Friday 11/29/24
How about a Black Friday prose off?
We'll circle back to Harper's and editor Christopher Beha. You can read about him in earlier posts. The site's search engine is useful in these matters. I'll put in some links, too, as we go.
After the prior editor published a story of mine at Harper's, he was fired shortly thereafter--you gotta be a system person, which means, both loathsome and all about incestuous evil and the worst writing in the world by people just like you--and Beha became the editor. Beha ignored everything I sent him, because I'm not one of these people and was never going to respond to me because i'm not a terrible person of this system who sucks at writing.
I sent stories to Katie Ryder at the magazine, and she'd turn them down without so much as looking at them.
Now, if I'm saying that--careful and as thorough as I am--do you think I don't have proof?
Do you think I didn't have proof? Of course I did.
This is how evil these people are. And how pathetic as humans.
I then came on this blog, after Katie Ryder had done this for the latest time--lying to me--and I said, "There this place, I've been in there, and I don't think the people there now are so much as looking at my work, but I'm going to try one last time."
Words to that effect. You can find the verbatim words in this record.
These losers--what else do you want to call them--at Harper's staked out this journal. They were waiting--Katie Ryder was waiting to try and find something about what she was doing.
Now, this could have been any place I was talking about, right? There are many venues. Let me be very clear: I said nothing about Harper's. You think I wasn't aware? You think I didn't know exactly what I was doing? You thinking I wasn't making I was covered? And that this was very open and non-specific?
Then, right after, Christopher Beha--this fraud, this execrable writer himself, this joke of an editor who is so typical of this rancid system--wrote me to say he--because he's a tough guy, a moral tough guy--can't sit back while I impugn--he actually used that word--the integrity of his staff, and he had to step in, being a hero and all, and so I'm banned. (I feel like this backfired in a bad way). As if that means anything given what was already being done.
Do you believe these people?
What is more of an indictment of someone like this than something like this? So: Christopher Beha was never going to respond to the work which destroys, in terms of quality--as we've seen, and as we're about to see again--every work of fiction that magazine publishes, save when it was a story by me.
Could you have less respect for anyone than you do for someone like these people? What do you think, Chris? Katie? What are you going to do? What do you have to say? And Katie Ryder, scoping out the blog, and tattling. When, again, it could have been anyone I was talking about.
It's entrapment. And I didn't come close to saying the thing they wanted me to say.
How do you prove your own guilt more definitively than that?
Remember how I've been saying I don't go looking for examples of awful work from these people, or further examples of their stupid techniques they all use? All I do is go to a site, click on what I see, and there I have it. It's all uniformly bad, and they do the same two or three tricks, which fools no one who actually looks at any of this garbage.
But how's really looking it? Mostly just them.
We've talked recently--and gone through examples--of how painfully unfunny these people are in fiction that's supposed to be funny or witty, so what they'll do is use exclamation points to let you know they're being funny or witty.
We've also talked recently--and gone through examples (without me intentionally looking for them or trying to stockpile them--about how they're so uncreative that one thing they like to do is use the second person, when it makes no sense to do so, in order to say, "See? Second person! Look how creative I am."
And that's what you're going to see here for the latest time. See how they all do the same predictable crap? The English have an expression: to be bored off of one's tits. This will bore you off of yours. What is the point? Who would wish to read this? And--shocker--we have Walt Whitman turning up. That's not for the story. It's to say, "See? Don't you think I'm highly educated and smart?"
No one thinks that. And no one will think that when we see the first excerpt in this prose off.
Here's something funny, too. When I was sending her the stories that she didn't even open, I said something to Katie Ryder. A gentle nudge. Something like, "I feel like these are really good stories, I'm a little confused."
I said that knowing exactly what she was doing and having proof of it.
You know what she said? You'll love this. She said that the competition was fierce to have fiction in Harper's because of all of the great stories.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Now that is funny.
What kind of competition would that be? Look at this shit. It's shit. It's not like, "Oh, what formidable fiction, how could I ever prevail, o no."
Are we talking a suck off instead of a prose off? Because if we're talking a suck off, okay, I can see how the competition is intense, because these stories do suck, and it's hard to tell which of them suck more.
Come to think of it, everything these people do--a Christopher Beha, a Katie Ryder--is a suck off. How hard can they suck each other off, because that's all this is. A whole system as a suck off. On multiple levels.
The English have an expression: To be bored off of one's tits. What follows from Harper's will bore you off of yours. You'll ask yourself, What is the point? Who would wish to read this? And--shocker--we have Walt Whitman turning up. That's not for the story. It's to say, "See? Don't you think I'm highly educated and smart?"
No one thinks that, no one is going to.
Anyway: This is from Rosalind Brown's "Discourse to Self" in the November 2024 issue of Harper's. Definitely can't compete with this. What intense competition. You liars.
Try, start here, try bringing a pot of coffee out into the sun in despite of the hot weather, and sit at your chair and table ready for all possible assimilations. Include with the coffee something slightly intensely sweet: not slightly sweet but slightly intensely, since all intensities only need to be slight at this point. Sit and drink the coffee and eat the chocolate, and here is the thing: stop making the mistake of trying to show other people that furthermost corner of yourself, it is good for one thing only, walk calmly over and ask them for it back. Remember, for instance, that telling people you are reading Tolkien late at night fatally alters the chemical composition of doing this. Also, stop celebrating. Or, qualifying that a little, remember that celebrating can also be very privately sitting drinking your coffee on a sunny morning, watching people go past in the street and reading a book you may not finish. Yes you have been blessed and baffled with success lately, and also god yes there is the ferocity of having a new lover, but what about behaving as if none of these things were relevant to your own strict project? Sometimes accuracy must take the place of expansiveness.
So leaving all these things not where you can see them but all right where you can just about feel the light-brown confidence of them, take yourself off into another room. They must not be useful even to cast your thoughts towards in moments of hesitation. Instead the finger of the mind must be poised to run down a skirt of dusky-pink satin, or over a white tablecloth embroidered in blackwork, or yes must curve and thrill at the strong coffee drunk outside in the sun. Or picture a gorge worn in English limestone, grassy at the top and then rocky as it winds downhill, with moss and trees and water bubbling: this entirely meaningless place get you there and gaze. This is what is so difficult to learn, to stop talking, stop anticipating, stop being vigilant in your ancient unnecessary way. The time as it passes isn’t it cool, and exquisitely textured like linen?
What else? Rather than announcing various refusals in the name of your own well-being, you would do better to find things to say yes to. Sometimes do make yourself tremble by agreeing to everything that is suggested, tremble at everything you yourself have the potential to do. Then you can reinstall the proper curtains which divide the possible from the actually impossible, and perhaps choose a new pattern or style for them or insert additional pleats where there were no pleats—though all the same, remember you are not designing a hotel, you will have to live here. Likewise it is almost certain that neither aubergine roasted with harissa, nor a navy T-shirt bought for three pounds from Oxfam, nor a book about the history of Baghdad, will entirely solve the problem because the problem exists elsewhere, as if in flowing water while you are sitting on the bank. Dip a hand in, would be one possibility, and feel how water is unattached to any of these bought and sold objects, how water wishes most of all to collapse into itself yet depends on its own surface tension to resist this until the very end. Or you could notice how your lover’s skin requires no accoutrements to be warm and lightly haired, or how the pleasure of their fingertips on your lower back loops and bunches and builds until the word pleasure ceases to make sense, like a bursting of the idea of pleasure in fact, into smithereens. Afterwards, yes, you can sit up in bed and read Walt Whitman while they sleep.
Initially today, I was just going to share the following, because I love it so much and I wanted to put it here, and then I thought, you know, might as well expose these people some more while we're at it, which is exactly what's happened. But initially, I just wanted to talk about this story.
In that letter that went off to some people along with "Dot," I had told my friend Norberg that "Dead Thomas" would follow soon, and he wouldn't be able to handle how good it is.
I can't handle how good it is. I couldn't handle how good "Dot" is. I actually cannot handle the quality of this story. It's overwhelming. There are as many surprises in this story as there is in life. It could be more, given the nature of those surprises. You think the story is about this thing, and it isn't. You think it's about this other thing, and it isn't. And when you find out what it's really about, you can scarcely handle it. If you can. I can't. It's just so powerful.
Fifteen minutes into English class, a new boy knocks at the door, comes in, says who he is to the teacher, gets introduced in front of the class, and takes his seat. The thing is, he's dead. He's there, though. He's going to school. This would be the dead Thomas of the story's title.
But the story isn't really about dead Thomas. It's about these two girls who are friends: Rachel, and the narrator, Bonita. And really it's about Bonita. Well, it's really about everybody, too. It's about you. You just haven't seen it yet.
The parts about the square and the drowning are new as of this morning, written before the sun came up. Ditto small miracles and the circle and the fairy. And the sky and the wish. As I've said, this is the third story in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls.
Compare this to any writing by anyone in the publishing system, the system of people like Christopher Beha, Katie Ryder, Michael Ray, Deborah Treisman, Jackson Howard, Emily Stokes, Daniel Zalewski. Compare it to any fiction in the world by anyone else. Compare it to any fiction ever.
“It’ll pass,” Thomas added as we all continued to stare at him, which was meant to both placate and bring this little intro to a close, without going into detail about what would be doing the passing. It sort of sounded like a spell that a sick person has, but despite being dead, Thomas wasn’t ill. He seemed athletic, and I bet some of the boys were worried that he’d be better than them at sports and you know how that can go for the new kid, though I figured Thomas could hold his own.
Ms. Kathleen didn’t know how to respond, given that she definitely now wasn’t aboard the hilarity wagon, so she said, “Right you are, dear,” and directed Thomas to an open seat in the front row. I was just glad that he didn’t have to stand up there any longer because that’s tough for anyone when all you want to do is not stick out.
During lunch Thomas sat alone at a table with his palms facing the ceiling but like the ceiling wasn’t there and instead the vast, endless sky of night, a sky that causes you to feel like you need to make the most important wish of your life, no matter how long you’ve been holding on to that wish, protecting it from not coming true, but only after you pick out the right star, which seems impossible. He may have been making an appeal to someone or something or trying to be beamed up, I honestly didn’t know, but that’s how he struck me. There were no windows in the cafeteria and I had my doubts that the sun was still out at all.
“Should we go over and talk to him?” Rachel asked me, folding and refolding an empty sandwich bag in her hands. When she was anxious she’d fold it into the tiniest square you wouldn’t have thought possible. It looked like a pill that someone had decided to not make a circle and sort of like a window for a fairy.
“He seems busy,” I said. “I think he just wants to die. Finish the process.”
“Like you have to complete it?”
“Sure.”
“I didn’t know it worked like that.”
“I don’t think it normally does. Maybe, though? Or just in his case. Rare cases.” I considered saying something about how at least Ms. Kathleen hadn’t made a joke about being a doubting Thomas, because I’d heard that before and it must have come from her. “Small mercies,” I would have added, which I know I got from my mom.
But Rachel wasn’t listening to me and before I decided whether to say these things or not, she had risen and was walking over to the table where Thomas sat by himself. I couldn’t leave her alone with a dead boy, and like I said, I didn’t know how it worked.
I saw this documentary about drowning and all of the places in which you can drown—it’s pretty much anywhere, including inside of a glass, but that was just so they could say a few warnings about alcoholism at the end—and it turns out that many people who drown do so because they’re trying to save someone else from drowning and they get pulled under. Maybe at the moment of Thomas’s ascension, or jetting off, or the precise second of his dissolving, he’d reach for Rachel’s arm—after all, that seemed the human thing to do when a crisis was visited upon you, and I figured this qualified—and she’d be whisked away with him, take a field trip that way. In her own clothes.
Rachel sat across from him, introduced herself, adding, “This is my friend Bonita,” and Thomas said, “You’re not Spanish” and I answered, “I know, it means beautiful,” leaving out how my dad had given me the name which could make it sound like I was calling myself beautiful, and Thomas didn’t say anything further on the subject.
I hoped Rachel wouldn’t be gross or make a dumb joke but if I had to pick one I’d pick the latter so I was a little relieved but still embarrassed when she said, “Why so glum, chum?” to which Thomas answered, “I’m dead, bitch.”
It was an uncomfortable moment. Kids had followed us to the table when we walked over because someone has to go first for others to come along and it’s not like we’d ever experienced a talking dead person before let alone in the school cafeteria and it might never happen again.
Thomas looked mostly similar to us—apart from the clothes that were tattered and pebbly as if they’d been discovered in a cave where someone had gone missing—and it wasn’t like you could totally see through him or his guts, but he wavered. I guess you’d put it that way. Shimmered. Like when you’re in the car and the road is flat and the sun all but boils the landscape in front of you and the asphalt could be a snake’s back after it’s gotten wet from the garden hose as it tried to stay hidden beneath your feet.
That is some prose. More than prose. That's more than writing and reading.
I think we all understand why these people wouldn't want to compete with it or have it--and that guy--compete with the garbage they're slapping out there by people just like them.
Yeah...I'm going to say
The time as it passes isn’t it cool, and exquisitely textured like linen?
(nice syntax, by the way)
and
During lunch Thomas sat alone at a table with his palms facing the ceiling but like the ceiling wasn’t there and instead the vast, endless sky of night, a sky that causes you to feel like you need to make the most important wish of your life, no matter how long you’ve been holding on to that wish, protecting it from not coming true, but only after you pick out the right star, which seems impossible.
isn't much of a competition.
But I don't know--I wouldn't want to impugn anyone.
