Literary Clusterfucks 2013

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.

Jesus, does Tao Lin have a whole decade now??

you can taolineate the decades however you want tbf

ugh. sorry

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

― Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers, P.S.C. (cat), Thursday, December 7, 2023 3:17 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I read that Molly wrote unflinching autobiographical stuff about her own family, including a book about her father’s criminal record. So this new book is honoring her legacy of honesty and honoring people in their messy humanity.

I also read that the book does not demonize her at all. Just mostly reflects how she was more complex than her husband understood. It was his failing as much as hers.

These are things I have read that made me soften on this. However, I have not read the book so who knows.

My original view that this was cruel to her legacy was based on not trusting the public to “get” a messy portrait of someone. Twitter, Reddit, and other mob spaces treat infidelity like it is murder. Very childish attitudes around this topic.

But it seems like the mob was attacking him not her so idk. Idk where the wind is blowing.

You guys are not the mob fyi

idk it seems to me like they both extremely suck(ed)

yeah big time sucking all around, and blowing too no doubt, and James Morrison + Andrew Farrell otm that it's just a guy wrote about his wife, but! we can fuck the cluster we wish to see in the world, i believe in us

there'd be some bitter justice in him publishing all her ugly secrets if she'd done the same w/ her family, but lol i ain't reading none of these peoples' books probably so won't try to weigh who betrayed who worst. from my hazy recollection of skimming articles for 10 minutes this morning, however, the daily mail/telegraph/ny post headlines (for a literary memoir! of a poet!)(no offense, table) predictably highlighted the most crass and gnarly aspects of her conduct, and the reviews i saw were peppered with tantalizing/humiliating details of the sex videos he found on her phone, and her heroin use

it's a little like revenge porn: the book, except the cheated person is sharing all the details of the cheating person's stealth fuckery while loudly proclaiming himself to be so so sorry that he couldn't be everything she needed, he never realized she had been in such pain, and the literary-industrial complex patting him on the shoulder reassuring him that he is such a strong brave survivor, meanwhile she's dead. he gets the last word. i don't like it. https://media.tenor.com/23NTnEtc3jgAAAAi/ebichu-pout.gif

it's been a very long 2013 indeed