Memes aside, is he really that bad? I've never read him but I have to read "Drown" for my workshop this semester

Memes aside, is he really that bad? I've never read him but I have to read "Drown" for my workshop this semester.

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theguardian.com/books/2014/may/19/junot-diaz-attack-creative-writing-unbearable-too-whiteness
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>In an introduction to a new anthology, Dismantle, Díaz writes of how, when undertaking his MFA (master of fine arts) in creative writing at Cornell University, New York, his experiences as a "person of colour" – Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey – were almost entirely overlooked. "That shit was too white," writes Díaz in the introduction, which was published by the New Yorker. "Too white as in Cornell had almost no POC – no people of colour – in it. Too white as in the MFA had no faculty of colour in the fiction programme – like none – and neither the faculty nor the administration saw that lack of colour as a big problem. (At least the students are diverse, they told us.) Too white as in my workshop reproduced exactly the dominant culture's blind spots and assumptions around race and racism (and sexism and heteronormativity, etc)."

>theguardian.com/books/2014/may/19/junot-diaz-attack-creative-writing-unbearable-too-whiteness

"SJW" has sort of worn out its welcome as a buzzword, but it's a succinct way to describe brown fuckwits who I will never read.

>Brown fuckwits

Bit rude tb.h m8.

I'd prefer to get an opinion from someone who has actually read him. I did say "memes aside" and I of course will not listen to the opinion of someone on an author who has never even read that author.

>I don't care about the colour of an author's skin or how much of a dick-head they are, as long as they are good!
>"brown fuckwits"

I read Oscar Wao, it was okay but it convinced me to stay a virgin, of which I'm sure the book was trying to show otherwise.

no opinion on his writing, but I wish women (oc) were given as much attention and prestige as him, he gets more credit for talking about mistreatment of women as someone who was shitty as a teen or whatever his deal is than actual women...

>tasted like Heineken

p-please tell me girls won't me make lick around that area...

:/
see how...is writing about women's body in a gross way (i've never heard a similar comparison before) but being like Now I know better! seen as a dude for women/feminism triumph...

like if roth came out and said see I was just writing an example of how a sexist hateful dude WOULD write about women, I don't feel that way :) who would praise that

>no opinion on his writing, but

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Then get the fuck out. Pretty simple.

I'm sorry my man but I don't understand what you're saying, your English isn't relaying whatever native language your thoughts come from.

sad for you
not like anyone else has anything else to say

He's pretty shitty but the last line of Oscar Wao made me kinda go Oscar Wow!

I'm not meming you. He's stupid, and he's brown. Why would I take him seriously if he recites all the same generic leftist cant as all the other brown fuckwits? Read an excerpt if you want, it's all about anime and pop culture and talking about how POC'ed he is.

Who are you quoting? Diaz has made it clear how much he hates white people and the feeling is mutual. He says the elite university that was kind enough to admit him was too white, and I'm saying his ethnicity is too brown. I'm a very conservative white male, he's a very liberal brown male. There is nothing I can learn from him or his books.

Disclaimer: I'm a filthy leftist fuck.
But I thought Oscar Wao was decent. Lively prose, a layered, interesting enough narrative. Feels contemporary. At the very least, I don't regret the time I sank into reading it.
So hopefully Drown is of comparable quality.

>look! someone with completely different life experiences and a different view of the world
>there's nothing I can learn from him

Hahaha what a piss poor fucking attitude

Junot Diaz's memelord critics haven't read him, because they just bring up hurrr SJW when in reality, his writing itself isn't that SJW. It just talks about Dominicans doing hood shit basically. There's no white people bashing... basically all of his protagonists (at least in short stories) are men or boys. Women definitely take a back seat. Yeah, not that SJW.

I don't like Junot Diaz, but not for the reasons most of his meme critics don't like him. I just think he is not terribly clever or interesting in terms of the stories he tells and uses a lot "cool", pumped up "voice" in place of that void. He also embodies one thing that is very wrong with contemporary American fiction. It's all so insular and solipsistic. Me myself and I and my shitty domestic problems. Ironically, because outside his work he's so vocal about muh brown people, etc. But his work doesn't really engage with a more universal narrative. It's all just domestic bullshit, etc.

Why would a Jew read Mein Kampf?

I'm not going to live forever and I would rather not waste 1.75 hours reading some glorified YA writer who hates my people and my culture with a burning passion. I'm white, I'm Protestant, and I'm rich - the Diazes of the world would see us all flensed and dispossessed.

>He also embodies one thing that is very wrong with contemporary American fiction. It's all so insular and solipsistic. Me myself and I and my shitty domestic problems
>his work doesn't really engage with a more universal narrative. It's all just domestic bullshit, etc.

But that's bullshit. First of all, you find the universal nested in the particular. Even when characters are caught up in specific, what you might call "domestic" disputes or problems, that's when they display recognizably human traits.
Second of all, thr narrative of Oscar Wao clearly resonates with "universal" themes about love, an individual's relationship to family and history, etc. even if the narratives themselves are very specifically located within a certain race/time/place.
So I don't know what you're talking about.

>I'm Protestant

>literally believing in your heart some that in the 6billion year history of the Earth some Jew from the Levant who showed up 2000 years ago is the son of a magic omniscient sky man who will bring all the good boys and girls to the wondrous sky kingdom someday

Lol, go ahead, call me a fedora, you're still the goofy one.

>Why would a Jew read Mein Kampf?
Why the fuck not? He doesn't have to enjoy it or agree with it, but since when is being exposed to different, even radical viewpoints a bad thing? Are you one of those fucks who advocates for safe spaces at colleges, complete with pillows and blankets? Get over yourself.

>the Diazes of the world would see us all flensed and dispossessed.
Of course brown people can be and are just as discriminatory and fucked up as white people, but if you stopped feeling attacked for five minutes and actually read his writing, you would realize that he's not trying to take your job and fuck your wife. If you hate the quality of his writing, fine. But it sounds like you've just got some irrational fear that the minorities are out for blood and they're here to take down the white race or some shit.

>I'm a very conservative white male

Lol I bet you're the life of the party, m8.

I don't believe in god, it's more cultural. I was baptized as a Protestant. My entire family is Protestant. When I die I'd like to be buried in a Protestant church.

Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

>But it sounds like you've just got some irrational fear that the minorities are out for blood and they're here to take down the white race or some shit.

This? On Veeky Forums? Nooooo.

Racism? On the Internet? Since when?

I'm sure the homeless man selling barbie dolls on Main street has some different, radical opinions.

>he's not trying to take your job and fuck your wife. . .you've just got some irrational fear that the minorities are out for blood and they're here to take down the white race

No, no, no it's way worse than that - they want our money. They will tax us into poverty and unionize our workers and appropriate our land. A certain relative of mine has an oil well on his farm - how are we supposed to make money off that if it gets nationalized? I stand to inherit that farm.

>I'm sure the homeless man selling barbie dolls on Main street has some different, radical opinions.
See? You're getting it now!

Ah, I'm too tired to respond to the rest of this. Hope the taxed into poverty thing happens though.

Who are your favorite writers by the way?

I can't imagine. You're so paranoid, reactionary and deeply simple minded.

What will you do when you've squandered it all and there is nothing left to steal?

In all honesty Junot Diaz does not write the kind of books I read, and I'm not going to read his anime book just to parse out his radical viewpoints when he makes them exactly clear in the articles he publishes. I don't give a shit about anime or Dominicans or New York: it's boring. The resident weebs here will tell you that he doesn't actually know anything about weeb shit and likely just namedrops the various franchises to add some hip modern flair to his boring YA novels.

What kinds of books do you read. Who are your favorite authors.

>inb4 Atlas Shrugged and Art of the Deal and Rick Santorum's memoirs.

I don't even like Diaz but you are such a cornball man.

they always get quiet when you ask them this don't they

TS Eliot
WB Yeats
Ernest Hemingway
F.Scott Fizgerald
William Faulkner
W.G. Sebald
Breece D'J Pancake
Virginia Woolf
Marcus Aurelius
Juan Rulfo
Dazai Osamu
Bohumil Hrabal
James Joyce
Vladimir Nabokov
King Solomon, and the Psalmist

Are you happy now? What do I have to do to get out of reading Junot Diaz? I'm sure there are authors you wouldn't touch with a bargepole, unique viewpoints notwithstanding.

Well look who's quiet now you supine protoplasmic invertebrate jelly.

Next time you line up for the dole ask for a free spine along with your foodstamps.

I wasn't talking to you before and don't care if you read Diaz or not, just noting the trend.

Nothing I don't give a fuck if you don't read Junot Diaz. I don't like him either. Just its not fair to hate an author you've never read.

That and you.general philosophy of "I can't learn anything from anyone with very different viewpoints" is laughable.

Fuck man you trust fund baby, daddy's boy little WASP pussy. You haven't worked for or earned a damn thing in your life. Don't talk about welfare queens, you're the queen god damned bee. Your life has been nothing but hand outs and its only going to get sweeter when you get that land isn't.

Disclaimer: I don't have an issue with wealthy people or even children of privilege. But I do have a big problem with the them when they carry themselves like you. What a twat you are. You nothing about anything.

Is it the lack of funding in education that makes people that think this?

>But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
>And see the things I see;
But you don't believe in God, so they clearly don't see and hear the same things as you

>defending SJWs this much
>true definition of hacks that exploit temporary fads to sell books/gain popularity while being useful idiots in a system that promotes cheaper labour costs via mass illegal immigration, atomization of society by removing the main cultural backbone of it, the natural family, promoting alternative behaviours as progress
>on Veeky Forums

reddit's the other way m80

Have you read Twilight to find out if it's bad? I bet you could learn something from Myers, right? There are literally millions of books out there, and if the author says something objectionable enough in an opinion piece, then I'm not reading him/her. This isn't that hard. John Milton was the last person to read every known book, and we don't have that luxury anymore. I don't even hate all brown people, but if they are open about their dislike for "whiteness" then I don't see why I shouldn't return to the favor. They inveigh against white people all-the-fucking-time and then act hurt when they get called mean names themselves. It's no surprise Donald Trump got so popular. When you push and push and push eventually someone will push back.

Cry more, Oliver Twist.

He's a fucking hack loser. I wish he never existed.

>implying that there is such a thing as 'natural family'
>implying that the family is not a recent invention
>implying that humans have a 'natural state'
>implying that this 'natural state' is the backbone of society

mein gott, so much ideology

>I'm protestant
oh boy

>implying that there isn't such a thing as natural family
>implying that the family is a recent invention
>implying that humans don't have a 'natural state'
>implying that this 'natural state' isn't the backbone of society
wew

>implying that the burden of proof lies with the person doing the counter-arguments, not with the original bullshitter

>Hey Vsauce, Michael here

Go back to Frankfurt.

Why couldn't it have been The Sixty Years War?

>implying something idiotic
>rebutting with a second much more sensible implication

Nice comeback hypocritical hand-out baby.

Junot is a fun author. I'm not sure his works ever transcend that, though.

Ignore his interviews and personal beliefs at all costs.

He writes the kind of fiction my mom would and does read. Nice emotional liberal stuff, strong characters, nothing too theoretical to grapple with. I always thought that kind of stuff rode the line between popular and literary fiction. I read it multiple times for various lit classes and it wasn't so bad. I got a couple of good essays out of it.

As I said before, his writing isn't particularly SJW. He just talks about Dominicans doing hood shit. He doesn't bitch about white people and his stories are male dominated.

>I'm white, I'm Protestant, and I'm rich
I wish more white people would preface justifications of their racial opinions in this way. It's so honest, it's so refreshing.

This is brilliant bait and I'd like to hire you to be the ghostwriter of my infuriating memors

t. Martin Shkreli

I met him irl, he's a cunt. I've told the story a few times here,
tl;dr is school paid him a lot of money to read and do a q&a, he decided to be an asshole the whole time, read a fragment of a story and answer two questions, then leave.

I'm a Spic and I hate this faggot. His whining and forced diversity causes stuff like .

Nice going fuckwit, just stoking the flames of resentment as they rise to swallow your fellow "people of color." Was this part of your plan?

It's not really so much that he's a bad writer as that he's absolutely insufferable, about being a Mexican of all things. It's the modern equivalent of a flushed Victorian gentleman pontificating about Rule Britannia through his white moustaches in between puffs of a comically oversized cigar, except you have to pretend to take it seriously because it's The Current Year.

this man is a liberal too...Alan Moore

but you guys don't hate him, so why do yall hate Junot Diaz?

Moore is a good writer, he also takes a more level headed side on things, irregardless of his own ideology/beliefs.

do you think Moore is a better writer than Diaz?

>this is what CTRL-leftists actually believe

what sad, oppressed lives they must lead

Our natural state is nomadic extended family group hunter gatherers fuckboy. If you spend more than a couple weeks in the same place you ain't living """naturally""".

okay nigger

>But it sounds like you've just got some irrational fear that the minorities are out for blood

There is nothing irrational about it. Ethnic minorities of every form are desperate to exert themselves on white countries. Why? Who the fuck knows. Jealousy and some false impression that we owe them something when it is they who owe us for creating modern civilization. Honestly I wish more minorities were honest in their intentions rather than hiding behind their oppression olympics

Most certainly, yes.

hahaha, babby's been spending too long on Revleft

i went to a speech he gave at harvard earlier this year

he had this whole riff on how privileged white authors sometimes need to just know when to shut up and it got a really hilarious burst of half-staggered applause from the mainly white and entirely privileged audience

i agree with his politics mostly, but treating literature and the arts as a zero sum game where it's possible for the incorrect side to win is extremely stupid

actually i think that explains my whole stance on diaz, he's never 100% 'wrong' and he's clearly ludicrously creative and educated but somehow he still manages to just constantly say dumb incoherent shit

Social liberalism, socialism, affirmative action, refugee settlement, all these things do nothing for me. Why would I support them? At the end of the day, my social class has to fund all these nice fair, just, things. Food out of our mouths.

I mean let's be practical here. I know why the dusky skinned races of the world do the things they do, it's completely understandable. You want what I have, and I don't want to give it to you. I don't care if the empires we carved out at your expense make the current system unfair. At the end of the day:

My family, friends and Her>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Me>>>White People and Trusted Outsiders>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>everyone else.

I never said his writing was SJW, merely that one should avoid listening to Junot Diaz, the person.

tbf do you go to an insufferable school

>I don't believe in god, it's more cultural.

You are the textbook fucking definition of phony.

>there are people this insecure

What do you want from me? I wish I could believe, but I have no faith. It's like I was born with something missing. That which is crooked cannot be made straight. The Church does a lot of good, and we were happier and better off when belief was more common, I will always have more sympathy for Christians than for other atheists.

There's no need to lose your temper, not everyone fits into neat, easy categories.

>liberal
>racist
Pick one, conservatard and /learn 2 dictionary/.

What did you mean by this? He's a leftist. Classical liberalism is just another word for fiscal conservative and nobody uses "liberal" in that sense outside of economics. I wish people wouldn't get so pissy about literal definitions when they know exactly what I mean.

Like when we say someone is bulimic, we don't mean they're insatiably hungry, we mean that they puke up their food to stay skinny.

he's an inauthentic fraud. if you're in the camp that doesn't care about authenticity, fine, but this guy probably has more in common with the protestant user then with any person of color.