Sunday 3/30/25
The University of Minnesota Press--which, as we've seen, is a joke with their pandering George Floyd children's book (because why wouldn't you want your child to grow up and stick a gun against a pregnant woman's belly?)--put out this ridiculously inept and directionless book about "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" by Jonathan Cott, which is mostly him interviewing fans and then writing down what they have to say, along with an interview with a Jungian psychotherapist who theorizes with loads of jargon on John Lennon's depression.
These people at these presses put forward the worst shit just because of who it's by and what that person means to them. People who write worse than anyone, with books as bad as can be. It's never about "Gee, is this any good?" This remains mind blowing to me after all of these years. That is, knowing the drill here has never made it less shocking to me how fucked up and backwards and counterintuitive and absurd this industry, for lack of a better term, is at all levels.
If I had approached these clowns at this academic press with my Beatles writing? You know how that would have gone.
I checked this out because I intend to write a book about "Strawberry Fields Forever." One person's shitty book that has nothing to do with my own shouldn't preclude the latter, but you have to be on guard for this kind of thing because for this type of people that's a hard concept for them to grasp, if they can grasp it. Most of them would scan the records, see a book out there, and that would be enough for them. That book could have blank pages, it could be just be dog piss instead of words on each page.
But they'd be like, "There was a book!"--and then they'd say something out of their ass using a word like "niche" while at the same time putting out these poorly written vanity projects that don't even interest the person who wrote them because these people lie, they don't think, they have no vision, they see in big lumps rather than with any clarity as to this here is this, and that over there is that, and they move the goalposts constantly for those they like--never mind how much the books by that person sucked, how little it had to do with anything, its total absence of value and commercial potential, and that hardly anyone saw it, fewer people read it, and there wasn't anyone on earth who could have honestly liked it and gotten anything from it, and "anything" is a lot different than huge amounts of insight, entertainment, enrichment, excitement, discoveries, new ways of hearing, new ways of feeling, new ways of thinking.
Cott isn't a writer. He's an interviewer. He sits there while smarter people talk, then he puts what they say in a book. He's not contributing. The issue in this case is that most of these people--the fans he spoke to for the "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane" book--aren't any smarter than he is. Then you just get babel, jargon, and a whole lot of examples of the ass voice.
Cott's title is unexciting and exactly the kind of flat-rote thing you'd expect, the cover looks like something a fourth grader knocked out on a computer in 1985, and the content is worse. I can't imagine doing something this pointless, let alone having someone at a press--people at a press--saying, "We will put this out."
People have to fill nonfiction books with quotes because they have no thoughts of their own, never mind interesting ideas. You also get a lot of books that are basically long Wikipedia articles. Why not just go to Wikipedia, then, for free, and save yourself the cost and the time? Shouldn't a book offer something that you can't get anywhere else? Otherwise, why the fuck is it a book? It's not a good book. And it sure as hell isn't a great book.
I'm a separate thing. You have to look at me separately.
You can take the same book, the same story, the same whatever, and you give that thing to a person that these people want to associate with because that person sucks equally and you give that same thing to someone who is not like these people and is great at what they do, and that person on the other end is going to be all enthusiastic and say, "Wow, this is awesome, we need to do this, I'm honored, the world needs this book!" and with that other person they'll either ignore them, send the boilerplate "Thank you so much for letting me see this, but it's not for us," or jerk themselves off by maundering in an email about markets and "It's hard to do this kind of thing right now," and lie their faces off, when their issue is you and you not being one of them.
And, of course, they don't think that anyone else will ever know. What? Are you going to be someone exponentially more qualified who writes infinitely better who's then going to turn around and share the details of all of this publicly? Present the facts, the evidence, the side by side examples of author and author, qualifications, prose, the truth?
Then they put out the shit by the bad writer and bad person, and thousands and thousands of examples--which is now in the millions--of similar shit. And it's all shit, because this is how it's done. Up and down the line, at the big places and the University of Minnesota Presses of the world. Are there places that are exceptions? Prove it. Get on the right side of things. Stand up. Be part of a solution. All of this shit comes out, hardly any of it is worth reading, no one reads, and where would you begin? How would you start to wade through the shit to find something that's less shit? Who will swim the channel of shit? Why? When you could stare at a screen. Which is easy.
There's no impetus for anyone to dedicate their whole life to getting better at writing, which is what you'd need to do to write great works. So now there's basically no one who can produce anything anywhere close to great. There's just more shit. There isn't anyone, just about, who could say, "I'm not going to write shit," because it isn't an option. This system makes it such that people can only do the shit. You need ability, you need to harness and develop the ability. You need to add to your game, if you will, every single fucking day. Your knowledge, your command, your range, the ways in which you can go.
They'd have to be a maverick not to do the shit, and they'd have to work in isolation, all of those hours every day, year in, year out, decade in, decade out, because that's what it takes. Writing is so hard. Doing great writing that is. They wouldn't be encouraged, they wouldn't be supported by people of this system. You going to go it alone? You have that type of drive and belief in yourself and knowledge of what you're doing? In this age, when people can't exist without their bullshit social media likes for Dopamine pick-me-ups? Who is strong enough to exist in a vacuum working away until they get a real chance, if they ever do?
There's no one else who can do that, no one else who does. They don't have the ability or the strength. Like I said, you can't compare. Can't put me with these people. You have to realize how different this guy, this writer, this artist, this work is, and you have to know that you can only go so far--which isn't far at all--with the rest of the slop, but here's a ceiling-less situation. Something potentially limitless. Commercially. And in impact upon the world.
As I said, a Beatles piece will be out later today. And as anyone who looks at it would be able to see, it absolutely smokes every piece written by anyone else on the Beatles. Now, someone up to no good can make up whatever lie they wish, but that lie--and their success in the telling of the lie--is predicated on people not seeing that work, or--and this is why we do the prose offs--seeing that work next to anyone else's work. Because once that happens--that is, once the actual work is out in the open and it's right there in front of us--that person up to no good is seen for being exactly that. The proof is in the prose.
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