I think the most egregious thing I heard in this episode was the woman who MeTooβd Junot Diaz referring to herself as a βwide eyed innocent TWENTY SIX YEAR OLD.β
Maβam. 26 is a fully formed adult. Yes itβs young in the spectrum of adulthood, but FFS.
Jesse describing Diaz as greeting everyone in a group with a kiss reminds me of the original Family Feud. I guess Richard Dawson wouldn't be kissing anybody circa 2022.
It's funny that the offended editors called the content of the interview "regressive, harmful, and also just boring." I mean, how can you be bored when you're so full of outrage at what's regressive and harmful?
So much cope when people were claiming the interview was boring or "just not that interesting" or similar... Right, that's why you couldn't stop talking about it!
So funny. I could barely get through their predictable resignation letter, but that long interview was really interesting. They were so clearly just insulted, because he very clearly called them out. He said they were mediocre lemmings who are ruining the culture. Ouch.
I just hate this upper class bullshit that I always saw in elite colleges. It always bugged me to have people who were more privileged than me tell me how privileged I amοΏΌ. It sounds like it happens in publishing toοΏΌo. And it is almost always rich white ladies who are having a crisis of conscience.
I have friends, slightly more subtle, who act and speak as though all white people are elite *because they and all the other white people in their lives are*.
It's really, really good to get outside your socioeconomic bubble. Recent economic research has focused on how this is beneficial for poor people; I think it's essential for richer people, too.
You mean they are white and all their friends are white?
My high school was majority Asian, with a lot of poor families. Everyone. Literally. Went to college. My first college roommate was white and first person in her family to go to college. Got a full scholastic college. Couldn't understand the course material and kept going home to her bf. Failed first semester. Dropped put by Valentines Day.
Maybe she went back to school and graduated but I am not sure. She was not elite. Versus my other suotemates. One was black, daughter of a professor and a nurse and she is now a nursing professor. The other e as white, daughter of a truck driver and stay at home mom. This is not 1954 anymore.
I mean they are white and all their specifically white friends are well off. They don't know any poor white people, so they think white = rich and POC = poor.
This despite the fact that we've had six years of political arguments about the "white working class" and so forth. These particular friends seem to think of poor white people as racists out there in the boonies, much like people used to tell stories about witches in the woods at night. Not a lot of interest in trying to reconcile their personal experiences with the reality of the rest of society.
When talking with such friends, I often think of the research finding that the main effect of diversity trainings is to make trainees more contemptuous of poor white people.
Youβre right. Iβm the first generation of my family on either side to not have dirt floors to grow up on. Iβm glad we donβt have the kind of poverty earlier generations endured anymore but for crying out loud people read a book!
One way to look at it is. How is a recent immigrant from Albania elite? How about someone who grew up in a trailer park in Florida? More importantly. Is an upper middle class black family less elite than a poor white one?
Or even. There are black CEOs. How is that CEO less elite than a white mid-level exec?
The argument only works in that white people in general do not have to prove they belong. Black people in general do not.
OTH. I have a client who kept going on about "elites," which he explained were white people. He felt that white people were advancing more at his company than he was. And most lf the higher ups were white. And in that sense white people do tend to be more elite. It ignores all the poor white people or the growing number of wealthy black people
Yeah thereβs a lot of equating people who basically won mega millions by getting into the Ivy League with people who got the forty-second Bingo Card at their local VFW Christmas celebration.
Iβm not from a privileged background. I went to a small private liberal arts school & it was a major shock seeing prep school kids up close. I went to school with girls like the ones mentioned in the Hobart interview. Of course 20 yrs ago activism wasnβt as widespread & the ppl I know of indirectly who went into publishing were not activists back then. I imagine them taking it on as a way of preserving their status.
I have a confession to make, y'all. I was talking with colleagues at lunch today and someone mentioned knitting influencer drama. I know I should have stayed and gotten juicy info for my fellow podlings, but instead I RAN AWAY AS FAST AS I COULD.
Thereβs a WOC yarn dyer who hasnβt been delivering orders - and thereβs speculation that she prioritizes customers according to how many social media followers they have, even to the extent that she makes sure they get the best quality yarn, while sending out shit yarn to those who have less influence.
Thereβs been an ongoing forum on Ravelry to discuss this situation- until it was closed down a few days ago and the moderators banned because it was seen as βattempting to destroy a businessβ. Iβm not sure how much race has played a role in the kerfuffle as I havenβt been following it that closely, but knowing βthe knitting communityβ, itβs got to be in the mix.
I've mainly been following the drama through r/craftsnark, but yes the Demon Trolls mods have set up a subreddit at r/DeRavelTrolls to cover what's going on.
Thanks, I found the subreddit. Itβs not a dyer Iβm familiar with, but Iβm making a mental note... yarn is way tf too expensive to not get what you ordered.
No, you were concerned for your safety and that's perfectly reasonable! I would probably turn and sprint in the opposite direction if someone IRL mentioned influencer drama of any kind, but especially fast if it was something as niche as knitting.
Highly (self) regarded audio professional here. You can always reach out for advice, help via zoom or cell, or an in person bespoke experience for reasonable day rate and travel expenses. I can also be a furry if that helps.
βThe content that started all this was regressive, harmful, and also just boring writing. The misogyny and white supremacy were treated with empathetic engagement, and that sucked beyond measure.β
βSucked beyond measureβ is a hilarious criticism to level at βboring writing.β
Currently lying down in my backseat in a parking garage in Arlington after my drive from Pittsburgh area because I came on the wrong day... lol Iβm such a ditz sometimes.
So I slept in my car cause Iβm poor lol and then I walked around DC during the day until the podcast at night. It was an amazing time and great show. Wouldnβt change a thing.
GREAT EPISODE!! Iβm a writer; what theyβre talking about literally happened to me. In 2016 I submitted my YA autobiographical novel to agents in NYC. I had a ton of initial interest. Dozens of agents read and praised it. But. In the end no agent took the book. Two basically said they were looking for βother voices.β I worked on that book for a decade. I guess merit is finished. This is why I started writing on Substack. The Perez interview was fantastic. Heβs right on every point. I interned for a literary agent for nine months in 2013. I lived in NYC for 2.5 years. I remember the Junot Diaz thing. Hereβs the truth: White Wokeism is racist. Boom π€―.
Loved Perez's take on publishing culture. If not 100 accurate it is spiritually true. In my experience there are two main types of publishing lady. The first are very well behaved do-gooder white girls who were prefects in their posh schools (I'm of London publishing which is different to the US but not really) and are usually successful because they work hard, obey the rules and like to feel that they are making the world a better place. Their husbands often work in finance/law. In another time, these girls would have been church ladies. I know and love many of them, they are really nice! The trouble is they are instinctively obedient which means they will not publish anything that challenges their status quo. These girls did not create cancel culture but they facilitate it in their utter inability to think outside the box and their deep desire to please and to suck up to the boss. Most of them also think that everyone who doesn't agree with their worldview (eg hate the Tories and Brexit) are Bad. This is true even or perhaps especially if they are privately educated.
The other type are the woke true believers who are suffering from deep internal wounds caused by any number of different things. Unlike the good girls, this type come from many different backgrounds. They have found in publishing a way for their personal pain to be turned into a brand. They tend to be writers, editors. They are generally not publicists and almost never sales people. Everyone normal is terrified them but still like their posts for fear of them turning on you.
There are many people who don't fit into these categories. These people either leave, like I did, or they figure out how to deal with all this crazy and often actually end up running things. The people at the very top of publishing are smart and generally not particularly woke but they are smart enough to know they cannot openly challenge the culture. They feel bad about publishing being so white and posh so they don't speak out against the madness and they very often sponsor super woke events and programmes as a way of buying safety from cancellation. They pretend to admire the insane wokies on social media but in reality they think they are crazy. There is I think another phenomenon in publishing whereby the most vocal and cancel-crazy people are getting quietly cancelled by the industry as the people in charge realize they would be a nightmare to work with and they stop progressing. I think this will happen more and more.
YA publishing has for reasons I cannot really figure out a much higher proportion of crazy wokesters to nice good girls and hence it is the worst part of the industry at the moment.
Many individuals in the woke camp are good people really and some genuinely think they are doing the Right Thing.
"There is I think another phenomenon in publishing whereby the most vocal and cancel-crazy people are getting quietly cancelled by the industry as the people in charge realize they would be a nightmare to work with and they stop progressing. I think this will happen more and more."
I am seeing this in tech as well. My company has a history of being extremely woke but when we had layoffs earlier this year suddenly several of the loudest voices were gone - the ones always calling for us to drop allegedly problematic customers who pay us a ton of money or publicly asking in all-hands meetings why the company hasn't yet put out a statement condemning Israel, where we happen to have have an office employing hundreds of people who were also in the meeting. There were a couple business units that got laid off due to the company sunsetting their product and then all the rest of the layoffs were a smattering of random crazy woke people who were either too senior or had too many protected identities to fire under normal circumstances. I felt bad for them losing their jobs but overall found it very reassuring (and it's been nice not to have to tiptoe around these people and constantly entertain their annoying slack crusades against anything and everything). As you said about publishing, the genuinely powerful people at the top do not actually buy into this rhetoric and when they have the opportunity to put a thumb on the scale on the side of sanity they generally do so.
That's good to hear. This has been more of a vague hypothesis/ wishful thinking on my part so good that others have spotted it too. Obviously it's sad when people lose their jobs but a few toxic people can have a massively bad impact on an organisation or, in publishing's case because it's so small, an entire industry.
Most interesting episode in a spicy little minute! πΆ When the Iowa program was first mentioned, I thought of Carmen Maria Muchado (CMM) because I think thatβs where she went? Then, low and behold, her name came up later in the conversation about Junot Diaz. I couldnβt even remember the details, but his cancellation was one of the first of that sort of perplexed me... Like not to be a jerk, but I thought it was sort of a nonstory unless I was missing something.
I read CMMβs book, In the Dream House, when it came out in 2018 or 2019. While she writes beautiful prose, the plot of the story was... wanting. *Spoiler alert* Allegedly about lesbian domestic abuse, she described what seemed like a toxic relationship and a sorta shitty girlfriend. Honestly, the whole book was less dramatic than my relationships during my freshman year of college. I remember, again, getting to the end of the story and going... like yeah this wasnβt a good relationship, but abusive? Thatβs maybe a stretch based on whatβs written. (Iβll add that Iβm not an expert on abuse and Im super open to info that could change my mind.) I super-duper hate to say it, but CMMβs total lack of accountability in that book made me think she was leaving some stuff out - which is her prerogative - there was a disclaimer about how some of it is maybe fiction or whatever.
Ok Iβm ready to go to hell - this made me think even more about the info I hear in ~heterodox~ communities about how lesbians allegedly have the highest rates of domestic violence? I have wondered about this and looked into it but canβt find good numbers. But at least when it comes to domestic homocide, women donβt really kill each other very often as far as I can tell. My lesbian friends think women, especially lesbians, may have higher standards for relationship quality and a lower bar for what is considered to be abuse. So maybe Iβm just a bad lesbian because I donβt think my college gf yelling at me once or whatever the hell is abuse.
Next time you hear that lesbians have the highest DV numbers, I recommend asking for a source. The time someone tried to convince me of this, it turned out to be about the number of lesbians who claim to have experienced relationship violence in their lives, so, including any previous relationships they would have had with men. The data in that survey would also be pretty old at this point.
I too read In the Dream House, and while I appreciated its structure and prose, I found it rather limited in scope. Iβm gay and, against my better judgement, I sometimes pick up the latest gay/lesbian/trans memoir thatβs getting all the buzz. Consistently, I find an inability to place their experiences in the broader society other than to say βpeople discriminate against me!β Identitarian memoirs, while giving some insight into the authorβs experience, fail to engage me because theyβre so insular. It can feel pretty claustrophobic.
I remember that stat about lesbian relationships having more domestic abuse, but I was reading that in the 90s. Donβt know if itβs true or not.
The only interesting memoirs are the ones written by people who are already famous for other things and people who have had exceptionally strange life experiences, like Tara Westover and Jeannette Walls. The average aspiring writer has lived a sheltered, boring, upper middle class life that's defined by their time at an elite college; it's really hard to take that kind of life and make a compelling memoir out of it (I say this as someone who had a very similar life path). People who haven't had interesting lives should, frankly, stick to fiction (which they can still excel at bc, ya know, it's fiction).
When I was in college, I dated someone who ended up becoming a creative writing prof. Despite her massive psychological flaws (or because of them!), she was a great writer. I remember reading poems and essays she wrote about the year she took off when she transferred colleges, and I always thought, "Wow, her life was so interesting before she met me!"
And then I started reading poems and essays from when we were together, and I realized that talented writers just make everything sound meaningful and sometimes dramatic, beyond what it actually felt like at the time -- or maybe I should say that they're able to capture and transmit the intense feelings of ordinary people to their readers.
I had a similar reaction to her collection Her Body and Other Parties: beautiful prose but lackluster narratives & superficially developed themes. Like she has a compelling idea behind each story but didn't bother to think it through, and instead expected the strength of her prose to make up for that lack.
That Alex Perez interview was really good. Itβs fascinating to me that people resigned over it. It seems they were just personally insulted. I didnβt find it boring or offensive. I grew up reading Bukowski and London and Kerouac. I find that stuff to be pathetic, misogynistic crap now. BUT, it was reaching for transcendence, as I was then. The whole culture is boring now. Art galleries, fiction, movies, conversations. Everything is scripted and people ARE afraid to speak freely. Iβm glad there are some people who are saying: βFuck it.β Being a member of the cultural class with these βmediocritiesβ as he puts it, is not worth it.
Yes! I would rather people reach for transcendence and miss than what we have now, where everyone produces this tepid garbage and critics have to pretend it's art because it reflects their morals back at them. I saw the movie TΓ‘r two days ago and I am fucking OBSESSED with it, I think because it's the first new work of art I've encountered in at least a couple years that seems to be genuinely reaching for transcendence. It's a movie about cancel culture on some level but that's such an incredibly reductive reading of it that I almost wonder if it was intentionally written with a surface level zeitgeisty conflict to distract the boring drones of the cultural class from the more compelling - but darker and infinitely less palatable - tale it's trying to tell about human behavior and the pursuit of artistic greatness. The whole culture is so boring now that it's a real shock to encounter any new content that makes me feel anything deeper than annoyance.
Edit: I also loved the Alex Perez interview. Would love to have a conversation with him, he seems fun and interesting.
Whatβs the LitHub link? I did read the Alex Perez interview but Iβm a random electrician in VA, I had no idea it had turned into a whole thing. See yβall in Arlington tomorrow!
I was glad Jesse mentioned, toward the end of the Alex Perez segment, that he found the interview entertaining. I found it so funny that I couldn't stop reading "just one more paragraph" to my spouse, who was attempting to get a little evening work done. I've re-read the most supposedly offensive chunks several times in the course of following the controversy, and they make me laugh out loud every time.
My first teaching gig in my graduate program involved running discussion sections for a very famous professor who began the course with several lectures that offered a feminist deconstruction of a famous comedic work of literature. In the course of running the ensuing discussions, I soon realized that the students were getting the message that talking about literature kills the joke. I resolved to try to avoid giving that impression once I got to teach my own courses.
Humorless reading too often wins the day in elite literary circles. I wonder whether the offended editors didn't get the humor mixed in with Perez's frustration with the industry, or whether they pretended not to get it for the sake of staying mad. Either way, I feel sorry for them.
And I recommend his brilliant discussion of "calibrating" the stories he wrote as a serious insider's look at what kinds of literature get published under the current system.
I was thinking about whether paler skinned Latinos who could pass as white should be considered white. Like Ted Cruz is Cuban-American but is basically considered white by everyone everywhere. Like Argentinians and Cubans could pass as southern European for example. Race is weird and stupid and this shouldn't matter at all but I think in this context to understand the outrage at Alex it might very well matter. In many progressive spaces it's fine for Black, Brown and Asian people to make fun of white women, it's fine for white women to make fun of white women. But when white men do it... it is a different ballgame. I know because I did used to be in these progressive online spaces.
The latest episode of the Fifth Column (subscribers only) has Nick Gillespie and Coleman Hughes, and includes a great discussion of how weird our racial thinking and categorizations are; some really good jokes, too.
It is "Hispanic of any race" though. I mean. When we think " latino or Hispanic" we tend to think "brown," but what does that mean? Someone of European and indigineous and African ancestry.
But who the hell knows what discrimination he has faced because of his last name? Same with Ted Cruz.
Also. I mean. A person can be of 100% Chinese ancestry might have parents who grew up in Peru. It is so complicated.
Itβs like the rare unicorn black/Asian. I wonder why you never see any? Does one genetic overtake the other? Are their penises small or huge? So many questions
That...is not true. White is a "race." Hispanic and latino is "ethnicity." Someone from Spain is Hispanic but not Latino. Someone from Mexico is Latino and Hispanic. Someone from Brazil is Latino but not Hispanic. Latino just means from Mexico, and Central and South America while Hispanic refers to being connected to Spain. Which is why Brazilian people are not Hispanic.
But while the census calls Hispanic or Latino an ethnicity, that does not really make sense. I know someone who was born and raised in Venezuela but his parents are from Taiwan. So ethnically he is Chinese. He is Latino or Hispanic. I met a couple from Colombia who were of the same ethnicity as me, the difference being that their grandparents fled to South America while mine stayed in Europe. So Eastern European Jews. And Latino or Hispanic.
When we think of Latino or Hispanic, we think "brown," because most people from South and Central America, etc are of European and African and indigenous ancestry. But it is silly we call it an ethnicity because a person wifh indigenous and European ancestry from Bolivia is not ethnically like a person of African and indigenous ancestry from Brazil.
It is not a longer of what you said and it IS a contradiction. Unless I am missing something. You said "Latino, white, and Hispanic are overlapping categories. People from Spain are mostly both Hispanic and white,..."
That is what I am disagreeing with. Latino and Hispanic are overlapping categories. "White" has nothing to do with it. It is a completely separate category.
Jesse and Katie recording in separate rooms in the same apt is just *chef's kiss*.
They just need to embrace it. The incompetence is part of their charm. π
Mixer? I hardly know her!
There should be a famous painting made of the scene. Perhaps on black velvet.
I think the most egregious thing I heard in this episode was the woman who MeTooβd Junot Diaz referring to herself as a βwide eyed innocent TWENTY SIX YEAR OLD.β
Maβam. 26 is a fully formed adult. Yes itβs young in the spectrum of adulthood, but FFS.
Yeah. I was surprised at that. Like. You have been out of college for at least 4 years.
Jesse describing Diaz as greeting everyone in a group with a kiss reminds me of the original Family Feud. I guess Richard Dawson wouldn't be kissing anybody circa 2022.
No self respecting 26 year old refers to themselves as βwide eyedβ.
TouchΓ©! Except 26 now is the new 15!
*sniff* he groomed me, I was only 26 when he started making his advances.... When will such power be held to account?
It's funny that the offended editors called the content of the interview "regressive, harmful, and also just boring." I mean, how can you be bored when you're so full of outrage at what's regressive and harmful?
So much cope when people were claiming the interview was boring or "just not that interesting" or similar... Right, that's why you couldn't stop talking about it!
I thought that was funny too. It reminds me of how people talk about exes they are still obsessed with. So boring I can't stop thinking about them!
So funny. I could barely get through their predictable resignation letter, but that long interview was really interesting. They were so clearly just insulted, because he very clearly called them out. He said they were mediocre lemmings who are ruining the culture. Ouch.
Because at the end of the day, they're mean girls.
I just hate this upper class bullshit that I always saw in elite colleges. It always bugged me to have people who were more privileged than me tell me how privileged I amοΏΌ. It sounds like it happens in publishing toοΏΌo. And it is almost always rich white ladies who are having a crisis of conscience.
Exactly. Somehow class gets totally thrown out, as if working-class and wealthy whites are exactly the same. Bizarre.
I had a friend tell me that "all white people are elite." I am sure that it's just not true, but how do you even argue with someone like that?
I have friends, slightly more subtle, who act and speak as though all white people are elite *because they and all the other white people in their lives are*.
It's really, really good to get outside your socioeconomic bubble. Recent economic research has focused on how this is beneficial for poor people; I think it's essential for richer people, too.
You mean they are white and all their friends are white?
My high school was majority Asian, with a lot of poor families. Everyone. Literally. Went to college. My first college roommate was white and first person in her family to go to college. Got a full scholastic college. Couldn't understand the course material and kept going home to her bf. Failed first semester. Dropped put by Valentines Day.
Maybe she went back to school and graduated but I am not sure. She was not elite. Versus my other suotemates. One was black, daughter of a professor and a nurse and she is now a nursing professor. The other e as white, daughter of a truck driver and stay at home mom. This is not 1954 anymore.
I mean they are white and all their specifically white friends are well off. They don't know any poor white people, so they think white = rich and POC = poor.
This despite the fact that we've had six years of political arguments about the "white working class" and so forth. These particular friends seem to think of poor white people as racists out there in the boonies, much like people used to tell stories about witches in the woods at night. Not a lot of interest in trying to reconcile their personal experiences with the reality of the rest of society.
When talking with such friends, I often think of the research finding that the main effect of diversity trainings is to make trainees more contemptuous of poor white people.
Exactly! Iβm white and upper middle class. I have WAY more in common with a black person of my class than a working-class white guy.
Youβre right. Iβm the first generation of my family on either side to not have dirt floors to grow up on. Iβm glad we donβt have the kind of poverty earlier generations endured anymore but for crying out loud people read a book!
One way to look at it is. How is a recent immigrant from Albania elite? How about someone who grew up in a trailer park in Florida? More importantly. Is an upper middle class black family less elite than a poor white one?
Or even. There are black CEOs. How is that CEO less elite than a white mid-level exec?
The argument only works in that white people in general do not have to prove they belong. Black people in general do not.
OTH. I have a client who kept going on about "elites," which he explained were white people. He felt that white people were advancing more at his company than he was. And most lf the higher ups were white. And in that sense white people do tend to be more elite. It ignores all the poor white people or the growing number of wealthy black people
I think I started reading Jesse because he was that leftish guy on Twitter who kept going on about how class matters.
Yeah thereβs a lot of equating people who basically won mega millions by getting into the Ivy League with people who got the forty-second Bingo Card at their local VFW Christmas celebration.
Iβm not from a privileged background. I went to a small private liberal arts school & it was a major shock seeing prep school kids up close. I went to school with girls like the ones mentioned in the Hobart interview. Of course 20 yrs ago activism wasnβt as widespread & the ppl I know of indirectly who went into publishing were not activists back then. I imagine them taking it on as a way of preserving their status.
Totally.
I have a confession to make, y'all. I was talking with colleagues at lunch today and someone mentioned knitting influencer drama. I know I should have stayed and gotten juicy info for my fellow podlings, but instead I RAN AWAY AS FAST AS I COULD.
Oooh I might know what this is about:
Thereβs a WOC yarn dyer who hasnβt been delivering orders - and thereβs speculation that she prioritizes customers according to how many social media followers they have, even to the extent that she makes sure they get the best quality yarn, while sending out shit yarn to those who have less influence.
Thereβs been an ongoing forum on Ravelry to discuss this situation- until it was closed down a few days ago and the moderators banned because it was seen as βattempting to destroy a businessβ. Iβm not sure how much race has played a role in the kerfuffle as I havenβt been following it that closely, but knowing βthe knitting communityβ, itβs got to be in the mix.
Was it in Demon Trolls?
I've mainly been following the drama through r/craftsnark, but yes the Demon Trolls mods have set up a subreddit at r/DeRavelTrolls to cover what's going on.
Thanks, I found the subreddit. Itβs not a dyer Iβm familiar with, but Iβm making a mental note... yarn is way tf too expensive to not get what you ordered.
No, you were concerned for your safety and that's perfectly reasonable! I would probably turn and sprint in the opposite direction if someone IRL mentioned influencer drama of any kind, but especially fast if it was something as niche as knitting.
Highly (self) regarded audio professional here. You can always reach out for advice, help via zoom or cell, or an in person bespoke experience for reasonable day rate and travel expenses. I can also be a furry if that helps.
βThe content that started all this was regressive, harmful, and also just boring writing. The misogyny and white supremacy were treated with empathetic engagement, and that sucked beyond measure.β
βSucked beyond measureβ is a hilarious criticism to level at βboring writing.β
That bit cracks me up every single time I re-read or think about it. Are they fuckin' 12? Jebus Cripes!
Currently lying down in my backseat in a parking garage in Arlington after my drive from Pittsburgh area because I came on the wrong day... lol Iβm such a ditz sometimes.
Better a day early than a day late.
Dude, no way! Omg that sucks but I'm also laughing.
Lol I guess now Iβm like those Harry Potter fans that would camp out in front of the bookstore before release day. Honestly Iβm kinda stressed.
Jordan! I stayed in a very nice and affordable hotel last night if you are desperate⦠the generator. $109 on hotelstonight.com
Thanks for the recommendation Katie!
So I slept in my car cause Iβm poor lol and then I walked around DC during the day until the podcast at night. It was an amazing time and great show. Wouldnβt change a thing.
GREAT EPISODE!! Iβm a writer; what theyβre talking about literally happened to me. In 2016 I submitted my YA autobiographical novel to agents in NYC. I had a ton of initial interest. Dozens of agents read and praised it. But. In the end no agent took the book. Two basically said they were looking for βother voices.β I worked on that book for a decade. I guess merit is finished. This is why I started writing on Substack. The Perez interview was fantastic. Heβs right on every point. I interned for a literary agent for nine months in 2013. I lived in NYC for 2.5 years. I remember the Junot Diaz thing. Hereβs the truth: White Wokeism is racist. Boom π€―.
Michael Mohr
βSincere American Writingβ
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Loved Perez's take on publishing culture. If not 100 accurate it is spiritually true. In my experience there are two main types of publishing lady. The first are very well behaved do-gooder white girls who were prefects in their posh schools (I'm of London publishing which is different to the US but not really) and are usually successful because they work hard, obey the rules and like to feel that they are making the world a better place. Their husbands often work in finance/law. In another time, these girls would have been church ladies. I know and love many of them, they are really nice! The trouble is they are instinctively obedient which means they will not publish anything that challenges their status quo. These girls did not create cancel culture but they facilitate it in their utter inability to think outside the box and their deep desire to please and to suck up to the boss. Most of them also think that everyone who doesn't agree with their worldview (eg hate the Tories and Brexit) are Bad. This is true even or perhaps especially if they are privately educated.
The other type are the woke true believers who are suffering from deep internal wounds caused by any number of different things. Unlike the good girls, this type come from many different backgrounds. They have found in publishing a way for their personal pain to be turned into a brand. They tend to be writers, editors. They are generally not publicists and almost never sales people. Everyone normal is terrified them but still like their posts for fear of them turning on you.
There are many people who don't fit into these categories. These people either leave, like I did, or they figure out how to deal with all this crazy and often actually end up running things. The people at the very top of publishing are smart and generally not particularly woke but they are smart enough to know they cannot openly challenge the culture. They feel bad about publishing being so white and posh so they don't speak out against the madness and they very often sponsor super woke events and programmes as a way of buying safety from cancellation. They pretend to admire the insane wokies on social media but in reality they think they are crazy. There is I think another phenomenon in publishing whereby the most vocal and cancel-crazy people are getting quietly cancelled by the industry as the people in charge realize they would be a nightmare to work with and they stop progressing. I think this will happen more and more.
YA publishing has for reasons I cannot really figure out a much higher proportion of crazy wokesters to nice good girls and hence it is the worst part of the industry at the moment.
Many individuals in the woke camp are good people really and some genuinely think they are doing the Right Thing.
"There is I think another phenomenon in publishing whereby the most vocal and cancel-crazy people are getting quietly cancelled by the industry as the people in charge realize they would be a nightmare to work with and they stop progressing. I think this will happen more and more."
I am seeing this in tech as well. My company has a history of being extremely woke but when we had layoffs earlier this year suddenly several of the loudest voices were gone - the ones always calling for us to drop allegedly problematic customers who pay us a ton of money or publicly asking in all-hands meetings why the company hasn't yet put out a statement condemning Israel, where we happen to have have an office employing hundreds of people who were also in the meeting. There were a couple business units that got laid off due to the company sunsetting their product and then all the rest of the layoffs were a smattering of random crazy woke people who were either too senior or had too many protected identities to fire under normal circumstances. I felt bad for them losing their jobs but overall found it very reassuring (and it's been nice not to have to tiptoe around these people and constantly entertain their annoying slack crusades against anything and everything). As you said about publishing, the genuinely powerful people at the top do not actually buy into this rhetoric and when they have the opportunity to put a thumb on the scale on the side of sanity they generally do so.
That's good to hear. This has been more of a vague hypothesis/ wishful thinking on my part so good that others have spotted it too. Obviously it's sad when people lose their jobs but a few toxic people can have a massively bad impact on an organisation or, in publishing's case because it's so small, an entire industry.
Kathleen: Beautifully said.
Thanks!
To be fair. They are "looking for other voices," but are people buying those books? New books that are out are...not good. It is bullshit.
Well a lot of people often do buy those books but they buy other books too thankfully
Most interesting episode in a spicy little minute! πΆ When the Iowa program was first mentioned, I thought of Carmen Maria Muchado (CMM) because I think thatβs where she went? Then, low and behold, her name came up later in the conversation about Junot Diaz. I couldnβt even remember the details, but his cancellation was one of the first of that sort of perplexed me... Like not to be a jerk, but I thought it was sort of a nonstory unless I was missing something.
I read CMMβs book, In the Dream House, when it came out in 2018 or 2019. While she writes beautiful prose, the plot of the story was... wanting. *Spoiler alert* Allegedly about lesbian domestic abuse, she described what seemed like a toxic relationship and a sorta shitty girlfriend. Honestly, the whole book was less dramatic than my relationships during my freshman year of college. I remember, again, getting to the end of the story and going... like yeah this wasnβt a good relationship, but abusive? Thatβs maybe a stretch based on whatβs written. (Iβll add that Iβm not an expert on abuse and Im super open to info that could change my mind.) I super-duper hate to say it, but CMMβs total lack of accountability in that book made me think she was leaving some stuff out - which is her prerogative - there was a disclaimer about how some of it is maybe fiction or whatever.
Ok Iβm ready to go to hell - this made me think even more about the info I hear in ~heterodox~ communities about how lesbians allegedly have the highest rates of domestic violence? I have wondered about this and looked into it but canβt find good numbers. But at least when it comes to domestic homocide, women donβt really kill each other very often as far as I can tell. My lesbian friends think women, especially lesbians, may have higher standards for relationship quality and a lower bar for what is considered to be abuse. So maybe Iβm just a bad lesbian because I donβt think my college gf yelling at me once or whatever the hell is abuse.
Next time you hear that lesbians have the highest DV numbers, I recommend asking for a source. The time someone tried to convince me of this, it turned out to be about the number of lesbians who claim to have experienced relationship violence in their lives, so, including any previous relationships they would have had with men. The data in that survey would also be pretty old at this point.
I too read In the Dream House, and while I appreciated its structure and prose, I found it rather limited in scope. Iβm gay and, against my better judgement, I sometimes pick up the latest gay/lesbian/trans memoir thatβs getting all the buzz. Consistently, I find an inability to place their experiences in the broader society other than to say βpeople discriminate against me!β Identitarian memoirs, while giving some insight into the authorβs experience, fail to engage me because theyβre so insular. It can feel pretty claustrophobic.
I remember that stat about lesbian relationships having more domestic abuse, but I was reading that in the 90s. Donβt know if itβs true or not.
The only interesting memoirs are the ones written by people who are already famous for other things and people who have had exceptionally strange life experiences, like Tara Westover and Jeannette Walls. The average aspiring writer has lived a sheltered, boring, upper middle class life that's defined by their time at an elite college; it's really hard to take that kind of life and make a compelling memoir out of it (I say this as someone who had a very similar life path). People who haven't had interesting lives should, frankly, stick to fiction (which they can still excel at bc, ya know, it's fiction).
I see what you mean about In the Dream House.
When I was in college, I dated someone who ended up becoming a creative writing prof. Despite her massive psychological flaws (or because of them!), she was a great writer. I remember reading poems and essays she wrote about the year she took off when she transferred colleges, and I always thought, "Wow, her life was so interesting before she met me!"
And then I started reading poems and essays from when we were together, and I realized that talented writers just make everything sound meaningful and sometimes dramatic, beyond what it actually felt like at the time -- or maybe I should say that they're able to capture and transmit the intense feelings of ordinary people to their readers.
So I'd put CMM in that camp.
I had a similar reaction to her collection Her Body and Other Parties: beautiful prose but lackluster narratives & superficially developed themes. Like she has a compelling idea behind each story but didn't bother to think it through, and instead expected the strength of her prose to make up for that lack.
If Katie murders the dog murderer Iβll be an alibi.
Oh and, NYC show was awesome!
That Alex Perez interview was really good. Itβs fascinating to me that people resigned over it. It seems they were just personally insulted. I didnβt find it boring or offensive. I grew up reading Bukowski and London and Kerouac. I find that stuff to be pathetic, misogynistic crap now. BUT, it was reaching for transcendence, as I was then. The whole culture is boring now. Art galleries, fiction, movies, conversations. Everything is scripted and people ARE afraid to speak freely. Iβm glad there are some people who are saying: βFuck it.β Being a member of the cultural class with these βmediocritiesβ as he puts it, is not worth it.
Yes! I would rather people reach for transcendence and miss than what we have now, where everyone produces this tepid garbage and critics have to pretend it's art because it reflects their morals back at them. I saw the movie TΓ‘r two days ago and I am fucking OBSESSED with it, I think because it's the first new work of art I've encountered in at least a couple years that seems to be genuinely reaching for transcendence. It's a movie about cancel culture on some level but that's such an incredibly reductive reading of it that I almost wonder if it was intentionally written with a surface level zeitgeisty conflict to distract the boring drones of the cultural class from the more compelling - but darker and infinitely less palatable - tale it's trying to tell about human behavior and the pursuit of artistic greatness. The whole culture is so boring now that it's a real shock to encounter any new content that makes me feel anything deeper than annoyance.
Edit: I also loved the Alex Perez interview. Would love to have a conversation with him, he seems fun and interesting.
Wow - great write-up of some the issues in Tar. I was also going to suggest that the op in this mini-thread check that movie out.
Whatβs the LitHub link? I did read the Alex Perez interview but Iβm a random electrician in VA, I had no idea it had turned into a whole thing. See yβall in Arlington tomorrow!
https://lithub.com/most-of-lit-journal-hobarts-editors-resign-over-tedious-anti-woke-interview/ hereβs the LitHub link, itβs exactly as pretentious and condescending as I expected
Did you used to in dc proper and work at a libertarian organization? π
No, Iβm a union electrician in Richmond and Iβve never even been to DC
Yo, thatβs my neck of the woods! /waves
Same! /waves
Did you used to [live] in dc proper
I was glad Jesse mentioned, toward the end of the Alex Perez segment, that he found the interview entertaining. I found it so funny that I couldn't stop reading "just one more paragraph" to my spouse, who was attempting to get a little evening work done. I've re-read the most supposedly offensive chunks several times in the course of following the controversy, and they make me laugh out loud every time.
My first teaching gig in my graduate program involved running discussion sections for a very famous professor who began the course with several lectures that offered a feminist deconstruction of a famous comedic work of literature. In the course of running the ensuing discussions, I soon realized that the students were getting the message that talking about literature kills the joke. I resolved to try to avoid giving that impression once I got to teach my own courses.
Humorless reading too often wins the day in elite literary circles. I wonder whether the offended editors didn't get the humor mixed in with Perez's frustration with the industry, or whether they pretended not to get it for the sake of staying mad. Either way, I feel sorry for them.
And I recommend his brilliant discussion of "calibrating" the stories he wrote as a serious insider's look at what kinds of literature get published under the current system.
I was thinking about whether paler skinned Latinos who could pass as white should be considered white. Like Ted Cruz is Cuban-American but is basically considered white by everyone everywhere. Like Argentinians and Cubans could pass as southern European for example. Race is weird and stupid and this shouldn't matter at all but I think in this context to understand the outrage at Alex it might very well matter. In many progressive spaces it's fine for Black, Brown and Asian people to make fun of white women, it's fine for white women to make fun of white women. But when white men do it... it is a different ballgame. I know because I did used to be in these progressive online spaces.
The latest episode of the Fifth Column (subscribers only) has Nick Gillespie and Coleman Hughes, and includes a great discussion of how weird our racial thinking and categorizations are; some really good jokes, too.
I agree. That was a good TFC episode.
Itβs superb.
Seconded! It was a VERY interesting discussion.
Yes! It was a great episode.
It is "Hispanic of any race" though. I mean. When we think " latino or Hispanic" we tend to think "brown," but what does that mean? Someone of European and indigineous and African ancestry.
But who the hell knows what discrimination he has faced because of his last name? Same with Ted Cruz.
Also. I mean. A person can be of 100% Chinese ancestry might have parents who grew up in Peru. It is so complicated.
Which is why I will again recommend "Classified" by David Bernstein. Goes into many such intricacies and self-contradictions.
I second (third?) this recommendation!
Itβs like the rare unicorn black/Asian. I wonder why you never see any? Does one genetic overtake the other? Are their penises small or huge? So many questions
π dang
Or both names: Rafael Cruz is his given name
That...is not true. White is a "race." Hispanic and latino is "ethnicity." Someone from Spain is Hispanic but not Latino. Someone from Mexico is Latino and Hispanic. Someone from Brazil is Latino but not Hispanic. Latino just means from Mexico, and Central and South America while Hispanic refers to being connected to Spain. Which is why Brazilian people are not Hispanic.
But while the census calls Hispanic or Latino an ethnicity, that does not really make sense. I know someone who was born and raised in Venezuela but his parents are from Taiwan. So ethnically he is Chinese. He is Latino or Hispanic. I met a couple from Colombia who were of the same ethnicity as me, the difference being that their grandparents fled to South America while mine stayed in Europe. So Eastern European Jews. And Latino or Hispanic.
When we think of Latino or Hispanic, we think "brown," because most people from South and Central America, etc are of European and African and indigenous ancestry. But it is silly we call it an ethnicity because a person wifh indigenous and European ancestry from Bolivia is not ethnically like a person of African and indigenous ancestry from Brazil.
It is not a longer of what you said and it IS a contradiction. Unless I am missing something. You said "Latino, white, and Hispanic are overlapping categories. People from Spain are mostly both Hispanic and white,..."
That is what I am disagreeing with. Latino and Hispanic are overlapping categories. "White" has nothing to do with it. It is a completely separate category.
Just listened to the old episode from 6/8/20 about Harperβs Letter where Jesse says, I quote, βSalmon Rushdie will be fine.β Oops
I honestly NEVER imagined anything would happen to Mr. rushdie