Everything wrong with publishing: Guggenheim winner Willard Spiegelman, aka, "Uncle Willard"

Thursday 4/23/26

We're just going to keep talking about what these people are about and what they're up to. The twisted ways in which they are wired. How corrupt they are. Thieving, petty. Unbalanced. The real reasons why most things happen in publishing. The classism. The workings of the system of incestuous evil.

Remember Eric Gibson? He's the arts editor at The Wall Street Journal who thought it'd be fun to chide me about how his paper had created a multi-year nightmare for me with the IRS and the Massachusetts Department of Revenue by adding multiple zeroes to the number they reported to the government that I had earned with them, while sending me a tax form that had the right--which is to say, very different--amount. As a result, I had the very frightening storm cloud that comes with being told you owe the government six figures hanging over my head for years, until I could finally resolve the matter.

Ha, ha, ha, we forced a Kafkan nightmare on Fleming, ha, ha, ha.

Eric Gibson is clueless as an editor. He hooks up people like him. That's the real name of the publishing game. Granted, Gibson is far better than James Taranto, the opinion editor of The Wall Street Journal, who, in addition to being such a bully that he once yelled at me for starting an an email to him by asking how he was--as in, "Hi James, How are you?" before getting into the business-at-hand--and has such deficient gaps in his knowledge that he told me he'd never heard of the Care Bears--which I had referenced in a piece--just as he had never heard of Buster Keaton's film, The General. (Granted, the guy looks how he looks, but he has to be in his sixties.) And wait until you see the comedy of errors that was the back-and-forth with these people regarding an op-ed about Hank Aaron.

I don't believe there's anything James Taranto actually knows save how to be a massive dick (even if his own is FUPA-obscured).

This is when he wasn't telling me how much my op-ed pieces sucked, as he published quite a few of them, making this kind of remark whenever he felt like to to the guy who is clearly the best at that kind of writing if we actually look at the work itself; you know, the ninety-seven masterful opinion pieces unlike any other opinion pieces by anyone else that he has in print with the vast array of outlets.

Eric Gibson, meanwhile, is so out of touch, and so ignorant when it comes to musical art, that he also rebuked me for using the term "chops" in reference to jazz musicians, a term he had never encountered, or didn't remember if he had. He said it was unworthy of the paper. Low class.

See? Class, class, class.

But this is just an ignorant, uneducated, fool of a tiny man.

How do you get to be the arts editor of The Wall Street Journal and not know that this is an accepted term, used over the course of a century plus, which features in professional articles, in universities, and in books, including those put out by scholarly presses?

He made as if I had randomly picked it up on the street and decided that, as a jazz expert, who has written about the music at the highest level, hundreds of times, in dozens of venues over decades, to slap it into a piece.

Clueless.

You know who a guy like Eric Gibson is going to love? Willard Spiegelman. Aka, Uncle Willard. One creepy, comically condescending guy.

Why is he going to love him and hook him up?

Birds of a twisted feather. The idea powering nearly everything that happens here.

Let me tell you about Mr. Spiegelman.

He was the editor of a literary quarterly called Southwest Review, which is based out of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. It is published--as one would expect--four times a year. The payment is essentially nothing. It isn't for people. It isn't really meant to be read. It's just supposed to be this thing that exists as a few scattered copies in dusty English departments and for professors to get another line in their CVs and maybe garner a mention in a biannual staff newsletter.

As we're going through this information about Willard Spiegelman, I want you to keep in mind that the person who succeeded Spiegelman as the editor of Southwest Review, Greg Brownderville, is even worse. He's going to get his own entry on here. But file that away as you read what follows.

A long time ago, I approached Spiegelman with a story when he was the editor of Southwest Review. At that point in my career, I'd published thousands of pieces. You'd have been hard pressed to name a venue in which my work hadn't appeared, and that means something else entirely with me because I was never one of these people, never accepted by them, and every last publication was some Herculean feat. Because ninety-nine times out of 100, these people tried to bar my way. All along the way.

There was never, "Oh, you should send me something, we'd love to have it." No playing grab ass at some cocktail party and someone saying, "You should meet blah blah" and then, boom, there's the story in The Paris Review, which is how is typical of how these things work.

Every publication was an act of massive overcoming, usually many years in the making. Perseverance. Endurance. When it was so damn obvious the quality of what I had, be it piece, story, book, idea. And the track record. The last stack of ten links from the last fortnight. While being shat on, lied to, stolen from, discriminated against. Blamed in the ultimate example of victim blaming. In a "business" which is almost all about classism, quid pro quo, shitty, talentless people hooking up shitty, talentless people, envy, pettiness, sight-unseen publication, galling displays of the nastiest attitudes, and insane displays of the most childish versions of power.

You know what this guy, Willard Spiegelman, said to me?

He yelled at me for using his first name.

Because that didn't show him enough respect.

Beginning an email with, "Dear Willard."

That's what you're dealing with here. Despotic, delusional people. But wait, because it gets better.

Within days, this same man turns around and asks me to send him naked photos of myself.

And to call him...

Uncle Willard.

From "How dare you address the mighty me by my first name" to "Call me Uncle Willard!!!!"

Are you surprised that he'd be a favorite of Eric Gibson? That's a grand for one of those quick Wall Street Journal arts pieces. EG can't give enough of them to good old UW, never mind that UW is nothing special as a writer. Sure, there are worse writers, but when that's about the best someone can say about your work, how good can your work possibly be?

Won't keep you from getting a Guggenheim, though. This is how you get a Guggenheim. By being like this, and one of them.

All of these people have Guggenheims it seems like. What has Willard Spiegelman ever done? Been the editor of a literary quarterly? Published some pieces in The Wall Street Journal thanks to his Eric Gibson hook up?

Look at his writing. That's amazing? You're not going to think it's amazing. The Guggenheim people didn't think it was amazing. They didn't even look at it. They don't look at any of the writing by these people. That has nothing to do with who is getting a Guggenheim. There's nothing impressive about this guy. He's just one of them. That'll get you the stuff. That's how you get the stuff. At present, it's the only way to get the stuff.

I can do a version of what I just did here with this guy with virtually everyone in this system of incestuous evil. What you would think of as normality scarcely exists here. Anything non-twisted.

Can you imagine yelling at someone for using your name?

This wasn't me as Dennis the Menace coming over to Mr. Wilson's yard and saying, "Hey, George, publish my shit." I don't want to list out any of the places I'd been in at that point--when I was in my thirties--as if any of that really means anything at all, but you know, anyone here would know, people like this knew. And you get into that in a first letter, too, don't you? That's just professionalism.

Call me Uncle Willard.

Something of mine ran in Southwest Review under UW's watch. Or a couple things. I'd have to look. I wouldn't have cleared $100, though. I'd done what I'd done in my career, I wrote circles around people like this, and I acted professionally, as I always did and do. And I got treated like that, spoken to like that, and then solicited, right? But not for material. Not prose material, anyway.

And this is before we get into everything with the easily provable bigot that is Greg Brownderville, who makes creepy old Uncle Willard look like a solid, reasonable guy by comparison.