Wednesday 12/27/23
Hitchcock's British pictures are far superior to his American ones, and so are some of his silents. I find myself thinking less and less of Hitchcock's American movies as I go along. The ending of Psycho is one of the worst in all of cinema--it's just some gasbag of a man talking on and on at you. In British films such as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, there are actual people and you care about them. The characters in Hitchcock's American films are more like characters in a James Bond film. They're stock agents of the thriller proceedings. Thriller pawns. The movies are almost all surface. Alfred Hitchcock Presents is also richer at times than his American movies. There's greater depth and wit. A devilish playfulness.
I look at thirty profiles in a row on a dating site, and without going too much into details, I end up thinking, for all thirty out of those thirty times, "Do any of you try at anything? Do you put any effort into anything in life?"
How lazy are people? Do they make the worst decisions as a matter of policy? Can they not lift a finger? Can't think of a single thing to say? You have no words of your own? Can't ever do an exercise or experiment with a salad?
Then I wonder if they expend much effort elsewhere, and where might that be. Is the reason they're shaped like a sponge and can't say a single thing, let alone a solitary sentence that speaks to who they uniquely are, what they care about as the one person in the world who is them, because they try so hard in other areas of their life and there's nothing left over for these other things?
But I know that's not the case.
One of these pear-ditzes will have a Let's Go Brandon sweatshirt on, the next will have a photo of the Obamas as their profile photo.
Always the same shit, again, again, again.
Wake up early today, look at the phone, see some horrific account from a cop about being the first person at a drunk driving crash scene. Cop finds a woman--the victim--with a broken neck, dead in her car, fluid--which was the word he used, so it didn't sound like blood, but rather something from her brain--coming out her ears, two crushed car seats in the back, which, it turned out, belonged to the two girls who she had dropped off at daycare.
You are an ogre if you drink and drive. That part really bothers me in It's a Wonderful Life. George Bailey could have wiped out a family that night, instead of crashing into a tree. I don't think you should ever be allowed to drive again if you're busted for drunk driving. I don't want to get my house back in Rockport, and be out of this hell, and get killed by some drunken asshole as I'm taking a Sunday drive along the coast after a day of creating ageless art. There should be much stiffer penalties. Can't drive for a year after a first offense, for example. Then if it happens again, done for good. But for me it'd be one and done for all-time. You're basically telling the world you don't care if you kill someone or some people when you drink and drive, or that the risk of doing so isn't a deal breaker for you. "Eh, I'll roll the dice on your life, and the lives of your family members and friends."
Then I saw this video of a guy at an airport hassling a Delta employee for misgendering him, which he called a "civil rights violation." These people are something else. You're sick. Get some help, maybe. And no, I'm not saying they're sick because they're pretending to be this thing they're not; I'm saying they're sick because of their narcissism. You are so broken, so empty and dead inside, that you need to go around filming people three days before Christmas because they don't know this invented minutiae of your life? This invented, capricious minutiae?
The employee handled it well. It's not easy to work a job like that, or in retail, or at the Starbucks, where narcissistic people act out on you and you have to take it, to whatever degree. I'm sure it's worse now than ever before, and it was never easy to work these jobs, where you're basically someone's slave to do with what they will, and you have to indulge them and go along.
The thing about these misgendering people, too--who always have their phone ready to film this encounter that was completely instigated by them--is that they start addressing everyone else who is their "foe," if you will, by pronouns--"She said blah blah blah"--without ever ascertaining if they're correct.
Gee. I wonder why they do that. Because she is a she and he is a he? Huh. Novel. But it's pretty hypocritical if you're going on and on about how no one checked to see what your preferred pronouns were, as this broken, vain muppet that you are, and yet you automatically refer to everyone else as you please. It's always like this.
Me me me me me me me me me me me me me.
I don't know how I could live with myself if I stood at the register at Starbucks and berated the employee--while filming said berating--and used phrases like "civil rights violation." And by the way: Most of the time, no matter how clearly I say my name, it says Colleen on the side of that cup. I can't conceive of this meaning anything to me one way or the other, save as a depressing indication that people don't read, don't have experiences outside of their little box, because if you did both, you'd know a lot of names, right? And mine's not even that uncommon. But that's beside the point. This doesn't matter.
When people are nothing, because they do nothing, they try nothing, they don't have talent, they don't work hard, they don't sacrifice, the don't put in a good faith effort with whatever they're doing, they invent things to be so that they can call themselves something. And that "thing" becomes their identity. "This is my thing!" When they don't actually have a single thing about them that is real, and which, ironically, they've brought about by building everything on this BS.
Look at all of these people who suck at writing. When you suck at it, you suck at it, and these people in the publishing system suck at it. Then the entire basis of their lives becomes lying to themselves and getting lied to by others, with every single thing they do being geared towards one or the other or both. That is really the crux of their system: Lie to me like I'm lying to me.
Who will be their ultimate enemy? Who will they want to stop from advancing, if and when they can, more than anyone else? The person who is the most legit as that thing they are not. Or, even worse: The person who is a thing so far beyond the bounds of possibility of what they thought a thing like this could be.
What's up? How are we doing today?
There is no one who honestly thinks you're good or could think you're good if you write...I don't know...what should I pick...should we just grab a recent Baffler story that I have not even looked at yet...okay...there is no who honestly thinks you're good or could think you're good if you write like one Miracle Jones with their "Middle Insomnia" in The Baffler that begins
"Only one of us should wear the mask."
"But we printed up the mask for each of us."
"I've decided that it's more shocking if only one of us wears it."
"I thought we wanted a whole army of Aidans running around being astonishing."
"It wouldn't be realistic."
"She's going to know it's not real, you bimbo."
“Also, I’ve decided it should be me who wears it. I’m short. I’m wide. I might as well be a troubled internet boy.”
“Fuck, when you say it like that it’s such a fucking turn on. Can’t believe I’m so horny for a teenage corpse. Come here, little chonk. Get in my rape van!”
Wow. That's awesome. Super. So masterful. What a talented author you are.
Obviously no one actually thinks that.
Want to do a Granta one? How much you want to bet there will be a reference to being in a grad program somewhere in the short story? Okay, let's take a peek...We got something called "Losing Irina," by Aria Aber, put forward by that heiress-bigot, Sigrid Rausing. I'm sure it will be stellar. You ready to be blown away by the opening paragraph of the best writing in the world, from one of the best venues in the world? Because that's how it works, right? Isn't it?
I met Irina that cold, foggy January after I first moved to America. We were both young artists then, enrolled in the same fine arts program, studying under the same professor. I noticed her in a crowd of people getting up to leave after a lecture and though she was all buttoned-up in a brown suede coat and ugly scarf, a pang of envy pulsed through me: she had a face of pure beauty. Irina was skinny in a way I hadn’t been since I’d stopped taking drugs – getting clean was a lie; I wasn’t clean, I just wasn’t using all the time. She had glossy, black hair that hung down to her waist, and her dark eyes were downcast, like those of an ingénue. She could’ve featured in an advertisement for good personal hygiene, I thought. When she noticed me laughing to myself, she smiled as if I were an old friend or relative, and though those first weeks remain dazzling and awkward in my mind, they perhaps serve as an indicator of the course of our friendship.
Whoah! Bull's eye! Arts program reference in the second sentence!
Obviously, that story sucks. That writer sucks at writing. That's not amazing. No one thinks it is. You would get better writing from someone who has never tried to write a story in their life, because something, some trace--even if it's the traciest of traces--of something real, would come through.
This canned shit? This lifeless, canned shit? Even the bloody name of the author is pretentious. And a Virginia Woolf reference. Whoa, another shocker. I'm so taken aback by the originality. And go look at the bio--it's always the same:
Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and is currently based in Los Angeles, California. Her debut book, the poetry collection Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Her first novel GOOD GIRL is forthcoming from Hogarth (US) and Bloomsbury (UK) in 2025
These talentless, pod people from the MFA programs with their connections, their dire, terrible, pointless writing, the same kind of venues automatically, fait accompli-style slapping it in for them because they're their kind of person, their fellowships, their book deals with a publishing house where the editor who bought the book thought no more of it than I would, but again, right kind of person, the kind of person who gets hooked up automatically by a fraudulent, lifeless, talent-free system drone like a Meghan O'Rourke at The Yale Review. This is why no one reads, and, really, why there is no reason for anyone to read what these at-best quasi-humans would call "literature."
Literature, my Boston ass. A fruit roll-up has more to say to you than fiction like this.
I know you're angry now if you're one of these people. If you're Sigrid Rausing. A lot of anger, right? Burning inside. What are you going to do about it? You want to take me on and make a case for how remarkable that was? You want to do that? It's so upsetting to have this person who is so much smarter than you are, who you did dirty, know the truth about you and have no problem saying it, right? Talk about anger. You want to step out in public, in the light of everything, where everyone can see, and pit your mind against mine? You want to point to parts of that story and say, "This is outstanding because..."
Ah, but you can't do it, can you? You would have a while back, and were you also not the worst kind of coward: the sort that needs automatic subservience because of money, position, and title, because that's all there is to you. There's no ability, no depth there, no character, no substance. Is anyone really weaker than such a person, in the ways that actually count? But everything I'm saying is 100% true, and you know it, you know I know it, and you know there's not a thing that you haven't already done that you can do about it.
And this is just going to keep happening until things are what they should be. Discriminating against me, because I can do what I do, on a totally different level, is not one of those things.
The internet is bringing along the end of humanity, by which I mean, humans being human. But narcissism is a great partner in that obliterative endeavor. And such vapid, uninteresting people. You look at Twitter, and I couldn't tell you how few interesting, intelligent things I've seen. How infrequently I've thought, "I'm glad I read that."
I get info, yes. For instance, I'll see what one publishing bigot traded as a favor with a fellow publishing bigot. These morons put it right out there. You might be like, "Oh, no, Fleming, you've tipped them off now because they all read this journal of yours and they'll cover their tracks better." They won't. They're too dumb, arrogant, clueless. Besides, there are too many ways of knowing. It's always very easy to know and show what these people are up to. And I'll always know, until they've all been ended as the people who do what they do. They just won't be around anymore, so there'll be nothing to see.
But whether it's posts about sports, jazz, classical music, museums, there is virtually nothing intelligent. I can't get a grain of insight. Someone could be like, "You've offended me, sir! I post amazing things." Have I? Do you? Have a read back through what's there. Have a big old, open-minded look. See? That's why I'm saying it. It's not a me thing.
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