Literary Clusterfucks 2013

Decided there was more "healing to be had" by yknow not being dead. She's amazing.

“i told you i would never log off!”

Donors who are angry are "cruelly wishing death on me"

I'm mostly wishing death on myself after having read all that, tbh.

This is my favorite performance by a lit clusterfuck actor. Truly hard to take the side of the victims.

i love when these deluded weirdos fo that “faux press conference” thing with themselves, asking & answering their own questions, it just makes her seem so much more unhinged

I do love the defense of, "Oh, I'm only worth money to you dead, you ghouls?" Good stuff.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Saturday, January 7, 2023 7:57 PM bookmarkflaglink

really is expert-level trolling.

has there already been an “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here!”- type show with people like this lady, bad art friend, the pathological liar in that NYT article, etc…? feel like I could binge that for sure

main character island

Would watch

Hosted by JT Leroy

Hosted by JT Leroy

― Motion to adjourn to enjoy a footling (President Keyes), Monday, January 9, 2023 2:01 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

kudos

Susan Meachen, a romance writer accused of faking her own death, said her online community had become a danger to her mental health. “It wasn’t good for me, no it wasn’t,” she told @EllenBarryNYT. “I wish I had never met the book industry whatsoever.” https://t.co/xebE0BwwJc

— New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) January 18, 2023

still can't believe her TikTok was up the entire time she was 'dead'

the whole thing just brings up more questions about this online self-published romance writer community that I do not believe I need answered

feel like this person doesn't really deserve an NYT article

however, am I reading it? yes, yes I am

At their best, the groups are a fountain of support for “indie” authors, who self-publish their work and help each other with covers and marketing, which is known as “pimping.”

Thank u for teaching us this hip new lingo, NYT

but, is it easy?

Started looking at that article but couldn’t be bothered to finish it.

“Literary” giving this all too much credit at this point

Anyone know any updates on bad art friend? Inquiring minds want to know and are too lazy to google I guess.

I totally forgot about that and yet it wasn't even that long ago!

this is why we need main character island

I'm not here to make art friends.

Not a clusterfuck so much as outright racism and transphobia which is thankfully coming back to destroy dude's career

Last week, Tom Monteleone had a FB post that attracted a lot of attention, and was around 800 comments when deleted. Yesterday, Tom joined Hatchet Mouth and Protestant Folk Peasant on a podcast episode called Facebook has AIDS w/Tom Monteleone. 1/24

— Dark Dispatch (@dark_dispatch) January 30, 2023

I’m afraid I have to drop a “who?” on this one

He was a horror editor

I think I can spot where his brain went wrong

Monteleone is an admirer of Ayn Rand, and has described her book Atlas Shrugged as a "personal barometer".[3]

I just read that Twitter thing you posted and my brain froze halfway through when it became word salad
Yeet Skreet and Bones Jonesin on a podcast episode called Beezy Got Threadz w/Brom Tobelerone

best I can gather this is a guy who has edited horror anthologies? the twenty thousand people who are looking for his ability to create a story collection and also have bought into his shit can go create their own community who care

People over the age of thirty who admire Atlas Shrugged are guaranteed to be among the worst people you'll ever meet.

admittedly learned of this guy from ILX alum Nate Carson's FB thread

Me too

Better off using it as a personal thermometer #hereallweek

sorry, I was being a little caustic last night and anyone who is wired into that community obviously does care!

Netflix editing Roald Dahl do they can pump out bad movies without getting yelled at: C/D

No winners

Well the Big Fucking Giant was always an odd name for a kids book

Keep Roald Dahl books as they are but have a little note at the beginning explaining that he was a cunt.

— Richard Blandford (@rblandford) February 18, 2023

not Roald Dahl but thought this was interesting re: literary scams. PANK was the first place to reject me, back in 2009 when it was a legit online magazine. wild story

https://litmagnews.substack.com/p/showcase-magazine-ephemera-c-and

wow that's ... depressing ... but more interesting than the dahl thing

I really loved Merve Emre on Dahl in the New York Review a few months back:

Reading Dahl’s books to my children in swift succession over the past few months has reminded me of Samuel Johnson’s complaint about the comedy of Gulliver’s Travels: “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.” Easy it may be, but the results are very wide-ranging indeed. Dahl’s fictions of scale are the stupidest and crudest I have encountered. They have none of the unearthly enchantments of Grimms’ Fairy Tales or Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle; none of the madcap philosophical sophistication of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth or Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, whose title character is forever stretching out or shutting up like a telescope; none of the intricate, if somewhat tiresome, world building of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books or Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree; none of the genuine ethical and political complexity of the three greatest children’s authors, Edith Nesbit, C.S. Lewis, and Edward Eager. With few exceptions, size, in Dahl’s imagination, is nothing more than a proxy for force. Largeness indicates the power to manipulate and coerce; smallness indicates vulnerability to punishment and annihilation that must be overcome through trickery. Even his happiest endings left my children listless and a little depressed, as if they intuited that what had seemed at first to be the pursuit of justice in an unjust world was nothing more intriguing than a game of bloody knuckles, a theater of schoolboy cruelty.

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with cruelty in art; in children’s literature, it has its place, particularly when it responds to the physical and emotional cruelties inflicted upon children, among the most powerless and casually brutalized creatures in the world. Yet the sadism of Dahl’s plots and the grotesquerie of his characters contain not a single germ of critical self-reflection, not one gesture of liberation, not a drop of pity or compassion, no matter how begrudgingly they may be tendered, in life as in fiction. The cruelty of his villains begets a reciprocal cruelty in their victims. He makes his children small then big; he makes his adults big then small; and he traps his shape-shifters and his young readers in a fun house of dirty, depthless mirrors. This is how one enters into “the marvellous world of Roald Dahl,” as the BBC called it in a 2016 documentary celebrating his enduring contributions to British culture.

Can someone give me a one sentence summary of YA Twitter. Is it as toxic as I've heard? Read quite a few articles mentioning it last night

Meet Brandon Sanderson. Brandon published two books in the time it took our writer to finish this story. Brandon's fantasy writing made him $55 million last year. Brandon doesn't think he's a very good writer.

📷: Michael Friberg | https://t.co/GczMykmqeC pic.twitter.com/CZebKi1r9N

— WIRED (@WIRED) March 23, 2023

I don't know if this counts as a literary clusterfuck but a lot of people are angry about this profile of fantasy author Brandon Sanderson. The profile is not polite about Sanderson or his fans or his community and I understand why people would be offended, but I thought it was an interesting article, more interesting than a more diplomatic equivalent would have been.

Sanderson has responded on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/brandonsanderson/comments/1200dzk/on_the_wired_article/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

But he also feels sincere in his attempt to try to understand. While he legitimately seems to dislike me and my writing, I don't think that's why he came to see me. He wasn't looking for a hit piece--he was looking to explore the world through his writing. In that, he and I are the same, and I respect him for it, even if much of his tone seems quite dismissive of many people and ideas I care deeply about.

I think this is correct and people calling it a hit-piece are wrong. I generally dislike articles where you can tell the writer is consciously trying to cut the subject down to size, but this felt more like a genuine attempt to engage with something the writer has a reflexive distain towards - it can't be fitted into a hit-piece/puff-piece dichotomy which is maybe why people are so wound up about it?

everybody calls anything that isn't PR fluff a hitpiece now, it's part of the cycle

vocabulary deteriorates at such a faster rate in the social media era

this piece could have been three words, "saunderson is mormon." the end.

looking at the article I'm mostly taken aback at how he took in 44 million on Kickstarter to publish 4 secret books he'd written. Does it really cost 11 million dollars to publish a book?

the article is definitely more unfluffy than the average non-PR fluff piece, I think, but I also believe that people are misreading it.

I liked this bit which, read in the context of an earlier account of how he writes non-stop for hours a day and doesn't do much revision or rewriting, makes Sanderson sound like a human chatGPT

Turns out Sanderson doesn’t seem to feel pain of any kind, even emotional. On roller coasters, he’s dead-faced, while his wife is shrieking. “It’s sick and wrong,” she says, smiling. She likes to say she married an android. For his part, Sanderson actually, at this moment, looks pained. He might not feel, he says, but his characters do. They agonize and cry and rejoice and love. That’s one of the reasons he writes, he says: to feel human.