Sunday 2/18/24
Sunday morning, brings the dawn in--actually, every day does, but that's how Lou Reed put it once, and this Sunday morning brings with it a prose off between a David Means story in Zoetrope, and something new by me.
As we've seen before with David Means and a story of his in The New Yorker, he sucks at writing as all of these people who get hooked up by people like Zoetrope editor in chief Michael Ray suck at writing. But let's be fair: Maybe this time David Means came up with something amazing.
Michael Ray, by the way, told me once with much relish--the relish of the envious, talentless person believing--erroneously--that they'll be able to get away with saying such an obvious lie to someone they understand operates on a level far beyond theirs--that never, in many years, had anything I'd written ever come close at all to being good enough for Zoetrope.
Now, what do you think chances are that what you're about to see from David Means won't suck? What do you think the chances are that this fiction won't have something in it about someone who writes fiction?
Ready? This is from "Near Death Experiences":
He didn’t believe in working like a magpie, collecting scraps of reality and building a nest of them in his fiction. Sure, he had a daughter and a son, but he didn’t mine them for material because, he assured himself, he had imagination; if there happened to be a daughter or a son or a wife in his work, they weren’t his, and any similarities—small details—were simply happenstance. I’m not authentic, he sometimes thought as he went over a manuscript. I’ve never been divorced, never renewed my vows, never lived in a big house along the Hudson River, or under an overpass in Nebraska. Never slept huddled beneath a blue plastic tarp while the rain pattered down, or sat around a campfire—at least not that campfire—with a bunch of drifters talking up a storm and then growing silent to hear the river flowing down the hill through the trees as they passed a bottle from face to face. Never lost my so-called Obama phone on the train—he thinks, referring to the cheap phones they got when they were homeless, calling them Obama phones though the man was long out of office, honoring him for starting the program that provided them a lifeline—and I’ve never had one stolen, not on a train to Far Rockaway at any rate, late at night, after nodding off to the roar and the rock. I’ve never used—he often reminded himself, as an example—the image of Stan dancing alone out front of the train station in Kalamazoo, high as hell with his tattoos and his manic energy, while we hung back in the shadows where the buses pulled in, getting a kick out of him and the whole scene, or the times we sold our blood at Plasma Palace, down the street from the station, and, when we were lucky, staggered around with cash spilling from our pockets searching for Stan, because all we ever seemed to be doing back then was searching for him, tracking him down, or the way Stan liked to show his arms—marked with tracks, bruised with knife scars—and say he had a rap sheet as long, and his arms were certainly long, hanging way below his waist, or that one time he went into a ramble about catching a bench warrant for something back when he was in New York, and then getting caught and taken in and tried and made to collect garbage along the West Side Highway with a crew of fuckups, and then the nurse, coming back with his results, rejected him because he had both hepatitis and AIDS, which we all knew because he’d told us the prescribed meds were too strong for his liking, telling us this as he baked up a spoon and inhaled the vapors.
Wow. Who could compete with that? What brilliance.
Building a nest of the scraps of reality.
That's pretty funny. "Let me tell you what I don't do: I don't build a nest out of the scraps of reality, no sir."
What is stranger to you: That there is never anything from these people that doesn't suck, or that you have an industry full of Michael Ray types who put forward work that obviously sucks and make like it doesn't, when we can all see--so long as someone actually pulls this stuff from the furthest portion of the margins of culture, which is where it now resides, and into plain view--how bad it is?
In the first case, you'd think with the law of averages, that someone might produce something...how about just not embarrassingly bad? Because what we just saw above is so bad as to be embarrassing. Though I do like the irony of David Means, who can't invent anything, writing a story--which isn't even what he's actually doing, if by writing a story we mean a narrative that one has invented--with this boast about imagination. It reads like someone defending themselves before being charged to get out ahead of the truth that they're working sans any imagination at all or with any story to tell.
You see how these people are always trying to throw up a smokescreen, something to deflect from or obscure the truth about their absence of talent? That's really what writing like this is: David Means thinks that by piling up the images and dispensing with punctuation and rambling away that this will stop people from seeing that all he has is bullshit. That's also why the Obama bit is there. He's just working with bullshit. He doesn't have anything else. It's like the kid who gets up in front of the class to make his presentation and he didn't read the book but he wants everyone--and especially the teacher--to think he did. That's how so many of these people write.
We let him go on for a bit. I'm not going to go on like that. I don't need to.
Ready?
He wasn’t specific, but with my own sharp stab of pain I took him to be referring to me. And Idra said, “And why is that, my Lord?”
The term “my Lord” took me aback. That she had it as a part of her all along, for that was how it emerged from her lips. As this thing that had been living inside of her, which I had not realized. Understand that she wasn’t challenging him. She wanted him to give her a certain answer that I could tell that she already knew.
My feeling was that I was at a considerable remove from whatever was happening between them and I reacted by thinking, “You ingrate, how dare you, there is no one else kneeling here in the dirt with you as you die,” but Idra is very beautiful, and when the fever is strong, the fever is strong. What can a man help when that man is he who cannot help himself? Little does one know until later. Or that is often how it goes, as Idra has made me realize in our time together, though not with words and direct expression.
I had the sensation that I should leave, like I was trespassing and this wasn't a place where I belonged, but stay I did.
After several more breaths, each shallower than the last, this man gave my wife his answer. Or hers.
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