Saturday 2/1/25
As one has probably noticed, lately I've been making a point of showing how fraudulent awards like the Pulitzer Prize and Guggenheim and MacArthur genius grant are, by taking the dreadful writing of the people who are handed such things in the rigged system of publishing, in which no one can write, and everything is done for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the work, and putting it next to my work. Garbage by the likes of Joshua Cohen, Junot Diaz, George Saunders, and so on. Say what you want about pudding, but the real proof is in the prose.
That will continue right now with a prose off featuring Yiyun Li, whose story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, and another Guggenheim and MacArthur winner, who, like all of these people, is handed such things for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of her writing. That writing is so bad--as it is with all of these people--that it is impossible to argue that that which you're about to see from her isn't exactly what I say it is.
Li is a box-checker. She checks off the right boxes, the boxes these broken people want to see checked off from a person they will accept as one of their own.
And make no mistake: Being like these people is among the most important things for publishing system success. They must see you as one of them, and never--I cannot stress this enough--as better than they are, smarter than they are, legitimate in ways they could never be legitimate, and on a different level far, far up above them.
Which brings us--or brings us back--to Zoetrope editor Michael Ray, a man who is ruled by discrimination to such a degree as to be clownish in his so obviously prejudicial ways, as we've seen with earlier prose offs featuring fiction selected by Ray for inclusion in Zoetrope.
This was a man so stupid--and again, sufficiently ruled by his insecurity and prejudice--that he once wrote me and said that nothing I had ever done was close to being good enough for the pages of Zoetrope.
Think of how consumed with envy and animus you have to be to make that remark. Think about it, perhaps, in taking a look at the November 1 entry pertaining to Michael Ray and Zoetrope from last year. Think about it in reading what one is about to see below.
What we have first in this latest prose off is an excerpt from a story in Zoetrope--which, according to Michael Ray, is far, far, far better than anything I've written--by Li called "The Buttercup Mousetrap."
You can go to the Zoetrope site--I just gave you the link--and read Li's story in full. That's often the case with these prose offs, but I'm noting as much here because when you read what you're about to see in this particular entry, you're going to think this particular excerpt from Li's story is so stupid that it can't possibly be how the whole story--which isn't even a story--reads. That it must be some digression within a story, although what that digression could possibly be for is anyone's guess.
No.
The whole thing is really this moronic. This pointless. Everything by Yiyun Li--Guggenheim winner, MacArthur grant winner (so, yes, as with Junot Diaz and George Saunders, we have another official genius in Yiyun Li), and, of course, New Yorker fiction contributor--is this stupid.
Terrible writing with no value, no reason to be be read, no skill in its making. No point. Not for a reader.
The sole point, as such, for having shit like this, is to travel the hallways of this fucked up, backwards, inbred system, and--this is important--so that a simple, pathetic, weak, insecure, clannish, prejudiced, classist clown like Michael Ray won't feel threatened by someone being smarter than he is, on a different level than he is. For no one would look at the work of a Yiyun Li and have any concerns on that score.
We can keep returning to Li's work and hammer home the point repeatedly. We should do that. We will. And we'll also start talking about Brigid Hughes, the editor of A Public Space--with whom I once went to Brooklyn to meet--another literary journal that encapsulates the incestuous evil that prevails up and down the system of which such journals are a part and where Yi is an editor herself.
But for now, let's just tend to the latest prose off slaughter, keeping those words of Michael Ray in mind:
Nothing I've written is close to being as good as what you are about to see from Yiyun Li, and close to being good enough for Zoetrope.
Ready? Take it, Yiyun!
“You’re looking for the lion skin.”
“Am I?”
“Or you’re looking to see if I have a lump on my back. I am not he, either.”
“Is there a hunchbacked king named Richard?”
“You don’t seem to know your history very well.”
“That’s because I don’t know which history is history. Each year, there is a new version of the same old history, like flowers returning in the spring.”
“Are they not the same flowers?”
“Certainly not. Flowers are temperamental—”
“Kings are temperamental, too,” Richard says.
“—and things temperamental do not last,” Nick says. How he dislikes an interrupter of his sentences. He once saw an illusionist cut a woman into halves and rejoin the halves as a whole. No sentence interrupter has that magic.
Richard appears not to have heard Nick’s verdict on kings and flowers. “Still, you should know some basic facts of history,” he says. “Facts don’t change. They’re the roots.”
“You can’t see the roots unless you dig them up. Then what? Dead flowers can’t even be temperamental.”
“So you must remain ignorant of facts to benefit from history that may as well be hearsay?”
Richard looks displeased, but Nick is accustomed to people looking displeased. People are often displeased, for any minute reason. Nick is pleased, all the time—with what, he needn’t know. Let others name their concrete discontents. Nick’s contentment can be content-free.
“What I’m saying is,” he says, “you can have any number of regulations to determine any number of things and non-things. Say, alcoholic drinks and nonalcoholic drinks, dairy products and nondairy products, aliens and non-aliens. But facts and nonfacts? They are a tricky pair.”
“How so?”
“Give me a fact.”
“I am a king—that’s a fact.”
“You are not a king—that’s a nonfact, then? But it is also a fact,” Nick says. “What’s something that is both a fact and a nonfact?”
“Methinks you are playing a not-so-clever game with me.”
“Yes. If a game is too clever, people become suspicious and they don’t want to play.”
“How so?”
“A jumper constantly reveals his limit,” Nick says. “A stooper can always stoop lower.”
“You’re speaking with a king. A king neither jumps nor stoops,” Richard says. “Let’s do this again. You are a fool—a fact.”
“Aye, a fact as solid as my name. You are not a fool—a nonfact.”
“What’s your name?”
“Nick Bottom.”
“I’m glad I don’t have a name like that.”
“Why?”
“Because no one takes you seriously if you are a Nick Bottom.”
“But why would I want anyone to take me seriously? You wanted to be taken seriously, as a king, and that is why you were unkinged.”
“There has to be a middle ground between a king and a Nick Bottom.”
“What’s the middle ground between a fact and a nonfact?”
“You tell me. It’s your game.”
“Rich Top.”
“What?”
“You can change your name to Rich Top,” Nick says. “A better name than Nick Bottom.”
“Impossible.”
“Rich Impossible?”
“You are impossible.”
Nick thinks about the other words people have used to describe him, and decides that this one is his favorite. “I’m impossible, am I not? I’m Nick Bottom the impossibilist. That shall be a good new trade for me.”
“Why do you need a new trade?”
“I used to be a weaver. Then there was an industrial revolution, so it’s no longer possible for me to be a weaver. There hasn’t been a revolution that makes it impossible for me to be an impossibilist, has there?”
Wouldn't you be so embarrassed to have written that?
Say you wanted to be a writer and that's the best you could do. You wouldn't want anyone to see it. Crumple it up, throw it away, pretend it didn't happen, or look at it as a first try. Everything has to start with a first try, right?
But according to these frauds and liars, that's the best writing in the world right there. Aren't you lucky you got to see it? Impressive, right?
Is it possible for a writer to be working with less? Li has nothing. She has no ability, no imagination, no story to tell. Not a one. Not for real. She is awarded what she's awarded, gifted what she is gifted, included where she is included, represented by whom she is represented, published by the press that publishes her, for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of her writing, which sucks.
We all know it sucks. Anyone who actually tries to read it knows it sucks.
If you're her agent, you know it sucks. If you're Michael Ray and you're actually having to look at that writing which you essentially published sight unseen--because me, it was poured over and vetted; it was enough that it came from the right person--here in this entry because you know people can now see you for the discriminatory clown you are, you know it sucks. If you're her book publisher, you know it sucks.
Pulitzer Prize finalist short story collection, baby!
I'd love for someone to mount the defense for any of this garbage and tell me what makes it awesome in their view. Do you know how many times that has happened after these dozens of prose offs? Have a big old guess. That's right. You don't think these people would love to be able to do that if it were at all possible? But they know it's not, because when they're forced to look at it, they know it sucks as much as I know it sucks and you know it sucks.
I should tell you, too, by the way, because you wouldn't know it if you were not well-versed in the world of these broken, talentless people, but the above is meant to be funny. They are not actually funny, and we've seen how they try and convey that they're trying to be by using exclamation points, but trust me, the Nick Bottom thing is the result of a person who is desperate to be funny--and who realizes she never could be--and crying and screaming inside over her lack of actual talent and humor trying to signal to others like her that they should treat her like she's talented and funny.
These people are so fragile. That's why they have to remove the truth entirely from their jobs and lives. Doing so is tantamount to the code of conduct which governs them all in their interactions with each other within the system they've created that allows for no truth, no creativity, no actual ability, which is too much of a threat for people who are this way.
How are we doing? We having a fun prose off so far? How are you liking this, Michael Ray?
Remember how much you thought you were enjoying yourself when you wrote what you did to me? And you thought you'd get away with it?
Didn't see this coming, did you, dumb guy that you are? I'm sure it will be fine. I'm sure anyone who sees this and reads that above from Yiyun Li and reads what they're going to see now from me will totally, totally, totally think you were on the up and up, and you meant what you said and had good reason based in truth for saying it, and that you're not a pathetic, envious, bigoted, worm of a man.
Nonetheless, I think I'll take my chances.
Ready? Here we go.
Thomas became so popular at our school that most days you forgot he was dead. He was only different the way cool kids are from the mere mortals, which was another ironic distinction given the circumstances.
Rachel begged her mom to take her to school early and pick her up late and her mom thought Rachel was evolving into a remarkable scholar, or at least that she hadn’t been talking bullshit after all about applying to schools you’d never associate with Rachel and her dampness and the legion of glum/chum jokes.
You could tell that she still almost cried a lot with her depression and had simply gotten really good at not officially crying. Her cheeks were technically dry. But you always knew Rachel was on the verge of tumbling into something that would enfold and hold her in the bad kind of grip. Because there are good and bad kinds. The better ones help you hold on. The worst take you away when you don’t want to go, to where you don’t want to go. I knew all about that type, because I had my own version.
When my dad drove his car into the embankment on the highway, he reached out to me after he went through the windshield and before he struck the pavement. He hadn’t worn his seat belt because that would have been counter to his objective of ending his life, which also meant leaving us.
I didn’t tell anyone what my father said to me when he died. I kept it a secret from my mom. Maybe my dad reached out to her, too, and it was better for her to believe she was the person he thought about as he left this world. His first love, there at the last as his forever love.
But I think it was just me, because of our talks. Those things he had tried to impart earlier than he might have otherwise and this was him finishing up but without asking if I followed him. And I didn’t tell Rachel because I didn’t want to make her less alive on account of her cutting out a part of herself to give to me so I could keep going.
“My heart is Skittles” was something Rachel would say in her Rachel way when she acted like my pain was her pain. Skittles meant pieces. It was how she told you she was heartbroken and would do anything to share whatever she had with you the same as she’d give me her candy when we were little. She’d insist I take the last few pieces every time. Death would have been meant one thing to her. What my father said, another.
Certain people focus on big ideas. What they call the big ideas. They let you know what they’re gonna be bringing up a bunch. Life, death, light, dark, here, not here. For others, it’s interaction. The back and forth. The listening. What gets said, what needs to be, what isn’t, what doesn’t. What gets said best without any words or because they weren’t quite the right ones. Touch. That’s where the love is. Where the pain is. The life, the death, the light, the dark, the here, and the gone away. I guess it’s kind of the same for each group, save with the one the big stuff is out there, and for the other it’s at ground level. Maybe it’s the difference between looking up and walking. She would’ve believed me. Unquestioningly. If I added, “I’m not lying,” all she would’ve said was, “I know.” I understood what those words that my father communicated to me would have meant to her. But I wanted Rachel to be Rachel. And not like me, a girl with less of herself left.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you,” my dad said in the final flickering of his life as he flew through the air for that last flash before hitting the ground—it was nip and tuck—and I knew he was gone.
That would be from the third story in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, which is all about, that's right, women and girls from a person who is neither.
And as with other times, I think that wasn't exactly very close, do you? Do you see think Michael Ray thinks that's close? Wait, my bad: According to him--think of how amped up you have to be in all of your discriminatory anti-glory to have said what he said to me--what you just read from me was nowhere near as good as what you read from Yiyun Li. Not even close.
Can your prejudice be more obvious if you're Michael Ray? Imagine if this was reversed and I wrote what Li did and she wrote--the fattest of chances, but play along--what I wrote, and here I was saying I'd been done wrong. I'd sound insane. How about if I wrote what Li did and posted it on here saying it was the best thing I've ever written, I worked on it for years, wow, I can't believe I wrote anything so good, wow, didn't think I had it in me, etc. Again, crazy.
Ah, Michael Ray: You sad, lying little man who can't get a grip on his animus that someone else is on a level he can only conceive of when he encounters it in that other person, and tries to punish them for being on it.
You look ridiculous. As you will the next time I do this. Because it ain't going away, chief. Bang to rights is bang to rights. And that's how I got you.
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