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As for the Anne Carson "poem", I see it as a flash fiction, but who cares about genre (except absolutely everybody, including a high-prestige magazine that said to me we love your essay, is it nonfiction? and then rejected it when I refused to say one way or the other, because I hate genre requirements. To what, besides science papers, does that label truly apply, after all? Not even history.)? What's important about the bitching over Ann Carson online, I think, is that Twitter is not where literary criticism lives, can we be honest about that please? Second, the type font shows that this was in The New Yorker, which increasing numbers of people in general and real writers in specific are beginning (finally) to hate because of its pretension, its clubbiness, its propensity to publish reviews and fiction that fiddle with the intellectual while avoiding completely anything that feels. So. I don't mind the paragraph, this flash-fiction, this poem, whatever it is. It addresses the discomfort of a date that starts badly and ends worse. I felt it. It is, perhaps, the perfect New Yorker piece for its cosmopolitan feel, its well-fed people complaining about bones and noise. And that's why it probably would have been received better by the public in a different magazine.
There is an increasingly reactionary attitude to any kind of supposedly 'controversial' attitudes in literature across the English-speaking world. Mainly it seems to originate from individuals who shout louder. Free speech depends on adult conscience, the expectation of society that an individual at a certain age can make up their own mind about political, sexual, aesthetic and religious and moral views. The term 'protecting from' is a applicable for children and the otherwise vulnerable, such as the mentally differently-able who may not be able to distinguish generally accepted views on those things. So have we mass-infantilised since the invention of social media? It seems to me so.
For me the best part of the Carson thing was watching it unfold which being almost completely certain that Anne Carson had no idea what was happening and probably would have been a little confused if someone tried to explain it to her. She's the real winner for never having gotten sucked into Twitter.
The thing is... Compact Magazine IS "fascist-adjacent." Many of their writers and editors are explicitly anti-democracy and in favor of a US governed by Christian theocracy and other forms of traditional power (e.g. male authority). They literally believe democracy is "decadent." They also publish the explicitly fascist and racist Nick Land. Becky, I feel you should look into Compact Magazine yourself before simply repeating the writer's charge. A good place to start is this article : https://johnganz.substack.com/p/compact-magazines-unholy-alliance
The writer in question has published three articles in Compact Magazine and appeared on a podcast with one of its far-right editors, Nina Power. Incidentally, Compact regularly publishes pieces saying queer and trans people should not exist (and if they have the temerity to exist, should certainly not be accorded civil rights.)
Don’t know if that’s true, but assuming it is, what do you think of all the leftists in this country who are actually communists, and want to do away with our system of governance altogether?
The thing is - I'm a leftist poet. I've met literally hundreds of leftist poets in person. I've met literally thousands online. Of them all, I've met two who feel the way you suggest. And one of them, when the next election came along, couldn't decide whether to vote Labour or Green. Of course this is in the UK, and things might be different in other countries, but communists are scarce here. For every communist, there are dozens of neo-fascists.
You’ve never met a fan of Marx? They’re legion in the U.S. Most Leftists here are or have been fans of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the Soviet Union, and other communist regimes. Millions of American leftists embraced Stalin before they found out he was slaughtering his own people. Che Guevara T-shirts are still popular among the Left.
This is simply untrue. I, and most of my friends are liberal democrats, but not socialists and certainly not communists. Someone is feeding you this nonsense and you are lapping it right up.
This is a walk across the nails, isn't it? I think cancelling Russo's book is the wrong thing to do. What are the merits of the BOOK?The BOOK. What about the book? If it is subversive in favor of something you disagree with then by all means don't use it. A good editor should know when they're being maneuvered into subversion. But if it stands on its own and was good enough for you to publish it why not keep it on the roster? Guilt by association? After you've approved the piece taking it down for association stinks a little of cowardice and pearl-clutching censorship. Do we take all of Knut Hamsun's stuff off the shelves and burn it now? I never liked his stuff but are we supposed to take Ezra Pound's stuff off the shelves forever? Ernest Hemingway was a misogynistic drunken asshole when he wrote "The Old Man and the Sea,"probably the most perfectly executed novella. I don't know. Censorship is like the Bible. Is taking the only parts of it you like authentic belief? Or should you be all in and claim to have the one truth? Should you tell an author which stocks to buy or be angry if they have stocks in a company you consider immoral? Is that grounds for cancellation? And who decides what is and isn't censored? This is a bed of nails.
1) Compact is a right-wing rag. And if you associate with "near-fascist." expect that folks who are anti-fascist won't like it.
2) As far as "diversity" is concerned, I don't consider the "fash" part of diversity. That's like calling deadly parasites a protected form of life.
3) Fascism is no joke. They're not kidding. They'll imprison and / or murder huge numbers of children. I wouldn't ban Hamsun or Pound, but I'd would give their work to a student without a "trigger warning."
1) There are also folks that are anti-fascist, like me, who don't mind who someone sits next to. People don' have to be perfect for me, and ideological purity is bullshit anyway. Akin to group-think and prone to censorship and the thought police as much from the Left as from the Right. Why not keep Russo's book on the list with a "trigger warning" like for Hamsun et al? Why do they get a break?
2) I have no idea what this refers to, sorry.
3) Fascism is no joke. Well, no shit. And authoritarianism can come from any side of the spectrum, as history has taught many well-schooled students in the past.
Re. the Emmalea Russo affair: In my opinion it is the right of any publisher to choose not to associate their brand with someone who publishes in a venue that can reasonably be seen as including, for example, transphobic content and just generally as a publication dedicated to "young fogeyism."
Re. the Anne Carson piece in The New Yorker: Good gracious, what a ridiculous contretemps on twitter. Whatever one thinks of the writing itself - I think it's finely wrought - it's a work of art, maybe based on an authorial experience, maybe not and who cares which? When these idiots see Macbeth do they respond by tweeting "has Shakespeare ever thought about not stabbing the king?"
'why can't you just sit down and have a nice dinner' actually works as a solid rejoinder to the entirety of literary praxis since the beginning of time, perhaps even to the entirety of life.
So much for diversity. It was always a lie to begin with. Diversity has always meant having the “right opinions” about everything. The “wrong opinions” simply aren’t allowed--even if they are held by your friends. This reminds me of McCarthyism, which the Left used to think was a bad thing. The editor who took down the poet’s book because she associated with the wrong crowd reminds me of McCarthy bellowing into the microphone, “But do you have any friends who are communists?”
Re the 'anti-fascist' fascists in publishing, “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” H L Mencken
Sorry, Anne. It's not a poem, as D P Snyder said below.
Ironic hyperbole, Donna, related to the cancel culturati waving the black flag of the anarchists as they tear up contracts and silence artists because of the company they might keep on occasion.
Is Ann Carson's insipid vignette a "POEM"? Since when did poets start palming off their prose as poetry. Who would consciously WANT to do that, knowing writers generally make more money (the rare times we DO) writing prose than poetry. Call me old schooll, but I cant understand how so many pieces of writing get away with being called poetry as long as we use the word HYBRID. Is this because advertisers and pubilicits dont have imagination to come up with a description for some of outstanding free floating kaleidicope PROSE that is so technically sumptuous and possessng a heart-yanking cadence that the readers are swept along AS IF READING SUCH GREAT POETS as Pablo Neruda, or Gwendolyn Brooks, or Mohammed Darwish, or Witola Symborska?
Karl Marx, one of the world's gamechangers (he hated the Yankees and love the Dodgers until their betrayal move to LA) remarked on the vacillations of the PETTY bourgoise. And that is US, for the most part, even those of us with working-class, or "blue-collar" or "trailer trash" backgrounds. that we have surpassed into the clean white collar light. But many of us are envious, spiiteful, narcicisstic, impulsively poised to leap on the slightest miscue. In short ( as in short-tempered which I guess is better than DIS-tempered) we are human.
But as I read about the latest black youth shot to death through a door because of sheer racist fear, or hear about another battered child, or read the news about the recent national railroad strike and discover the railroad workers do NOT have paid sick leave as Joe Biden grins and mentions striving for an equitable agreement for " some of our best es ansential wprkers", I feel like Im going to puke up my dinner - from the last two weeks.
So when I read Ann Carson's "incident", I think of rereading " MUCH ABOUT NOTHING" and wonder how anyone could look at the nation's most successul magazine loved by the most accomplished snobs and high end denizen of the "petty" bourgoise, and read the vignette introduced as POETRY and sit blinking for at least five minutes.
What they did to this poet was wrong. I do understand how it happened though. People are so enraged about political machinations out of their control that they seize any power they still wield to fight against those forces. It's clearly wrong to stick this person with the blame for the rolling back of rights we have taken for granted for decades. And it will do nothing but alienate and deepen the divisions among us.
I agree with everything but your last sentence. I am not sure that a poetry collection not coming out is going to deepen any divides, or perhaps you meant that such a mentality will. It's dumb of the publishing house not to know who they're publishing from the very start. If the poet had already signed a contract, the Author's Guild might direct them about how to take it to court for breach. It's shoddy treatment. It's also bound to happen in media environment we inhabit. *Sigh*.
As for the Anne Carson "poem", I see it as a flash fiction, but who cares about genre (except absolutely everybody, including a high-prestige magazine that said to me we love your essay, is it nonfiction? and then rejected it when I refused to say one way or the other, because I hate genre requirements. To what, besides science papers, does that label truly apply, after all? Not even history.)? What's important about the bitching over Ann Carson online, I think, is that Twitter is not where literary criticism lives, can we be honest about that please? Second, the type font shows that this was in The New Yorker, which increasing numbers of people in general and real writers in specific are beginning (finally) to hate because of its pretension, its clubbiness, its propensity to publish reviews and fiction that fiddle with the intellectual while avoiding completely anything that feels. So. I don't mind the paragraph, this flash-fiction, this poem, whatever it is. It addresses the discomfort of a date that starts badly and ends worse. I felt it. It is, perhaps, the perfect New Yorker piece for its cosmopolitan feel, its well-fed people complaining about bones and noise. And that's why it probably would have been received better by the public in a different magazine.
There is an increasingly reactionary attitude to any kind of supposedly 'controversial' attitudes in literature across the English-speaking world. Mainly it seems to originate from individuals who shout louder. Free speech depends on adult conscience, the expectation of society that an individual at a certain age can make up their own mind about political, sexual, aesthetic and religious and moral views. The term 'protecting from' is a applicable for children and the otherwise vulnerable, such as the mentally differently-able who may not be able to distinguish generally accepted views on those things. So have we mass-infantilised since the invention of social media? It seems to me so.
For me the best part of the Carson thing was watching it unfold which being almost completely certain that Anne Carson had no idea what was happening and probably would have been a little confused if someone tried to explain it to her. She's the real winner for never having gotten sucked into Twitter.
I cannot think of a single author more primed to not give a damn about Twitter discourse about her than Carson
She should win the Nobel just for that alone.
The thing is... Compact Magazine IS "fascist-adjacent." Many of their writers and editors are explicitly anti-democracy and in favor of a US governed by Christian theocracy and other forms of traditional power (e.g. male authority). They literally believe democracy is "decadent." They also publish the explicitly fascist and racist Nick Land. Becky, I feel you should look into Compact Magazine yourself before simply repeating the writer's charge. A good place to start is this article : https://johnganz.substack.com/p/compact-magazines-unholy-alliance
The writer in question has published three articles in Compact Magazine and appeared on a podcast with one of its far-right editors, Nina Power. Incidentally, Compact regularly publishes pieces saying queer and trans people should not exist (and if they have the temerity to exist, should certainly not be accorded civil rights.)
For example, see these quotes from Adrian Vermeule, a contributing editor to Compact. https://newrepublic.com/article/157132/emerging-right-wing-vision-constitutional-authoritarianism
Don’t know if that’s true, but assuming it is, what do you think of all the leftists in this country who are actually communists, and want to do away with our system of governance altogether?
Both of them?
All of them.
The thing is - I'm a leftist poet. I've met literally hundreds of leftist poets in person. I've met literally thousands online. Of them all, I've met two who feel the way you suggest. And one of them, when the next election came along, couldn't decide whether to vote Labour or Green. Of course this is in the UK, and things might be different in other countries, but communists are scarce here. For every communist, there are dozens of neo-fascists.
You’ve never met a fan of Marx? They’re legion in the U.S. Most Leftists here are or have been fans of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the Soviet Union, and other communist regimes. Millions of American leftists embraced Stalin before they found out he was slaughtering his own people. Che Guevara T-shirts are still popular among the Left.
This is simply untrue. I, and most of my friends are liberal democrats, but not socialists and certainly not communists. Someone is feeding you this nonsense and you are lapping it right up.
This is a walk across the nails, isn't it? I think cancelling Russo's book is the wrong thing to do. What are the merits of the BOOK?The BOOK. What about the book? If it is subversive in favor of something you disagree with then by all means don't use it. A good editor should know when they're being maneuvered into subversion. But if it stands on its own and was good enough for you to publish it why not keep it on the roster? Guilt by association? After you've approved the piece taking it down for association stinks a little of cowardice and pearl-clutching censorship. Do we take all of Knut Hamsun's stuff off the shelves and burn it now? I never liked his stuff but are we supposed to take Ezra Pound's stuff off the shelves forever? Ernest Hemingway was a misogynistic drunken asshole when he wrote "The Old Man and the Sea,"probably the most perfectly executed novella. I don't know. Censorship is like the Bible. Is taking the only parts of it you like authentic belief? Or should you be all in and claim to have the one truth? Should you tell an author which stocks to buy or be angry if they have stocks in a company you consider immoral? Is that grounds for cancellation? And who decides what is and isn't censored? This is a bed of nails.
1) Compact is a right-wing rag. And if you associate with "near-fascist." expect that folks who are anti-fascist won't like it.
2) As far as "diversity" is concerned, I don't consider the "fash" part of diversity. That's like calling deadly parasites a protected form of life.
3) Fascism is no joke. They're not kidding. They'll imprison and / or murder huge numbers of children. I wouldn't ban Hamsun or Pound, but I'd would give their work to a student without a "trigger warning."
1) There are also folks that are anti-fascist, like me, who don't mind who someone sits next to. People don' have to be perfect for me, and ideological purity is bullshit anyway. Akin to group-think and prone to censorship and the thought police as much from the Left as from the Right. Why not keep Russo's book on the list with a "trigger warning" like for Hamsun et al? Why do they get a break?
2) I have no idea what this refers to, sorry.
3) Fascism is no joke. Well, no shit. And authoritarianism can come from any side of the spectrum, as history has taught many well-schooled students in the past.
Thanks for a couple of provocative topics.
Re. the Emmalea Russo affair: In my opinion it is the right of any publisher to choose not to associate their brand with someone who publishes in a venue that can reasonably be seen as including, for example, transphobic content and just generally as a publication dedicated to "young fogeyism."
Re. the Anne Carson piece in The New Yorker: Good gracious, what a ridiculous contretemps on twitter. Whatever one thinks of the writing itself - I think it's finely wrought - it's a work of art, maybe based on an authorial experience, maybe not and who cares which? When these idiots see Macbeth do they respond by tweeting "has Shakespeare ever thought about not stabbing the king?"
'why can't you just sit down and have a nice dinner' actually works as a solid rejoinder to the entirety of literary praxis since the beginning of time, perhaps even to the entirety of life.
Ironically, most of the Chill Subs article about fees is behind a paywall.
Sounds like a typical night out in Manhattan.
So much for diversity. It was always a lie to begin with. Diversity has always meant having the “right opinions” about everything. The “wrong opinions” simply aren’t allowed--even if they are held by your friends. This reminds me of McCarthyism, which the Left used to think was a bad thing. The editor who took down the poet’s book because she associated with the wrong crowd reminds me of McCarthy bellowing into the microphone, “But do you have any friends who are communists?”
poets cancellation. over what? not the book... frightening. for sure.
The emotional shallowness of the replies to Carson’s piece is all one needs to know about prevailing Twitter literary culture. Glad to be out of it.
Re the 'anti-fascist' fascists in publishing, “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” H L Mencken
Sorry, Anne. It's not a poem, as D P Snyder said below.
"Normal," huh? "Slitting throats"?
Ironic hyperbole, Donna, related to the cancel culturati waving the black flag of the anarchists as they tear up contracts and silence artists because of the company they might keep on occasion.
Is Ann Carson's insipid vignette a "POEM"? Since when did poets start palming off their prose as poetry. Who would consciously WANT to do that, knowing writers generally make more money (the rare times we DO) writing prose than poetry. Call me old schooll, but I cant understand how so many pieces of writing get away with being called poetry as long as we use the word HYBRID. Is this because advertisers and pubilicits dont have imagination to come up with a description for some of outstanding free floating kaleidicope PROSE that is so technically sumptuous and possessng a heart-yanking cadence that the readers are swept along AS IF READING SUCH GREAT POETS as Pablo Neruda, or Gwendolyn Brooks, or Mohammed Darwish, or Witola Symborska?
Karl Marx, one of the world's gamechangers (he hated the Yankees and love the Dodgers until their betrayal move to LA) remarked on the vacillations of the PETTY bourgoise. And that is US, for the most part, even those of us with working-class, or "blue-collar" or "trailer trash" backgrounds. that we have surpassed into the clean white collar light. But many of us are envious, spiiteful, narcicisstic, impulsively poised to leap on the slightest miscue. In short ( as in short-tempered which I guess is better than DIS-tempered) we are human.
But as I read about the latest black youth shot to death through a door because of sheer racist fear, or hear about another battered child, or read the news about the recent national railroad strike and discover the railroad workers do NOT have paid sick leave as Joe Biden grins and mentions striving for an equitable agreement for " some of our best es ansential wprkers", I feel like Im going to puke up my dinner - from the last two weeks.
So when I read Ann Carson's "incident", I think of rereading " MUCH ABOUT NOTHING" and wonder how anyone could look at the nation's most successul magazine loved by the most accomplished snobs and high end denizen of the "petty" bourgoise, and read the vignette introduced as POETRY and sit blinking for at least five minutes.
The fear of ambiguity is contagious for the right and the left.
What they did to this poet was wrong. I do understand how it happened though. People are so enraged about political machinations out of their control that they seize any power they still wield to fight against those forces. It's clearly wrong to stick this person with the blame for the rolling back of rights we have taken for granted for decades. And it will do nothing but alienate and deepen the divisions among us.
I agree with everything but your last sentence. I am not sure that a poetry collection not coming out is going to deepen any divides, or perhaps you meant that such a mentality will. It's dumb of the publishing house not to know who they're publishing from the very start. If the poet had already signed a contract, the Author's Guild might direct them about how to take it to court for breach. It's shoddy treatment. It's also bound to happen in media environment we inhabit. *Sigh*.