Literary Clusterfucks 2013

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

no it isn't

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQs26c1klAU

I always feel like the issue of memoir/autofiction is something that only really affects writers, i.e. it is relevant to the process and I can see how writers would get frustrated at it being the dominant genre. But as a reader it's kind of a red herring - what matters is whether the book comes out poetic or funny or moving, whether the events described in it are real (or as real as one person's perspective can be) doesn't matter and I don't think there's anything inherent to autofiction that would make it more likely for works to fail or succeed.

Obviously outside of that if work is done under ethically murky circumstances that's something to discuss but that's kind of a separate issue.

Butler's memoir of insomnia - Nothing - is really good and his old VICE columns introduced me to a lot of authors/books back in the day. Very very weird seeing him on the Daily Mail, I must say.

Might be nearly as good as Paul Morley's book about his father's suicide of the same title.

"it is relevant to the process and I can see how writers would get frustrated at it being the dominant genre."

The frustrated writer that isn't writing autofiction is also being published. Maybe the bad quality ones find it harder. Which sounds good to me!

I have a lot of thoughts about this— my next book is a mix of poems and essays about medical trauma, gay sex, narrative, and political resistance— but I think that treeship’s point is well-taken. Many of the writers I encounter are working through how to be a human in a world that has been mediated by a constant stream of lies, violence, and despair. Some are more successful than others, but those that are successful write very movingly about their subjects. Part of the complaint, tho, seems to be the subjects, which I totally understand— I am not so interested in young people musing philosophically about their sexual exploits, for example.

But take this essay by Hilary Plum— it is about reading, writing, her partner’s cancer, memory, etc. It is auto-fiction or memoir… but it isn’t some salacious, gossipy piece of candy to be absorbed and forgotten.

https://brooklynrail.org/2018/09/fiction/Narrating-Forgetting

The frustrated writer that isn't writing autofiction is also being published. Maybe the bad quality ones find it harder. Which sounds good to me!

Eh, "who gets published" is always and at every moment influenced by a plethora of factors, "what's fashionable" being a major one amongst them, and I don't think you can make a "they're not getting published = they're not good enough" argument unless you believe in the free market. So I'm always sympathetic to authors who're having a harder time of it because what they do doesn't happen to be the thing that's getting buzz. In a similar vein, it must be very annoying to be in a writing class and have everyone around you opting for the exact same strategy to mediocre effect. This is just based on what I've heard from writers, including at ILB faps!

"I don't think you can make a "they're not getting published = they're not good enough" argument unless you believe in the free market."

While there could be a combination of luck and circumstance involved I'd say if you are white, middle class, live in the West or a combination I feel like the amount of opportunities to be published in the West are pretty good. Just a ton of small presses out there. There are ppl in corners of Romania whose writing got known through twitter, went for it and get published!

Imago attacking writing by women (again) because he feels he can't get a break is an ugly sight and should be called out every time.

yeah sorry not vibing with your grindset attitude here, good ppl go unpublished all the time! and of course it's not just a published/unpublished dichotomy, getting published is step one, whether what you're writing is trendy influences every other single instance of promotion/success.

Also why the fuck would we limit this discussion to white middle class ppl from the West? I don't think hostility towards autofiction cones exclusively from ppl in that category, at least not more than writing autofiction does.

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

Butler was part of that Muumuu House online world centered on Lin, and he really was an asshole to people online to an extent that, as I said, keeps me surprised at his success. Kind of like knowing a shitty guy in a fraternity who goes on to be a judge.

he ran htmlgiant, right?

xp He's the Sen. John Blutarsky of autofiction

Also why the fuck would we limit this discussion to white middle class ppl from the West? I don't think hostility towards autofiction cones exclusively from ppl in that category, at least not more than writing autofiction does.

― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 8 December 2023 bookmarkflaglink

The West is what I mostly know about, and I've only seen hostility from white middle class men towards autofiction, which is why I address that.