Bad Art Friend

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Taking vaguetweeting to a new level!

Which is funny because I had forgotten about this, but listened to the Daily episode of BAF today, and one of Dawn's "offenses" is that vaguebooked about Larson and The Kindest at one point. She posted something about how a writer friend had based a piece of writing on her life and she felt really conflicted about it. This was one of the details that had people rolling their eyes at Dawn as being needy and attention seeking. And yet...

This is one of those stories where you have to be careful about climbing on too high of a horse because a lot of the supposed sins are pretty common. Though oddly for me, the one sin that isn't common (just absolutely trashing an acquaintance behind her back until her reputation is destroyed) is the one many people on Twitter initially most identified with. Very surreal.

[Anonymous]

Wow. Maybe GrubStreet really doesn't have any problems with plagiarism. The article linked below is nuts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wonder if Kolker wrote the piece overcompensating for the fact that he got the story tip from Dorland, so tried to give some slant to Larson, also. I don't really believe that he understood Dorland the way we do and wrote the story that way, anyway. Thinking it's more probable that he didn't read all the legal filings and also that his story may have gotten changed around a bit in editing (he suggests it did but I don't know which side it might have favored more in the original draft form). I suspect that he did maybe see things from both sides. He does after all write stories about female harassment etc. that misogynists probably wouldn't bother spending their time on, I don't personally think he's a misogynist.

When I go back and reread the original Kolker article, I'm struck by how some of the facts that initially put me off Dorland were not actually from the article, but from the original twitter takes. The idea that Dorland went back to Larson to ask her why she wasn't liking her kidney posts on Facebook? That wasn't in the article. Actually Kolker described the whole letter exchange there pretty accurately, though he didn't print all of the letters. I think he does suggest Dorland got a lawyer first, since he notes she was shopping legal opinions sometime around the Boston book fair thing, and that seems to have been incorrect.

But he does include sympathetic details about Dorland. For example, the fact that she didn't read the story right away even when she found a paid for version, which was basically out of Dorland's goodness and trust. “I did what I thought was artistically and emotionally healthy,” she said. “And also, it’s kind of what she had asked me to do.” Moreover, Kolker's quotes from Dorland are generally some of the most insightful parts of the article. On Dorland's reactions to seeing the mean girl texts and email, he wrote: "But there also was something clarifying about it. Now more than ever, she believes that 'The Kindest' was personal. 'I think she wanted me to read her story,' Dorland said, 'and for me and possibly no one else to recognize my letter.'"

I don't think Kolker quotes Larson saying anything this insightful. Maybe her comments about race, from that perspective. He also doesn't pull his punches about her plagiarism: Kolker puts the letter language Larson stole, in the early audible release, side by side with Dorland's letter, showing that of course the language was actually stolen. Like, he made the plagiarism pretty clear, without stating it outright in a way that the paper might be legally liable for. And he includes the letter excerpt where Larson says that she stole sentences word for word and felt like a good artist but a shitty friend.

There are some places where I think that if Kolker had excerpted MORE from the letters and texts he would have given a fuller, more correct portrayal. For example, when Larson was writing to audible about needing to rerecord the letter, he includes the part about her having taken some sentences from a real life letter but not her next sentence about not wanting to take those sentences out, for moral/ethical reasons. Keeping that in would have shown her admitting her mistake. Maybe it was space, or editing.

I remember the article coming out, and reading a lot of "takes" about it on twitter, and feeling like the "takes" weren't really hitting with the way I felt about the article, and then doing some reading on my own about it until I felt really powerfully in favor of Dorland. That's just me, though, and I can totally understand you guys feeling Kolker should not have written this from both perspectives at all.

Great analysis.
Also great is the emotional-role analysis above.

One thing:
Kolker wrote this from both perspectives because that was the revenue-maximizing thing to do.

The issue with the NYT is that it is a billion-dollar media corporation, that does hard investigative news alongside lifestyle stuff alongside horrible bothsides info-tainment political news. Look at Maggie Haberman or Peter Baker— they are effectively ESPN talking heads who write about politicians rather than athletes. And the NYT does this because it makes money and because they are a huge for-profit conglomerate that is now diversifying into Netflix culture stories (“Framing Britney”) and other media.

The NYT does a lot of great things. But it has to make money. And entertaining narratives make money.

Ownership of most American “news” by big media conglomerates— CNN to MSNBC, NYT to Politico to WaPo — is sinking our democracy.

[Anonymous]

Hey guys, can you imagine if donating a kidney actually WAS a symptom of narcissism? Then maybe there would be 12 people dying every day of kidney disease because there are lots of great narcissist kidneys to go around! Maybe we can somehow make this a thing. Liver and bone marrow too!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hey guys, can you imagine if donating a kidney actually WAS a symptom of narcissism? Then maybe there would be 12 people dying every day of kidney disease because there are lots of great narcissist kidneys to go around! Maybe we can somehow make this a thing. Liver and bone marrow too!

Lol. After how many hundreds of posts (thousands now?) it's still kinda wild that this all got started because someone decided to turn the decision to *donate a kidney* into a morality play about the kidney donor being racist; and meanwhile IRL that someone was mercilessly gossiping about the kidney donor behind her back. And still there's somehow a question about who is in the wrong ...

[Anonymous]

The article in The Atlantic about Dave Chapelle relates to this. It may have already been discussed and I don't know how to post a link. Worth a read.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The article in The Atlantic about Dave Chapelle relates to this. It may have already been discussed and I don't know how to post a link. Worth a read.

Interesting article but I take issue at framing BAF as a Rorschach test. It's a Rorschach test the way Charlottesville 2017 was a Rorschach test. Did you see yourself in the Neo-Nazis or the counter protesters?

I posit that if you "see" yourself in Sonya Larson -- you may not be as morally upright, kind, and ethical as you think you are.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The article in The Atlantic about Dave Chapelle relates to this. It may have already been discussed and I don't know how to post a link. Worth a read.

Interesting article but I take issue at framing BAF as a Rorschach test. It's a Rorschach test the way Charlottesville 2017 was a Rorschach test. Did you see yourself in the Neo-Nazis or the counter protesters?

I posit that if you "see" yourself in Sonya Larson -- you may not be as morally upright, kind, and ethical as you think you are.

Yeah, same. Rorschach test? Sometimes people just suck in certain situations. Sometimes, yes, there is a villain and a victim in a situation. People are doing serious mental gymnastics to try to both-sides Dawn into being somehow deserving of this kind of malice. Truly bizarre. What, was the Holocaust a Rorschach test? How far do we want to go?

[Anonymous]

This is what The Atlantic says about BAF by the way:


It was funny—in the “weird” sense—that The Closer landed on Netflix the same week a New York Times story headlined “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” went viral. That article told the story of a writer who altruistically donated her kidney to a stranger, and of the Facebook friend who plundered the experience for her fiction. Switching perspectives and told out of chronological order, “Bad Art Friend” was deliberately written to deny the reader an obvious victim and villain. Some commentators nevertheless found it easy to assign blame: Dawn Dorland is a white woman, and Sonya Larson a mixed-race one, so Dorland was crying white tears and Larson had a genuine grievance. Dorland’s kidney donation was needy, entitled, and cringeworthy—as white women tend to be, according to the stereotype—and she probably tried to sabotage Larson’s career. “Some white women have way too much free time,” the writer Roxane Gay declared. Case closed.

Except there are other ways to frame the power dynamics involved: Dorland the unsuccessful writer versus Larson the published author. Dorland the earnest but irritating do-gooder versus Larson the Facebook lurker who mocked her “friend” with the cool kids from her writing clique. In some versions of the matchup, both women look bad: Dorland the control freak, intent on revenge, versus Larson the alleged plagiarist, who ineptly covered her tracks. Notably, the story never answers the question posed in its title. It was a Rorschach test.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is what The Atlantic says about BAF by the way:


It was funny—in the “weird” sense—that The Closer landed on Netflix the same week a New York Times story headlined “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” went viral. That article told the story of a writer who altruistically donated her kidney to a stranger, and of the Facebook friend who plundered the experience for her fiction. Switching perspectives and told out of chronological order, “Bad Art Friend” was deliberately written to deny the reader an obvious victim and villain. Some commentators nevertheless found it easy to assign blame: Dawn Dorland is a white woman, and Sonya Larson a mixed-race one, so Dorland was crying white tears and Larson had a genuine grievance. Dorland’s kidney donation was needy, entitled, and cringeworthy—as white women tend to be, according to the stereotype—and she probably tried to sabotage Larson’s career. “Some white women have way too much free time,” the writer Roxane Gay declared. Case closed.

Except there are other ways to frame the power dynamics involved: Dorland the unsuccessful writer versus Larson the published author. Dorland the earnest but irritating do-gooder versus Larson the Facebook lurker who mocked her “friend” with the cool kids from her writing clique. In some versions of the matchup, both women look bad: Dorland the control freak, intent on revenge, versus Larson the alleged plagiarist, who ineptly covered her tracks. Notably, the story never answers the question posed in its title. It was a Rorschach test.

I'm sorry, but I think that is a flatly ridiculous take meant to excuse bad journalism.

[Anonymous]

The NYT article -- "tricky," "clever," or "specious," --- didn't fool me! Come on!

[Anonymous]

Rorsarch test for sociopaths, perhaps.

[Anonymous]

Kidneygate is signing off, which I am sorry to see, though I suspect it is very time-consuming. I wish I knew who she is (she is a journalist). I would read her work!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wonder if Kolker wrote the piece overcompensating for the fact that he got the story tip from Dorland, so tried to give some slant to Larson, also. I don't really believe that he understood Dorland the way we do and wrote the story that way, anyway. Thinking it's more probable that he didn't read all the legal filings and also that his story may have gotten changed around a bit in editing (he suggests it did but I don't know which side it might have favored more in the original draft form). I suspect that he did maybe see things from both sides. He does after all write stories about female harassment etc. that misogynists probably wouldn't bother spending their time on, I don't personally think he's a misogynist.

When I go back and reread the original Kolker article, I'm struck by how some of the facts that initially put me off Dorland were not actually from the article, but from the original twitter takes. The idea that Dorland went back to Larson to ask her why she wasn't liking her kidney posts on Facebook? That wasn't in the article. Actually Kolker described the whole letter exchange there pretty accurately, though he didn't print all of the letters. I think he does suggest Dorland got a lawyer first, since he notes she was shopping legal opinions sometime around the Boston book fair thing, and that seems to have been incorrect.

But he does include sympathetic details about Dorland. For example, the fact that she didn't read the story right away even when she found a paid for version, which was basically out of Dorland's goodness and trust. “I did what I thought was artistically and emotionally healthy,” she said. “And also, it’s kind of what she had asked me to do.” Moreover, Kolker's quotes from Dorland are generally some of the most insightful parts of the article. On Dorland's reactions to seeing the mean girl texts and email, he wrote: "But there also was something clarifying about it. Now more than ever, she believes that 'The Kindest' was personal. 'I think she wanted me to read her story,' Dorland said, 'and for me and possibly no one else to recognize my letter.'"

I don't think Kolker quotes Larson saying anything this insightful. Maybe her comments about race, from that perspective. He also doesn't pull his punches about her plagiarism: Kolker puts the letter language Larson stole, in the early audible release, side by side with Dorland's letter, showing that of course the language was actually stolen. Like, he made the plagiarism pretty clear, without stating it outright in a way that the paper might be legally liable for. And he includes the letter excerpt where Larson says that she stole sentences word for word and felt like a good artist but a shitty friend.

There are some places where I think that if Kolker had excerpted MORE from the letters and texts he would have given a fuller, more correct portrayal. For example, when Larson was writing to audible about needing to rerecord the letter, he includes the part about her having taken some sentences from a real life letter but not her next sentence about not wanting to take those sentences out, for moral/ethical reasons. Keeping that in would have shown her admitting her mistake. Maybe it was space, or editing.

I remember the article coming out, and reading a lot of "takes" about it on twitter, and feeling like the "takes" weren't really hitting with the way I felt about the article, and then doing some reading on my own about it until I felt really powerfully in favor of Dorland. That's just me, though, and I can totally understand you guys feeling Kolker should not have written this from both perspectives at all.

Great analysis.
Also great is the emotional-role analysis above.

One thing:
Kolker wrote this from both perspectives because that was the revenue-maximizing thing to do.

The issue with the NYT is that it is a billion-dollar media corporation, that does hard investigative news alongside lifestyle stuff alongside horrible bothsides info-tainment political news. Look at Maggie Haberman or Peter Baker— they are effectively ESPN talking heads who write about politicians rather than athletes. And the NYT does this because it makes money and because they are a huge for-profit conglomerate that is now diversifying into Netflix culture stories (“Framing Britney”) and other media.

The NYT does a lot of great things. But it has to make money. And entertaining narratives make money.

Ownership of most American “news” by big media conglomerates— CNN to MSNBC, NYT to Politico to WaPo — is sinking our democracy.

NP - I disagree with your assessment of the bolded. The article stated, or at least strongly implied that Dawn reached out to Sonia because she had not reacted to any of her Facebook posts. Here is the quote with background information omitted:

But just after the surgery, when she checked Facebook, Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson.

....

Over email, on July 21, 2015, Larson answered Dorland’s message with a chirpy reply — “How have you been, my dear?” Dorland replied with a rundown of her next writing residencies and workshops, and as casually as possible, asked: “I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Right?”

Only then did Larson gush: “Ah, yes — I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing!”

The author absolutely wanted to reader to think that the purpose of Dorland's email was to inquire about why Larson had not reacted to her kidney donation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is what The Atlantic says about BAF by the way:


It was funny—in the “weird” sense—that The Closer landed on Netflix the same week a New York Times story headlined “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” went viral. That article told the story of a writer who altruistically donated her kidney to a stranger, and of the Facebook friend who plundered the experience for her fiction. Switching perspectives and told out of chronological order, “Bad Art Friend” was deliberately written to deny the reader an obvious victim and villain. Some commentators nevertheless found it easy to assign blame: Dawn Dorland is a white woman, and Sonya Larson a mixed-race one, so Dorland was crying white tears and Larson had a genuine grievance. Dorland’s kidney donation was needy, entitled, and cringeworthy—as white women tend to be, according to the stereotype—and she probably tried to sabotage Larson’s career. “Some white women have way too much free time,” the writer Roxane Gay declared. Case closed.

Except there are other ways to frame the power dynamics involved: Dorland the unsuccessful writer versus Larson the published author. Dorland the earnest but irritating do-gooder versus Larson the Facebook lurker who mocked her “friend” with the cool kids from her writing clique. In some versions of the matchup, both women look bad: Dorland the control freak, intent on revenge, versus Larson the alleged plagiarist, who ineptly covered her tracks. Notably, the story never answers the question posed in its title. It was a Rorschach test.

I'm sorry, but I think that is a flatly ridiculous take meant to excuse bad journalism.

The fact that they are even entertaining the narrative that Dorland did something wrong by donating her kidney is just ... wow.