Monday 6/17/24
Let's just keep doing these. Continue making the irrefutable point regarding the bigotry at play with the likes of--in this case--a Speer Morgan, as we just did with Sy Safransky.
I've talked about my history with The Missouri Review and Speer Morgan and Evelyn Somers Rogers in the past. No need to restate it, when we can link to it. If one is reading these words between the covers of a book of a large, multi-volume set, you may recall that information, or just flip back to the entries from 1/21/24 and 1/27/24.
As an exercise within this exercise, I want you to do something here when you read the following from the start of Paul Curley's "The Side Effects." Identity at what point you know that what you're reading is lifeless and will not be something which at any point contains any life and is standard, flat fare. Ready?
Fallon isn’t my biological daughter.
The DNA results came after my wife had died. By then, the hospital bed had been hauled out of the living room, the condolence flowers composted. Fallon and I snuggled on the couch with the laptop open to our 23andMe accounts, and Val smiled back at us from the photos that we’d set out on the coffee table. I thought it would be a sweet way to remember Val, maybe share stories and get Fallon to process her feelings. If only I could take it back.
Side effects included losing Val all over again. Side effects included wanting her alive again to answer for this. Side effects included Fallon calling herself an orphan and calling me Tom.
Fallon is angry. I tell her that she has a lot to be upset about, but that doesn’t seem to help. My counselor tells me that Fallon’s anger is good, that it tethers her to me, but if Fallon’s anger tethers her to me at all, it’s only so she can torture me. She’s some kind of angry. Not sure she wants to live with me anymore angry. Wants to meet bio dad angry.
We’re two hours into our drive from Portland to Idaho to do just that. In the Columbia River Gorge, lush forests of Douglas fir swept from the roadside clear up to the cloud-capped half domes, where waterfalls spilled from the cliffs. That was just minutes ago and already the shift to desert is nearly complete.
Fallon is in the back seat with her bestie, Max. As we were leaving home, Fallon had said to Max, “I call aux.” They speak fluent middle school and I’m struggling to keep up. If Val were still alive, she’d have this new dialect nailed and Fallon wouldn’t be drifting.
When do we know that what we're reading is lifeless? Somewhere in that first sentence. We have no idea who this Fallon is. Or the narrator. The first sentence is meant to be this bombshell. It's deemed important enough that the writer has it stand alone as a paragraph. The statement doesn't mean anything in and of itself. I could just as easily say a carrot is not my biological child. And?
There isn't anything earned. There's no context. It's just vacuity. You're not stunning/wowing us with this declaration. You're making us say, "So?"
Never make a reader say, "So?"
Then it gets worse. We have the paragraph break, and a second sentence as flat as the first, structured the same way--rote subject-verb with the rote subject-verb cadence.
Again, it's something meant to be heavy. DNA test. Wow. But we don't care. Just saying "DNA test" doesn't get you some creative writing win. This is prosaic stuff and we didn't care with the first paragraph and we're no closer to caring now.
Nor is it this wowser of a set-up that the widowed narrator's kid isn't his biological kid. The problem is that it's meant to be. We're supposed to have this readerly reaction of "Oh my God, that's crazy."
But why would you?
Let's say that happened to you. What would it change with your kid? Because you'd still think of the kid you raised as your kid. Would a DNA test really happen then, too? When someone is on their death bed?
Then we're just talking about people who are not people but simply names. You are pissing away the space on the page. Will we care later? Anyone will have stopped reading by then. And if you read the entire thing--again, as part of an exercise--you'll see that no one will care about any of this at any point, even if they did stick it out.
The author presumes familiarity and significance. Like we're familiar with the characters, the narrator, and what is meant to be something of the utmost importance. Something singular. So then they're just listing shit at us. This isn't writing--it's listing. Nothing is being earned here. We're getting reportage.
You really cannot do reportage with the fictional. That's not what this is about. It's what a condensed news broadcast is about, but not fiction. Given that fiction is invented, reportage is this oxymoronical conceit.
Look at the lifelessness of the language, too. What is memorable in the prose? What will you retain? What is indelible? What is written in such a way that you absorb it?
Nothing, right?
Later on in the story--and I'm just skimming around, because who would actually read all of this?--we get "the roar of the waves and tufts of sea foam will bounce past our ankles like tumbleweeds."
Damn that's bad. Bouncing foam? That's not what foam does. Foam decidedly does not bounce. Then this watery metaphor is crossed with the dry gulch type of metaphor? What are you doing? Can't be both. Even if you, as the writer, think there's thematic overlap, you can't be mishandling the language this way.
This is as basic as writing gets, and as basic a mistake as you can have in writing. It's amateur sort of stuff. Amateur writing, amateur editing.
This is a joke.
And again, you are meant to believe what is impossible to believe: That Speer Morgan honestly viewed the likes of this as better than anything I've written in my life. Obviously that's not what he believed. But it's how he acted for a quarter of a century.
This is how discrimination works. What could be clearer?
There's one answer to that: When we put the likes of what you just saw next to something of mine.
So let's do that, shall we? We've had the first six paragraphs of the Curley story and now we'll do the first six paragraphs of a Fleming one. Ready?
“I could go at any time,” Thomas said, “it’s nip and tuck—just how these things work.” He spoke like an authority but with a tinge of the bullshitter. That was my leading thought. If a man came to our school and we were told he was an expert on duckbill platypuses, I’d expect him to talk like Thomas talked. Even Thomas didn’t know the precise label befitting his status, or his state, I guess—and it had happened to him—though he possessed an air as if knowing a galaxy beyond anything you knew. That’s not me making a pun like my friend Rachel tended to do. You don’t encounter the power of other worlds and their possibilities like that often, even if realistically speaking the duckbill platypus guy could tell you anything about those animals—that they changed color and levitated—and you’d be like, “Okay,” and that’s how it went with Thomas.
Sometimes we pulled our chairs over to Thomas’s desk when it was feasible, like before the teacher got there, mostly us girls, sitting in a half-circle. “What is this,” Thomas might say, “people crowding around the radio for one of Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats?” None of us knew what he meant until we got to the 1940s in history, but that’s when Thomas was from.
“Oh dear. Oh no,” Ms. Kathleen had said on Thomas’s first day when he interrupted class, which was what he was supposed to do. She was generally-presumed to be the witty, full-of-fun teacher, which I think may have been the part you had to play if your last name was a first name and your first name was Wanda.
We would be going over some ancient play and she’d say, “Okay, this section is funny, trust me, get ready to laugh, hold your sides, they are about to shake, here comes the mirth, all aboard the hilarity wagon.”
Then we’d read the passage and no one would laugh at all, and she’d have to add, “The porter in this scene is a drunk who can’t get it up and he just pissed on himself,” which made us laugh when she put it like that even if we didn’t know the word “porter” exactly.
Thomas had knocked on the door and come in when asked to do so, polite as possible, informing Ms. Kathleen that the principal sent him and he had a note which he then produced, though from where we couldn’t tell exactly, like he manifested it, but that would have been easy enough to check and was therefore probably legit. He handed it to Ms. Kathleen who was one of those people who can’t help reading something aloud never mind if it was stamped TOP SECRET.
These prose offs always speak for themselves. I never did anything to Speer Morgan, save be on a different level than he is. And all of this is before we get into publication track records. And that is with one of those people--the person who has published thousands of things--having a lot of people against him. That, too, is a huge problem for a Speer Morgan, that this person has done what he has done, and what he never did and never could.
Again, what could be more blatant than what a person like this was up to?
Just a heads up, too, for the likes of Speer Morgan and Sy Safransky: When you're dead, I'm still going to make sure that people know what you were really all about. This is what you'll be known for, insofar as you're known for anything. That's not some threat. It's said in a very even tone. I've lived with what you've been doing for a long time. You know what it all comes down to for you. This is simply a statement of what is going to happen.
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