Tuesday 3/19/24
What we're going to do this time is take the excerpts from theoretically different stories, from theoretically different writers, straight from website of The Sun, in order. Why? We're making a point. What you're going to see is writing put forward by editor Sy Safransky that is stylistically identical from story to story, such that if someone told you it all came from the same story, you'd believe them, just as it's hard to believe that these are different people.
What you're also supposed to believe, according to Sy Safransky, that everything here is better than anything I wrote in twenty-five years, because that's how long that went on, with me trying in good faith, though I knew, of course, what was happening. I don't think you believe that. I don't think you think anything is less believable.
I call one's attention to this earlier entry in these pages about Safransky, so you can look at just how mentally ill such a person is. This is the guy you need to make cry. That's great--I can't conceive of someone reading "Friendship Bracelet," for instance, and not crying. But we're not talking about an honest emotional response to a great and moving work of art.
We're talking about a member of this subculture of broken freaks. You're dealing with the unwell and you're asking them, in effect, to put aside their mental illness, their envy, their brokenness, and do their job where they put the best work forward. So before you start, you essentially have no chance.
So here we go.
This is from "Falling Action in Hoboken" by Lucy Tan:
There is something hard in me, a seedlike malignancy. I can’t say how it got there or when, but I can’t remember the last time I felt pure love or sadness or joy. It’s always a mix of things, some confused and muted in-between.
This is from "Basements" by Lauren Hohle:
I was considered “good,” considered a “good influence.” It amazed me — like the cool feeling of Marshall’s tongue on my labia had amazed me — that I could possess all of these qualities; that I could be both warm and cold, virtuous and defiant; and that someone could love me for all of it.
This is from "Deformation Catalog" by Emet North:
I had thought nobody understood dark matter — that it was, fundamentally, an encapsulation of all we didn’t know. But it turned out other people’s lack of understanding took the form of complex theories, mathematical equations, computer programs that turned impenetrable data into different impenetrable data. Other people’s confusion was a castle you could live inside, a whole architecture of the unknown. My confusion was a wall I kept walking into.
This is from "Animal Moments" by Bethany Marcel:
At the hospital two nurses, a doctor, and Dave all stand and watch as I transform into animal. My body expels fluids, feces, and finally a human baby. I grip the bed, howl, grunt, and writhe. Outside the window the trees are sunlit, and the leaves stutter in the breeze. I try to forget that I took a shit in front of Dave.
The same boring, predictable thing, in the same tone, the same voice, the same Creative Writing 101 cadence, again, and again, and again.
Replacement-level writing by replacement-level writers.
Remember the other day when I said these people are so incapable of creating anything legitimate and lived-in that they resort to pee pee/poopy stuff--three-year-old bathroom language--in this effort to be real and edgy? I gave you that example from American Short Fiction. New work. I don't go searching for this stuff. What I'm describing and showing you proof of here is a regular technique of these people now. And there it is above. Pregnancy bit as well. Same thing. Different writers, different venues, same garbage. The labia thing is meant to be edgy, too, but it's just forced and childish. The grammatical construction "I was considered good, considered a good influence" is supposed to be stylistically daring, but it just sucks and reads like a mistake, something that wasn't picked up in copy editing.
All of this blows, and we all know it. Most people don't read. You probably don't read. This is what's out there, so why would you? Maybe you read some because you liked to once as a kid and then you read less and less to the point of hardly reading at all, but it's not like we consciously articulate a reason in our minds. Or at least often we don't. But this is the cause of the effect--it's all shit like this.
Apparently none of these people in the publishing industry can connect these dots that are right on top of each other with the replacement-level stories by replacement-level writers that is also piled on top of each other . But I also don't believe that any of them care about writing and reading, despite the lies they tell themselves, which they're repeating right now to themselves in anger against me--citing how many hours they work, or some such, but work doing what, really?--because what I just said is completely true. They are in this subculture of theirs for other reasons that have nothing to do with quality writing and providing readers, any reader, with work worth reading.
And who is going to object to this when there's no one reading it? So on it goes with this shitty writing and this fucked up system and the subculture of broken freaks with absolutely nothing of value to give the world.
For my side of things, I'm just going to do first sentences of recently completed or about to be completed stories. That's more than enough to finish off the making of this point.
From "Idra":
We cut Christ down from the cross and despite what you’ve heard, he was still a little bit alive.
From "Box Art":
This boy gets dragged to the museum with his parents and his sister and he really thinks of it like being dragged because to him what’s happened is no different than if he was tied to the car with some rope and his dad hit the gas but when he's at the museum he sees these Joseph Cornell boxes standing upright in a wall-mounted display case and he likes them.
From "Horny Date":
Another dream, and soon enough Langston realized he was having his favorite kind again.
From "Last Thought of a Dying 101-Year-Old Man":
Remember what you said that other time on the forest side of the football field that hadn’t been mowed since the year before when I told you my dick wasn’t going to suck itself?
From "Friendship Bracelet":
The finger outside of Doreen’s window sounded like it was clicking against ice instead of glass.
From "Why I Hate My Friends":
If there was a rule that you couldn't hate your friends and still carry on as a person who was able to tell themselves they have friends, I'd have a real problem on my hands in life.
From "The Ghost and the Flame":
The flame motioned and beckoned as the ghost advanced upon it—moved as a flame ordinarily does not, as though it was human and its yellow-infused shadows were limbs made from leftover fire.
Says everything when you put what they do next to what I do.
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