Saturday 10/19/24
Yankees great Joe DiMaggio used to play every game the best that he could. Even though there were many games that didn't matter, or whose outcomes were settled, he wouldn't take a play off. He hustled, he did his best, he ran hard after every ball he could get to. Someone asked him why he played this way in some lopsided 12-3 affair with the pennant already clinched, and DiMaggio said because there might be someone in the stands seeing him for the first--and perhaps the only--time. In other words, he wanted to give a representative performance.
It's a bit different, but I'm aware of something along similar lines when it comes to the prose offs and Everything wrong with publishing entries in this journal. There are new readers here all the time. The plan is for there to always be more, no matter the volume of readers there may be. That includes readers when these pages are in book form, because this is not some "blog." It's a conscious literary undertaking, an important record, a means of exposure, an agent of change.
There are returning readers who are acclimated to certain realities of the publishing-related posts. They're used to seeing things that are almost impossible to believe. Look at how awful all of this writing is. And yet it gets the Guggenheim, the Pulitzer, the placement in The New Yorker. People don't actually read that work in their lives, or if they do, they're just glancing at it, at best. They're not looking it over seriously. They just assume that if something is winning those awards and appearing in those places, it can only be so bad. Because that's how we think. If someone is in the NBA, it's not like they're incapable of making a lay-up if you left them alone on a basketball court all day and said, "Okay, just try and get it to go through the net once. You take your time."
But the truth is--and these readers of this journal have seen this, and know this--that in this analogy, that player would be launching bricks from three feet below the basketball for hours on end. That's how bad these people are at writing. What's more, that's what a corrupt, evil, incestuous system they have that allows for them to put forward this work, saying whatever grand claims they wish, about how amazing it is.
They pick someone they want to make things happen for. All that person needs to have is a story or a book. To meet the minimum requirement. Why? They need something to lie about. The book or story can be random words on a page. Just so long as that chosen person has it. Then, their people of the system--who are entrenched--lie about the book and the story. There's no other way this works, because none of these people--and we've seen it here again and again--can write at all.
What's none? None. Zero. They're all the same. They all do it the same way. They come from the same places. They're the same person, in effect. There's no imagination. It's always either gobbledegook or it's them. Their lives, "fictionalized." That means, they change the names. That's it. There's no imagination, no effort, no talent, and these people couldn't care less about the people they should care a lot about: readers. They despise readers. They think readers are beneath them. Because--ironically--those writers are so insecure and that's what insecure people do. And they should be insecure. No one in the world writes worse than the people you see on the losing side of these prose offs. Reading a random text chain between a construction worker--someone these people would look down on--and his wife would make for a better reading experience.
I understand how hard it is, if you're not aware of this world--the publishing world--to believe, to accept, that anything could be so twisted, so backwards, so insane. So stupid. So childish. I am very sensitive to that. This isn't like other things. There's nothing to prepare a person for what this is. There's nothing as fucked up as the publishing system. And as the people of it. For all of the mental illness in our world right now, there's no place in society where a greater percentage of the people in that area, that field, that subculture are broken and mentally ill than in publishing. Warped. Hateful. Petty. And so bad at what they do, with no repercussions, nothing to answer to, no prying eyes, because the only people who look at these people--if at all--are the people just like them in the system.
I realize what occurs when you say to someone, "Bear with me know, there's this place called Granta, it's a British literary journal, people in the writing and publishing world view it as one of the best venues there is, that publishes the best fiction, and you're supposed to believe that what I'm about to share with you is that--the best writing in the world. Brilliant writing."
Then you show them "Motorollah." Or you could do the same with The New Yorker and J. Robert Lennon's story in there, and add that J. Robert Lennon is also the editor of tiny literary journal Epoch at Cornell and who wanted me to pay him $3--get out my credit and pay him--so he could form reject work, because it was by this person he understood to be an infinitely better writer than he is. Instead of, "Wow, this genius is letting me have this masterpiece of a story for my tiny literary magazine, for next to financial compensation, what a generous, generous soul," it was, "He's better than me, I know it, he knows it, but I'm in this position of power, or so I think, and I'm going to use it against him by essentially trying to take a shit on this guy and doing this insanely absurd thing, which I can get away with, because it's not like anyone is ever going to know."
But there's this journal, and people do know. And what happens--and will happen more and more--is that this is what you ultimately become known for, insofar as you're known for anything. Because this becomes the only interesting thing about you--how bad your own writing was, how corrupt you are, what a horrible person you are, what a bigot you are, your anger issues, what you tried to do to someone you knew was on a totally different level than you or anyone you know or publish or tout--because what else could there be? Your writing? It's awful.
It's not that just no one in the world actually likes it. That could be because they don't see it. It's that no one in the world could possibly like it. Not honestly. Entrenched cronies and system-agents will sing their songs of false praise, but nothing rings more hollow, and they haven't even looked at that thing they're saying is so good in the blandest of terms. They're plants. This is what plants do. They wait until the end of the given act and they stand up and applaud because that's their job. Then they just go to the next theater and do the same thing.
That's why I say things like, "This is the point where I tell you that you're supposed to believe this is the best writing in the world" or "Here's where I point that you're meant to believe that this is better than anything I've ever written." Because there are new people. And this is just so beyond the pale of how anything else works, even in a bad world of rampant corruption. This is the worst. These people are the worst. Their system is the worst. Their product is the worst. Their morals are the worst. Nowhere is there less of a meritocracy.
So, with all of that in mind, on we go to the latest prose off.
I had mentioned something would be coming pertaining to a former editor of The Paris Review. This is not that--because this a prose off concerning a new story in The Paris Review. Like The New Yorker, but on a smaller scale, The Paris Review represents the tote-bagging of American fiction. People don't subscribe to either place to read great writing. They subscribe to get the tote bag, so they can walk around and people will say, "They must be smart, they subscribe to blah." It's not about reading; it's about a form of intellectual prestige-branding. People pay for the brand. And how they can self-brand in this pathetic way. "I am very smart! Don't you see my tote bag?"
Lately I've been making the point that usually when you read one of these stories, it's the author. These people have no imaginations. They can't invent. They use their own, boring, meaningless, sheltered, entitled lives for their "fiction." They change some names. There's no value for anybody. Any potential reader. Then other people just like these people think, "I also have an MFA and live in Brooklyn, and this story is about someone with an MFA in Brooklyn," and that's what they're looking for. They just want to see that. They're not reading it any more than we are. They just want to know that whoever wrote that story is just like they are.
As I said, it's pathetic. Soulless. They then lock arms against anyone different. But different and better? Infinitely better? Ultimate enemy. Maximum envy and hate. That's my world. That's the war I'm in. And the war I'm going to win.
I'm going to set up this prose off by saying, as clearly as possible, that the excerpt from this first story is fiction. Or, I should say, it's labeled as fiction. This isn't nonfiction. I'm spelling this out. No offense to you, the reader. Even now, I have to spell this out to myself, because just how fucked up all of this is has never worn off on me. Almost thirty years into this, and it's still hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea that any of this...could actually...be. That anything could be this way. I often feel like no one else knows it at all. That's because the world doesn't care about any of this. Why would anyone in the world care about it? Look at this shit.
That leaves the people of the system in all of their brokenness, stupidity, corruption, pettiness, evil, and we know what they're up to. They don't read these things all that much more than all of the people who have never heard of these things. Think of it like the coin of the realm. It's how these people move each other along. Do you have shit that no one could want? Are you from these schools? Are you this gender? This color? Are you socially inept? Do you look it? Did you go to this writing program? Do you live in Brooklyn? Are you so lackluster that you could never, ever make me doubt my own nonexistent abilities? Do you know nothing like I know nothing? Is your publishing track record similar to mine? Do we know the same people? Do we both have douchebag agents who have lunch together?
And so on.
So here we go. This is from Renee Gladman's "My Lesbian Novel." This is billed as fiction. Not a novel--despite the title--but a short story. I don't mean a fiction writer talking about writing fiction--I mean this is their actual fiction. Not only that, you're supposed to believe this is the best writing and the best fiction in the world. Because it's The Paris Review.
Now, do you think you need to look up this author, to read about her, to know various things about her? Or is this her right here? Of course it is. Again: None of these people can invent anything. They have no imaginations. Never mind invent anything for people to care about, see themselves in, feel passionate about, be moved by, grow because of, see the world differently because of, see themselves differently because of. Want to share that story. Want to come back to it again and again.
But maybe I'm being unfair. We haven't seen the work yet. Right then:
As pertains to this novel, something kind of extraordinary happened. I think the first time we met to discuss my lesbian novel was the spring of 2018, and I’d just finished reading Naomi Alderman’s Disobedience and Fiona Shaw’s Tell It to the Bees. I can’t remember how I’d gotten there, but I’d been on a foray through lesbian fiction—I’d also read Doris Grumbach’s Chamber Music and probably a Sarah Waters book.
I realized that people who write literature (me included) are not comfortable with leaving people in a well-nourished and happy place. It’s not complex enough. It seems to suggest that all your questions have been answered. The women in Tell It to the Bees get run out of town. Rachel Weisz’s character in the book version of Disobedience is a player; she just walks away from the other Rachel. Chamber Music is a beautifully written book dominated by a wife and a nurse taking care of a brilliant though ill man, who don’t get together until after the husband dies, and then one of them dies! So, I was like, I’m going to write my own fucking lesbian romance, and when you finish reading it these women are going to be together and happy and sexy!
The funny part is, I had no idea there was a lesbian romance genre of Happily Ever Afters, HEAs—like, hundreds of books, so many that I didn’t even need to go back to Rita Mae Brown or to the nineties, when many of them emerged, because they were being written now and profusely so. However, I didn’t discover this until the fall of 2018, and for some reason, once I did, I could no longer write this novel.
To be clear, again: That's what they're calling fiction. A short story.
Where does it end with you ridiculous, talentless, bigots of this system? I'd ask how low can you go, but I know that there's no absolute bottom for you. There's nothing so stupid, so bad, that you won't say or pretend is great. And you can only get away with it because no one cares. Which is how you've made it. You've driven readers away, potential readers, turned readers into non-readers. But I care. Because it affects me, and, more importantly, it affects the world because the world needs what I have for it, and this system puts itself between me and the world. Which is all any of these people in this system will be known for later. What else is there? The shit you just read?
Come on.
And you know what? That's all Renee Gladman does. Each of these people do one simple, stupid thing badly. There's no range. If they write terrible fiction like this and they happen to write nonfiction, it's not about football or music or nature, it's about this. They'll review shit like this at The New York Times Book Review where one will find the likes of a Sadie Stein--and she's not even the worst one there--by people like them.
Why be alive if this is all you do and what you're about? Why? What's the point? So you can tell someone you were in The Paris Review with nothing anyone could want?
Can you even imagine writing what I just showed you? Can you imagine thinking, "I wrote a great story today"? Can you imagine thinking, "This is a special work of fiction I've just done, people really need to see this"?
How gone in your brain would you have to be to think these things? How enabled and serviced would you have to be--so that your brain and your soul has been wiped into nonexistence--by other people, the people you're constantly around, to fall in line with lies? To become someone who says it's light out when it's dark and vice versa? You'd also have to be around no one but people like these people, because if you stepped out into the world, away from this subculture, no one would indulge you, enable you.
And you're writing fiction, this thing--potentially the most powerful of all things--that, in theory, connects with people at the deepest level of their humanity?
And this is who you are and what you do and what you've gotten yourself to believe?
But okay. Best fiction in the world. Best writing in the world.
You think that's amazing, do you, Paris Review editor Emily Stokes? Really? Why don't you tell us why it's so amazing? This is so good because...what?
But Emily Stokes doesn't think what you just read is any better than you think it is or I think it is. That's not why it's in The Paris Review. These people don't do or bestow or trumpet anything because they think the writing is great. All of the writing sucks, and this is wholly about other things. And you know what? It all sucks more or less equally. So what then determines who gets what? You know. We just talked about some of those things. They're the reasons for what happens, what is awarded, what is in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, what book is pushed forward, what wins the Pulitzer, who is given a Guggenheim. They all write the same. Then it's just picking who they want to have at the popular kids'--the popular kids being incestuous ghouls--lunch table here in this dark valley of these broken, talentless...whatever you want to call them. I don't even like calling them people.
Quick question: Why do you think there's no blowback? Why do you think there's not a peep said against what I'm saying and showing?
Because there's nothing that can be said. Nothing to refute any of it, anyway. Someone could say, "He's entirely correct, and this is bad, we should fix it." Do you think they're going to say that? So that's out. What remains is silence. The hope that not too many people see this. That they get away with it. That they're not held accountable. All of this is true. And these people know it's all true.
That's why.
Doesn't this get you down? Doesn't this enrage you? Why should these people be allowed to get away with this? It's not possible, when presented with the evidence, not to know the truth and not to know what they're up to.
Because there isn't anyone alive or who ever will be who, when asked for their honest opinion about that story, as if their life depended on it, would say it doesn't suck. You want to read a book of that? You want to come home from work and read that?
How many of these have we done? It's a lot, right? So you know I'm not cherry-picking. I'm not looking for the nastiest stain at the bottom of the barrel. These aren't the exceptions. There are too many of them. This is how all of the fiction in all of these venues, all of the award-winning fiction, all of the people the system builds up, is and are.
You know what I said to myself this morning? "You want to do a prose off to start the new week? What venue should it be? How about The Paris Review? Okay." Then I went and picked the very first story I saw. I don't scour. All I have to do is pick any story, book, author.
This is all there is. (And what do you know--I look to the right of this story on its page at The Paris Review and I see a piece by Laura van den Berg--who, if anything, is even worse, and is simply more connected yet, someone who was handed a Guggenheim--because we know how corrupt those people are, with everything stuffed in the bag for the right people, in what's tantamount to this form of intellectual Aryanism--on the exact same day as her husband, Paul Yoon, who is also mega-connected and as boring a writer as can be. Actually, those two could have an intense in-home battle for who was the most boring writer under one roof. Couldn't be more evenly matched. Let's see what her piece is about...oh...her and her husband looking at art with their dog and whether their dog likes it. Again: Where does it end with you ridiculous people?)
But then there's this, with which we'll finish off this latest prose off. It's from my story, "Words of Rain," which is about a mother who lost her child because of something she did--perhaps; we can't really know the actual level of blame, as we're getting her side--who thinks, or tries to think, that her child speaks to her via the rain at night, as it was during a night when it was raining that she lost her.
I am not a mother. I don't have a child. I haven't lost a child. I am story.
And story is everything.
A young doctor was smoking under the awning of the main entrance when I got outside. Leaving alone. And he was alone. I stood five feet away from him, close but not too close, as if we were simply two people pondering the rain because it was this thing that happened to be occurring in front of them with whatever it meant to their lives at the moment and in those that might soon be connected to it.
Him, so far as I knew, wondering if it’d still be raining at the end of his shift and whether he’d have to change his plans for the day. Me, for all he knew, with no greater a dilemma than determining if it’d be better to step to the street and try and find a cab or brave the walk home at that hour and in this weather.
The rain is picking up now as I lie awake in bed. No one says, It’s started putting down more water. The rain picks up. Like a girl gathering flowers at her feet. Lifting a toy. Holding it out.
Is this what the rain does in these moments because I’m thinking the same way I’ve thought for so long and it’s not how I’m supposed to think as per her wishes?
The voice sounds like “yes and yes” against the window, but that could just be because of me and not a voice at all.
Immediately I feel like I’ve denied her, denied her words, when I’ve already denied her everything else. Instead I address her out loud like she’s been addressing me and so she knows I know it’s her just like I know it is every time it rains like this.
She's looking back on this night when she went to the hospital and it was raining and raining harder when she--they--got there, and how it was still raining when she left alone. There's this part in the story when she talks about how you think you're in this pocket of grief, sealed away, but the pocket is turned inside out. All of life is in the open, which doesn't mean it all gets seen. Our entire lives can be this thing we carry around with us, which become us, and people can see us as clearly as they see anything, but they don't see. This doctor is the last person she sees on her way out. They're together in this moment. Of the pocket on the outside, the seeing without seeing. They're linked but also not linked. Not let's just look at the second paragraph of the excerpt, okay? Writers like Matt Bell who can't write say all of this bullshit about what they call "craft." Don't listen to them, because they don't have a clue. It's the only nonfiction they can write, because what do they know about anything? So it has to all come back to the same shit.
Note how parallelism establishes a certain synchronicity: "...so far as I knew" and "for all he knew." But there's also a break, the idea of askance lives. For the "him" part, we get the word "whether." We're not really thinking about the sound of that word. But this is what I mean when I say you're writing on all of these different levels, and you have to attend to the reader's subconscious and not just their conscious mind. Tend to the former, and you get payoff with the latter, and this kind of emotional feeling of someone getting something in a way that they can feel along their spine. We get to her part, and she closes with the word "weather"--same exact sound, totally different meaning for her. It's that idea of appearance v. reality. And do you hear--in your head, that is, as you read--how "whether" is strongly accented, but "weather" is not--it's soft. Like something's not there; has left, but left something behind. An imprint.
Anyone knows these things are on completely different levels. Things are happening and playing out on different levels. There's no comparison. But because that's true, and because of all of the other things I am and these people are not, and all of the boxes--the gross boxes of the bigot--they check that I don't, they're going to put forward that bad work and loathe and try to suppress the work and the person who is on that different level.
That's how this works. And that's a very bad and evil thing. And a harmful thing for this world. That's why I'm as thorough as I am in these entries. And for those who have come here for the first time on a Saturday morning like this.
People always have the option to knock it off. To change the narrative. To be better, to be just. Nothing in these pages is ever going to come down. But the stories can be altered. Arcs can change. And that can be reflected in these pages. But if you're dug in, I'm just going to keep lighting you up. More people are going to know you for what you are--or certainly as you've been. You took it here. Not I. I simply refused to keep taking it. I'm not going to stop until things are right.
And if you're out there and you want to write and you have work that you think actually matters to lives and that's why you're doing it, not because of some ego bullshit, or just so you can call yourself something, then you need this war to be won by this person. Because if you're not one of them, you got no chance. And if you are one of them it doesn't matter anyway, no matter what lies they say on your behalf. So think about what you can do for the cause and do it. It may look like I'm in something alone, but there are stakes here for many, many, many people. Writers and readers. Humans.
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