Thursday 10/17/24
You ready to see some more of the best writing in the world? Because that's what the fiction in Granta is supposed to be, right? Sigrid Rausing thinks what you're about to see is the very best writing in the world. So this should be exciting. Who wouldn't want to see something that's the best in the world? We're all going to be floored, right? Captivated! Blown away. I can't wait. Let's get to it.
This is the beginning of Alexandra Tanner's "Bitter North" from the new issue of Granta. She's also had work in The Baffler, thanks to the estimable J.W. McCormack, because you know exactly how all of this works. She lives in Brooklyn! Bet you didn't see that coming, even if there would have been a greater chance that she lived on Pluto.
Hal had a bad shoulder. Danna had no patience for it. She felt Hal was selective about what the shoulder could take. They could fuck in whatever position, he could carry her bags at the airport, but if Danna wanted to book a duo Pilates session ever, Hal was in agony. He often said it like that: I’m in agony. Hal and Danna were sitting on a restaurant patio, eating cheeses. Hal had the ball game up on his phone. In the morning, they’d leave on a short vacation in celebration of Danna’s birthday; the night before a vacation, they never ate at home.
Hal was moving his right shoulder in circles: forward, backward, forward. When he did his shoulder exercises his face always became vacant, upsettingly so.
‘Who’s winning?’ Danna asked.
‘Not us,’ said Hal. He rolled his shoulder harder. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Fuck.’ He made a disgusting noise of relief and rubbed his right shoulder with his left hand.
What can you say, but wow, that's so good. Definitely the best writing in the world. Beyond captivating.
Returning to reality, note the second grade prose rhythms. You may recognize them from your seven-year-old's school work. You have a writer, who, like every other one of these writers, is working with nothing. They don't have anything for you, the reader. So then it becomes about filling up the page and bullshit. The latter is often a matter of their two or three little techniques that all of these people have to resort to. Look at the first three sentences. Nothing in them, right? Flat. They go nowhere. Lifeless. Stock. What's the solution? Gotta try and shock!!!!!! "They could fuck..." Inserted discordantly, because it's time to be literary and hit the reader hard!
Grow up. You're bad at this. You have no ability. You obviously don't work at it either. One can have no ability and write better than this just by effort and learning and applying one's self.
Were you to read a bit further--which no one actually would--you'd be to enjoy this for yourself:
When he couldn’t penetrate her, which was often, because Danna had a tight pelvic floor, she knew exactly the sorts of phrases to whisper in his ear while he jerked himself off with one hand and cupped his own balls with the other, the order to say them in, which ones to repeat, which one to save for last, which one would make Hal get that sad look in his eyes that meant he was about to bust. She felt liable for him. She had the capacity to hate him. She had the need to manage him, protect him. She and Hal cared for each other. They popped each other’s pimples. They fingered one another’s assholes.
You have to laugh, don't you? How do you not laugh at this? Is anyone supposed to take this seriously? No one can actually expect this to be taken seriously.
But yes, definitely the best writing in the world. I could never do that. I'm sure Sigrid Rausing totally, totally thinks that's the best writing in the world. Just as she thinks I wouldn't be able to ever come close to that level.
You're a bigot, lady.
And Luke Naima, Rausing's deputy Granta bigot: You also think that's the best writing in the world! You deserve respect, man. You're clearly a smart, honorable guy who is all about merit.
Which is as true a statement as the one that says this is the best writing in the world.
Then again, there is that excellent Son House number from his 1941 session with Alan Lomax, "Tight Pelvic Floor Blues."
Is everyone having fun so far?
I just looked up this woman's story in The Baffler. It's the same thing. The same second grade prose rhythms. You want me to put that in here as a prose off bonus or should we save it for later? Hmmm. I don't know. Let's just carry on with the prose off, shall we? This is from the start of something of mine that I hope to finish today. It will be in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, which is all about girls and women.
Sometimes when I’m in bed and it’s raining, I think I hear her voice against the glass.
“Mom,” the rain says, “You know it’s me, right? Please go. You can take care of me later. Live.”
She never used words because she didn’t have words to use yet, but I tell myself, This could be how she’s reaching out, these thoughts aren’t yours, she’s talking to you, don’t dismiss what you might be hearing, what you’ve been made to think, just in case.
It rained when the ambulance arrived and rained harder at the hospital. I was wet and she stayed dry, as if we were already in different worlds.
They kept asking the same question like they were waiting for the fog to lift from off of me but the fog was gone and I kept saying the same words.
I don’t know how long she’d been lying that way.
The answer seemed so important and I wasn’t sure if I estimated and got it wrong, no matter how close I was, whether that would make it harder for them to save her.
All I felt like I knew for certain was that it wasn’t until that night that I’d had a drink since she’d born and that I loved her more than life itself, something I had never loved until I Ioved her.
But how much I loved her didn’t make a difference now, which was more fantastic than anything I could imagine and yet as true as anything could be. And I never would have said how long it’d been since I had a drink unless that would have meant she’d be okay because I deserved for them to hate me like I’d been evil my whole life, and it came down to the same thing.
Would you look at that. Pretty different!
It's almost like we're looking at the best fiction in the world, but it's the wrong fiction!
That's not how it's supposed to be for these people.
My bad, bigots.
How about we do that bonus prose off within a prose off and take a look at the aforementioned Tanner story put forward by walking Brooklyn writer/editor cliche J.W. McCormack in The Baffler? All set? Here we go:
The author put the chair from behind the table on top of the table. “Okay,” he said. “Now—can you stand up on the table?”
I crawled up on the table. My asshole quivered.
“Now,” said the author, whom I now hated more than anyone alive, “could you stand up on the chair on top of the table?” I hesitated. “I’m right here,” he said, and he put his arms out, like he’d catch me if I needed him to. Very slowly I climbed up on the chair and stood up, looking out at three hundred people who didn’t want to pull my sex bracelet off.
No, we get it--assholes. You write about assholes. Understood! Deep. Shocking. Brave. So literary.
Where would you be, reader, what would you do, if I didn't share the likes of that with you, the best writing in the world? You'd be diminished, wouldn't you?
How could the likes of me compete with the likes of that? I can only do this, which is from a different story for a different book--a book of ghost stories--that I'm also working on today.
In kindergarten, I remember a sign on the wall made from cut-out construction paper letters by an enthusiastic teacher—she must have done it, because it wasn’t us—that read, "April showers bring May flowers,” in the gayest pinks, blues, and yellows, colors that all but smiled at you.
For each of the springs of over a half century since, I've brought the line to mind, fresh as it was on the day I first encountered it, nature's own commandment, delivered not atop a mountain but on the wall near the cubbyhole rack where we stored our balled up jackets, never mind how they wouldn’t dry very well if it had indeed rained in the morning and so you went home wet well after the rain had stopped.
Then May came that year and there was more rain and I didn’t see any flowers, for which I was on the lookout, if not the hunt. And you know what I thought? Something's wrong. Something has been gotten wrong. But I didn't know by who or by what. I just trusted in the absolute correctness of the dictum.
I can't remember when I learned that someday I would die. It seems that it should have been around this time, because if it was in first grade instead, I feel like I would have been a very slow child who came by this knowledge later than most, or else a child attuned and open to the complexities of a life eternal, or whatever followed death, and I'm reasonably confident I was not a child on such a plane.
So it must have been kindergarten when I began to understand that a day would arrive when I couldn’t be found in this world, regardless of who, if anyone, was on the lookout or the hunt, and yet I can't be certain, just as there may come a time when I hear rain outside, allowing that it has not penetrated the place in which I am, and I'll want to say it's the hardest, strongest rain I have heard since...and I won't be able to cite this time right now, because I will not remember it.
Ha. Laughing for a different reason. I read that and I laugh, but that's the good kind, the "I can't believe someone can do that" variety.
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