Who is afraid of the art police?

Yellowface, AI writers, and how to cast spells against commercialism

At the Whale Museum the afternoon before I don't murder the spider because I'm reading a horror story. Not pictured: Living spider. Credit: MSJ 2023

Every time I go to my parents’ house, ‘the cabin,’ as we affectionally call it, nestled in a madrona forest at the end of an island in the Salish Sea, I find a spider in the bathtub. For years. Decades! Inhale the fresh, salty air, there's a spider. A different one every time, of course. Sometimes the size of a quarter, sometimes a half dollar. But always there.

I usually take it outside. I’m uncomfortable with killing. Others here are less concerned. The spider has been drowned and smashed. Sometimes, it’s chased first, with a shower nozzle spurting well water. It must be terrified. But despite my reluctance to smash spiders, I’m terrified when it is there. Unable to do anything until it’s gone. But it’s never really gone. Seriously! I leave, return, month after month, year after year, and another spider is always there. Dancing around the porcelain tub, resurrected.

When we arrived last week, something unusual happened. The spider was in the tub, but I ignored it. I was completely engrossed in a novel, Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang (which I recommend!). Plans to hike and swim fell by the wayside. My fear of spiders—for the day at least—suspended.

I had bought the book before a visit to the Whale Museum (62 1st Street, Friday Harbor, open daily 10a-4p. Worth a visit! See the photo of the window in the room featuring a collection of 1970s whalesong-listening equipment. Representation or real? Discuss) at Griffin Bay Bookstore (155 Spring Street, Friday Harbor, opening days and hours vary, check website).

According to the table where it was cataloged, Yellowface is a bestseller nationwide. It’s satire, written in a caricatured first-person, presenting a white, middle-class, sloppily-but-Ivy League-educated 20-something woman’s subject position. I found it to be a thrilling takedown of the dark intersections of commercial publishing, whiteness, jealousy, cultural appropriation, and theft in fiction. And not only what people will do for success. But what the values of commercial publishing allow us—encourage us—to do for it. It is uncomfortably morally ambiguous. I loved the horror.

I'd already been thinking about jealousy and what values shape our desires for professional or artistic success. I'm trying to notice when my own jealous feelings surface and speak to them in soft tones. This sometimes works! Before I came up to the island, I’d had one of those enriching, satisfying conversations over tea with a brilliant, grounded, former colleague from the Wikipedia and libraries world. We'd talked about fiction, barriers to entry in publishing, quality, who is allowed to say what, and meanness in publishing and publishing-adjacent worlds on social media. I hadn’t started Yellowface yet, but during our conversation, I felt uncomfortably aware of the fact that readers are primed to consume the identities of the writers in relation to their stories, and success is predetermined by a set of characteristics about the worthiness of the author. There’s a type of line we expect to see from one to the other. When that line doesn’t seem authentic, there’s judgment. Sometimes, meanness.
 
The line-making is discomforting to me not because the identities, subject positions, of writers don’t, or shouldn’t, matter. To be clear, diverse stories matter. Having a broad range of storytellers and writing styles matters deeply for our shared cultural legacy and the way that we imagine ourselves and the worlds we create. We are all more expansive when we create and consume widely. After our tea, we wandered up to the Fremont Library, and I took a Seattle Public Library's Summer Book Bingo, which will be a delightful challenge.

No, what concerns me is, as Yellowface helps us see, the terrifying effects of anxiety about limited opportunities in commercial publishing. Being a working writer is hard enough, add an unscrupulous, white publishing business concerned with optics as they pertain to ROI, add spiteful writing friends, and the effects are written. No one wins. The stories are nightmares. The writers are grotesque.

No swimming or hiking until the book is finished.

Not to mention, reparations do not happen through optics, or representation, alone. Consider the kind entreat of Mr. Lee at the Chinese American Social Club to please remember his uncle, who fought in World War One, pg. 120-121. The shame burns. Don't look away.

I can’t help but associate Kuang's masterful, caricatured take on the cutthroat stakes of commercial publishing with anxieties about the impact of generative AI writers in higher education, journalism, copywriting, and more. There are concerns that AI writers will be used in ways that displace human writing with mediocre, always-grammatically-correct robocopy. There are also concerns that people will nervously leverage AI writers to cheat, in hopes of getting ahead, or finding a shortcut, or cutting through the bs. Being a working writer is hard enough. Combine unregulated AI writers with human nerves about financial instability and representation without reparation and no one wins. The stories are unexceptional. The writers are cheaters. Everything is corrected but still terrible.

I intended for this newsletter to be a place to discuss gifts, including—especially—the talents we have percolating in our bones, desperate to be released. Like, writing, for instance, or art. And again I come back to the same question (this is also a question that animated my dissertation, incidentally). How is it possible to give one’s gifts when we're inside the cultural machines of commercial logics? Whether it's racist appropriation, emotional theft, or any other sort of cheating, these anxieties show us the monsters we become when we try to succeed according to a merciless, white commercial imaginary. They hijack our imagination and curtail our thinking, leading us to act out of fear rather than generosity.

Resist! Fortunately, the best spaces I’ve found to cultivate gifts have been in noncommercial generative workshops and support groups. These are imperfect spaces of imperfect people and imperfect writing. Sometimes I pay a modest sum to participate. Sometimes, I'm paid to facilitate. Sometimes, we just decide on our own to make space for each other, to trust each other to be grace-ful readers. And generally, it’s meaningful because we commit to bearing witness to each other’s imperfect, vulnerable efforts at art.

The urge to create is human. To make mistakes and be unwieldy and messy is human. To commune is human.

“Yellowface is, in large part,” writes Kuang, “a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry” (p. 321).

Think expansively about your definition of success, as one dear poet I wrote with suggested once. It's less lonely this way.

Though I do hope my words eventually appeal to a wide readership, I do not attempt to write formulaically, about a topic because I believe it will be trendy, or to outright copy. I told this to a friend the other day and it felt diagnostic because I know why I am loathe to sound tinny. I do not want to face the humiliation of inauthenticity. I am such a bad cheater, in my dark moments of desperation, preventative shame keeps me from attempting to lie my way there.

But I am inspired by others’ art making. I write best when I’m thinking with others. When I’m having conversations. Even then, sometimes I write terrible stuff. Sometimes I copy style as if I'm singing in harmony with their mind. I hope it is a tribute.

What about that spider? Let's return to the spider. Somehow, in the deep of engagement, I left the spider alone in the tub. We all did. I wasn’t fearful. It wasn’t terrible. Later, even, the spider disappeared again. I want to make nothing of it. But that night, when I finished the book, I dreamt I was trying to take an elevator to an important place. As the opaque silver doors came to a close, the other occupant turned to face me. They were an enormous black spider, leggy, chelicerae waving, wearing a cloak. My heart pounded out of my chest. I was so terrified, a murderous mood overtook my lucidity. Dream me wanted to unscrupulously butcher this spider. And I would have if it hadn't been so large and imploring.

I ran out, away, turning to find the stairs. Another exit. But when I approached the landing, down came another spider, a web forming in the hallway shadows.

Let me vaguely apply what I remember about Jungian dream analysis. This dream could suggest I’m anxious about entrapment. It’s also possible there’s a shadow self that needs acknowledgment before I can go on. Acknowledge that darkness! Don't murder it or push it away further. I do think these interpretations map onto a collective anxiety about our moment, perhaps, about entrapment, about feeling locked out of our own humanity, and the need to acknowledge this, lest we respond murderously. Because the spider disappears, but it reappears. Chimeralike. Ghostlike. Waiting to be acknowledged. Again and again. Year after year. And I don’t have a final, easy conclusion about what this means, and why it keeps happening, except to reassure myself that I can’t be alone in this feeling.

The Gift | Cultivate your imagination (a list)

Adding to the list that I started in the last newsletter on cultivating imagination.

2. To create something, suspend judgment. Suspend everything. Be messy and make terrible stuff. Get the cliches out first.

Book recommendation

In the Museum of Hunting and Nature
by Cynthia Randolph

You might like it for (what I like it for)

Chance encounters
I met a poet in a writing class
that dissolved and reformed
a 6am online open mic for four
after one year or so I realized the poet had become my friend
her spoken words calming
parts of life that I'm nervous about
and helping me see what I didn't previously see
can change
they are spells

Also: exquisite use of white space
and line breaks

Buying a book of poetry published by an independent press feels, in the context of this post, like a cold glass of fresh water, a cleansing
selection away from the saccharine effects on the imagination that the commercial forces I was describing above
seem to have

Maybe you will feel this, too?

Published in 2023 by fmsbw.

I also love her short film on chance: But the rain/is full of ghosts/tonight

"Sometimes I wonder if I spent too many
years trying to live too many lives
simultaneously.”

- Cynthia Randolph

Thank you for reading The Gift!

Until next time,
Monika
The Gift