Literary Clusterfucks 2013

i expect it will be food for thought *adjusts monocle*

lol:

"And while you a fkn legend to mfkrs who know, it baffles me how many of these so-called literary fucks don’t know your shit. So many people who read my shit are like Yo, that style you doin, how figure that out? To which I’m like, Sam Pink, bitch! Read Sam Pink you New Yorker Paris Review fuck."

can anyone (tables is tables?) explain the clusterfuck around sean thor conroe's novel? saw some vague allusions to it on twitter but couldn't traceback. i like his podcast

― flopson, Tuesday, March 8, 2022 1:30 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The clusterfuck seems to be from any number of sides. One side, the snooty bougeois liberal progressives, think the protagonist is offensive. Another side, the more actually left literary types, think that another stylized novel about a terrible man looking for fucks and redemption is the last thing anyone should ever have to read again. And more conservative types are like, "good heavens, a book not written in the queen's English, by crum!"

I mostly don't care, fwiw, because in interviews, Conroe comes off as the most obnoxious asshole I can possibly imagine, an actively disgusting human being, and the excerpts from the novel look like utter shit.

And the dude got a $200,000 advance, so there's the "guy imitates others in the indie ranks to take major-label money" angle.

Like seriously, look up excerpts from the book and you'll find that it is the clunkiest, cringiest straight male "voice of authenticity" that you've ever read. That would be fine if there was an ounce of self-awareness, but there isn't.

If you want to read a guy who is writing in a toxic masculine voice that is actually interesting and aware of itself, read Mike Amnasan.

The money thing isn't surprising, money begets money and Conroe is clearly from a well-to-do background.

having a podcast probably didn't hurt

I don't really understand the phenomenon of podcasts, I don't listen to them and don't see that changing. If assholes and charlatans keep getting book deals from them, to me that means that they're even less worthy of attention.

for a writer I'm sure they provide more exposure than a reading at a small bookstore does

I liked Sean Thor Conroe more when he was called Atticus Lish

Though not THAT much more tbh

I mean, I've DONE podcasts— hosted them and been interviewed on them. I still never listen to them lmfao.

James, can you spoil how the novel deals with trans ppl (if at all)?

Trans people are mentioned but (DRAGS DETAILS FROM POSSIBLY FAULTY MEMORY) don't play much of a role. Basically trans women with XX chromosomes vanish with all the men; so do women with androgen insensitivity syndrome.

And yeah, the bits of Fuccboi I've seen make it look like absolute trash.

Honestly it's desperately bad, the excerpt on the book's website and what little I've read from people posting it makes it seem like the worst garbage. I was going to paste a quote but I'll spare everyone.

i, however, feel no such compunction

I know you have your ideas about me. And maybe they’re correct. Maybe I am a sus hetero bro who’s been subtly abusive and deserves to be cancelled, for my basic ways.

i have a fondness for sean after listening to a few episodes of his podcast and liked the short story of his that was posted on tyrant blog a year or two ago. i don’t think he’s toxic, just a neurotic kinda dumb stuttering stoner bro. im not sure if his background is affluent, is that confirmed or inferred from the schools he attended? i read he went to swarthmore on a scholarship

we should all have to declare before holding forth else how can we know the sus from the sussers

https://i.imgur.com/MIcvku1.jpg

I don't really understand when ppl talk about podcasts like there's something specific to them - it's just talk radio, basically, if the ppl talking are ppl you think are worth listening to you'll enjoy if they're not you won't. Not having a go at you table, some mediums just aren't for certain people, it's just I find it sad when ppl hear "podcast" and assume it's all Joe Rogan shit.

Trans people are mentioned but (DRAGS DETAILS FROM POSSIBLY FAULTY MEMORY) don't play much of a role. Basically trans women with XX chromosomes vanish with all the men; so do women with androgen insensitivity syndrome.

Thread has moved on but yeah this seems like the author hasn't done as much thinking on gender as she might think.

I get what you're saying, Daniel, and didn't take it as a swipe. I think, tbh, that I have some weird psychological thing wherein I was forced to listen to a lot of NPR growing up, and then a few years ago was forced to listen to Rogan episodes while working on a weed farm, and I simply don't want to listen to other people talk, almost ever. I'd rather read.

It's also related to the phenomenon, for me, of people talking about Netflix or other shows or the football game like it's something that everyone does. So many people I know talk about certain podcasts this way, and it really icks me out.

I was forced to listen to a lot of NPR growing up

lol I have used this fact as an explanation as to why I a) hate NPR and b) don't listen to podcasts much. I can only listen to them in situations where I'm doing something that means I can't read (washing dishes, cooking, and driving), and I tend to prefer fully scripted ones. In my personal hell, Marketplace will be playing ubiquitously

Somewhat glad to know that I'm not the only one who has this aversion for similar reasons

Oh yeah the NPR house style is unbearable. Recently listened to the Trojan Horse Affair podcast, which is gripping, vital journalism and even on that the cutesy NPR style drove me up the wall.

I think my mental image of podcasts is like the opposite of ubiquity, a lot of the stuff I suscribe to I assume has like twenty other listeners. I do actively resent that stuff being edged out by huge celebrity podcasts, but twas ever so.

I hate listening to radio news for the same reason, but I've recently realized that my aversion doesn't extend to all podcasts. I think the format of people talking to each other in my hearing doesn't bother me as much as someone reciting information at me. But I'm still very picky about my podcasts; I have a few French ones that I listen to for language purposes, and a couple of English-language ones that I like okay, and that's it.

In a convergence of separate clusterfucks in this thread, Lauren Hough weighs in on Sandra Newman

https://laurenhough.substack.com/p/a-question-for-lambda-literary?s=r

Have to say that Hough comes off better here than she does when complaining about her Goodreads reviews

She’s completely right about YA Twitter, the worst book people on the planet.

who are the war criminals adichie is aligned with?

― flopson, Saturday, 19 June 2021 bookmarkflaglink

do you see now how trans-exclusionary radical feminism and white supremacy go hand in hand? https://t.co/ydXUyuExvs

— d (@venusinreverse) May 8, 2022

"An author’s online essay on why she used plagiarized material in a novel pulled earlier this year has itself been removed after editors found she had again lifted material"
https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/authors-plagiarism-essay-pulled-plagiarism-found-84601217

feel like i have to respect it

Author’s plagiarism essay pulled after more plagiarism found

NEW YORK -- An author's online essay on why she used plagiarized material in a novel pulled earlier this year has itself been removed after editors found she had again lifted material.

Jumi Bello's “I Plagiarized Parts of My Debut Novel. Here’s Why" appeared just briefly Monday on https://lithub.com. Bello's debut novel, “The Leaving,” had been scheduled to come out in July, but was canceled in February by Riverhead Books.

“Earlier this morning Lit Hub published a very personal essay by Jumi Bello about her experience writing a debut novel, her struggles with severe mental illness, the self-imposed pressures a young writer can feel to publish, and her own acts of plagiarism,” the publication announced. “Because of inconsistencies in the story and, crucially, a further incident of plagiarism in the published piece, we decided to pull the essay.”

jinx

the plagiarized material concerned passages about the history of plagiarism

It's uh... meta-textual, yeah!

Maybe this person needs to rethink what it means to be an author, because they seem not to have grasped the most basic essentials, yet.

come on, man

This is the carceral system at work within the literary field.

The centering of Jumi Bello’s indiscretion as opposed to the systemic harm of the industry on the mental and physical wellbeing of marginalized authors. https://t.co/DBlzkZ3EIv

— Mx. Faylita Hicks (@FaylitaHicks) May 9, 2022

lol

Defund Literature!
Oh, already done

"The lights are growing dim...I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate. And yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am." *coughs blood, dies*

Dear Mx. Faylita Hicks, it only required a cursory five second web search for me to discover Jumi Bello's author photo, in which she looks to be a black woman, and so might be considered a "marginalized writer" simply because black women authors are traditionally very under-represented.

However, the same cursory five second web search revealed this brief bio: "A fiction graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop... she is a Black Mountain Institute creative nonfiction PhD fellow at the University of Las Vegas" and her debut novel was accepted for publication by a division of Penguin Books before it was pulled for plagiarism.

If this is a writer being shoved to the margins, then I'm thinking there are a great many aspiring writers who'd be quick to sign up for that kind of marginalization.

I want to know more about the university administrator who thought, "This magazine's editor-in-chief embarrassed one of our donors by doing a Zoom call in the bathtub. Well, I'll show them. I'll sell the whole magazine to a sex toy company!"

— Caleb Crain (@caleb_crain) May 11, 2022

Big Brass Eye wanking senator vibes from that double plagiarism story

lmao christ, american discourse is so fucked

Even if Bello isn't a textbook example of a marginalised author (although I really have no way of confirming that), I don't see the problems with Hicks's tweet beyond its portentous phrasing.

I mean, it's a funny story and it's okay to find it funny (double plagiarism!) but it's also okay to accept there some are systemic, dysfuntional inequalities and pressures in publishing that make this sort of thing more likely. And that doesn't have to be a slight against authors who are capable of writing with plagiarising wildly.

*without plagiarising wildly

i feel like this is some kind of perfect idpol rorschach test

It’s a crap tweet because its argument is absolute bullshit.

going a bit deeper, i feel like copyright is kinda bullshit and people should be able to plagiarise as much as they want, but i also feel like publishing companies should also be able to withdraw from publishing agreements if it becomes clear the writer is just lifting their content from elsewhere without credit, the story should really end there, with an added lol for the double plagiarism

Why is it bullshit though?