Saturday 11/23/24
There's a Rolling Stones bootleg called Philadelphia Special, at the beginning of which--just as we are plunged headlong into the opening notes of "Brown Sugar"--Mick Jagger shouts, "Good morning!" given that that was the day's early show.
I like that. So: Good morning! How about a prose off to start this Saturday?
Straight to it, then.
As we know, Carolyn Kuebler is the editor of New England Review, a literary journal out of Middlebury College in Vermont, and a writer herself. This is from her short story, "Summoned," in The Literary Review:
Jacob has a scar from the right side of his upper lip to his ear. Like a pirate, he says, grinning and baring his teeth. Hannah giggles and runs away, hoping he'll drop his tools and come after her. Sometimes he does, chasing her into the house and saying "argh, argh, argh" while he tickles her, which makes her side hurt. Other times she stares at him, waiting for the grin and the pirate, but he just stares back and says, "What?" until she wanders off and leaves him alone.
Hannah Brock is in kindergarten. She has mousy brown hair and large black eyes like her mother's. On her shoulder is a chip, like her mother's only smaller. She carries it around, her shoulder at a slight upward tilt, her heavy head at an angle to the world. She even has a bit of a swagger when she knows she's being watched. Her teacher Mrs. Lieber is wary of her at times--Hannah doesn't always play along; Hannah is skeptical--though other times Mrs. Lieber wants to scoop Hannah up like a baby and sing her lullabies, the same ones she sang to her own daughter when she was still small enough to hold.
Jacob and Lisa Brock have only one daughter, and it's likely to stay that way. It's always been more than they can afford, and always been the reason for their living where they did--first with Jacob's family, then with Lisa's father, where they stayed for a couple years, longer than they should have. How do people do it, paying for things at every turn? It's not like they don't work. They both do, and have since the day they graduated, that whole year before Hannah was even born. Thank god for Jacob's grandmother, who gave them her old place in Jerryfield last spring for cheap. Bonnie helps with after-school pick-up and sick days too. Hannah needs so much and they want to give it all to her. Look at her. She looks just like her mother, Jacob says. And it's not the words so much as the tone of his voice that tells Lisa she finally did something right.
How is that interesting? How it is compelling? How it impactful? How is it memorable? It's just a listing of quotidian shit. The empty, blah blah blah not-worth-mentioning parts of life that most people don't mention because who cares? It's just the whatever stuff. And it's not like that stuff is being presented in surprising ways that reveal meaning and levels of meaning we'd not expected or considered, which would in turn mean the ostensible blah blah blah isn't blah blah blah at all.
But this is just blah blah blah.
What does fiction like this--which is probably just sourced from Kuebler's sheltered life--offer a reader? What does it do for a reader? Why would someone read this? How is it anything?
Why is that great? Tell me: What makes it great? Walk me through it.
All anyone can do--anyone, that is, who is this woman's friend (in which case I'd suggest you should have better taste in friends and greater moral standards) and would want to try and defend the honor of this person who is so obviously acting out of prejudice--is default to cliches of how art is subjective--more blah blah blah--but they wouldn't, because they'd know the truth and they'd know that they could end up exposed here and made to look like a fool.
That's bad writing. Nothing writing. There's nothing in it, and there's nothing in any of the very few number of pieces--there are like five on her website--that Carolyn Kuebler has managed to publish in the whole of her life, and those that she did, as we've seen before, were as a result of cronyism. A hook up within this system of incestuous evil.
You think if I wrote the above--which is itself a laughable concept--and offered it, that someone--or Carolyn Kuebler at New England Review, for that matter--would write back and say, "That's amazing! Wow! Brilliant! Would love to run this!"
Come on.
This reads like what someone would come up with upon trying to write a story for the first time.
If you were told that what you saw above was written by someone who signed up for a writing course at the community adult learning center and that was what they wrote as their "homework" between Monday and Wednesday in preparation for class number two, you wouldn't be surprised at all, would you? Tracks.
Let's say you're not a writer, never so much as thought about writing anything. If you tried to write a story right now--seriously, this very second, like when you were in school and the teacher said, "Okay, turn your papers over and start now"--you're telling me you couldn't come up with three paragraphs "as good" as what we see from Kuebler above?
Of course you could.
The cliche about the chip on the shoulder? That's what this fiction master--I mean, she has the MFA--elected to go with? It's less a story than a few flat announcements. There's no immersion. These are just announcements read over the intercom by a droning voice during home room while you're barely awake.
"Hannah Brock is in kindergarten."
Okay. Super.
Remember: Carolyn Kuebler, as a result of her envy, the knowledge of what she is (which is to say, what she isn't) as a writer, the knowledge of what this other person was as a writer, and their unmeasurable gap in talent, told me that I was not very good at writing and couldn't be in the New England Review. The New England Review. Not good enough.
Think about that. I don't need to tell you to. But of all the insane things to say.
Like, really, lady? You think anyone would believe that that was true? And when we look at the work? When we put the work you publish or your work next to mine?
Think of how much hate--and, again, envy--you need to possess to act like Carolyn Kuebler did. To say such an obvious lie because your prejudice runs so deep. There's my writing, there's my publication track record, and here we have a journal that is not read, which barely exists, with no compensation to speak of. And along comes that person, over many years, with their superior work, and plainly so, and you want to do him like that? When he's generous enough to give it to you? And with the slop you shovel out there? The slop you write, which is all you're capable of?
But that's a big part of the problem, isn't it?
Why do this? You are ruled by your hate and prejudice to such a degree that it's impossible for you to not act upon those things? To not give yourself over to their influence completely? Just so that you can be exposed and embarrassed over and over again on this blog?
This blog didn't exist when she said what she did to me about me, but the point is that she thought she could get away with it. Get away with what we all can see is discrimination.
The language of that Kuebler story is so flat, isn't it? There's nothing to it. There's certainly no life in it.
I gave you three paragraphs of Kuebler's story, and now I'll give you three paragraphs of one of mine. What do you think would happen if I sent this to The Literary Review, where the absolutely dreadful writer Justin Taylor is the fiction editor? I think we all know. And we all know the extreme difference in quality.
My mom lived in Chicago by then, but she was in Boston often enough, with her family here. Aunt Dot had ended up in a facility for elderly care, which was to be her last stop in her long life—she was in her nineties—that hadn’t known much in terms of companionship, friendship, or love. She couldn’t see you very well, but she sure as hell could comment on your waist. My mom would be angry that no one would really visit Dot—it was a rare occurrence that anyone made the trip, no matter how little time it took—but I think she also understood, because no one really knew her the way my mom did, which she believed, and I came to believe, was truly the way Dot was.
Two poplar trees stood outside of Dot’s window at the facility, on a lawn that had no others. They were the sentinels that had grown about fifteen feet apart from each other and looked like rakish, arbor-themed football goalposts. Dot viewed them as the spiritual embodiments of her parents in deciduous form. She spoke to them often, lying in her bed. She didn’t read, she sat, she thought, she conversed with the trees, believing she was reaching from this world into the next, or that people from the next who understood who she was, were reaching back to her in her dwindling here and now. Maybe she thought about those trips with my mom when my mom was a girl. She had a lot of time to think.
After she died, there were scattershot stories about things she’d said to people in our family, but those quickly went away, though you always hear Grammie stories. It was like Dot had become a mere annotation. Dot had become a dot. And when I would wonder, and when I still do, if it matters that people knew she was a good person, or it only matters that she was a good person, I see the entire world differently. People I know, people I think I know, people I will never know well enough.
It isn't my fault it's not close. These people act like it is my fault, and I'm a wicked person because we are not on the same level. Again, not my fault. That's not me doing anything wrong. That's not a reason to hate someone. To try to block them. To lock them out. He's just better at this than you are. Try not to think of as a competition, because what you're doing, if you're like a Carolyn Kuebler, is trying to make sure that this guy doesn't get a chance to compete, because he'll crush you and everyone else in a competition.
So if that's what you feel you have to do, you're admitting that this guy and his work are on that entirely different level anyway. Or else you wouldn't feel the need to do what you're doing.
Yes, this person has infinitely more ability, but they also work exponentially harder. They're not sitting back and dabbling and counting on cronyism. They are working at this thing--writing, that is, and what is really writing beyond writing--every waking second (and some others) of their lives. That's not an exaggeration.
The proof is in the prose, as they say. Or as we should say.
's not an exaggeration.
Comments