Literary Clusterfucks 2013

Gary Gilmore donated his eyes to science iirc

narcissus fell in love not with himself but with his reflection

Narcissism is a slippery word. People use it to just mean “self-involved” but it also evokes narcissistic personality disorder in people’s minds. Sometimes there is a motte and bailey aspect to this.

The Living Donor Program should really just be like "Donate a kidney! Impress your friends Save a life!"

But anyway, the Facebook stuff is moot. Dawn believed Sonya's lie. Later she found the truth — was hurt enough to quietly unfriend Sonya — and yet for TWO YEARS didn't bring it up. How is Dawn "obsessed"? She only went ballistic when she finally saw how much plagiarism there was pic.twitter.com/NBE2MZlT1e

— Dan Nguyen (everyone you love decomposing to bones (@dancow) October 8, 2021

yeah it’s outrageously craven

They seem to not know how fucked it is too. Just kinda one of the tools in their bullying toolkit, and it’s justified because dorland is so bad omg

This is perhaps the “richest” literary clusterfuck we’ve had. It provoked real discussion.

I mean did it tho

Different supposedly factual facets of ppl that serve as mere caricature aide memewars for our own often questionable recollections of ppl we didnt like once emerged and changed and in the end here we are treesh, annoying ppl exist and sometimes they form writers clubs and somewhere along the line they realise not everyone else is there to tell only them how wonderful they are full kidney complement or not and it turns toxic

I mean its the oldest story known to man rly

this is where my third-kidney request hits, join me in a better society

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kidney-donation-online-dating-site_n_6162fbd6e4b06a986bd09b73

A Chunky Monkey says sorry

Whew, this is a hard thread, friends. Here goes. I have been a member of the Chunky Monkeys writing group, as featured in the now-famous Bad Art Friend saga. As of today, I am no longer a member of this group.

— Becky Tuch (@BeckyLTuch) October 11, 2021

Oh shit they lost becky

that is so perfectly written in that stupid twitter thread tone i can't even believe it

“I am sorry for the role I played, a role that I am too humble to specify here, right now, exactly, but, suffice to say”

“We tortured some folks”

I haven't been around much but this story just gets more infuriating; as someone with roughly as much claim on being nonwhite as Larson, I think the racial angle in this is horseshit but also no one seems to be really addressing it

like, there's a lot of emphasis on "she can't be a white savior, she didn't know the race of the recipient" but that's not what Larson is saying -- she's saying that white people tend to latch onto people of color and assume they are better friends than they are, and that that's what was happening here. and yeah, in general, this happens. however:

1) Larson was actively presenting herself as a friend, and kind of effusively too! if someone emails you with stuff like "I think so highly of you, and yet you say you're not feeling it. I have always encouraged you as a writer and a person, and I would not stop now, or ever," it seems like a reasonable assumption that that person is at least on good terms with you?
2) it's not like she just communicates this way with people of color -- there's a very charming email from Chip "#PublishingPaidMe an $800k advance" Cheek in which he is shocked, shocked! that Dawn was really friendly to him when she moved to LA. this just seems like the kind of person she is, in general, to everyone.
3) there are other things that can make someone unaware of social cues, such as childhood trauma -- you know, the thing mentioned literally at the start of the article
4) that whole gross "don't worry, you can always recruit PoC as your personal army to draaaaaag her" thing

there's also a "only white people are saying this" narrative which can be disproven in like 5 seconds of looking. it's actually kind of weird how the sides are shaking out, on dorland's side you have a bunch of seemingly ok people and also j*sse s*ngal

LOL her background image pic.twitter.com/EwonpTjiJv

— Cersei was right (@MoviePrograms) October 12, 2021

meanwhile

you guys have me going back and forth about who the worst person is in the bad art friend story so i’ve decided to just try to see myself in both of them and turn my loathing inward which is also a form of narcissism from this particular circle of hell there is no way out

— eve 6ix (@Eve6) October 12, 2021

That is what i said earlier though

Plagiarism imo

J*sse s*ngal's angle seems to be "they both look white to me", which, respect for finding a terrible take after everyone else thought there was just bones left.

Still waiting for the "Women would rather give away their organs than date incels" take

I think "we all have texts between friends that are obnoxious about people who are getting on our nerves, like Sonya Larson" is true in a way that "we all have work emails where we grunt about who's a f****t and a p***y, like John Gruden" is not

1) Larson was actively presenting herself as a friend, and kind of effusively too! if someone emails you with stuff like "I think so highly of you, and yet you say you're not feeling it. I have always encouraged you as a writer and a person, and I would not stop now, or ever," it seems like a reasonable assumption that that person is at least on good terms with you?

it is the way somebody who is not your friend but wants to remain at least on good terms with you writes. the formality is way over the top for an actual friend. right? or maybe I just have very casually-writing friends but none of them would ever say or write to me "I have always encouraged you as a person"

these people seem weirdly obsessed with appearing to be "kind" and "warm" in that way

i keep reading their quotes and tweets in the voice of the art teacher from daria

omg do you think they actually DO talk to their real-life friends that way? Yeah maybe so, the "that could never be you because of your superhuman self-awareness!" line mentioned earlier does kinda suggest that. lordy, what a discourse community

I also think "plagiarism" is a big stretch here -- if I saw a weird sign outside a church and wrote a story that had a church that had that sign it wouldn't be plagiarism. I suppose the argument is that it's different because Dorland is herself a capital-W Writer. At the very least it's just not nice to put someone's words in the mouth of a character you're casting in a cold light (in the same way it wouldn't be nice to the church and you'd just have to hope whoever put up that sign didn't read American Story Monthly.) Anyway I cannot quite fathom the idea that Larson wrote the story *as an attack on Dorland*, I think the encounter with Dorland gave Larson the idea for a story about a character who based on that New Yorker review is very obviously not Dorland and not based on Dorland.

Except that character was named 'Dawn' in an early draft - which then got changed to 'Rose Rothario', which has exactly the same alliterative pattern as 'Dawn Dorland'.

"rose rothario" also so goddamn hilarious

Her friends call her RoRo.

it's truly the todd bonzalez of literary fiction

I've definitely used comments from videos and internet forums (never ILX, i wouldn't do that) in my written work.

It's pretty common practice tbh, there's a whole poetic school based off of this sort of thing lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flarf_poetry

ha, "it was just flarf don't you see" would be a hilarious new line of Sonya Larson defense

bad flarf friend

lol i agree tbh

it's truly the todd bonzalez of literary fiction

actual lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flarf_poetry

― I'm a sovereign jazz citizen (the table is the table), Tuesday, October 12, 2021 2:16 PM (yesterday)

lol, I actually did a thing (undocumented iirc) that was inspired by K.S.M.'s deer head piece

I know everyone's probably sick of this by now but this doc seems like the final nail in the coffin of "why would she ever think we were friends"

fwiw here is Dorland's description of her relationship with Larson (screenshots 1-2; pgs 23-24 here: https://t.co/4IgCbqCRvL)

screenshot 3 shows Larson's attorney's statement about their relationship (pg 8 here: https://t.co/mlv7NFLIKb)

(thank you tipster!) pic.twitter.com/Mr9S2t1wPi

— kidneygate (@kidneygate) October 13, 2021

Agreed -- if that's the best Dorland can come up with to attest to their close friendship it kind of sounds pretty much like "people who moved in the same social group." Like, if one of your data points in favor of "we were really close" is "she knew about my difficult childhood once she read the essay I published about it"...

I mean, that's just a few pages, maybe there's more to it, I don't know, but I can't think of somebody I'd call "a true friend" who I've never hung out with one to one, certainly including people whose birthday parties I've been to.

Or I dunno, maybe those are people I'd call "friend" in the sense of "my friend from work said" but ... is that what we're talking about here?

I meant it in the opposite way, this is not the behavior of someone who says "we have not and have never been friends"

And I guess it seems to me like exactly the behavior of someone who would say about you "we're friendly but we're not FRIEND friends"

But I don't want to overinterpret, I recognize this is not Dorland speaking for herself but her attorney trying to strategically accomplish something on her behalf.

I'm not sure why it matters if they were bffs or passing acquaintances

I'm not sure either but it seems to be an issue before the court for some reason

it doesn't matter for the legal plagiarism sense but it sure matters for the "how could she possibly think we were friends, I gave her no reason to think that, therefore she is the worst and anything that happens to her is justified" narrative

it just seems to me that if someone invites you to their birthday party, their partner's mom's funeral, shows up at your farewell party, etc., it is not a crazy stalker act to think you're friends? which is how it's being characterized