Sunday 3/30/25
In an industry loaded with frauds, bigots, people hooked up from the word "go," a Meghan O'Rourke still stands out. Everything she has was handed to her because of the perceived color of the blood in her veins, because no one has ever read her work and thought, "Wow, this is outstanding." The New Yorker hooked her up, Slate hooked her up. She's never written anything interesting, but she does her whiny first person things and her poetry and so, having gone to Yale, it was only fitting that she was made the editor of the Yale Review, where a fraud like this would then hook up people like herself.
We've done a bunch of prose offs in these pages with those people who Rourke also featured in Yale Review. People like Jamel Brinkley. There's never been a country club--which is essentially what publishing types like Meghan O'Rourke are a member of--as odious as this one, which is saying something. At least at the regular country club, though, maybe someone's good at golf? These people aren't good at writing. Clearly. They're good at being evil. It's just disgusting. Always.
Are you one of us?
And if you're not: Go away.
Doesn't matter what you've done, what it is in your hand that you are offering, how much more accomplished you are, how much more legit, how much better.
You could have work that would save their soul, save the souls of their loved ones, make them a fortune, save the world, and it's no dice if you aren't one of them. Work they wouldn't be paying for. That they're getting for free or close to it at their journal filled with navel-gazing shit that no one cares about or could care about.
And the more legit they know you to be, the better they know you to be--as they're sucking each other off, doing their quid pro quo, plagiarizing, raping, sexually harassing, defending the hiding of bodies, enabling, lying, banishing, blackballing, you name it--and the better you are at writing, the thicker the door, but that's academic--no pun intended--because we're talking an absolute of a door anyway.
They could be bathed in glory as a result of the association, but they'll still opt to be petty and resentful--as if they're seeking revenge against a person who committed no crime save to produce better work, which isn't a crime at all--because that's what the imposter is all about, and what a pretentious, entitled, talentless nasty, petty, insecure, envious, empty person is all about.
Along I came to Meghan O'Rourke--who is all of the above--and how do you think that was going to go when I offered her something infinitely better than anything she could do or has published? No chance, right?
You know what she told me? She told me to pay her money. I was to get out my credit and pay her for the fait accompli of having my story form rejected.
Isn't that insane?
Meanwhile, all of these bad writers are going in work-unseen--and we all know the work blows--because they're the right kind of people. Think they're paying? I don't know how anyone could be that naive and that stupid not to get how this works. It's right in front of your face if you choose to look at it at all. That's how these places operate. They get chumps to send them money--it's stealing--while they hook up their revolting friends and people who are the right type. The people of the system. And the shit these people write is never for reading. It's just to be there with their name on it and keep the system going like this.
What do we say?
The system exists so that the people of the system can be the people of the system.
So that Meghan O'Rourke can be Meghan O'Rourke in this system of incestuous evil.
Do I even need to tell you--we're just crossing all the T's here--that Meghan O'Rourke has a Guggenheim? I haven't even looked that up before I typed that in. This shit is just automatic. I probably should double-check, though...hold on a second...
Gee, what do you know:
We've talked about Yiyun Li before. She's a ghoulish human. I know--and yes, I'm talking to you--how you look at people for material. I know you can't think of anything on your own. I know what's grist for your sick mill. I know what you don't really care about. I know what you look at as something for you to use because you can't come up with anything else. I know what a user you are. I know that there's nothing sacred to you because there's nothing inside and when there's nothing inside there's just using and using and using.
Remember that one we did about Li before from the pages of Zoetrope, whose editor Michael Ray told me I'd never come close to writing anything good enough--not even close--to being worthy of inclusion in Zoetrope? Which, obviously, is only going to be said by that person who knows they're lying when they think no one is going to find out and the work about which this is said isn't going to be placed side by side with the work in the venue (woops).
That was a good one, wasn't it? Talking about a pasting.
Go read the entry. Don't take my word for it. There it is. Plain as can be.
I was just going to do one sentence with this prose off. It's good to keep things fresh and not every prose needs to be the same kind of prose off. Got a lot more of these we'll be getting to.
But instead of a one sentence versus one sentence prose off, let's let Li have a bunch of sentences and I'll just use the one of mine. I'm outnumbered. Not a fair fight, right?
This is the first sentence of Li's "The Reason Why" from Yale Review, put forward by the discrimination-loving Meghan O'Rourke:
Why are the parents of these children never around? I asked my writing class during the discussion of a story in which a set of teenagers seemed to live in a dome established entirely for their adolescent existence.
What is it with these people? Why do they have to write about being a creative writing professor so much? Can you invent nothing? You have no imagination, so we get meaninglessness from your life that you call fiction?
Who on earth cares? Does anyone outside of a creative writing program care? And no one there cares either. It's all grab-ass. You ever watch a terrible moving just because it's filmed near where you live? "There's my bar! There's town hall!"
That's what this is, for pretentious dolts. "Yes, I am a creative writing professor also."
How simple are these simpletons?
The thing, though, is that you'll sit through that bad movie that features your street, but there's no one reading the likes of this. And you don't get away from it. To wit:
Xian read the card catalogue, and I walked between the shelves with stacks of borrowing requests. In this way we had found the writers we would read together: Romain Rolland, Albert Camus, Françoise Sagan, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Sometimes we read side by side, sometimes to each other: Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, The Rainbow.
Let me be over-the-top in spelling this out: This is meant as fiction. Or it's presented as fiction, from Guggenheim winning, Pulitzer Prize finalist, New Yorker fiction contributor, Paris Review fiction contributor, Yiyun Li.
But you'd never know it, would you?
This isn't writing. This isn't a story. This isn't entertainment. This isn't art. This isn't anything.
But you know that.
The only reason these people can get away with this--or have done--is because no one cares. No one outside of their system cares. And everyone in their system is one of them. Get it?
They are protected by how bad the writing is, because this isn't a thing to the rest of the world. It is in the best interest of these people of this system to only publish and award and make it so that people like them can only write this shit. Because then they can be the people of the system. And there's nothing to intrude or call them out.
Because it's just fucking them.
You want another sentence from the Li story? Okay.
Unlike me, he would have taken his time to become a Chekhovian character, if at all.
It's unbelievable, isn't it?
Why don't you take a look around, and you can see what her go-to is for exploiting.
But when you can't invent anything, and you have no scruples, what else are you going to do?
You're not going to write the likes what will now complete our latest prose off. I said I needed but the one sentence. A page, a story, a paragraph, a sentence. Anything I have shows the gap between me and anything these people have. I can play a game of Pin-the-Tale-on-Donkey and let pick the first thing I land on. I can use something I wrote as I'm writing this that isn't twenty seconds olds. But for these purposes, here's a single sentence from "Finder of Views."
“Don’t you dare,” she would say without anger, because by then she’d be crying, her head pressed into the top of his chest as she drummed a hand against his shoulder—one beat, two beat, three beat, four; no more—wanting only to reach and connect, if only for a single second, allowing that another wasn’t possible, to say nothing of the total number of moments remaining to them.
Fucking hell, what is that? That's a story right there. A symphony. Who would even think to write such a thing? One beat, two beat, three beat four, then the touch of the off-rhyme as an off-beat? A feat of engineering. Look at that construction. That design. Look at the sweep, the depth. The musicality beyond music. You don't even know this story. That's a sentence on page 33. I just grabbed a sentence. It's 33 pages into a story, we don't know what's been happening, we know nothing, and by itself, even ripped from its context, it both goes right through us and stays within us. Imagine seeing the whole thing?
Life. What do we say? The value of a work of art is directly proportional to the life it contains, and we can extrapolate that to say, the life that it itself is.
That sentence alone is life. A huge amount of life. And there isn't anyone else alive, or who has lived, or will live, or any machine, that could write it.
But yeah, Meghan O'Rourke, I should locate my credit card for the pleasure of uploading the likes of that so that I can be complicit in your discrimination against me--and pay for the privilege--as you hook up your cronies in your sick system, you lying con artist.
Anyone reading this will know you for what you are morally and what you're about, but at the same time, one still has to ask, How stupid are you to think that this person wouldn't know exactly what was going on? Not that I can be bought, but my silence probably would have been worth more than three dollars. To say nothing of the forked-over matchless works of art.
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