"I'm so proud of myself": Ha Jin's awful writing, the truth about the Beatles' success, and assorted observations

Wednesday 1/7/26

You see this with regularity now: An overweight person begins taking Ozempic and becomes thin. They didn't become thin on account of putting any effort into doing so. They stayed sedentary. That person then leaves their spouse because now they can get someone more attractive physically. Most people would do this if they were able to or they had the option.

Love essentially doesn't exist now. Everything is transactional. Being with someone. The reason for having children. In most cases. And there's also the idea of, "What else are you going to do?" When that question is in place, functioning as a directive, people do what they think they should by default.

Most people are together because 1. They don't want to be alone and 2. In our world, people can't handle being alone with their thoughts in a quiet room for so much as as five minutes, let alone five weeks, five months, five years.

Everyone is a commodity to each other. What can you do for me. What can you give me. What can you provide me that I don't have and want and/or need. Consumerism isn't limited to the marketplace.

The women who complain about there being no "good" guys out there, whose Instagram feeds is nothing but thousands of photos of themselves.

Something I saw posted this morning:

Still over here choosing calm in a very loud timeline

People no longer have any idea what the word "timeline" means. They've turned it into a narcissistic conceit, because of course they have. People think you can just say we're in a timeline. There's a big timeline. The whole thing is time. You wouldn't say, "President Grant was in a timeline..."

Isn't it amazing, too, what people will brag about?

You understand how that "Still" is meant to function, right? That's this person jacking themselves off over...nothing. Giving themselves credit for...nothing. And almost certainly being horrible.

I saw a post from a woman who went on and on about how she walked for an hour. She said she was proud of herself. Proud of herself. For walking. For an hour. You might think, "Well, if she was 450 pounds, then good for her, and you're so cruel, Colin, gosh..." or that she'd been hit by a drunk driver and subsequently hospitalized and now she had finally taken her first walk in so long.

No. Regular-sized person. No physical setbacks. Just a lazy ass dog looking to self-congratulate for next to bloody nothing.

In the same week, I had a Beatles feature in The Atlantic, fiction in the VQR, and I made my debut on NPR. I posted this on Facebook at the time. How many likes you think that got from 5000 Facebook friends? You think it got less than five? Of course it did. Because no one else could do this. It was indicative of greatness. People want someone like themselves. Who does what they do. They want people they can look at and think, "I could do that." They need to feel that someone else is achievable. That is, they're not so different from who they are, and if they went down this road, or had been made this offer, or put in that position, they could do what that other person has done and is about.

Will someone out there be the editor of The New Yorker? No. But there isn't anyone who sees New Yorker editor David Remnick on TV and thinks he's smarter than they are, let alone so much smarter.

This is what I mean by achievable.

Whether we're talking David Remnick or the woman bragging about how proud she is of herself for walking for an hour.

Achievable.

I'm not.

And that's a big problem. One I haven't solved. But no one is going to look at me and think, "I could be him. I could do that."

I'm not saying, by the way, that the above placements and appearances are on their face are indicative of greatness. We've seen the awful writing in those venues. We've heard the people who can barely speak and no nothing and have all the charisma of a used handkerchief droning on on NPR. They're not there because of their work and its quality. It's other stuff. The work has nothing to do with it. For everyone else, accomplishment is publishing is the result of a handout, something they are given. Their work--their poor work--isn't the reason why that piece ran where it did, why they won that award, why they made that appearance. Any of it.

But even if you were just handing these things out, there isn't anyone else who could have done these things. For instance, if you wanted to hand out things to, say, George Saunders or Junot Diaz, all they can do anyway is their one extremely limited thing which they do badly. A kind of bad fiction. They'd have to decline the handout to have the feature on the Beatles. Or whatever it might be.

And what do you think was the quality of the work I did in these three instances? Unmatchable.

How many "likes" do you think that post boasting about walking for an hour by that woman got? Probably hundreds, right?

Can anyone really be so stupid not to understand how this works at this point? If they are seeing this journal? If they can't see how this works on their own. How could someone fail to understand this, no matter how much stupider we continue to get?

The average person walks three miles in an hour. I've touched on this before. But if you're out walking, and you're unsure of distances, and you want a rough estimate of how far you've gone, err on the side of caution and multiple the number of hours you were in motion times three.

People who say they're protecting their peace, or choosing calm, or on their recovery journey are usually selfish, narcissistic, destructive, toxic people looking to blame anyone else but themselves, and permanently absolve themselves of any culpability for anything they may do that is wrong. They simply chalk it up to protecting their peace, choosing calm, or a part of their recovery journey.

People are so soft and weak. Humans are able to handle and contend with less and less. The real road they are on is the road to helplessness. When everyone is helpless or getting there, society has to devolve further.

It's like if you have a whole high school of kids who can't read. You can't hold everyone back, can you? No, you would have to pass everyone in this case. Get rid of reading as a core requirement or expectation entirely.

Maybe the powers that be/the state/the administration replace reading with just being able to chew with your mouth closed. Then, in time, no one is able to do this. So what do you do? You remove chewing with your closed as requirement or expectation. You replace chewing with your mouth closed with being able to wipe yourself after a bowel movement.

This is how society functions. And it keeps getting worse and worse.

You don't want to be here if you're intelligent. There will be so little in this world for you that you can be provided by anyone else. The more intelligent you become, the more you grow mentally, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, the more alone you'll be, the less hope you'll have for anything decent, let alone good, in any aspect of your life, save your interior life.

But that's not companionship, connection, friendship, love--by the by, beware of the people who tout self-love, too, the same as the peace-protectors, who are usually the same people and almost always broken and destructive--or a fair chance to earn in commiseration with one's abilities.

Next to nothing in our world is real. Legit. "Real" seems like a simple word, but it's not a simple concept. Maybe it should be. It is to me. When are we ever real? Being real means fully real. There isn't a fractional component.

I had an agent once--more on this joker soon--who said to me this once, "I'm going to be transparent with you this time," because he was just, again, a joker who said stuff. Sourced from his ass.

He represented Ha Jin. Do you know how bad Ha Jin is at writing? How boring Ha Jin is? This agent would treat Ha Jin like he was God. But if Ha Jin didn't have what he had--that is, if people like this agent didn't automatically say these lies about Ha Jin, whose work blows, like it doesn't blow, the same way they do for Lydia Davis or Salman Rushdie or whomever you want to name--and was instead Jack Smith from Attleboro, MA who approached this agent with the exact same work that Ha Jin had, then the agent would never have said, "What a brilliant master of fiction."

And there I was, standing in front of this guy's desk in Manhattan as he says to me, "This time I'm going to be transparent." He didn't even mean to. It just slipped out. You won't believe the things this guy did. How bad he was at his job. Helpless.

But that's what I mean. People just say things. It's transactional. In publishing, though, transaction isn't about money. Amazingly, money matters very little to people in the business of publishing. The word "business" is an oxymoron. The real business--the real coin of the realm--is pettiness here. And ego. Trading in this much insecurity for these many lies--or trying to, anyway.

Everything gets better when people and things are real. When we are real with each other. There isn't a single other author in the world right now who is real on the page. They are doing something. Up to something. Trying to finagle something. Catering to their ego. It's machinations, poses.

Be real with me.

It's such a reasonable request. When do we make it? When the bullshit won't do. When an iota of bullshit is enough to fuck things up. Realness has to be total. Or else you have something else. And when you have something else, you have something worse.

I'm not talking about truth telling right now. I'm talking about the absence of artifice. Pure experience. Pure being. Is.

We are almost entirely incapable now of doing "is." Writers in their work, people in their (transactional) relationships, people with their own thoughts, in their heads. Everything is put through so many filters, as if by a reflex.

This must be taken out, and this, this, no, sorry, that's too close to the truth, and this, that, this, that, this...okay, now I'll say this thing, post this thing, write this contrived times contrived times contrived thing that really has this motive behind it; I want you to think I'm smart, not because I've written something great and moved you, taught you, but because I used these words that you probably don't know in this way that makes no sense and you don't get it which means I know something you don't, right? Right? Please? Thanks.

It's fear. Weakness. Cowardice. Insecurity. Helplessness. And each of those things become further along versions of those things with each passing piece, book, interaction, relationship, lie to self, social media post, selfie, day, month, year, decade, life, wasted life, stand-in life, because it stopped being a real life.

As for writing something truly great: Besides needing to be more than a genius, besides needing to devote every second of your life to harnessing that ability, and growing it--and I mean every second, not two hours each morning, but every second, because you are this way, and you experience everything this way, and there's no shut-off switch, there's just constant having at it--you need to be a brave and strong and secure person.

I never feel like I must impress someone in my work. I never "show off." I will write as a I write and that will result in not just the best work ever created, but the best anything a human has ever made. I will be myself as myself--this has nothing to do with autobiography--and I know that in doing so this will be the result.

After that...then I am dependent in large part on other people. And some of those people--we're talking in publishing now--are the very worst people there has been. That's why they're in the subculture that they are. And they have say, as a kind of go-between, with that work getting to the outside world, the masses.

If the masses don't see someone touted as this and that that is super important and notable, the masses won't 1. Know to check that thing/person out and 2. They'll be much less open to thinking in those terms when they see the work because people need to be told how to think, even if they're going to honestly thing something in the end.

Two examples. The Beatles had their early UK singles released in the States at the end of 1963. What do you think those singles did? Nothing. Do you think anyone who heard them thought, "Wow, amazing, what a brilliant group, I need more of this."

People heard that music and didn't give a fuck. It meant nothing to them. Then, Capitol puts this massive hype campaign in motion. Everyone knew about the Beatles, including people who'd already heard them and didn't think that music was anything special or good. Those same people in that latter group now heard that music and thought it was remarkable.

I can have the best work of fiction there is. I can send it to someone I know. Relative, family friend. Depending on who they are, they might say nothing. Maybe think nothing. (They could also think it's the best thing they've seen in their lives, and not convey that to me, because they have me on this pedestal and are so intimidated by me that they'll opt for silence rather than risking what they feel would be embarrassment for not having the right words that do the work justice, and then they'd look dumb, or I'd think they were dumb--though I've only ever been kind to them--and so forth.)

Say things ever worked for me. I somehow get out of this situation. That story is now hailed as this masterpiece of masterpieces. It's in every proverbial home. Had real impact in the world. Even in who we are. What do you think that person is going to do then? How do you think they're going to talk about that story and about me to people they know? It's the same exact work. Just like "She Loves You" was "She Loves You" in 1963 when it first came out in the States, and then the next year after Capitol's big marketing push.

Let's say the Beatles didn't get the push. They produce their first three albums. Same albums. What happens? What would they be? They'd be this band that people in the know knew about. Record collector types. The people who like Moby Grape and the Creation.

I know what people who don't know anything about the Beatles but think they do want to say: "That's just the early stuff! They got so much better!"

No they didn't. The Beatles never wrote a better song than "She Loves You." A more complicated, sophisticated, and yet accessible song. They never made an album better than A Hard Day's Night. What they were doing with chords had never been done before. They were inventing and innovating far more on A Hard Day's Night than the White Album.

People can't understand that, because usually they know nothing about the subject or anything. They just say things. The more people say one thing, the easier it is for others to come along and say it, too, and believe it, and think that's how it must be. Again, it becomes like a reflex. Automatic.

For most of my life, the White Album has been my favorite album. I'm not talking preferences here. I'm talking is.

As for Ha Jin: Go look at his writing. Look at it after what I said. Look at it and tell me how anything can manage to be that boring. Like it's some record-setting achievement in that regard. It isn't--it's tied with a lot of stuff by the likes of these people in their subculture. But there isn't a single person on earth who honestly believes that's great work, that that's what they'd want to take to the desert island.

So little is real, and real is rare.