Literary Clusterfucks 2013

Beginning to think maybe a rolling thread might be good. Anyway:

So Alisa Valdes just publishes this memoir about this cowboy of hers and how he's a man's man and now's she's a woman like never before and etc. That link's to Hanna Rosin's review, and she's essentially going "Um...you sure?"

And then Valdes publishes this today.

That said, a lot can happen in two years, especially when you’re in a relationship with a man as complicated and volatile as the cowboy.

"what I actually wrote was a handbook for women on how to fall in love with a manipulative, controlling, abusive narcissist."

just what the world needed. like a poke in the eye.

jesus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FORoSB5JxCU

"Cowboy up."

none of these people are really writers

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, June 4, 2010 1:18 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wtf @ that whole story

polo shirt under a jacket, tho

I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.
You see by my outfit that I'm a cowboy, too.
We see by these outfits that we are all cowboys.
If you buy a cowboy outfit, you can be a cowboy, too.

damn nm I just actually read this shit how f'd up

i keep reading her name as alida valli

jesus

I don't know if we do this around here but there's some srs abuse and sexual assault triggers in Ned's second link

it's probably a good thing that she's posting a picture of her rapist on the internet, now we can watch out for him

man that's a tough read

cowboyfucks

How much you wanna bet that Mr Cowboy is gonna be a MRA talking head

In 2001, Valdes emailed a 3400-word resignation letter to her superiors at the Los Angeles Times. The letter was widely circulated on the Internet[ and reprinted in the St. Petersburg Times. In the letter she accused the newspaper of racism and discrimination, especially in its synonymous use of the word "latino" with "Spanish-speaker", a practice she equated to genocide.

buzza are you suggesting that alisa valdes is hysterical or otherwise to be dismissed

this is not the elizabeth wurtzel thread

And so, even though I was 43 years old and have Lupus

WHY DO THESE FANFICCY CRAP ROMANCE NOVELISTS ALWAYS HAVE LUPUS OR FIBRO WTF.

hm prob should have read the whole post of hers before making light. still, this shit brings the whole 50 shades bullshit into its awful, true light.

Considering Valdes wrote one of the single most amazing demolitions of a horrible person ever, reading/seeing all this...yeah.

okay that was awesome. thanks for linking that Ned

still cannot get over her story with the cowboy. so fucked up. I mean, just that it reads so familiarly, is so sad to me.

this is not the elizabeth wurtzel thread

oh, okay then

“An irresistible, post-feminist Taming of the Shrew. Don’t be scared by the premise. This is not a story about a woman relinquishing her identity. Quite the opposite. It is a riveting tale about how a brilliant, strong-minded woman liberated herself from a dreary, male-bashing, reality-denying feminism.”

– Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys; How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men

a practice she equated to genocide

ugh fuck this, there is like a 100% chance she was referring to cultural genocide, a term used for decades and not meant to imply the actual murder of a group of people

http://www.sptimes.com/News/110300/Floridian/The_language_of_genoc.shtml

buzza idgi are you trying to damage the credibility of the woman who basically just announced she wrote a book about a man who raped her

apparently so?

it's tough when you can only speak in the form of revived threads

seemed like zachylon wanted the context of the wiki quote so i provided it?

thank you for posting it

she does make a clear distinction between the two types of genocide tho she doesn't mark it with "cultural" or something similar. she does 'equate' the two but that's sort of the idea, while the wiki editor left out any of that context and framed it like "she compared this one tiny linguistic choice with the holocaust", fuck wiki

"literary"

I have a lot of thoughts about this whole thing and also some feelings but none are organized enough to share except for, Jesus, Lady--at least when I did that I didn't write a book about it.

considering that one of the major goals of feminism was to protect women from the power imbalances present in domestic relationships, it's not super surprising that valdes' paean to how feminism got romance wrong and how there's something special about a real man turned out to be about an abusive asshole. i don't mean to suggest that she deserves what happened in the least, but there is a sort of irony that the very political principles she decried in the context of this relationship turned out to be especially relevant to her needs.

xp On second thought that makes it sound like my experience was as extreme as hers: it was not. I also didn't put it in those terms of submission etc or posit that it revealed anything about how feminism has failed us. And I didn't have to jump out of a moving truck although after getting hit by an actual car frankly I'd take another one of those accidents over another of those relationships.

there is a sort of irony that the very political principles she decried in the context of this relationship turned out to be especially relevant to her needs.

It's not like that's a coincidence. She decried them because she was being told to.

really want some blogger to try to get a reaction out of christina hoff summers

I usually assume "How I did X and Changed My Life" memoirists are flighty, superficial and unrealistic people, because shit just doesn't work like that. This is a particularly egregious example.

This is a horrible horrible story.

btw, I regret my above post, having apparently made it without really reading most of the story in her blog post.

However, the blog post is now gone.

?!

this just got a little clusterfuckier

without the followup blog post this is kind of incoherent

she wrote a fluffy romance novel that seems to spend half its time scolding modern feminism, then revealed that the man she was writing about raped and abused her and (this is where things are fuzzy to me) the whole novel was a double-feint?

it's a memior!

ergh

so, replace "romance novel" with "memoir"; is the rest accurate?

Yup.

huh

Given some of the things she was also saying about her publisher I wonder if that had something to do with it.

So here's something funny from the world of music books.

Melvin Gibbs (bassist for Harriet Tubman, formerly of the Rollins Band, Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society, and many, many other situations) wrote a book called How Black Music Took Over The World. It's really good - part memoir, part cultural history, part hands-on guide to playing/making groove-based music. I loved it, and wrote about it here.

Allen Lowe, a musician and scholar whose professional frustrations (nobody buys his records, and even fewer people read his books) have turned him into kind of a crank, thought a book called How Black Music Took Over The World should be about the history of black music - that it should start with minstrel shows and progress through Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and blah blah blah. He grumbled about this on Facebook, then published a review for JazzTimes that wasn't a review at all - instead, it was a description of the book he, Lowe, would have written under that same title.

Gibbs took note, and got JazzTimes to publish a rebuttal. And Allen Lowe has been crashing out ever since. I think he's posted nine or ten times on Facebook since Gibbs's piece went live, and has even posted a photo of himself with duct tape over his mouth. For he is being silenced, you see.

Allen Lowe has a very large record collection, but he is a gaping asshole animated by two core beliefs: first, that he knows more about American music and history and race than you do, and second, that every other writer on earth is a bought-and-paid-for shill in thrall to the Jazz Industry. So seeing someone tell him, "Shut up, dude," is very welcome.

doesn’t seem very discriminative to me tbh

― k3vin k., Tuesday, 26 May 2026 18:13 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

saw someone use it on a new yorker article that had it at 100%

― k3vin k., Tuesday, 26 May 2026 18:18 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

everything evaluation i’ve seen has been very impressive. this paper did an independent evaluation of it and competitors:

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly used for written deliverables, e.g., ensuring assignments were completed by students, product reviews written by actual customers, etc. This has created demand for distinguishing human-generated text from AI-generated text at scale. A decision-making aiming to implement a detector in practice must consider two key statistics: the False Negative Rate (FNR), which corresponds to the proportion of AI-generated text that is falsely classified as human, and the False Positive Rate (FPR), which corresponds to the proportion of human-written text that is falsely classified as AI-generated.We evaluate four leading detectors—Pangram, OriginalityAI, GPTZero, and RoBERTa—on their performance in minimizing these statistics using a large corpus spanning genres, lengths, and models. Commercial detectors outperform open-source, with Pangram achieving near-zero FNR and FPR rates that remain robust across models, threshold rules, ultra-short passages, "stubs" (≤ 50 words) and ’humanizer’ tools.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5407424

xp Lowe is his own worst enemy. I appreciate his encyclopedic knowledge and he’s led me to discover some rewarding black music I never would have on my own. But yes he gets into snits.

^this

Man that Gibbs rebuttal was brutal

The majority of people using AI detection software are using whatever cheap programs they find after a cursory Google, plus I can't get past the hypocrisy of using AI tools to determine if AI was used.

I've read many a post from fatigued TAs who said they've had AI detectors turn up 50% AI-written results on papers that were written before LLMs existed.

Part of the issue i have is the lack of falsifiability. The studies above involve an experiment where the conductors know the AI status of the works used. However, unless some watermark or digital artifact is left behind in the document definitively proving it was generated by an LLM,the tools are basing the results on style-based assumptions and not actual evidence.

As such, unless you kept meticulous records of your writing process from start to finish, how can you disprove it? And even if you have THAT, how do you prove you didn't use an LLM to write it and then transfer it to your word processing software.

I've heard stories of a Ph.d candidate who had to redo his dissertation 5 times because the AI detection tool kept popping "likely AI" results even though he swore he keyed every character manually.

LLMs are a big problem but I feel like we've started nuking innocent people in efforts to fight it. Like there's the presumption of guilt in academia where students have to prove their innocence rather than vice versa

And then there's this

AI-Detectors Biased Against Non-Native English Writers | Stanford HAI https://share.google/ZxZarB6POr30yohrw

plus I can't get past the hypocrisy of using AI tools to determine if AI was used.

takes one to know one

I'm not a duck but I'm fairly sure I could identify one

Actually I might be a duck

RETVRN (TO ORAL TRADITIONS)

xp try this game someone made where you distinguish real vs ai texts and post your score https://fakewriters.onrender.com/

i got 5/10

5/10 here, too.

I got 7/10. Not quite Voight-Kampff but I'll take it. I couldn't identify AI Edith Wharton, AI Agatha Christie, or AI Mary Shelley

Interesting statistics on those results. Most folks can tell the difference between real and fake Tolstoy, but Arthur Conan Doyle fools 3 out of 4.

9/10. TBH, the only one of those authors I've read semi-recently was Melville a couple of years ago, it seems like (this) fiction AI has a noticeable style that shows through. No matter who it's trying to imitate there's a kind of clipped cadence like it was trained on a bunch of bad Hemingway knockoffs.

also is the AI trying to mimic Tolstoy via Constance Garnett or Pevear/Volkhonsky or etc.

Is this the first Natalie Portman related literary clusterfuck since Jonathan Safran Foer left his wife? Or does the Moby book count?

When Natalie Portman interviewed Rachel Cusk for her book club, she hailed the author as “one of my favourite writers”. The actress, 45, may now wish she had admired her from afar.
For Cusk’s latest book, Life of M, appears to be drawn on her relationship with Portman, with its portrait of the actress and her celebrity life proving less than flattering.

Although Cusk does not name the actress, referring to her only as “M”, the parallels are marked. She writes that “M” was cast in a ballet film, while Portman won an Oscar in 2011 for Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

“M” is the model for a big brand and her “image looked out everywhere”, much as Portman is the face of Miss Dior perfume. “M” is shown to be detached from reality, but trying to seem normal.

The book, published next month, is about a film star who agrees to let her author friend write her biography. It culminates in a showdown between “M” and her unnamed writer friend in which the actress says that she finds her portrayal “hurtful” and complains that she has been made “identifiable while filling the book with things she herself didn’t recognise”. The actress eventually concedes that the writer can “do what you want”, provided she does not use her name.

Reports have claimed that Portman is “outraged” by what she sees as Cusk’s betrayal of their friendship. However, sources close to the actress dispute this, and have sought to distance her from the furore surrounding the novel.

They said the pair were never friends and met only a handful of times, including for the book club interview. They also stressed that Life of M is neither a biography of Portman nor even a portrait of “M”: it is about how people project themselves on to celebrity.

While some critics have read the novel as a scathing disection of celebrity culture, Portman — who is understood to remain an admirer of Cusk’s writing — is said to believe that the author is instead projecting herself into a fictionalised version of an actor’s world.

“It’s very identifiably a portrait of Natalie Portman that doesn’t seem to recognise her as fully human, suggesting she’s been subsumed by her own fame,” one literary critic who knows Cusk said. “But she seems one of the last actresses you’d say that about, because she is highly intelligent and present. I think it dehumanises her. Her not naming Portman is her way of pretending this is in the dominion of fiction, rather than her being a real person that you have responsibilities to.”

They added: “This is what Rachel Cusk does — she torches people and moves on. Her subject has always been the insufficiency of the world — and particularly the people in it — to Rachel Cusk. She writes wonderful prose, her sentences are marvellous, but her fiction is deeply unkind to other people — that is the connecting thread of her work.”

Others believe Portman was naive to engage with Cusk. The book opens with the suggestion that “M” agreed to be written about.

In an article for UnHerd, the writer and editor Valerie Stivers argued: “No one in her right mind who understood Rachel Cusk’s work would allow her to write about her — at least, no one with a sense of self-preservation and a public image to protect.”

A publishing executive who knows Cusk said: “She’s obviously going to do it to you — she’s burnt every bridge. But she’s also a magpie of a writer, she would have taken things from lots of people — her characters aren’t one person.”

Cusk is regarded as a master of autofiction, the literary genre that blurs biography and invention. This is not the first time that the closeness of her books to real life has caused controversy.

In 2009 she wrote The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, her account of three months travelling in the country. Seemingly, Cusk did not sufficiently disguise the people she wrote about and was threatened with a lawsuit for breach of privacy. The first print run of the book was pulped.

Then she wrote Aftermath, a stark and controversial book about the breakdown of her marriage to the photographer Adrian Clarke. She later admitted that even her “dearest friend” told her “the thing you should never have done was write that book”.

In 2017, Damian Barr, who wrote the memoir Maggie & Me, complained that Cusk had based the character Julian in her novel Transit on him. He later joked that Cusk’s books were useful “if you had a wobbly table and need to prop up the leg, for example.”

In publishing, Cusk is regarded as a “difficult” figure, who has fallen out with a succession of editors. When she interviewed her for The Observer in 2009, Lynn Barber likened her to a “highly strung racehorse”.

One year, she was longlisted for an important literary award but did not make the shortlist, with one judge privately admitting that some of her fellow judges had refused to read the novel, because they felt Cusk was too cruel.

Few, however, doubt her talent. A publishing boss who has worked with Cusk said: “She thinks exclusively about art, she’s a bit of a Patricia Highsmith — uncompromising, but she’s the real deal.”

love cusk but none of the above sounds surprising or inaccurate based on what i know.

The return of the glitz novel? Those were all roman a clefs, as well.

Based on famous people, I should say.

Cusk has always seemed like a hack and a terrible person to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i liked the Triology just fine but remember little about it. this just sounds super boring: They also stressed that Life of M is neither a biography of Portman nor even a portrait of “M”: it is about how people project themselves on to celebrity.

Trilogy even

pretty sure that was Portman's person who described it that way

Like a smart way to say: You're so obsessed with me.

it still sounds boring whomever wrote it. i read an excerpt online and it didn't seem too bad! this is fucking hilarious tho

Wherever M goes people recognise her. Everyone knows who she is, except me. When I met her I had no idea who she was.

NOT ME

I like her novels the best. Like the ones before she started ranting on about hating fiction etc. Arlington Park is so fire.

xpost I don't even own a Star Wars.

I don't even own a Portman

Goddammit deleting acct now

they're both good

Obama’s 2026 summer reading list is confounding as always pic.twitter.com/xFP3AtfcXK

— griffin🎃 (@ohiojesustwink) July 29, 2026

lmfao

This one is pretty niche, but if the Charity & Sylvia controversy crossed your radar, this is a very (VERY) thorough rebuttal of the claims against Tillie Walden: https://buttondown.com/thene/archive/charity-and-sylvia-the-extraordinary-claims-of/

isn’t Tillie Walden that “AI actress”?

I was aware of this matter, and that rebuttal is pretty convincing to me

I'm dubious of the snarky tone, faux-thoroughness and pointless length of this rebuttal. Clearly Cleves overreached/fibbed when she said Walden didn't give her enough credit, but it also seems that Walden's book wouldn't exist without Cleves. Not to be "both sides" about it, but, er...

Maybe, but even if that is true so what? That’s not what adaptation means. It’s weird that Cleves is presenting herself as the sole author of real people’s lives

I should mention that I haven’t read either of these books

Might not blow up into a viral conversation, since the last part of it is hidden behind a paywall, but Garth Greenwell's essay against the writing workshop format is getting passed around a bit.

Who ever thought it was a good idea? Ten or twelve students sitting around a table, the professor at its head, pronouncing on fifteen or twenty newly drafted pages—likely, at the beginning of the semester at least, the only writing anybody has seen from the student under review; while said student sits, head down and silent, supposedly listening and taking notes but actually, much of the time, too indignant or defeated or humiliated—or excited and flattered and exhilarated—to take anything in. Who came up with this model? Who thought this was the way to educate an artist? For decades around the middle of the century a kind of ethos of cruelty reigned. Frank Conroy, who directed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for almost twenty years, reportedly believed a workshop wasn’t a success if nobody cried; even in a softer, more student-focused age, tears sometimes flow. I saw several fellow students cry over my years in school; only once in twenty-five years of teaching workshop has a student run out of one of my own classes in tears. Once is too often.

B-b-but a couple of decades ago nabisco managed to convince us that such workshops were actually a good thing!

I think getting used to negative feedback from people who have power over you is an important thing for an aspiring artist to learn as part of a professional career. Ideally it should be communicated respectfully in a classroom setting. However, IRL it often won’t be.

The issue of the academic setting itself is a separate issue and what little skin I had in that game has been sloughed off already.

the turning of every profession and craft into an expensive university curriculum that burdens the student with a lifetime of debt sure is a thing

I can’t speak to writer’s workshops, but I really miss academic critiques and discussions of artwork, including mine. Any academic method depends on the instructor not being a dick.

ting used to negative feedback from people who have power over you is an important thing for an aspiring artist to learn as part of a professional career.

I still find it difficult to reconcile the ideas of 'making art' and 'being an artist' with the idea of "having a professional career as an artist" where art becomes wholly-owned subsidiary of a distribution system. I know the latter career does exist, but fitting all those concepts together into a smooth and harmonious relationship defeats me.

I suppose much of this difficulty is grounded in the fact that my chosen art was poetry, which has never been anything but a near impossibility to transform into a career. It's much easier to commodify the visual arts or music or the various compartments of prose. A career in poetry is about as rare as hen's teeth.

I have ignored the Greenwell essay because its main effect will be for less funding to be directed at creative writing courses and the mostly contingent labor force that teaches them, such as myself.

The model that he proposes is one that is outdated and which very few people utilize any longer.

The goal of a workshop is to help the writer achieve in their writing what they want to achieve in their writing, and to help foster a community of writers supporting each other. Anything else is unimportant.

The paywall prevented me from reading what his proposed model is lol

I wouldn't want to be in a setting where people were being cruel, but I'm not sure artists crying about feedback on their work is a sign of sadism. It could be cathartic, who knows. Art is hard, it brings up raw emotions, seems OK to cry over it.