Wednesday 1/29/25
This one will be enjoyable. We got a beat down coming.
If anything, Junot Diaz is every bit as decorated thanks to this fraudulent, evil, incestuous, rigged system of ceaseless bullshit as George Saunders, whose wonderful fiction featured in a prose off thrashing the other day.
Present anything by any of these hooked-up, hyped, touted, supported, backed, tongued, taken care of, publicized, award-winning dreadful ass writers and anything by me, take the names off of it, and ask anyone in the world which writer do they think has all of those awards, etc., and there isn't anyone who is going to pick these people.
And remember: What you see with these shitty writers is all they do. They're not the expert on myriad subjects. Or any subject. They're not moving from this to this to this to this and being the best at each of those things. They do their own single thing--badly--over and over again.
Junot Diaz is a fun case. This isn't shooting fish in a barrel--more like fish in a thimble. Because not a lot is easier than describing how his simple, simple, simple shtick works.
He uses first person, because the narrator is him (never mind that this is fiction). He can't think up anything. The narrator has Diaz's education, he references creative writing programs and the like.
Diaz drops in some Spanish, and holy shit do these idiots lose it over that.
They think, "I am a renegade despite what those mean kids said about me before I went to rich person boarding school with other people with the right blood in their veins like me. Here I am reading these otherwise loathsome terms of the dirty barrio, racist that I am, because skin color is huge for me in picking what I'll say I like and what I'll publish, which is the way of the true racist. But look at what I say I'm reading! I'm not some repressed drone who is terrified of life. I am daring! Look at me out on the other side of the tracks where the people who are beneath Greenwich, CT silver spooners like me have to live."
Could I have nailed that that's what happens with you people any better?
It's this vicarious thrill for broken fools for whom episodes of Masterpiece Theatre cause them to up their number of therapy sessions from three to four a week.
The thing about this is, Junot Diaz--who views women as collections of holes for the use of men like him and nothing more--is wholly inauthentic with this slice of multicultural life he's serving up as part of his scam. He can't even get it right. He's playacting. Because he's a fake everything. If you were Dominican, you'd find all of his asinine, cliched, uninformed posturings laughable. This isn't any kind of real Dominican experience.
There's nothing real about this writing.
But the simple fools of publishing who roll the log for this guy can't tell. There is nothing authentic about them either. They don't know what rings true. Their world, their culture, their hives in which they're cloistered, it's all the most maxed out dysfunctional form of make believe.
So what Diaz then does is he juxtaposes pop culture and barrio-speak with what he thinks are deeply intellectually references, which are actually just buzzwords he's picked up that he drops in without reason.
You know that dad who isn't up on the slang of the youth but tries to speak the lingo of his kids when their friends come over? That's how Diaz writes.
Correct, you misogynist? This goes right through you, doesn't it? Because you know it's all true and here's this person saying what you fear, what you desperately want no one to notice, knowing full well the imposter that you are, a product of this hook-up system and nothing else.
That's why it's so hard for you to write, right? I get it. Well, I don't get it in terms of my own experience. It's easy for me. What you're going to see below, which is infinitely better than anything you could ever write, was easy for me. I do it in minutes. I do it while I'm doing other things. I do it all day, I could do it until the end of time.
In interviews--well, back when you gave more of them because less people knew you for the woman-user/hater that you are--you try and cover up this truth I just hit on by talking about craft, and fastidiousness, but we know the truth, don't we? The two of us. We know. Yeah. We sure do.
Diaz tries to sound like a tough guy in his writing, but he's akin to that pipsqueak you know who makes you burst out giggling when he tries to be a hard ass for some childish reason. This is a dweeb-tool voice. It's a dweeb-tool writer.
Then Diaz crams everything together--the tough talk, the pathetic, would-be intellectual references of an insecure man who knows he's working with nothing--and you get dweeb-tool mashery as his house--casa--prose style.
And New Yorker fiction editors like Deborah Treisman--the boss of that section--David Wallace--as big a fraud as you're going to find in publishing, right, Mr. Fiction Coordinator?--Willing Davidson, and Cressida Leyshon put it out.
I mean, as long as people aren't talking as much right then about what a misogynist Diaz is. But if there's a lull and he has some slop? Sure, they'll slap it into The New Yorker.
Who writes female characters worse than Diaz? Well, there are plenty of these men who are tied for that spot in last place. It's because they can't write. A great writer can write every character equally well. That's misleading, though, because Diaz doesn't have characters, so don't understand this to be me saying he writes any character well. He has caricatures. And wow does this guy think women are vessels for semen and that's gonna be it.
But according to the MacArthur people, he's a genius! That's why they gave him three-quarters of a million dollars. And our Guggenheim friends gave him a cool $40K. That's totally on the up and up, as we've seen before. Right Guggenheim, people?
And here I am talking a sort of way, and you're hoping, "Well, maybe he doesn't have something that great, we won't look like the obvious clowns of systematic bullshit and backroom deals that we so obviously are," but yeah...I'm talking this way because my God do we have a big-time contrast coming up. I'm not sure how you'd describe that contrast or the clear--there's nothing more obvious--discrepancy in ability between this misogynistic hack-tool and this writer right here.
Think of how simple you have to be to fall for what Diaz does in every goddam bit of fiction he writes. Juxtaposition, Spanish words, fake tough talk, say titties and pussy and such, drop in allusions to MFA programs, have the narrator be him because he can't think of anything else being totally devoid of an imagination, and voila!
That's all it is. All it ever is.
We ready? I think we've preambled long enough and it's prose off time. And who doesn't love a good prose off? I know I love a good prose off.
This is from Guggenheim, MacArthur, Pulitzer Prize winning Junot Diaz, and his short story "Pura Principle," that doubtless is better than anything I've ever written or could ever write, and I'm sure the people at The New Yorker, and the people at the MacArthur genius grant headquarters, and the Guggenheim people, totally, totally, totally truly believe that.
Mami tried to keep his ass home. Remember what your doctor said, hijo, remember. But he just said, Ta to, Mom, ta to, and danced right out the door. She never could control him. With me she yelled and cursed and hit, but with him she sounded as if she was auditioning for a role in a Mexican novela. Ay mi hijito, ay mi tesoro. I tried to get him to slow his roll, too—Yo, shouldn’t you be convalescing or something?—but he just stared at me with his dead eyes. We hadn’t really been close before the cancer struck, so it’s not like I had any wins with him. Right before we all got shipped out to cancer planet, we hadn’t even been talking. He’d side-fucked this girl I was trying to talk to and thought it hilarious: You got to move faster, bro. Pussy got an expiration date.
Anyway, after a few weeks on overdrive motherfucker hit a wall. Developed this dynamite cough from being out all night and ended up back at the hospital for two days—which after his last stint (eight months) didn’t really count as nothing—and when he got out you could see he was trying to be smart about the whole thing. Stopped breaking night and drinking until he puked. The Iceberg Slim thing stopped, too. No more chicks crying over him on the couch or gobbling the rabo downstairs. The only one who hung tough was this ex of his, Tammy Franco, whom he’d pretty much physically abused their whole relationship. Bad, too. A two-year-long public-service announcement. He’d get so mad at her sometimes that he dragged her around the parking lot by her hair. Once her pants came unbuttoned and got yanked down to her ankles, and we could all see her toto and everything. That was the image I still had of her. After my brother, she had hopped on a white boy and gotten married faster than you can say I do. A beautiful girl. You remember that José Chinga jam “Fly Tetas”? That was Tammy. What was strange was that on the days she dropped by she wouldn’t come into the apartment, not at all. She’d pull her Camry up in front and he would go out and sit with her in the bitch seat. I’d just started summer vacation and had nothing going on, so I’d watch them from the kitchen window, waiting for him to palm her head down into a blow-job position, but nothing like that ever happened.
See? Told you.
Look up anything else by Diaz, and that's what you get. Pulitzer, baby!
Look how he strains. He's desperate to have the prose evince some authority or legitimacy he just doesn't possess. Notice how he's buckling to come up with something, anything memorable, but he can't find it. Ain't there. It's not in him. As a result, you get these forced efforts, these misfirings: "cancer planet," for example. Contrived. Inorganic.
Deborah Treisman: You're not even looking at any of this shit though, are you? You're looking at who it's by.
You're disgusting. And you know what you're going to do about me pointing that out? Nothing. There's nothing you can do or say. You have no defense. Because this is all true. And you bloody well know it.
So I'm just going to keep pounding, and pounding, and pounding, and pounding, and I'm not going anywhere. The truth isn't going anywhere.
It's not like you can all of a sudden publish great writing either, because none of these people can do it. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. It's all from the same garbage pile, and the way the system works now, there are only writers who can produce garbage. It trains people to make crap. And these people are so spineless, so weak, so cowardly, so without individuality, so sheltered, so broken, that it's not like anyone amongst them--and by the time they'd needed to have done it, too, which is early in life--would be able to say, "Nope, I'm going my own way, I have ability, I will master it; and my vision, my purpose, in fealty to that ability, is what charts my road."
That's a laugh. There's me. I'm going to be it.
Again: How many of these prose offs have we done? I've been catholic in terms of spreading it out with many places. But it's always the same level of shit that goes first, isn't it?
I can do this with any of the writers in your sinecure. There isn't anyone else out there writing anything great. It's all the result of the same system, the same channels, the same dilettantism.
And there sure as hell isn't anyone else who can do what I'm about to put in here to complete this prose off.
Someone wrote me the other day and said, "I love that moment in the prose off right before you lower the hammer with the sample from your work. It's the ultimate proof."
So, in that spirit of that sentiment:
Mason had never considered it possible to hate one’s self as an adult for a simple chore one had been commanded to do at the age of ten-years-old. He cut the grass without greater chagrin for loss of life than when he lit the cocoons on fire. Grass was meant to grow. And there were all of the bugs he must have trampled, no compunction, no guilt, because that would have been silly.
But it was cool to see and hear the flame whoosh and emerge. He’d imagine that he was a cave explorer, and these were quiescent, ancient alien lifeforms that were on the cusp of their return and subsequent overtaking of the human race in the world outside. Saving had to be done, and Mason was the man of the match.
“I think I got them all,” he’d tell his mother, coming back inside the house, with spider webs and cocoon strings in his hair like so much sticky gossamer or infested, argent-inflected wisps of cotton candy, the contrasting tones of whitened bricks.
It’s amazing he thought, these forty-odd years later, that which causes us to weep. He was ashamed and sorry—so sorry—that he ever kept anything out of the sky that deserved its best chance to be there.
The bigger miracle was that here was a way back and a way forward. Skyward. A beginning. A true chance. An opening into a better place. The entrance to untrammeled spots where all was still as it could be. Call it the future. A wiping of the slate. The words didn’t matter. The past didn’t matter. Mason knew his wife was thinking exactly what he was thinking.
And that was enough, because the miracle would double as everything in time. The lit rag could be extinguished in a muddy puddle, and the resulting steam would rise and dissolve into a beautiful invisibility of no harm done and the peace facilitated by someone who knows enough or cares enough—or both—to understand its value.
The rising vapors. This was all—and everything—Mason wanted to be for his child. The sovereign transparency of the tenderest care that puts another first, and always, so that they may be guided to take to the sky on their own and cast but a shadow on the ground beneath. A shadow that represents everything that has been overcome and risen above.
There was a word for the maximum fulfillment of the task and challenge. A word that did matter. One word. Precious in all that it could stand to mean while the darkened patches shrunk below.
Mason pictured each half of that word, evenly divisible, as a wing as he remembered again, and again, and again—the again without end—what had been said in their first official conversation.
“Look!”
“Wow. That’s amazing.”
The smile on her face. The smile in his voice.
Life.
Except there was a second word at that, an airborne craft unto itself, the ultimate searcher and seeker of the skies.
Love.
And away she flew.
Just a little something from a 12,300 word work in a book called Big Asks: Six Novelettes About Acceptance.
In further miniature:
You got to move faster, bro. Pussy got an expiration date.
versus
The lit rag could be extinguished in a muddy puddle, and the resulting steam would rise and dissolve into a beautiful invisibility of no harm done and the peace facilitated by someone who knows enough or cares enough—or both—to understand its value.
Yeah...I'm gonna say that's not very close.
Anyone think it's very close? Hey, Guggenheim people: You think that's close? What about you over there MacArthur people?
So where's my stuff? Wait, what? We're not doing merit at all? No?! You don't say!!!! And let's see...I never did anything to anyone. I wasn't going around Lorin Stein-ing people. I was just smarter and wrote better. And people like this, wanted me to pay for being what they weren't. There I was, knuckling the forehead, taking abuse and discrimination for years and years, sometimes decades.
All I do is work harder, know more, and write better. Those are my crimes. That's why these people locked the arms. That's why entries like this eventually became necessary, unless I wanted to be complicit in the discrimination being perpetrated against me.
I just want to write and have a level playing field and get to where I'm going.
But I'm getting there either way.
And remember: This man, Junot Diaz, can't do anything else. He's not the world's leading expert on...and...and...and...and...and...
There's nothing else in his quiver. And it's hard for him to even do what he does.
¡Es verdad!
