Tuesday 12/28/21
I'm going into 2022 with more material than I've ever entered a year with. Material in-progress I mean. I am already looking ahead to how I'll be going into 2023 and 2024. Wrote another story yesterday, which I must fix, see what I have.
I'm now starting to make a hard, dedicated push on finishing--in highly polished, final doc form--both There Is No Doubt: Storied Humanness and Longer on the Inside: Very Short Fictions of Infinitely Human Lives. A portion of a letter to someone regarding the way I think it best to go about this, them, and me:
The way to do this is to put There Is No Doubt and Longer out on the same day. Hype that. Play up the range and the genius. Orson Welles was hyped as the boy genius. I am a genius unlike any other. Play it up. Make it an event. Eventually this will change. Play up the banning, even. The blackballing. That publishing wants to suppress this unique voice. I can't be marketed me like these other people. It won't work. Look at it this way: if the Beatles had A Hard Day's Night and Sgt. Pepper at the same time. They made them at the same time. And put them out at the same time. Defied people to believe that the same artist made them. That's these two books. This is unique in history.
My sister sent me an Amazon gift card and ordered food for me for the holidays. That was very nice and thoughtful of her and much appreciated.
Aaron Cohen is a good and just man. He knows how hard my life is right now and how hard the holidays are for me--I barely made it through Christmas, to be honest; it's just pain and my despair overwhelmed me--and he texted me early Christmas morning. Aaron is a man you'd want your children to know as a model of how a person should be. He's also someone you want to know for that same reason.
Dan Wickett texted me on Christmas as well, and sent me a Starbucks gift card. He's kind and I know I can turn to him.
I started feeling sick last night and developed a cough. I'm supposed to get the flu shot and the booster today and I hope this is okay because it took a little while to schedule them. Yesterday I ran so few stairs it is not worth mentioning how many. That was more about the lack of drive.
I wrote Bob Boyers and his wife this morning over at Salmagundi, wishing them the best of the season and a happy new year.
I will be doing several entries on here thoroughly exposing American Short Fiction and Rebecca Markovits, Adeena Reitberger, and Nate Brown, a person you're going to come to know quite well, who one will practically die laughing at. John called me yesterday, having read this dreck of a piece, called "Matt's," by Kathryn Savage. (To the surprise of no one I'm sure, Raluca Albu published her at BOMB, because of course she did.) It's a shooting story. "Fitty" is a shooting story. There is no better story than "Fitty," and every unbiased person who reads it knows it. John was out of breath, telling me he was going to have a stroke or a heart attack. Obviously the piece is terrible. It reads like a formless, pointless, bad poem with periods written by a buzzed ninth grader. It's juvenile, sophomoric. What can you say? It fucking sucks. You know it fucking sucks. I don't mean to be so violent in my language, but you need to cover how bad it is, don't you? How flagrantly bad. There is no one on planet earth who wants to read this or who honestly thinks it is any good. It's embarrassingly bad. And John is on the phone, telling me that what these people are doing to me is criminal like murder is criminal and molestation is criminal. Flat out criminal. Criminal in this level of bigotry. Again, obviously.
Listened to a bootleg of the Stone Roses in Belfast in 1988.
Watching Arsenic and Old Lace. Like the fall vibe. The falling leaves, the leaves blowing in the streets, the old headstones in the yard. Then you see the Brooklyn Bridge in the background.
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