Monday 4/29/24
We're going to be getting soon to the work of Carolyn Kuebler, the editor in chief of New England Review, who we talked about recently, and we'll also talk about Dennis Johnson, the vengeful, unbalanced, slanderous, narcissistic editor of Melville House--complete with quotes from his employees--who is putting out her dreadful book, but what we're going to do right now is feature the beginnings of three recent stories in New England Review, and put them up against the start of a story I wrote Saturday.
In Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row," we're told that Ophelia's sin in her lifelessness, which is one of the many sins, as such, of all modern fiction.
You have the same kind of person, with no ability, the same background, who goes to the same kind of school, the same kind of writing program, these amateur, sinecure-obsessed dilettantes, every one of whom can be easily replaced by AI. What a robot could produce is more human than what these people write. They are interchangeable. You can't tell any of them apart, and the next time someone honestly cares about anything any of them have written, will be the very first time. For real, that is. I don't mean for Bookforum bullshit and for another proverbial notch in the old Paris Review tote bag.
You could say, "AI, write me a shitty, pretentious, meaningless MFA-type of story that no one would ever want to read," and AI will spit out the likes of what we see time and again in stories by these people. You'll get what we just saw in The Georgia Review, as published by Gerald Maa.
Do you know why we see what we do in every prose off from the opponent's end? It's because that's all there is. No one writes in order to be read. Writing is no longer for reading. These people write for other reasons. To be a member of their diseased subculture of broken freaks. For control. Petty power. Because they can't face that they're nothing. They have nothing, offer nothing, do nothing, know nothing. They're not special, they're not talented, they don't even work hard or at all. To lie to themselves some more, constantly, in a life that is not worth living because it's less a life and more an attempt to pass through an existence of complete delusion, and be enabled in that delusion by people like them, until death.
Why bother? What are you even here for? What's the point? There's no point to what you're writing. These things aren't points. They're just pathetic and toxic.
Most people who buy "literary" books do so for status, to say something about themselves, to have them be seen a certain way. We're going to keep coming back to this idea, because this is how it works now. People buy a Roxane Gay book, a Lincoln Michel book, a David Sedaris book, a Justin Taylor book, an Aimee Bender book, an Amanda Gorman book, in order to convey something about how they want others to think of them, and how they want to think about themselves, no matter how full of shit that thing is.
For instance:
I'm one of the good ones!
I'm very smart because I bought this completely unlikeable, meaningless slop but only a smart person would say they read it!
I'm rich and the most interesting part of my week is watching the Mexicans work in my yard so it's important to me to strike a pose like I'm cultured!
Like the author, I am also a lying, racist of a pretend victim who seeks to be enabled in that pretending! And if I can keep claiming victim status I never have to be responsible for anything and I can be a hate-fueled monster!
I also got an MFA!
As we've seen, it is impossible to read anything we see here by that other person in a prose off, and think, "I want more of that!"
It can't be done. Do you think there's a single person in the world capable of thinking, "Give me more Motorollah"?
What do you think, Sigrid Rausing? Do you think so? How would you answer someone who asked you what makes it so good? Imagine if you had to go on TV and the host said, "You're saying this is amazing, right?" and you'd have to be like, "Um, yeah, it's amazing," and then the host said, "Why don't you read it for all of the viewers out there?"
Imagine how stupid you'd feel having to do that? Like a joke. How would you answer someone who asked you why you treated that Fleming guy with his clearly superior work the way you did, talking down your nose to him like you did? What are you? What can you do? Would you just say, "Well, I'm a vile bigot, and I'm all about classism, and, oh, yeah, trying to profit off the death of my sister-in-law who I'm embarrassed by because she made my super rich family look bad even though my brother hid her dead body for two months, but hey, that's just billionaire heir stuff." You liking this? What are you going to say? "Motorollah is better than anything that man can write." You're guilty. And anyone reading along here knows it. You know it.
But whether it's in New England Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, The Sun, it sucks. It sucks as much as anything can suck. There's no variance. No, "Oh, that sucks a little less."
I'm just going to keep saying it, showing it, and there isn't anyone in this system who can prove me wrong or who is even going to dare to try, because it can't be done. Go ahead. Give me something you want to enter into a prose off. Who's feeling confident?
This is the start of Isabelle Appleton's "What You Want" in New England Review.
Occasionally, Ingrid would become overwhelmed by an anxiety about privacy, feverishly deleting every residual of herself from the internet. Whole social media profiles were voided, dashed. Texts were sent to friends, former employers, publications, and image hosting services, begging for emancipation from the horror of a tagged photo, headshot, and bio. Jane would only learn about this later.
Jane had moved upstate five months ago for grad school. “Being alone”—which she’d once regarded as an unofficial fifth cardinal virtue—she experienced now as anguish. She pieced together days by sitting in different places, emailing Ingrid.
That evening, Ingrid emailed Jane to remind her that she was not an ecologist.
Jane, I am not an ecologist. I am kind of essentially unconcerned with worldbuilding. I don’t care about speculative fiction or the construction of new geology, culture, language, and race. I see the nature of our project as something emerging from the “culture,” as it were, something overwhelmingly causal. We are working with the here and now. I’m concerned about you lately. I don’t know why you can’t seem to get your head around the Agreement or its importance. I’ve been only honest with you, about the land and what I want.
Jane received Ingrid’s email just after the winter sun abandoned her. She promptly clapped her laptop shut on the table. Blankly she looked into the kitchen, then crumpled her face and folded it onto the shelf of her palms.
Grad school, talk of "worldbuilding" and "speculative fiction"--whoa! It's almost like this is you in all of your lack of imagination and reliance on navel-gazing because you don't have a single real story to tell and nothing to say and you never will, so you're just fictionalizing crap from your own life as a writer and of academia. And some mental illness. Bet that's you, too, right?
Then we get the forced metaphors. It's hilarious when these people think, "Time to sound creative, what to do, what to do..." and so we get "and folded it onto the shelf of her palms."
The shelf of her palms. Are you just trying to be bad at this? Do you even run that back through your head? You'd think the editor would, but Carolyn Kuebler's position is one of caste-maintenance, pettiness, and spite, not having the best writing, not even tending to the bad writing that's there. She doesn't know what she's doing. You know who lets this through? I don't just mean the whole shitty story, I mean mistakes like this. Someone who is incompetent. Who doesn't know the first thing about writing or editing. Or just someone who never looked, never cared, because the writing isn't what this is about.
But for such a writer: Do you not understand how fake and forced that sounds? Does that really sound natural to you? Physically, it makes no sense. You out there, reading this entry in this journal: Try to fold your face--what does that even mean?--"onto the shelf" of your palms. What pose are you in right now? We'd all be in a different one, right? Because this is unvetted nonsense. It's just someone saying dumb shit pretending to be deep, and someone even dumber saying, "Yes, I should send that writer who is the right kind of person an acceptance letter to appear in our award-winning journal."
But the thing is, this writer would never ask themselves how this sounds, what it means, what a reader would think. They've never given a thought in their life for a reader. This isn't meant to be read or taken seriously or looked at discerningly. It's meant to be offered to a practioner of bigotry who is not going to feel envious of what this other person can do, who recognizes this other person as someone like herself, and who is stupid enough to tell me that I have never written anything as good as what we just saw.
I mean, we all saw it, right? We all have that proof in front of us. We all see the same words in the same story. There is no mystery here. There could be no less mystery in anything. This is bad writing. It's always bad writing. It's always by the same kind of person, from the same academic background, and none of those people write for any of it to be read.
Think of how twisted that is, how insane such a system has to be.
Writing is not for reading.
I get it. There are people out there who like, say, baseball, so when a Rickey Henderson biography comes out, they're going to buy it and read it on their vacation. But that's not the "literary world." (And, frankly, it's not going to provide anything more than what you could get on Wikipedia, save for a few new quotes, because that's how low the standard/baseline is right now. You don't have to rise above Wikipedia. That arm of publishing doesn't even want you to.) Nothing produced in the latter is meant to be read. Nothing produced in that world is meant to entertain or add anything to anyone's life. It's all so sick people, without ability, can be as sick and evil as they please.
Or so they think.
Let's look at another one. This is the start of Imad Rahman's "Ed Thinks of Everything" in New England Review.
Husband Ed accidentally severed a couple fingers off his left hand and there’s no way he’s going to the ER so please let’s not even go down that road, Tanya Chandra posts.
Ed once worked for the hospitals and saw things he wasn’t meant to see. The lawyer would tell me to stop right there, Tanya Chandra replies.
We understand this is the sort of inner-ring subdivision where private-leaning residents help each other live their best lives regardless of what those lives look like. We’re hoping to do most of this at home. If you hear me we’re at 5761 Pinecrest just in case, Tanya Chandra replies.
Sorry won’t be able to let anyone in the house anytime soon because the windows and doors all tripwire once the alarm activates. I set the alarm off by accident and Ed’s not his usual self so it’ll take a minute to remember the deactivation code, Tanya Chandra replies.
We’re new to life outside the city so apologies in advance if I’m inappropriate or offensive. Ohboy my hands are shaking. Ed insists I remind you it’s his decision to reject the alien-medical-military industrial complex. That’s what he’s thinking about right now the alien-medical-military industrial complex, Tanya Chandra replies.
What the fuck are you doing?
Again, when pretentious people don't have a story to tell, and they want you to think they're special, they say to themselves, "It's writer time! Now how can I look as creative as possible?" and they start doing shit like this. In that Granta story the other day, "Writer time" was a case of, "Look how creative I am! Other people would use periods, but not me!" I know all of their little tricks. It's all just little tricks. Then you get someone like Carolyn Kuebler to play along, because a writer like this is as bad at writing as she is, and so there's no envy. It's comfortable. And it's the right kind of person.
When you are working with nothing, you try to scam people. Publishing people exist to be scammed. They want to be. Then, they may scam others. And you have moron upon moron saying shit they don't mean about all of the other morons, who are recognized as being a member of that class. Publishing is classism. It's all about class. Being in this class, which in turn constitutes a diseased subculture.
The funny thing is, you have all of these hypocrites in the publishing system talking about race and gender and being an ally and equality and equal opportunity, etc., but they're all about classism and keeping out those they deem not fit to be in that class. There can be all kinds of reasons. Someone doesn't come from money. Someone is infinitely better at writing than the lot of them. Someone is a straight white male. Whatever it is. Someone didn't go to an Ivy. Someone didn't go to Iowa. Someone isn't a broken freak. Someone isn't a dick. Someone isn't awkward. Someone isn't a racist. Someone isn't sexist. Someone is productive. Someone is an expert. Someone has achieved on their own. Someone has no limits. Someone writes every kind of thing, every kind of story, with every kind of character. Someone invents constantly and makes it look so damn easy. Someone's work has appeared in hundreds of venues. Someone, gasp, writes for actual people, the horror. And so forth.
Making "oh boy" one word is also supposed to be creative, by the way. That's how juvenile these intellectual lightweights are.
Last one. Thank God, right? This is the start of Subraj Singh's "Ship Sister" from New England Review.
Having received permission from the overseers, the gathering convenes on the seashore and the funeral pyre is lit.
The fire spills and spreads as soon as the torch touches the wood. The thick flames leap, curling, unfurling, stretching across the bier and towards the blue sky. Tiny waves are smashed under the heels of the mourners who stamp and wail and bounce on the balls of their feet. The waves reform and rejoin the safety of the seawater.
The noon sun is a dry eye, oblivious to the commotion taking place below it.
Anuradha, wearing a white sari, squats in the dark sand before her father’s burning body. She stays out of the water because she has no desire to run into her father’s spirit.
As the clamor rises with the heat, she clutches her head-scarf closer to her mouth so none of the others will see the smile trembling on her lips. All around her, the cries of his friends, fellow cane-cutters, are loud, drowning out the quick, excited, thumping of her heart in her chest.
The smoke, black as his soul, is snatched away by the sea-breeze as soon as it reaches for air. Anuradha wafts the falling soot away from her face and turns her head from the pyre. She sees one of the overseers standing on the seawall in the distance, a midday phantom, watching over the burning.
What can I even say? What's the audience for this? Who is the intended reader? If someone you knew said, "You need to read this writer," and they handed you this, what would you think? There's nothing here that could mean anything to anyone. Entertain them. Sustain them so that they want to keep going. Why would you keep going? Out of charity? Because they were your relative? Because you wanted something from them--like to have them publish your own equally worthless shit--and you were looking to kiss their ass? What does this offer you, as a reader?
It's so amateur, like what a mid-teen thinks of as creative writing in their own early forays to get something down on paper, but they know better. That fifteen-year-old knows better. Their efforts aren't producing the kind of thing they want, and for that teenager, the thing, as such, is that effort. That they're sitting there. Feeling like they're expressing something. Then they hand it to mom and dad, and mom and dad get it. Their kid was trying something, and that's the good part, not the finished product.
This shit here, though, is supposed to be the best writing in the world. And you know what? Given that all of this writing sucks, you can't even say what's best and what's the worst. It's all the exact same shit. I can't stress that enough. Everyone who writes does this. Everyone who writes "literary fiction," that is. I'm not leaving out the ones who are good at it. There is this. There is nothing else. This is what they expect, what they demand, what they teach. They teach it because that's the only way they can make money, because no one would want to read anything that any of these people produce. Then the people they teach it to teach it.
If someone told you they loved these things, and you knew, for a fact, that they spent a lot of time reading them, you'd think they were crazy. But that would never happen anyway. If you knew someone who listened to Miles Davis a lot, you'd be like, yeah, okay, that makes sense. If someone told you they spend hours a week reading Imad Rahman, how the hell could you respond to that? What would be a more absurd statement? One that is less possible to utter?
Then we have this other person. The last human writer in the world. Or the first of something. The only one who can't be replaced by a machine or an app. This is the start of my story.
I spent a lot of years not drinking, so that probably helped.
An aunt of mine once told me that she’d known a woman who lived to be 102. She was visiting this woman and made a comment about what a remarkable life she'd lived and how she must have been grateful that she'd taken care of her health, but the woman said no, she wasn't, because all of her friends weren't only dead, they were long dead and she'd been alone since she could remember.
My aunt—who was old herself—told me I'd feel differently later on about reaching a certain age than I did at the time, because I’d said that I wanted to live long as possible. It was one of those days after Thanksgiving when most of the family has gone away again and a smaller group remains. Everything feels more intimate, perhaps because it's less formal, but also sadder, or sadder to some. For me it felt like a show was over, and I liked it.
People I used to know would say things to me like, "What are you trying to do, live forever?"
I had a prepared response: "Why? Are you going to do it for me?"
I said it less, though, as time went on.
Men travelled around the Old West selling their elixirs of life out of the back of their wagons and you know who those bogus or not-so-bogus elixirs benefited the most? The people who believed they were doing something.
Is that stupidity? Faith? Alcohol? I guess I’ve never known the answer.
I was much older before I knew that morticians don’t just embalm people on account of wakes and funerals, but so that they'll stay intact for as long as possible in the ground. I wondered why. Who were appearances being kept up for? Or was it really that hard for even morticians to consign unto dust, and this was the practice they settled on before they, too, were let go of, but also not quite completely?
Yeah...kind of different. I don't think we really need to say anything else about that. We all understand the difference in quality, just as we all know what is happening here.
But let's close with these words from the New England Review website.
"NER is on the lookout at all times for writing that rewards the reader for spending time with it."
Ha. Sure It is. These are just lies. They're plainly lies. We've just seen these things to be lies. We'll keep seeing them to be lies. Who is supposed to believe this thing that is impossible to believe?
You're just looking for the same kind of shit that sucks from the right kind of person.
Ohboy.
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