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.

it’s true, glad i find reading and writing it interesting, but also glad i still read plenty of other writing.

If you sort r/hobbydrama by top, and scroll down, it's only a matter of seconds before you stumble on some juicy, juicy drama involving Young Adult authors. Presumably because there's a tendency for people just slightly above the lower rung of the ladder to be massive shits, because they haven't got the hang of imperial aloofness yet and they're terrified that someone will mistake them for someone just slightly further down the ladder.

For example this, which is about the rags-to-riches tale of a YA author of humble beginnings whose parents are millionaires and whose sister is the CEO of a large media company. Or the case of a YA author who turned up at the house of someone who gave her a bad review, and then wrote about doing so in The Guardian, which I won't link to because it's already fairly famous. And the teddy bears in Venice chap.

I could post more but I'm not wasting my life reading paragraph after paragraph about Warrior Cats. God had greater plans for me. I also learned from that subreddit that the BBC made a series based on Terry Pratchett's City Watch books, except that it was awful and only ever broadcast once on the BBC, trickling out six months after its international release. Which is why I had never heard of it until that point.

adult YA fans tend not to care about aesthetic dimensions of texts. they aren't looking for complexity, insight, even humor, and they find people who look for these things "pretentious." so their standards are just about judging the morality of the book based on this very rigid ideology of representation.

their perspective is sort of anti-literary. nothing is ever more than it seems. you *are* your background and you *only* have a right to *your* stories.

I stopped writing fanfiction in part because it's nothing more than a farm team for the YA Industrial Complex these days. (It didn't help that I wrote for fandoms so microscopic that no one was reading me, anyway.)

Is there room for my A Real Pain fanfic about Kieran Culkin and Jennifer Grey’s lost night in a Polish hotel?

https://bsky.app/profile/kjcharleswriter.com/post/3lkasr5vj4c2v

This whole saga is kind of weird, and I'm rather confused how a publisher that crowdfunded its expenses has managed to go into administration.

To be noted, Unbound weren't paying royalties by the end, and that is a big old nope.

sounds like they were overly optimistic about overhead costs and the per-book overhead didn't cover the publisher-level overhead so they fell behind? hopefully this straightens them out and they stable

Interesting para from a recent bookseller article

Unbound also raised £1,293,050 through Crowdcube in June 2019.

According to the Crowdcube page, this funding was intended to go towards a machine-learning tool developed by the publisher which was designed to assess someone’s X (formerly Twitter) network, and estimate how effectively they could crowdfund a book.
The Bookseller understands that the machine-learning tool was not successfully launched.

The £1,293,050 investment had also been intended to go towards bolstering the publisher’s UK operation and enabling Unbound to expand into North America.

The spokesperson said: "Regarding the 2019 investments, this is very common for an entrepreneurial business like Unbound. Part of our remit has always been to try out new ways of connecting writers and readers. We’ve successfully raised a lot of investment over the past 14 years to do that. Some of the initiatives have worked well and some haven’t."

Interesting para from a recent bookseller article

Unbound also raised £1,293,050 through Crowdcube in June 2019.

According to the Crowdcube page, this funding was intended to go towards a machine-learning tool developed by the publisher which was designed to assess someone’s X (formerly Twitter) network, and estimate how effectively they could crowdfund a book.
The Bookseller understands that the machine-learning tool was not successfully launched.

The £1,293,050 investment had also been intended to go towards bolstering the publisher’s UK operation and enabling Unbound to expand into North America.

The spokesperson said: "Regarding the 2019 investments, this is very common for an entrepreneurial business like Unbound. Part of our remit has always been to try out new ways of connecting writers and readers. We’ve successfully raised a lot of investment over the past 14 years to do that. Some of the initiatives have worked well and some haven’t."

Interesting para from a recent bookseller article

Unbound also raised £1,293,050 through Crowdcube in June 2019.

According to the Crowdcube page, this funding was intended to go towards a machine-learning tool developed by the publisher which was designed to assess someone’s X (formerly Twitter) network, and estimate how effectively they could crowdfund a book.
The Bookseller understands that the machine-learning tool was not successfully launched.

The £1,293,050 investment had also been intended to go towards bolstering the publisher’s UK operation and enabling Unbound to expand into North America.

The spokesperson said: "Regarding the 2019 investments, this is very common for an entrepreneurial business like Unbound. Part of our remit has always been to try out new ways of connecting writers and readers. We’ve successfully raised a lot of investment over the past 14 years to do that. Some of the initiatives have worked well and some haven’t."

Oops

fs (not at the double post, at its content)

that's astonishing

It tracks for me -- I worked at a charity in the mid 2010s that spent a fuckton on Orwellian but essentially un-useful social media monitoring tools.

Some of that was down to there being a lot of money back then to slosh around on digital nonsense. But there was also a lot of boomers who thought computers were magic and could do anything if you "let the tech guys do their thing", which is a proto-AI attitude I guess

this is really disappointing -- both the podcast and the venture have done good work

Given there is little to no funding for writing via say, the arts council, alternative avenues are open to abuse.

Lol @ investing in a machine learning model to predict success rather than putting this to nurture actual writing.

A million pounds to check a writer's follower count.

"But there was also a lot of boomers who thought computers were magic and could do anything if you "let the tech guys do their thing", which is a proto-AI attitude I guess"

The sad thing is that Ilxor has several members who could have told these people that everybody on the internet lies about their numbers all of the time. This is one of the key themes of my blog, and one of the reasons why such notable people as Warren Buffett, Todd Howard, top bassist Pino Palladino and probably William Gibson regularly read my writing, true fact x3.

The internet has an awful lot of people who either have masses of fake followers, or real followers who are never going to hand over any cash. My hunch is that a Twitter-follower-evaluation-tool would end up evaluating the subject's ability to fake it, which would fall down if at any point the subject was asked to provide genuine concrete evidence of their reach.

Warren Buffett, Todd Howard, top bassist Pino Palladino and probably William Gibson

Great band. Can't wait to see these guys live.

Hopefully after this dodge they can leave the debts to the creditors while paying the people who need paying, I do believe that’s the plan tho it’s fucked ppl have gone this long without being paid. Nobody in their right mind will trust the new venture tho

I don’t think I quite appreciated how much mushy disruptor brain shit was involved here, should have been obvious from their model but it’s not the impression you get from the public face — inc the podcast which I’ve taken heat from stans for criticising despite being an avowed supporter (it’s called critical support comrades look it up)

The big incompetence I know about is that they failed to print enough copies of the cain’s jawbone sequel, a slam-dunk gift item, before Xmas

I retract my previous comment speculating that they just underestimated overhead costs. They were inventing new ways to spend money, I guess

Well well

https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-real-salt-path-how-the-couple-behind-a-bestseller-left-a-trail-of-debt-and-deceit

Have been seeing the trailer for the very shitty-looking film for what feels like a year, didn’t realise the life affirming “true” story is that the husband miraculously cured his terminal illness by going on a hike (and she wrote two sequels where the same thing happens). What is it with British con artists and walking

it's such a cliché that the second Alan Partridge book ("Nomad") is a parody of it.

Lol at "the observer" when there should be a picture of a Tortoise.

Chummy Guardian article from 2018. Every photo I see of them they have this knowing smile.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/dec/06/home-is-a-state-of-mind-you-dont-need-walls

This Rolling Stone piece about some assholes who've decided they're L.A.'s new "anti-woke" literary brotherhood is so stupid, it should have been published in The Atlantic. These arrested adolescents are self-publishing their masturbatory bullshit, so no one is obligated to care at all, but they somehow found the one credulous dolt who could get them into Rolling Stone.

Is it not just another filler for the RS Young Fuckups feature slot?

A new piece on the Unbound mess

https://thecritic.co.uk/balancing-the-books/

Luckily Rolling Stone is a magazine for fucking dinosaurs so it’s not like it means much xpost

They've actually been doing a lot of really good work on a wide range of subjects over the last few years. This is an embarrassing stumble.

Quite sure that Peter Theil is behind it like he subsidized the Dimes Square crew and the ill fated anti-woke film festival https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/peter-thiel-anti-woke-film-festival-trevor-bazile

A new piece on the Unbound mess

https://thecritic.co.uk/balancing-the-books/

― Ned Raggett, Sunday, 6 July 2025 bookmarkflaglink

Part of the reason people feel so betrayed is that Mitchinson is a left-wing media establishment figure to his core, a Hay festival regular with a column in the Byline Times.

Ok.

This was particularly appealing to authors with a large following like Cox or television personalities like Jonathan Meades. A few thousand £25 hardbacks sold directly to readers meant a tidy amount of money. The unique way books were funded allowed Cox to write sui generis works that combined nature writing, memoir, fiction … and the oeuvre of Twitter personality Russell Jones (aka Russ in Cheshire) to find its audience.

The duality of man.

I'm slowly working my way through Empty Wigs btw. It's pretty startling stuff, but I had a fair idea what I was getting into. He's a brilliant writer and a massive edgelord lol

They've actually been doing a lot of really good work on a wide range of subjects over the last few years. This is an embarrassing stumble.

My point isn’t about whether the articles are any good, but whether they have any sort of readership. No one reads Rolling Stone except people who remember its glory days— aka, people who are middle aged or older.

Look out for the next instalment of the salt path chronicles to be put out by the new John Mitchinson venture ReBound

A new piece on the Unbound mess

https://thecritic.co.uk/balancing-the-books🕸/

― Ned Raggett, Sunday, 6 July 2025 bookmarkflaglink

_Part of the reason people feel so betrayed is that Mitchinson is a left-wing media establishment figure to his core, a Hay festival regular with a column in the Byline Times._

Ok.

I mean the Critic is a fascist rag what the fuck do you expect

The writer is extremely, extremely posh (and a total Tory).

He was probably one of the most left wing members of the bullingdon club

(JM that is)

British lit clusterfucks always about class

I mean the Critic is a fascist rag what the fuck do you expect

― from…Peru? (gyac), Monday, 7 July 2025 bookmarkflaglink

It was a v funny list of items, is all.

The writer is extremely, extremely posh (and a total Tory).

I mean the Critic is a fascist rag what the fuck do you expect

British l̶i̶t̶ clusterfucks always about class

― Iza Duffus Hardy (President Keyes), Monday, 7 July 2025 16:57 (twenty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink ftfy

I have never read the Critic before, and probably won’t again, but I know the writer from my years as a literary editor, when he was a publisher’s press officer (one of his charges was Alexei Sayle).

Brandon Taylor's 'Real Life' and 'The Late Americans' are both great! His writing is nuanced and precise, it is about the necessity of being cautious, keeping secrets from the past, shedding one's skin, documenting micro-aggressions, and trying to find some kind of pleasure in an uneasy present

― Dan S, Saturday, September 7, 2024 8:45 PM (

I just started Late Americans.

I just discovered this thread, had no idea what it was about.