Guardian article about Kate Clanchy "The book that tore publishing apart: ‘Harm has been done, and now everyone’s afraid’"

[miri1985]

www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/18/the-book-that-tore-publishing-apart-harm-has-been-done-and-now-everyones-afraid

Interesting article but Sarah Ditum said it on twitter better than I could "I think it's a major flaw that this article broadly assumes good faith on the part of cancel-culture agitators. A lot of them are perfectly self-interested and borderline sociopathic" twitter.com/sarahditum/status/1538144622643494912?cxt=HHwWgIC-3dCYy9gqAAAA

What's your point, Iris?

My last contribution: I don’t believe all types of offence are equal. I believe there are degrees of offence, and the degree is experienced subjectively. I find racism offensive. I also find mimicry of people’s religious beliefs offensive. I am entitled to find these things equally offensive, or differentially offensive, depending on what I said.

What I am not entitled to do (and nor is anyone else in a democratic society) is censor whatever offends me.

(depending on what is said)

That you might answer the question.

I don't even know what your question is. Something like, if you are the terrible person I'm accusing you of being, then don't you also think some other terrible thing that I'm accusing you of? Sorry, I couldn't follow exactly. You're not the clearest communicator.

I've made my views extremely clear on this thread. You are welcome to scroll back to the beginning and read all I've written. There you will learn my views on censorship and cancellation, and the state of the arts, which is what this thread is about. I hope that helps.

You can claim this here. Anyone can claim they find racism offensive. But it’s at odds with what you’ve posted elsewhere. If you find racism offensive you do also have to be able to identify it.

I too will bow out now, so as not to "shut down the discussion". Discuss away!

"The publishers should be in the frame more than the author."

I agree with this entirely. I'm so flabbergasted that a huge publishing house like Picador let that manuscript go to press with certain obviously offensive phrases and descriptions just being left to stand! Publishing has always had an editorial process. Books can be improved beyond recognition by a skilled editor. This is what makes professionally written and published books (generally) a vast improvement on most of the self published slush on Amazon.

Picador were hopeless in so many respects here.

I won't comment on cancel culture and what it's like on Twitter as I have no interest. I have no time for Twitter as a source of news or current affairs because, again, it has not been through the editorial process and therefore must be at least 90% guff.

Deliberately misunderstanding everyone's posts must be exhausting.

The internet is full of bad actors. It's good self-care not to engage with them. They add nothing to any of the debates and simply illustrate my earlier points.

The type of censoriousness that is taking place impacts authors and readers from every minority group. It is centring capitalist middle class experiences and prejudices. It is hugely damaging for publishing and literature, and for minority groups. I'll repeat, it's exclusion masked as inclusion. It's insularity disguised as diversity.

And as always the changes that need to take place won't happen on social media but the outcome of those changes do need to start affecting how publishers, writers and readers respond on social media to these debates. There have always been groups who want to burn books; remove platforms; police language and gatekeep who is given a voice. In a way, the current backlash and bullying is a sign that we were starting to make headway in challenging those unfair power dynamics.

Yes, it’s that group (for whom the book was written about and has their poetry amplified) who seems to be saying they like KC and are happy to be involved, while KC’s detractors are repeatedly yelling over them: ‘BUT WE’RE HERE TO SAVE YOU!’

It's saying 'you're not allowed to claim your experience unless you agree with us and frame your lived experience in terms acceptable to us' because 'critics' and I use the term loosely because their criticisms are often removed from critical studies of the text and lack any critical approach to context (whether social, historic, political or textual) are following an agenda that is about silencing voices rather than amplifying them.

It's almost a slippery slope to McCarthyism with shades of 'I saw Goody Proctor reading with the devil ... or writing with the devil.' But it's not hysteria - it's political. It always has been.

A more worthwhile conversation might be how can we as readers and writers counter this tendency? By petitions? By buying books? Women over 25 are the biggest demographic who purchase books. We have a lot of purchasing power and influence. We just need to harness it.

Actually what’s kind of interesting is the perceived ‘victims’ of this has now changed from the anonymized children in the books to the detractors of the book.

(although it isn’t ‘racist’ to struggle with identifying pupils - it’s common).

And it is quite genuinely ableist to use issues with face recognition as evidence of racism. A lot of people with autism struggle with face recognition. Universally, people find it harder to recognise faces of those outside their own race. It’s well-studied.

Not that it’s exactly relevant - as you say, Clanchy never said that and there’s zero connection between her and Prince Philip, even less than there was between her and Kipling (🤣).

But it does demonstrate that these absurd human beings who are contorting themselves so grotesquely for ways to demonise her don’t give a fuck about the collateral damage.

(speaking of people performing grotesque contortions to demonise their enemies, this thread is very like the LGB Alliance thread in aome ways!)

‘And it is quite genuinely ableist to use issues with face recognition as evidence of racism. A lot of people with autism struggle with face recognition. Universally, people find it harder to recognise faces of those outside their own race. It’s well-studied.’

It is. Perfectly okay. It doesn’t suggest any bias against those pupils, and is involuntary.

Funny that.

Claiming victimhood status seems to allow people to get away with all kinds of shit.

Nrtt, and don't intend to. But thought I'd put this here because I like things neat:

www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/24/cancelling-kate-clanchy-has-blocked-publication-of-our-kids-poems

Those kids’ poems were going to be published, but now won’t be

I was already emotional for unrelated reasons so that has properly upset me. I hate to see an underdog get trampled.

Not that it’s exactly relevant - as you say, Clanchy never said that and there’s zero connection between her and Prince Philip, even less than there was between her and Kipling

She cited Prince Philip's inability to distinguish between Chinese people in the book. She compared his inability with her own inability to distinguish the mousey Scottish pupils. The comment has been excised from the current edition.

'I was having difficulty, as Prince Philip had with Chinese people, in telling them apart.'

And trying to smear KC as racist via association with Prince Philip makes you sound desperate

Oh dear, didn't you realise she made the association herself? In her own book?

I think you are completely wrong about that.

In fact I would say that what is going on in this discussion is, to a large extent, about some people wanting to keep any discussion about things racism within a very small framework - essentially allowing only one view. The whole point is to shut down views about racism that challenge the one they support, so there is no discussion where they can both be aired.

Intellectual freedom is not separate from that. Just as we've seen with other areas of id politics, the desire to step away from the established liberal democratic understanding of free speech as fundamental to other democratic freedoms seems to be attached to the claim that anyone who has a different understanding of sex/race/sexuality/gender etc is in fact bigoted.

Not being able to write about these things in the public discourse means people don't get to think about them, to consider their merits, to ask questions. That's a bad thing in any kind of democratic state, it undermines the whole political structure. Publishing, like the media, has a role to play in this that is important and carries with it certain responsibilities.

Her point was about continually making comments about a personal view of what Clanchy said in her book - I don't think whet she said about teeth was the right thing for a teacher to say about a student for example - ignores the real substance of the thread which is about the wider issues in terms of the publishing industry, who gets to have a voice in that industry, intellectual freedom, and all the rest of it.

The fact that people don't like what an author said is just really not the point. There are all kinds of authors people don't like J.K. Rowling, Nabokov, Rushdi, and many others. What happens when publishing begins setting these kinds of lines for what count as "harms"? Or when other authors see this kind of reaction? What about these sensitivity readers, what do they do to publishing?