Sunday 11/17/24
Back at it again with fiction from The Baffler as selected by editor J.W. McCormack.
Reading these entries, it can appear uncanny how things just fall into line. I tell you, for instance, one of the little tricks these people use and provide an example, and then shortly thereafter, half a dozen others follow.
That's not really by design. I don't select a theme as per bad writing and then focus on finding examples of that theme.
I think this is an important point to make. Those examples that you see are simply what's out there and what you come across if you're looking at any of this writing.
That's how commonplace these trite tricks are, these attempts to compensate for a lack of ability with these substitute attempts to signify talent without any talent being in evidence, or anything legitimate.
If you go back through recent prose offs--I'm talking over the past several days--you'll see commentary in those entries on how these people use exclamation points as a stand-in for being witty. They're witless, and the exclamation point is supposed to make you think otherwise.
We just saw it with Diane Williams and her fiction in Harper's that Christopher Beha is lying about. We just saw it with Kenneth Calhoun's fiction in The Threepenny Review that the affable peach that is Wendy Lesser is pretending is an amazing work. We just saw it in Patrick Dacey's "O Despot! My Despot!" (we saw it right from the title with that one) put forward by the pathetic Michael Ray in Zoetrope.
Now we're going to see it in this story from the The Baffler called "The Lady in Red: The Exegesis of J.D. Van Cleef, Husband and Realtor," by Adrian Van Young, which starts like this:
Go on, find it on your phone. “The Lady in Red” by Chris De Burgh from his seminal 1986 album Into the Light. Now standing at the kitchen island, hover your finger above the play icon. But don’t press it yet, make yourself really earn it. See, you have to be hungry to really eat well.
Crap. You forgot to connect to the Bluetooth!
You take it with you everywhere, the Bose Soundlink speaker which came so highly rated on Consumer Reports and which you only bought last month after tracking sale options for weeks. Connect to the speaker—for real this time, buddy!—and switch back to the song. Then cherish the moment all over again as a mellow percussion, at last, starts your journey for one measure, now two, and the keyboard kicks in. All in one avalanche of harmonious swell.
Ah yes, at long last—you collapse to your knees.
On the blonde hardwood of the open floor plan between the kitchen and the den, with the light from the window walls pooling around you while the stories above—that’s right, count them, two!—in this lovely colonial, really a steal with its seashell-pink paint job, loom in silence. Bow your head beneath the assured, alpha bass of de Burgh’s composition, only lifting your head once again by degrees in a feminine, graceful, swanlike maneuver. It’s as though you yourself were the Lady in Red, practicing Yoga in this very room, what some call Upward-Facing Dog, and her husband (you, too!) had just happened to enter, stunned by her in Lululemon, watching her stretch without saying a word. In this way, you can be both within and without, participant and observer, the Lady in Red and her steadfast, good husband, watching yourself, watching her—as one does.
You find you have to clear your throat.
You really wish this house was yours. Not just to sell, but yours to keep.
You haven’t seen your daughter in such a long time—almost as long as your Lady in Red, who at one point in time, an eternity now, had conceded to be called your wife. Just as you now concede to imagine her there, descending the stairs in her shimmering gown, summoned into your arms by your shared favorite song. You compliment her looks. Her dress. How her hair, freshly highlighted, catches her eyes. Such a gentleman, yes. Help her off the last stair.
Ask her if she’d like to dance.
I always feel like I should apologize after subjecting you to writing like this. Please know I'm not trying to anger or annoy you by showing you their writing. The awful writing that this system calls the best writing in the world, which no one in the system actually believes to be true, and which no one outside of it could believe. Very few people outside of the system see any of this so-called best writing because they don't read in part because this system gives them nothing worth reading that isn't just the most annoying, off-putting slog to try and read. I'm trying to show what's happening and how things really stand and the real reasons for why they're done within this publishing system so that there can be change.
Something else these writers have in common is how insufferable they are. This story from The Baffler is insufferable right from the title. It's like all of the people of this system write (it feels almost silly to even mention this writer's name, because what they're all doing is equally stupid) with the goal of being as annoying as possible.
And an editor like J.W. McCormack is so stupid and so predictable in his stupidity and how fake he is--he's like a Brooklyn lit culture hipster wind-up toy in human form-- that yes, he is going to cream himself when he sees the word "Exegesis" in a title and then a terrible story from someone like him.
Of course he is.
Speaking of creaming: Here we have another person with no idea what the word "seminal" means. It doesn't work like that, chief.
You'll note that I said that's the start of the story. That portion there is what is supposed to make you care, pull you in, and not drive you away.
Why would the above do any of those things? Who is that for? What is that for? What is the point? Who could find that entertaining? Who could find that artful? What is anyone supposed to get out of that? What is that doing for anybody?
And what were we just saying about second person and how these people try and use that? Right? Here it is in that recent prose off with the horrible non-story picked by the the blatantly discriminatory Carolyn Kuebler of New England Review.
Do you see how they're all doing the same stupid things as these attempts to hide how bad they are at writing? Or using what are essentially these empty symbols meant to signify good writing? "See? Second person. That's a creative writer thing." "See? Exclamation points. That's what someone who has mastered mordant irony might use."
Let's finish off this prose off. This is form a new one of mine called "The Smoked Grasshopper."
A song was once sung in ancient times that told the tale of a wise man who smoked a grasshopper. The grasshopper burned all day long. It was alive for the smoking—this recreational drug taking—but it didn’t mind. Had a stellar attitude, you could say, on account of being tired of its own sound and desiring to move beyond what’d been a limited circle of experience.
The man lit the grasshopper on the end with the legs, causing them to cease working, but they must have been meaty—a lot to burn through—as far as bug legs are concerned, because they lasted all day and that meant the flame didn't reach the grasshopper’s midsection, let alone its head, and this was actually a nice time for the grasshopper who was going to die soon anyway and knew it, that being the season.
Most grasshoppers make their sounds in fields—but also potentially anywhere, because there's scarcely a place where you can’t hear a grasshopper, save out in a body of water, though grasshoppers have made it to the smallest islands—until that final scraping of leg against wing, and another grasshopper who happens to be paying attention will notice that an additional scratch doesn’t follow and he'll think, "Damn, that's it for Harry," and then chirr a lament of how the legs are the last to go, when you really got down to it, though that’s just how other grasshoppers experience death given that’s how they know you aren’t with them anymore.
But it was different with this grasshopper that the wise man smoked. The wise man had some pretty significant thoughts that day, as did the grasshopper, only they didn't talk much after lunch. The sun went down early that time of year. You can't help but turn introspective, whether you want to or not.
Eventually the grasshopper began to fade because he'd become flaky crisp. His guts were drying out. They were less like syrup and turning stringy. The man, meanwhile, had gotten so high that he couldn’t help giggling and he had to take the grasshopper out of his mouth or else he’d choke.
The grasshopper tried to scrape his legs to make them scratch, but that was just a reflex. He knew better. I mean, he was looking right at these roasted, charred horrors that used to be his prized song-makers, which is how grasshoppers regard their legs, and there wasn’t any way he could rub them against his wings now.
The man, calming down, said, "You know what?" Rhetorically. He was sufficiently high he was really just talking to himself. He was sufficiently high he was really just talking to himself but as if his words would nonetheless be known by everyone in the world.
Then he goes, "There are no absolutes in this life. Everything is relative."
And the grasshopper, who in that very moment was dying, and knew it, which is why he opened and shut his eyes super fast to try and produce a scratching sound so at least someone would know that he was gone after the silence followed, shouted, "That statement is itself an absolute!"
There's an exclamation point, but that's what we get with a shout. This is a shout that's more than a shout; also something of an existential howl from an insect. But what are any of us, really? The humor doesn't have to try and underline itself, if you follow me; it just occurs, naturally, and that humor is cut with gravity, darkness, or perhaps it's the other way around. It's both both ways, isn't it?
The images are arresting and memorable, the voice is notable and distinct. It's a composite voice; part this, part that, part past, part now, part future, part third person, part first--tonally--both literary and conversational, a voice of the page, a voice for out in the world, a read-voice, a lived-in voice.
The language is casually virtuosic. The virtuosity isn't flaunted. There's no "Look at me!" It's conversational, fabular, but also front and center--indelibly immediate and immediately indelible. It's relatable on various fronts. For various people. Of various ages. Theme. Metaphor.
Sound produced by the scraping of leg against wing. Is that not a kind of theme for all of us? The key idea of the nature of relativity. Which is this idea that people default to, but I think they do that because it's easier. It's both experientally easier--less is asked of us, there's less for us to do--and intellectually easier. The idea of relatively allows us to punt. To bail. To bag out. It moves right and wrong closer together so that they may be very nearly superimposed, which requires less dedicated observing, thinking, accepting, and absorbing on our parts.
There's more for us to take on sans relativity, when there's right and there's wrong and there is black and white. Because there is. We just act like there isn't sometimes because we ca't see it, and we can't say we don't know, and we don't keep trying to know, and also because knowing could then cause us to do things that make things harder for us. That's what I mean by absorb. Or take on things that are worse for us. Because that's what doing the right thing can certainly mean.
It's a drug story but a clarity story. And not in the "I achieved epiphany through drugs" cliched kind of way. It's not really about drugs at all--that's simply an aspect of the presentation.
The blinking eyes of the grasshopper trying to produce sound when it's own epiphany kicks in. That is so many of us, isn't it? In our lives and it can be at any point when we are thinking about what we've done and what we are and what it amounts to. A breath of finality. Before finality comes.
We can realize we're dying well before we die. The process can be protracted. This grasshopper had these intentions and they seemed both practical and wise. Break the circle of one's familiar experiences. Sounds good.
But at the very last, it's frantically trying to be heard so that others will know--or remember--that it was there.
Aren't you?
You have what these people are doing and then you have what I'm doing and they couldn't be more different things.
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