Wednesday 3/13/24
I'm here, I'm finishing this new story, so we'll do another prose off. Want to hammer at how bad the fiction is in American Short Fiction again? Okay--we can do that.
What you're going to see in this next excerpt is something that's become very common. As we've seen, these people never have actual stories to tell. They don't have anything for you. They can't invent. They have no imaginations. What they are trying to do is cover that up, and one technique they use is with this "gritty" approach to writing, which really means describing bodily functions. I'll show you something that's a dead ringer for what you're about to see from American Short Fiction in The Sun, which a broken has-been-who-never-was like Sun editor Sy Safransky would fall for. Same tactic.
These people conflate this kind of thing for authenticity. They themselves have never been authentic in their lives. It's like this totally foreign concept to them. So what happens is they fall, like the morons they are, like the fake people they are, for this slovenly, half-assed simulacrum of authenticity. Description of a bowel movement will do it. That's how dumb and simple these people are.
So here we go. We'll keep this short this time. This is from Kate Tighe-Pigott's "Neighbors" in American Short Fiction:
At this moment, a man passing them on the street, maybe ten or twelve years older, appraises them — young family, springtime, daffodils — and, in that deadpan New York way, says, “It gets worse.”
Does it? After labor, Libby held her broken vagina together with two hands in order to go number two. She spent half her sister’s wedding in the bathroom milking herself into the sink because her pump was broken and she had mastitis in three places. There was one time she’d been crying in a produce shop to Mike — (on their “grocery shopping date”) — about what it was like to lose your identity, when he interrupted her to wipe poop off her face.
It’s not that she doesn’t believe the man, her harbinger of doom. Things must get worse. Dying will be terrible, eclipsed by your child dying. And accidents are the leading cause of death for children, which means she lives in a register of constant, high frequency panic that leaves her exhausted and alienated from Mike, who carries himself like he’s always on a boating holiday. The friction between them is compounded by lack of sleep.
But, she chuckles into her daffodils, it gets worse!
See how that works? With simple, dumb, inauthentic, sheltered, broken people--like editors Adeena Reitberger, Rebeca Markovits, and Nate Brown at American Short Fiction--who are all about the pose, and then all about letting the right kind of person in, with their dreadful work, writing "going number two" is radical to them. That's the stuff that pushes the stylistic envelope. The life envelope.
It's daft. Childish. But these people are so stunted. And it's also all they can handle: they need things to be fake, because reality and anything real terrifies and crushes them. They can think, "That's earthy, I'm not offended, I must be super real and deep," when all you have is first grade pee pee/poopy talk.
It's like people with Junot Diaz. Do you know how inauthentic his writing is? How devoid of any invention? We just have this misogynistic, brainless fraud changing names from those in his own life. Fiction master! This guy can't invent a single thing. He doesn't have it in him. He'll sooner flap his arms and fly to Jupiter than he will invent a single thing in his life. And he's tacky, shallow, witless. His go-to is this puerile gratuitousness that any adult who has ever lived at all--or any teenager--just laughs off as such a contrivance. Guy tries to be so edgy, but in reality he's like Howard Cunningham from Happy Days trying to be this badass by swearing and saying these things he's overheard that he doesn't understand and getting them wrong. The type of guy that every "normal" person laughs at. Someone like that is more crass than some puke of a kid you remember from a high school locker room because this is an adult and the kid was a kid at the time, not some two-dimensional scam artist who realizes every single word I'm saying about him here is the dead-on truth, but has to keep doing it, because he can't do anything else, isn't anything else, and hopes to whatever he hopes to that others don't know it like this Fleming knows it. They do.
You don't have to get anything right from real life to trick these editors. Anything consistent with how humans work. They don't know the difference. They don't know how mortifyingly cringe-inducing any of this shit is. They can't tell. They live in this protected bubble away from human nature, how people talk, how they act, how they respond. They're the last people on earth to have a clue. But someone like a Diaz puts in a Spanish word and italicizes it, and people like Deborah Treisman at The New Yorker think they're veterans of the barrio when they see it and publish it. It's funny, actually, save for the harm it does, these people do, in having killed off reading in our society, and in making it so that there are no good writers in this world because if you don't do what they do, if you're not like them, they lock you out.
Who is going to fight though that? Who is going to write through it? Anyone else stopped a long, long, long time ago. And that leaves people like these people and very little else as the deciders at every level of an industry, for lack of a better term, because this certainly isn't about business, value, commerce, giving people top-notch product. There's not a great-writing cavalry ready to ride in and save the day. You don't just start writing amazing stuff with the flip of a switch.
Generations and generations worth of writers, now, have all given themselves over to being in lockstep with this fucked up program, writing a certain way, being a certain way, because that's how you get what you get from the system, which adds up to what? What does it really add up to when you suck at what you do and none of it translates to the world? What? So you can say you got this thing or were in that place or went to that residency? What does any of that mean when your work is terrible and has no actual value? And you know the truth. You know you suck at it. There aren't enough awards and fabricated puff piece reviews to blunt the edge of someone knowing how much they suck. You don't think Emma Straub knows she sucks at writing? Blake Butler? You think Laura van den Berg believes that she's this writing genius? Lincoln Michel? Justin Taylor? Matt Bell? Paul Yoon? Or do you think these people know the truth and need to be lied to? Do you think you have an entire rickety system built on lies and self-delusion and enabling? Sounds about right, right?
It takes constant dedication over the course of your life to be great at writing, if you are even born with the ability and the chances are less than nil that you were. That's just life. It's just reality. Your kid plays hockey, but your kid wasn't born with the ability of Connor McDavid. Sorry. You think it's different with writing? Writing is harder. We can wipe this system out today, let's say, but it's going to take a long time before there are good writers again. They're almost certainly not born yet. But that's how simple-minded these people are, like with that Junot Diaz example, and what you just saw from American Short Fiction. They're that easy to fool when it comes to a person they want to be fooled by. It's horribly racist, too, but do you think Deborah Treisman has any self-awareness whatsoever? You think she's interested in having any? Or do you think these people try and do all they can so they never have to deal honestly with who they are?
These are infantile idiots. Entitled infantile idiots. Look at the whole of Nate Brown's career, this guy who teaches writing at the university level. At Johns Hopkins, where he busies himself looking exactly as you'd think someone like this would look. And look how little he's ever published and never for any stakes in an outlet bigger than a blog. What does he do? He goes the "pee" route, too, as you'll see here. He sucks. He's working with nothing. He has no talent. So when he writes this piffle about David Bowie, a guy like this thinks he's being cutting edge when he says he went for his morning pee.
I mean, honestly. Look at what you're working with here in these people. You're dependent on them? Their say-so? You come to them and they see someone so unlike them, doing what they could never do, with a track record completely unlike theirs, and how do you think that's going to go?
I'm looking today at a woman with pink hair. Frumpy. No ability. All of the Woke signage and filters. All the stuff. Teaches, has her MFA, and edits a literary journal.
Now, do you think there's anything at all I can send her that she would allow into her journal that doesn't pay, that no one reads, with that work, of course, on a totally different level--and obviously so--than anything else in there by people like her? Or do you think she's going to get off on telling me, of all people, with the quality of my work, with my pedigree, with everything about me, with even how I look, to pay her $3 to upload it to their submission manager, where it would have no chance, for all of these reasons, if I was even crazy enough to give her money?
I'm going to pay you to consider "Idra"? Which you wouldn't even be honestly considering. That's hilarious. I'm offering you what I offer you, for basically nothing, too, and you want me to give you money for that? How gone in the head are you? And while I watch you--and can so easily document--hook people up because you're in bed with them?
It's like J. Robert Lennon. I offered him--very politely; pure professional class, these letters--a story for Epoch at Cornell, for which I would have been paid virtually no money, which no one would see, because no one reads Epoch. I had already offered him "Dead Thomas," which is as good as writing is going to get. I didn't even look until later at his emails--think about that; I know what the emails say before I even open them, so in a way it's really more about me building a legal case by sending the work--because I knew what he was all about. We've all seen his writing. It's pretty bad, isn't it? He took one look at me, this guy on this other level, who was not like him, and being the bigot he is, being the envious, awkward, talentless, low-to-ground toad that he is, he was going to get himself off by telling me to pay him money to have those stories form-rejected by an underling.
I mean, it's comical, in one regard. Because J. Robert Lennon is the same guy who then had the truth about him put up on here, who has twice had to have his writing shown up by being put next to mine as we see with the links above, who had to look into how much it costs to get the results of his name and this blog scrubbed from Google because he looked so bad and every single word of it all was true.
I'm just going to keep taking you apart, brother.
It's very simple what happens if you take it to the point that you leave me no choice: I bury you on here. Then I dig you up, and I bury you again. For all to see. I bury you, dig you up, bury you, dig you up. You have a problem that isn't going to being going away. And you took it here. You forced my hand. I did everything possible to avoid having to put you up here. You did it all to yourself, by discriminating--and blatantly so--against the wrong guy. The choice was yours. It was a bad choice.
(NB: You know what would be fun? How about we take some of Lennon's dreadful fiction and do a couple more prose offs with those two very stories that I sent him? I'll make a note. How unsurprised are you that Adeena Reitberger, Rebecca Markovits, and Nate Brown at American Short Fiction are editors who made sure to hook up J. Robert Lennon and his own writing? Tough to be less surprised by anything, right? And that's just how it goes here in this subculture of these people. On and on and on and on and on.)
I could send whatever right now to this woman I just described. A man-less story. Any one of these hundreds that I have. Should I do that just so this can play out exactly as I said it's going to play out and then document that here? Because it's that much of a given. The plumber contends with the pipes. He's not dependent on the people. You come along to these people here, and you're expecting them to not be crazy? Hateful? Bigoted? To be fair? Competent?
No one cares about any of this shit in what is really this twisted subculture. These people in this system have made it that way. So this pink-haired woman of no talent, who hates men, or a Nate Brown, get to just run whatever because it blows and it's from someone who however you slice it is the same type of nothing they are? We talked about the BS awards in that mock Q&A and why these people wouldn't be threatened by that, and that's bang-on. Legitimacy is the issue. Someone being this actual thing that they are not, able to do things they could never do. Not a one of which. Not close. You could say it's just that place, but it's more than their place, because you have thousands and thousands of people like this from place to place. This is just disease, pettiness, backwardness. It's sick.
Think of how simple and stupid you have to be to orient yourself this way if you're a Nate Brown at American Short Fiction. It's embarrassing. And you teach this? You? Parents spend all of that money to have their kids taught about writing by you? And all of the thousands and thousands of the people like you? Interchangeable with you. And this is how the editors are at "the best" journals in the world? So what does that say about them? Why is the prose I put on here from these venues always so godawful? (Hail, Motorollah.) I thought it was supposed to be amazing? Brilliant? No? The above isn't better than anything I've ever written in my life? No? You don't say? That's shocking.
Then we have believability. Characters in these "stories" are never believable. They don't act as anyone would act. You'll see that's a very common complaint with readers out in the world who are duped--by the log-rolling, the award-giving, the fake-praising, the "starred" reviews, The Washington Post lying about this, The New York Times lying about that, all of the bullshit--into reading this crap. I look at a lot of their reactions, and this is a common theme/raised-criticism. "No one would act that way." It's all contrived.
No one walks down the street and says to a stranger, "It'll get worse." Doesn't happen. It's not believable. It's someone who sucks at writing trying to jam a peg that doesn't fit into a given hole regardless, because they don't have an actual story to tell. They have to force everything.
Look: A story is a natural entity. It's not an agenda. It's not a scheme. It's not a desperate attempt. It has a natural way of going, or it's not a story. That can take all sorts of forms, that natural way of going. But once you start to manipulate and have characters do and say things because what you have is falling apart, and you want it to be this thing that it isn't--an actual story--you're cooked. It's over. You have it backwards. Ass fucking backwards. A real story doesn't require any cheating. You don't have to rig it. You can't. This isn't like your system, if you're one of these people. You can't rig a story.
Now let's say that someone did walk down the street and say that to a stranger. Would that stranger--our narrator--then just breezily carry on like was normal? Nothing to see here. Nothing to comment on. Of course not. But that's what you're meant to believe in this piece--you're meant to believe both of these ridiculous things--and you don't. Just like you don't think it's brave, daring, shocking, all of that BS, when you read "wipe poop off her face."
Grow up.
Let me put this to you another way. Two other ways. This person with her work here in American Short Fiction doesn't have a story to tell. That's a big thing. You need a story to tell. This person also doesn't have a story to write. First you need a story to tell. Understand what I'm saying. Sounds simple, but it isn't. Under, or behind--you pick the preposition--every story that you write, there's a story to tell. The writing of the story is what makes the story the most that it can be, and even more than it is. It's not "just" a story. And when you have a story to tell, there's no manipulation. You're not making concessions in order to try and get things to cohere. To be a story. That's faking a story. Hoping to Frankenstein something plausible enough together to dupe people. That's not going to work. It's just going to be something flat and unconvincing that sucks.
Anyway. I need to finish this prose off. So here we go. Again, you have to have a story to tell, and a story to write. That's how it has to be.
Life is the emergency, though. It just fools you because most of the time it looks calm enough. Regular. You go into Tuesday knowing more or less what you're going to get, but that's not necessarily a good thing. You actually need something from people pretty much every day. They need something from you. But when everyone can get away without giving anything, that's what they tend to do. Is that being a friend? Because if true friendship is just about emergencies, then you only need a friend ten times or whatever between the time you meet them and when you kick off.
I think of it that way, too: getting kicked off. Kicked off the earth. People talk about firing the people they hate into the sun. I could see it being like that, especially with people who also hate part of themselves, and there I am, moving through space, helping my own flight along by moving my arms like I'm swimming. I picture the view accompanied by a feeling of overwhelming remorse that I could have seen and known wonder like this back in the life that is now over if only I had lived it better.
I try to hope that peace will descend upon me then, and wash away my guilt. That I won't louse up the moment with fear. Waste it. You only given the one chance to die. Presumably. Or maybe as you're swimming along through space God intervenes if you're freaking out too much and depriving yourself of both the view and peace such that he puts down an enormous hand, stopping you, and says, "You're not making the most that you can out of this. Let's start over."
And you think, "I'm going to live again, hot dog!" and God, being God, laughs, but not cruelly—it’s that form of gentle, knowing laugh—and says, "No, that's not what I mean. The dying thing is what we're talking. Trust me, you want to max out on what’s happening. Don’t waste the view."
Then you’re put back in the cannon, as it were, that launches you towards the sun and into death. And maybe you do better. Or maybe you don’t, hope the hand comes down again, but it doesn’t, and that’s that.
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