Twitter!

[Jennifer]

But nicole, the best-selling author is the powerless one here

OH GOD ELLIE I JUST FOUND MYSELF READING ABOUT THAT PART

in jezebel

Did you see the COMMENT JENNIFER WIENER LEFT ON A LOCAL SD NEWSPAPER:

“It’s hard to know what’s sadder: that Brooke Nelson has internalized misogyny to the extent that she can see nothing of worth in books beloved by “teen girls” but is presumably impressed with the merits of a book centered around video game culture that is beloved by teenage boys; that Nelson joined the committee not to champion a book or a genre but to keep a specific author’s work out of contention; that she bragged about her actions, as if she’s done some great service to literature, or that Nelson graduated with an English degree, is pursuing graduate work in English, and will someday be foisting her sexism and elitism on the next generation of readers.”

hahahhahhahhahahhahahhahaha

I've never heard of Sarah Dessen before this, and based on context I strongly suspect I'd regret it if I looked up details about the book in question, but ... by Wiener's logic, wouldn't it be "internalized misogyny" to say "I dislike the Twilight books for various reasons, including the really unhealthy relationships and sexuality portrayed within?"

I think the comeback to that is usually, "Not in your case, but the reason most people who sneer at Twilight do so has absolutely nothing to do with whether Edward resembles an abuser, etc.." Which does seem to be true.

I'm still confused about what "committee" the woman was on, given the explanation that this was started by her merely complaining about having been required to read a book.

Harrumph. I have read more about Dessen and Weiner and a couple other of their YA author buddies and the whole brouhaha over them piling on the college student, and ... in lieu of going on an obscene rant a la "Fuck those entitled thin-skinned bitches," I will instead offer another analogy: back in the day, the book "Twilight" did not yet exist but there was a series of YA novels called IIRC "Twilight: Where Darkness Begins," and another YA series called "Dark Forces." They were definitely marketed toward middle or youngest-high-school aged readers (IIRC, most of mine came from the Scholastic Book Club order forms at school), presumably marketed mainly to girls given how all the books I remember had female protagonists/viewpoint characters, and I seem to recall they were all about high school girls just like we hoped we'd be in a couple years -- intelligent and brave and independent, with cool hobbies and such -- except they must deal with malevolent supernatural forces in addition to school issues.

I read plenty of books in both series, and enjoyed them, and while I don't have any of my old copies I DO keep an eye out in secondhand shops because I'd love to re-read certain of them again ... but I still would've opposed putting any of those books on a college reading list specifically because they ARE, in fact, for young teenage girls. And despite Wiener's whining, it is not "internalized misogyny" which inspires me to say that, so much as understanding there's supposed to be a pretty significant intellectual-maturity difference between a college freshman and the Twilight/Dark Forces target audience, even though the actual age difference is rather small. Regarding people your age or mine, you generally do NOT hear us say "I liked this book two or three years ago, but I've outgrown it since then." But from college freshmen? Hell yes.

(And even when I still read and liked those YA horror books, I still understood that they were basically the intellectual equivalent of potato chips -- tasty and fun, but don't mistake them for a source of actual nourishment. I still knew better than to even write a book report about a Twilight or Dark Forces book, let alone reference them in situations where I knew "I need to impress some authority figures with my intellectualism and gravitas, except I don't think I actually know the word 'gravitas' yet. I get the concept, though.")

[Eric the .5b]

* My school had a one-month 'Interim' term where you'd take one single special-topic course each January. My freshman year I took a sci-fi lit course offered by one of the Philosophy profs. Assigned stuff like "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "The Dispossessed" which ... that's quite a contrast reading those two back-to-back, and I think a legitimate academic exercise. But that was a specialized course, not a general entering-class-wide assignment.

I guess? I read those in high school (from my high school library, unless Moon was from the pubic library), myself, but that's at least not YA material. Thinking, I can't remember any assigned fiction reading my freshman year at Trinity. That's a little odd, in retrospect, or maybe it was just ~25 years ago and I'm forgetting a couple of the pile of assigned books.

But I'm not saying the reading shouldn't be challenging. I'm just saying that if someone publicly declares, "I joined the committee to keep YA books off the reading list", well, OK—that makes sense and is unobjectionable. Announcing "I joined the committee to keep books by this particular writer off the list" personalizes it*, and when you throw that personalized remark out into the world, well, it's the twenty-first century, and unless they're at truly rarified levels of fame, someone will end up linking it to them.

Hence sowing the wind.




* And besides, not every YA writer only writes YA material.

[Eric the .5b]

I've never heard of Sarah Dessen before this, and based on context I strongly suspect I'd regret it if I looked up details about the book in question, but ... by Wiener's logic, wouldn't it be "internalized misogyny" to say "I dislike the Twilight books for various reasons, including the really unhealthy relationships and sexuality portrayed within?"

I think the comeback to that is usually, "Not in your case, but the reason most people who sneer at Twilight do so has absolutely nothing to do with whether Edward resembles an abuser, etc.." Which does seem to be true.

Harrumph.

*shrug* In my experience, there are two groups of people who are Twilight-haters: people who actually know something about the books and disapprove in an informed manner, and people (even young people) who are disdainful of things aimed at young women, but not so much at things aimed at young men. And I wouldn't swear that the former group is remotely as large as the latter.

Except, of course, if someone who seems to have half a brain expresses dislike of Twilight, I give them credit for probably being in the first group. These writers and their fans are using the existence of misogynist reactions to things young women like as a knee-jerk plan of attack, without knowing (or caring) about context like how half the reading list is by female authors, etc. Like if we went off on a typical libertarian grievance WRT a news story without looking at the actual facts of the story. Except far more viciously, and in a forum designed to communicate back to the people we're deploring.

[lunchstealer]

$10M seems high for merely “rich”. I mean median net worth is like $70,000 and $640,000 gets you in the top quintile.

It's the general amount at which you could reasonably just not work if you wanted to and still have the income to do things to keep from getting bored.

[D.A. Ridgely]

Meh. YA fiction is, by my reckoning, still a fairly recent phenomenon and, as such, will just have to struggle for acceptance as genre fiction like every other genre fiction category has. Heinlein wrote explicitly juvenile fiction for years along with his novels and stories written for, let's face it, older men, but there was no love lost between English teachers and science fiction writers when I was in school, even in college, for that matter. Sure, every once in a while someone writing genre fiction, e.g., Chandler or Bradbury, would get accepted through the back door as, okay, maybe sufficiently literary to make it on a reading list, but there was no such thing as YA genre literature, barely such a thing as Romance novels as they later came to be known and mysteries and sci-fi were strictly beach or nerd reading. Nowadays, James Patterson (inexplicably, to me) and Steven King make tens of millions of dollars and many genuinely successful popular writers definitely have reached the exalted ranks of, um, millionaire.

I don't know how long that particular author has been writing or how popular her books are and I suppose I should be at least mildly pleased that adolescent girls are reading dead-tree books, but whether the young woman had a grudge against that particular writer or just thought her stuff was crap or whatever just strikes me as much ado about nothing. Don't care about her, don't care about the author, don't care about the genre.

[nicole]

People were totally not alienated in 1919. Modernism, what’s that?

A39D3639-72D4-477E-8FFD-B4B5036421C3.png (436.4 KiB) Viewed 1160 times

[Aresen]

Somebody needs to send that guy a copy of Barbara Tuchmann's A Distant Mirror or have him read Caesar's The Gallic Wars from the Gaul's point of view.

[Ellie]

I'm pretty sure people ate a lot more bugs BEFORE the current century.

[Ellie]

Also, literally infinite amounts of existential despair are a price worth paying for anesthesia in modern dentistry.

[JD]

Also, who the fuck is "they"? "They" had Christian social mores? Including the Jews and Muslims and atheists? Also "we are alienated from the way all human beings have lived life for millennia" - hey, dumbass, people have been living in cities for over five thousand years. Has this fool never heard of, gee, I dunno, Babylon or Jericho?

[JasonL]

This is common of the left and right handwringers. The version from the left is like Wendell Berry everyone used to play with Bambi and frolic in the fields and didn't care about owning things and So. Much. Community.

[Mo]

Has this fool never heard of, gee, I dunno, Babylon or Jericho?

All this made me think of was Rev. Brown.

[Warren]

Hallelujah

[Jadagul]

The actually amazing thing about this is that the idea of "alienation" was invented in...the 1800s. And was _specifically_ being applied to the Industrial Revolution working class that he's talking about in those tweets.

[nicole]

The actually amazing thing about this is that the idea of "alienation" was invented in...the 1800s. And was _specifically_ being applied to the Industrial Revolution working class that he's talking about in those tweets.

Also specifically applied to like, everything in 1919.

[Jennifer]

The actually amazing thing about this is that the idea of "alienation" was invented in...the 1800s. And was _specifically_ being applied to the Industrial Revolution working class that he's talking about in those tweets.

Also specifically applied to like, everything in 1919.

Seriously. In his school days classes, both history and literature, he obviously paid no attention whatsoever to the lessons about World War One and the effects it had on people then (over and above the political fallout from that mess).

[lunchstealer]

I'm pretty sure people ate a lot more bugs BEFORE the current century.

Yeah that last sentence was kind of a plot twist.

[Hugh Akston]

What's so bad about eating bugs anyway? Bugs are full of protein!

[thoreau]

Don't they also have electrolytes and shit?

[Jake]

Don't they also have electrolytes and shit?

Definitely the second of those, I can tell you that.

[nicole]

What's so bad about eating bugs anyway? Bugs are full of protein!

Yeah the trad narrative about how the media is laying the groundwork for us to all to be forced to eat bugs is...even dumber than the one about how "we" all live in pods (except later in the thread that guy reveals he is living with four kids in one bedroom so...some of us do live in pods).

[Warren]

Bugs got what plants crave.

[Eric the .5b]

So, who is this guy that we should care about his crazy, anyway?

Just some random twit?

[lunchstealer]

Sometimes Twitter loves us and wants us to be happy.

@MattWelch
Tik-tok clip of Peter Welch (no relation) saying "Do it hard, do it dirty," please.

@hvyMetalnvestor
and then overlay the Swalwell fart at the end

@FistofEtiquette
I'm thinking it also needs Salt-N-Pepa's "Push It" laid underneath.

[nicole]

Pretty sure I will never love anything as much as I’ve loved cigarettes