Monday 8/12/24
Want to do another prose off with another story in Conjunctions that editor Bradford Morrow, with that meat cube of a nonetheless empty head of his, and with his own lack of ability as a writer, an editor, a thinker, a human, and his his envy and need to discriminate, put forward as his idea as the best writing in the world. Because that's how it works, right? I am told that Conjunctions publishes the best work there is. Just like I'm told that--and just like you're supposed to believe it--about all of these places with the slop they shovel out there. The slop you see in the pages of this journal, which we all know is slop if we actually look at it and pay it any mind. Which the people who publish it know is slop.
Now, they're usually very stupid, and they have all kinds of prejudicial and ego-serving (and ego-saving) motivations, and they're often putting in the work sight-unseen because it came from the right person with the right agent, the right gender, the right skin color, the right connections, the right brand, they're the right flavor of the times, they went to the right school, they're the right kind of mediocre, and they suck as writers and as people. The only difference here is, I pull their slop into the light. Otherwise, it's never really vetted, because it's not considered by people out in the world, because it sucks. No one wants it, no one reads. So then it's simply incest. Publishing incest. Incest in a closed-off world. And someone like Bradford Morrow is just a three-headed--three-chinned?--result and progenitor and facilitator of that system and closed-off/under-a-rock-world.
Because what do you think someone is going to do after I put this up? I'm going to show you something so bad, so stupid, so pointless, that it is impossible--can't be done and no one is going to try--to defend, to make a case of it being remarkable. It's 100% stupid, embarrassing, inept. I don't think any one of these people, crazy as they are, as far gone from reality as they are, can honestly think, "Yep, that was an amazing piece of writing." Go ahead. You can write me and tell me how it's amazing. I'll put you up on here with your name proudly displayed. Show me I'm wrong. I'd love for you to have a go. There won't be a single damn cricket, because we all know that I'm putting the absolute truth out there.
This "story"--I think I do need the quotes--is by Kim Chinquee. She is very much one of them. A Bradford Morrow looks at a Kim Chinquee and recognizes her as one of his own--their own. Has all of the things. The MFA, teaches the slop to others so that they can join the system. Everything Kim Chinquee writes is like what you're about to see. It's what she does. It's all she can do. There is nothing else. There's no nonfiction with her expertise on these various things, and there's no fiction that is ever any different than the stupidity which you are about to see, the sheer pointlessness of what you are about to see. And there is no way, there will never be any way, it will never happen, it could never happen, that anyone alive, or who will be alive later, will read the likes of what you're about to see--which is a complete Kim Chinquee story--and think, "My God! What a work of writing art! What fiction!" There is no one who won't think it's ridiculous, because it is. It's just dumb.
And then someone like a Kim Chinquee is also an editor, a gatekeeper. That's how it is up and down the publishing line. They have power. So say I come along with something they could never do. As this person totally beyond them. Who does what he does, has come out what he has come out despite having so many against him, is not one of them, doesn't look like them, doesn't come from where they come from, and writes infinitely better than they do. How do you think that's going to go at that press, that journal, that magazine, whatever it may be?
What's my recourse? This journal. I give you the chance not to do the fuckery or to stop doing the fuckery and make it right. But if you are committed to discrimination and bigotry, for the reasons cited above, then I'm going to do reality. And reality is pulling you and your dreadful work, that everyone who sees it would laugh at, into the light (if you're also writer), and showing your practices on the editorial side of things for what they are. And you won't be able to defend any of it, because I have you bang to rights, and you know it.
I'm the only one who does this. You can be like, "But people can see that work you're saying that no sees and/or vets when it's in Conjunctions." No they don't. No one reads Conjunctions. No one reads any of these places. People don't even read the fiction in The New Yorker. You thought this was good, did you, from our boy J. Robert Lennon? No you didn't. No you don't if you're seeing it for the first time now. You think that fiction by him in The New Yorker, put forward by editor Deborah Treisman, who knew, by the way, all about Alice Munro essentially being okay with her husband having sexually abused her twelve-year-old daughter/his step daughter--more on that soon--and was thus essentially okay with it herself, is better than what you see from me in that prose off? No you don't. You think it's close? No, you don't think that either. We can all see the extreme difference in quality.
So what's going on? I think we all know that, too, by now. And if you're coming late to this particular party and are bent on playing devil's advocate and want to say that anything results from the truths expressed in this journal/blog, you'd be wrong, and it's very easy to verify what has happened factually and truthfully. This journal has existed for six years. What went on here, as pertains to me, went on for twenty years prior. Nothing was done by me to anyone. It'd be out there, wouldn't it? Having to address these matters in this journal was a result of there being no other way, no other option, save to sit back and let it happen, with all that came with it. To be a willing victim.
People who read Conjunctions are the writers in Conjunctions and MFA people who want to be in Conjunctions so they can brag about it to someone in their English department. They're not really reading it. They're skimming, they're scanning the table of contents to see who is in there. No one is reading it seriously. No one is like, "Can't wait to get home from work tonight and really dig into some innovative prose courtesy of the new issue of Conjunctions." With The New Yorker, people want attention. They want the tote bag so that others will think they're smart. I see at least one person every day here in Boston with one of those tote bags. They want to display their back issues of the magazine in an accordion-type arrangement on their coffee table in their Beacon Hill apartment to impress the fellow blue-blood who comes over.
None of the things by these people are for serious reading. It's not for entertainment. It sure as hell isn't for a combo. Everything here, everything that I talk about with publishing, comes down to one thing: The publishing system, as presently constituted, exists so that the people of publishing can be the people of publishing.
Anyone who tells you that they repped some author or what not because of commercial possibilities is lying to you. They took them on because they were like them, made them feel a certain way about their own lack of ability and mediocrity, had a given number of TikTok followers, were well-connected in the incestuous Brooklyn writing world, were Native American and that's very in right now, or some bullshit like that. The agent thought they could play the Yoda role and would thus be above someone and get to indulge their ego that way. "I'm the expert, I'm the person who knows. I get to tell you what to do, how things are. You don't know." No one is looking at the commercial possibilities of the work as the work. They might see someone who does the white-people-are-bad thing and has whatever number of followers on social media and they pick that person for those reasons. End all, be all in that case.
People put out books all the time that they know will make no money. Agents take on writers all the time who have never made five bucks and never will, knowing that they'll never make them five bucks. The money here comes down to old money, trust funds, academia. They'll say whatever. Someone will say to a writer, "I didn't think this had commercial potential," but they're cosplaying some role. Because that writer, if they wanted to, could just as easily point to that agent repping someone like Kim Chinquee, because they're all like Kim Chinquee. These people are all alike in that they have nothing for anyone. Most of this is just moving piles of bullshit around.
No one in the system ever thinks, "This is outstanding, I love this, I can't stop reading this, people would love it, they'd talk to other people about it, things would build, we could really have something here." That never happens. Books are selling like ten copies. The books that sell in notable numbers only do so because hundreds of these odious people decide to force that book and that author on the outside world. It's sort of like reader-rape. There are lies, trickery, whatever needs to be done to get some innocent person to think, "This must be pretty good if it's winning those awards and I read those reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and the author is on all of these shows I watch, so they must be important, I'll buy that book."
They buy it, and they hate it. Did not finish. They feel conned and cheated, because they were. They put their pants back on, and walk back home, so to speak, saying "Never again."
The people of the system team up to market that book and that author, hype them, lie about them, make sure it gets blurbs from the right frauds, they have gushy, lying reviews planted, they get with the awards committees. It's all calculated. And they could pull off the same effect with a book of piss. An actual book of piss. No words. Just urine stains on the page. Because what is happening has nothing to do with there being quality work between those two covers.
And that's the difference between a book by one of these people selling the ten copies (to people they know) and being some big "success"--whether or not the other people in the system decide to team up and make it happen. Now, when we do have the big success, it's very limited. It's the sale of a couple hundred thousand books, but that is the end. It goes nowhere else. Those people who bought the book will come back in fewer numbers each time, because no one actually liked the book. That author will be able to do nothing else. They won't have a different kind of anything. They do one thing, poorly. Same subject matter, same style. There will never be freshness, never a surprise, never a book that is different than any of their other books. No writing different than their other writing.
But once upon a time, people decided to make it happen for them.
That was Wells Tower one, circa like 2008. Where you at, Wells? Wait? I thought The New Yorker told me that this was one of the most important writers in the world, being on that twenty-under-forty list of theirs all of those years ago and despite having everything set up for him such that it all it would take would be some urine-soaked pages, he's written...oh...nothing since to join with the shit-slop he wrote and that they lied about on his behalf as being any good in the first place. Huh. Do you know how often people come to this site to read about Wells Tower and how bad he is at writing? The analytics for that particular topic are kind of funny. I feel like a lot of those numbers have to be coming from him. (Hey, buddy.)
Tommy Orange is one of the people they've decided to make it happen for right now. Publishing people like the Native American thing and get excited by the word "Rez" as in, "We were drunk again on the Rez." It's actually rather racist. It's the Native American thing with him. It's nothing else. And the name. (The actual name as a name can be really important to these people, as we see with these two examples. If either were named Robert Smith, it wouldn't have happened.) That's why you see all of these other Native American writers who can't write having their mini-moments on the back of Tommy Orange's invented moment.
And the moment is just the moment. It's also the apex. Why? Because the work is legless. Things can't grow, spread. Build. Then build bigger and bigger. It's One-Shot McGrew. One-Shot McGrew rides into town, everyone in Incestburg comes together to make it happen for ol' One-Shot, but that's it. He rides into another town five years later, and no one gives a fuck. It was a manufactured, bullshit thing, a manufactured, bullshit moment, and it had nothing to do with the work, which is terrible.
But hey, let's be fair, right? Maybe I'm dead wrong. As wrong as can be. And maybe you're shortly going to say, "Colin, how could you? What would my life have been like if I hadn't been able to read that Kim Chinquee masterpiece? It gave me faith once more in the power of art. I think about it every day of my life, the story, the ideas. I suppose I will never not be reading that story, if you know what I mean, in that I'll always be thinking about it, playing it back in my head, and then revisiting it as I go along over the course of the rest of my journey, to see what new wonders it reveals to me as I come to know it better, this story that so well understood the nature of my root humanity, and my root self, my self all the way through, all along."
You might say that, but I don't you're going to.
Bradford Morrow thinks Kim Chinquee is such a brilliant writer--because I'm sure that's totally, totally, totally true, and it's not just him acting as he does and including her work because he's one of them, she's one of them, and a talentless person who is one of them prefers work that doesn't make them feel insecure about their own--that he published six stories of hers recently. Wow. What a bonanza for us all. We talk about the sun smiling down on us, but has the sun ever had so large a smile on its face as with an occasion like this? I'm going to share with you one of those stories. In full, as I said. Now, a story can be any length. That's true. Could be twenty words and be a story, and a great story, if they're the right words. So this isn't a length ting beyond that the length allows me to share with you the full thing. Ready? The story is called "The Pilot."
In the middle of a blizzard, my dreams welcome me to skies. I’m my own pilot, on a motorcycle, flying over trees like ponderosa pines, kokerbooms, then I become a Humvee with a checkbook, overseeing a factory full of plums. On the ground, I develop a niche for creating the most exotic fruitcakes.
There you go. Yes, I'm being serious. You can go check on your own. I'm not making that up to embarrass someone. That's how these people are. This is seriously what they're doing. Remember (of course you do) Sigrid Rausing, whose family has a penchant for hiding dead bodies--actual corpses, this isn't some metaphor, but more on that later (but honestly, do you believe these people? I mean, what the fuck)--publishing Motorollah in Granta? BEST WRITING THERE IS. That's the premise here for these people and their system. Seriously. This is the best writing in the world in the best venues. This shit. This laughable, inept, embarrassing shit. And if someone said to me, "Well, you don't do that style that Conjunctions does," allowing that someone was that stupid--and also probably inebriated--I might say a couple things. I might say that I do every kind of writing there is and I do every last kind better than anyone who does anything they do and likely do exclusively, and I invent new modes of narrative constantly. I might say that. But I might also also ask a couple questions as in "And what style of writing would that be? The do-you-believe-how-bad-this-shit-is style?
Yeah. I don't write in that style. That is true. My bad?
How do they get away with it? They make sure that no one cares. And no one does. No one outside of their system. And the people in the system just want to be the people in the system. Do you think Kim Chinquee asked herself, when she wrote the above, Who is it for? What is it for? What is the point? Or did she just know that Bradford Morrow would slop her slop into the pages of Conjunctions? And she tells herself that being in Conjunctions makes her important, makes her special, but she knows. They all know, somewhere deep down, at least. They all know how empty they are, how pointless it is what they write, how bad they are as this thing they purport to be, how little value their writing has for anyone on this planet?
Am I hitting a nerve? Sorry. But I'm just the messenger that might be getting through your thick skulls. Your real problem is with reality. Take it up with him, or her, or it. And if you're so stupid to discriminate against me knowing full well that I know what you're doing and why, I will light you up in these pages just by pulling you out of your hole and shining some of that light on you. Don't compound the situation by doubling down in your behavior and what you're doing. People will deride you, think you're terrible at writing, read that writing aloud and laugh at you, and they will have total awareness of what you're doing as editor and/or a publisher. They'll know your motives, what you're up to, what you're about, how unethical and gross you are, why you publish who you publish, and why you got what you got. Bradford Morrow has a Guggenheim. Do you think it's because anyone has ever thought highly of Bradford Morrow's work? Do you think they're blown away by his mind? Or was he one of them, and he knew this person, and those people, and he had this title, and this affiliation, and he went to this party, and had that agent, etc. etc. etc. and he was so boring and limited but pretentious and entitled and voila, that's the winning combo with this crowd. Because that's all it is. There is nothing real here in this system. Nothing is happening because anyone else honestly thought that someone else was great at writing. Does not work like that. But it's going to.
But what's a prose off without a second half to it? This from a little something of mine I'd mentioned called "Expect Delays." This is the start of it. The story, as I said, is about a group of people on a summer morning who are temporarily locked out of a train station because of something that happened inside, which causes them to speculate. And we learn about these people as they do so, and about our world. What we prioritize. What we say and what we do. What we espouse and how we actually are. It's also a ghost story--a kind of palimpsest ghost story, as it's one ghost story on top of another.
People were going to be late. A group of them stood outside the locked doors of the train station as a helicopter hovered overhead.
Most fiddled on their phones. Some looked annoyed. It was already humid but the temperature wasn’t as high as it felt like it should have been given the thickness of the air.
A man who many would have identified as fifty-five but was ten years younger had been thinking about talking now that he had become more confident because the sweat on him had dried.
“Crazy when you have someone going out in the morning and jumping in front of a train,” he at last elected to say, his voice as neutral as he could manage to keep it, despite his impulse to also issue a remark or two as political commentary on the times. After all, you never know when you might lock up another vote for the good guys—
“Who?” someone blurted out, as if anyone might have a direct connection with the deceased.
“Someone hopped up on drugs,” the man answered, pleased he’d been consulted as unofficial spokesperson. The cop who had provided a quick debriefing hadn’t said much, but the man had seen this kind of thing before. Not just here, but other places he had lived when they started going to pot because of the stupid policies of those—
The woman behind him offered a correction that seemed to physically pass right over the man by dint of her being a head taller and the added emphasis that came with having determined this was one of those times she had to say something.
“It was a woman with her baby,” she said, her voice less neutral and like it might be a while before she was able to talk again.
“I heard it was a homeless lady,” suggested a college-aged kid gnawing on some kind of tubular breakfast concoction dense with meat, the backpack at his feet crowned with badges proclaiming his most important beliefs in the least amount of words for those who read bags.
A breeze ran up out of nowhere—the sort of breeze that feels like the first in hours and might be the last for days. Heads raised so that their owners would be less likely to miss its full effect.
“Feels good,” a woman said to her husband who hated having to talk when it wasn’t necessary.
The breeze reminded her of their quiet walks at dusk on the beach during their vacation when it had never been quite the right time to discuss having children again. Seemed impossible to believe it was only a week ago.
Who doesn't love a good prose off? Well, I can maybe come up with some names. But I think most people do. I do.
Lastly: As always, everything has been screenshot. Any attempt to obfuscate, doctor, remove, or suppress anything will be taken as a formal admission of guilt and will relayed and documented as such in this record.
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