Literary Clusterfucks 2013

made me think of this: https://www.amherstlecture.org/perry2007/Borges%20and%20I.pdf

i respect the commitment

absolutely despise it when humanities academics talk about "loving books." you shouldn't love books and you shouldn't demand anyone else to love books, it is wildly inappropriate. just fundamentally not the correct way to do serious work in the archive

— i read a book, and i liked it (@drumm_colin) October 3, 2023

His commitment to arguing with every single commenter is something else

I lolled

Had you opened more books, you'd have learned "eros" is a Greek word (the Latin translation is "amor") for a kind of love, and also that love is also "philia" and "agape", which are not the same with eros. Thinking love is only eros only shows you should enagage books more.

— Alexandru Mircea (@Alex__Mircea) October 4, 2023

This guy is a researcher in monetary history. I wonder why doesn’t love books.

I think there’s a kernel of a defensible point in there but it’s not at all represented in what he’s actually written

I lolled

🐦[Had you opened more books, you’d have learned "eros" is a Greek word (the Latin translation is "amor") for a kind of love, and also that love is also "philia" and "agape", which are not the same with eros. Thinking love is only eros only shows you should enagage books more.
— Alexandru Mircea (@Alex__Mircea) October 4, 2023🕸]🐦

i followed the colin for a while, it's a fun academic nutter account. had to unfollow after a while tho he's just way too intense. i don't pretend to understand (or care to learn about) his schtick but i think "monetary history" is kind of a misnomer, he's mostly a philosophy humanities guy who reads old books

From his thread I learned that everything you don't agree with is "cop shit"

Fellas, I heard that liking books is subconscious (at best) racism and erasure of indigenous epistemologies, wyd?

It is certainly exclusionary of pre-literate and pre-verbal societies

I nominate the second sentence of that initial tweet for ILB board description.

When someone questioned him about what archives he was talking about he was like, you know, all the books in the world

don't follow this guy but he reminds me of a load of other very clever and generally correct people I used to follow on twitter until I tired of them constantly trying to start fights with absolutely everyone else on the website

just about every defense of Colin's initial tweet has come from people that attend his school lol

When someone questioned him about what archives he was talking about he was like, you know, all the books in the world

not sure he'd agree with this guy

"I always imagined that Paradise would be some kind of library.”

No, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t.

He means "you shouldn't demand that anyone else love books," not "you shouldn't demand anyone else to love books"

But I'm just a non-academic who loves pedantic usage distinctions

I think you just wiped out a small civilization with that correction

We should be very careful of dark magic on this thread

(he doesn't mean anything)

What, like I’m going to have an untoward reverence for what the text says because I appreciate the book it’s printed in?

— Katherine Harris (@mst3kharris) October 3, 2023

Didn't expect a former FL Secretary of State to weigh in on this clusterfuck

I hadn't seen this before, but NaNoWriMo (or at least the centralised support and forums for it) seems fucked?

Remember how the quirky "write a book in 30 days" #NaNoWriMo program allegedly ignored reports of minors possibly being funneled to a ADBL fetish site from their forum & allegedly didn't investigate even tho it allegedly involved one of their mods?

*Pepperidge Farm Remembers*🧵 pic.twitter.com/e3A9K0D36X

— Arumi Velociraptor | sudo -426 int (@Arumi_kai) November 7, 2023

good luck Agriculture Development Bank of Nepal

so, blake butler’s “molly”

lol i thought about posting about that to this thread yesterday and decided... fuck it I don't care. but yeah, messy

Is that a clusterfuck? Like, is there a story beyond the story in the book?

Oh I thought it would be this https://x.com/Natalie_Leif/status/1732542297936732607?s=20

Bah

HOKAY, for anyone else on Writer Twitter who just woke up to a bunch of weird memes and posts about Goodreads and Reylo and reviews, here's a recap thread, as best I can manage. Buckle up as this is gonna be a long one: 🧵

— Leif Leif Leif (@Natalie_Leif) December 6, 2023

what is the substance of the thread?

Tho re Blake Butler and his new one, he has always been an utter piece of shit, no surprise that he wrote a book that posthumously smears his deceased wife.

re: the guy's memoir about his dead wife, i can see how there's elements of an ethical clusterfuck -- on the one hand, he's got every right to share his experience; on the other, he's profiting off a lurid tragedy; on the other other, he appears to have been victimized by her; on the other other other, she's not around to tell her side of the story; and depending on one's pov you could see the whole thing as either "this dude is opening up about an unimaginable dagwood sandwich of tragedies and that is good" or "this dude is getting back at and making money off of his tortured and much more talented/celebrated dead wife and painting her as a toxic slutbag and himself as the devoted naïf and that's bad", and it could coarsen down to people yelling at each other on twitter (or wherever people yell at each other these days)

but maybe no one gives a darn, which imo might be for the best

maybe i've read too much daphne du maurier but i incline more to the dead wife. there's a bit in one interview where the guy says he once explained what gaslighting was to her, but after she died and he found out about her secret affairs he realized she'd been gaslighting him all along, and that is an awful situation of course, but also (forgive me) somewhat lol

dang table, how has this dude's shitness manifested previously? i'd never heard of him before (i have not heard of most things/people)

the excerpts from the book seemed well ropy to me but it feels churlish to point that out

perhaps i am a churl, o no

cat, he’s always been an “all-for-myself” egomaniac who has purloined strategies from various sources and utilized them to further his own career while never giving credit. he’s a shit.

I read a few reviews of this book before he started getting dragged and they made it sound like a loving portrait full of admiration -- if his goal was to smear her with the book he must have failed

I admit that I also despise the editors behind the book— like am in occasional online snipe-fests with them over what I feel is their mean-spirited and aggressive posturing.

xp Ha, I thought that Twitter thread was about Blake Butler and read the whole thing like "WOW it's gonna be a really interesting twist when Blake Butler is revealed to be behind all this"

In other news, when I first started seeing reviews of "Molly" I thought Blake Butler was Blake Bailey the Philip Roth biographer, and I was like, wow, they rehabilitated this guy and they're not even gonna mention...?

willing to start a literary clusterfuck with anyone remaining on ilx who thinks that posting the first tweet of a thread is acceptable conduct

That debut authors clusterfuck is pretty run of the mill: sniping, sock puppets, claims of racism and appropriation, ending up with someone using “albino” as a putdown.

the blake butler situation is more interesting and hits on some ethical live wires.

personally, i think he is betraying the memory of his deceased wife. however, this is more just an instinctual reaction. i don't think the world needs to know about her affairs, especially because one of them was with a student and in today's climate that is going to make people think of her as monstrous. like everyone else, she had her flaws.

however, this might just be a holdover of something i was raised with. my grandfather was very insistent on not speaking ill of the dead, and he had a pretty strong personality. to me that prohibition has a lot of force, even though if i think rationally i realize it's not sustainable.

In other news, when I first started seeing reviews of "Molly" I thought Blake Butler was Blake Bailey the Philip Roth biographer, and I was like, wow, they rehabilitated this guy and they're not even gonna mention...?

I can Alphie-post the text of the whole thing here if you want imago? It's isn't much of anything or at least not much to distinguish it from other YA Goodreads nonsense beyond the albino thing and some hilariously bad photoshopping of chat logs (https://bsky.app/profile/thelincoln.bsky.social/post/3kfxjilaplk2z if that's any more use)

But at least I can see that it's a clusterfuck - like James Morrison I'm not sure what there is to the other one beyond "a guy wrote about his wife"

thought about the butler situation and changed my mind.

thanks for the perspective, table. that characterization of bbutler seems congruent with the more negative interpretation of his motive in laying out a mentally ill woman's dirty laundry so soon after her suicide (not that i care, why would i care, i'd better not be identifying with her ffs)

whatever! doesn't matter anyway! congratulation to him on the success and sympathy his late wife's wicked behavior has garnered him, and extra congratulation on getting married again just 2 years after she died, really inspirational stuff

goddamn but i feel kinda bitchy about this

how has your mind changed, treeship? and would you like to fight about it

how has your mind changed, treeship? and would you like to fight about it

new borad description

"I can Alphie-post the text of the whole thing here if you want imago?"

🙏

Tho re Blake Butler and his new one, he has always been an utter piece of shit, no surprise that he wrote a book that posthumously smears his deceased wife.

He was an abusive troll online in the 2000s Tao Lin days, always been surprised at his success, deserves comeuppance.