Monday 11/11/24
In the past, we've talked about Wendy "Don't Call Me a Termagant Because I'm Actually a Mega-Termagant" Lesser, editor in chief of The Threepenny Review, in connection with the idea of replacement-level writers (and replacement-level editors).
This woman is such a nasty, hateful piece of work, that even Scott Stossel of The Atlantic, who has had no occasion to cross paths with her (he doesn't do "literary" or critical writing, which is what The Threepenny Review publishes) in his perpetual handout of a career, once made a remark to me about what a toxic monstrosity she is.
You also can't be more insecure and more pretentious than this woman, and as we know, that's a bad, bad combination. Makes for a bad human, makes for bad writing, makes for the publication of bad work, makes for a bad magazine.
But in publishing...it makes for praise from the people within that gated community that none of them actually means. This isn't about meaning things. Or meaning anything.
Because that's how publishing works (which is also to say how it doesn't work in terms of producing and offering works of value for readers and to give people reason to be readers). Or literary publishing, as this case may be.
For years, I dealt with this woman. Or tried to. Which means I took it. Took what she was doing, took the discrimination. Receiving her condescending, haughty emails after she'd looked at something of mine for ten seconds while she hooked up people like her, with work as bad as her own work.
She likes to think she's cultured, but she's one of those people who equates being cultured with boring you out of your mind, and assigning the blame on that score to you for being a member of the lower classes.
In other words, she's a pompous fool who would deserve pity, if, again, she wasn't such a brutish piece of work.
She hated me. For being non-nasty. Being so much better at writing than she was. Knowing everything about everything. Being the actual expert on so many subjects. (Because those boring pieces of hers are nonfiction works on classical music, art, and literature.) Being in the places I'm in. Then there were matters of my professionalism, friendliness, that I always had something new, and kept trying, until I finally said something about what she was doing, and she went berserk. Like a lunatic.
And it wasn't just fiction over those years. It was nonfiction, too. Do you know how much writing I've done on classical music, for example? I started my career writing for Fanfare and Gramophone. In the years since, classical pieces have appeared all over the place.
What do you think would happen when I'd send a classical music piece to Lesser that had my name at the top of it?
Not exactly an insoluble mystery as to the inevitable result--and why--is it? You can figure that out faster than it takes to melt an ice cube in a furnace.
It was a fait accompli. A form of classism Calvinism.
What I was really doing, though, in the bigger picture sense, was compiling evidence for something like this entry. There was never any doubt what was happening, but I'm a thorough guy. I removed any vestige of doubt for the most dedicated Wendy Lesser backer of all, as if there was such a thing.
I'm as covered as you can be.
And so here we are, with me saying all that I'm saying, nothing anyone can do about it because it's all true, and a prose off.
Who doesn't love a prose off? I love a prose off. I would though, wouldn't I?
It's like if Mike Tyson had a bout scheduled against a drunken moth on the floor. Mike Tyson would think, "I love a pugilistic event," whereas the moth would be like, "I don't!"
You know why none of these other writers could do a prose off of their own? Theoretically, I mean. It's because it would be the same v. the same. It's all the same. A team competing against the mirror image of itself. There is one writer who separates. Hello. There's one writer who is different. Subsequently, there's one writer who could do this kind of thing. So let's get to it, shall we?
This is the part where I tell you that Wendy Lesser expects you to believe--though of course she doesn't actually believe it herself--that what you're about to read is better than anything I've ever written in my life or could.
I bet you're thinking it's going to be amazing. No--amazing times amazing times amazing.
Right?
Of course you're not. We all know how this goes and how much what you're about to read will suck. But I'll do that caveat thing where I say, "Maybe I'm wrong, let's see, this could be the best writing and it will blow our minds," etc., etc., etc.
This is from Kenneth Calhoun's "All Laws in Limbo."
There is a policy. Maybe agreement is a better word. An understanding. One is hesitant to introduce words like policy when there is an opportunity to live outside the cage of bureaucracies. So let’s go with understanding. The understanding is that a person in need of a pill doesn’t have to disclose what the pill did or why they needed it. They must only describe the pill. Give its physical description with as much detail as they can recall. I will then go about the task of making it.
I guess that makes me the island pharmacist of sorts, but really I’m just a sculptor—a pill-maker in the most superficial sense. A pharmacist would be more concerned with the substance of the pill, naturally, whereas I only want it to look and feel right. Look-and-feel goes a long way. And I’m surprised how I’ve taken to it! I can get very intensely focused and single-minded about crafting something with my hands, turns out, obsessed with aesthetic detail—size, texture, smoothness, color. It’s my contention that, if I get it right, the pill will work as it should. As it is expected to work.
As it has.
After Terese’s hands stopped shaking, Graham, so eager to appear a step ahead, shrugged and said: “Placebo.”
He said it again when Suchita claimed to feel much better. Whatever had been ailing her had apparently been addressed by the small white pill I had custom crafted, based on her recollections, from taro dust and coconut milk.
“Pla-ce-bo!” Graham said, this time more shrilly, more shruggy.
I rushed to silence him. Not just because by identifying the trick, by naming it, you spoil the trick, but also because I don’t think it’s a trick—or, at least, not that trick. Mind over matter.
The conversation makes me yawn. It places everything within, when I like the idea that it’s not within, that nothing is within. It’s beyond. A force outside. So I yawn in his face. My yawn against his shrug in our gestural Rochambeau. Graham would never understand. “It’s about a certain aesthetic alignment earning cosmic endorsement!”
Ugh...Can what these people write ever not be dreck?
My yawn against his shrug in our gestural Rochambeau. Graham would never understand. “It’s about a certain aesthetic alignment earning cosmic endorsement!”
Why does it need to be so bad? So ridiculous? Meant for derision?
How unsurprised are you by Graham's bio beneath that story:
Kenneth Calhoun’s stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, The Paris Review, the O. Henry Prize anthology, and elsewhere. His novel, Black Moon, was longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Debut Novel Prize.
It's always the same here, isn't it?
I should tell you this, because you wouldn't know otherwise, but that story was supposed to be funny, the same with that Zoetrope despot thing from the other day.
When these people use exclamation points, that's their way of signaling that what they've written was this attempt at wit--trenchant wit.
How about a prose off within a bad writer's own bad writing? A worse off.
What's worse: "...our gestural Rochambeau" or "It's about a certain aesthetic alignment earning cosmic endorsement"--as (hypothetical) line of dialogue?
Ah, Wendy "DCMaTBIAaMT" Lesser...what a joke you are.
See how I didn't put an exclamation point there? Because it was actually funny. Whoa. Crazy concept.
How many people would get the Rochambeau thing?
It's not meant to be gotten.
Remember what we've been saying about points of contact? These people give a reader none. Not a single point of contact. This is about class. Classism.
These people think they're better than you. Not because they are. They're not better than anything. People can be better than other people. Of course. But people like this writer and people like Wendy Lesser want to make you feel inferior because they went to school longer than you did and they know a word like that, but you know what? They don't even. They're just trying to find a word like that so they can drop it in and put you in your place beneath them.
This isn't for readers. It's not for reading. It's for being a member of their system.
And what have we said?
The publishing system exists so that the people of the system can be the people of the system.
For what it's worth, Rochambeau is a French word for the game of rock, paper, scissors, and the name of a Colonial era general, so he means the former usage.
These people equate being smart with others not getting what they've written and leaving people out. That's their make-up. That's how they're wired: To leave people out of their privileged group.
This is just terrible writing. It goes on for 5800 words.
Then you get this fossil-fraud in Wendy Lesser slapping it out there because it came from the right kind of person that these people deem worthy of living in their gated community.
What you have is classism. Entitlement. And idiocy. A very dumb person would be exceedingly challenged to be dumber than these execrable, lifelong dilettantes.
Think of how insecure you have to be in order to be that way. Think of how plain dumb. Think of what a bad writer you have to be in order to be that way. You couldn't have less of a clue about what writing really is and what it's for--and certainly what great writing really is--than if that's how you think.
Speaking of great writing...let's complete this prose off, yes? This is from a little recent something of mine:
He was unsure what to do now. Panic spread inside of him like something that had escaped from cold storage and overrun everywhere else. No joke would help despite that being what jokes are supposed do do. She favored sarcasm in her own humor, being the age she was, and as clever as she was, and it occurred to him that a self-deprecating remark with a sardonic tinge as to his own failings might be useful, but it wouldn’t be enough, so instead he sat as still as possible in hopes of making his ineffectuality less thunderous until he found the right words, or they found him.
He felt like speaking out against a race of beings that included both himself and this boy he’d known for so long who had hurt his child. Boys were the worst, that was true. Believe me, I get it, he’d say, warming himself up to the task.
All of the pain boys cause. The pain that they ultimately bring on themselves in the hurting of others, which they somehow can’t see, despite the connection being no less in evidence than some bridge across which an entire battalion had marched seconds before. This boy probably knew, though. Stupid boys.
But as for tonight, it wasn’t his fault, he told himself, it really wasn’t. What was he supposed to do? What was he supposed to say? What wasn’t he supposed to do? Whose trust wasn’t he supposed to keep?
Then again, boys had an excuse for everything. The transgression—active, passive, planned, happened upon, allowed, it didn’t matter—had yet to be invented to stop a boy from having an excuse. Nor was there a single conceivable charge, however valid, for which a boy, some boy, wouldn’t first, and perhaps always, respond, “But…”
What can you say? What can you ever say? Busted is busted. Guilty is guilty. Obvious is obvious. The truth is the truth. And what the truth is is very clear here.
Would you like a bit more? A sentence from each. From the Calhoun story:
“What was it like?” I asked as I held the seeds and petals of various plants against his fleshy nipple fringe.
From the Fleming story:
Problems call for solutions, just as love seeks to undo pain, whether it can or not, and often all the more when it can’t.
What you want to do when you write--among other things, like compel and entertain and help a person to feel and become more alive--is pull the veil back on what is ultimately the meaning of everything. Of our lives and our selves and this life. And more than this life.
You're giving someone the best view possible, with that veil pulled back, so they can see for themselves.
Do you think any of the people of this system ever do that? Do you think any of them ever could?
And if all of this has upset you--the incestuous evil, the discrimination, the stupidity of these people, their lies, their classism, the rancidness of their system--then take a calming look into the reassuring eyes of Wendy Lesser, with their pure placidity indicative, no doubt, of considerable stability.
