My whole life I wondered what the supreme honor of my existence would be and I’m now discovering that it’s to wake up on a Saturday morning to an episode of my favorite podcast based on a tip I submitted. 😍
And as Leigh mentioned, pre-order her new (amazing!!) book, If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You, and you will also get an exclusive set of stickers made from my paintings of tarot cards:
Katie… the other thing you forgot from the show notes was the email address to get the stickers. I think Leigh said: stickers@leighstein.com but I was driving when I heard it. I just sent a receipt there so I hope it is right!
A Princess Diana Tarot deck is EXTREMELY relevant to my interests. I will order it for my Princess Di collection, which includes a Russian nesting doll set (each doll has a different portrait of her) and a shot glass with her likeness and "The People's Princess" on it.
Make sure you let us know because I will surely buy in.
Postage cost from the USA seems to vary wildly - I’ve bought A3 art off Etsy and postage was 20 bucks, bought clothes from LA and postage was 10 backs then tried to buy a record from Austin and it was like 80. Never could figure out what was going on.
Great cards tho, love them, if you get a U.K. distributor I’ll pick up a set for sure.
I was awake at 4:45 this morning ruminating about what I could have said better on the podcast! 🫠
There’s actually a connection between how uncomfortable I was branding myself as a victim to market my memoir —> to writing a novel about how victimhood gets leveraged and commodified (the “Believe Victims” beach towels in Self Care). Andrew and I tried to explore this through satire; Jasper tried to expose this through a prank, resulting in outrage and embarrassment.
There were certainly prank elements to what I did, but I promise my "Publication Notes" and "Afterword" sections in the manu lay out a lighter side to all of this -- encouragement as to how we might address some of the fundamental industry issues I encountered as both and editor and poet along the way. All the same, I appreciate you reading my stuff out with enthusiasm. The "Flarf" anecdote was cool. I hadn't heard of that. There are jokes around every corner in the poetry world, apparently.
Were the statistics you cited regarding ethnicity and publishing solely with respect to America? The "discourse" is very Americanised, and American cultural mores get projected onto the context, regardless of the context, basically every in the Anglosphere. And as for women "winning and dominating", it would seem incoherent to argue that having more men published is somehow unrepresentative of the human experience and in need of rectification; yet 73% of books being published being by female authors isn't of equal concern. And, "come on...they had their turn" is one of the most intellectually incurious things I have ever heard.
While there are a whole bunch of reasons that men are reading and writing fewer books, I think an underexplored reason is the huge rise in the amount of time guys spend playing video games.
I also suspect video games are a big factor, though certainly not the only one, in the decline of a lot of male centered hobbies like rockhounding, model building, and coin collecting.
Comics have been decimated by video games - which is understandable - when you attend comic conventions that are actually about comics it’s old dudes, some 20/30-thing indie creators and families with kids under 12. The 12-20 range? Nada.
One of the worst indictments of Marvel and DC's comics divisions is that despite how popular superhero stuff has been for the last 15-20 years, they've done a horrible job attracting new readers. It's not like kids and teens don't enjoy comics. Manga and stuff like those Dog Man books are pretty popular.
There's definitely a crowding out effect where comics are competing with video games for entertainment time and money. The comics industry hasn't done itself any favors with a distribution model where new comics are almost exclusively sold through comic shops now, expensive comics (most kids and teens can't afford to regularly spend $5 for a single issue), chasing the adult collector market, and it being hard for new readers to easily find an entry point to jump in. I always liked the idea of reading superhero comics when I was a kid in the 90s, but whenever I bought an issue at Walgreens I was jumping midway into a story that spanned multiple issues and I had no idea what was going on.
I know well my friend, the end of newsstand distribution was a serious error. Even more so now Diamond - the monopoly distributor - has recently gone bankrupt.
Personally superhero comics aren’t my thing but I appreciate the skill in the art.
I think superhero comics, specifically, are at best an antiquated niche at this point. It was one thing in the 1940s-1980s when comic books were pretty much the only place you'd find that genre outside of the occasional campy TV show or Superman movie. But now the market is so saturated with high-quality superhero content that comics just can't compete.
Surprisingly, if you don't let your kids stare at TV, YouTube, cell phones, tablets, video games, etc. 6 hours a day (the US average for 8-12 year olds) they read a surprising volume of comic books and graphic novels.
From what I see in my circles, men are reading a lot of hard fantasy and alternate history. There's some "Napoleonic Wars with dragons" series that has a huge following.
The percentage of women reading and amount of time women spend reading on the average day has dropped off too although is still quite a bit higher than men.
The kind of guys that play video games all the time where the guys who read sky and crime fiction in the 90s. I wonder what happened to the literary fiction male reader.
Different video games. The crime fiction bunch is playing Modern Soldier XI: New Dawn or Axe of Magic, while a lot of potential literary types now instead have strong opinions on Bluesky about Autism: The Pixel Art RPG.
(All names are made up, but the gamers will know what I'm talking about.)
They fucked off or something. Dunno. Maybe it got eaten by comic book movies? It's not like they can't go down to the library and get some Cormac McCarthy (difficult to find something more literary and male than him) but it's clearly not as interesting as whatever it is they're doing instead.
That's fair - it's too bad it's Hella epic and so well written. I did sort of develop a heuristic where people who said they stopped at the animal abuse were judged more harshly than those who indicated the uh you know everything else in the story.
It's a great book but fitting that BM (and the character of Judge Holden specifically) is the McCarthy that's broken through to mainstream internet culture, people love the old ultraviolence. The Road is a much shorter and easier read but far less of a manly signifier because Oprah liked it too. And of course none of these goofballs are stanning for Suttree or All The Pretty Horses.
Honestly I blame it more on the title than anything else...ATPLH doesn't roll off the tongue as much.
And as a "study in masculinity" the crossing seems more on-point? (whatever the fuck masculinity means but it's important to the chuds)
I made the mistake of reading the road when my partner was pregnant with my son. I'd read all his "westerns" and figured this was a good change of pace. Bad bad timing on my part! Ugh...
You notice a delineation in different types of books and the different guys who read them. Now realize that games have the same phenomenon. Guys who play 100 hours of baldurs gate and are actually interested in the new oblivion remaster are an entirely different group of people who play online shooters with friends.
I think the type of guys who game all the time today are probably a lot less likely to be the type who might have been drawn to literary fiction in an earlier era, but even the guys I know who read literary fiction now still spend some time gaming.
For me, gaming tends to be more fun in the short term. Reading tends to be much more satisfying long term. One thing I’ve tried to do in the last few years is to do activities that I’ll be happier I did in the long run vs the short run.
Of course, reading isn’t always more satisfying in the long run. I still think about how goddamn much I hate everything about the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I barely remember crappy video games I’ve played.
I love a good book! I tend to love characters I read about even if historically they are not the best. For instance I was very high on President Jackson after reading a book about him by Jon Meachem while understanding historically he did a lot of not so great stuff.
Enjoyed this a lot, but am quite surprised that you didn’t mention the movie American Fiction which satirizes the difficulties faced by a black author who doesn’t write “black” literature. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, but still an enjoyable movie and very relevant to this topic.
American Fiction was a weird one. It was 70% family tragedy and 30% preaching to the choir about woke stuff. The latter plot felt like it needed a few more drafts.
Yeah, I didn't love the movie for the reasons you mentioned - heavy on the family tragedy and a preachiness to the 'woke' stuff even when (I think?) it was attempting to satirise it. It's based on a book by Percival Everett, and I wonder if I might prefer it or would the same things annoy me.
I like how Katie is deleting her entire digital footprint at the same that Jesse is crashing out on Twitter. Sincerely curious to see which tactic sells more books.
I hated the first poem, really — tho Stein is probably right that it could play live with the right performer. Second poem not so bad. Third was in fact bad though, imho… tho this is not a deeply felt/firmly held assessment.
I respect the effort, but no. Those poems are inane nonsense. If men are no longer getting sufficiently high on our own literary supply to sincerely write that sort of drivel, it’s honestly to our credit.
I read Victim a few weeks ago, and it seemed like suuuuch a BARpod book so it’s cool to see it mentioned in this ep. It’s about a literary scandal surrounding identity, so naturally while reading it I was reminded of Yellowface, a much more successful and popular book that is also about a literary scandal surrounding identity that I thought was maddeningly unsophisticated and preachy. Yellowface really relies on creating caricatures of its characters while Victim makes fun of those kinds of caricatures. Yellowface didn’t teach me anything while Victim reeeally made me think. I really wish Victim was getting more love because it really deserves it, Boryga did such a great job on it. Y’all should buy a copy!
I actually really enjoyed Yellowface (though I have heard others make similar criticisms!) Reading both Yellowface and Victim, I kept thinking “I can’t believe this got published!” I think publishing people want to signal they get the joke….. otherwise they’d have to admit they’re the object of the joke
I understand your critisism of yellowface but I actually enjoyed it a lot. I was suprised that it was actually very critical of cancel culture and satirized the publishing industry quite effectively. I will read victim next.
Looks like I made the show. Big ups to Katie for the feature. Lots to address here. Stein's takes are a little milquetoast, and her stats on publishing are, for reasons that would probably get me banned in most places, inaccurate, but Stein was a good sport when reading out the poems at the end. That was fun to hear. And her personal testimony about client demographics was interesting.
The big joke with the "Decolonizing" piece was that the beef suya the speaker intends to feed the cat would actually kill it due to the garlic/onion powder content. The "sub_urban boi" one was pure what I call "constellation poetry" nonsense, if you simply read it on the page and don't perform it. (Fun thought, though.) "Corporeal" has already taken it down as a part of their "whisper network" pushback to try to avoid encouraging what I've done. And the emojipasta poem was a completely original one I drafted up on my phone in about three minutes' time while thinking about Shakespeare's love life. You can still find it online under my "B. H. Fein" persona, and its got a fancy AWARD-NOMINATED designation above it, but they messed up the emojis trying to publish it, which we fixed in the manu.
As for the idea about people on "my side" of the industry creating our own publications -- well, we do do that (without any government funding or media attention, typically), but that's a can of worms that would take a great deal of time and effort to dissect. The "Pere Ube" website hosts a free sample of my book with my full afterword explanation included for why I did this, for those who might think this was simply a shallow stunt. Or come stop by my Substack for a truncated explanation. I think even the free Amazon sample features the afterword and my publication notes, too.
But in brief, I love poetry, and I love poets. That said, we were long overdue for another literary ruse to shake things up and start important conversations.
We stopped listening after an hour. We kept waiting for Katie to push back on Leigh's identitarianism and finally gave up.
When she explained that white men novelists aren't publishing because they are busy being "white men whining on the internet" I thought is she joking? Or is she making excuses for open discrimination against a disfavored identity? (Note: white men are not a category sharing the same characteristics, interests, politics, or abilities.)
Who brought Ibram X. Kendi into the chat with that "18% of books by POC"? As if that reflects some kind of racism instead of, well, any number of other factors?
And when Katie pointed out how white men have been kept off "best of" lists, Leigh reiterates the "it's our turn" bullshit. Was she joking? Was I missing the sarcasm?
Two wrongs don't make a right. Categorizing people by immutable characteristics is bad, especially when we're talking about culture. Right? Right? Did I mishear this podcast?
I couldn't believe that on the podcast I enjoy for skewering identitarian bullshit, I had to listen to some of it being taken seriously. Or was I just not getting the joke?
Think it is part of the point I made below. Sure the B&R podcast skewers "identitarian bullshit" as you write at times, but this podcast also shows that it is indeed alive and well when it comes to certain situations, even on B&R.
I stuck it out to the end, somehow. And no, it did not get any better. Katie at least at one point mentioned the merits of blind submissions, but then LS prattled on about the value of "branding" authors to sell books and all that intersectional bullshit that has completely destroyed the arts. She further whined about the pay structure of the gatekeepers (the lit agents/editors) in the big publishing houses, as if that had anything to do with anything. The fact is that these corrupt gatekeepers (the twenty something female Ivy-League-educated trust fund babies) actually care very little about good literature but very much about appearing to be virtuous people vis a vis the authors they allow to pass through. It is the reason most books, plays, and movies these days are absolute garbage. The storytelling has completely been supplanted by the immutable characteristics of the storyteller. It's been a bad joke for a while now, and extremely disappointing to see these views countenanced on an episode of B&R.
I don’t entirely disagree with you but I also think it’s okay to hear from people who don’t quite agree with many of us here on occassion. I for one am OK with certain efforts toward diversity but not when it becomes totalizing, as it has. I felt like that was where Stein was coming from. I did think the comment about male writers was a bit daft but it’s also true that there is a lot of whining out there. On the other hand, I also think it’s true that Hemingway wouldn’t make it past the slush pile today — but tough counterfactual to prove.
The intersectional and oppression pyramid way of viewing the world is turning people's brains into mush I feel. In the end you are caught in a regressive and oppressive world view where the capable and excellent has to take a step backwards, where bias becomes something to be proud of.
Listening to this podcast it becomes clear what a mind prison it is. One in which you can tell yourself you are well-meaning and doing good. And it is one where way too many middle class and educated women find themselves.
My whole life I wondered what the supreme honor of my existence would be and I’m now discovering that it’s to wake up on a Saturday morning to an episode of my favorite podcast based on a tip I submitted. 😍
You are now our leader.
Hi, I am the artist Leigh mentioned on the show :)
You can find The Diana Tarot, my deck of tarot cards based on the life of Princess Diana, here:
https://www.amazon.com/Jennifer-May-Reiland-Diana-Tarot/dp/B0B859V443
Or here:
https://jennifermayreiland.com/
And as Leigh mentioned, pre-order her new (amazing!!) book, If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You, and you will also get an exclusive set of stickers made from my paintings of tarot cards:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/783037/if-youre-seeing-this-its-meant-for-you-by-leigh-stein/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Sorry Jennifer! Meant to put this in the show notes. Will add.
Katie… the other thing you forgot from the show notes was the email address to get the stickers. I think Leigh said: stickers@leighstein.com but I was driving when I heard it. I just sent a receipt there so I hope it is right!
A Princess Diana Tarot deck is EXTREMELY relevant to my interests. I will order it for my Princess Di collection, which includes a Russian nesting doll set (each doll has a different portrait of her) and a shot glass with her likeness and "The People's Princess" on it.
omg love it! the russian nesting doll sounds amazing.
The Diana tarot cards are brilliant. Sadly Etsy shipping is doubling the price to Dianaland.
Yeah, unfortunately international shipping is just very expensive. Hopefully in future I will have a distributor for them in the UK!
Make sure you let us know because I will surely buy in.
Postage cost from the USA seems to vary wildly - I’ve bought A3 art off Etsy and postage was 20 bucks, bought clothes from LA and postage was 10 backs then tried to buy a record from Austin and it was like 80. Never could figure out what was going on.
Great cards tho, love them, if you get a U.K. distributor I’ll pick up a set for sure.
I was awake at 4:45 this morning ruminating about what I could have said better on the podcast! 🫠
There’s actually a connection between how uncomfortable I was branding myself as a victim to market my memoir —> to writing a novel about how victimhood gets leveraged and commodified (the “Believe Victims” beach towels in Self Care). Andrew and I tried to explore this through satire; Jasper tried to expose this through a prank, resulting in outrage and embarrassment.
You were great! Very good guest.
BOY FOLKS ISNT LEIGH TERRIFIC. SHE HAS THE BEST WORDS. WILL NOMINATE AND RUSH CONFIRMATION FOR DHS SEC ASAP!!!!
an honor Greg
BOY THIS GREG GUY WHAT A GREAT PRIMO HE IS.
There were certainly prank elements to what I did, but I promise my "Publication Notes" and "Afterword" sections in the manu lay out a lighter side to all of this -- encouragement as to how we might address some of the fundamental industry issues I encountered as both and editor and poet along the way. All the same, I appreciate you reading my stuff out with enthusiasm. The "Flarf" anecdote was cool. I hadn't heard of that. There are jokes around every corner in the poetry world, apparently.
I will check those out! I hadn't seen that before I recorded the episode (Katie sent me your 3 poems to read ahead of time)
Were the statistics you cited regarding ethnicity and publishing solely with respect to America? The "discourse" is very Americanised, and American cultural mores get projected onto the context, regardless of the context, basically every in the Anglosphere. And as for women "winning and dominating", it would seem incoherent to argue that having more men published is somehow unrepresentative of the human experience and in need of rectification; yet 73% of books being published being by female authors isn't of equal concern. And, "come on...they had their turn" is one of the most intellectually incurious things I have ever heard.
I only have experience working in American book publishing and I’m not qualified to comment on foreign markets
I’m sure they aren’t writing many STEM books so the actual intellectual side is still covered.
I’d be interested to see how much emotion and drama you can fit into an engineering manual though…
Hi Leigh, I just wanted to say I thought Self Care was hilarious and I pre-ordered If You're Reading This.
thank you so much! email me if you’d like stickers: stickers@leighstein.com
I will!!!
While there are a whole bunch of reasons that men are reading and writing fewer books, I think an underexplored reason is the huge rise in the amount of time guys spend playing video games.
I also suspect video games are a big factor, though certainly not the only one, in the decline of a lot of male centered hobbies like rockhounding, model building, and coin collecting.
Comics have been decimated by video games - which is understandable - when you attend comic conventions that are actually about comics it’s old dudes, some 20/30-thing indie creators and families with kids under 12. The 12-20 range? Nada.
One of the worst indictments of Marvel and DC's comics divisions is that despite how popular superhero stuff has been for the last 15-20 years, they've done a horrible job attracting new readers. It's not like kids and teens don't enjoy comics. Manga and stuff like those Dog Man books are pretty popular.
There's definitely a crowding out effect where comics are competing with video games for entertainment time and money. The comics industry hasn't done itself any favors with a distribution model where new comics are almost exclusively sold through comic shops now, expensive comics (most kids and teens can't afford to regularly spend $5 for a single issue), chasing the adult collector market, and it being hard for new readers to easily find an entry point to jump in. I always liked the idea of reading superhero comics when I was a kid in the 90s, but whenever I bought an issue at Walgreens I was jumping midway into a story that spanned multiple issues and I had no idea what was going on.
I know well my friend, the end of newsstand distribution was a serious error. Even more so now Diamond - the monopoly distributor - has recently gone bankrupt.
Personally superhero comics aren’t my thing but I appreciate the skill in the art.
I think superhero comics, specifically, are at best an antiquated niche at this point. It was one thing in the 1940s-1980s when comic books were pretty much the only place you'd find that genre outside of the occasional campy TV show or Superman movie. But now the market is so saturated with high-quality superhero content that comics just can't compete.
Surprisingly, if you don't let your kids stare at TV, YouTube, cell phones, tablets, video games, etc. 6 hours a day (the US average for 8-12 year olds) they read a surprising volume of comic books and graphic novels.
Can confirm.
Men ARE reading books.
They just aren't reading FICTION.
From what I see in my circles, men are reading a lot of hard fantasy and alternate history. There's some "Napoleonic Wars with dragons" series that has a huge following.
And science fiction!
The Bureau of Labor Statistics does an annual survey on how Americans spend their time.
The percent of dudes reading on the average day has really dropped off in the last 20 years. https://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/TUU30105AA01050847
The amount of time the average guy reads has dropped off too: https://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/TUU10101AA01021753
The percentage of women reading and amount of time women spend reading on the average day has dropped off too although is still quite a bit higher than men.
I think maybe podcasts and audiobooks have eaten books. I am always learning by listening stuff I would have read twenty years ago.
Most people include audio books in their count of "books read this year" or whatever.
Not sure I agree. But everyone I know consistently includes audio books in their books I've read list.
I'd wager those stats in the survey include a lot of audio "books".
The kind of guys that play video games all the time where the guys who read sky and crime fiction in the 90s. I wonder what happened to the literary fiction male reader.
Different video games. The crime fiction bunch is playing Modern Soldier XI: New Dawn or Axe of Magic, while a lot of potential literary types now instead have strong opinions on Bluesky about Autism: The Pixel Art RPG.
(All names are made up, but the gamers will know what I'm talking about.)
They fucked off or something. Dunno. Maybe it got eaten by comic book movies? It's not like they can't go down to the library and get some Cormac McCarthy (difficult to find something more literary and male than him) but it's clearly not as interesting as whatever it is they're doing instead.
In my experience, the ratio of men who *claim* they've read McCarthy (specifically Blood Meridian) to those who have actually read him is like 100:1.
I have not read it. Now I feel compelled to read it so I can be 1 in 100.
It's only a few hundred pages. Could knock it out in a day or two.
*edit*
Also, apparently I need to read it so everyone can understand just how manly I am. Do you get a t-shirt?
No, just bragging rights, as with every other piece of "difficult" literature.
That's unfortunate. I'm all for bragging rights. But it'd been nice to get some T signaling as a bonus.
That's fair - it's too bad it's Hella epic and so well written. I did sort of develop a heuristic where people who said they stopped at the animal abuse were judged more harshly than those who indicated the uh you know everything else in the story.
(tbf there's a lot of dead animals but cmon)
It's a great book but fitting that BM (and the character of Judge Holden specifically) is the McCarthy that's broken through to mainstream internet culture, people love the old ultraviolence. The Road is a much shorter and easier read but far less of a manly signifier because Oprah liked it too. And of course none of these goofballs are stanning for Suttree or All The Pretty Horses.
Honestly I blame it more on the title than anything else...ATPLH doesn't roll off the tongue as much.
And as a "study in masculinity" the crossing seems more on-point? (whatever the fuck masculinity means but it's important to the chuds)
I made the mistake of reading the road when my partner was pregnant with my son. I'd read all his "westerns" and figured this was a good change of pace. Bad bad timing on my part! Ugh...
Should have just reread suttree...
It's definitely video games.
You notice a delineation in different types of books and the different guys who read them. Now realize that games have the same phenomenon. Guys who play 100 hours of baldurs gate and are actually interested in the new oblivion remaster are an entirely different group of people who play online shooters with friends.
I think the type of guys who game all the time today are probably a lot less likely to be the type who might have been drawn to literary fiction in an earlier era, but even the guys I know who read literary fiction now still spend some time gaming.
I like to game and admittedly it’s more fun than reading. But I will read on the subway
For me, gaming tends to be more fun in the short term. Reading tends to be much more satisfying long term. One thing I’ve tried to do in the last few years is to do activities that I’ll be happier I did in the long run vs the short run.
Of course, reading isn’t always more satisfying in the long run. I still think about how goddamn much I hate everything about the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I barely remember crappy video games I’ve played.
I love a good book! I tend to love characters I read about even if historically they are not the best. For instance I was very high on President Jackson after reading a book about him by Jon Meachem while understanding historically he did a lot of not so great stuff.
I saw a guy with a Steam deck on the tube during the morning commute, and I was so embarrassed for him.
Why?
I had to google what that was, shows how much I know lol
I managed bookstores from the late 90’s to the early 2010’s and even then it was a truism that almost all our customers were women.
Enjoyed this a lot, but am quite surprised that you didn’t mention the movie American Fiction which satirizes the difficulties faced by a black author who doesn’t write “black” literature. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, but still an enjoyable movie and very relevant to this topic.
I was thinking that too. It was enjoyable though I felt they could have pushed the topic a bit further.
American Fiction was a weird one. It was 70% family tragedy and 30% preaching to the choir about woke stuff. The latter plot felt like it needed a few more drafts.
Yeah, I didn't love the movie for the reasons you mentioned - heavy on the family tragedy and a preachiness to the 'woke' stuff even when (I think?) it was attempting to satirise it. It's based on a book by Percival Everett, and I wonder if I might prefer it or would the same things annoy me.
I like how Katie is deleting her entire digital footprint at the same that Jesse is crashing out on Twitter. Sincerely curious to see which tactic sells more books.
As a black woman let me say that I am disgusted by white males faking their race and gender for gain.
🤣🤣🤣
Wow, LiveJournal, Girls, xoJane, dressing up as Joan from Mad Men... This conversation is making me so nostalgic about a specific chapter of my life.
It feels like unpacking a time capsule.
I laughed out loud at the intro about Singal handed.
“Tight-ass Andronicus” would be an incredible male stripper name. Someone get on that.
I hated the first poem, really — tho Stein is probably right that it could play live with the right performer. Second poem not so bad. Third was in fact bad though, imho… tho this is not a deeply felt/firmly held assessment.
I respect the effort, but no. Those poems are inane nonsense. If men are no longer getting sufficiently high on our own literary supply to sincerely write that sort of drivel, it’s honestly to our credit.
I liked the kitty one
I read Victim a few weeks ago, and it seemed like suuuuch a BARpod book so it’s cool to see it mentioned in this ep. It’s about a literary scandal surrounding identity, so naturally while reading it I was reminded of Yellowface, a much more successful and popular book that is also about a literary scandal surrounding identity that I thought was maddeningly unsophisticated and preachy. Yellowface really relies on creating caricatures of its characters while Victim makes fun of those kinds of caricatures. Yellowface didn’t teach me anything while Victim reeeally made me think. I really wish Victim was getting more love because it really deserves it, Boryga did such a great job on it. Y’all should buy a copy!
I actually really enjoyed Yellowface (though I have heard others make similar criticisms!) Reading both Yellowface and Victim, I kept thinking “I can’t believe this got published!” I think publishing people want to signal they get the joke….. otherwise they’d have to admit they’re the object of the joke
I agree, I thought Yellowface was actually quite nuanced. Babel, on the other hand, was just embarrassing.
That’s true, they are both very transgressive in the same ways!
I understand your critisism of yellowface but I actually enjoyed it a lot. I was suprised that it was actually very critical of cancel culture and satirized the publishing industry quite effectively. I will read victim next.
Looks like I made the show. Big ups to Katie for the feature. Lots to address here. Stein's takes are a little milquetoast, and her stats on publishing are, for reasons that would probably get me banned in most places, inaccurate, but Stein was a good sport when reading out the poems at the end. That was fun to hear. And her personal testimony about client demographics was interesting.
The big joke with the "Decolonizing" piece was that the beef suya the speaker intends to feed the cat would actually kill it due to the garlic/onion powder content. The "sub_urban boi" one was pure what I call "constellation poetry" nonsense, if you simply read it on the page and don't perform it. (Fun thought, though.) "Corporeal" has already taken it down as a part of their "whisper network" pushback to try to avoid encouraging what I've done. And the emojipasta poem was a completely original one I drafted up on my phone in about three minutes' time while thinking about Shakespeare's love life. You can still find it online under my "B. H. Fein" persona, and its got a fancy AWARD-NOMINATED designation above it, but they messed up the emojis trying to publish it, which we fixed in the manu.
As for the idea about people on "my side" of the industry creating our own publications -- well, we do do that (without any government funding or media attention, typically), but that's a can of worms that would take a great deal of time and effort to dissect. The "Pere Ube" website hosts a free sample of my book with my full afterword explanation included for why I did this, for those who might think this was simply a shallow stunt. Or come stop by my Substack for a truncated explanation. I think even the free Amazon sample features the afterword and my publication notes, too.
But in brief, I love poetry, and I love poets. That said, we were long overdue for another literary ruse to shake things up and start important conversations.
(lol -- they gave me AI blackface.)
I agree that you succeeded in writing poems that shouldn’t have been pubbed, my man… bought your book as an artifact of the moment, tho
Really appreciate it, man. Give me a shout when you've read it and let me know what you think!
Onions and garlic are toxic to cats but they’re not very lethal, so you’d be looking at a sick cat rather than a dead one if you fed it beef suya.
God, listening to those poems was a punishment. I GOT IT, THEY'RE BAD. Stop hurting me.
We stopped listening after an hour. We kept waiting for Katie to push back on Leigh's identitarianism and finally gave up.
When she explained that white men novelists aren't publishing because they are busy being "white men whining on the internet" I thought is she joking? Or is she making excuses for open discrimination against a disfavored identity? (Note: white men are not a category sharing the same characteristics, interests, politics, or abilities.)
Who brought Ibram X. Kendi into the chat with that "18% of books by POC"? As if that reflects some kind of racism instead of, well, any number of other factors?
And when Katie pointed out how white men have been kept off "best of" lists, Leigh reiterates the "it's our turn" bullshit. Was she joking? Was I missing the sarcasm?
Two wrongs don't make a right. Categorizing people by immutable characteristics is bad, especially when we're talking about culture. Right? Right? Did I mishear this podcast?
I couldn't believe that on the podcast I enjoy for skewering identitarian bullshit, I had to listen to some of it being taken seriously. Or was I just not getting the joke?
I thought she was at least half-joking in both cases?
Think it is part of the point I made below. Sure the B&R podcast skewers "identitarian bullshit" as you write at times, but this podcast also shows that it is indeed alive and well when it comes to certain situations, even on B&R.
I stuck it out to the end, somehow. And no, it did not get any better. Katie at least at one point mentioned the merits of blind submissions, but then LS prattled on about the value of "branding" authors to sell books and all that intersectional bullshit that has completely destroyed the arts. She further whined about the pay structure of the gatekeepers (the lit agents/editors) in the big publishing houses, as if that had anything to do with anything. The fact is that these corrupt gatekeepers (the twenty something female Ivy-League-educated trust fund babies) actually care very little about good literature but very much about appearing to be virtuous people vis a vis the authors they allow to pass through. It is the reason most books, plays, and movies these days are absolute garbage. The storytelling has completely been supplanted by the immutable characteristics of the storyteller. It's been a bad joke for a while now, and extremely disappointing to see these views countenanced on an episode of B&R.
I don’t entirely disagree with you but I also think it’s okay to hear from people who don’t quite agree with many of us here on occassion. I for one am OK with certain efforts toward diversity but not when it becomes totalizing, as it has. I felt like that was where Stein was coming from. I did think the comment about male writers was a bit daft but it’s also true that there is a lot of whining out there. On the other hand, I also think it’s true that Hemingway wouldn’t make it past the slush pile today — but tough counterfactual to prove.
The intersectional and oppression pyramid way of viewing the world is turning people's brains into mush I feel. In the end you are caught in a regressive and oppressive world view where the capable and excellent has to take a step backwards, where bias becomes something to be proud of.
Listening to this podcast it becomes clear what a mind prison it is. One in which you can tell yourself you are well-meaning and doing good. And it is one where way too many middle class and educated women find themselves.