Saturday 11/16/24
This is going to be a pasting. They're all pastings. I just wanted to say that here.
I don't need to set this one up too much. What we have is fiction from Harper's by Diane Williams. You know some about Harper's editor in chief Christopher Beha. We'll do a prose off soon featuring his own dreadful fiction. You know about Katie Ryder from Harper's. If not, there's the link, and the search function may also prove useful.
I'm not even going to talk too much about Diane Williams in this entry. I'll do that later and I'll drill deep. I have a particular target in mind and I also want to get into the people who lie about and for Diane Williams.
What you see here is typical of Williams' writing. It's stupid. Juvenile.
We don't have to work much harder than that to describe it. These people--like a Christopher Beha--pretend that this is witty and clever.
I'm just telling you the premise they want to push. The set-up. The peg they're trying to hang someone's non-existent brilliance on. So understand that this is supposed to be witty and clever. Officially. Which means, then, that they all have to say it.
Williams is called a "writer's writer," which really means that her writing is so bad as to be embarrassing to anyone save these people in this system who are, of course, just doing their nonsense.
We don't need to say much more than that right now. All you need to do is see for yourself and you'll know.
This is from Williams' "Four Stories" in the September 2024 issue of Harper's:
I had just met Devin Stamp!—and I would have liked to hold on longer to our promising, necessary bond, but I was visiting him for only two days—during which time I was often blushing.
It was as if tiny lights were continuously being switched on when I got off the train to go home, because dandelions lined the sidewalks, and these weeds blinked at me.
An envelope was waiting for me at home, addressed in a familiar hand—from Rex!
Oh, I want to have plenty of reasons to believe in activities that are stimulative.
I remembered when his big head was above mine, my ear on his warm chest.
Rex Pickens wrote: I have heard that you are lonely. I need to tell you something that cannot be said in a letter.
When we met up, Rex looked to me brightly painted. He wore a heavy wool suit I’d never seen before—glen plaid, a houndstooth check—and next, in bed, I thought his very pink privates were meant to be some cheery dessert.
So how come I am never with him anymore?—because he never said he had the time.
But Devin does have the time, and he and I, only yesterday, were basking and stripped bare.
As I write this, my face is turned toward you, the reader, and due to ill health, I have thin, downturned lips, which often work to extol and to uplift—why not Devin?—because that’s lulling.
And here I am now, stroking my pet—my sheltie—although it is impossible for me to remain in this position for long—not quite sitting, standing, or lying down—because we are both leaning up against ground that steeply slopes.
Below I can see how my town is enclosed within a very narrow area, between these hills and the sea.
True, we are prone to sea storms and landslides, but this village also provides a panoramic view, amusements, and benefits, as well as a horrid gorge. But don’t let’s look at that. Let’s be happy.
Let us enjoy our holidays and let us fall for or swear by whatever we want to—because people really like to!
Remember what we said about exclamation points? These people use them to let you know they're being funny because they can't actually be funny. But that's what they're meant to indicate.
These system people are so awkward. Painfully awkward. Their writing is socially inept, the same as they are. They gather in this incestuous sinecure and do what they do and exact revenge when they can on people not like them.
It's so childish and petty. These aren't serious adults. And they certainly aren't serious writers. I mean, look at that.
"That's lulling."
Holy shit is that bad.
Williams is the editor of NOON, which features, hey, whoa, this is so shocking, people like her who write stuff just as stupid--or close to it--as what she writes, which the other people in the system say is this amazing publication jam-packed with the best short fiction in the world.
What a joke all of this is, right? Isn't it amazing that something like this can happen? Can be a thing that works the way it does?
I didn't expect to be doing this because I had thought I was done with the story, but I went back into "Dot" yesterday and today, which is the second story in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, to make sure, because I put each work through untold paces now, and there were some things for me to do. Very minor. A few changed, added, or subtracted words.
Again, I don't really need to say anything else to make this pasting more obvious than to just share an excerpt from the story story:
When she died, she did not go easily into that good night. She drifted into a coma, but the official end wouldn’t come, and she lingered and lingered. Then she was taken off the machines so that she might better slip away, now that the slipping was inevitable, but the waiting continued. Waiting on life to cease, when so much of the rest of life is already spent waiting. I remember thinking that we should try to do less of that, as I sat with her, just the two of us, across the span of several evenings, so that she wouldn’t have to die alone. And she did not.
But it was aunt Dot who really knew something about sickness. As Grammie was off living her life, Dot took care of their oft-cancer-ridden parents, who shared an uncanny knack for survival despite dire prognosis after dire prognosis. They had lost their first child, whose standing as the forever favorite seemed to be all but a divinely sanctioned and stamped matter of course, and neither Dot nor Grammy had any problem with their secondary—or tertiary—status.
This was their brother Teddy, and one of the few things that Dot and Grammie agreed upon was that this fellow was the absolute bee’s knees—they hailed from the jazz age—and he could have been a politician, they’d both race to add, trying to beat each other to the punch of the rhetorical flourish, as if nothing could be more incandescent or impressive about anyone, and then they would nod, in unison, sagaciously.
Teddy loved his drink, and one night in the mid-1930s, when locked outside of the family’s house, bombed out of his mind, he scaled a wall via a tree and drainpipe to try and gain entry through an open upstairs window, and fell to his death on the pavement, a senatorial career that was never going to happen crushed before its first filibuster.
But his two sisters, sixty years after the fact, would still theorize—in the tones of someone reading the Gospel at mass—that Teddy would’ve gotten us to the moon faster than Kennedy did, if only his own issues on the gravity-front of this earthly plane had not so cruelly interceded. Grammie, though, spoke like she was looking back, whereas Dot sounded as if she was still living within scenes that had long receded from the memory of everyone but these two women.
When they were older, and Dot was decades deep into her spinsterhood and Grammie had outlived her second husband, they resided as roomies at the house the latter loved so much. Dot had the top floor, my grandmother the ground one. It was only a short matter of time after you arrived for a visit before Dot would make her descent and call you fat. You’d hear her pacing around upstairs, the beast stirring, and Grammie, knowing what was about to come, would say, “Oh dear,” or sometimes, when the footsteps were really heavy—the portentous tread of a soon-to-be-manifested problem in human form—that initial exclamation would be extended into my grandmother’s version of a rhyming couplet with, “Oh, dear, bread and beer,” which also might have been a shout-out to Teddy in the ether.
The cellar of this house was the stuff of nightmares. There was a coal shoot—very old school—and shadows numberless, such that you thought goblins of some kind or other had to have at least a temporary residence here. You were told—warned—even by Grammie, which was especially worrisome, given that you believed she wouldn’t mess with you, not to go down there, save when she or Dot wanted something. Then it was cool.
Only, it was not cool, because aunt Dot had created this character named Willie Winkle whom she said lived in the basement. He didn’t just abduct and murder children, but there was this seducing element as well in her narratives on the subject. It felt like he was going to do some pre-murder things to you that were beyond the pale, even by the standards of basement goblins.
Nonetheless, if aunt Dot wanted her cribbage set, she wanted her cribbage set, and why she couldn’t keep such a small item in her rooms was one of those mysteries behind the veil of life itself, so with your marching orders, down you would go for a prelude to the hell she spoke of so regularly, and aunt Dot would carry herself to Grammie’s sink, where she’d open the cupboard beneath the basin and take a hammer and bang on the pipes, so that an echo seemingly sourced from the fiery bowels of the earth—from someone who knew fiery bowels—would throb and ring in your brain, as Dot screamed, “Winkle is gonna get you ya! Here he comes!”
It is worth noting that on the occasions when Dot tweaked her wrist—for she was also a hypochondriac and self-sidelined easily so that she could complain about the offending ailment later—Grammie would take her place with the hammer, this being, again, one of the very few things upon which they found accordance. Perhaps Winkle was Teddy’s ghost, for all we knew.
How do you have a bigger or more obvious gap in quality than that?
What can you say? It's blatant what someone like Christopher Beha is doing. How he operates, what he's about. Blatant that everyone in this system is lying and saying something they don't think, that no one thinks, when they state that Diane Williams is a brilliant writer of fiction.
Look at her brilliance as demonstrated above, right?
Brilliant!
See? Gave you an exclamation point there. People really like to!
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