You're the stair guy, aren't you? + Bloomsbury Object Lessons and BFI Film Classics

Thursday 4/3/25

Walked three miles yesterday, did 100 push-ups, ran five circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument. While running those stairs a woman asked me if I was training for the military. Reminiscent of the woman who'd asked me last year if I was special forces.

Whether or not these are odd questions doesn't really matter to me. They're indicative at the least of where I've gotten myself to physically, and it'd have been unthinkable for someone to have asked me them fifteen years ago. And I think that's pretty good and pretty rare and speaks to strength and dedication. I have been alone--completely alone. I have nothing to live for. Not right now.

The pain every day is total. I can create the best work there has ever been--I do--every day, that is not seen by anyone. I have no quality of life, no people. I'm in a war against these evil, mechanized forces, with no help coming, a war that no one else in the world--so far as I can tell--cares about, which means I'm essentially fighting it in the darkness, because that's where publishing exists--only in the darkness--and I easily could have 1. Killed myself--anyone else would have or 2. Not decided to give up what I gave up and run up and down thousands of stairs every day so that I could get stronger to keep creating and to fight the war in the darkness so that the efforts might be pulled into the light, so that people would see and care and progress could be made.

Regarding the stairs: I'm going to have to do something very unpleasant on here about Bloomsbury and their Object Lessons series. I have the dirt on these people. I know what they've been doing, I know what they did with my email, I have quotes from people totally unqualified to write books in that series on how they came to write those books--it's predictably disgusting--and it's impossible for anyone to be anywhere near as qualified as I am to write a book in a series about the hidden meaning of objects than I am about stairs. But sure, that book on air conditioners. I mean, come on.

Stairs and me are an epic, life-changing thing. An inspiring thing. Stairs--when properly understood--will teach you so much about life and what you can be. How you can think, what you'll learn, what you create, who you are, how you are. Stairs are life, if you truly know stairs.

It's not possible to be anywhere close to my absurd over-qualifications to do this. I've watched my email go around the country. I know. I always know what you're doing and up to. I try everything in my power not to take it here. Just don't treat me more unfairly than you would ever treat anyone else, or ever had. I've done nothing wrong. Everything you don't like me for is because of what I do better. That's not me doing something wrong. And you're going to do my like this? Like I don't know? And what? Hope for the best?

Why would you do that when you know I'm going to put it all up and every word will be true and proof of incompetence, discrimination, incestuous evil, etc. etc. etc. You hate that person so much you won't let them do the book they're more qualified than anyone to do that epitomizes what you say your series is about better than any book or writer does or can that you won't let them do that book for free for you? People come up to me on the streets of Boston and ask, "You're the stair guy, aren't you?"

But yeah, let's have this woman who knows nothing about music, has never written about music in her life, write a book about the saxophone, a subject she joked about knowing nothing about on her Facebook page, because she works at hoity-toity writers' retreat?

It's so blatant what's happening. And I have everyone's IP address, location, all of it. I see it. You are busted. I just haven't done it because I don't want to do it. I just want to write my book. I just want to not be discriminated against. I also want this not to be a case of yet more evil because it gets me further down to have to think, "Is there anything else in this entire industry than people behaving like evil, broken, petty children?"

You want it to be something else. Massive human error, say. But no more. Bad as that is. But not with malicious intent. Not targeted at one person who has done nothing wrong.

I very likely am going to end up going around the horn with Bloomsbury. Music, film, stairs. The way this woman at the BFI Film Classics series spoke to me about the book on the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night film that I was going to be doing before she was put in charge--and the false statements she made to me (like that A Hard Day's Night isn't artistically worthy of a book, despite the fact that the BFI had basically already given me the go-ahead, and the film featuring on the BFI's own list of best British films, and then doing a recent book on Die Hard, because that's a piece of art house cinema...right--is something else.

Being hit from the jump with a barrage of obvious personal animus. But I hung in there, was polite, affable, and again, it's not possible to be anywhere close to as qualified as I am to write a short film book for a press I've already written a short book, whether it's on A Hard Day's Night or some horror film or Orson Welles film or a noir film, and believe me, I tried the other ideas. And my film qualifications? My track record writing on film? I mean, holy shit, right? Wrote for Sight and Sound twenty years ago, with hundreds and hundreds of film pieces following since in just about whatever venue you can name. Even film op-eds in major newspapers. Everything covered--The Atlantic, literary places, a film book from an academic press, up and down example of expertise and matchless writing time and again.

But you know when someone loathes you. Without you having done anything. Just automatic animus.

And there I was, time and again, so polite, so upbeat, so professional. I sent an entire book proposal for a volume on The Curse of the Cat People, a film I published an essay on that, well, let's say it was kind of good, which didn't even merit a response from this woman.

I've also occasionally sent along a published piece, like this essay on Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow. Have a read.

Ever seen a piece that good about a film? And I mean ever. When have you ever read any nonfiction like that? Any "critical" writing like that? Anything at all like that?

I sent her a recent op-ed in the New York Daily News on D.W. Griffith. Ever see any op-eds in major newspapers about film directors born in the nineteenth century? Doesn't happen, does it? Think anyone else could do that? Have ideas so fresh and current and relevant to now that such a piece could be written to run where that one did? Who else could do that?

I don't want to document everything here, spell it out, lay it out, present the facts, the truths, share what happens with the emails, divulge how other people were given what they were, their qualifications, their writing, what it really came down to...my over-qualifications, my writing, the side by side examples...I really don't.

But what do you expect me to do? Just take it? Think I deserve it? I'm put in such an untenable situation. Because obviously I can't just take it, and think I deserve it, because that would be insane. How stupid would I have to be, how much would I have to hate and disrespect myself, to go along with that?

Unfortunately, these people typically can't get out of their own way even if they wanted to. There's a truck barreling down on a deer. A deer that's been up to no good. In this metaphor, the deer, not wanting to get splattered, could say, "My bad, I'm sorry you feel that way, can we talk?" and then the air is cleared--even if it's just because someone doesn't want the truth about them out there and is protecting their own hide--and you get to run the great story or you get the great book that could actually do something and move some units--like a book on A Hard Day's Night by me in the BFI Film Classics series would--and you get the credit for that, too.

What's the problem? I didn't steal your wife, I didn't screw over your kid, I didn't shove you down a flight of stairs. I didn't do anything to you. I don't associate with any of these people. I don't interact with them. I write. I create. That's what I do. Any interaction with publishing types I do via email for my work and for business. I do the amount that is necessary and have never wished to do any more than that. There's never been an email I wanted to send that I didn't have to. It takes away from what I would rather be doing. I'm not looking to send anyone, ideally, more than one email.

I didn't hook up with you at a conference and ghost you, I don't rape people like so many of these people do, I'm not some shitty writer, I'm not some pretentious douchebag, I'm not some asshole.

(I'll put something up here in the next day or two about Lydia Davis and how her agent gets in touch with editors and threatens them after sending along like twenty of her idiotic "stories." You think I do shit like that? It's just me; just me working my ass off; alone. And these people don't hate her...because they're like that. They're made of the same stuff. And they're not like me and I'm not like them; which we all know here, and which is the problem).

I just want to do my work and then out it comes. The work that speaks for itself in terms of its quality.

But that takes social skills on the deer's part, and some courage, I guess we'll call it. I'm right here. I'm approachable. I'll hear you out. I'm not interested in being your friend. The work is all I care about. Not being in bed with you, not being your crony. I don't need to like you, respect you, and I don't care if you hate me, so long as everything is just about the work and business. I don't need an apology. I know what things are and have been. I answer to my work and to the idea of moving forward.

The deer doesn't want to get run over, but it adopts a policy of hoping for the best despite impact being imminent. And then there's blood all over the road. And the parts can't be put back inside the body. You don't think Raluca Albu would love to go back in time to that day she pulled what she pulled and not pull it? Do you know how many people come here and go through those posts? What was the point? Where did that hate come from? Was it worth acting out on that totally irrational hatred? People end up thinking you're unstable, bad at your job, a bigot, twisted, envious.

All for what? Because you hate someone who did nothing to you and who is great at what they do?

That's insane.

I don't want to have to do it. Now I'm a point where I think I all but have to and I can't in good faith--with myself--delay much longer, because it is what it is. I'm not going to lose respect for myself by letting people get away with what they're trying to get away with. Then I'm like an accomplice. And I have to live with myself. And I need to be a certain person morally in order to do that. I can't think I tucked tail and ran, I can't think that I'm a coward, and I can't live with myself knowing I didn't do the right thing.

Look, I get it. People can tell themselves just about anything and get themselves to believe it if they really want to. A person can warp their thoughts so that they go something like, "This isn't what the series is all about," but that's in private, with emotions shaping those thoughts. Feelings. Animus. A reaction to what someone else has done a lot of that maybe they haven't done. How a person looks. Their politeness. Their cheerful, energetic spirit. What have you.

But when it all goes up on these pages, it's like something in a court room. A presentation of facts and truths. The feelings don't work the same way then. They don't wield the same influence on the thoughts that they might have before. The clear light of day--and knowing others are seeing those undeniable facts and truths--has a way of working like that. And then it's too late. It's not actually too late. You could still stay something to me. Even out of your own selfishness and simply not wanting that information to be out there about you, embarrassing as it is. As inculpating as it is.

I'll still move forward with you, chances are, unless you're Mark Warren. There's just one rule: Nothing comes down from these pages once it goes up. But as I've said: Once you're here, it's not one and done. I'll keep keeping after you even after you're in the ground. I'll make sure that this is ultimately what--and all--you are known for.

Do I seem like someone who tires or stops or forgets? Do I even seem like someone who sleeps? Or do I seem like someone who does more work and more writing than it is possible to believe a human can do? It's not like writing in these pages causes me to write less in my formal work--rather the opposite. Which I wasn't necessarily expecting when I began this journal in 2018, but that's how it's gone.

But there wouldn't be more if a halt is called, asked for. There wouldn't be those posts that there was going to be. Things can be turned around. Different things can be said. Favorable things. Again: all I care about is the work and moving forward.