Monday 11/11/24
Remember my Guggenheim application? So over the weekend I get an email requesting materials. It's not like how this works could be any more clear, but there you go. People think that when they're asked for these materials after the initial application process, that they've made it through a "round" or some such. And I said that and they requested materials? It's a done deal. It's just rigged. They know who they're giving it to.
Did they look at it? Yeah, they could have. I'd put it at a 65% chance. They could have thought, "This guy's a problem, let's try and show that we're fair by asking for his materials regardless," knowing they already have the list of who these things are going to anyway. Or maybe they thought, "He won't keep blasting us on that blog now, putting his superior work against the shitty work by the connected system people we automatically hooked up as part of what's nothing more than a backroom deal."
That's not going to happen. There are going to be a lot of Guggenheim things--and prose offs--coming up on here.
You can give me the grant I deserve more than anyone or anyone possibly could, by the letter of your own definition for who should get it--which is just a set of lies--and we'll be done, because then I can say, well, there it is, these people actually did what they boast about being all about. But barring that? I'm going to keep exposing you and lighting your ass up.
Someone wrote me recently about the Guggenheim and how this corrupt committee--because they're hooking up the "right" people without looking at any work or who deserves what at all--gave the grant in the same year to husband and wife writers--they write separately--Paul Yoon and Laura van den Berg.
No one is worse at writing than either of these people. But they're as dyed-in-the-wool system people as you get.
Anyway, this person wrote me and said, as sarcastically as they could manage, "That's really beautiful how two writing geniuses found each other like that. What are the chances?" I know--crazy! This committee is so corrupt that they hooked up each of these people in that house in the same year. Who are you fooling? Can you be more blatant in what you're doing? You know that when they knew they were hooking up the one, they said, "You know what would be fun? Giving it to both of them at the same time because they're married." Two geniuses under one roof each totally, totally, totally deserving of this grant/money at the exact same time.
Okay.
Every Paul Yoon story goes like this one called "Cromer" from The Atlantic: It's just a boring person telling us boring things, doing the skin color thing--gotta be about that for him--in Wonder Bread prose.
In New Malden, they owned a corner shop together. It was the place where you could get the gossip magazines and newspapers from Seoul. Then, when everyone got smartphones, it became the place to get your smartphone cases: cute cats, cows, hippos. Gel pens, too. The students picked out a few colors while they got their fizzy drinks or, when it grew warmer, waited their turn at the shaved-ice machine that Harry had convinced his wife they should buy. At first, Harry had wanted a pinball machine and Grace had been forced to tell him that was ridiculous. What kid played pinball these days?
Harry never minded the kids—kids helped him forget that they had woken up one day to find themselves in their mid‑40s—but Grace went to the back whenever they came in. She said it was because their voices sounded to her like paper shredders, and they always picked up a box of something and left it somewhere else. But Harry knew it was because years ago, one of them had come up to the counter while Grace was arranging the pens and asked if they were really North Koreans and what life was like there and whether they had any health defects or bad teeth or were actually siblings or something.
A parent had made a comment about them, maybe at dinner, maybe while passing the shop, and their kid had overheard. This had happened a few times over the years, would happen probably until they died.
Harry and Grace weren’t North Koreans, not technically. Their fathers had defected together in the early ’70s and then a month later found a home here in the Korean community southwest of London that only grew larger as the decades went on. Grace’s father had found work as a delivery-truck driver, Harry’s at a home-and-garden shop where, later, Harry and Grace roamed the greenhouse, trying to learn the names of plants and flowers. If there was talk about the two men who had escaped from the north, the focus on them dimmed as the years went on, because more and more did the same and came to New Malden. Their fathers both married South Korean women; they had children, Grace older than Harry by a year.
A boring guy, telling you boring things, in a boring way.
Now, if Guggenheims were meant to be awarded for that, then he would totally deserve it. I'd be the first to admit I can't compete.
3000 applications, 175 grants handed out. That's a lot of people and not a lot of people applying. 175 out of 3000? Please. If there was one instead of 175 that that shouldn't matter, but 175?
Remember with these people, too: They do nothing else save this one-note shit of theirs. They write a very bad, prosaic, lifeless, MFA-machined fiction--on the same subject, in the same style--every now and again. You think they're also writing dazzling pieces about sports and film and music and life and nature and doing op-eds and inventing new kinds of fiction and doing something like this journal every day?
These people can do so little and what they do sucks. And it always sucks the same way. In looking at the above, you saw, for all intents and purposes, everything Paul Yoon has ever written or will write in his life. There it is. You need to see nothing more. That's all he does. Nothing happens either. It just goes along like that. Until the last word. Every damn thing. That he occasionally writes. And he just gets hooked up, awarded. Recently had fiction in The New Yorker. Same exact thing. Which is to say, same exact nothing.
Say I told you I wrote that. That's what you saw from me in these pages. "There's Fleming, doing his boring ass thing again. Does this guy ever mix it up? How can he not know how bland and not notable his writing is?"
And then I started saying, "Wow, I'm really being robbed by the Guggenheim people, they're not living up to their mission statement, I should totally have one of these."
You'd think, "For the love of God, why on earth does this guy think he should get this prestigious grant for writing like that? Does he seriously think it's brilliant? I could do that crap in my sleep."
Of course you could. Who couldn't?
And if I wrote that way, and I said those kinds of things, I'm sure there'd be thousands of comments all over the internet about how I was nuts. People would be laughing, mocking me.
But system people like Paul Yoon? They just sit back and collect gifts that they don't deserve.
A certain four-year-old buddy of mine was at Grammie's the other day so we talked on FaceTime despite her being very busy. She was practicing signing her name even though she doesn't know how to but that shouldn't stop someone and it didn't stop her. She's left-handed but if someone were to say that she'd go, "No, I'm not."
Her interest perked up when I said that because she had outsmarted me the other day with that super hard game about what was her favorite food--the one shaped like a rectangle which turned out to be macaroni and cheese--told you it was hard--I had been working on something to try and outsmart her and I'd give her a clue so she could try and figure it out.
I said, "This used to be one of my favorite foods even though I don't eat it anymore. But people of all ages eat it. Your dad eats it and you eat it. Ready?"
She's looking at me like I'm going down.
"Here's the big clue. This food usually starts off round, but when you eat it, it's often the shape of a triangle. And you use your hands."
Right away she goes, "Macaroni and cheese."
"Close, but try again."
"Pasta!"
Then I hear Grammie whisper in her ear, "Pizza."
"Pizza!" Amelia says in triumph.
"Oh my goodness, you got it so fast! I knew it'd be hard to outsmart you."
Then Grammie says, "Did you get that all on your own or did Grammie help you a little?"
"On my own."
Ha. Next she tells me, "Do another."
I'm like, "What do you mean do another? It took me three days to think of that one. You're very hard to outsmart."
This was followed by Grammie saying, "I know something Colin used to like that he doesn't eat now. It comes in a bun..."
"Oh, I know," I declared.
"Macaroni and cheese!" ventured Amelia.
"No. I'll give you a hint," I said. "It rhymes with 'not frog.'"
"Pasta!"
She's funny.
My fitness efforts over the past several days--really over the last week--haven't been very good. Saturday I was at City Hall because I had somewhere to be during the Monument hours and I barely did any stairs there. I ended up talking to someone on the phone as I did a scant amount and then I just bailed. I was supposed to make up for that yesterday at the Monument with a notable amount but that didn't happen. I did my base-level five circuits and my push-ups and walked eight miles. Yesterday marked 3045 days, or 335 weeks, without a drink. I'm at 350 Monument circuits since August 15 but beginning Wednesday when the Monument reopens that number needs to start rising sharply. I can do better on the stairs at City Hall today. I also need to start stretching first and just generally speaking--pliability being important--as I don't do this at all now and my legs have been somewhat tight of late.
On Saturday night my Facebook was hacked. There were these random spam messages going out. And posting on a page of mine. I didn't know what to do save delete them. The issue appeared to quiet down--though not altogether--on Sunday. I posted a link to a recent article I wrote on my author page as well as a link to this journal and those went up without a hitch. Then last night I was told my Facebook was about to be disabled, to take a photo of myself, which I did, and then a couple hours later my Facebook was gone with a note saying I can never get it back. All of the content lost.
I have everything through mid-2016, which was when I was most active. What I wrote on there. That tapered off. Since leaving Twitter, all I posted on Facebook, really, was links to my work. I had 5000 Facebook friends. Because it's me, not a single person would hit the like button for anything. Which, as I've said before, and as anyone else would know from experience, is impossible to have happen unless you are Colin Fleming. That's the way it goes because of what I am. So it's not like this was adding anything to my life or cause. But it's just one more thing. One more thing going wrong. One more thing with technology. You can't talk to anyone at Facebook. This is all controlled by bots. There's no customer service. No humans have anything to do with this.
Technology is a nightmare. It doesn't ever work like it's supposed to. One problem leads to another. Look at this very website. A disaster host I'm saddled with right now until I find a better option and the time for what would be a virtually endless amount of work given how much content I have--so little of which is up here as it is, and then there's this journal--and very likely large outlay of money.
I see all of the people who go to page 100 of the blogs, trying to go further because they know it goes back 130-odd pages, but they can't see anything past page 100 unless they search on a term that happens to be mentioned in a post from those earlier entries. In other words, the content is there--sort of--but it's also not there in that you can't just go to it. You can chance upon it.
What a disaster. That's the host site's design. That do that intentionally. They create a platform where the whole of a site isn't visible if you have a certain amount of content. But it's there. How could you have something stupider than this if you are a host site? What is a more basic design flaw than not letting people see what is on the bloody site? They don't fix it. They're just like, "Well, that's how it is." And it took them three days on their end to figure out that's how that's how it is after I brought it to their attention, because I guess I'm the only person whose ever caused this issue to come up.
So they didn't know that's how they had made this. And, having found out, they didn't just rectify it.
What a joke. It is--it's like a joke. How can it be that way? How can you leave it that way? It's like having a store that's open but the door is locked. That's insane. "You can't come in! Yes we're open! We close at five!"
I can't keep going with this computer longer than a few more days. It gets worse and worse. I have to restart it from the power strip six, eight, ten times a day. It takes hours for Microsoft Word to load. The rainbow wheel thing just spins. The internet stops working. I'm losing like twelve hours a week. Then there's the stress and frustration. I have to replace the computer, take this machine and a new one to the Admiral's at their new place so he can help me port everything over--which I'm worried about--and set up the new machine. I'm hardly any better with this kind of thing than I am with doctors, of whom I'm very scared.
Finally was fall-like over the weekend. Ran stairs in sweatpants and fleece with Bruins beanie replacing headband. How I look is also an issue here. You're supposed to look certain ways and not like I do. Which is more of an issue still with my ability and knowledge. What I represent even physically to them via my outward appearance. If me and all of these people were gathered, you'd very easily be able to pick out the one who didn't belong--remember that game on Sesame Street of which is not like the others?--and that's in every way.
