Tuesday 10/29/24
Want to mix it up? A lot of prose offs are upcoming. I'm working on a story today and I thought it'd be apt to use it on here against something from One Story, which is Bigot Central.
These people are as Brooklyn, discrimination-loving, pro-publishing system it gets in the likes of editor Patrick Ryan--whose best friend is John Freeman--and additional editor Will Allison.
I mention Freeman because there is no one worse in publishing. You can't really say that one of these people is the very worst--I mean, look at all of them--but if I had to pick someone, it could be him.
This guy is so incestuous, metaphorically speaking, that he's someone who'd have kids just to hook up with them.
There are many entries coming about Freeman in these pages. The problem is, it's a lot of work. He's so bad and it goes so far that to document all of that thoroughly takes a lot of time and energy.
He once sent me a letter saying that if I wrote the Bible (which I guess he thinks is the best thing ever written, which tells you a lot about the quality, or lack thereof, of his mind), he wouldn't publish it at his magazine that he named after himself (Freeman's), adding that he has all of his friends to hook up.
He actually put all of that in an email.
You're not dealing with our best and brightest. The morally bankrupt, yes, emptiest, yes as well, ditto biggest bad jokes in human form, and the most odious--these people cause your skin to crawl, don't they?--but best and brightest, no.
One Story, meanwhile, is sufficiently gross that they have a Brooklyn literary debutante ball. I'm not joking. You can look it up. The endless galling classism.
The way it works there is you can only be published by them once. Each issue is a stand-alone story that has to be over 3000 words long. They run a story by someone, and then that's it. There's no going back to the same writer.
If a place can only publish a single story ever, on merit, that should be pretty easy for me, right? If we're doing merit. Quality of the work. But with this set-up? How easy should that have been for me?
But you know exactly how it went, don't you, for years and years and years with these bigots, just as you know exactly why it went that way. Just like you know there is nothing I could have given the likes of David Ryan and Will Allison that they would have allowed to run.
Because of who it was by. Because of what I am. Because of what they are not. Because I am not like them. I'm not part of their incestuous, evil subculture, and, oh, yeah, perhaps most problematically, I don't suck at writing, and I'm as far from that as you can get.
We've actually mentioned One Story in the past when we talked about the story they ran by Lincoln Michel, another product/creature of their Brooklyn incestuous ooze. We'll do a fun entry about him soon in which we take some of his recent pieces and look at how amazingly bad all of them are, while putting in the obvious lies that his cronies have said about him. You're going to laugh. This guy is so bad, I don't even know which ones to use. It's an overabundance of the worst, most laughable work you've ever seen.
A bigot sees someone like myself and thinks, "Not like us, lock him out," and that's how it went with Patrick Ryan and then Will Allison, who came along later and whom I only wrote because I knew what Patrick Ryan was doing and why. Freeman could have had a hand in it too, sociopath that he is, as I have ample proof of him doing that kind of thing. (Freeman, by the way, is married to the agent Nicole Aragi, who represents Junot Diaz. There are no degrees of separation with a monster--and I don't think that's too strong a word--like this. He was also once employed by our favorite billionaire heiress, the woman whose family literally hides the body, that lover of Motorollah, Sigrid Rausing, who made John Freeman the editor of Granta. Do you believe how far this stuff always goes?)
We'll do a three-against-one prose off this time because the excerpts that One Story provides on their website are only comprised of so many words. You know how these excerpts work: They're supposed to grab you, the reader. The potential consumer. The person who would pay money for the whole story. For a subscription. So these excerpts are meant to be stand-out material. Grabbers. Enticing. A proud representative of the great story that you, potential reader and consumer, can partake of if you get your credit card out and make a payment.
Right?
So these should be pretty great then, don't you think? You wouldn't pick the worst part of a story for these excerpts now, would you?
I'm picking the three most recent stories that One Story has ran. I cover everything as thoroughly as possible. I don't want anyone to be able to think I cherrypick and look for the worst writing I can find. It's all the worst. All of this sucks. The way all of these people write, the way all of these people are, results in work that only and ever sucks.
I also don't want anyone to think that they saw a rare bad apple, as it were, an exception to some place's normal high standard of quality.
No such thing exists.
I'm giving you the last three stories from One Story. Am I being clear enough? These are the parts from those stories that are supposed to wow a potential reader and consumer.
We're all agreed, right? That's how this works.
I'm simply showing you the truth. I'm showing you the truth about how bad this work is. What people like Patrick Ryan and Will Allison are all about. What a corrupt, rigged scam this system is. I'm showing you the truth of bigotry.
Let's get to it then, shall we? I'm sure you're going to be totally shocked that the first story we have does the skin color thing. Couldn't see that coming, could you?
I want to emphasize that this is the actual prose from the actual story. Because that might not be clear considering how stupid this is. How non-story like this is.
It's just someone listing skin color and race stuff. And is then rewarded for it.
You know who rewards you for that? Racists. Actual racists. Like Patrick Ryan and Will Allison.
This is from Lin King's "Yellowpeople."
Who
Me, 36-year-old male, Taiwanese descent, Taiwanese and U.S. passports, speaks Mandarin (Taiwanese accent) and English (likewise Taiwanese accent, watered down over the years), Big Tech product manager (based in Sunnyvale, working remotely from Taipei).
My wife, 36-year-old female, Anglo-German-unknown descent, U.S. passport, speaks English (continental American accent) and Spanish (likewise continental American), Big Tech data analyst (working remotely, in our California home, roughly seven thousand miles away from me).
My father, 65-year-old male, Chinese descent, Taiwanese passport, speaks Mandarin and Shanghainese (pidgin), retired computer technician.
My mother, 62-year-old female, Taiwanese descent, Taiwanese passport, speaks Mandarin and Taiwanese (Tainan accent), retired clinic administrator.
My daughter, 5-year-old female, Taiwanese and white-medley descent, U.S. passport, speaks Mandarin (American accent, though quickly evolving over past month) and English (“perfect”), full-time kindergartenener.
What
My daughter Beatrice and I recently traversed the Atlantic to stay at my parents’ apartment, the home in which I grew up—the home that I have not called home since leaving Taiwan for graduate school in the U.S. a dozen years ago. Here, in Taipei, Beatrice can go to a physical kindergarten instead of fidgeting in front of a laptop for four hours a day. (Four hours of online kindergarten a day, my wife and I agreed, were too many for the child and too few for the parents; too few, certainly, for the five-figure tuition.) Our hope was that in-person learning in relatively COVID-free Taiwan would organically undo some of the new “habits” Beatrice has developed in isolation.
(There is also, of course, the matter of the hate crimes.)
If you scroll down once you click on the link above you'll see some words from Patrick Ryan about this brave and brilliant story.
"One Story is honored to bring this story to readers at a time when empathy is being regarded as a political stance," he writes.
That's funny.
And no one things that. At least the straw man in The Wizard of Oz seemed real.
Are you even fooling yourself, Patrick? Clearly someone like you has to be able to fool yourself often, or how could you get up in the morning, go through life, or even look in a mirror, but still...
And you're not fooling anyone who isn't just like you and wants and needs to be fooled anyway.
In each of these examples, I want you to note how bland, lifeless, artless, vanilla, basic, remedial, the language is.
You'll note that on your own--I'm simply calling your attention to it.
Next we have an excerpt from the second most recent story from One Story, that being Kate DiCamillo's "X-Acto."
It was 1973. Pen was eight years old; her brother, Thomas, was eleven. They were in Pennsylvania. They were spending the entire summer with their father and his girlfriend, a woman named Heidi who was an architecture school drop-out, and who made tiny houses out of white, thick cardboard.
“They’re just a hobby,” said Heidi. “A way to unwind, you know?”
Every line, every door, every wall of every house Heidi made was straight, exact, and true. Pen liked looking down at them and imagining herself inside their perfect emptiness—she held her breath because the houses were so fragile that it seemed as if someone could knock the walls down just by breathing on them.
I’ll huff and I’ll puff . . .
Also, Pen held her breath because she felt guilty admiring Heidi’s work. It seemed like a betrayal of her mother. She didn’t know why.
How did Heidi make the houses so perfect?
She used an X-Acto knife, that was part of it.
X-Acto.
To Pen, the knife name sounded as if it belonged to a magician—X-Acto, the Magnificent!
But also, it made her think of the word “exactly,” a word that belonged to her father.
This is enervating, isn't it? Only one more, I promise, and then we'll get to the good stuff. but first, here's the excerpt that is supposed to dazzle you and get your business from Emma Cairns Watson's "The Dissection Question."
They met through a service that connected men his age to young women hers. Nadine had selected this service in particular because it was the only one that did not require you to submit your name or photograph. All you had to do was provide your phone number and your answer to the question, “If you had the opportunity to dissect another person, who would it be, and which part of their insides would you be most interested in looking at?” Based on your response, the service paired you with somebody they considered compatible.
“What did you put for the dissection question?” Nadine asked her man the first time he called her after the service matched them up.
“I’m surprised you would ask me that,” said the man. His voice sounded empty, tired, like he was calling her on the drive home from a long day. It was clear from that voice just how much older he really was. When Nadine signed up for the service, she had to check a little box saying she was eighteen to twenty-one, but they didn’t bother verifying, so Nadine was just thirteen and daring. “I would only feel comfortable with a corporation knowing something so private,” said the man.
Good grief. Thank goodness that's over. So lifeless. All of it is like writing as a form of antimatter.
We could do three against one, ten against one, 100 against one, and we all know that what we see by whomever goes first is going to suck, and what we see last is going to destroy all of it in terms of quality.
It's just a matter of what it's going to be from me on this side of the prose off. Just as by the same token there was never anything I could have given Patrick Ryan or Will Allison that they would have ran, because of the immeasurable gap in quality between it and what they do run and what they themselves can do as writers--which is nothing that's any good--and on account of the name at the top of the page.
Is this big talk? No. We know it isn't. It's just the truth. The truth said by someone who does the likes of this, which is simply what I happen to have been working on this morning.
The world is designed to pass you by, Mason concluded. Maybe that’s what was happening to him. What was scandalous once became merely how it went later on, and then it was normal and not that bad, just different than you’d have thought of as permissible. Comes a stage of life when your mouth is as much for buttoning as it is for speaking, if not more so.
You were also free to stop thinking about something. That was an option. Try to let the world be the world the way the church is supposed to let the state be the state and vice versa, and keep yourself from getting left behind by closing your eyes for some of the ride instead of jumping clear off or having someone throw you aside because they deemed you not worth it or too much of an obstacle in their own journey.
Look at Elvis, Mason tried to reason with himself, though it felt more like bartering. A kid wouldn’t think twice about all of that hip-swiveling these days. Quaint and innocent. They’d laugh if someone played them an old black and white clip of Elvis on TV, but for people of a certain age, that young man from Tupelo may as well have been pleasuring himself in their damn living room and shooting spunk rockets on the carpet, another of those terms that Mason hadn’t previously known, despite never having been some prude—he was known for getting after it in college, a formerly pleasing memory of himself in the years afterwards that he’d since been banished from his brain—which was now an unwanted staple of his internal dialogues.
Mason hadn't existed then, but he had been present at the near-dawn of cable and tried to relate. A man came to his family’s house selling it when Mason was a child. Selling people on it. The man had rung the doorbell at night, which seemed strange. It must have been the winter. Dinner was sacrosanct back then. You’d apologize before you said anything else if you had to call someone around five or six.
Mason’s parents were duly sold on this new enticement. He had resolved to beg his mother to get the Disney Channel, but he didn’t have to. That was part of the deal anyway. Later he’d sit on the couch with his own child and watch The Fox and the Hound. She must have been in first grade at the latest. He stole looks at her, hoping for some telltale sign from his view of the side of her face that she loved the movie as much as he once had. Still did. And wanted to love it through her love of it.
“This isn’t very true to nature,” she opined when the hound let the fox, his former friend, escape with his life at the picture’s end.
“It’s about bonds,” Mason said limply, as if he was a part of the war effort back in the 1940s. “Buy bonds, my fellow Americans, and show mean old Mr. Hitler that he can’t push your Uncle Sam around.”
She looked at him with a sympathetic expression, a calm widening of the eyes, as though to say, “No, I understand, and I’m happy you like this movie, but the truth is different.”
She was always a little adult. A teacher. Even as a girl. The fox scampered off into the woods, with the understanding that next time—if there was a next time, which was likely—matters would go differently and natural order restored.
In the meanwhile, the movie ended. You didn’t have to worry about that next time. A new program began. Same station. A stopping and a continuation. True to the nature of life. Endlessly cycling. The linkage of opposites. Same turf. Cartoon shorts. The sun had gone down. Another evening in winter. When it was barely winter. Had just become the new season so that Christmas wouldn’t have to take place in the autumn. Which wouldn’t have been natural. Donald Duck was headed to a party for his nephews. He probably wouldn’t be a good sport about it. Always making everything about himself. Blowing those raspberries and squawking.
Mason couldn’t have been happier despite what a certain critic and knower of nature had recently opined about the film he’d long looked forward to sharing with her. The girl who was always a little adult had fallen asleep with her head on his leg, thumb in her mouth. Bad habit she hadn’t kicked yet, but for now, for right then, Mason wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Kids didn’t have TVs in the same sense they used to back then. Like his daughter used to, briefly, in their house. That’s how long ago it was, but how long ago could it have really been, given that she was always young? The children in the houses on Mason’s street had screens. Screens weren’t sets but rather substrates for flashing, passing images. Ironically, he’d eventually come to have his screen of screens, and a screen of shame, but Mason had no idea back then, as the fox made off into the woods, stealing a last look over his shoulder, that he was to go on to become what he thought of as a finder of views, probably the first and last there’d ever be.
Any time their daughter came up now—which wasn’t as much as he figured she would or should—his wife said the same thing, and maybe that’s why the girl they were both always thinking about was an infrequent topic of conversation in a theoretically shared life with fewer and fewer shared words.
“She could have come to us,” Olivia said, by which she meant earlier, Mason presumed, because their child did come to them, after a fashion.
Mason wasn’t sure he believed what Olivia believed or if she believed it herself, instead hearing her words as though they came not from a mouth but from behind a barred door sans handle or keyhole, rendering the key in one’s pocket moot, if one even had a key, and Mason knew that he did not.
Just like he knew how hard it is to go to anyone when you feel like you can’t even go to yourself. That’s where it all starts. The continuation. The next program. But also perhaps where it ends. The shutting off of the set. The TV cools down. Put a hand against the box five minutes later and you wouldn’t know that mere moments before people had been sitting in front of it, laughing, or happily dozing in the darkness illumined only by a flickering image.
She was such a private kid in other ways. Didn’t do the social media. Termed it a waste. All of these people with nothing to say save, in effect, “Look at me.” Sign of shallowness in her view. The need for attention. A need that is never met, because that need is ultimately about other things. Wanted the camera turned off when the time had come to capture her reaction at a gathering after everyone else had made their various faces of mirth and jest. No photos, no videos, an irony beyond any others that Mason could think of, and he spent a lot of time thinking. More time than he wished.
But if he didn’t think he wouldn’t remember, and if he didn’t remember all he’d have was what he could find now, and what he could find now was meant to help him recall and relive. Round and round he went, a man circling a drain, like some bug in a sink.
Mason used to wonder whether those bugs knew they were going down, never to come back out again, and if they gave vent to what was an insect’s version of a final cry.
“Oh hear me, ye within the range of my voice! Or beating wings or scratching legs, whatever the case may be. I descend into the vortex now, trapped in the swirl of death, as I erred in believing I had greater opportunity to explore this toothpaste-frosted basin before someone took to the taps, and though I leave this world and my loved ones before my time, mine was not a life lived in vain, for I…”
Huh. Seems like we have a gap in quality.
Patrick, Will: I know you guys disagree, but there really is more to life than bigotry and shitty writing and incest. Like great writing. Matchless art. People seeing you for what you are.
Just getting started on you, boys.
I gave you two every chance, but we all knew what you were doing and why. Just like you now know what I'm doing and why.
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