Thinking about your Monstrous Men piece in relation to the Drake nonsense. I do wonder if part of the reason that our culture is eating itself alive is because we allowed predation to become synonymous with talent, so there was no way to check the vultures at the door.
What I mean is - if you allow someone brilliant to be a money-hungry creep *because* they are brilliant, that is one thing. It is, like you’ve argued, their talent that gives them a pass. But the talent itself still needed to exist.
But too much of that predatory behavior got swept under a rug; it was too easy to normalize it, to take evil as a given. Applying community standards was too hard and would dry up the money and it was a different time blah blah. It is impossible to keep vultures out of the community when it is taken as a given that people *generally* have a right to degrade those more vulnerable than them.
Then the rot spreads further and faster than anyone could have predicted, and everything gets eaten up. Except there is always someone who predicted it, they just got shouted down or bullied out, and now we have to deal with the shambles when we could’ve just listened the first time and done the hard thing.
I've been thinking about this lately re: my own scene of queer artists. It's frustratingly true that money seems to corrupt everything it touches, but my friends and I are always joking about passing the same five dollars back and forth, and I wonder if it's even possible to form mixed-class communities where we could maybe stop having to do that so much. It also makes me think of the shift away from talking about queer "community" to the importance of queer "spaces"-- like, we'll give you a hangout zone like a club or a coffee shop, sure, but if you want people who share your values or want you around at all, you're on your own.
I know it's not directly relatable, but I always enjoyed reading about the lesbian scene that created the possibility for modernism to come forth. That was definitely a mix of heiresses and really fucking poor people, and there were intermediaries like Margaret C Anderson and Sylvia Beach to help the heiresses direct their money toward the poor people (and not just assume they'd be benevolent). (Anderson pawned a rich woman's engagement ring to pay her writers, Beach was helping artists and writers find places to live with her rich friends, etc.) We don't have the same quality of heiresses these days, sadly.
I don't really mean, keep all rich people out of the arts. But rich people need to be held to the same standards as everyone else. And there need to be people with enough integrity to make sure that everyone just doesn't genuflect to the rich people because they are dazzled by money.
Yeah, that comes to my mind, too. Not even just the heiresses, but like, the working-class butch/fem communities where the people who could move relatively smoothly through straight society would leverage that to bring support and money back home to share with everyone who couldn't. It feels like today we have mostly replaced that with piecemeal contributions to strangers' gofundmes or donations to charitable institutions. It is a problem of integrity among the rich, but I also think (in both directions) people are afraid of the way that building community leads to a sense of obligation to others, especially if money is involved-- it's the problem of familial obligation all over again. Which is reasonable to want to avoid, but it's like, what else do we even do? America loves to say that we value individuality so much, but then we're totally unwilling to create public scaffolding that would let people actually be independent. Maybe once all the hideous giant condo buildings are hollowed out and ready to refurb, some benevolent property dev will turn them into gay beguinages, ha.
I would love for someone to write a really thoughtful response to the Munro situation, because as an avid reader of her writing, I'm struggling on how to work through the issue.
I have no problem reading authors who did "bad" things in their personal life and am generally allergic to this idea of "bad" authors (probably why I subscribe to this newsletter). The one-two punch of the Munro news happening so unexpectedly and its content, however, is really making this one hard to process.
As someone who has never felt strongly about Munro's writing, I was genuinely surprised at the reaction to the news. Not that people shouldn't be outraged that someone who was held up in this particular way had done something so awful, but that people's connection to the work was so strong they also felt something powerful for her as a person. It was in certain ways as if she had just died again.
I don't know that I have a lot of hope for something thoughtful to be written about this, though. Just because we're in a literary culture that operates on a moralistic binary. The kinds of responses we're likely to get are rote: separate art from artist, full shunning, death of the author, it's complicated (goofy shrug!). If I do read something worthy, I'll try to remember to post it in the newsletter.
If you enjoy her work, enjoy her work. If you don't want to read it again, don't read it. Many people do bad things and don't bother to create anything at all, and I'm sure there are artists out there who were personally pieces of shit and never got aired out. You can't exist in a constant state of paranoia about art.
(Although publicly airing out artists creates a secondary market of abuse victims, some of whom will be more valuable than others, while not actually curtailing abuse. But that's another topic completely.)
Her hatred is straightforward and pretty ordinary: she’s watching someone who abandoned her get deified. Why should the world at large benefit from the best parts of her mother when she got the worst? Why should she protect the woman’s legacy when she wasn’t protected in turn?
It sounds like any level of nuance, deference or understanding that Skinner gave to Munro got burned up over decades. This is a pretty normal amount of revenge-seeking, all things considered.
I’m not familiar with Munro’s work but I’m willing to guess she’s been girlbossed to hell by virtue of being a female Nobel Laureate. I think having this now be a major part of her legacy offers a learning opportunity. Not in the sense that it can right past wrongs, but because this feminized mode of abuse - of ignoring predatory behavior because you’re in love or lonely - is common, and we have to think through how to deal with it better than we have.
It was just announced, a few hours before this was posted, that Egyptian Lover is playing Berghain next Sunday. I've never heard of anyone as longstanding/famous/popular as him headlining there before (maybe its happened? I just haven't heard of it!). I imagine his presence will make lines even longer, and I imagine it will also make Berghain regulars "annoyed" with the presence of "tourists" there specifically to see him, but not necessarily to integrate into the scene there. (This is no knock against Egyptian Lover at all, I love his music personally and he also seems like a pretty amiable guy with his fans, at least from afar. I just wonder how people there will react.)
Thinking about your Monstrous Men piece in relation to the Drake nonsense. I do wonder if part of the reason that our culture is eating itself alive is because we allowed predation to become synonymous with talent, so there was no way to check the vultures at the door.
What I mean is - if you allow someone brilliant to be a money-hungry creep *because* they are brilliant, that is one thing. It is, like you’ve argued, their talent that gives them a pass. But the talent itself still needed to exist.
But too much of that predatory behavior got swept under a rug; it was too easy to normalize it, to take evil as a given. Applying community standards was too hard and would dry up the money and it was a different time blah blah. It is impossible to keep vultures out of the community when it is taken as a given that people *generally* have a right to degrade those more vulnerable than them.
Then the rot spreads further and faster than anyone could have predicted, and everything gets eaten up. Except there is always someone who predicted it, they just got shouted down or bullied out, and now we have to deal with the shambles when we could’ve just listened the first time and done the hard thing.
I've been thinking about this lately re: my own scene of queer artists. It's frustratingly true that money seems to corrupt everything it touches, but my friends and I are always joking about passing the same five dollars back and forth, and I wonder if it's even possible to form mixed-class communities where we could maybe stop having to do that so much. It also makes me think of the shift away from talking about queer "community" to the importance of queer "spaces"-- like, we'll give you a hangout zone like a club or a coffee shop, sure, but if you want people who share your values or want you around at all, you're on your own.
I know it's not directly relatable, but I always enjoyed reading about the lesbian scene that created the possibility for modernism to come forth. That was definitely a mix of heiresses and really fucking poor people, and there were intermediaries like Margaret C Anderson and Sylvia Beach to help the heiresses direct their money toward the poor people (and not just assume they'd be benevolent). (Anderson pawned a rich woman's engagement ring to pay her writers, Beach was helping artists and writers find places to live with her rich friends, etc.) We don't have the same quality of heiresses these days, sadly.
I don't really mean, keep all rich people out of the arts. But rich people need to be held to the same standards as everyone else. And there need to be people with enough integrity to make sure that everyone just doesn't genuflect to the rich people because they are dazzled by money.
Yeah, that comes to my mind, too. Not even just the heiresses, but like, the working-class butch/fem communities where the people who could move relatively smoothly through straight society would leverage that to bring support and money back home to share with everyone who couldn't. It feels like today we have mostly replaced that with piecemeal contributions to strangers' gofundmes or donations to charitable institutions. It is a problem of integrity among the rich, but I also think (in both directions) people are afraid of the way that building community leads to a sense of obligation to others, especially if money is involved-- it's the problem of familial obligation all over again. Which is reasonable to want to avoid, but it's like, what else do we even do? America loves to say that we value individuality so much, but then we're totally unwilling to create public scaffolding that would let people actually be independent. Maybe once all the hideous giant condo buildings are hollowed out and ready to refurb, some benevolent property dev will turn them into gay beguinages, ha.
I would love for someone to write a really thoughtful response to the Munro situation, because as an avid reader of her writing, I'm struggling on how to work through the issue.
I have no problem reading authors who did "bad" things in their personal life and am generally allergic to this idea of "bad" authors (probably why I subscribe to this newsletter). The one-two punch of the Munro news happening so unexpectedly and its content, however, is really making this one hard to process.
As someone who has never felt strongly about Munro's writing, I was genuinely surprised at the reaction to the news. Not that people shouldn't be outraged that someone who was held up in this particular way had done something so awful, but that people's connection to the work was so strong they also felt something powerful for her as a person. It was in certain ways as if she had just died again.
I don't know that I have a lot of hope for something thoughtful to be written about this, though. Just because we're in a literary culture that operates on a moralistic binary. The kinds of responses we're likely to get are rote: separate art from artist, full shunning, death of the author, it's complicated (goofy shrug!). If I do read something worthy, I'll try to remember to post it in the newsletter.
This comment from Munro's biographer, who knew about the abuse and estrangement and decided to leave it out of the biography, is stunning:
The updated biography, published in 2011, omitted what Thacker knew about the abuse.
“I viewed it as a private family matter,” he said.
from this: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/books/alice-munro-reactions.html
If you enjoy her work, enjoy her work. If you don't want to read it again, don't read it. Many people do bad things and don't bother to create anything at all, and I'm sure there are artists out there who were personally pieces of shit and never got aired out. You can't exist in a constant state of paranoia about art.
(Although publicly airing out artists creates a secondary market of abuse victims, some of whom will be more valuable than others, while not actually curtailing abuse. But that's another topic completely.)
I'm not sure that responses like this are very helpful.
Her hatred is straightforward and pretty ordinary: she’s watching someone who abandoned her get deified. Why should the world at large benefit from the best parts of her mother when she got the worst? Why should she protect the woman’s legacy when she wasn’t protected in turn?
It sounds like any level of nuance, deference or understanding that Skinner gave to Munro got burned up over decades. This is a pretty normal amount of revenge-seeking, all things considered.
I’m not familiar with Munro’s work but I’m willing to guess she’s been girlbossed to hell by virtue of being a female Nobel Laureate. I think having this now be a major part of her legacy offers a learning opportunity. Not in the sense that it can right past wrongs, but because this feminized mode of abuse - of ignoring predatory behavior because you’re in love or lonely - is common, and we have to think through how to deal with it better than we have.
It was just announced, a few hours before this was posted, that Egyptian Lover is playing Berghain next Sunday. I've never heard of anyone as longstanding/famous/popular as him headlining there before (maybe its happened? I just haven't heard of it!). I imagine his presence will make lines even longer, and I imagine it will also make Berghain regulars "annoyed" with the presence of "tourists" there specifically to see him, but not necessarily to integrate into the scene there. (This is no knock against Egyptian Lover at all, I love his music personally and he also seems like a pretty amiable guy with his fans, at least from afar. I just wonder how people there will react.)