed by some entitled author twat, btw.

links or it didn’t happen

I had no idea about the NBCC, but that's because almost nothing I read is on that level— I honestly just don't really read much popular literature besides non-fiction, and my poetry and fiction choices tend to be pretty esoteric, at least by US standards.

I was aware of the Gwen Benaway thing because I have a pretty large number of connections in the experimental poetry scene in Canada, and someone posted about it— if true, it seems really obvious that she needs to apologise and give money to First Nations organizations in her home city.

To bring this back to Mordy's comment, I feel like while it is ever important to point out that racism is real even though race itself is a construct, I also *do* think everyone needs to be careful about elevating certain works simply because of their author's sociopolitical subjectivity. For example, that Jericho Brown book that won the Pulitzer? It's facile garbage, and critiquing the book on its poetic merit shouldn't automatically make a reviewer into a Klansman. Examining whether one's critiques of it are based in white supremacist notions of 'importance' or what is 'literary' is certainly worthwhile, but I don't know a single one of my poet friends who gives a flying fuck about Jericho Brown, and the community that I circulate in is pretty diverse.

Thus arrives one of the major problems that occurs when a mostly white literary establishment begins engaging in efforts to raise visibility of marginalized people— it tokenizes certain marginalized voices and makes them into monolithic speakers for that identity, when many writers who share that identity find the work terrible. But because there's *so little* attention and funding and etc given to those marginalized voices, many people just put up with it.

A few years ago, a Black writer I'm friends with said something along the lines of, "You know, the white literary establishment can only have so many experimental or challenging black poets, which explains why Terence Hayes or Danez Smith or Jericho Brown get so much love for being so accessible, and then there's like a little room for someone like Fred Moten, particularly in the hallways of academia. But you think any of these people give a shit about Kamau Brathwaite? Simone? Adjua? Alexis Gumbs? No. Because white folks have decided what they think Black writing should be, and anything that strays from that can't be marketed because the whites control the market, so it isn't considered."

More people are stepping forward with ways I've made them uncomfortable. I have made inappropriate and overfamiliar comments with many people regarding personal lives. The kind of talk I thought was acceptable was absolutely not. Please let the victims keep speaking.

— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) June 25, 2020

Having women tell me publicly and privately when I've made them feel uncomfortable or been inappropriate when drinking led me to a horrifying realization and reckoning with the harm I'd done and the impact I had on women around me. 1/

— Myke Cole (@MykeCole) June 24, 2020

xpost

Wait, you're telling me that white male SFF writers are misogynist pigs? God, I never would have imagined.

I had assumed Chuck Wend1g had locked his Twitter account and gone relatively silent because of the blowback he was getting for leading the charge to shut down the Internet Archive, but considering those two quoted above are two of the writers he spends the most time vocally supporting on Twitter... I wonder if he knew something else was coming.

my poetry and fiction choices tend to be pretty esoteric, at least by US standards

Care to cite a few names? Asking for a friend.

Wait, you're telling me that white male SFF writers are misogynist pigs? God, I never would have imagined.

Pomenitul, today I finished Nicole Brossard's 'French Kiss: or a Pang's Promise.' One of her early 'blue books.' This afternoon I've been ploughing through a bestseller, unusual for me, the short story collection 'Friday Black' by Nana Kwame Adjei-Benyah.

Before that, I'd re-read Bisson's 'Fire on the Mountain' and Jean Day's 'The I and the You' simultaneously. Oh, and 'Who Owns Primo's?' by Andy Sterling, plus 'masculine nature's by Clara B..Jones.

My to be read stack features newer books from Anna Gurton-Wachter, Lawrence Giffin, and Don Mee Choi, as well as Gordon Faylor. Older stuff includes Sesshu Foster's first book, a collection of French Canadian feminist theory in translation, and Puar's 'Terrorist Assemblages.'

I should say that I teach for a living and am an 'experimental poet,' so to speak, so that might explain it.

Pretty much all my spare money goes to books and w33d

Thanks. I haven't read that particular Brossard volume but I'm generally a fan of her work.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to keep up with the contemporary 'experimental' North American poetry scene a decade or so ago and ultimately gave up because it became an exclusionary experience for me (either you're part of the clique or you're not) and because I found myself increasingly more interested in what was going on across the Atlantic instead. I've been meaning to make the attempt again, but the incestuous 'community' aspect of it is as off-putting as ever, even violent in its sociological impact (unless it's the community of those who have no community), but this is true of most 'scenes' tbf.

most 'communities' are actually 'scenes' and 'scenes' are very prone to sick dynamics

Pomenitul, I don't blame you for giving up. I've been in and out of a few different scenes but tend toward independence....the writing either interests me or it doesn't, and that's kind of where a lot of my community comes from. I'm friends with many people who violently dislike each other for various reasons, but they have little to do with me.

As in, their reasons for hating each other have little to do with me, so it's no concern of mine tbh