Everything wrong with publishing: Lydia Davis and how her work gets printed, with stops at the VQR, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and a nod to Saul Anton

Friday 4/4/25

It's helpful to understand the ways in which the people of the publishing system behave. Remember: I am the bad guy, though I do none of the things they do. I write better, I work harder, I know more, I am always professional, I do nothing to these people, and I took decades of abuse and discrimination while still being polite and trying again and again.

I'll give you a typical example of the entitlement.

Remember Lydia Davis? You can't write anything stupider than Lydia Davis's "stories"--her ten word or whatever dribblings.

These people love to lie about Lydia D. Here's one of her short stories--and I'm not making this up, it's the whole ridiculous thing--from the VQR:

This is a reminder that today the community will be gathering this afternoon to come together as a community.

What a masterpiece. That's what she does. That's the shtick.

Could you even imagine writing anything that imbecilic, let alone writing something that imbecilic, calling it a story, and then thinking, "Hot damn! I'll probably be lionized and get lots of money and awards writing this garbage."

It's insane. It's always insane, isn't it?

We'll be getting into the VQR. You're going to love seeing the way that their publisher, Siva Vaidhyanathan, spoke to me, a contributor a couple times over, in an email.

These are evil people. And the hubris that you that you think you could talk like that to someone--and with your history--who did you no wrong, and that you'd be dumb enough to put it in writing, and think no one would ever see it? It's mind-blowing. But that's how crazy these people are.

And what do I mean by history?

The VQR is a venue where one editor bullied another editor so much that he went down to the old water tower and shot himself in the head, and there are many things equally as bad about this place that I will air out here (took a long walk with a former VQR editor--wait until you hear how he got them to pay him off after they let him go--who, when he wasn't bragging himself, kept coughing up the disgusting dirt.)

You want another Lydia Davis classic put forward by equally-crazed system clown--but master of fiction, of course--Halimah Marcus in her role of editor of Electric Literature? Okay, here you go:

How will we solve the problem of how Father sleeps on his right arm? He is not comfortable, his arm is under him, it hurts him as it presses into his ribs, and it is hurt by the weight of his body pressing down on it. He tells us this, with a gentle smile, as though to say it is not important, and not our problem.

Father died many years ago. But the problem is still there on my mind, unresolved, even though Father no longer tries to sleep comfortably and in fact no longer has an arm.

I mean, this doesn't seem possible, does it?

How could anything this moronic get written, published, awarded? How far gone from reality would someone need to be?

But it's worse--because it's a lot of people in this system of incestuous evil who go along with this obvious lie.

Can you be more full of it than to say, "Oh yeah, she's brilliant, what amazing fiction from Lydia D.!"

These people essentially all stand along the sidewalk of their messed up, black hole of sanity of a subculture/cul-de-sac and applaud the large-bottomed, foul-smelling, naked emperor or empress as he or she squirts all of them in an eruption of pus.

That's not an excerpt. That's the whole thing. That's what she does.

Speaking of being that kind of person: Here's some more Lydia D. fiction in Conjunctions as published by Captain Crony Bradford Morrow, a story--God, I feel ridiculous using that word here--called "Odd Behavior":

You see how circumstances are to blame. I am not really an odd person if I put more and more small pieces of shredded kleenex in my ears and tie a scarf around my head: when I lived alone I had all the silence I needed.

How is this real? How can anything this stupid exist? What I mean by that is how can you get so many crazy, broken people together that they all team up for this absurd lie?

Can you imagine me writing that nonsense and coming on here and saying, "Here's some genius fiction from me!" and that's what I shared? How crazy would that be? You know what the backlash would be like? You'd have all of these people going after me. You know how many people do it now with the prose offs? That's right. Because what are you going to say? You going to say that J. Robert Lennon's slop, and Ed Park's slop, and Junot Diaz's slop, and George Saunders' slop, and Yiyun Li's slop, and Diane Williams' slop, and Joshua Cohen's slop are better than the excerpts against which they're pitted?

Can't do it. Not if the side by side comparison is in front of the person you want to say that to. It's impossible. A Halimah Marcus knows that, which is one reason why her hatred for me--which was there from the start, because of what I am and what she isn't--continues to deepen.

Sorry--it's not my fault you're bad at what you do any more than it's my fault I'm able to do what I can do.

There's this editor I know. Well, he used to be an editor of a Midwestern literary journal. He was telling me how one day he got a phone from Lydia Davis's agent. He said that the agent had just sent him like thirty of Lydia D.'s ridiculous "stories"--you know, stuff like what you saw above because, again, that's what she does. She has a Guggenheim, by the way--because of fucking course she does. Was a finalist for the National Book Award. "In 2013 she received the Award of Merit Medal in Literature for the short story from the American Academy of Art and Letters and the Man Booker International Prize." That's straight from her VQR bio. How can you not laugh? It's so absurd. Nothing is for real here. It's all fake. Fantasy, delusion, mental illness. Enabling, hook-ups. Rigged all along the line. Not a single thing happens because someone wrote something good. These people can't write anything good anyway.

The agent asks this editor if he wants to publish a bunch of the Lydia D. stories. He just got this passel of ridiculousness. You know how much I hated following-up with the likes of Raluca Albu? You think I've ever wanted to write any of these people more than I have to? I kind of seem busy, don't I? And not in their "let me lie about being busy way," but in the manner of, "It's not eight in the morning yet and I've written 7000 words kind of busy" way. Walk the walk busy way. The proven busy way. The "how does this guy do it" busy way.

And here you have this agent buttonholing this editor, like a child. Wah wah wah wah, I want I want I want I want Lydia D. Lydia D. Lydia D. we won't wait wah wah wah.

Do you know what would have happened if I behaved in this manner?

There was this terrible person at BOMB--different terrible person. This was before Raluca. This other nut job gets a couple stories from me--works infinitely better than the inanity they run out there--and he holds it for more than a year. Off of my life. Finally, he turns them down--I'm sure he didn't even read them--with a boilerplate, "Not quite right for us." Screwing with me. This arrogant prick. Because he thought he could. Saul Anton is his name.

You know what I did? I thanked him. That's how I behaved with these people. I took the abuse. The blatant discrimination. Tens of thousands of times. I smiled. I was so kind. So professional. I sent him a couple more stories, thinking that he just took all of this time, you only live for so long, and I needed to get the clock started since this was going to take like a year and a half for him to send me his automatic rejection.

And you know what this insane person did? He yelled at me in email. For sending him something so soon. He sermonized to me like I was some kid and it was my first day on the writer job.

You have to realize: At that point, I'd been in like very venue. I'd published thousands of things. I was so far beyond this guy in terms of career achievement, and that's before we got into the talent discrepancy.

That's how these people are. Or worse.

And let's not forget Mónica de la Torre, the BOMB editor I went to Brooklyn to meet with who threatened me by saying that if I said I didn't like Lydia Davis's writing--after she had just finished declaring how outstanding it is--that I wouldn't be permitted in BOMB, not on her watch.

Anyway, the editor who told me all about this tells Lydia D.'s agent that he hasn't looked at the stories yet. The agent presses him for a decision on the spot. The guy says, "Well, if you need an answer right now, then the answer is no," and the agent gets all offended and says that he'll never be offered any Lydia Davis stories again.

These people. Do you believe any of this?

So that's how they're carrying themselves. And we know about the raping and the sexual harassing, and wait until we get to Joel Whitney in the next little bit, and the plagiarism, and the theft, and the scams, and the back room deals, the sexism, the racism, and the quid pro quo, and trading sex for publication, and obviously the terrible, terrible, terrible writing.

I do none of these things and am about none of these things. Can you conceive of the reaction if I did or was? But when they do these things, it's fine. They're all okay with it. They help each other move the goal posts.

It's just straight-up, almost entirely across-the-board rancidity.

And yes, it's a given she'd be an indoor scarf person. Everything is affectation with these people. Nothing is real.