Saturday 11/9/24
We'll go back to The New Yorker for another one of these prose offs. This is from a story called "The Honest Island" by Greg Jackson.
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come. He had ransacked his mind but he could not remember and he could not recall many other things besides. The period before his arrival, for instance. He knew he came from elsewhere. His appearance made that abundantly clear, and he did not speak the islanders’ language, although between gestures and the few words of his own language the islanders knew, he could communicate most of his basic needs.
The island was small. If one cared to, one could walk from one end to the other in a matter of hours. To reach the southern tip, where there was a swimming beach, he sometimes took one of the small buses that circulated throughout the day. Across the hazy sea to the south, one saw a city on a far-off coastline, with factories lining its harbor, whose tall chimneys emitted knotted white streams. An unmaintained road led from the swimming beach into steep hills above, where an abandoned complex of concrete structures had been overrun by bushes and ivy. To the north, not visible from the beach, was a distant shore, where rows of mountains resembling jagged waves disappeared into the mist.
The island itself had a teardrop shape. Craint knew this from a map at the bus depot and another at the ferry terminal. Its northern half had been given over to mining ventures. Large machines dug up the rocky waste and pulverized it into powder and gravel. He had seen images of this in the small museum devoted to the island’s history, where, unable to read the explanatory texts, he had had to invent his own history from the photographs and dates.
A few things. I'm sure you can see how basic this is. How unmemorable. Daniel Zalewski, an editor at The New Yorker, once told me I wasn't any good at writing. He said I didn't have the ability to create memorable prose. The turn of phrase to be savored.
You'll notice how I've dialed in on the handful of people who've done the whole "You're not good at the whole writing thing," because they look extra stupid, don't they, in that they put words they obviously don't believe into the written record, such was/is the sense-obliterating nature of their animus, envy, and prejudice. Why else would you put something so ridiculous in writing? (These would be those people: Michael Ray of Zoetrope, Stephanie Merry of The Washington Post, Carolyn Kuebler of New England Review, Zalewski, and Jonathan Galassi of FSG, and wait until we start digging in on this colossal joker, both as an editor and a writer.)
Look at what you just saw. This would be funny, wouldn't it, if it wasn't so blatant what's really happening and how truly fucked up that is.
The excerpt above is very wooden, awkward. There's no flow. Stop and start-y, you could say. And not by design and for some purpose--but because of a lack of writerly skill.
Note how often the writer uses the word "one." Do you think that's intentional and efficaciously rendered, or a mistake? Gets pretty repetitive, right? Stilted. You want to do that double "one"--as a stand-in for a universal "you," then ugh, fine, whatever, but don't do it for the buses. It's obviously a mistake, a lack of awareness on the writer's part and the editor's. Editors', as it were. But again, The New Yorker isn't really invested in the quality of a story. They're invested in who wrote it. With the right name at the top of the story, everything else is just going through the motions. Mere formality. It's about classism. Not good writing.
This is writing that's uncomfortable with itself by a writer who's not confident in what he's doing.
Note, too, the use of that construction with the word "where." Again, awkward. No flow. Is used multiple times.
The first time, there's a comma in front of "where." See how that halts everything? It's this bad wrinkle sticking out of a pedestrian, at best, sentence. Then he uses it again, with commas on each side of the "where." Even more of a clunker. Do you have no ear at all?
You might think--if this is your first visit to this journal--that I just picked the worst writing by this writer. It's the most recent fiction in The New Yorker, which was my sole criteria. I decided to have another go at The New Yorker, and I knew all I had to do was click on the most recent story, because they're all going to be bad. I'm not wasting my time searching. Don't have to. Any one of them will do. And anything I have when set side by side with fiction The New Yorker publishes will make a mockery of that fiction.
But FSG--where our friend Jackson Howard is an editor, and responsible for publishing people who write like this, because they're the right kind of person in Jackson Howard's estimation--put out a story collection by Greg Jackson which the various system plants--like planted members of an audience at the theater--all lied about being awesome, because that's how it works.
Here is a sentence for you to enjoy from that amazing story collection, called Prodigals, which I'm sure lots of people honestly believe is just remarkable:
And soon enough—or, you know, whenever—I found myself back in the sunny yard, watching Gabrielle articulate her body in serpentine asanas, listening to Terry interview an author I like, and then an actress I like, as happy as a puppy and at peace, because what I understood just then was that Terry Gross’s voice was the voice of the metanarrative, demotic ur-parent, Catcher in the WHYY, the call of the shepherd returning me to the pastures of solicitude and moderation, that cultural plane on which the day’s horrific news—ecocatastrophe, civilizational conflict, postcolonial scarring, and our legacies of violence and extortion—was not diminished or ignored but existed in a strange vaporous adjacency to yuppie mores, triumphalist life narratives, midcult art, and an anachronistic fixation on jazz, this narrow-bandwidth refugium for temperamental decency and civic virtue and a heartbreaking reasonableness that seemed less and less like the earned wisdom of life than a tragic hope laid over it.
Are you laughing or do you feel like throwing up because this is how their system works or both?
When we see something like this, I think we all--I'm being serious now--have the same thought: Why are you trying so hard to be a douchebag?
And:
Maybe just write well?
Do I even need to tell you that his work also appears in a certain British literary journal headed up by a billionaire heiress who thinks it's a dead person's fault when her family chooses to hide that dead person's body for two months?
How is anything this corrupt? That's a rhetorical question. We know the answers to that question. They are contained in these pages.
If you're ambition in life was to be the person more full of shit than anyone else in the world, you couldn't beat these publishing people. You couldn't beat Daniel Zalewski or this guy here or the people at FSG like Jackson Howard who publish books by people like this and the people who award it and puff-piece review it and say that the likes Laura van den Berg writes timeless fiction.
You just can't be more full of shit than these people no matter how full of shit you otherwise are. There's who they are--which is someone inclined to be so full of shit for starters--and then there's their system, which results in the full-of-shit factor going up multiple notches for all of them.
But yeah--that's awesome. Sure it is. Brilliant. Memorable. I think we'll all remember and cherish those turns of phrases for a long, long time.
What do you think, Daniel Zalewski?
You clown.
If someone told you they were reading something this on a Saturday night, you'd think they were crazy or lying or both. It would be impossible, if you knew this work, to think, "Oh, that sounds good, I should do that."
Then again, people cut themselves. So...cheers? You're the reading version of someone cutting themselves?
But you know what? A lot more people would think they have a reason to cut themselves than anyone honestly would to ever read that slop.
And Zalewski: What a bad, arrogant, tiny little joke of a man you are. You think I didn't know what you were doing and what you were all about when you were talking to me like you did? And the things that I see that you don't know I see? Not good. Not good at all.
I wanted to do this prose off because I keep looking at this paragraph of a story of mine I'm finishing and it blows me away.Here's that paragraph:
He knew she wasn’t crying. There was no movement to her shoulders. The painted sea gave up no waves. The tears were waiting for after he’d departed and the anger had passed. He couldn’t say, “Hold on to that anger, at least this kind of anger, it will serve you well,” nor was that how he wished for her to go through her life, any part of her life, whether with good reason or without. Probably more good than otherwise. He looked at her and felt his heart break as he’d not felt it break before. A new kind of breaking, but maybe the oldest of all. He ought to say something. He really should. But he wasn’t finding the words and they weren’t finding him, and already he was planning the sound of his footsteps for his trip back down the hallway so that they wouldn’t get heard and he’d fail to encroach upon so much as a single one of her thoughts.
Let's look at this. How words and sentences are arranged, their lengths, the manner in which it all comes together, has to me more musical than music, more painterly than painting, more architectural than architecture, more mathematical than math. There are fractals, sounds, various geometries. And they all balance as a whole which is itself balanced within a whole--that's a paradox. Writing works in relation to a litany paradoxes which the great writer understands and masters. Puts this to use and is guided--put to use themselves--by that understanding.
Greg Jackson can't write. We know that. We've seen enough. Logs can be rolled for him, but that has nothing to do with writing except insofar as the people of the system prefer bad writers, because they are insecure, they have no abilities themselves, and poor writing from people as pretentious and dumb and fake as they are provides comfort because their egos aren't challenged, and they have the most fragile egos. If you were a hockey player and you could barely skate but you wanted to think a certain way about yourself, you'd feel better, wouldn't you, if everyone else out on the ice could barely skate, too.
So what someone like Gregory Jackson will do is what you saw above. They'll douchebag it up. It's how they compensate for the lack of ability. How they try to say, "See? See? See? Please see? I'm smart. See those words I used just to use them so you'd think I'm smart? Don't you think I'm smart?"
No one thinks you are, brother. Even you know that.
If you want people to think you're smart, move them at the level of their souls.
Back to the Fleming paragraph. It rings out like something eternal, doesn't it? This famous thing that's been around forever. But it's new. It just got here. The ring, though, is timeless. It's almost like it predates the story though it's endemic to the story, and I'd say that in a way it does--again, paradox.
The paragraph is 164 words long. It's comprised of eleven sentences, seven of which don't have commas. The first four in the paragraph do not.
Another writer, using shorter sentences without commas, would lose flow. That is, the prose would become stutter-y, robotic. But you won't see a paragraph from anyone that flows like this one does, and it's because of the amalgamation, how it all blends, and the rhythms.
We get the word "no" in both the second and third sentences. That's deliberate. The "one" in the Gregory Jackson story is a mistake. That's a writer fucking up and editors fucking up. Again, the writer doesn't care, the editors don't care. It's just about their lunch table games. It's not about writing and it's not about giving readers a story worth reading. It's about who someone is and whether that person is deemed sufficiently like these other people. Are you one of us? Are you a pretentious, talentless, boring, highly connected douchebag from the right background?
The "no" is used twice--straight no, not a negative expressed in another manner--because it's an absolute. There's no equivocation. These are driving sentences--they drive us forward, and the repetition of the "no" builds a momentum through linkage. There's a connection here, a span, across which we move, without tarrying. It's dramatic, too. The absolute essentially doubled. Which, again, is a paradox. You can't multiple an absolute times an absolute...but yes. (And what, after all, is the result of a double negative? This isn't technically one of those, but there's real hope in this passage despite everything else it contains and grants.) And you see how we're getting the ring? How this is becoming sonorous and elegiac in the sense of a grand sweep? But these are "simple" sentences. Except they're not. They're playing their part in the design.
Remember when we talked about the phraseology of something being buried in the mix in an earlier entry and points of contact? How it was a music-related phrase, but it also didn't have to be.
Here we get a play on a literary reference that isn't itself a reference, because it's stand-alone. The idea of the painted sea. This is a scene--just to give some background--which is preceded by a key detail about a glass of water and which is going to lead to another even more important--story capping--detail about a glass of water, but a different glass of water.
We're always progressing. Always building. The movement has to be forward, even when we go into the past--again, paradox.
This fourth sentence heightens the ringing, if you will. The prose is singing out with that eternal, elegiac sweep of timeless truths, which, again, also feel endemic to this story. Born here in this place. But what is this place, really? The world. Life. And yet, we are fully in the story. We're also in our own lives, in our own experiences. Fully here, fully here. Present here, present here. You see what I'm saying about paradox?
After four sentences with zero commas, the fourth sentence has five. Do you see the math? This is all by design. You earn with each sentence--each sentence helps you earn the overall build. This is a virtuosic sentence that reads as easily--even with the multiple clauses--as the shorter sentences that preceded it. This is how you write. What Greg Jackson would do is that dipshit thing you saw for the FSG book. He doesn't have a clue what he's doing.
We come out of that longer sentence and what do we get? A five-word sentence that isn't technically a sentence. The longer sentence flows into it, though; there's an emotional and sonic elision that carries us through the end of the longer sentence and essentially annexes the shorter non-sentence sentence. Think of a rest in music--there's still a pulse in the rest, right?
We get another sentence that starts with "He." That pronoun is like putting the hand down in the dirt in football, so that the player can explode up through the line. People, too, are being foregrounded. Not just this man, but all men. The "He" is contributing to the ring now. It has the eternal, elegiac sweep. And it's a two-letter word. But that's the design. The build.
The idea of someone feeling their heart break as they've never felt it before, but with this implied, dawning knowledge that this is the oldest form of breaking that exists, is something we all identify with. What did you identify with in the Greg Jackson examples? Fuck all, right? Nothing. And you never would. You never would with anything these people write, publish, hype, celebrate, award, lie about.
Two sentences follow that each start with "He." More ring. More of the elegiac eternal and its sweep. And the here and now. The immediacy. Because this is him. This is one person. But it's so much more. We are here, fully present. But we're also dealing in something else in which we're fully present. The paradox.
"He" is a driving element when used at the start of these sentences. Earlier in the story, the thirteen-year-old girl who is arguably its main character--then again, it may also be the man, it may be all men, it may be all women who have what is done to them as a result of men and boys being men and boys--experiences a similar breaking; the kind unlike any other, that also may be the oldest of all. And with it, this tinge--on some level for these characters, if not a conscious level--of a new cognizance. That's how we learn, usually. It's not this direct "I'll put this in the conscious part of my brain today" type of deal.
The "He really should" sentence uses the technique of that sliding rest again, but it's not quite the same because it's as if the rest is now in a different octave. Paradox. A rest is technically silence, but here, things happen in the rest which itself is a form of moving us forward. We can say that this rest is in a different emotional octave. The rest is speeding us along. More paradox. And like I said, you have a paragraph of eleven sentences in which seven don't even have a comma. But look how complex this is--and this is just some of what's happening--but how easy and enveloping this is to read.
Then we come to that last sentence, and damn, right? Your heart has been moved to your throat, and now we conclude with this final portion of virtuosity. The seemingly effortless swing and the ringing out of the sweep of the elegiacally eternal and the full-on, practically overwhelming immediacy of the now. But there's more--the future is involved, too.
He's planning the sound of his footsteps. Who else would ever have something like that in a work of fiction? But you read it, and you relate, don't you? In your own life. You've now gone in your head to a time when you did something like that and you didn't call it that, might not have thought of it at all, but you realize now that's what you were doing. He's being both selfish and evasive and selfless--after a fashion--at once. Cowardly, but also caring.
That part about him not finding the words and the words not finding him--I love how the words are posited as these living things with their own agency--is a play on earlier language.
To wit:
She favored sarcasm in her own humor, being the age she was, and as clever as she was, and it occurred to him that a self-deprecating remark with a sardonic tinge as to his own failings might be useful, but it wouldn’t be enough, so instead he sat as still as possible in hopes of making his ineffectuality less thunderous until he found the right words, or they found him.
And the idea of finding--and the nature of finding--is one that touches again on a theme we encountered earlier in the likes of this:
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.
Look at the gap in ability, in artistry between these two writers and their works. Think about a Daniel Zalewski. Think of what a joke and a fraud and a bad person you have to be in order to behave like that, to be so plainly discriminatory. What a worm you have to be.
You think he believed what he said about me? Of course you don't. And he didn't believe it any more than I do.
Fleming can't come up with something sufficiently memorable.
Look at these people? Aren't they sickening?
And then we end up here, with a work of genius versus the work of talentless, connected system person, with the obvious, immeasurable gap in quality being pretty memorable itself.
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