Wednesday 1/8/25
Emily Stokes, editor of The Paris Review, was offered the story below by me from which you will see an excerpt. But because I am not one of these people, and I do not suck at writing like all of these people do, it was never going to be seriously considered or considered at all.
I was sitting here today hours before the dawn--as someone who actually works at writing, unlike many of these people who roll out of bed circa ten o'clock and then have to decide how to deploy the trust fund for the day--working on this story, which is for There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, my book of unmatchable works of female-centric literature when I thought, "You know what? How about a prose with this bit here? I'm sure if we go to The Paris Review's website we will immediately find a new, horrible story that is about someone in a writing program or a writer."
Sure enough, the very first thing I clicked on fit that bill. Shocking. As always. But let's play along. This that you're about to see right here is supposed to be better--right--than what will follow from me. Okay. We'll see how that goes. This is from Dan Bevacqua's "Daughters."
In March, Gibson flew to Chicago. His girlfriend was in a graduate program there studying literature, and one night the two of them went to dinner at her professor’s house. Gibson was a professor too. Most of his students were poor. So was Gibson. He suspected that he wouldn’t have liked teaching at the school his girlfriend attended, but he knew it wasn’t anything he would ever have to worry about. During dinner, the professor asked questions about Gibson’s school, saying that he imagined his experience was different from Gibson’s, because his students were privileged and Gibson’s were less so. For a few minutes, the conversation sputtered. The professor opened up another bottle of wine, and then he, his wife, and Gibson’s girlfriend—all poets—argued about poetry. Gibson didn’t drink. He also didn’t write poems. He didn’t drink because he was an alcoholic, and he didn’t write poetry because he wasn’t good at it. “If only that stopped more people,” the professor said.
By the end of dinner, Gibson’s girlfriend, her professor, and the professor’s wife were very drunk. They started arguing about a writer. Close to midnight, the professor slammed his hand down on the table, and when he raised it back up again the sharp edge of a knife was stuck into his palm. For a moment, they were all entranced by this. It seemed like a miracle. Then the professor shook his hand and the knife fell onto his plate. “My God,” the professor said. The wound began to pour blood. After that, the professor’s wife swooped the professor over to the sink. Gibson’s girlfriend said she was dizzy, and the two of them went to a couch.
A minute later, the professor’s five-year-old daughter came out of her room. She wore a tiara and a burgundy costume dress that implied Renaissance Faire. The walls were bookshelves, and the girl took down a thick novel with a bright orange cover, sat down on a different couch, and started reading. The girl’s couch was underneath the far window, and the way she slipped in between two pillows made it seem as if she was playing a game in which no one could see her. She wasn’t all that concerned about her father, who was swearing in the kitchen. Instead, she concentrated on her book. Gibson knew that certain children had crazy sleep schedules, or that sometimes parents made exceptions when they had company, but still he thought it was odd that she was awake and that no one seemed to care. He wanted to ask her what her bedtime was, but he wasn’t her father. Also, he had a hard rule against interrupting anyone while they were reading, and he guessed that included children.
When Gibson had first arrived and was introduced to the girl, either the professor or his wife had suggested their daughter would grow up to be a writer. Other than their own projections of themselves, Gibson wasn’t sure what this forecast was based upon. But Gibson had the idea in his head now. He knew poets, and the girl wasn’t one. She lacked the heroic self-consciousness: that nervous, ecstatic way a poet let you know there was a person inside of them. So, a fiction writer. There was, in fact, a certain Cheever-ness to her situation, her WASP-y, tenured father bleeding in the kitchen. Because of that, the girl’s childhood felt classic.
Do these people ever invent anything? The same shit every time. We can't go so much as two sentences in this story before we got a graduate program and someone studying literature. Why is it always just this garbage? Who the fuck is this for? It's for ass-pots like these people so they can go, "Yes, I studied literature in a graduate program, yes."
And then it just gets worse. More ridiculous. More inevitably on-brand. But can I even say it gets worse? Remember our entry the other day about splitting a super-fine hair? But Cheever, really? You're dropping in Cheever? And Cheever people, which means many of you MFA non-human drones: He also sucked (though not to the same degree of everything we now see courtesy of the MFA epidemic). Do you really not know how boring and entitled and privileged and without human value a Cheever story is? You grew up rich in the suburbs, and the equally brainless, soulless people around you in academia and publishing think it's best to cite him, so you do, too.
Try being a person for the first time in your life. I know it's too much to ask to write for an actual human person, but maybe start by trying to be one. It's actually not against the rules. Yes, I know, it's against the rules of your system, it's against the rules for people like Emily Stokes at The Paris Review, but maybe, just once, ask yourself What the fuck is this shit for--who is it for?--that you're writing.
And if the answer is, "Well, really no one, save that there are these hallmarks for douchebags like me if they skim the thing because no one would actually want to read it," then maybe do something else?
How can that not occur to you? But yeah, The Paris Review. There it is, brothers and sisters: The best fiction in the world. Same as with The New Yorker, One Story, Harper's, The Atlantic, Zoetrope. Better than Colin could do. Right. I'm sure we all believe this.
Look at this system. How is this not criminal? No one cares--because it's just this; writing like this--so there's that. The totebagging of American fiction. Writing--and publication and awarding of said writing--that is not meant for reading and readers. But how wrong is this? What is more deeply entrenched as wrong, backwards, and fucked up than this? Look at all of these prose offs. Look at the garbage by these people. It's unilateral garbage. There is no let-up. Garbage, garbage, garbage. And lies. "This is amazing, this is the best book of the year, this is the best story of the year, this is the best writer." Lies and garbage. It's blatant. What is more blatant when you actually look at any of this?
You think Emily Stokes thought that was amazing? The hell she did. What's that back and forth like? "Why's it amazing, Emily?"
"He included a writing program early on and referenced Cheever." These aren't fucking answers to that question. There are no answers to that question because this sucks. Wouldn't you like to do that interview, though? Take us through your thinking. Come on. Tell us. Defend yourself. I'd say, "Defend yourself, criminal," but to me, this is worse than criminal, because these people think this is something they should automatically get away with because of the blood in their veins, what they come from, the money come from, their classism.
Anyway. This is going to be a good one. Beat down, that is. I'm looking forward to how this goes. You want to see a little something from this story by me? This is typical--though each work is completely different from each of my other works; I'm talking in terms of matchless quality--that was and is offered to these people. Sometimes for ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty years. Imagine being offered the likes of this, from the this guy with this body of work, this historically unique publishing track record, and because he is what he is--which is everything an Emily Stokes is not--he's going to be discriminated against while the above is slapped in The Paris Review. Do you think anyone thinks the above is good? Amazing? Brilliant? Genius? More than genius? You think anyone could? Then you tell me how easy it is to think that this is.
“We’re going to fuck,” Rachel announced before the bus had barely started moving again after picking us up like she was restating an important verdict she’d reached overnight and also trying to shock me into standing down. “Thomas and me,” she clarified in case I’d taken her to mean the likes of Mr. Margolis who Rachel had a crush on earlier in the year or some ordinary living boy.
Then she added one of her awkward Rachel-type lines for reinforcement, “We are going to rock and roll,” and I declared no, that is not happening, almost, I realized, like Rachel was my kid, but her jaw tightened and she pushed back by saying Thomas deserved happiness and a life, given all he had been through, even as a parting gesture. A proper parting gesture unlike the first time. “And if he goes out while going in,” she added, “I’d be happy knowing I helped.”
My dad used to say, “Be your brother’s keeper,” and I asked him what if you don’t have a brother, because I didn’t. I wouldn’t have minded, but a brother or a sister wasn’t anything I wished for. Santa didn’t see “Baby sister with fun name” below “Binoculars but not toy binoculars” on my Christmas list. There was Rachel, who was like a sibling. But I didn’t want for what I didn’t have, because it felt like what I had was what I wanted, even if I didn’t consciously say that to myself, though I would have if I’d been pressed on the subject by someone like Mr. Margolis, except I did not know him at the time.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t have a brother or a sister that my dad gave me this advice as often as he did, though it was also like he was talking to the air. That’s what people do sometimes. Not because they want to hear themselves talk, but like if they get that important thing out there often enough it’ll stick to the air and get blown around by the wind and reach who it needs to reach up there in the jet stream of human kindness and concern.
One year, Rachel gave me a Valentine’s card after having first said that this card, special as it was, and as much as she meant it—and more—didn’t mean she wanted to marry me, because she would someday marry a boy—but only if I also thought this boy was great and “really super truly” the boy for her—though we would still live close to each other.
There were quite a few stipulations and promises before she forked the thing over, a bit of Crayola dug under a couple of her nails along with some backyard dirt. She’d drawn this heart in a blue sky on the outside. It took up practically the whole front of the card. Only the thin outsides of the heart were red—it looked like thread—and there were clouds in its open middle where clouds would have normally been anyway like nothing up above had been interrupted. Inside the card she wrote, “I would stitch all of my love in the sky for you.” I think we were seven and had recently learned that a stitch in time saves nine, which sounded important.
When my dad said “Be your brother’s keeper” and he spoke to both me and the air, I thought of Rachel’s card. All the same, he clarified that it was an expression—the first few times, that is, until I guess he figured he didn’t have to anymore. It meant take care of people. You’d think everyone was supposed to be responsible for everyone else the way my dad spoke and you had to keep your eyes peeled for those who needed you and sometimes stop your feet from moving so you could hear better, and of course my mom later when she started recognizing the signs of depression all over the place.
“That’s why we’re here,” he’d add, “which you learn as you get older.”
Why he said that to me I didn’t know for certain, given that my age ruled out what I could understand on the subject, by my father’s own admittance. I guess he believed that just because something will keep and it’s really for down the road doesn’t mean it shouldn’t get said when it does. Especially if it’s also being put in the air, and the wind can come up behind you with the right words and say, “How do?” Or maybe he was saying it so I’d look back and remember later on because my dad knew other things.
It is impossible to quantify the difference in quality. That's why I use the term, infinitely better. You need no special qualifications to see and know as much, other than being someone who draws breath, has working eyes, and can read.
Worth saying/reiterating: These are excerpts on here from me. The above comes from what is a 6800 word story. There is the whole other matter of how everything in each of these works of fiction I do come together, and that's a life experience on its own level.
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