Friday 1/3/25
Recently we had a prose off in these pages featuring a story from Narrative, the thieving den co-run by Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian, in which I also broke down some of their "business"--a word that implies some degree of ethics and non-criminality--practices, and I thought it'd be nice here in the early days of the new year--in which I'll just keep doing this with Narrative--to feature a story by Carol Edgarian herself. And what's more: One she ran in the journal which she edits, presumably without tossing thirty bucks into the kitty. But that's how it normally works: Pay us money to automatically reject you--because this is how we make money--while we hook up our friends and people like us, you gullible dumbasses.
Except, I'm not like you and I write better than all of you. And that's very easy to illustrate, isn't it? Have a big old search on the term "prose off" if you're new here. Then we have the whole career thousands of publications thing, and thousands of things in places these people could never sniff, and that's with an industry that's always been against that person. Imagine if he had a level playing field? But we digress. There's a prose off to be gotten to.
When I read the awful things that the people of this evil system of incest write, I think, "Why is it necessary for your work to be so stupid?"
Is that the goal? Because if that was the goal, the ultimate aim, they couldn't be more successful in hitting the mark.
I also think, "Is this really all you can do? How is it possible to be this bad at something?"
And despite all of the years I've been looking at this crap--all of the decades--I still ask these questions with the same frequency I did from the get-go, because I remain that floored that anything in life, in the world, as backwards as much of the world is, could be as stupid as all of the shit these people write, pretend is good, publish, award, hype, carry water for, put on their best of lists, without any of them actually reading any of it or liking it or looking forward to it or having it add anything to their lives.
None of the people in the literary fiction subculture--for that is what this is--are here to actually read anything. And what they write isn't for reading. Nothing is meant to make for a worthwhile reading experience.
And that blows my mind as much now, to the same degree, as it always has, because it's the most backwards thing I've ever seen, and it's as plain as plain can be. And with that, I give you the opening of writer Carol Edgarian's "Vera," published in Narrative by editor Carol Edgarian (and her husband, co-editor Tom Jenks):
I always thought of my city as a woman. But the house, it turned out, was a woman too. When the quake hit, she groaned. Her timbers strained to hold on to their pins, the pins snapping. And the rocks beneath the house? They had voices too. And if I ever wondered how long it would take for the world to end, I know: forty-five seconds.
An unearthly stillness preceded and followed the shaking. It’s what we did and didn’t do in the stillness that determined the rest of our days.
I lost two mothers that year. The first was Rose. I can’t say where she was born or where her kin came from. The fact is, I don’t know what mix of blood flows through me. I suspect there’s some Persian, possibly Armenian. I understand there may be some Northern African and Spanish in the mix too, and a good pour of French. Spanish by way of Mexico. None of this Rose would confirm or deny. “We’re mutts,” she said, and left it at that.
One of the harlots claimed that Rose had been found as a waif in the slums of Mexico City. For a fee, she was brought north. I believe that; I believe most anything when it comes to Rose. She spoke five languages; her hair was blue-black, her skin copper, her eyes green. In San Francisco she became a much-favored prostitute, catering to the gold rush miners. Her next clients were the fellows who came after the miners, the suit-wearing bankers and merchants, who thought they could gentle a murderous, gambling, whoring town; they thought they could gentle Rose.
"They thought they could gentle Rose."
For fuck's sake.
Gentle her.
How can you be this bad at anything? And you know what? As terrible as this is, it's not even original-terrible. These people are so talentless that one of them says a stupid thing, and then others have to write that same stupid thing.
For instance: We have Bill Clegg, as system a person as you can be, and a horrible person. But as horrible a person as he is, he's every bit as terrible as a writer. He's an agent. Loved crack. Big fan of crack. Went off on a crack bender, abandoned a bunch of his clients--albeit shitty writers all--then cashed in on this by writing a memoir called--no joke--Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man.
So original. "Thanks, Jimmy Joyce! I will just take your title and swap out 'artist' for addict." Very similar to what Keith Gessen did with All the Sad Young Literary Men--I'm embarrassed for me just writing that title, and it's not even my title, of course, because I don't have it in me to write anything so dumb--except that was F. Scott Fitzgerald instead of James Joyce.
I don't know--maybe think of your own things? No? Too hard? Well, that's understandable, given what you're working with. Tough to do anything with nothing.
Can you even imagine being like that and having to do that? Be willing to do it? "I can't think of my own thing, I'll swipe that other person's." And then you get rewarded for it. In this system, if you're one of these people.
In Clegg's memoir he has this line that goes something like "the sunlight gentled the buildings across the street."
And you think, "Wow, how can anyone suck so much at writing?" and that you wouldn't see something that stupid again, because it's like the stupidest thing you've ever seen, but sure enough, here's Carol Edgarian to say, "I'm that stupid and equally bad at writing!"
Of course you are. And a comparably bad person who is essentially a thief along with hubby Tom Jenks--remember when an emissary at Narrative wanted me to give Tom Jenks hundreds of dollars?--with the scam she's running at Narrative.
That's a bestselling author right there in Carol Edgarian. I'm sure it's because people love her writing and not because numbers are so low and so few people read that you can just make shit on a shingle a bestseller if that's what the right people in the system feel like having happen.
As for Bill Clegg: A bit after the crack memoir, which was a lot of descriptions of the sex he had--and it was gay sex, which these people very much liked in theory--no one was actually seriously reading his crap--because it allowed them to say, "I'm so progressive," something they love being able to do, that being one reason why so many of them try to use Black people simply for their skin color--Clegg wrote a novel called Did You Ever Have a Family?--brilliant question, you superstar thinker; deep--and because this guy wrote it--this trash bag, talentless thief/hack--it was long-listed for the Booker Prize.
On account that he's so amazing. He's brilliant. He's a writing genius.
Wait, no? It wasn't that? You don't say? You mean the system is completely rigged and everything is manufactured? Imagine that.
If the system wants something to happen for someone, it makes it happen. There are so few readers in the world--because there's just this shit and no one can write because everyone comes from this same system--that it takes so little for something to be this or that or a bestseller or what have you. You can just rig it up if the people of the system decide that's how it's going to be.
It's all a mirage. None of it means anything, nothing is real. It's all crap. The writing is all garbage. No one reads it, no one likes it, no one cares about it, no one could. So then it's the people. It's connections. It's appearances.
We'll be taking apart Jill Bialosky and her writing soon--and wait until you see this woman's Creative Writing 101 prose; you'll laugh--and she's similar to Clegg, save that she's an editor at Norton as well as a writer. Hyper-connected.
And that's going to be it. That does the job. That's all that ever does the job.
I can tell you why every single person has what they have in publishing. And what I can tell you right now is that none of it has to do with the quality of their work. Give me a name. I'll break it down for you. You know how you can go to the genealogical place and get that printout of your provenance, essentially? I can do that with everyone in publishing and their career. The work never enters into it.
Because that's all that's here: writing like this by people like this. Anything else will be locked out. But the thing is: There is now no one--save one person--who can do anything else. Which is perhaps the biggest problem. Because it's not like there are other writers here with me who have so much to give that's worth reading. Anyone who wants to write goes into the system. For the most part. And the few who don't still want to lift up the system or, at the least, a number of the worst exploiters of it.
That's how it goes, how they think it has to be, what they're told, what they're taught, advised, instructed. To be a part of the system, you need to be a bad person and a bad writer. You need to be like these people. You need to come from money--you think Clegg, Bialosky, and Edgarian are self-made individuals?; come on--and know nothing and look a certain way and check the boxes and be so severely limited as to be nothing of any substance at all. You need to be someone who can only write the worst shit that we see go first in these prose off before the inevitable and thorough beatdown.
These people are so bad at writing, that when you look at the writing, however much you might want to hate me if you're one of them, or carrying water for them, you can't defend their writing at all.
There is no one who can say, "I think it was brilliant how Carol Edgarian used the word 'gentle' because..."
It can't be done. We could do this with every single paragraph of every single book and every single story by these people. At random. We can open any book, flip to any page in any story--which is essentially what I do in these prose offs--and what we see will suck as bad as the above and any of it and all of it.
It's amazing, frankly. That so many people can be unilaterally bad--and in the same ways--at something. But this is the business: Being bad at writing. You pay money, you go for that MFA, then you get others to pay money, you teach them to be bad in the ways that you're bad at writing, and then some of those people and their works get selected for prizes, Guggenheims the MacArthur, they get pushed, we see the trash fiction in The New Yorker, and so forth.
It's all about sucking. What's untrue here? Look at these people. They'll hero worship someone like George Saunders. Wait until you see what's coming in these pages regarding that guy and his writing and The New Yorker. He's one of their gods. I guess that should go poorly for me? How can I compete? Are you worried for me? Of course not. Everyone knows how this will go. The people who hate me and who seek to lock me out and keep me from the world and who discriminate against me know how it will go, which is why they do those things. That's the rub, isn't it? These people won't let me compete because they know they can't compete with me. But we'll do that one soon. Maybe today. Gonna be a good one.
(Also: I like how Carol Edgarian is so bad at writing that she uses "gentle" that way twice. Eh, fuck it, right? Let's just suck! It doesn't matter. You still get handed stuff--that's how you get handed stuff.)
Anyway. Now we'll do the start of one of mine.
“She’d gone from being really sick to being all better. And now it was time for her to leave.”
“Were they upset?”
“Who?”
“The people who’d taken care of her.”
“They wanted her to get better but they were also sad. But mostly happy. Sometimes we’re both at the same time.”
“I’m sad.”
“But we haven’t finished the story.”
“I know. I’m just sad she had to leave.”
“Me too. But let’s see what else happens because often there’s more to things than we think at first. So the penguin who had been very sick back when someone found her washed up on the beach wasn’t sick anymore. She was healthy. And even though she was small, she was a strong penguin.”
“Was she as small as me?”
“Much smaller.”
“As small as my leg?”
“Hmmm…let’s check. Pull back all of these covers…yep, there’s a leg. And some pretty neat new purple unicorn pajamas you’d think would have been easier for mommy to find. No, smaller than your leg. She was about as tall as four apples on top of each other. But plump apples—green ones like the kind you like. You could lift her up, and that’s what the woman did, but we haven’t gotten to that part yet.”
“What woman?”
“One of the humans that helped the penguin. She was the person who took the penguin to the beach on a gray morning when there weren’t any other humans out, only a few noisy gulls. It was a cold day and the wind was blowing as hard as…Remember that time you and daddy tried to fly your kite at the beach and I said, ‘We may have to wait until tomorrow’ because it was so windy and then it started to rain?”
“The kite didn’t work.”
“No, it didn’t. Well, the kite worked. It’s a good kite. It just didn’t work on that day. But when we went to the field the next afternoon, when it was warm again and sunny, what happened?”
“We flew the kite higher than any kite.”
“That’s right. Same people, same kite, different day. But the woman hadn’t gone to the beach with the penguin to fly a kite. They went because it was time for the penguin to go be the penguin she was. That’s what a penguin has to do. It’s what everyone and everything has to do. Be what they are.”
Caring. We care. This shouldn't be so foreign concept to a writing: actually caring about the story, what happens, and the people. Having a relationship with these people and being invested in it and them. And in ourselves with this reading experience and what that brings and adds to our lives.
In looking over this entry, I find that I do have to come clean. It's mea culpa time. Or else it's going to eat me up all day. The guilt.
I have a confession to make: I failed to gentle here. My bad. My gentling game has been off. I'll work on that.
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