Literary Clusterfucks 2013

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

meanwhile she's dead. he gets the last word.

I feel sort of the opposite. When you kill yourself, you get the last word. People can say stuff, sure. But not to you.

i feel like that ascribes a degree of intentionality to suicide victims that isn't usually there. sure some of them make that decision while in their right minds, but generally they're in the grip of intense mental anguish, augmented by an undertow of monstrous social forces.

say she'd died in a car accident or from illness, and her widower uncovered all the awful things she'd been doing, iyo would he still be justified in telling the world?

but to undercut my own point she probably knew she was married to a writer and figured he'd write about her. perhaps she was on some 5d parcheesi and we are all just dancing on her strings, and she laughs at us mockingly from beyond the grave!

I think it's fair game for writers to write about traumatic experiences they have personally had, up to and including a loved one's suicide. How well they execute that I guess is up to the readers, but I don't think there's anything wrong with him writing the book. It's his life too.

yeah while i personally cannot imagine writing this (or really any memoir) . . . he's a writer, she was a writer, what else would one expect

in any case i doubt that 'oh shit is he gonna write about this' was a particular concern while catching the bus

just to be clear, tipsy 100% otm! guy's got every right to write his life. maybe it could even help people. maybe it has some literary value that isn't immediately obvious from the excerpts. and even if neither of those things are the case he still has the right to publish whatever he wants. i just think, as someone who doesn't know him and who probably won't read his book and whose connection to his whole deal amounts to idly browsing the internet for a while, that this guy probably kinda sucks. AND BY GOD I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL.

I was sympathetic to the urge to venting (even in such a public way) about finding out your wife cheated on you (lots) immediately after dying and I'm not very precious about the rights of the dead (to privacy, etc..)... but then I read the guy's tweets.

bro, you've got be a bigger name to pull off the conservative media darling pivot

Amazing to see that “believe survivors” has hard limits even on the left no? 🫡

— blake butler (@blakebutler) December 7, 2023

oh ewwwwwwwww

it's a little funnier now that he wrote a whole book about getting cucked

I think it's fair game for writers to write about traumatic experiences they have personally had, up to and including a loved one's suicide. How well they execute that I guess is up to the readers, but I don't think there's anything wrong with him writing the book. It's his life too.

otm. not sure i really get the criticism tbh--once someone dies, you can't write about your own life with them? i can't see how he could have written the book without discussing the affair.

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

molly was a great writer and poet. i read her memoir and she seemed like a pretty good person. unusually talented, unusually fucked up upbringing, but otherwise like, normal or at least far from "extremely sucked." i guess you're saying that because she had an affair? is that really such a big deal? idk

it's a little like revenge porn: the book

yikes

Oh yeah no I'm not sitting in judgement, just Cecily Stronging it: "yeah, and? Was she sleeping with his clone?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf26Q-E2YNY-

all that i am saying is

He found troves of photos of her posing in lingerie and with sex toys, along with videos of her pleasuring herself and saying the names of other men in a baby voice.

the new york post and similar rags are lapping this up like vomit, as is to be expected, and even if butler didn't *intend* to publicly take a dump all over her memory, he seems to have done so regardless, and anyone could have seen that coming, and it's an ugly thing to do

again i'm not saying he shouldn't be allowed to write whatever he wants! just that his choice of publicizing these sorts of details makes me think that he is an ass hat, and probably doing so for money and revenge.

in the law & order episode the twist will be that he killed her after discovering the affairs, and the double twist will be that actually one of her lovers killed her and set him up, and the climactic reveal will be that their chickens orchestrated the whole thing

none of this seems to have much to do with literature tbh

How would you know?

i suppose if i were to write some sort of punishingly honest and direct memoir of my days getting riled up on an increasingly irrelevant webforum i'd have more chance of getting published. wait who am i even zinging any more

Yourself. That's a terrible idea for a book but who knows, knock yourself out.

one cold but fresh december morning, i encountered a familiar username literally retreading the implication of a light-hearted post of mine in a sort of crushingly serious tone, like he had come up with it himself. i briefly worried for his sanity, then realised my coffee mug was empty

settle down, you're both pretty

but how is the butler mess not literary, there's an author & poet & book, what element of literariness is lacking here

no ofc it is, sorry, i am just increasingly tired of the omnipresence of what amounts to diaristic confessionals equating to literature. the whole epistolary novel thing reheated, i'm sure

my inclination is to side against this blake chap purely because he's written a fuckin memoir without having done anything remotely to justify it

'been cheated on by a Kinda Famous who then killed herself' is not justification, it's if anything disgustingly lurid and cheap

no amount of pretending to honour her memory can overcome the fact he's doing this for commercial gain. if you truly wanted to honour her memory there are a thousand ways to tell your story of her without seeking monetary profit for it

*from it. bad writing imago!

maggie nelson's 'the red parts' (a modern memoir that is entirely good, relevant and thought-provoking) this is not. i'm sure there are other exceptions but there's so much of this solipsistic licentious emotional pornography knocking about rn disguised as rel8ability

To be clear, after defending the guy’s right to write the book, I have zero interest in reading it. Might look up some of her poetry tho.

*without having done or experienced i shd have said up there soz

maybe the 5d chess theory is accurate, the fallout from this can only mean her poetry gets more attention

i'm sure there are other exceptions but there's so much of this solipsistic licentious emotional pornography knocking about rn disguised as rel8ability

― imago, Friday, 8 December 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Most of these are written by women. Talking about things that are relating to other women's experience.

I don't think this should be dismissed as emotional porno.

It is hard to write about what it feels like to live today. This is why autofiction is the genre of the moment. Sorry imago