Saturday 9/21/24
Someone wrote me a letter the other day in which they described publishing--and with it things like the awarding of Guggenheim grants--as "incestuous evil."
That's accurate. Guggenheim applications were due this past Tuesday. The Guggenheim pays out $40,000 individually to writers that, according to their farcical mission statement, have shown they'll put the money to good use by creating works of value. The money is meant to ease the financial burden--for a year, anyway--of a writer who would benefit from that opportunity to block out the noise and primarily write.
What actually ends up happening, though, is the usual suspects--the talentless, connected people who already have money and come from money--are given more money. It's rigged. No one's work is actually vetted. The mission statement is a sham. People who are always hooked up are hooked up some more. It works the same as everything else in publishing. Nothing in publishing is about the writing. Nothing is real in publishing in that sense. Everything happens for other reasons, none of which are on the up and up, fair, or merit-based. When I say nothing, I mean nothing.
That book that The New York Times is hyping isn't being hyped because anyone actually thought it was any good. That person who is nominated for the Pulitzer in fiction wasn't nominated because anyone thought they wrote anything of quality. As we see again and again in the prose offs, that story in The New Yorker, New England Review, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, The Baffler, American Short Fiction--you pick the name--isn't there because anyone who put it there thought it didn't suck, let alone believed it to be great.
I applied for the Guggenheim, as I do every year, but also not really this year, because I know that there's no way they'd award one of these fellowships to me unless they had to. I don't number among these odious, blue-blooded, talentless people who are part of this system of incestuous evil. I'm the guy who writes infinitely better than all of those people, as those people know.
Which is one of the reasons they hate this person, and do their best, as their industry dies and there is hardly anyone in the world who reads, to lock him out, despite the irony that this person is the written word's last and best chance to actually matter in this world. So things then become about change and accountability. I apply simply so I can say that I did. This is like a legal case. Everything here is like a legal case. Sigrid Rausing was offered "Fitty." Among other works over many debasing years. But there is nothing that I could have given Sigrid Rausing that she would have published because I am not the right kind of person. It's very Aryan, actually. At least ideologically. Sigrid Rausing published Motorollah and it's not possible for a person to think that's anything but stupid. Sigrid Rausing, who once yelled at me for not being obsequious enough. Not kneeling down in front of her with sufficient enthusiasm. Just because she thinks that's how it should be. Even from someone whose work she was never going to run because he was not one of these people. (Sigrid Rausing has a brother. The brother had a wife. The wife died of a drug overdose. The brother--who, like Sigrid Rausing, is a monster--hid the body for two months in an effort to save his own skin. Hid. The. Body. For two months. You know what Sigrid Rausing did? She wrote a book about the late sister-in-law--she who had her body hidden--whining about how she embarrassed Sigrid Rausing's upper class--billionaire--family. That's what we're dealing with here.)
Does bigotry get any clearer than this? How about hubris? Evil?
I'll send something or some things to someone whom I'm fully aware is all about discrimination--someone who would never let me pass, never put my work forward, even if and when they know that's the best thing they've ever seen--so I can factually say they were offered X, Y, and Z, as they published A, B, and C--while documenting the reasons and relationships--the quid pro quo, the cronyism, whatever it may be--that led to A, B, and C being published.
Again, it's like building a legal case. That's how I look at this. Nothing but documentable facts and truths. This isn't someone caught up in a wave of emotion. You might get a "fuck" out of me, but it's a rhetorical fuck. It's part of the presentation. I'm not acting out of feelings. I've set my feelings aside. I compartmentalize, with all of the energy and mental discipline that requires. That's why there are no false steps. No gaps. The same as it is impossible to get me to take any bait. There are only facts and truths.
I did nothing to these people. Latecomers to this journal, wishing to play devil's advocate, may say, "But there's the blog!" That was my lone recourse after more than twenty years of dealing with these people and essentially allowing them to get away with it. All of their bullshit, incompetence, ego, delusions, prejudices. Anyone who knows me or reads these pages understands that I am as non-confrontational a person as can be. I simply wish to do my work and have a fair chance. But that aversion to confrontation is one reason it took twenty plus years before I did something. It was either that, or basically sign off on allowing these people to make it so that I would die in anonymity, impoverished, and with my work never getting to the world as it should and must get to the world. My character and professionalism are beyond reproach. You'd know otherwise, wouldn't you? Let me put it this way: These people not only hate, fear, and envy greatness, they resent goodness. Morality. Because they are themselves evil. We see it over and over here. We will keep seeing it. We know how my writing compares to what is out there. We know the career and the absurd publication history--despite so many people standing against this person. The unrivaled expertise on so many different subjects. The worlds and worlds of fiction and story. Do you know, too, that in my career, no one has ever once requested anything. Want to write an op-ed on this, want a gig, hey, do you have any stories for us, would you like to write a piece on such and such, I see you have all of these great books, want to do some business, how about a Beatles piece. It's never happened. With this person who can do everything and does. With the historically unique track record of publication. Who has every kind of writing, mountains and mountains of art of so many diverse kinds.
Gee, I wonder why that is.
Greatness and goodness: they represent the enemy to people of this system.
I'm not rolling over and being a willing victim to a system of incestuous evil. That's the last thing I'm going to do. I would have to hate myself and hate my work. And I know that there has never been anything like my work in this world, and there never will be. I'm going to do everything in my power to do right by it.
These people always have the option to stop. All of these people, for the most part. I'm not looking to be their friend. All I care about is my work and that work having the chance it deserves. I don't want to be on here writing about these people. In a way, it's really up to them. But no one gets to fuck me over simply because I'm something they don't have it in them to be. And if that's what you're doing, I'm going to fight my side of the war until I don't have to anymore.
Part of the application for the Guggenheim is called the Narrative. You summarize, in what's tantamount to a hybrid letter-essay, where you're at. So below is what I wrote for that Narrative portion here in 2024. You'll see mention of some of the things that are coming in these pages.
Making everything a fait accompli, an automatic closed-door, before I write or do anything, only makes me a bigger threat to this system because you keep me from thinking, "Well, if I do this, or hold back here, say nothing, then maybe this thing might happen." You are essentially further arming me to take you down and to proceed without any doubt or hesitation with what I know must be done.
By the way: the person who wrote Motorollah--which has become a catch-all word, going by remarks made to me by readers here, for just how terrible all of the fiction of this system of incestuous evil is (people will say to me that something is "Motorollah bad")--is the kind of person who is awarded a Guggenheim. That's exactly the type it goes to. And that's how awful they are at writing.
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Colin Fleming: Guggenheim Narrative 2024
What’s there to say? I know how this works. I document it on my blog. You give this award to highly connected people; sometimes they live under the same roof.
What should I do here? Tout the thousands of things I’ve published in just about every venue there is even with an industry against me because I am not in any sinecure with the usual suspects? Tout my demonstrated expertise in subject after subject?
How about the 500 works of fiction I’ve written in the last five years, all of which are as strong as a story published in Harper’s in 2018 which resulted in it becoming just about impossible for me to publish fiction (and helped get the editor in chief fired) because the wrong kind of person had succeeded and a stop had to be made to that?
Should we talk about how I can have fiction in the VQR, a feature in The Atlantic, and go on NPR to be interviewed in the same week and my life gets much, much harder because these blue-blooded frauds then do everything they can to halt my further advance?
Should we talk about the unique literary achievement that is my blog—and I bet you’re balking at the very term as I write it—which is the single longest sustained work in history—you could look it up—and is only six years-old? Should we talk about how it stacks up as a literary achievement next to the likes of Montaigne’s essays and Thoreau and Emerson’s journals?
How about how I’ve published more op-eds than anyone not on staff as an opinion writer ever has? Which is also a fact. That’s a relatively new thing for me that I had to pivot to on account of an industry-wide attempt to lock out a single writer. I added that to my repertoire and it, too, has also made my life harder because it’s one more thing I can do and have achieved on my own.
But you give this to people like Laura van den Berg. And Paul Yoon. At the same time, no less. Connected people who are the right type. Did you even look at their work? Their actual writing?
You may have even banned me by now. I have no idea. I didn’t look at the response you sent last year, because I know how in the bag all of this is. This is a done deal before I send you anything.
You know what I’m going to do? I have this popular feature on my blog called “prose offs,” in which I take work from one of these highly-connected, talentless people, and I put it up against my own. They’re up there side-by-side.
Go to the site and type in “Prose off” in the search bar. You’ll see. A number of the people who have been exposed as the bad writers they are in these Prose off were awarded Guggenheims. But what I will be doing is a special Guggenheim Prose off series in which I feature authors you chose to award, and it so obviously was not because of their work and because they’d shown they were going to write something anyone needed. You were just giving money to people who had plenty of money who come from money and who don’t create anything this world actually needs and could benefit by. A lot of them hardly write at all.
This is probably considered uncouth to you, but there’s a saying about walking the walk. Your mission statement? To give this award to someone who has earned it, has shown they’ll make the most of it, and create work that does actual good in this world in part because they were assisted in that cause by you? You don’t actually do that. That’s just talk. It’s not walk.
I only apply so that I can stand out there in public with that on record and say that this is what you passed over while while you were awarding such and such.
This is the best writer in the world. Why don’t you look at the work. The actual writing. Then you have the hardest working writer in the world. The most productive writer in the world. He has everything against him.
Why don’t you look at what this guy does and the level he does it at. Why don’t you be fair. Why don’t you actually be about what you say you’re about. There’s your Narrative. And no, I’m not changing it, even if you offered.
You aren’t going to give this to me unless you have to. We all know that. In the meanwhile, I’m going to keep doing what I need to do, and that means showing what is what.
Because me, I’m both talk and walk.
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