Literary Clusterfucks 2013

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?

I guess I just think lolling at the double plagiarism and comprehending the possibility of the systemic dysfunction that might put pressure on people to plagiarise are not mutually exclusive

any sort of idpol angle is astonishing nonsense, die on this hill, there are so many ways to not plagiarise, including above all CITING SOURCES

plagiarism is not a singular sin unaffected by the world around you - nothing is

I think it is in poor taste, at the very least, to compare someone who got a publishing deal, got caught plagiarising their work and then got the chance to write an article about that to the conditions that ppl facing the US carceral system face.

Obv ppl from marginalized backgrounds face greater challenges in publishing as everywhere else but to hold an instance of a person who was given far more opportunities than 99% of ppl currently struggling to work in the sector up as an example of that is grotesque imo.

I always thought this was a fun essay on plagiarism https://archive.harpers.org/2007/02/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2007-02-0081387.pdf

but find the tweet nonsensical, unnecessary apologetics

well no, most writers are usually under enormous pressure, but there's no excuse for plagiarism, it is a failure of writing and an aesthetic sin of the first order

the fact that plagiarism was committed in an article that offered excuses for plagiarism is the lol, and it almost pushes the whole affair into the status of successful artistic experiment

that was xp to CT

successful artistic experiment that J Lethem has already performed, lol

Daniel_Rf completely otm obv, got it in a nutshell

Patronizing bullshit at that. It essentially implies that marginalized writers couldn’t possibly have free will or a sense of what plagiarism is or isn’t— it is, in its essence, a parody of progressive hand-wringing that ends up making marginalized people into children. Aimless’ post hints at another element that is bullshit: the very idea that the author is some kind of outsider to the rules of plagiarism because she is marginalized. Horseshit— the author went to Iowa. She was at the top of her game, in other words, and then willfully threw away her opportunities by engaging in plagiarism…. and it’s somehow the industry’s fault? Spare me

xpost

I don't think it's grotesque. We really know nothing about Bello and her life and income and her mental health. We're basing our thoughts about her based on our need for schadenfraude (especially when we get the rare chance to direct that schadenfraude at a black woman) and our assumption that plagiarists are singular dolts who deserve special punishment. I mean, she is clearly a dolt, and what happened to her is funny and probably deserved, but it's okay for there to be more to the story too.

essentially implies that marginalized writers couldn’t possibly have free will

no but it does imply that there isn't a level playing field

yeah but...obv ppl from marginalized backgrounds face greater challenges in publishing as everywhere else but to hold an instance of a person who was given far more opportunities than 99% of ppl currently struggling to work in the sector up as an example of that is grotesque imo.

or perhaps you could say that inequalities run deeper than you might expect, to include who might superficially appear to have had "more opportunities"

again, this is not to excuse plagiarism but to be a bit more empathetic about why fuckups fuckup

*to include people

Well, speaking as a professional writer...fuck plagiarists forever, no excuse is acceptable, end of story. Fuck outta here, someone else gets your spot now.

I don't really see why plagiarism is the only inexcusable crime, unaffected by systemic inequality. And I'm a former professional writer fwiw (which is nothing).

We really know nothing about Bello and her life and income and her mental health

But we know that she got a publishing deal, and we know that after fucking that up she got a chance at writing about that for a popular publication. If you don't think that's a position of privilege I don't really know what to tell you.

Tbc I couldn't care less about getting schadenfreude from this, what I do care about is that situation getting compared to ppl in prison. It's the pomposity and dishonesty of the tweet I'm reacting to, not the original writer's infractions.

yep

I get no schadenfreude from it, ftr. I hope Bello finds what she is looking for!

But cosign with Daniel’s post— she was certainly in a position of relative privilege, and she violated rules that would get any author nixed. I know that many of us have friends who are part of marginalized groups who are brilliant writers and who would absolutely be over the moon to have the advantages that Bello was afforded. There is nothing carceral about what happened to Bello.

The real carceral thinking in publishing is related to the legibility of marginalized voices to an assumed white readership— those who do not write to satisfy the white gaze (in its many forms) are either sidelined or punished when they attempt something different.

I hope Bello finds what she is looking for!

Well, she does know how to use Google

not really a direct response to the above, but some of these issues are why I'm looking forward to Olúfemi O. Táíwò’s new one: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/olufemi-taiwo-identity-politics-elite-capture.html

not really a direct response to the above, but some of these issues are why I'm looking forward to Olúfemi O. Táíwò’s new one: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/olufemi-taiwo-identity-politics-elite-capture.html🕸

I hope Bello finds what she is looking for!

― Halfway there but for you, Wednesday, May 11, 2022 5:57 AM (three hours ago)

hahahahahahahahahah omg lol

Not exactly literary but while we're talking comical acts of plagiarism

https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2022/05/duke-university-commencement-student-speaker-2022-similarities-harvard-2014-speech

copyright is kinda bullshit and people should be able to plagiarise as much as they want

this reads as if you think the work that writers produce is functionally indistinguishable, as interchangeable as the labor required to string popcorn using a needle and thread, except you are stringing words into sentences.

I meant legally rather than aesthetically or morally! But yeah, language should be free to use. It may have professional or social consequences, but I don't like it being a matter for the courts.

the legality comes in with the concept of just compensation for work performed. if something has no recognized value or no no known owner, you can take it without fear of legal liability, but if it has both a recognizable value and a known owner, then the taking of it without just compensation transforms into theft.

this is an interesting topic and I wish I had a better handle on the theory, but it feels like the balance, legally speaking, is too heavily weighted in favour of the 'owner' of the copyrighted work, although I appreciate that academic plagiarism is a different and probably much more serious offence than fiction plagiarism

probably much more serious offence than fiction plagiarism

why? fiction has different goals and techniques, but it is not less difficult to do well. if I found someone had just blithely appropriated large verbatim chunks of my novel as their own work and sold it to a publisher, with no permission, no attribution, and no compensation. I'd be furious.

oh same, but I wouldn't want to get the courts involved. 'dragged on Twitter' honestly feels like the right punishment nowadays, if social media has given us one thing it is a mechanism for instant ridicule that occasionally proves valuable

plus that publisher would almost certainly drop them as a result

it's precisely because the publishers chose not to publish when they discovered the plagiarism that this will end with the author just being dragged on Twitter rather than ending up in the courts. Presumably, any advances paid must also be paid back. When money starts changing hands and none of it is going to the real author then the courts get interested.