Saturday 1/4/25
We'll get more into this guy later--let's just start it off for now.
Have you ever noticed how so many people making this point of announcing how much they hate drama and how they don't "do" drama and yet how so many people are more dramatic than two-year-olds? How they have no sense of proportion and so the tiniest thing becomes this biggest thing in the world to them?
You see this often with publishing people who are usually crazy. Take Michael Griffith, for instance, the editor of Cincinnati Review and creative writing professor at the University of Cincinnati. Bad person, bad writer. Everything he's published--granted it's not much--in his life is the result of someone hooking him up. Cronyism.
For example, when he has something in Southern Review it's because he's been friends with Southern Review co-editor Jessica Faust for thirty years. So she publishes his word puzzles--I'm being serious--because that's some serious literature right there. Southern Review. Best writing in the world! You see what a joke all of this is. Nothing is real in this subculture. Nothing is what it claims to be. Nothing is what it claims to be about.
If you look at the table of contents of an issue of Cincinnati Review and do a quick Google search on that name and either the University of Cincinnati or Michael Griffith, you'll know why a given person's work is in there.
Brock Clarke, for instance, knows Griffith because he used to be the editor of the Cincinnati Review before him. Do you know how bad Brock Clarke is at writing? You definitely do if you ever tried to fight your way uphill through one of his horrible slog-piles like this one from AGNI, put forward by our friend Sven Birkerts.
What a joyless, grinding, unrewarding act it is to try and read bad fiction like this. No reward, no entertainment, no edification, no pay off. Just...slog. You are reading a piece of cardboard.
Anything Brock Clarke has that he wants his buddy Michael Griffith to publish, Griffith is going to do that. A micro press grew out of the Cincinnati Review venture called Acre Books, headed up by Griffith, so of course he published a book from Brock Clarke, awful writer, about...writing.
Griffith also picked his wife Nicola Mason to be his righthand person at Cincinnati Review, the journal financially backed by the university. Gotta do that nepotism and cronyism. They pay $150 by the way (which is more than most of these journals), and they never paid me, for one.
I dealt with this guy for years. I played along, I pretended that he wasn't Mr. Incest. One time, I even tried to suggest where he could send his work which has less daring to it than a glass of milk.
He said no. You know why? He actually conveyed this to me in an email.
He didn't have a friend there.
Isn't that amazing?
Not worth trying otherwise. He requires cronyism.
One day, after years of this, knowing what he was doing and how it worked, as I'm sending him amazing work over those years, I basically said, Look, man, I know what's going on here, it's gone on long enough, I have a blog and it gets into why things happen as they so often do in publishing and I really don't want to go into this on there, but I feel like I don't have much of a choice at this point or else I'm just enabling something that isn't right.
It was very polite. This guy is just a coward and weak-ass log-roller who perpetuates a system of incestuous evil. He's nothing. As a human, a writer. Editor. Just a nothing. I didn't say that. True as it all is. As easy as it is to show how true it all is. Hell, one of his editors at Cincinnati Review wrote me and told me all about how Michael Griffith picks what he publishes, as if I didn't know. That was someone in the office there.
Griffith's response? He told me I was like the Mafia. The Mafia. Then: Never email me again, Mafia member.
I mean...how stupid, how mentally ill, how weak, how divorced from reality do you have to be to get to that place, to make that remark, to have come to that conclusion, based on what I said?
Which was so benign. And more benign when you consider what this guy was doing.
Now, Michael Griffith makes no money with his writing. He never will. When I say no money, what I mean is he'll go years without receiving a couple hundred bucks and what he gets comes from his friend of thirty plus years--he told me this in an email--in Jessica Faust at Southern Review when she puts in one of his word puzzles, which isn't exactly a literary endeavor, is it?
This guy is, I don't know, sixty? He's not going anywhere in that career, there is never going to be anything that's anything, or is anywhere, or is seen, or read, is becomes a hit. There is no chance to make any money from Michael Griffith and his writing. That's obvious. What are his skills? What makes him stand out? Does he have amazing stories? Singular expertise in any area? What? What is there? There's nothing. This is a nothing and it's nothing writing of the same kind--what's he going to do, explode into new arenas?--every time. He is what he is. Which is really to say, Michael Griffith is all that he isn't, never was, and never will be.
Why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because even this guy has an agent, one named Emily Williamson. That agent doesn't think Griffith is going to make her any money. He's never made her a nickel. I thought this was a business? Of course it's not a business. Publishing masquerades as a business, but really it's just a clique-system of broken, pretty, insecure, weak, simple people and old money, inheritance, trust funds, academic salaries (the result of the jobs to teach this shit and inculcate others in the MFA system so they can teach the shit and more people can pay their money to be taught the shit that means nothing and can do and earn nothing, and on and on it goes).
Griffith is one of those authors--most of them are this way--who uses author photos from like twenty years ago, so there he is at the agent's page. No money, no business. No prospects of business. There will never be any earnings. This is how it works. The agent is not about business. No one here is about business. People here want to be with and support people like themselves. It's all about maintaining the fragile ego. Not getting ahead, not astounding people, not blowing minds, not ability, not expertise, not invention, not genius, not excitement, not hard work, passion, meaning, value, not having things for the masses, not having things for the smart people, not having things for the masses that are also for the smart people, commercial appeal.
If I wrote this agent, what do you think would happen? You know what would happen. She'd see me there and have no explanation for what I am, my limitless range, my pace, my knowledge, my drive, my boundlessness, my uniqueness. That's all completely beyond her world and comfort level. None of that would be her speed. She'd either ignore me or make up a blatant, easily provable, absurd, laughable lie.
But Michael Griffith? No stakes, no talent, no money, no range, no nothing, brother--and being similar, essentially to this agent--yeah, that's a go. See? It's not a business. And that agent is clearly not qualified to be my agent. Neither are any of these people. I do everything and each thing I do I do better than anyone has ever done it. I'm not simple. I'm not basic. I'm not like you if you're one of them, I'm not like anyone there has ever been or will be. I would need someone with humility, ability, self-confidence, balls, and vision, who does not have a problem with me not being on their level, let alone not on the level just below them, which is what agents like to think so they can be the Yoda figure of the relationship, which they love. They do not want it to be the other way around. I don't think that person is out there. This agent here just wants someone like them. That's Michael Griffith. It's not a business. This is a middle school lunch table system. With broken, talentless adults.
I mentioned photos. It is imperative that you are like these people in every way. That's essential to them. That extends all the way through to physical appearance. The do not want--they will not allow, if they can help it--someone to move amongst them as an athletic-looking straight white male. And if that athletic-looking straight white male is someone who returns from running 5000 stairs to write about ballet and a film from 1927 and a story about a girl the likes of which they'd never dreamed of in form and content and to write an op-ed that will run the next day in one of the highest circulation newspapers in the country, then that is even worse. Because that threatens them in all that they are not. And if that person knows the truth about them and what they're about and how they do things? That's a worst nightmare scenario right there.
So they gang together to lock out. They bind the arms. A Jessica Faust does that. (And wait until I tell you later on what Michael Griffith said to me about her in another email.) It's better to look like someone regarding whom one would be given pause as to whether it were best to call the police if they saw them hanging around outside a school. But it's everything. You have to be like them. Why on earth would you ever want to be like this as a human? And why on earth would you ever want to write like any of these people write if you wanted to write and actually have things for people to read?
Komentarze