At a sold-out Guardian event on Friday night, James said publishers too often sought fiction that “panders to that archetype of the white woman, that long-suffering, astringent prose set in suburbia. You know, ‘older mother or wife sits down and thinks about her horrible life’.”...You know, there are a lot of us white women who don't want to read that kind of crap either, but I guess we have the benefit of the feeling of being the nexus of pandering, even when we don't like what's served.
By the way, let me ask — in a long-suffering, astringent way — Is choosing an "author of colour" for the Man Booker prize another way of pandering to white women?
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True dat!
Everybody panders to white women. It is the price of our male privilege!
How foolish of those Publishing Companies and authors to market to their audience!
It's like they're trying to stay in business/make a living or something!!
How so very laudable that Marlon James has avoided falling into this trap. He can remain true to his vision. What an artiste!! (Cue the confetti shower of rose petals!!)
...because that's where the book money is.
You know, there are a lot of us white women who don't want to read that kind of crap either, but I guess we have the benefit of the feeling of being the nexus of pandering, even when we don't like what's served.
They go where the money is.
Similarly only 40% of women like soap opera newscasts and politics, but it's a big enough bloc to pay the bills. There's no other group to take up the slack if you run hard news.
My claim is that the 60% of women who vote like men should see that they're better off if no women vote, since they vote like the men who would be left; but those women are not logical. it's the woman's brain.
White woman that I am, I read fiction to escape the long-suffering astringent suburbia I inhabit.
I look at Amazon and, AFAICT, if you want to be an A list writer you have to write Romance. I'm sure that "Marlina" James could sell a lot of books if xe learned the template.
"You know, ‘older mother or wife sits down and thinks about her horrible life’.”..."
What if the older wife is reflecting on how much better her life would have been if she had been strong enough to face Oppression and had married that black guy she longed for back in her youth?
Of course, you would have to add depth and nuance to it: it just can't be about her missing the Black Cock.
I am Laslo.
The name of the prize (the "MAN" Prize) is genderist
"Is choosing an "author of colour" for the Man Booker prize another way of pandering to white women?"
One more layer: that "author of color" using the award as a platform from which to slag "white women" is of course also a mechanism of pandering to white women.
If targeted, thematic "pandering" of this kind gets under this guy's skin he can't be a Democrat, can he?
It all hints at a black man/white woman fantasy thing going on.
I read Ann Enright's "The Gathering", which won the 2007 Man Booker, and he certainly nails it as far as that particular book is concerned. It has a whiny, navel gazing, unfriendly narrator with affluenza, and obviously needed a better editor - has major timeline inconsistencies (a body is pulled out of the ocean after several days, and THEY HAVE AN OPEN CASKET, and the protagonist goes and considers the body in the funeral home - inspecting the eyelashes, etc - this is preposterous). I wanted to jump into the book and strangle the narrator.
And who is Mr. James pandering to by bitching about the ennui of long-suffering, astringent white women and the publishers who seek to sell them books? It seems someone hands out awards for writing those kinds of books - awards that can just as easily be turned down as not. Is this what they call having ones cake and trying to eat it, too?
A shorter lament, and more to the point, would be "I never had the balls to be a starving artist."
He's judgmental, racist, sexist, and a supremacist, too. His market is self-limited to the snob club and "good Germans".
1. Who he?
2. After looking him up, the following comes to mind: Too much "Ganja"; Too much arch-typical and racist blaming of Whites for some Black's failures.
Excerpt from the 2016 Man Booker Prize Winner "The Negro of Madison County."
There is snow, silent, cold unlistening, unknowable snow just outside the window of her Conneticut home. Sipping Chamomile Tea, Sarah's mind slips wistful into the past, to that One Hot Summer in 1957 in Madison County...
"I'm sorry, but I don't think I can do this anymore."
"Miss Sarah, No! Is its cause I'm a Negro?"
"Our lives just lead two different ways. I'm going to an All-Girls College back East in the Fall, and --"
"--And I lives in a tin shack behind the junkyard. I get it."
"I wish it didn't have to be this way..."
"But Miss Sarah, it doesn't! Beneath my Negro skin I am the same Mandingo Jones you've come to love."
"But I may marry a doctor, or a lawyer. That could be my future."
"I could be a Doctor, too, Sarah, if only the Whites Man would let me."
"Oh Mandingo, this world is so unfair."
"I is the only Negro in Madison County: I know how unfairs it can be. But you -- you can makes a choice. You can be Strong."
"I can never be as Strong as you, Mandingo."
"So this is it, Miss Sarah? This ises Good-Bye?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Could we makes love, just one more time, in my tin shack? Could that be Good-Bye?"
"Yes, my Love, my Mandingo. We will make love, one last time, in your tin shack, by the bucket of chicken bones."
"Can I do's you in the ass, Miss Sarah?"
"How about we just make love like two white people..."
"I can do that for you, Miss Sarah: I can do that..."
I am Laslo.
Everyone pandering to white women is more proof of the patriarchy.
"Marlon James has slammed the publishing world, saying authors of colour too often 'pander to white women' to sell books"
The beginning of an insight. As others have noted, "that's where the money is." Any white men here who care to read Marlon James? But it goes deeper. The world is organized by (mostly white) men for the benefit of (mostly white) women -- they get to lead longer lives, in greater comfort, social spending geared to their needs, with right to vote and abort, all media catering to them 24/7, child birth ignored or made easy, all tech they'd ever need provided courtesy of male nerds, all the dirty work of maintaining infrastructure done by men, all the needless dying for the nation done by men. If Mr. James were to take the next step, he might even begin to think of feminism as the embodiment of white privilege. Have at it, Mr. James. But then also take the next next step. Cui bono, ultimately? And is this sustainable?
Crazy authors, wanting to write whatever they want and sell more books at the same time.
Crazy white women, reading books they like and all that.
Crazy publishers, wanting books that get bought.
Whats the old saw? Once you go black, you never go back.
Authors of Colour Matter. Sounds a lot like a KKK rant with the names of the race changed to protect the innocent.
When sexual sports become blase, Boredom becomes the Enemy.
"You know, ‘older mother or wife sits down and thinks about her horrible life’.”..."
Heh. The Hours!
What was that horrible other one where the woman is sad on trash day because everyone has a garbage can on the curb?
MadisonMan said...
How foolish of those Publishing Companies and authors to market to their audience!
It's like they're trying to stay in business/make a living or something!!
Or, they could publish more books that men would want to read and, gasp!, grow their audience! Imagine targeting an overlooked niche market, 50% of the human race. Nah, that's too much like work.
I'm personally tired of fiction in which some significant portion of the characters work for a university.
Write what you know! they say. Hemingway was an ambulance driver and went on safari. Modern writers work for university creative writing departments.
Choosing an author? I thought they at least pretended to choose a book.
His complaint boils down to that he lives in a predominantly white country where the publishers cater to white woman who prefer white crap to black crap. Perhaps he ought to try to get published in predominantly black countries where the women prefer black crap to white crap.
“panders to that archetype of the white woman, that long-suffering, astringent prose set in suburbia. You know, ‘older mother or wife sits down and thinks about her horrible life’.”
White women are the readers who could afford $30 or more to buy books, the luxury of time to read, to day-dream, to read about someone else's "horrible life" and not to think at all.
A publisher's job is to publish and sell books, preferably a best seller to keep his company afloat... or to dish out millions of advances to pay off politicians such as Hillary before she's sworn in as a US senator.
A publisher meets a paying reader, and hears the nicest music of the cash register. What is not to like?
Most likely Marlon James's brilliance was a one hit wonder, and doesn't have anything else, ergo, no more books.
Who buys most new fiction? Probably white women. I'd love to see statistics on this.
Is it bad because they're white, or because they're women?
I don't think I've ever read a book about a long-suffering white woman in suburbia thinking about her horrible life. Maybe, but I don't think so. I mean, why ever would I? I have read a few about angry, resentful black men, though.
Black man wins award:
White people to blame, somehow.
He's probably on the short list for a MacArthur and gets laid more than Charley Sheen. He's not so dumb. On the other hand, some Pakistani cab driver passed him by so he knows all about the dark reality of racism in America.
You could go broke trying to sell books to black men.
""Marlon James has slammed the publishing world, saying authors of colour too often 'pander to white women' to sell books"
Perhaps literature is an art, but publishing is a business. Most businesses understand that success comes from providing customers with what they will actually buy (which may be very different from what they say they would want to buy).
So, if you want to be a starving artist then write literature that few (except perhaps libraries buying from the ALA's recommended list, if your work is PC enough) will buy. Or which you'll have to self-publish, because no publisher wants it. But don't ask publishers to be something other than what they are: businesses that profits by supplying what customers are actually willing to pay for.
Or perhaps if you're really clever, write literature that is also good commercial product. As Dickens did (for example).
Or, you could gripe that your customers must be boors and fools (perhaps racist fools) for wanting what they want, instead of what you wish to offer.
I avoid DVDs about the future, for not having any dramatic structure, and anything with a prom in it, which is most high school coming of age shows.
Is choosing an "author of colour" for the Man Booker prize another way of pandering to white women?
If the reason for the choice was skin color ... yes.
I guess the publishing world needs a better class of book buyers to solve this problem.
Can Marlon James speak/write in Spanish? It's a growth market...
Hipster author of color is a new stereotype for me, but since it seems to fold in the salient attributes of its sub-stereotypes I don't think it's much of a challenge.
"Uh, writing that sells is so mainstream, so conformist. I'm too cool and edgy for that."
I wonder how this demographic changed once women were taken out of the kitchen, advised to abort or plan their babies, became taxable commodities of the state, sent into combat in order to prove an ideological point, and discriminated by class diversity schemes.
Life is full of choices, and this fellow made a few in what he chose to write about and how he went about it. Nice to know that he thinks his choices were superior, on some unstated scale of goodness, to the "long-suffering, astringent prose" he declined to produce.
Of course, the same goes for those who buy and read books -- they get to pick and choose, too, and to use their own scale of goodness in doing so.
It's a process in which every player gets to feel superior to all the others. And, lacking any accepted scale of measurement, all the players are right in thinking so.
What a world we live in. Thank you, Nietzsche.
rabbit redux?
I'll have to read this novel about the fictionalization of the attempted murder of Bob Marley. Don't know how many Marley fans like novels but I do
"Can Marlon James speak/write in Spanish? It's a growth market..."
Its not. Spanish language media in the US is pretty limited and does not run to intellectually challenging forms, certainly not novels. Even Spanish language TV isn't very overtly political because the common denominator is so low.
And I suspect most of the market for Spanish language books in the US, such as it is, is Anglo academics, students and literature specialists.
Spanish-speaking people in the US, with the education or ability to enjoy literature, seem to nearly all prefer the English language for literature.
Who buys most new fiction? Probably white women. I'd love to see statistics on this.
Women buy 59% of fiction, and whites buy proportionally more books than blacks, so, yeah. This has been a truism for awhile, and it's self-reinforcing. With women buying most of the new fiction, publishers target women, which in turn makes men less likely to buy.
"Who buys most new fiction? Probably white women. I'd love to see statistics on this."
Does the Walking Dead comic books count? ... if they do teenage / young adult white males are making a dent it the female lead, if my sons' reading habits are indicative.
Google the Sad Puppies Project regarding the Hugo Awards to determine all one need know about the publishing world today.
Not only are all left wing, progressive viewpoints tolerated, indeed required, the publiswriters have to be left of LGBTQs' screaming about their sexuality at Midnight Mass in St. Pat's Cathedral, to be published at all.
I'm thinking it's pandering to black men, and leftists in general. Not specific, though, or the winner would be a black and LGBTQetc.
90% of all fiction is bought by women. And I assume white women make up the vast majority of that.
Given the above, I'm always surprised how many fiction writers are Jewish Men.
I haven't read anything by him but I expect he is pretty good. But he is a writer who doesn't know anything about business and to listen to his thoughts on publishing is like leaning in to Barbara Streisand's political commentary. Or any other actor.
Also, he teaches in Minnesota and is originally from Jamaica. Very few white women in Jamaica and many very very white women in Minnesota.
If James Patterson didn't take a crap and while taking a crap thought up the next Alex cross book "a man is on the toilet. While on the toilet he looks out the window and sees a man pointing a gun at another man on the toilet. Boom! Next Alex cross book" he might actually come up with better books.
But there is a market for shitty books, and hes writing to that market. And does pretty well for himself. And considering he writes around 12 books a month there apparently is a big market for treacle.
This "man of color" is simply mad that he's not massively famous like James Patterson. He reminds me of the punk rocker who says "I,m not in it for the fame or the money. I'm just in it for the art" well, you have a choice. Go for the top 40, or do art. If art, you might not actually sell records. But at least you are not pandering to teeny boppers.
Meanwhile, those that succeed at pandering to teeny boppers usually live in huge mansions.
If black men of color pandered to a black audience would they get other black men of color to read their books?
This stuff starts in school at a young age. Need some Cormac McCarthy on the fifth grade reading list. I'd put this guy's book on there, too. Sounds pretty interesting.
From the original Guardian article:
"James wrote a response to a piece titled On Pandering by novelist Claire Vaye Watkins, in which she examined the pressure on female writers to suit male expectations of writing in order to get published."
So, in a liberal rag newpaper, a column mentions that a female writer complains she has to pander to men (really?) and the black writer de jour then complains, Oh yeah, well, I have to pander to white women!
My oppression trumps your oppression. Bitch.
They both need some safe space.
I for one am done with fiction about people coping with things. You don't like something, you shoot a gigantic space laser at it. Or you take the Shakespearean route and start swinging a poisoned sword around until all whiners have been accounted for.
And don't get me started about beautiful sentences, or I'll start swinging a poisoned sword at you.
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