Friday 10/25/24
We've talked about how the people of the publishing system--for whom the system exists so that those people can be the people of the publishing system--decide to work in unison to make their form of stardom happen for someone. That person's writing will be dreadful. It doesn't matter. That's not a factor. Who that person is, to them, is the only factor. What they represent to them. This often becomes a matter of gender, skin color. It always has to do with how connected they are. It's the person--it's never the work. And it's not because it's some dynamic, brilliant person.
They hype this author, they give them awards, they market the hell out of them, they have the right people in the system say lies about how good they think them to be, when no one actually honestly believes it at all. They publish their work, they feature it, they include it simply because of the name of the person who did it and what the people of that system are trying to force the name to mean. People outside of the system will see this fakery and not know it as such. They think that the book The New York Times Book Review declares is some masterpiece must be one, because that reviewer--the representative of this "important" institution--wouldn't be lying.
But of course they're lying. They're as full of shit as can be. Chances are low that they even read the whole thing or did more than skim it, if they looked at it at all. They know what to say in advance. Then they do their part. They're simply playing the system game.
The person out in the world who reads--one of the few who are left--will buy this book based on all of this hype. They will hate it. They'll be bored, they'll feel nothing, they'll either not finish it force themselves to because they paid thirty bucks for a hard cover copy, and they may very well blame themselves for not "getting it," because, after all, that person won these major awards, The New York Times and The Washington Post said this was the most important writer in however long, their fiction was in The New Yorker, etc. etc.
Tommy Orange is one such writer who the system decided to make it happen for. He's Native American. So, of course, that becomes his whole shtick. That's all he is going to write about. And these people are going to eat it up. Because when they can be all about skin color and that kind of thing, they're always going to elect to be so. These are actual racists. That's how the true racist works. The true racist sees a name, and because it looks and sounds a certain way which they deem as different, thinks, "They can be a star!"
They're not thinking it because of the work. The work is irrelevant, save that one simply has to have that story, that book, as a minimum requirement, so that all of these lies can be told about it and its author.
Tommy Orange's bathetic, arid fiction is always the same. Native Americans, the Rez--that word gets publishing people off--drunkenness, Oakland. Always the same. Moan-y, lifeless, empty. The most prosaic language. Nothing rich, interesting, gripping, illuminating. Nothing to move you. Nothing to make you care.
They simply decided to make it happen for him. How far can that go? It can permeate the subculture that is publishing--or "literary fiction" publishing, really--and leak out slightly into the world, in the sense that a book of his will be in the front window of bookstore you walk past, but that will be it, because there are no legs to the work.
And this is how it goes for all of these people for whom they decide to make it happen. And it's thousands of people, really, working to make that happen. It's not one editor who--let's pretend for a second--says, "What visionary work! I will be the one to put it forward for all to see!" No. They're working in tandem. It's like payola. Secret handshake with money passed from one palm to another. And everyone is in on it. The people at the bookstore who put the books on those front tables, the liars of the review sections. We've seen what the Guggenheim people are really doing. A Ladette Randolph at Ploughshares will be in on it. Deborah Treisman at The New Yorker. The O. Henry and Best American Short Stories editors. Radio people, talk show people. It's an enormous, many-people-involved, hook-up.
You have these writers who all suck at writing. They are all the same. The level of sucking is the same. But the system want stars. So they choose someone. That person's horrible writing could be swapped out with the horrible writing of a million other horrible writers. That doesn't matter. These other things do. And, as always, being one of these people--which, really, is the last thing you want to be in life if you're doing any of it correctly--is paramount.
No one out in the world reads, for the most part. So no one out in the world is going to make readerly discoveries. They are not going to find some work, book, or author that they love in the course of their reading. They won't come across that in their reading travels because there are no such travels. In order for just about anyone to read anything--again, the very few people who do read--they will have to be told that they should read it. They will have to be told about it. This is the only way they find out about anything to read. The Tommy Orange way. The flavors of the month/period way.
Do you see how controlled this is? When that reader picks up that work, they will be less likely to read the next time because they had such a bad time. They'll do something else. No one is aware of all of this because no one cares. I'm about the only person who does. Part of the reason is because I know how corrupt this is. I know how bad it is. I know how bad it is for society. Another reason is because of what I have--and the legs it has--for the world. But because I am not one of these people--I am, in truth, the person they hate or would hate the most--they are not going to assemble their thousand-person teams on my behalf. They are, instead, going to do what they can to make sure that no one out in the world knows about this writer and his work.
What's to stop any of this? People in the world aren't going to object. They don't know about any of this, because they don't care. They're doing other things. The people of the system are all equally talentless, corrupt, and broken. More or less. They want it to be this way, because if it wasn't, they couldn't be the people of the system. A Tommy Orange couldn't be carried, awarded, complimented, hyped.
He doesn't care that none of that is real. These people aren't like that. That's why they're the people of this system. Anyone who has success in this system owes it to the nature of the system. A system where nothing is about the quality of the work. Because if it was a system in which the quality of the work mattered, the people who have success within the system would have no success at all. They'd never be published, even.
If you're Laura van den Berg, you don't want to compete in a system against great writers, may the person with he best work, with the most value for people, for readers, the world, win. Obviously not. You wouldn't get that Guggenheim then on the same day your equally talentless husband did. No one would say anything about you. You wouldn't have any books. No short story in Oprah's magazine.
So we'll do a prose off now with a Tommy Orange story called "The State" from The New Yorker. It's just him doing his shtick. I want you to look at how flat the language is. It'll probably cause you to say to yourself, "I could do that."
But that's not correct--you can do better. You are an individual, right? This isn't the writing of an individual. It's the monochromatic voice of the MFA-machined writer. For all of this guy's blathering on about skin color and identity and the Rez and how bad white people are, you can't write anything more homogenized and impersonal. Soulless. Mechanized. There's no individuality here. (Nor universality.) No humanness. An app could do this. Just tell the app ahead of time that you'd like to feature some buzz words. Climate change, indigenous, Native. That'll do it.
In looking through story trying to determine what part of it to excerpt, I realized all of the parts were the same. Nothing built. There was no tension. No stakes. Just this nothingness. Prose aimlessness. Just la-la-la, filling up the word count, hitting the bare minimums so the doc could be sent over to Treisman, David Wallace, Willinging Davidson, and Cressida Leyshon at The New Yorker, and in she'd go, the final part of the fait accompli: the delivery of what can be called a story--because there are words on a page--with that as the only requirement. The quality of those words is meaningless. All that matters is that the name at the top is Tommy Orange, and the system has approved him and is working in concert for him. That name. Not that work.
And it's not like anyone's going to read it honestly anyway. These things are all just things to have there, if you will, so that things can be said about the person whose name is at the top.
After the system engineered this form of success for Tommy Orange, all of these publishers, magazines, editors, agents, started putting out the call for Native American writers. Because that was in.
Do you understand how revolting that is? Picking people because of blood? Not what they do, not the quality of what they have: The blood in their veins. That's rather Nazi-esque, isn't it? That doesn't appall you? These people didn't care about any of that work. They wanted to be able to say, "Look! We got us a Native!"
And if that's why you're getting what you're getting? How do you live with yourself? Do you have no self-respect? Or you'll just take it anyway you can get it, because you know you suck at this?
Speaking of which, here we go:
Before you were born, you were a head and a tail in a milky pool—a swimmer. You were a race, a dying off, a breaking through, an arrival. Before you were born, you were an egg in your mom, who was an egg in her mom. Before you were born, you were a nested Russian doll of possibility in your mom’s ovaries. You were two halves of a million different possibilities, a billion heads or tails, flip-shine on spun coin. Before you were born, you were the idea to make it to California for gold or bust. You were white, you were brown, you were red, you were dust. You were hiding, you were seeking. Before you were born, you were chased, beaten, broken, trapped in Oklahoma. Before you were born, you were an idea your mom got into her head in the seventies, to hitchhike across the country and become a dancer in New York. You were on your way when she did not make it across the country but sputtered and spiralled and landed in Taos, New Mexico, at a peyote commune called Morning Star. Before you were born, you were your dad’s decision to move away from Oklahoma, to northern New Mexico to learn about a Pueblo guy’s fireplace. You were the light in the wet of your parents’ eyes as they met across that fireplace in ceremony. Before you were born, your halves inside them moved to Oakland. Before you were born, before your body was much more than heart, spine, bone, skin, blood, and vein, when you’d just started to build muscle, before you showed, bulged in her belly, as her belly, before your dad’s pride could belly-swell at the sight of you, your parents were in a room listening to the sound your heart made. You had an arrhythmic heartbeat. The doctor said it was normal. Your arrhythmic heart was not abnormal.
That was from the start of the start of the Tommy Orange New Yorker story. This is later in the story:
You pass a coffee shop you hate because it’s always hot and flies constantly swarm the front of the shop, where a big patch of sunlight seethes with some invisible shit the flies love and where there’s always just that one seat left, in the heat with the flies, which is why you hate it, on top of the fact that the place doesn’t open until ten in the morning and closes at six in the evening, to cater to all the hipsters and artists who hover and buzz around Oakland like flies themselves, America’s white suburban vanilla youth, searching for some invisible thing Oakland can give them, street cred or inner-city inspiration.
Before getting to the 19th Street station, you pass a group of white teen-agers who size you up. You’re almost afraid of them. Not because you think they’ll do anything. It’s how out of place they are, all the while looking like they own the city. You want to run them down. Scream something at them. Scare them back to wherever they came from. Scare them out of Oakland. Scare the Oakland they’ve made their own out of them. You could do it, too. You’re one of these big, lumbering Indians. Six feet, two-thirty, chip on your shoulder so heavy it makes you lean, makes everyone see you, your weight, what you carry.
See what I'm saying? There is nothing happening here. There's no arc, no build, no stakes. It's just a talentless guy saying shit and dropping in some of the go-to words--oh, wow, peyote--and filling up a word requirement. He's not telling you a story. He doesn't have a story to tell. And he never will. He can't invent. He'll just do this.
I left out this big paragraph that was just some cliches about climate change. Which was just dropped in. Again--fill in the word count, do some buzzword shtick, never mind that it has nothing to do with this story-less story.
Look at that "what you carry" lit fiction cliche.
I play so fair here, don't I? I give someone a chance to show that they don't suck. I'm not hunting for the worst thing and stripping it out of context to make someone look worse than they are. I give you the link to the whole story when it's possible to do so, because I know someone will click on that link and realize it's all equally bad.
Just as what always follows in these prose offs is equally good--but different every time. It's never shtick, it's never buzzwords, it's never soulless, and it's never me, this guy, sitting here in Boston. It's story. The likes and depths of which there has never been.
Afterwards, the man said, “Shouldn’t you go in and make sure she’s okay?”
He meant both physically and not physically—something closer to spiritually, a matter of essence. In the first case, because she’d actually been so sick. Made to have been so sick. In the second, because a vital spark had been doused for the time being. The wick was too too wet for relighting as of yet, but he also understood that there wasn’t a guarantee it’d ever be dry again or a match close enough to hand. Likely, yes, certain, no. The spark of life doesn’t operate on premises of promises. And now there’d been whatever this was, in the room where he remained.
The moon wasn’t out and the window curtains were thick and drawn, which may have helped in obscuring the optics. Then again, the kid was about as far from dumb as you got.
What was that sound that had come from her? Maybe she was going to vomit once more and it just happened to hit her when she came into the room to report of worsening ailments.
No, that wasn’t it. She knew all about the clinic and the medicine and the prospective sibling. The importance of schedules. Family discussions about future family. Suppositions of intimacy, but business-like intimacy. Never mind how that worked, only that it did. The stuff of being grown-up.
It could be so easy, the man thought, to start to believing that there was a binding, unspoken, depersonalizing truth, a secret which had to remain one, regarding the mechanics of life and how what should have been the best parts, commissioned on the heart’s behalf, are really in service to a shadow confederacy for which everyone ultimately casts a vote, fingers to lips, or else gets left behind.
At which point it borders on the impossible to believe that anything discovered in what had once been looked at, and looked towards, as a veritable mine of possibility, its veins thick with mystery and cause for hope, hadn’t been salted by the person who’d also done the finding.
He despaired that he believed this. He certainly didn’t want their daughter to. For as long as possible. Better still, never. The daughter they actually had now.
There wasn’t an instance where she had seemed that open to the idea of a sibling, never mind excited. She’d made a joke, though, during one of those talks of a future family, about how she just didn’t want anyone to think she was its mother.
Usually when she joked she was okay with whatever was being joked about, but the joke didn’t feel like that kind of joke.
The man recast his words before his wife had a chance to respond to his question.
“I think she’d rather talk to you.”
Huh...that's not very close, is it? Look at all of that life. It's a part of a story and that part is its own story. It's a bunch of stories, isn't it? But all working together, for the good, for something amazing and important and that matters.
Not in the way the people of the system work together for the shit that they do.
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