Tuesday 1/30/24
I look at Substacks for the gathering of information. Sometimes gathering information is simply seeing what people do, or confirming what I think they probably do.
There are millions of these bad writers without an iota of ability or anything of interest to say who have a Substack newsletter, which really means blog that people then pay to subscribe to.
What they post is so predictable. A bad writer who pretends that Diane Williams is a good writer posts bland, predictable entries about writers like that which Brooklyn writers purport to care about though of course they don't because no one could. We'll get into Diane Williams more in exposing some people. One thing we like to say here about a writer like Williams is that you can suck as much, but you can't suck more. It's tough. (Even as I write that I find myself thinking, "What about the cat guy at The Missouri Review or Motorollah? J. Robert Lennon? It's like the league leaders of sucking, but in reality, when you look at any of this, it's all that bad.)
At the most--the very most--such a person who is hooked up, handed things, for the sole reason of being one of these people, has not an iota of talent, is a bad and often creepy person, might have one other thing they post about. Films, for instance, and the kind of film they post about would be exactly the kind of films you'd expect from them.
There is never a single spark of life evident from the brains of these people, of which there are millions, and they're all bad at writing. Millions of these people who have nothing to give the world, who don't produce art, entertainment, anything of value, who have killed off reading in the world--it's done, right now, man, no one reads any of this, people read next to nothing, and they have just about lost the ability to read, and even to sit there and do something like reading for a half hour--then work the scam of academia and the MFA system and teach others to do the exact same thing, and this is the only way they bring in money.
Think about that. Think about that galling irony. The only way these people--and there are so many of them, I'm not using that "millions" hyperbolically--can make any money with anything related to writing is to have gotten everyone in the world to stop reading by creating this shit, feeding on this shit, chewing, spitting, spit in my mouth, thanks, let me pay you to teach me this, let me take your money to teach you this.
It is a total scam that is against writing and reading. All done so that broken, empty people without ability can lie to themselves about this thing they are not and never will be, and which they care so little about in actuality that they won't work hard at it in the slightest.
And they don't care that no one reads. They don't care about readers or getting people to read by giving them something worth reading. They care about their lies, and their system, and being enabled, and this self-con of a life which is not a life.
I see all of these articles--and I'll get into some of them specifically on here--about how even people who are nominated for the Booker Prize can't make any money writing.
Not once have I ever seen one of these pieces get to the root of the issue. They blame the world, people, technology, short attention spans, etc. etc. etc.
These articles get clicks because they're so doom and gloom, and people are miserable and self-defeating and usually want to feel sorry for themselves (and get points and likes and followers for doing so) rather than heaven forbid, try, or, nightmare of nightmares, try without a guarantee that anything will come from all that effort.
It's like when someone who's forty whines about how old they are. You're not old, you just want to stuff your face on the couch and not go to the gym and this is the bullshit you tell yourself so that you can tap out of life.
The above--technology, short attention spans, and the Twitterization of the human mind--are true things, certainly. I'm not suggesting otherwise. They're certainly problems in need of solving. But they're very defeatist these articles. If you want to write, yours is to be a life of poverty, etc., is the principle takeaway from all of them, and all you can do is turn to teaching in the MFA system, and how much longer will that be around?
And you know what none of these pieces ever say? I'll say it here. I'm going to be the first person to say this publicly, and probably at all:
The writing sucks. Almost all of it sucks.
That is the biggest issue. Those books nominated for the Booker Prize? That writing sucks. I could take anything from those books and put it up here in a prose off and everyone would be laughing at how bad it is the same as everyone has been laughing about how bad the Motorollah shit is.
No one is looking at these things for what they are. Most people aren't looking at any of it--as in, they don't see it. Why would they? Why should they? There is so much bad work, and so many bad writers, it's like there's a greater quantity of those two things right now than there is water in all of the oceans. If there is something good there, how would you ever know it? Especially when efforts would be made by the people of that system to bury that work and that kind of writer in the deepest trench on offer? Then there are people who read things that win awards or were hyped. That's why they bought those things to read. Why do you think those things won those awards? We've gone into this time and again in these pages. They didn't win jack shit because they were amazing. Or because they didn't suck. It was wholly about other things. But the member of the public doesn't know this. Why would they think it? They're going to think, "This is the best, and I hated trying to read it." They'll be done. Why read? Why stick at that? You see these comments, too, where people fault themselves. "I guess I wasn't smart enough..."
No. That's not why you didn't like reading Jamel Brinkely's bad book. You didn't like reading it because he's a poor writer. He's so stiff, tin-eared, syntactically awkward, boring, predictable, empty, creaky, bland, joyless, lifeless, emotionless, humorless, tedious as a writer. It's the opposite of good writing. That was the problem. It's not you. The reviewer at The New York Times Book Review wasn't trying to be honest with you. They're perpetuating a system that they're a part of, and hyping someone they're like (which is why they were assigned that book to review, if they're not on staff--that's how they do it; if a Black woman fresh out of her MFA program has her first book come out and it's hyped up the ass by these lying shills, then the Black woman who was last year's version of this Black woman is given that book to review and what do you think she's going to say?). That reviewer isn't smarter than you, more able to assess these things than you. They're on the clock with an agenda. So are the Nobel Prize people, the Guggenheim people, clearly The New Yorker's fiction department, Sigrid Rausing at Granta, and on and on and on. You're not the problem because you had that experience that I'd have, that anyone who is being at all honest would say that they had.
People think there's no direct correlation between why no one reads and the actual work because there are all of these other culprits to readily blame and they're the things people actually think about, know something about, and are familiar with. Technology. The internet. Short attention spans.
But there is no more direct cause for why people don't read than for the reason that there is so little being produced that is worth reading, and it's been this way for a long time. You can't underestimate the attritional effect of that over the course of decades, which has also made it harder for anyone to observe and recognize this reason for what it is, because it's buried beneath so many other things in terms of what our eyes, and our styles of thinking, cause us to look to. But just because one thing is buried doesn't mean that that thing at the very bottom isn't the biggest thing at the entire dig site.
But who can see this? Do you know why so few people can see this?
I'll answer that second question with a question: Because who cares?
The person on the street does not care. By that I mean the public. The people of the system don't care. Without their system being the way it is, they're done. They are finished. Do something else. You're not this. It's over. You weren't good at it, you didn't have anything to offer. Move on. Who does that leave? Well, kind of just me. I shouldn't say just me--because there are people reading this this morning who think some version of these things and have been nodding along, and people out there thinking, "Finally, someone is getting to the truth and putting it in a way that everyone can understand."
Here's what I believe: The public could care. I'm not saying that they automatically don't care because they've rejected great work and reading such work cannot be for them. I'm saying they don't care in part because they don't know, the same as I could say that I don't care about something I've never heard about, or heard very little about. But if I wasn't in the dark, maybe I'd care a great deal--so much.
I look at Big Asks: Six Novelettes About Acceptance, which starts with "Big Bob and Little Bob." I know that millions and millions of people, millions of members of the public, would love that story. I know this. I know that about "Best Present Ever." To experience those works in a circumstance where they've been set up to succeed--for example, if that work had notoriety, and it was talked about, and someone who hadn't read it was going to check it out now on account of what they'd seen or heard about it--would be to love them. I don't believe that could be avoided. Sure, you have people who want to hate, but that's more about what someone else represents to them, rather than what that thing is. You don't count that person as part of the data. Not really. They're up to something else.
The issue for me isn't what something is not and what it can't do with millions and millions of people--it's creating that favorable circumstance, or even just having them know about it. Because no one does. This world here of the publishing system exists at the outermost extent of the margins of human existence. Of our lives and society and culture and world right now.
That person above with the Alaska Quarterly Review story? That's fine for them, that outermost portion of the margin. It's the same either way, because what they are, all they are, is a person who can say, "I have a story in the spring issue of the Alaska Quarterly Review" and note/boast in the first line of their Twitter bio, "Repped by Huntington W. Broadback of Jerkwad and Associates," never mind that they're fifty-three and have made a total of $125 from their writing in their life and will obviously never make that much more. They offer so little. It's not like, well, if this kind of writing they do isn't going gangbusters, they can do their sports stuff, or their opinion stuff, or go on TV, whatever. It's one super limited thing that each person almost always does poorly.
It wasn't because of that person's writing or prospects that HWB took them on as a client. It's because that person was like HWB, and HWB could play expert, coach, leader, and HWB likes that--with the right kind of person. It was never about readers and reaching them and money/business because clearly that writer is never going to make any money, never has, and there's zero reason to think they ever will.
Do you know how many writers I know who have done nothing, who will do nothing, who can do one thing--review "literary fiction," write personal essays--who have agents? Do you know what would happen if I wrote that agent? I wouldn't hear back. Because I'm something else. Nowhere is it more true than in publishing, right now, that people want people like them. That's what it all comes down to. That, connections, checking boxes, and mediocrity. Mediocre isn't even really mediocre. Do you know what I mean? A mediocre high school baseball player means something much different--and much better--than a mediocre writer in 2024.
Pretty much all of this is written by the same kind of broken, talentless, incurious, pretentious, cowardly, fragile, monodic, clueless, uneducated--I mean actually educated, not degree collecting--lifeless pod person without any imagination who never put the time in, and who has never written anything of actual value.
And no one thinks that that might be the biggest issue? This elephant is tearing up the room. He just ate your spouse. He's obliterated the house. He's knocked down everything on the street. And you can't see him? He's not an amoeba.
If you're already in this system, you have to be so willingly ignorant, so deep in denial, so steeped in a diseased environment as to have become an extension of that environment in human form, and maybe just plain dumb not to see the elephant in this room: That there is nothing worth reading and there is no one lined up and able to produce writing worth reading because it's been decades and decades and decades now of this MFA nonsense. The next great writer, if there is ever to be another great writer, might not even be born yet.
I'm lashed to the wheel here. I'm on my course. Nothing will knock me from it. But everything else, just about, is this.
You know what else you have to be? I'll tell you: You have to be someone who needs it to be this way or else you can't call yourself this thing and think of yourself a certain way.
Let's say God came down and made an offer: He said, "Okay, listen up you writers, I'm going to give you a rating of how good you actually are as a writer, and it's the honest to God's truth, because I'm God. Don't you want to know?" Then he goes into this thing about how he's real, and there he is, so everyone accepts that there's this guy and he can fly and do whatever miracle and everything. Just so we're all playing along here for argument's sake.
Then God says, "Those of you who rate below a...7...will need to give up all of your bullshit and you can't be a member of this community that you all need so much and it's just over for you, you'll be dropped by your agent who didn't take you on because they thought you were any good anyway, you can't play-act at AWP, no more books will come out from that press that puts out your books that no one understands word one of...but you don't have to get the rating. It's up to you. But if you really believe in a world with the best writing possible, step up, and do your bit for the cause, get your rating and we'll get rid of the chaff!"
Now how many of these millions of people I'm talking about would flee as fast as they could in terror rather than stick around and get that rating? It would be pretty much all of them, right? Because then you couldn't bullshit yourself and bullshit your graduate program writing students you were teaching this crap to and bullshit your ego and try and Spackle in some of your myriad cracks by saying, "I have a fiction piece in the spring digital-only issue of the Alaska Quarterly Review, things are going well, that must be a good story, it's a very prestigious literary journal. Oh, look, a penny on the ground--I should pick it up, because that's more than I was paid for my story that must be great, right, I hope it's great, at the prestigious literary journal. I can add it to my indoor scarf collection fund so that I can make sure I dress like a real writer and people will know what I am. Speaking of which, where is my Paris Review tote bag? Today would be a good day to sit in a cafe and pretend I'm writing or reading that new Lydia Davis book so that people can think I'm smart."
How about taking some responsibility? How about some looking in the mirror? It's everyone and everything else's fault but it can't be that all of this sucks because you have the same kind of person being taught to do the same useless thing the same stupid way?
I don't know, seems like a problem, no?
Someone out there might be thinking, "He's talking about me! He sent me that story"--or that book--"and now I'll have my revenge on him!"
First of all: Am I? Secondly, if that's you, try to be better than that. We always have the choice. Thirdly, if that's you and that's how you insist on being, you will go up in these pages. You will be exposed for what you are by the person who knows all about you, there will be a comparison between the work you put forward and what you were offered, and also a juxtaposition of what that other writer has done in their life, against what this one has done. It's always better to try to make a positive difference by moving forward with a great work.
And as I look at these Substack blogs, it's like the people writing them don't have any curiosity about anything at all, no passion, no drive, no need to know, to explore, to range, to discover. They just chew and chew and chew the same meat, and then spit it from their mouth into the mouth of another person in this same valueless group to chew and spit in following, and on it goes, chew, spit, chew, spit, chew, spit, that's right, spit that right in my mouth. It's like they'd each die if they ever went out and found things on their own and engaged with the world with any curiosity. The world of anything.
There is never anything interesting. There is no variety, freshness. There is no depth, no insight, no quality writing. No life, no humor, no reason to actually give a damn what that person, who is one of millions, is putting down. There's not that much content even of this poor kind. And people pay money to subscribe and I don't believe there is a single one of them who likes what they see any more than I would. That's not why they do it.
Here's a way of looking at a dominant theme/trend of commerce right now: When people pay for something, they want to feel like they're paying themselves. That the money is going to them. An extension of them. That justifies the financial transaction for them.
The bad, boring writer, for example, pays for whatever--the book, the Substack subscription--from the other bad, boring writer. It's a form of self-justification. That is what they're paying for. (And then there are people who allot a certain amount of money to smart things, like they should make some attempt on that score. They grow bored immediately, and come back less and less. They're acting out of what they think of as some form of obligation. They have to pick some people to keep up with.) What people don't want to do is give money to someone or something that they think is above them and that they look at and which deepens their self-doubt or makes them feel inferior.
You see this in everything. It's what determines who gets the money. Are you like me? Do you think like me? Could I say or write what you say or write? Have I? Do I constantly? Do you say the same boring things that I say?
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