Wednesday 2/14/24
How about a Valentine's edition of a prose off? Just a short, sweet kiss of one?
In our earlier mock interview, the charming editor said something about publishing exquisite work.
Do you know what the motto of American Short Fiction is from our friends down in Texas?
"Publishing exquisite short fiction since 1991."
Exquisite.
Let's think about that.
Would you say that Tolstoy's writing was exquisite? You wouldn't, would you? "Exquisite" is the kind of word, in this context, that an insincere, faker of a person uses. It's suggestive of something dainty and inconsequential. "The Verdi opera was exquisite last night." That's the language of the dilettante, isn't it? The language of someone who has nothing else to say. They've faked it as far as they could.
Shouldn't people who claim to be experts when it comes to language and the written word and the art of fiction know better?
Right from that motto, you know that you're dealing with dabbler BS and insincerity.
Speaking of which: How about we feature our exposed friend J. Robert Lennon in another prose off, being as how he had such a nice time with the last one? Remember that? Here it is again, if you'd like to check it out.
This time we'll look at some lines from his 2022 short story in American Short Fiction called "Pingüino."
And remember, you're supposed to believe that this is better than anything I've ever written in my life, according to American Short Fiction editors Rebecca Markovits and Adeena Reitberger.
Ready? Here we go:
It’s a gray gumdrop made out of dreadlocks, about the size of an upturned bucket. As Hugo watches, it shakes itself, and the dreads shimmy and wave. Beneath them, two red clawed feet are visible gripping the perch, each with four—no, five—stubby fingers—no, toes. Hugo can make out two gleaming points behind the dreads, where eyes ought to be, but that’s about it. The creature is emitting a low, clucking chatter that reminds him of an actor practicing his lines backstage before the show.
This thing is not remotely a penguin. He’s not even sure it’s a bird. He thinks it is, but it also has the bearing of a small monkey wearing a costume of its own design.
“Pingüino,” Hugo says, and the thing clacks and clatters.
Super.
The other day on here I wrote about the need for a story to start fast. What writers like J. Robert Lennon prefer to do is bore you fast first, of course, but also show you immediately how much they suck at writing. They don't make you wait around.
Lennon achieves that in the first sentence above. "It's a gray gumdrop." Okay. "The size of an upturned bucket."
You read these things by these people, and you think, "Are you that stupid?" You're doing this size equating thing. And what you're telling me is that a gumdrop is the size of a bucket.
Do you not know what a gumdrop is? Do you not know what a bucket is? Do you only know what one of those things are and you'll maybe look up the other one later but it was okay just to toss them both in here with this shit because, hey, what does it matter? Who cares? Who's even trying?
I mean, honestly, how are you this dumb?
And these editors, these masters of discrimination in Rebecca Markovits and Adeena Reitberger who shovel shit like this into their pages because it sucks, and it's from the right kind of person, don't recognize that, gee, that's a problem?
A gumdrop is not the size of a bucket.
I can't believe I'm actually writing that like people don't know, but this guy apparently doesn't. Or he doesn't understand that the construction of his own sentence sets up what would have to be a similar size thing. You can't say something is this thing, with what we know that thing to be, because the properties of that thing get applied. When you say that something is a gumdrop, it means that that thing is comparable to the size of a gumdrop. You can't then say it's the size of a bucket. You can't have both. You could say it's shaped like a gumdrop and the size of a bucket, but that's not what happened, is it?
It's like a talent to suck this bad at anything.
This is a conversation I'd have with a fifth grader in going over their little homework assignment.
Then what do you get? Description of a penguin. Fascinating. Wank wank wank wank wank. Go-nowhere wank.
Hey, Mr. "Pay Me $3 at my Literary Journal Epoch to Form Reject You, Fleming, because I Hate That You Are on This Totally Different Level From Me" Lennon: You are terrible at this, sir. And it's obvious to anyone who actually considers what you write.
These people like the editors at American Short Fiction are so simple that when they see an Italian word, they think, "That's foreign! Foreign means good! So exotic! Multicultural!" And publishing a story with the words "dreads" makes them feel like they have street cred.
So simple.
And you note the absence of voice, right? There is never anything indelible in what these people write. There's no writing that only could have come from that story. In film we talk about mise en scene. There's a mise en scene to writing, too. Or there is to good writing.
But see how vanilla these things always read? Creative Writing 101. You could plug the tone and style of one story into any other story. It's all so interchangeable. Basic programming.
And when I wouldn't give him my money and told him I knew what he was doing and what had gone with him at American Short Fiction, he emailed those people to say that I was on to the lot of them. What can you even say? These are bad jokes in human form.
Pingüino!
That's all of the text from that J. Robert Lennon masterpiece that is available on the American Short Fiction site, so I'll just use a few lines from a story of mine, called "Box Art."
This boy gets dragged to the museum with his parents and his sister and he really thinks of it like being dragged because to him what’s happened is no different than if he was tied to the car with some rope and his dad hit the gas but when he's at the museum he sees these Joseph Cornell boxes standing upright and he likes them. They have parts of dolls fastened inside and glued cut-outs from magazines of black and white movie stars and coins for moons. He finds the boxes soothing. Back at home he goes into his sister’s room and starts pulling apart her dolls but mostly just taking off some of the heads while she is doing something stupid in the basement and then gluing them into these shoeboxes he got from the back of his closet. He's really focused and trying hard. They don’t look like the Joseph Cornell boxes he saw at the museum but that’s okay because he hasn’t gotten the polished quarters yet or used marker to draw anything like the kind of clouds you can see at night.
See the rhythms? See the bubbling urgency? There's something going on but we also know there's more going on. We're curious about that. You can't plug and play this prose into anything else by anyone else. It's not basic programming, but it's accessible and gripping. What one of these writers would do is look up Joseph Cornell, drop the name in so that people like them might think they're smart, but you can't do that. Most people have no idea who Joseph Cornell is. He's the kind of artist that publishing people want to know about and think it'd be cool to know about, but they're too uneducated. What you have to do, then, is make someone who has never heard of Cornell know what he did. You can't leave readers behind. You can't just announce something either. That's not natural. They need to know without consciously noting that they're learning this thing. Then they're a part of what is happening. It's not some teacher-student dynamic. A story goes with the reader, the reader goes with the story.
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