Wednesday 2/19/25
Quite a few new stories are about to be finished here, so this morning I thought I'd head on over to Granta, home of some of the best writing in the world--or so says every liar in the publishing system who doesn't actually read any of this shit any more than someone out there who has never heard of any of these venues or any of these writers--and which is of course edited by Sigrid Rausing, billionaire bigot and person who claims that the infamous Motorollah (Motorollah!) is better than anything I've ever written in my life or could ever write--because I'm sure she totally believes that and is not a galling, envious, empty Dixie cup of a loathsome person and really dumb individual to boot--and whose family believes in 1. Hiding the dead body of a spouse and 2. Blaming the person whose dead body was hid for months for making the person who did that body-hiding have to do it and embarrassing a billionaire like Sigrid Rausing who has done nothing in this world save inherit money and ooze evil. You can read all about that with the help of any search engine and it's also been covered in these pages. I know, it sounds like this can't possibly be true, but as you can see for yourself, I'm not making up a word of it. That's how sick these people are.
We also don't want to forget about Luke Naima, Granta's deputy bigot--I mean, deputy editor. He's also all for shitty writing, the color of the blood in your veins, and if you're the right kind of horrible person devoid of ability.
And so this morning I thought to myself, "Colin, you think you've got this really great story here, but I bet if you head on over to Granta, you'll find some new fiction that really puts you in your place, and it'll be so awesome because it mentions Yale really early on and does some pretentious name-dropping for would-be intellectuals who are actually morons who hate themselves because they know how lacking they are, and I think that would be good for you to be humbled by that outstanding prose by some connected person who is sufficiently lackluster that even an insecure, talentless, prejudiced, classist like Sigrid Rausing would be able to look at them and think they're not smarter than she is. And then maybe you can be inspired by that amazing prose that's much better than yours from the person who has published next to nothing in their life, every which publication was the result of a system hook-up, and you've only published, what, seven pieces in the last week with an entire industry against you? You should humble yourself with a prose off."
Okay.
This is from Maia Siegel's "The Institute" in Granta. We'll do the first four paragraphs. Ready? Here we go:
The founders of the Institute were not exactly sure what they were looking for. They were looking for a ‘live player’, someone who might stretch their legs or stab you, and you wouldn’t be sure of which until it happened. They wanted Barron Trump to be the new Caesar. They wanted Klaus Kinski to shill Bitcoin. They wanted eyes like his, boiling in their shells. Pressure would hiss from behind their leaching plastic contact lenses. And then: they’d open, plastic slick to the skull. A live player saw the rules of the game for what they were. The founders would not spell out these rules because they were impossible to sum up. Ancient Chinese philosophers had tried. Robert Greene had tried, with his forty-eight laws of power. But the live players had this knowledge almost primordially, the way a lizard understands how to move through grass.
The signs of a live player could be simple: majoring in political science was a negative sign, while pure math was positive. Being from a wealthy family was positive, especially if the wealth was stored or made overseas in a country other than Switzerland, which was a boring and obvious choice. Liking certain authors was positive: Habermas, Spengler, Borges, Goethe.
Knowing each country’s major imports and exports was essential, mostly so you could have an opinion on Vanuatu. Indonesian was, this year, a very good sign. German had been better last year, but was still superior to French. Chinese was practically a requirement. Certain colleges were known to produce certain types: Harvard had no one of value, except for a Belgian tap dancer who had once pledged to them that ‘many must perish so few may rise’. She assumed she would be one of the few. Princeton had a few contestants, disproportionately Comparative Literature students who ranted about Turgenev at Malibu pool parties. Oxford had some promising Turkish intelligence officers. Cornell was not reached out to.
The Institute was meeting at Yale, at a corner bar with a pool table and subpar beer. It was only a society at this point, attempting to build itself out. Many projects had been proposed: the largest organic beef farm in America funded by Chinese investors, nuclear fission in Canada, graphite mines in the Philippines, joining the international Ambergris trade, using LIDAR to dig in Afghanistan for wares to sell at indecent auction houses. Some of the founders were secretly considering grad school, but they would not tell anyone that. Most were currently assistants at think tanks, but they’d call their roles ‘chief of staff’ when asked, as if a think tank was a small country. Each of the founders secretly believed that, if dropped in a small country, they could quickly start running it.
Do you simple, simple, simple people sans a speck of talent or originality ever give it a rest and write anything that anyone might care about and which doesn't drop in Yale?
They never come off the robot line. Gotta toe that robot line. The same pretentious, boring nothingness again and again and again.
This isn't for reading. It's for a silver-spoon idiot to look at--to scan--and say, "Yes, there's Yale. Box checked. Yes, there's a reference to someone like Spengler. Box checked."
Who the hell is this for save that asshole looking to do what I just described? It's not even for that asshole to read. Why do it? For this? For what? To say you were in Granta? With what? What is the goddam point of this? Who couldn't do this? Who couldn't be told exactly how to do this? Could you be more boring? Could anything be less significant? Why does anyone need this in their lives? What does it do for anyone? Is it entertaining? Edifying? What does it do?
And don't get me wrong--just because anyone could this and lots of people do doesn't mean it's going into Granta. You need the other stuff for that to happen. And none of it has to do with writing.
Why would you do anything in this world without knowing or asking yourself what the point is? It is impossible--and I invite anyone to try, because believe me, I'd love to put you up in this record if you did--for a person to tell me what the point is of that Granta story. And the point can't be a negative. That is, it can't be so that an insecure, vapid, disgusting creature like Sigrid Rausing can think the writer isn't on a level above her, or so that people who went to school for degree after degree can feel all smug about themselves because they recognize two out of every seven references.
Because people will see the name Turgenev and think, "Gotta reread Fathers and Sons. That Bazarov, man!"
Right. That'll happen.
Are you kidding me? Are you being serious with this garbage? You're this insecure? You're this bereft of a single idea? You're this dead and gulch-dry inside? You don't have any of the spark of life in you that you could capture on a page? You can't think of a single story? An actual story. You could never honestly begin a sentence in this life with the words, "Let me tell you a story" because you've never had a story to tell and you never will. About anything.
Look how this drips with elitism. Cornell (where our friend J. Robert Lennon--the man they call "the other John Lennon"--is, and who has been a part of some spirited prose offs himself, like that time we showed what a joke he and the New Yorker's fiction editors are) wasn't up to the mark. After all, Cornell isn't Yale.
It's appalling. And it's appallingly empty. Always is. Because there's nothing else out there. There's the system and system writing, and that's it.
And a lizard understands how to move through grass? Really? What is there to figure out? How many different ways are there to move through grass?
Did some lizard need to think, "Wait...the best way for me--and, by extension, all of us lizards--to move through grass is to dodge every seven blades of grass, run over the next three, then dodge seven again, run once more through three, keep repeating, and that's the way to do it."
It's so awkward and unwieldy when these people try to be deep. Kind of like asking the water that barely fills up an ice cube tray to go all the way down to the bottom of the ocean.
There it is, yet again, more writing from another untalented drone, same as in One Story, in The New Yorker, in Zoetrope, whatever it's going to be. Hand out the awards, hook up the right people with the plainly rigged backroom hook-up BS that is the Pulitzer, issue the book deal, get the dreadful writer in the top ten lists of the new year, the summer, the year that just was.
It's not possible to care less about anything than what you wrote if you're this writer. The only time anyone would ever care is with an entry like this which puts the truth right out there, front and center.
The writing isn't about the reading. Not at all. Isn't that mind-blowing? You have writing and it's not meant to be read. It's meant for these people to have their system, to hob-nob, to hook up, and to think that they're not less intelligent than someone else while touting their imbecilic, insubstantial selves to themselves.
Click on the link above because it takes you to the entire story. You can read the whole thing. When you do that--when you see it in full--you'll realize what's there is even worse than what I showed you.
Not that the prose gets more embarrassing as you go along--it's the same kind of bad throughout--but what you'll see is all that this story does, that it goes nowhere, that it's not a story, it's some more paragraphs like what I excerpted, and then that's the end. It's even dumber in its totality than what you get with the paragraphs I highlighted.
It's like this amazing achievement of totally sucking at something. Like if there was a gold medal for sucking, this story--as with all of these stories by these people--would make its author a legend of the sucking Olympics.
"She holds the record with nine suckage medals."
Look at the references, too. Little to nothing can be gleaned via context about any of them. You can't just name-drop. Look at all that I know. Look at all I'm the leading expert in the world on. It's crazy, right? It's not arguable. There it is. There's the body of work on all of those things.
But when do I ever name-drop for the sake of saying, "Look at me, I know of this thing that you don't" and to leave readers behind? It doesn't happen. I would never do that. We are in this together with everything I write, and no one is more important than the reader. It's your needs that matter the most. There's no ego for me. Everything is in service to you. The reader. For people.
To that end, here's a little something by me from one of those new ones called, "Still Good."
The story is told by a guy who buys a subscription to what he thinks is a certain kind of thing--a video thing. But instead of seeing what he expects to see from the woman he expected to see it from, there are all of these videos of her sitting in her car, fully-clothed, in some remote parking lot, talking into her phone. We come to learn quite a bit about this woman from what the narrator--and us--put together as to what's happening offstage in her life. We don't know all of it, but we know a certain kind of enough. And in one of those videos, the woman isn't alone.
Then he double-backed with an, “Are you sure?”
There was caution in his voice, a “You don’t have to answer right away, think about it” quality implying a soft landing on his end no matter what, but also that he didn’t want to force anything on her.
She responded “I’m good, I promise,” which felt like a big leap—that she’d immediately gone to giving her word—in whatever this conversation was, but a leap she couldn’t help but try to make.
The top of her ear facing the camera had reddened and made me realize how white her skin actually was. She looked as if she would have been less embarrassed if he’d chanced upon her in the nude. There was no shame in that, but this was different.
“Thank you so much,” she said, effectively ending the conversation like someone skilled at getting off the phone without you being the wiser that it’d be better for them if they were done talking to you now. But there was also a weight in her voice of a person honestly believing no one had done anything nicer for them, and any words she added would have said less than what she hadn’t denied.
He started to leave, bringing his gloveless hand to the roof of the car for a quick, but-long-enough touch, the intention made no less plain by a factor of metal. Then he turned and went, slowly but willingly. It was the kind of leaving when you’re a kid and your friend’s mom drops you off at home and waits until they watch you go inside before they drive away.
She watched through the rearview mirror until there was nothing else of him to see, no summoning that could be done on second thought, then let her eyes fall back to her phone, which merely happened to be in her hand.
“That was so nice,” she said in a voice you expect to be followed by a surging towards an embrace, making her seem embarrassed again. She held herself motionless for a few seconds, a spent look on her face that made me think of the packed-down, now-soundless snow that had gotten spread across the ground outside her car, as if the sky hadn’t been part of the operation at all.
The video quality wasn’t the best but I think she was crying as she added, “There are still good people out there.” But I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right trying to play judge about the existence of someone else’s tears.
You couldn’t hear the sound of running water despite her window still being down, so maybe the brook itself was frozen, but you figure brooks have a code never to freeze or else they weren’t ever really a brook and what were they then, and it could have been something else that was making the noise in the first place and I’d been mistaken in what I thought I heard or the wind had drowned it out.
Yeah...we're at the part of the prose where I say that I don't think that's very close and I don't think anyone else could possibly think it's very close either.
Princeton had a few contestants, disproportionately Comparative Literature students who ranted about Turgenev at Malibu pool parties.
versus
She held herself motionless for a few seconds, a spent look on her face that made me think of the packed-down, now-soundless snow that had gotten spread across the ground outside her car, as if the sky hadn’t been part of the operation at all.
And yes, I know, the "disproportionately Comparative Literature students" bit makes no sense. What does that mean? What is up with that phrase? That's like saying, "Disproportionately accounting students."
Again: Are you trying to suck?
Sigrid: Are you trying to be a disgusting, vomit-inducing, bigot?
Obviously you are, but wouldn't it be better to be less blatant about it? Because I think you look ridiculous again here, don't you?
You can't be like, "Oh, that's fine, I'm not embarrassed by that, he's not showing people what I'm undeniably all about and how horrible the writing is in my magazine."
And the thing is, it's so easy to do.
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