You are a hack who for yrs made your living by showing up in a studio for an hour a week & reading things your staff prepared for you so ppl would mistakenly think you’re clever. Actual inquiry doesn’t work this way, but hopefully you feel better dumping on someone’s monograph.
It’s a bit rich that someone whose livelihood came from others distilling and synthesizing information for him is going after people who deconstruct & think deeply about literature.
Something similar here to “cancel culture” hysteria: Few people get angrier about any kind of critical rigor than white man like @KBAndersen who’ve has everything handed to them. Bc everything they know has been chewed up for their unthinking digestion so they can hold power—
—they want no one to question or think too deeply abt ANYthing, so they can maintain power & be the gatekeepers of their know nothing fiefdoms.
A mentor once said we don’t walk into a physics department expecting every physicist to speak to each other in a way we non-physicists would understand. When they get under the hood talk about the nature of the universe, it takes complex, specialized thought.
Why, then—
—would you walk into an English department & expect the specialists there to not also have a specialized language to talk to each other that gets under the hood beneath the level of passive understand, @KBAndersen? Are you a physicist or an English scholar? No.
You’re just another white liberal man who expresses a kind of anti-intellectualism quite like that of the right: “If I can’t understand something EASILY (without my staff making it pablum for me), it’s illegitimate.”
You @KBAndersen are shitting on a book as inappropriate for a class from an *academic press* that you admit you don’t know it it’s ever been on a syllabi. You are so out to lunch abt academic life that you don’t know that academic presses are RARELY taught to undergraduates!
As @PatBlanchfield shows with righteously angry humor, criticism is important! Teaching students to read critically is important! And at conferences & in books from academic presses, scholars teach each other so we can research & better teach students!!!
This kind of book isn’t going to be on an undergrad syllabus. It’s a diss book, written for FT scholars. Who cares what George Eliot would think? They’re dead. This smarm from ppl like Anderson, that everyone ought to just accept things as they are—this is very conservative.
There are dangers w over specialization (every word of this West interview is a gem, but especially what he says about specialization). But let’s not pretend like scholars can’t specialize in their dissertations, AND also teach the pleasure of reading! truthout.org/articles/corne…
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I’m done. “Diversity,” a word that totally obscures racist power relationships, is beyond parody; the shark has jumped over the moon (along with the cow), the horse has been beaten into ground meat. It’s a word I never want to hear again.
Buckingham Palace will engage in a “listen and learn” tour about “minority rights” 😆. Are they going to bring in Robin DiAngelo?! Are Elizabeth and Charles going to be lectured and then have to go into a break out group to reflect on their white privilege????
1. TEAR AND JOY: @TheSamhita, who was the heart and backbone of @TeenVogue for the past few years as its Executive Editor, is moving on. Great for her, a big loss for Condé + TV's readers.
2. Executive editors don't often get the acknowledgment they deserve that EICs do, but they often hold publications together . and make them fly. @TheSamhita was so important in making Teen Vogue what it was: a unique, cross-generational publication
3. that treated teens and adults with respect and harnessed journalism's greatest power: to let readers and writers discourse about the important matters of our lives.
One thing I teach my students is you want to build a body of work you’re proud of.
In my career, I’ve had thoughts & a few pieces I regret + WILDLY uneven earnings at too many jobs.
But overall, I’ve made a body of work aligned w my values—& that does a lot for your peace.
It means the world to me when a Black trans teen writes to me about a piece I published about therapy in 2018, or someone whose sibling died of cancer writes abt a piece I wrote even before that. Only got a few hundred dollars for both pieces, written for different pubs...
...it’s hard freelancing and turning down bland & more stable work. But if you can hold on to do work in alignment w your values over time, you’ll grow, & your readers will grow w you & allow you room to grow. And you’ll feel good abt the work (even when your bank account hurts).
In hiring her, Condé Nast seemed to be going for representational politics/optics over substance. There is NO shortage of Black women, ppl of color, QTPoC etc who could have helmed this very important space & its recent, unique and wildly popular history of sharp analysis.
Instead, Condé seemed to be trying to reign in the Marxism, anal sex tips & labor coverage with someone who’d ~never been an editor~. The timing of the anti-Asian tweets couldn’t be more worse than this week, but zoom out please... nytimes.com/2021/03/18/bus…
Everything is a shameless marketing opportunity, isn’t it? Is there a platform that has done MORE to stoke Asian fetishization & promote white supremacist beauty standards for gay men than Grindr?!
Substack is increasingly a kind of anti-union (dis)(u)topia: package up a lot of writers, make them work against each other, encourage no one to talk about who is getting what $$ (this is a classic tactic to suppress income), through in a dash of “giving them the religion” hustle
As @mattdpearce put, $15 a month can get you subscriptions to 3 writers a month on Substack or like a subscription to a paper w hundreds of unionized journalists & support staff. I Subscribe to newsletters & am glad friends can make work for & with them. But...
...Substack seems to be a predatory platform built on extracting value from atomized writers in an “entrepreneur” model. I worry about them using their $ to poach stars who could be working in teams (even unions!) & encouraging everyone to go on their own w/o benefits or “jobs.”