That was more depressing than the original Twitter thread, which was pretty depressing. Now I'm feeling that I should subscribe to Hughes' newsletter literary magazine. No point in having the dead-tree copies delivered to Kakania, though -- anyone want them? First person to email me with their US address gets them.

Grr. That was supposed to be: "subscribe to Hughes' newsletter literary magazine"

Thanks for the link; an excellent (though frustrating) longread.

This paragraph, tucked near the bottom, refutes that - she's a highly talented, hardworking person who does not play games or do the showy shmoozey thing to further her own career, and so the patriarchy insistently erodes her contributions.

I thought the statement that Brigid wrote was poignant and difficult.

I will offer one last observation. The survival and success of A Public Space required stubbornness and hard work and the support of many talented people who worked without accolades. I know the same is true of numerous independent magazines and presses, many of which are led by superb pioneering women, and who are publishing excellent work under difficult circumstances. They could also provide enlightening experiences of their own to be shared. It is my hope that in these seismic times, while overdue change is pursued, we continue to support works of art, and to sustain the best work of writers and editors regardless of the level of exposure they have attained.

It's hard to know exactly how to read the tone of that, but I hear at least a profound exhaustion on her part -- a sense that the topic is important but that she really doesn't want to be dragged into (or be the focus of?) this particular conversation.

What drives me nuts about that is the empty space where the adversary belongs. Someone or ones with a name decided to rewrite the history of the magazine to eliminate her, but everyone quoted isn't sure how it happened. Someone repeatedly edited wikipedia, someone talked to the Times writer and described Gourevich as the second top editor -- it didn't just happen, someone changed history deliberately. But there's no way ever to tell who, it seems.

What drives me nuts about that is the empty space where the adversary belongs.

I thought you said not to bring up divorce.

||
Marginally on topic, Ridley Scott's erasure of Kevin Spacey (begins at 10:50).
Masters: ...was there part of you thinking, I wish we could just release this because it's good work and it shouldn't matter?
Scott: ..."it shouldn't matter" is the see-saw phrase...and actually we've got to stop that, it does matter.
|>

Someone or ones with a name decided to rewrite the history of the magazine to eliminate her,

But are you saying it was deliberate? I assumed it was just the shrug of the patriarchy - men tasked with doing something that required them to list the important people, and they lazily recalled off the top of their head, and they only retain memories of people who register as Very Important.

7: That could be, but there's something to be said for John Emerson's Law: Never attribute to incompetence that you can attribute to malice. "Oh, I just forgot" is a convenient public stance to take.

6: It's a bit of an odd situation, but in my mind it's much closer to the (unobjectionable) case of firing Spacey part way through filming due to revelations of rotten behavior and replacing him than it is to the (objectionable) case of pulling a released film from circulation and bowlderizing it.

7: Seriously? This is from just a few years ago, and she wasn't in the middle of a long list, she was the immediate successor of the iconic founder. And someone kept editing Wikipedia to take her out of the list -- someone who didn't know who the editors were wouldn't have done that, that seems as if it had to have been someone who knew the history and actively wanted her not to be recognized.

The article is sort of written to make it sound like sloppy sexist laziness, and I'd believe that you need sloppy sexist laziness to make a malicious campaign like that work, but there had to have been malice.

I'm serious about not reading very closely. I half-ass with my whole ass.

My ass is illiterate.

Except with very large font Braille.

If done properly, it looks like somebody made a bench designed to keep the homeless from sleeping on it.

10: What it sounds like to me is that a significant fraction of the board had retconned their memories of her tenure into believing that she was only ever an interim appointee who was holding the magazine together while they conducted the real search for Plimpton's replacement, and they had passed this version of the history on to others. That was aided by the "Executive Editor" title shenanigans. Interim appointees don't typically get listed in lists of holders of a particular position, so whoever was doing the erasure might have just bought in to that version of the history.

For board members who were involved in not renewing her contract, it's going to be more comforting to believe that her tenure was just an interim arrangement, because then you don't need to feel guilty about forcing her out. As the article notes, a number of the board members from that era are no longer living, so it's not possible to ask them about the events. But it sounds like there was a faction from the beginning who thought they wanted a different type of editor, the one guy who strongly supported her in furtherance of Plimpton's supposed wishes, and a bunch of people in the mushy middle who went along with the appointment initially (particularly since they needed someone immediately), but who were eventually talked into supporting the first group. That's the group who were most likely retconning their memories. Once the first group forced the dissenter off the board, there wasn't anyone around committed to disputing their version of events, and other people tend to go along to get along in constructing the joint history of their experience.