Literary Clusterfucks 2013

JRN, sexual harassment does not depend on the intention of the harasser, but on whether the people consider the behavior unwelcome. However unintentional the bathtub incident may have been, it was behavior of a sexual nature that was unwelcome.

Why was he in the bathtub while on a call?

I think indecent exposure, accidentally, via Zoom is possible, and I don’t think it would be sexual harassment then. Like what if you forget you were in a waiting room and the host suddenly lets you into the meeting? Or you thought you signed off but didn’t. The app runs in the background, behind your other apps.

In this case he was already naked on the call which seems weird.

His explanation is that he has fibromyalgia and was soaking in the tub to manage pain. I'm not sure that's being challenged, as such.

Or rather it's being viewed sceptically but no alternate account of events has been publicised.

I understand that you can harass without intending to--but can you harass via an action you didn't even intend to perform? If a boss accidentally tripped and fell into an employee's lap, could that count as sexual harassment? That seems to be the suggestion in the open letter. I don't get it, the response seems plenty strong without it.

That letter pretty clearly says "Sure, this one thing might have been accidental, but he's just the kind of asshole who'd do something like this on purpose, and you better believe we've got some stories we could tell."

^^^ that was my take, seems like employees he's treated like shit over the years are all too happy to put this incident into an overall pattern of behavior

the Open Letter is suggesting the harassment was because he had a pattern of being negligent and showing disregard for the staffers, suggesting that he cares little enough about the sensitivities of his co-workers that he wouldn't take precautions to prevent the possibility of something like that even happening (like, perhaps attending the call on audio only, or ....not being in the tub).

but with that being said, it is really fucking easy to fuck up web cam by accident. I had a new laptop once and hit a button in WebEx by mistake and it flipped my camera on while I was shirtless (I immediately ducked under the table and threw a shirt on and flipped camera off).

I teach classes regularly and yes, on days when I haven't been required to use web cam, I always make sure I'm attired for that reason. but I think "this was a freak accident" is probably likely.

or what unperson and jon said. dammit, took too long to rewrite the message

Having worked for a couple of years at a small lit magazine of Believer-y proportions, edited by a total asshole who made everyone's lives miserable, the open letter rings completely accurate to me.

I guess the point is, some freak accidents are less freaky than others

Yeah one rather obvious reading would be "it may have been unintentional, but given our other experiences, we doubt it". So never mind what I said before.

I'm not sure it's even that - it seems close to 'it may have been unintentional but only someone who doesn't care about their staff's wellbeing could have put themselves in a position to make that mistake in the first place', which idk.

Yeah. "I forgot to be careful" is only a hair from "I couldn't be bothered to be careful".

Not having a shirt on and having one's camera come on by accident is very different from what this guy did, y'all. He literally was on a call, naked. Either he doesn't give a shit or shouldn't have been on the call because he was in too much pain.

Wondering if there was any benefit to this meeting being a Zoom call instead of a conference call by phone. Dude could still have a job if he’d said that he had to be in the tub because of his medical condition and so maybe a call would be better, or else had kept the camera off for the call for the same reason.

Hmm x2

The article did not quote anyone else who had been present, and so there was little room for Shenk’s exposure to be interpreted as anything more than an unfortunate mistake. Staffers were incensed. “This article is all he needs to get himself another job where he can endanger people,” a colleague wrote to me. This was the first we were hearing about a bathtub, and several other details in the article seemed to be acting as convenient distractions; for instance, the “mesh shirt” Shenk was supposedly wearing had appeared on screen to be a normal-looking white t-shirt.

https://defector.com/whats-happening-at-the-believer-is-about-more-than-just-a-zoom-incident/

yeah I'm inclined to believe his employees' account, pretty fucked how many journalistic publications spiked the employee comments.

Skyhorse Publishing has picked up the Philip Roth biography. Check out their website to see the other fine, fine books they publish...

http://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/

I think I've got one of their Robert F Jones books. Since when did they become associated with Night Shade Books? I love Night Shade.

They publish all sorts of stuff, literally no filter

Skyhorse Publishing’s House of Horrors

Skyhorse Publishing, literary home to Michael Cohen, Woody Allen, and Alan Dershowitz, has struggled with bigger problems than a roster of political unsavories. Interviews suggest a history of workplace toxicity and inappropriate behavior.

Wow shocking

https://www.chimamanda.com/

have at it folks

the chimamanda essay is essential reading but this part just absolutely nails everything that is wrong with this generation pic.twitter.com/5wW1pn3SlJ

— jonathan nunn (@demarionunn) June 17, 2021

way to make it personal, lol

i remember her comment about trans women from 2017 and thinking "well i'm just never going to read this person's work"; i am going to continue not reading her work

thispersondoesnotexist.com

Screaming about kindness while denying groups their right to be and exist. Oh, and I love literature btw.

when the personal emails get published on the blogs is when you know the cluster is reaching its fuck horizon

💁🏻‍♂️🦋 Is this time cube

I don't even think that thing rises to the level of a clusterfuck, it's just an author rehashing conventional wisdom about how the internet is bad and everybody is mean and nobody actually *thinks* anymore except your clear-eyed correspondent

i cannot fucking imagine the level of solipsism one must have to think that "being afraid to tweet" is a legitimate concern in 2021

anyway Ben Shapiro retweeted it which i imagine if she has any shame, she must be thrilled about

It doesn't appear that her "cancellation" really hurt considering that she has the clout to get a publisher to stop production of someone else's book to remove offending matter

"She didn't tolerate my intolerance! I won't tolerate her intolerance of my intolerance! Waaaaaaah"

There's a lot of puffed-up bullshit in that essay but "I don't think this person who kissed my ass when she wanted something, then talked shit about me when I said something she didn't like, should get to use my name in her PR materials like we're BFFs" is an unreasonable position.

That position isn't unreasonable at all, but the parts of the piece that the usual people are quote-tweeting as "SO BRAVE AND NECESSARY" are the puffed-up bullshit.

ass-kissing and two-facedness are not traits that are unique to kids today either

why in my day the kids kissed my ass with both their faces and never complained

Having read more about the opinions she has expressed re trans people, I feel like she's more heart-in-the-right-place than, say, JK Rowling, but is never gonna be 100% acceptable to US/EU thought leaders on this issue, at least in part because she's the product of a much more conservative society. Any kind of feminism at all is pretty radical for Nigeria. So she's starting from a very different baseline than your average Twitter trans rights activist, and anyone attempting to hold her to/expecting her to meet contemporary Western standards of progressivism is gonna find themselves flying into a rage pretty fast.

Part of Nigeria's conservatism, too, comes from colonial processes, the lives and afterlives of which are still very much part of Nigerian society. It's pretty myopic and uncomprehending of historical processes for western activists to force these issues when it is their very societies that set such conservatism into place.

she has Masters degrees from John Hopkins and Yale, stop acting like she's brand new

Her degrees and their provenance don't seem entirely relevant to the points made by unperson and table.

yes they are, in so much as they show she's not new to Western culture, like the babe in the woods the two posts are making her out to be

and yes, I'm aware that Western academia isn't the most progressive place either

they show she's not new to Western culture

is western culture presumed to be so attractive or superior that one invariably must adopt it as soon as one is sufficiently exposed to it?

These are good tweets imo has she written any others

I...would be careful about assuming Adichie is representing her beef with Akwaeke Emezi fairly/accurately, especially because at the beginning of their relationship there was definitely an asymmetry of power. Also, many trans people have engaged Adichie over the years pointing out where her takes on trans women not being women don’t match a reality she herself has no direct experience of. She has shown no inclination toward humility/trying to understand a different experience, and all the stuff about young people not feeling safe in tweeting their actual thoughts seems like a distraction. My impression is that she is v delighted with herself in a way that sometimes obstructs critical thought (honestly that can often be a charismatic quality!) I say this as someone who admires her way with words and some of her fiction. The extremely long blog post is a coded fuck you to Emezi and a doubling down on transphobia. I am out of patience with her.

Also, I wish she would put this energy toward writing another novel, frankly; she’s a bit out of her depth taking on gender identity imo.