J.D. Vance, EriKa KirK, lying bigots like Nate Brown of American Short Fiction, the exploitation of children with cancer, and dictatorial dreams and diapers

Friday 2/27/26

J.D. Vance looks like a man who wears eyeliner. I feel like this is an odd choice, especially for someone who I'm certain thinks that men should be "manly" with all that entails--you know, having no heart, never crying, being hard and unloving, etc.

I must admit that when some video of Erika Kirk from the State of the Union popped up on my screen that I laughed. It's such bad overacting. Like a satire of overacting. The way she wipes away tears that aren't there and or in the making or would ever be happening. What an awful world this is. Because this is how it works. This is how everything here works.

I have said many times here that almost everyone is awful at their jobs. There's mostly only ineptitude. Take a look at what the publicity departments for all of these NHL teams have been slopping out there over the last couple of days. The Bruins' PR department actually went with dog-based player content. Divert! Divert! Divert! That's amusing.

It's like with publishing people when they lie. They can't even do being bad well. Some editor bigot will tell me "You need to pay me $3.50 to consider your story, that's how it works for all," when what they really mean is, "Give us your money for the thing I'm not look at and which will be automatically form rejected because I'm envious of your ability, legitimacy, and track record that wasn't handed to you and instead earned with everyone like me working against you." You go to the new issue and every single person in it is a friend of theirs. Cronies galore. Look at Bradford Morrow and Conjunctions. It's not hidden. It's right there. Absolute morons. These aren't masterminds of stealth.

Nate Brown--someone you can't be less talentless or more pathetic than--actually tried this at American Short Fiction, where it's just Laura Van Den Berg, Roxane Gay, Joyce Carol Oates, all the usual suspects who are just dreadful, dreadful writers being waved on in as a matter of mere formality.

I know--Joyce Carol Oates! How dare he mention her! She's famous as a super great writer!

Why don't you actually click on that link to her story above that was published by system eunuch and fellow talentless writer Mitch Wieland, then editor of the Idaho Review, which is housed in the MFA department of the University of Idaho. Go ahead and actually use your eyes to read that story.

You think I sit here looking for the worst ones? Or do you think I simply grab what's nearest to hand? It's a foolproof system, because this stuff is always the same. We can also see how much work this guy, Fleming, does every day, so you know he isn't lying. When would he find the time? We can see the stairs, too. He's not scouring the world for the worst writing by someone like Joyce Carol Oates. You know what I'm doing. You probably even know where I'm at at any given time. You know why I'm doing it. And you know I'm never up to anything that isn't pure of heart and purpose. What I am, what I'm doing, is right here.

It's all that bad. I can use anything by any of these people. I could put out an open call for prose offs. Send me anything by any of these people you want and we'll put that up here and then we'll put something by me after it. Send your thing if you're one of these people. The thing you think is the best thing you've ever written. You think I'm going to have any takers? Hell, we can limit my thing to something I wrote that morning before you got up. It's not going to matter.

But sure, chief, Citizen Gay was pulling out that credit card and double checking the security code on the back. It wasn't that her godawful hackery was automatically being slapped in there sight unseen 'cause, you know, that's just how it works when it's all about the name at the top, and what that name means within this class and caste system, and nothing about the work. And checked boxes. That's how this goes. Next to nothing published, next to nothing happens in this industry, because someone read something and thought it was amazing. And all of the writing from people like this is garbage. Same idea with becoming the director of the FBI. See the overlap I've been talking about?

No? That Roxane Gay story, which is also in a book of hers, is art for the ages? We're still doing this, huh? And don't worry--we'll be getting back to those prose offs. I have some good ones coming.

I'll indulge a would-be defender, though. Let's get one of these stories out in the open, shall we?

Here you go, enjoy a Roxane Gay story called "I Am a Knife." What a brilliant writer, right? An artist for the ages. I bet you thought that was amazing. Genius? Mega-genius? How do you want to classify that? What preternatural gifts one must possess to compose the likes of such fiction? I'm sure you're absolutely blown away. Not ridiculous at all. Obviously I could never come up to that level. I have to know my place, right? But maybe if I work really hard, I could start to get to be that good. Because that was really good, no? I should be realistic, though. You have to know your limits, and when someone else is just...well...matchless.

Back to reality now.

Try and simp for this shit, if you're of a mind. I think that's the expression people favor now, right? What could even say? Try it. "It's amazing because..." Quote something. So I know what the brilliant parts are.

Don't get mad at me. It's not my fault that's terrible and you see it. It's not my fault that Junot Diaz is an awful writer. George Saunders. Tommy Orange. Lincoln Michel. Justin Taylor. Look at Emily Nemens and her fan fiction lite. Seriously: How is what she writes any better than fan fiction? And then you get this fraud in Lynne Nugent, editor of The Iowa Review, publishing that Nemens story because it was written by the person, in Nemens, who was the editor, at the time, of The Paris Review, that magazine so noted for its core principles of merit and it's the writing that matters most! Ha. Right.

And where is The Iowa Review housed? In the MFA program of the University of Iowa. The bestest MFA program in the land. This is how it works. How can you have a brain and think any of this is real? Anything here is what it pretends to be? But yes, an MFA--so impressive! That's clearly where Melville would have gone to get better at writing if he could have. Totally legit, man. As you're slapping in Nemens' high school-level fan fiction because of whatever she represented to you as a card carrying member of your system. I'm sure it would have been super helpful for Dickens to workshop A Christmas Carol with a bunch of Iowa MFA students. You know, with it not being boring ass navel-gazing featuring a lightly fictionalized version of the writer as a protagonist in higher learning. Wait...did I just describe Pulitzer Prize finalist Ed Park's writing? Huh, I guess I did. Like they say, can't swing a stick...

No one is fooled. It's just that people aren't looking. They don't care enough to know one way or the other. Those who do, are the people who profit by it being this way, who wouldn't have a chance if it was any other way. If you actually had to have, you know, ability. And write great things. They'd be cooked.

How dumb would you need to be to think that Nemens paid a submission fee (which is just a scam these places use to make money, because it's the only money they make; meanwhile, they're just hooking people up who don't pay them anything; and the idea of paying someone to read your work? For which they're going to pay you nothing or very close to it if they use it? Come on) to The Iowa Review for them to kindly consider her story and then that story--which isn't even a story, just something pulled out of her embarrassing fan fiction baseball novel and called a story because people like this struggle to write anything at all and are less productive than dung beetles--was selected because of some legitimate process and because of its excellence?

Can you be that dumb? People can be astoundingly dumb, but if there's a limit, this could be it.

But like I said, don't get cross with me. Isn't the messenger's fault. I'm not the one without any ability writing that crap and faking every last thing in my life and career as people hand me shit and award me shit that I know that I don't deserve. I'm not perpetuating that system. I'm not the one without morals, a conscience, integrity, a soul. I'm not the classist. I'm not the bigot. I'm not the fraud. I'm not the coward. I'm not the textbook case example of axiomatic discrimination. I'm not the stalker/sex pest/deadbeat. I'm not the mentally ill dilettante. I'm not the unbalanced, acting out, manic nutter. I'm not the trust funder. I'm not some slime-coated tapeworm. I'm not the embittered, human version of projectile vomit. I'm not the publishing adjacent/system enabling ableist stooge. I'm not the rapist. I'm not the water-carrier. I'm not a thief. I'm not the mocker of the disabled. I'm not the one who makes someone ask if they're drunk with rage or drunk because of alcohol or is it both.

As Dylan said, it ain't me, babe. I just write better. And run stairs.

And I have working eyes that I use. I actually look at this nonsense. You have all of these millions of people pretending to be writers, saying they're writers, so they can have this identity badge type of thing, and not one of these people actually cares enough to look at any of this work and see what's what. They just want to be able to tell someone they were published. It's all a version of that. Whether it's their unreadable fantasy book, pages of which they post on Reddit with captions like "Would you keep reading this?", or it's a Laura Van Den Berg type who wants to go to a party and have someone congratulate her on some poor story of hers (and same goes with her husband, Paul Yoon, who totally deserved to get a Guggenheim on the exact same day his wife did! What are the chances, wow!) in The Atlantic. Everything comes back to that. Not the writing. Not what the work actually is and could truly mean to people. To someone.

This isn't Sherlock Holmes at his apogee sussing out the hard-to-find truth. All you need to do is actually look and read a few lines. And virtually no one else is doing that. All you need to do is type in the author's name and the editor's name on Google if this is your very first day here and you will know why that work appears where it appears.

Then I share what's there--and this is all that's there--for you to see it. I shouldn't do that? Seems like a reasonable thing to do, if one actually cares about writing, reading, merit, right or wrong. Should I just play along? You want me to lie? Because anyone who says any of that is amazing is lying. And/or up to no good. They don't think it. They don't think it any more than I do.

I am a knife. Hmmm. I'm inspired. Let me try.

I am a ham sandwich. You put me in the brown bag. You take me out and eat me with chips. I once knew a pickle. Men suck. The bites they take of me are too big. Rapine. Rapine. Rapine.

It's a closed, exclusive club, and talent doesn't get you into it; more like the opposite. Favors are traded in the club. Club members are entitled to awards, publications, hype, support, coverage, deals. The idea isn't very different from the Jeffrey Epstein club. And, as we've seen, there's no shortage of that kind of behavior. Lorin Stein-ing someone isn't exactly helping them shovel out their car in the snow now, is it? It's all so similar to how the Trump circle works. Same mindset, same methodology. Trump, David Remnick. Same kind of deal, different dollar amounts, different degrees of visibility.

Publishing people are better hidden in what they're doing because no one cares. No one reads. Of course, these same people have helped to bring that about. People not reading, people not being able to write well, let alone produce art for the ages, and art that matters right now and makes a difference in a world that so desperately needs art like that to make a difference, is to their advantage in terms of the existence these people wish to have. With all of the pettiness, the ego indulgence without having to actually be any good, have any talent, any brains. There's no accountability or burden of proof.

They're not looking to reach readers, to enrich people, enrich the world. Hardly anyone here cares about any of that. The publishing system exists so that the people of publishing can be the people of publishing. That's the truth. It allows these people to get away with being what they are. It allows people without any talent to win Pulitzers, get Guggenheims, have their rave reviews. None of it is real. None of it is for the purported reasons--for example, that a book that wins the Pulitzer for fiction is a great work of fiction. And we haven't even gotten much to Percival Everett, yet. Don't worry--we will.

You don't think Joshua Cohen is a great writer. Not after you actually read him, I mean. You are not going to tell me that this fiction of his from David Remnick's The New Yorker is outstanding. If do want to do that, make sure you say why. It just can't be done. Unless one is bent on looking like a complete fool.

The Ottawa Senators, for whom the lovely, intellectually curious, man for others Brady Tkachuk plays, actually showed their players wearing women's hockey jerseys in an attempt to distract everyone from the dancing elephant in the room; an elephant also singing an out-of-tune song in support of misogyny, rape, pedophilia, murder in the streets, racism, Fascism. But sure, don that jersey and we're all cool.

You desperate, pandering, intelligence-insulting, deflecting simpletons. But not so desperate, apparently, that you wouldn't do the laziest, least thought out thing possible. Isn't that a strange dichotomy? It's like someone trying to get away with a crime. They want to get away with the crime. But they show up to commit the crime when the most people will be around, because that's when they happen to go to that place anyway, and, eh, don't want to really change the routine, that's a pain in the ass, and they all but yell out that, "Okay, I'm a criminal! Here I go doing my criminal stuff! But don't you notice me!"

So many people even suck at sucking. I'm floored by this and how often I see evidence of it. I live it with publishing. Look at Sigrid Rausing and Carolyn Kuebler. Could you be worse at hiding the motives for this obviously bad thing you're doing? Could be you be less bad at hiding that you're a bigot? And it's not like they want to be seen as bigots. The desire is to keep that kind of shit in the dark. I see these male USA hockey players acting so stupidly, and have always known most male hockey players to be stupid. They have the brain power of gerbils. Says the guy who was a hockey player and writes about hockey in all the places. Good luck on a male hockey team if you're intelligent. But people like Rausing and Kuebler are even stupider. It's funny, too, because I know that Kuebler hates anyone who so much looks like they've ever caught a ball in their lives.

Irony.

Stupid people always act like everyone is even stupider than they are. They think they're smarter. I have no idea why. I mean, I guess that's part of being that stupid. But sure, that fooled 'em.

The Nashville Predators--talk about a regrettable name choice--dialed it up an extra degree by using kids with cancer in a PR move yesterday on their social media. Ah, you disgusting ass motherfuckers.

I'm not some Democrat. I'd never be a member of either of these parties. My interests, humanity-wise, are in much bigger and purer things, ideas, ideals, manners of morality. These publishing people will tell you they're Democrats, and you can't be a worse person than most off them are, as we've seen so plainly again and again and again in these pages simply by me stepping back and allowing their own words and actions to speak for themselves. I don't need to editorialize--it's just a matter of dragging these people and what they're all about into the light. No, I don't think either of those political party ways is the way.

But look at these Republican fools. What the fuck are you doing? You're standing for tyranny, murder, molestation, abuse, racism, sexism, criminality. An aspiring dictatorship with a child-king overlord. People like to say that Trump wears diapers because he's this old man who shits himself, but the more effective way of thinking about it is he's a child who hasn't been potty trained and rages out of his back end and into his diaper--like he's trying to make the person who has to change it pay--when he doesn't get another cookie. He may have already eaten all the cookies that were there and there's just one left and he's had these starving kids around him who'd take a few crumbs at this point, but he still thinks that cookie should be his and no one else's.

It's not political. It's not political differences. It's not even really about politics. This isn't policy. There's nothing to even disagree about. Not really. It's like disagreeing whether one should carry around a crowbar at night and come up behind women and swing it at the back of their heads or not. Like there's two sides to this and let's argue it out or do point/counterpoint.

That's not a thing. This shouldn't be one either.

By the way: Those three K's in Erika Kirk's name really jump out at you, don't they? It's like they should be glowing. Maybe have this fire/burning cross type of effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=RDBNj1qgdLN6M&v=BNj1qgdLN6M