Tuesday 10/1/24
They can play all their games, give out their bullshit awards, dry hump each to death in their sinecure-sandboxes, but there isn't anyone amongst them who reads the likes of this--just a little something I've been working on--and doesn't know that they could never come anywhere close to being able to do it.
Your fiction can be in The New Yorker 100 times, you can have a new Pulitzer in your back pocket, a spiffy Guggenheim, a fresh MacArthur genius grant--there's a laugh of laughs--and what I know is that when you read this, here's what you think: I could never do that. I don't have that kind of ability.
He was unsure what to do now. Panic spread inside of him like something that had escaped from out of cold storage and overrun everywhere else. No joke would help despite that being what jokes are supposed do do. 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.
He felt like speaking against a race of beings that included both himself and this boy he’d known for so long who had hurt his child. Boys were the worst, that was true. Believe me, I get it, he’d say, warming himself up to the task.
All of the pain boys cause. The pain that they ultimately bring on themselves in the hurting of others, which they somehow can’t see, despite the connection being no less in evidence than some bridge across which an entire battalion had just marched. This boy probably knew, though. Stupid boys.
But as for tonight, it wasn’t his fault, he told himself, it really wasn’t. What was he supposed to do? What was he supposed to say? What wasn’t he supposed to do? Whose trust wasn’t he supposed to keep?
Then again, boys had an excuse for everything. The transgression—active, passive, planned, happened upon, allowed, it didn’t matter—had yet to be invented to stop a boy from having an excuse. Nor was there a single conceivable charge, however valid, for which a boy, some boy, wouldn’t first, and perhaps always, respond, “But…”
The man suppressed a sigh. It struck him in doing so that he’d never wished to be misunderstood less, as if a possible outcome of that misunderstanding was the sealing off of a precious passageway down which he’d never be able to walk again. But silence was every bit as bad. Problems call for solutions, just as love seeks to undo pain, whether it can or not, and often all the more when it can’t.
There it is. Standing in the sharpest contrast to everything in an industry in which nothing is real. There isn't a writer who thinks they're anywhere close to as good. There isn't an agent who thinks they represent a writer who is close to as good. There isn't a publisher who puts out a book by a writer they think is close to as good. There isn't an editor who publishes a story in which they think the writing is close to that good.
That's the real untouchable deal.
None of this manufactured bullshit. None of the lies. None of the fakery, none of the fuckery. None of the evil, none of the log-rolling, the hooking up. None of the interchangeable, meaningless, garbage work.
Just writing on a completely different level.
And it's the likes of that--which is but one small part of one story, of which I have hundreds all as good--which they don't want the world to see.
That, by the way, is from "Go and Come Back," which is in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, which is all about women and girls, and often narrated by them, and is the best book ever written about women and/or girls, and it's by this guy.
I'll probably finish it tomorrow.
And what are you going to do if you're one of these people? You going to write something as strong as that? No you won't. You can't. You'd never be able to, and you know it. So for you, it has to be all about other things. You'd have no chance for anything otherwise.
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