Why

Friday 7/26/24

I'm floored by the amount of talent some radio actors possessed in what they did. The range of their characters and characterizations. They understood their characters and the texts so well. They used nuance and what a singer would call phrasing to convey maximum meaning. They'd be working so much, too, and yet they'd still nail each character.

A buddy of mine launched her first official business yesterday, an independent operation in the beverage industry. It's called Amelia's Lemonade, the logo being a big A, and is conveniently located at the end of her driveway. There was lots of purple in the decor and the owner even wore a purple shirt for the launch, of which I was texted a photo.

I was thinking last night about how unusual it is to be working on so many books at once, and books so different from each other at that. Some of them have been going on for a while. I could have just done one, gotten it done, then moved on to another, but I haven't done that. Part of the reason is the position I'm in right now. What I have right now doesn't matter. Something that I do have can be wasted, in that it would have to come out again after anyway, when the situation is different, when it would have the chance it deserves. There's a certain degree of abeyance at play. Of circling. And yet paradoxically there's a moving forward all the same. I understand the situation, and I'm acting accordingly, or at least as I have determined best at present, on behalf of the work's future and my own.

I'm looking at this abysmal piece on Alice Coltrane this morning as part of something upcoming on here. I'll be exposing someone repeatedly, without let up. Not just once, not just thoroughly. Indefinitely.

It's so easy to prove discrimination. My history with this venue went back fifteen years. They even openly support and hook up someone who wrote me a threatening note about murder. And it's just so easy to prove everything. Why do it? Your envy of someone better than you is that great that you can't stop yourself and you'll even risk your career? This is a branding. This person will just be branded. It's how and the only way they'll be known.

I confess, I'm overwhelmed in looking at this Alice Coltrane piece because every line of it is just so poorly written. Laughably so. What do I mean by that? You can read this out loud to someone and they'll laugh over how bad it is. And it goes without saying that there's no insight, no ideas. Right now I'm just talking about not fucking up every single clause--in other words, I'm not even talking about being good, but rather not being a disaster of a writer--and of course you have an editor who hasn't any clue either, who is letting this into print and not fixing anything because that editor is an incompetent bigot who doesn't even understand how basic grammar works, what words mean, and they were also just automatically publishing this anyway because of who it came in from. It was in the bag. But what's in the bag here is shit.

This writer--and it's easy to show their connection to the editor--has no idea what they're doing. I say I'm overwhelmed because you want to pick examples that highlight how inept the writer is (I should say, though, that with the fiction in the prose offs, I don't look around that much, because I don't want to subject myself to Motorollah-type stuff from Sigrid Rausing's Granta--and that's how bad all of this is everywhere--longer than I have to), but I could do the whole thing. I could spin the bottle, so to speak, and wherever it stopped I could then take that sentence from this Alice Coltrane piece and cite it on here and everyone would know how terrible it was. It's like amateur hour. Inviting someone from the crowd to come up on stage and perform for everyone, but that person, in this analogy, is drunk out of their minds, too.

How dumb do you have to be, and how possessed--taken over--by envy must you be, too, to think you're going to get away with doing me like that? You have to be so unbalanced, and so ruled by your hate for someone who is everything you are not and could never be that if you have to hurt or destroy yourself to do wrong against them, you'll still do it. That's like a crazy person. A very stupid crazy person. And it just all proves itself. All you need to do is put it out there, do a little copy and pasting, state a few facts. Then it's busted, proven, irrefutable. It's just crazy. Why?

Also: Imagine being so bad at writing that it's impossible for anyone to defend you? This Alice Coltrane piece is a good example of that. And obviously the Granta story. So what you're doing, then, as a writer like this, or as someone like this editor I'm talking about, or Sigrid Rausing, whom I'll be talking about more, soon, is predicated on darkness, on your work never being pulled out into the light, for people to see it and examine it.

Because that's all anyone else would need to do, right? I simply have to take the likes of Motorollah in Granta and show it to you. That's it. Everything these people do, they do in darkness, away from prying eyes, and they're so arrogant, and stupid, and ruled by forces of no good, that it doesn't occur to them, or they don't do anything about it if it does, that a light could actually be shone on this straight-up crap.

Think about that: All of these writers, these editors, they're banking on no one giving a fuck up writing. That's how they want it and how they have to have it.

Isn't that just insane?

Because if people cared, if they checked any of this out as something they might want in their lives, these other people in this system would be fucked. They couldn't even go through the motions of their bullshit. Their Guggenheims, Pulitzers, their hyped authors, their payola puff piece review set-ups. They'd be laughed out of the room of society, of culture. People would learn more about why things were done, like with Lorin Stein Lorin Steining writers with the ol' Hollister and why what appeared where it did, why so and so got that deal, why this talentless and also terrible person had thousands of these other people just like them water-carrying on their behalf, and the people doing these things for these reasons would never work again in any non-menial labor field. They wouldn't work there either, because of the trust funds and old money at their disposal, but they'd be known as pariahs and punchlines, the same way that "Motorollah, Motorollah, Motorollah" has become a punch line on here. Do you know how many people say it to me? Actually happens quite often. Motorollah, Motorollah, Motorollah!

Lorin Stein liked to have sex with The Paris Review's interns, by the way. I have some words from the man himself about what it takes to be a good intern--which included fucking him, as the editor--that we'll get to.

Readers are witnesses. These people, though, have killed off readers and so they think they've killed off witnesses. There's no one to see what they're doing. And they're mostly isn't--not right now. But there is me. I pull what they do in darkness out into the street, where the light shines, where people can see it. When that happens, it's impossible to defend the work or the actions of the people who put that work forward, back in the darkness.

The other day a little girl in the Monument asked me what number of climbs I was on. I kept passing her and her family. “This is number four,” I told her. “Four!” she said. I replied, “You don’t want to try and do it a few more times?” “No way!” she declared.

Did five circuits in the Monument, walked three miles, and did 100 push-ups each of the last two days. There was a really friendly crew in the Monument yesterday, actually. That's pretty rare. And get this--a couple was actually doing circuits together. I think there was one other time in all of these years that I've seen anyone working out in there. She was really fit and he was really big, but he was doing it, so credit for that. He kept moving to the side so I could pass and he was really friendly. Even patted me on the back.

His girlfriend, or his wife, I'm not sure what, started telling everyone how many times I was going up and down, and then other people were talking about it, and the number was never accurate. It got exaggerated. One person had asked me. But it was like this tale being told from the top to the bottom with people passing it along, a game of telephone but with an obelisk rather than cupped hands. That's how you play that, right? You cup your hand, you whisper in someone's ear, they pass it on to the person next to them, then when you get back to the very beginning, the message is this other thing than what it started as. It was kind of like that.

I have all of these different stairs, of course, and I picked out some new ones to try, too, near Copps Hill Burying Ground, but for me there is nothing like Monument stairs. That is my place of places, stair-wise. You're breathing so deeply, it's hard, but you keep going, with the full, deep use of your lungs. You feel like you're accomplishing something.

For me, what that is, is part of a bigger cause. It's a piece. There are a lot of pieces to that cause. Some are bigger than others. But they're all a part of it in their important way.