Saturday 8/10/24
Ah, Bradford Morrow. Quite the guy, Bradford Morrow. I have something upcoming about him--he's the editor of Conjunctions, a terrible writer, full-on fraud, a veritable king of cronyism, and a man with a head suggestive of a cube of beef with rounded corners and as bereft of brains as one would expect from such a meaty cube (and a big indoor scarf fan, to boot)--so we won't focus on him in this prose off, save to say that what follows is the first paragraph of a story called "Freesias" that he put forward by Aimee Bender, who is also very much one of these people, in that she has no ability and is hooked up as a member of the clan.
Again, let me reiterate: This is the first paragraph. The story goes on for 7000 words of this nonsense. Can you get through this single paragraph? Why would you even try? What is amazing about it? What makes you care about any of it? What makes you want to keep reading if you did force yourself through this paragraph as some academic exercise or undertaking in self-flagellation?
Do I need to do the thing where I tell you that according to Bradford Morrow--a man so immature and wracked with envy that he would send me email, trashing me, in his moronic, witless way, by "accident," like it was meant for others, and a man who once yelled at me for publishing so much--you're supposed to believe that this is better than anything I've ever written in my life?
Okay. Consider it said. Ready for that paragraph?
He went down the street, his old street, on a whim, and then the whim birthed another and he turned a few more corners, finding himself on a block he’d never walked before, one with the usual lining of maples and upright autumnal-color mailboxes and then there, set in the middle, was a house not unlike his own. A house with a dark blue door and a row of slim birch trees in the front, and even that small ornamental brick wall circling a hedge, so of course he had to go and knock. When looking back on the day, he thought often how there had not been any other choice, and if time had bent to allow him to go again and again, to test and retest, everything still would’ve played out the same. His own house had burned down in the fire, just those several blocks away, and had looked almost the same, even exactly the same, really, and it was a Tuesday at three in the afternoon with an even sun and guileless clouds and he did not expect anyone to answer except then a woman opened the door, distracted, just getting off the phone, eyebrows raised with a hint of impatience, and he almost fell over. Her perfectly oval hairline; the small, pretty ears. The warm light brown of her eyes, the color, he had once tried to explain, of a thoroughbred horse, something he had meant as a genuine compliment but which had made her scoff with irritation. Which all goes to say the woman looked very much like his late wife, very much, almost identical, with her hair just a little darker, with a different freckle on the high end of the left cheek, with, maybe, a fuller lower lip, but the rest the same, the same, and when he tried to fall into her, to do what his body wanted first, which was just to feel her living, to press himself against her, when he took a step forward, she slammed the door. “Jenny!” he shouted. If he hadn’t been so dizzy he might’ve pounded on it, but grass and sky switched places and he grabbed onto a thin, prickly branch of the nearby hedge to keep himself from crashing. Steady, man, he told himself. It gave him a moment, and his cop self had, then, a chance to rise and think and remind him of harassment. To look around and stabilize the eyes and be sure he wasn’t dreaming. Birch trees, yes. White-brick walkway. Circle of green hose. Her scent, that warm bergamot lingering in the air, a smell he hadn’t encountered in seven years, avoiding all tea, truly, suddenly awake, smash, into him. What was this place? Had it always been here? Had she? Had she been born just today into this mirage? How desperately he wanted to break the door down and run to the back to find her in the bedroom, which was surely just where theirs had been maybe even with the same needlework teapot he had despised on the wall saying Good Morning Tea-totalers! made by her dead, drunk grandmother that she couldn’t bear to throw out and she might be tucked up reading as she so often was in the afternoon before getting ready for a late shift at the restaurant and he could throw her book out the window, grab her wrists, force her memory to find him, “Me! Me!”
You like the double "and then" in the first sentence? I could go through this line by line and itemize examples of incompetence, both on the writer's part and the editor's. Neither have a clue what they're doing. But this isn't about getting anything right or producing quality work. This is a fait accompli and this is how it goes for someone like Bradford Morrow with someone like Aimee Bender: "You are one of us, you have sent me shit, I will run the shit because it is shit from one of us, as I am one of us who writes the same shit."
It's like freemasonry, but with talentless, toxic, bigoted, blue-blooded freaks.
Look, when you write something, it has to have a certain pace, a rhythm, and this comes down to feel, among other things. When you write music, the music is in a given time. If it's in 3/4 and it doesn't work, maybe you change it to 4/4 time. You have a functioning ear. Your ear understands how your music will be heard by a listener. You know what works, what drives someone away. What bores them, what is monotonous, forced, labored, awkward, off-putting. Your ear has to be empathetic, in a sense; you're hearing that music as if your ear was someone else's ear. You are in their head as they drop the needle on the record. You know how it will sound to them, because you're hearing it as if you are them.
When you're writing, you need to move the reader. Yes, emotionally and all of that, but I'm talking in a physical kind of way--you need to move them forward over the page. You can't expect them to put their shoulder to your square-shaped boulder and grunt and strain and push the thing along, when they'd rather be doing anything else. You have to work with the reader, and for fuck's sake, you need to give a rat's ass about the reader. You need to care about the reader. Otherwise, just write what you write in a private journal of your go-nowhere stories.
You see how you're fighting the above Bender paragraph all the way through? It's a very long paragraph, and its tone, the cadential repetition of the sentences, pulls you down. If you're going to have a long paragraph like this, we really need to like the company we're with, so to speak. Or else it's going to read like a bad joke that keeps going on and on. You are stuck with this shit for the length of that paragraph. The tone isn't ingratiating, charming; it has no appeal from the start, and then it just keeps repeating. You want to be put out of your misery. That's not how the first paragraph of a story should work.
Shall we apply the three-question test? Who is this for? What is it for? What is the point?
I'll tell you who and what this is for: People like Bradford Morrow who do what people like Bradford Morrow do. It's not for reading. It's not for art. It's not for entertainment. It's not for anyone out in the world. It's for the publishing system. It's for membership in this system. Writing terribly like this doesn't get you membership in the system of these people on its own. It's just part of it. You have to be a fake, horrible, vapid, trite, weak, broken person, too. You need to be so limited. You must have no expertise, no range, little productivity, no imagination. You even need to look a certain way.
If you are great, if you are smarter, you'll be a threat, and a threat to the egos of very insecure people, like a Bradford Morrow. You need all of those other things, though, in addition to the bad writing that anyone else could do/replicate--and teach others to do/replicate; not for reading, not for readers, not so that anyone will ever get anything out of what you write, but instead for system membership. You need to come from money, from the right schools, have the right blood lines.
Writing like this isn't for anything but system fuel. It's a system that runs on badness and bullshit, like a car runs on gas.
"Fill 'er up," these people say--to the right kind of gas nozzle--and then in goes the shit.
This, meanwhile, is from something I've been finishing up. It's a story called "Reality," which is told in the first person by no less a character than reality itself. That's kind of different, huh?
If I had to say that there was a single thing that got me down more than anything else, it’d be how readily people try and stay clear of me. I’m patient. I’m constant, though I do change. As time goes on, and as I go on, greater numbers of people act as if they want to destroy me. They drink to forget me. In their view, I drive them to it. They profess, declare, shout, insist, demand to be what they are not, enlisting others to assist in the making of their personal mirages, as if they can thereby force me into a partnership with them in these pursuits, that I’ll “get on board,” but they cannot. I don’t work that way.
They curse me. Do just about anything to deny my existence, including hurt themselves badly. Warp their minds. Limit their learning. Reduce their humanity. Apply inaccurate labels to their fronts and their backs with the flailing desperation of wind-torn scarecrows so as to be able to claim a different identity rather than plumb and accept their own. Expend far greater amounts of energy in attesting to how happy they are than in the seeking of happiness. Cut into those they love. Claim they desire connection as much as anything while brandishing shears and hoarding back-up pairs to stay ready to snip all of the bonds that won’t be made. Say what they’ll do as if for the sole reason of then not doing it. Make the world, in the vastness of their numbers, an all but sworn enemy to truth. Champion the worst amongst them—envy, fear, and suppress the best, as they become increasingly like each other.
They shield their minds from me. They’ll barter their souls to block me out. They treat their feelings as if I am a storm and those feelings must be given shelter, though it never stops raining outside the walls. They fashion false societies, colonies, groups, subcultures, forums, chambers, applications, affiliations, causes, camps, classes, parties, sects, and communities to create distance between me and them, but the distance is never really there, because I always am, and I am everywhere, and all they are doing is putting themselves at greater risk to the harm I can do as that which cannot be outpaced. You will always find me waiting. Beside you. Beneath you. Above you. Within you. Often despite you. Every time. Wheelwrights once made wheels. This is what I do and as I’ll always do.
They build technologies that are meant to provide new and better alternative versions of me, but what they usually end up with is weaker and more damaged versions of themselves. They stare at screens where so little of my essence and character are to be found and wish with desperate, faltering, isolated hearts that I was really there. I’m no one’s friend. It doesn’t work like that. I don’t pull for one person over any other. I am a unified whole, but it is for everyone to experience me differently and as I am.
You can change me. I’m not a dictator. I’m not God. I know about God, but that’s for me to know and for you to find out. People often feel like I’m inflexible. Oppressive. That I grind them down. They think that I admit of no hope. No fluidity. But the truth is that courage, humility, and effort can make major inroads in terms of shaping me. You can alter me, but first you must deal with me. And then you must always be dealing with me. You have to sit with me. Stand with me. Fly with me. Walk with me. Touch me. Recognize me. Know me.
It's not hard to come up with a lot of answers to our three questions from that excerpt, is it? It's someone doing a completely different thing, on a completely different level, for actual reasons and actual readers.
That is an alien, threatening, terrifying concept within the shit-filled walls of the system that these people must have, because if it were any other way, if it had anything to do with writing well and giving readers work worth reading, there would be no place for these people in this system.
I'll put this very clearly: The publishing system exists so that the people of the publishing system--a Bradford Morrow, an Aimee Bender, these other people featured in these pages--can be the people of the publishing system.
That sounds like a simple statement. It's not. Think about it, because it's exactly the reality.
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