Wednesday 10/16/24
I swear, looking at what these people write, seeing it as anyone would see it for how bad it is if they're actually reading it and being honest, and knowing why it got published and why that writer was awarded, practically makes me vomit. I have to be thorough on here, but it's like I want to get posts of this nature done as quickly as possible, at least the part of them that deals with all of the above. I have to fight off being physically sick. These people are just so revolting.
So, yeah, let's get to this. We're going to do another prose off this time with a recent--the most recent--short story in The New Yorker, which is by Joshua Cohen Remember when I said we'd be doing a series of prose offs featuring Guggenheim winners? We'll here we go, because Cohen was awarded a Guggenheim. But there's more! For in Joshua Cohen, we also have a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Which means we're probably about to see something pretty amazing, right? Something way better than anything than I could do. Yeah...
We've done enough of these for you to know how this will play out. This story that you're about to see, from The New Yorker, by the Guggenheim guy, the Pulitzer guy, is going to suck. You know it's going to suck. We all know it's going to suck. There's no way this isn't going to suck, right?
Nothing in this business, this system, happens because anyone thought anything was amazing or even because they thought it didn't suck. Not even these things. Fiction in The New Yorker, a Guggenheim, a Pulitzer. It's all about other stuff. And not good things. It's disgusting. It's corrupt as can be. It's as unethical as can be.
Want me to do that pat line where I say, "But you know what? Maybe this excerpt--which is the start of Cohen's story "My Camp" in The New Yorker--is going to be dazzling. Brilliant. A work of genius"?
Okay. Consider it said.
But we all know it's going to suck. Ready? Here we go:
Human nature, yes. Nature nature, no. I know nothing about it. A rose is a rose is my tradition, but then feelings lead us outside tradition, they lure us beyond it, and I feel nature deeply. I feel its lack of interest in me, its lack of humanity jibing with my inner emptiness; I like how its trees come together to make a forest that shows me how to breathe, and how its boulders show me how to concentrate. I’m content with having these immature, idealizing poetic-romantic emotions about the great outdoors and don’t want to know anything more, chiefly because I’ve always regarded the outdoors as a refuge from knowledge—a haven of ignorance to flee to whenever the city news runs me down.
In the summer of 2023, this was certainly the case. Though in retrospect that season now seems a golden age, at least a silver age—the last sane season—in the literal heat and humidity of the moment I was depressed. All my friends were out of the city and I had no invitations. It seemed that every one of my acquaintances lucky enough to have a house upstate or in the Hamptons had just given birth and childless singles like me were no longer welcome: Happy summer, we’ll catch up in the fall . . .
I was going stir-crazy in the tarry swelter, and though I couldn’t quite get it together to purchase a new, non-leaking air-conditioner or book a hotel or motel or really come up with anywhere climatized to retreat to even for a weekend’s vacation, I found myself beginning to contemplate homeownership. That should be proof I was losing my grip: that I didn’t dismiss the idea immediately, that I let it grow on me like a prickly rash as the sweat slicked down my back. A place of my own was the fantasy. A little place out in the hinters. As I pigged around my hotbox, crosstown traffic fuming and blaring outside, I kept imagining a wattle fence, a thatched roof, a clutch of loosely mortared walls out in some leafy glade where I could sit cool and quiet and get back to writing.
For fuck's sake. Welcome to the Festival of Boredom.
A story told by a writer character who wants to repair to a leafy glade, from a writer who thinks he's being creative because he says things like "pigged around"--so awkward and forced--and whoa, another big shock, we have the Hamptons putting in an appearance. Get your tote bags! Subscribe to The New Yorker and get your tote bag so that people who see you walking around with it will think, "My! Aren't they smart and sophisticated! What a tote!"
Look at that first paragraph. Where is it going? Where does it take us, the reader? All of this throat-clearing and ass-scratching. Round and round.
Trees show you how to breathe? What level of dipshit is narrating this story? Trees show you that, do they? Imagine if someone said that to you?
"Jen, look at all of those trees--they show me how to breathe."
Good thing, because if you weren't breathing, you couldn't be learning how to concentrate from the boulders, those famed teachers of focus.
Cohen goes on and on. It's his thing. To bore the life out of you. He's one of the people of the system, and he deals in a kind of maximization of boredom. So pretentious, completely devoid of imagination. At some point in whatever he writes (I didn't even check with this story, but I bet you anything I'm right) there will be Jewish writers because he's a Jewish writer. On and endlessly on. No point. Just the same note for the duration.
The moan-y bit about finding somewhere "climatized"--only a douchebag would talk like this--is, of course, unintentionally funny.
Blue-blooded, boring, talentless, entitled, hooked-up system guy problems.
What are the stakes? This boring asshole's lack of a second home? Finding the inspiration to write another boring thing like Cohen himself does?
Who could possibly be invested in this? Isn't that, I don't know, a big part of the point of reading? That you're invested in what you're reading?
So there you go. Nice of me to make you aware of this writing, because, in case you didn't know, it's supposed to be the best fiction in the world. That's what that looks, according to these people, in their evil, incestuous system, if you were wondering. I'm sure you weren't, but in the off-chance.
Were you to read a touch further, this is what you'd find:
There was a younger man, weedy and Visine-eyed, whose childhood was passed on a nearby farm that according to him “didn’t grow shit,” and who, after volubly denigrating the Pines, calling the area “dead-end” and “pussy-free,” asked me, straight up, why I wanted to move there. And I answered him just as directly: “To write.”
“Like, you write scripts and all?”
“Books.”
He took that in, bobbleheading. “That checks out. Fits in with your taste.”
This is what happens when you have one of these people--who are as fake and as far removed from real life as anyone can be--trying to do what they think of as "the voice and ways of the people." The folk. The unwashed. Those beneath them because they don't move within the walls of academia and they don't have a trust fund and may, gasp, use their hands to work.
No one says to anyone that a place is "pussy-free." Certainly no one just announces it so some twee-douchebag they don't know.
And you remember how Wells Tower likes to have someone "wands" a pen in the air because that's how Wells Tower used to trick these simpletons that he was "deep" and "literary" and "creative" because someone else would would have said "waves" but he said "wands"? These people love that shit--look, I used a noun for a verb! They use the same stupid, simple tricks again and again. Cohen does it here: "He took that in, bobbleheading."
No, you're right, New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman: That's astounding. And you too, Pulitzer committee! And all of you deciding who gets those Guggenheims! You totally believe he's a great writer. I'm sure if your kids' lives depending on you answering the question if he was or he wasn't honestly that you'd definitely say he was great. That's not embarrassing at all. I'm bobbleheading as I admit as much. Wow. I wish I could write that well.
Also: You see the double use of the word "in"? That's a mistake on the writer's part, that fiction editors Deborah Treisman, Willing Davidson, David Wallace, and Cressida Leyshon, and editor in chief David Remnick--that swell guy who condones following women one doesn't know home from parties and asking if they'd like to be anally fisted--couldn't be bothered to fix. I thought you were all these outstanding wordsmiths? No?
This is basic, basic, basic stuff. Basic writing, basic editing. They're not actually vetting this story from Joshua Cohen. It's determined that certain people are going to be given things and put forward by the system. All they have to do is produce the work so that the others who are rigging everything are able to say, "Here's some work by X." The only requirement, on the work side--with a a story, a book--is that it technically exists. What the work says, its value, its quality, is irrelevant. It could be anything, no matter how bad.
You can have words repeat. Sure. But you need to know they're repeating and there has to be a reason. A thematic reason, or because it's part of a construction. This is just a mistake. You could go through the whole thing, line by line, and point them out. What we're focusing on here, though, is how bad, how valueless, the story is.
You're liars. You're full of shit. Nothing you do, nothing you put forward, nothing you say is all of this, all of that, holds up to any scrutiny whatsoever. And what I really mean by scrutiny is so much as a single honest quick look. It's not hard to know you for exactly what you are. The only reason someone could fail to is because they wouldn't be interested in enough to actually look. Kill off any outside interest, and the system can operate however it wishes to operate because there are no witnesses, no one to object--there's only the people inside that system.
Do I even need to tell you that Granta formally declared this guy one of the best writers in the world? I feel like I don't need to tell you that, but consider yourself told all the same. Motorollah!
(By the way, can anyone confirm the rumors that Sigrid Rausing has a second memoir coming out called, My Family Is So Rich That It's Someone Else's Fault If We Have to Hide Their Body or did I get some bad info?)
And that part where the narrator responds, "To write," is meant to be super dramatic. That's what was going through Joshua Cohen's mind when he produced that line. He thought, "This is why I'm an important writer." Just like he was proud of "baubleheading."
I don't know how you take these people seriously. It's impossible, except insofar as they've killed off reading in the world, they've made it so that there's no one coming along who can actually write anything worth reading, and they stand united against the last real writer, who is also the first something else. I don't think we need to worry about a label for that right now.
But we will complete the prose off. Because that was the start of Cohen's story, I'll use the start of this one of mine that's been among the bits of business of today.
“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 play on words like my friend Rachel tended to do or trying to be casual about the unknown. You don’t encounter the power of other worlds and their possibilities 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 before class if we were early enough, 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,” were Ms. Kathleen’s initial words for Thomas on his first day when he interrupted class, which was what he was supposed to do. They just came out like her professionalism and her “every day should be a happy day” attitude had been overcome on account of here was a new boy who wasn’t quite another new boy. 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 so everything was probably legit. He handed the piece of paper to Ms. Kathleen who was one of those people who can’t help reading something aloud never mind if it was stamped TOP SECRET.
“So it says here that you’re from…” she began.
Then Ms. Kathleen’s voice trailed off, and she repeated the “Oh dear, oh no,” with a grave intensity instead of what had initially been mild discomfort or confusion or annoyance—you never totally know with teachers—and she was very serious now.
This is the part where I say, "That's a bit different, huh?" and "We're not exactly talking writing on the same level, are we?"
What can someone say? There it is. Nothing could be more clear. Joshua Cohen doesn't have fiction in The New Yorker, he wasn't awarded a Guggenheim grant, he didn't win the Pulitzer for fiction because anyone thinks he writes well, let alone is this brilliant artist.
It's not legitimately thinkable. He was given those things because this is a corrupt, evil, incestuous, bigoted system.
And everyone reading this journal, reading entries like this, knows it.
Wait until you see another one we have coming up here. It'll feature another Guggenheim winner, who also won the Pulitzer prize, The New Yorker again, a former Paris Review editor, and the return of an old friend who once told me that nothing I had never produced was anywhere close to being good enough to go into their journal.
Now, in addition to it being unwise as a general rule to say something the likes of which you've never believed less in your life, it's really unwise to say that thing to me when we both know what you're really doing.
You bobbleheading, bitches? I know I'm bobbleheading.
