Saturday 4/27/24
How about a prose off before I head out to run stairs?
Given that discrimination is so important to Granta editor Sigrid Rausing, billionaire heiress who has never achieved or earned anything on her own, let's do another story from their pages. Remember: Granta features the best writing in the world. Here it is. That's what you're told by the publishing system and what you're supposed to think.
What do you think the chances are that this won't be a slog to try and read? Do you think there's any chance? We all know how this is going to go, and how it would go every single time you take anything from one of these places, but I ask those questions because they speak to just how absurd and twisted--beyond the pale fucked up--this system is.
Ready? This is from the very latest story on the Granta website. It's called "Prairie Dogs," by Benjamkin Kunkel, who is very much one of these people. Here we go:
Helen too seemed to like the idea, possibly because of the prospect of our taking a bunch of drugs with friends as if we were still young, not so long ago I’d joked to her, when she’d been pressing me to take edibles before a movie, that youth was about telling yourself you really needed to stop doing so many drugs, while middle age, as it turned out, was about telling yourself you really needed to start taking more drugs, I should mention that Helen and I don’t have any children, only a cat named Harriet, so for us there really was no excuse not to spend more of our weekends becoming wiser, happier, more sexual beings by way of appropriate doses of mushrooms, MDMA, weed, et cetera, and in truth it was usually me who dragged his feet before this prospect, I suppose I was afraid that weed or mushrooms would only sharpen my attention to the horrors of the world, both the discreet grinding horror of collapse and the more spectacular horrors of state-led or freelance massacres, not to mention ‘natural’ disasters, and on account of these hovering intimations I feared I might not have such a good trip on mushrooms or edibles at all, meanwhile as for MDMA I knew that rolling (was this the term anymore?) on molly (was that the term either?) couldn’t do much for me so long as I continued, like approximately half the people I knew, to take my daily SSRI.
‘If we’re going to do this,’ Helen said brightly, ‘we should send out an invitation soon. That way people can arrange babysitters.’
Helen I won’t physically describe, she is a beautiful woman with little beside kindness in her eyes, but I find that once you are married (in my sole experience of the phenomenon so far, many of my friends, having been married at least twice by now, would be better qualified to say) you don’t really see the person anymore after a while, instead you merely recognize them, they become so familiar in their features as almost to forfeit their features completely, a little bit as if they were your own feet or something, which you never pause to study or even to see before pulling on your wool socks.
‘Oh yeah – great idea – we can hire a dog-sitter,’ male Charlie was adding to the conversation, being, with female Charlie, the owner of a large, beautiful and needy Great Dane by the name of August, a name I’m sure I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
The dinner party in question took place on Friday November 18th, I know this because I can still see in my Gmail that it was on Tuesday November 22nd that I sent out the invitation, to more than twenty friends, to a phone-free New Year’s Day party that was to get underway with brunch and last until people felt like going home, hopefully after dark, not that the arrival of dark (as the email didn’t need to say) indicated such a long day when the days are so short not even two weeks past the solstice, and our house lies so close up against the foothills to the west of town, that the sun will have set, on early-winter days, before 3.30 in the afternoon.
No one cares, you pompous bag of wind.
The entire thing is like this. A story should energize you and make you feel more alive than you did before you encountered it. It shouldn't fatigue you just by trying to get through it. This is a chore. There's no let up from the slog at any point in this story which goes nowhere.
What you end up with is a fake dumbass selling their bad shit to some other fake dumbass.
Whoa, drugs! You're so edgy! These people are always so late to the party. A party that never even really existed--at least not the way they think so. They're always out of touch. Mentally superannuated. Irrelevant, toothless, useless.
You want to suffer some more? Here's another paragraph:
Having earlier had to close my eyes against flying grit in the liquor store parking lot, when I got to the trailhead, before getting out of my car (an EV for what it’s worth), I put on the wraparound sunglasses that ordinarily I only wear while biking, in order to shield my eyes, as I ran, from the scouring dust in the air, but even so, once I was ‘running’, or really stumbling, over the trail toward the mountains, shoved by the buffeting winds at my back, I didn’t even make it a quarter of a mile before turning around and heading back to the car, out in the fields south of town there was no one else to see at 9.30 a.m. on a New Year’s Day characterized so far by merciless winds of (as I later learned) 80–100 miles an hour, except for a young woman, no doubt a professional dog walker, walking four dogs on separate leashes through the pummeling air, and I was concerned enough for the young woman’s unprotected eyes – she herself had no sunglasses on – that I offered her my wraparound sunglasses only to have her look at the author of this gesture as if he weren’t at all the good man I was meaning to be but only a strange one, anyway not only did the dog walker refuse the gift of the wraparound shades but of course there was nothing I could do for the dogs and their eyes, and I’ve often wondered since that day, with a curious persistence, whether the eyes of any of the four dogs might have been injured by what I guess I’ve already called the scouring dust in the air, when I wonder this I always think also of the crazed ticking sound of the dry grasses rummaged or ransacked by the wind, these grasses making a sound, it seemed to me at the time, of so many wristwatches (not that wristwatches are worn anymore) having gone insane all at once.
You want to come home from work and read that? You want to use money that you've earned from working and exchange some of that money for more of that writing?
Of course you don't. No one does. This is someone who sucks at writing. Obviously. Has no feel for it at all, let alone everything you need to be good at it. But Sigrid Rausing wants you to believe that what you just read--and, naturally, the vaunted Motorollah--is better than anything I've ever written in my life or could ever write. But we all know what Sigrid Rausing really is.
What a wasteland this is, this empty "literary fiction" that all of these people do. It's a desert without even the sand. There is nothing here. Just the navel-gazing minutiae of the emptiest of lives, which is as applicable to the "characters"--and these aren't even characters--as they are to the author. And to the editors. Rausing, Luke Naima. No one believes in this any more than I do, because there's jack shit here to believe in, and we all know it.
This is from a story I'm writing today. Ready?
An old man in the neighborhood where I grew up had a stroke and was confined to a wheelchair. I'd go over his house when school was over and sit on the porch outside with him and listen to Dodgers games on the radio.
They weren't going to be in Brooklyn much longer. That was something else that I didn't think about until later. How so many people wanted the Dodgers to win the World Series, and then after they finally did, they left. Which almost made it feel like it counted less because they were gone.
This man had amazing stories about what he called the old ball yard. He told me that when he was my age, he caught a foul ball hit by the great Honus Wagner. Then he handed it to his sister so she could see it, and she did the darnedst thing and threw it on the field.
The first base coach walked over to the ball, picked it up, and instead of tossing it back into the stands, he threw it to the pitcher, and on the next pitch, with that very ball, Honus Wagner smashed a line drive over the center fielder's head. The ball hit the fence and bounced back towards the infield, and Wagner came all the way around to score on a home run.
"I felt like I was a part of that," the man said to me.
I could see there was something in what he was saying, but I remember remarking that it still would have been nice to have the ball.
"Well, yes and no,” he said.
He died not long after.
Kind of different, right? It's told by a very old man at the end of his life. I'm not a very old man near the end of his life. You see this little thing I do? We call it invention. And giving readers something to care about and not sucking at writing, which you are allowed to do, contrary to what people like Sigrid Rausing like to think.
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