Literary Clusterfucks 2013

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

the writing either interests me or it doesn't

Yeah, that's the sole viable attitude. I do feel like it's partly my fault for paying too much attention to the sociology of literature – it's just that 95% of the time, I struggle to muster the least bit of interest in stuff that I feel like I'm 'supposed' to be reading (as regards the contemporary era, at least), which systematically gets me thinking about the machinery of artistic visibility (who sees who, who gets seen, and why), and that just kills the pleasure of reading for me, to the extent that I've been consciously spending more time on the classics (the dead) of late. Even as their corpses still wiggle and the so-called Canon's boundaries are perpetually drawn and redrawn, there's a comforting feeling that comes with knowing it's truly over for these writers, it no longer really matters since poetic immortality is the worst kind of sham anyway. This isn't really the case, of course – what we retain from the past, how we establish a given 'cultural' archive, has sociopolitical import in the here and now – but it feels less exhausting to deal with the dead than to keep up with these relentless clusterfucks among the living. Even if it's a necromantic figment, I kind of need it right now.

paying too much attention to the sociology of literature

As an addendum, I will also say that much contemporary writing explicitly, aggressively invites this kind of reading, which doesn't help.

It's funny you mention the sociology of literature because I learned from people who were very much involved in schools and scenes... but what interested me about their work was its mix of high and low culture, radical left political leanings, and equal interest in the abject and the classical. The gossip and shit has always bored me.

I think the only literary clusterfucks that I've even commented on publicly in recent years were regarding people who'd been outed as former Nazis and people who sexually assaulted other people. Otherwise, not worth my time, your prize doesn't mean shit to me if I think your work is shit, I'll keep reading what I want to read, thanks.

Looks like this round is only going to get more involved, judging by this tweet there are more SF/F male artists on the horizon:

I opened my DMs & I've been reading stories. I'm not sharing specific details because those are potential identifiers.

John Ringo
Robert Silverberg
Steven Brust
George RR Martin
Mike Resnick
Chuck Wendig

More follows.

— Ann Aguirre (@MsAnnAguirre) June 25, 2020

A couple of those don't really surprise me, not sure on some of the others.

anything that strays from that can't be marketed

this is broadly true for every facet of publishing, not just experimental poetry written by Black poets, but for everything that is published, bar none. book buyers are a small market these days and the majority of book buyers are notoriously conservative about what they choose to read, sticking to well-defined, easily identified genres almost exclusively. small presses often try to buck this trend and branch out into under-represented genres or experimental books. small presses also die like mayflies.

as a result of this perverse narrowness of interests among book buyers, publishers are extremely reluctant to publish anything by anyone that strays from known, comfortable, easily marketed genres. because the point is to at least break even on a book, and that modest goal is very hard to attain.

Perhaps this would be less of a problem if we stopped fetishizing the book qua object and fully realized the internet's potential for disrupting and fragmenting said 'market', which is a self-proliferating feedback loop if ever there was one.

less of a problem if we stopped fetishizing the book qua object

fwiw, I read printed books only. This is not because I fetishize them. I own a Kindle and it is loaded to the gills with books I might enjoy reading. I ignore them and pick up a book, because I find that printed & bound books are easier to read. Ink on paper is a good medium for looking at words in type. This matters much less for brief pieces that I can read in 20 minutes or less, but it becomes increasingly important to me as a piece reaches book length and my reading times are more like 90 to 120 minutes at a stretch.

I kind of envy those of you who find electronic devices an attractive way to read books. I haven't been able to make that leap.

changing font size helps on bumpy train rides

I prefer printed books myself but the process of turning them into tangible matter is fraught with sociopolitical obstacles. E-books can serve as a useful alternative when those obstacles become needlessly insurmountable.

e-readers are u&k for reading on one's side in bed

I opened my DMs & I've been reading stories. I'm not sharing specific details because those are potential identifiers.

John Ringo
Robert Silverberg
Steven Brust
George RR Martin
Mike Resnick
Chuck Wendig

More follows.
— Ann Aguirre (@MsAnnAguirre) June 25, 2020

Looks like this twitter account is gone.

Whoa, yeah. It's gone. Seems... odd... for that to just disappear.

Nothing just vanishes on the internet.

No, I just mean for it to go from collecting DMs from women who have experienced harassment at cons to being deleted several hours later seems... suspect.

Seeing a couple people on Twitter claiming they heard from her offline and the abuse she was getting in her DMs was so awful she deactivated her account.

Sadly makes sense

i thought this was going to be about nick flynn

I read that essay about Flynn and couldnt really spot where the abuse and grooming was supposed to be.

ooh, go tweet some people about that, i dare you

Lol no thanks. someone else did tho

What a galaxy-brain take. When she uses the term "grooming" she's describing a dinner date and the offer to read over her poems. the essay describes a man who is narcissistic and inconsiderate at worst. The idea that abuse occurred is so far reaching

— Helena Duncan (@helena_duncan_) June 26, 2020

xpost to Aimless: Oh, you're absolutely right, but part of what I was bemoaning is the fact that the small handful of Black writers who do get published by more visible presses are seen as monolithic and entirely representative of what Black writers can do and are doing, a truly tokenizing brain worm that infects even people who should know better.

James Baldwin noted the same tokenizing phenomenon long ago. In the USA it seems even worse for Native American writers than for Blacks.

*sigh*. Yes, I guess I just find its continuation rather disappointing.

As as far as indigenous writers in the US, I think that is changing a bit more, but I'm also in touch with a lot of Indigenous writers because it's one of my main research and personal interests, so my view is probably skewed.

Speaking of Canlit clusterfucks & Benaway, Hal Niedzviecki has taken to Quillette to decry mob rule and cancel culture

mob rule? heavens!

which institutions of legal governance are being overruled here? the NBCC? goodness me! did they do something forbidden by their charter and bylaws?

thwarted the will of the people of the republic of letters, who should revolt and install a new government

A short story about John Boyne in tweets...

Once upon a time there was an Irish writer called John Boyne who wrote a book called “The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas”. It was very successful, bringing John fame and lots of money... pic.twitter.com/dKbyc3COy2

— Helen🧜🏻‍♀️ (@mimmymum) July 19, 2020

^^ thread

Holy heck. What a series of terrible decisions. I don't know how that man could've been offered more opportunities to course-correct, and failed more drastically at each one.

Hmmm

You think it would have gone differently?

I don't like the sound of those Irish libel laws though they sound like the ones we had in UK ... NDAs was it?

Mostly surprised that the Striped Pajamas backlash only happened after the trans book backlash because the concept of that book seems like a Very Bad Idea.

only tangentially literary, but the ortberg family saga is a lot

wow, a lot has happened since I used to read the toast

there's absolutely nothing wrong with the basic premise of TBITSP imo, but he certainly seems like he's being a total arse rn