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snarpPlease see cleolinda's timeline for a description of this situation, if you're not familiar with it. Disclaimer: I'm a fan of both Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown's work, have been reading Brown's blog for years, and know nothing about Joanna Stampfel-Volpe and Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation.
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swan_tower says something close to what I have been thinking about the situation involving rachelmanija and sartorias's YA book:
It is armchair psychology time. Armchair psychology time comes in the evening after I've had some tea but before I've given the cats their pills.
The law firm I work for does a lot of plaintiff's work, which means that we represent people who have decided to sue other people (or corporations). Some of them call bewildered with fury over the awful things that have happened to them. Some of them lie.
These groups overlap. It has been my observation that they overlap very heavily.
We like to believe that we're the Good Guys. To do that, we also need to believe that we have enemies, who are the Bad Guys. We tell stories about this to ourselves constantly, even though we know better; they're comforting, and usually harmless. I mean, our private conclusion that our ex was born with horns, one hoof, and a dog-eared copy of The Fountainhead is not really going to do him or her much damage. The friends to whom we impart this knowledge at 9:42 PM know better than to act upon it materially. Mostly, so do we.
The problem comes when we decide that we need public vindication. That's when we call a lawyer to see about suing our ex for wrecking our car. And we definitely want to get the incident where he told us we sucked at Starcraft into evidence. It constitutes, like, a pattern of jerkitude, which we're pretty sure is a legal term. We want to sue him because, by means of an alchemical process involving a frowny judge and a brief article in the local paper, vindication from a jury about the car thing becomes a vindication of our personal beliefs. Partly of our beliefs about him, but mainly of our beliefs about ourselves.
Suppose that the night before the accident, we said it was okay for him to drive even though he'd been up for forty-eight hours and probably shouldn't have been on the road, but we were tired and grumpy and didn't want him staying over. That's not all black and white. Some people might say that we pressured him into a situation in which he might have killed himself or someone else, some people that he could have called a cab and it was all on him, some that there was blame on both sides.
Yet we've already established very firmly to ourselves that we're the good guy, which must make him the bad guy. The impulse to edit the story is natural. It doesn't change anything important. He's the Bad Guy, and that's the only truth that matters.
When we feel vulnerable, we need external validation of our own value, and we'll sometimes mess around with the truth to get it. And when that happens, at some point in the process, we always end up buying into our own lies. We're constantly rewriting our own histories to make ourselves the sort of people we'd like to be.
And I think that even that's often harmless, or even helpful. Sometimes, though, it is harmful. Because sometimes, people behave really badly if they find themselves in the wrong story.
It's this sort of thing that makes it hard for me to tell whether someone's lying to me. It's one thing when someone knows they're lying; on most people that's easy to recognize. But once someone in this situation has worked themselves up enough to do this drastic thing of calling a lawyer, it's very likely that they believe their own story. More than that - the narrative of their aggrieved innocence has become necessary to their identity.
There are people who, minutes after you meet them, start telling you stories about the terrible people who have hurt them. It's a form of self-introduction; I'm a Good Guy, as you can tell from my harrowing run-in with the Bad Guys, which I will now relate to you. If you question that story's weak points - even in a neutral, curious way because you, like, didn't actually catch how that poor parakeet got into the cooler in the first place - you're their enemy for life. You're questioning the very state of their soul.
After enough of this, you start doubting people who say they know a villain.
And you know,rachelmanija and sartorias weren't the ones who did that.
I find it extremely difficult to trust Stampfel-Volpe's version of the story, simply because it is an personally hostile response to a carefully impersonal post that was neither about her specifically nor, largely, about her agency; it was very carefully written to be about a larger trend. The thing that makes me most suspicious is the fact that the original post named no names, but got the sort of reaction that I would expect from a person who feels very exposed.
Stampfel-Volpe says that there were rumors about the agency in the aftermath; but to my knowledge, no one else has produced any evidence of this. It's easy to suspect that they heard the rumors in their own heads first. (I was on a filter she used to make some private posts on the subject before going public, andrachelmanija didn't mention any identifying information. This doesn't rule out the possibility that she or Smith discussed it elsewhere, but if she'd honestly wanted to "spread rumors," that filter would have been the avenue to take.)
People do get all sorts of issues that make them feel guilty for no reason. There are sad German books on the subject and all. But Occam's Razor suggests that they may, you know, actually be feeling guilty about having done the thing they were accused of doing. I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that Stampfel-Volpe thought that the explanation for the parakeet thing would make her agency look bad.
-
Regardless of all of this, due in large part to Stampfel-Volpe's comments, you can now find a lot of people saying, whew, there's no homophobia in YA publishing after all! How nice.
Again, take a look at cleolinda's timeline: after Brown and Smith's announcement went up, twelve other authors, many of whom also used their real names, showed up to say that exactly the same thing had happened to them.
I think that that indicates a problem, people.
cleolinda's timeline for a description of this situation, if you're not familiar with it. Disclaimer: I'm a fan of both Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown's work, have been reading Brown's blog for years, and know nothing about Joanna Stampfel-Volpe and Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation.swan_tower says something close to what I have been thinking about the situation involving rachelmanija and sartorias's YA book:But even without the evidence I've seen and you haven't: one side was careful not to make this personal, and the other side was not.
It is armchair psychology time. Armchair psychology time comes in the evening after I've had some tea but before I've given the cats their pills.
The law firm I work for does a lot of plaintiff's work, which means that we represent people who have decided to sue other people (or corporations). Some of them call bewildered with fury over the awful things that have happened to them. Some of them lie.
These groups overlap. It has been my observation that they overlap very heavily.
We like to believe that we're the Good Guys. To do that, we also need to believe that we have enemies, who are the Bad Guys. We tell stories about this to ourselves constantly, even though we know better; they're comforting, and usually harmless. I mean, our private conclusion that our ex was born with horns, one hoof, and a dog-eared copy of The Fountainhead is not really going to do him or her much damage. The friends to whom we impart this knowledge at 9:42 PM know better than to act upon it materially. Mostly, so do we.
The problem comes when we decide that we need public vindication. That's when we call a lawyer to see about suing our ex for wrecking our car. And we definitely want to get the incident where he told us we sucked at Starcraft into evidence. It constitutes, like, a pattern of jerkitude, which we're pretty sure is a legal term. We want to sue him because, by means of an alchemical process involving a frowny judge and a brief article in the local paper, vindication from a jury about the car thing becomes a vindication of our personal beliefs. Partly of our beliefs about him, but mainly of our beliefs about ourselves.
Suppose that the night before the accident, we said it was okay for him to drive even though he'd been up for forty-eight hours and probably shouldn't have been on the road, but we were tired and grumpy and didn't want him staying over. That's not all black and white. Some people might say that we pressured him into a situation in which he might have killed himself or someone else, some people that he could have called a cab and it was all on him, some that there was blame on both sides.
Yet we've already established very firmly to ourselves that we're the good guy, which must make him the bad guy. The impulse to edit the story is natural. It doesn't change anything important. He's the Bad Guy, and that's the only truth that matters.
When we feel vulnerable, we need external validation of our own value, and we'll sometimes mess around with the truth to get it. And when that happens, at some point in the process, we always end up buying into our own lies. We're constantly rewriting our own histories to make ourselves the sort of people we'd like to be.
And I think that even that's often harmless, or even helpful. Sometimes, though, it is harmful. Because sometimes, people behave really badly if they find themselves in the wrong story.
It's this sort of thing that makes it hard for me to tell whether someone's lying to me. It's one thing when someone knows they're lying; on most people that's easy to recognize. But once someone in this situation has worked themselves up enough to do this drastic thing of calling a lawyer, it's very likely that they believe their own story. More than that - the narrative of their aggrieved innocence has become necessary to their identity.
There are people who, minutes after you meet them, start telling you stories about the terrible people who have hurt them. It's a form of self-introduction; I'm a Good Guy, as you can tell from my harrowing run-in with the Bad Guys, which I will now relate to you. If you question that story's weak points - even in a neutral, curious way because you, like, didn't actually catch how that poor parakeet got into the cooler in the first place - you're their enemy for life. You're questioning the very state of their soul.
After enough of this, you start doubting people who say they know a villain.
And you know,
rachelmanija and sartorias weren't the ones who did that.I find it extremely difficult to trust Stampfel-Volpe's version of the story, simply because it is an personally hostile response to a carefully impersonal post that was neither about her specifically nor, largely, about her agency; it was very carefully written to be about a larger trend. The thing that makes me most suspicious is the fact that the original post named no names, but got the sort of reaction that I would expect from a person who feels very exposed.
Stampfel-Volpe says that there were rumors about the agency in the aftermath; but to my knowledge, no one else has produced any evidence of this. It's easy to suspect that they heard the rumors in their own heads first. (I was on a filter she used to make some private posts on the subject before going public, and
rachelmanija didn't mention any identifying information. This doesn't rule out the possibility that she or Smith discussed it elsewhere, but if she'd honestly wanted to "spread rumors," that filter would have been the avenue to take.)People do get all sorts of issues that make them feel guilty for no reason. There are sad German books on the subject and all. But Occam's Razor suggests that they may, you know, actually be feeling guilty about having done the thing they were accused of doing. I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that Stampfel-Volpe thought that the explanation for the parakeet thing would make her agency look bad.
-
Regardless of all of this, due in large part to Stampfel-Volpe's comments, you can now find a lot of people saying, whew, there's no homophobia in YA publishing after all! How nice.
Again, take a look at cleolinda's timeline: after Brown and Smith's announcement went up, twelve other authors, many of whom also used their real names, showed up to say that exactly the same thing had happened to them.
I think that that indicates a problem, people.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 05:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 01:13 pm (UTC)Although I'm biased having followed both authors on their LJs and being part of their filtered lists for around 7 to 9 years now. They don't do gossip - as much as Will Shetterly would like to imply. If they have a beef with a person they know and they want to post about it, they name names for their discussions.
If it's not about a single person, but a bigger issue they use links and their own opinions. And they've never openly, aggressively called any person a liar in all that time.