DELETE UGH

Dec 28th, 2017 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog
Tags:

Oh look –  Milo Yiannopoulos sued Simon & Schuster for dropping his book, so S&S submitted the editor’s comments on the manuscript, so we get to read them.

The editor did not think it was a good book.

In July, Yiannopoulos set out to sue Simon & Schuster for $10m for breach of contract. As part of the case, Simon & Schuster have submitted documents that reveal the problems they had with the book. Among other criticisms, the publisher’s notes say Yiannopoulos needed a “stronger argument against feminism than saying that they are ugly and sexless and have cats” and that another chapter needs “a better central thesis than the notion that gay people should go back in the closet”.

In addition to the documents, a full copy of an early manuscript of the book, complete with the Simon & Schuster editor Mitchell Ivers’s notes, is available to download from the New York state courts’ website.

The tone is set in notes on the prologue to the manuscript. Ivers writes to Yiannopoulos: “Throughout the book, your best points seem to be lost in a sea of self-aggrandizement and scattershot thinking,” and adds: “Careful that the egotistical boasting … doesn’t make you seem juvenile.”

If only someone could convince Trump of that.

You have to wonder what Simon & Schuster was expecting, though. Boasting and scattershot thinking are all there is to Milo Yiannopoulos. Did they think he would write a well-argued book free of narcissism?

Ivers frequently calls on Yiannopoulos to back up his assertions in the text. In the first nine pages of chapter one, notes include: “Citations needed”, “Do you have proof of this?”, “Unsupportable charge” and “Cite examples”.

…The editor makes several notes asking the author to tone down racism in the text. “Delete irrelevant and superfluous ethnic joke,” Ivers writes of a passage about taxi drivers. “Let’s not call South Africa ‘white’” is another request, while elsewhere Yiannopoulos is reprimanded for using the phrase “dark continent” about Africa.

In a way it seems unfair to young Mr Y. The only reason he was invited to write a book was because of his notoriety as a Twitter asshole. (How do I know that? Because there is no other possible reason. That notoriety is all there is to him.) Since that’s why he was invited to write a book, it’s not surprising that that’s the kind of book he wrote; it would not have been unreasonable of him to have assumed that that’s what they wanted and expected. If they didn’t want and expect that, why invite him to write a book, when that’s the only thing he’s known for?

But that’s not to say I feel at all sorry for him.

Yiannopoulos is repeatedly warned his choice of words is undermining any argument he is attempting to make. “The use of phrases like ‘two-faced backstabbing bitches’ diminishes your overall point,” reads one comment. “Too important a point to end in a crude quip” is another. “Unclear, unfunny, delete,” reads another.

The early sections of a chapter on feminism prompt the note: “Don’t start chapter with accusation that feminists = fat. It destroys any seriousness of purpose.” Yiannopoulos goes on to criticise contemporary feminism as “merely a capitalist con-job – a money-grab designed to sell T-shirts to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé fans with asinine slogans”. “Um … like your MILO SWAG?” the editor responds.

Oh, burn.

Ivers’s evident exasperation becomes clear by page 84, where Yiannopoulos’s call for lesbians to be thrown out of academia altogether simply elicits the all-upper-case comment: “DELETE UGH.”

Ok well I’ll be saying that to everything from now on.

15 Responses to “DELETE UGH”