Wednesday 11/13/24
We've talked about Conjunctions editor, pretentious-fop writer, veritable Sir Soporific, and Guggenheim winner--of course, right?--Bradford Morrow a number of times. Guy is simply a disposable fool of the highest order of disposability, so we won't linger long with that right now--will get back to more of it later, though.
I just wrote seven stories in twenty-four hours. That's pretty nuts, right? Nonetheless, there it is.
Seems like a prose off would be good, no?
This is from a story called "Into the Arms of the Man on the Moon," by Yannick Murphy, a writer whom Morrow publishes regularly because she's amazing and this story is amazing. Right. Definitely the reasons. Here we go:
There is the man on the moon. Go to him. Get bread from him, drink his water. Take your dog, Blue, to him. Take your mother. She is skiing outside around the house. Stop her, tell her that Blue is going also. Take the gander, Henry. He is short in the legs. Leave me Iris. I have seen her eat feed in a pattern.
Tell the man on the moon I am out with the dogs. I have loaded them up. I am not without ointment for my lips. This is an occasion. Harnessed, the dogs are mindful of the pregnant bitch. Tell the man on the moon I think she will whelp seven. Ask him if he can know those kinds of things. Ask him if he is like God. Ask him if he knows if God knows how many the pregnant bitch can whelp.
I will miss your hair. Cut some for me. Leave it inside my boot. When I pull it out, I will see summer. My foot will stay warm. Tell the man on the moon we have summer here. If he asks, show him your hair. If he asks about stars, laugh, then if he asks again, show him your mother’s eyes.
Super. Thanks for that. (Click the link above that takes you to the whole story. Read the rest of it. You'll end up saying, "Seriously?")
You notice how there's never any depth in the fiction by these people? Of course you do.
What is the point of this? Where are you hitting us? How are you hitting us hard?
What these people write is always so trite. Then they're like, "Time to be edgy..."
Ask him if he knows if God knows how many the pregnant bitch can whelp.
These people are more desiccated inside than dust that's 2000 years old, but you still feel like saying, "Can you grow up?"
I have seen her eat food in a pattern.
Deep stuff.
You want to be hit by a story. You want it to knock into you hard. You want to feel deeply. Isn't that a great feeling when you feel deeply? Like with some song that means a lot to you. It's playing and you feel it in every part of you.
Writing can be like that--it can be more like that than that's like that, if you know what I mean.
That's the writing that matters. And that writing can hit us that way in so few words. And for the entire time. This is from something I wrote called "Personal Plane."
What plane are you on?
Well, planes don't have names. Higher isn’t a name. It’s a direction your finger points. Or maybe I just don't know the names and because I don't know them I'm concluding they don't exist. You see what I mean. Kind of arrogant. Which is funny because I'm so unhappy and I’ve always thought of people with great lives as more likely to be arrogant because it’s easier in their situation. I can't take the pain. The pain is so total that even when I use the word “funny” I’m consciously noting how I’m really using it. I can't handle knowing I just awoke, the realization of which crushes me in the moment of opening my eyes and the insertion of the “Oh, yeah.” I envy the person who lives the life in my dreams, no matter what those dreams are, and by dreams I mean whatever they were experiencing, not storybooks, and that person doesn’t even exist.
Hits. You feel. Hard. And if a story isn't doing that, it can't be a great story. It can't be a work of art. It can be something. But it won't be those things, and it won't have the value that those things have. It won't be close. The gap, the difference, isn't measurable.
This narrative voice--the second narrative voice--is so highly personal, right? But is it also not universal? Have you also not know your own version of these things?
And it's amusing to think about The New Yorker's Daniel Zalewski from the other day, isn't it? With his charge--which, of course, was just something he said because he wanted to be a dick--that this was a writer who couldn't so much as turn a memorable phrase.
Higher isn't a name. It's a direction your finger points.
That's nice. If someone else could write that, they'd use it for the whole thing. There wouldn't be anything else. That'd be the hat-hanger, if you follow me.
But that's just something in there, and we build to bigger things. Note, too, the blend of awareness, self-awareness, and the change--the dawning new thoughts, potential epiphanies--with the space of the words, this "answer."
This isn't the leaden writing these people do. This is alive. Great writing has to be alive. It has to have that life in it.
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