Prose off, acreage of existence edition: Story in n+1 put forward by classist Mark Krotov, mentee of egomaniac Dennis Johnson, v. Fleming story

Saturday 5/8/26

Dennis Johnson was the editor of the independent press Melville House. He's an egomaniacal tyrant. It isn't hard to find people who worked for him who have plenty of reasons to loathe him.

Once I sent him a book I'd written in the form of a file attached to an email. He writes me back saying he's a massive fan of my work, but there's no attachment. There was, of course, but these people are often helpless.

When they screw up as is their wont, you have to take the blame for it, like you're at fault, because they're so fragile, so arrogant, that they insist on you pretending the fat-rumped, puss-oozing, naked emperor in the street is svelte, prepossessing, and dressed to the nines.

I say, "Oh, sorry about that, blah blah blah, here it is again." Time goes on. If you're not one of these people, you almost always have to follow up with them, and then again, over God knows how long, because they're off taking care of their own.

I always did this with much stress and trepidation and decorously. That is, with lots of time and time in-between built in. Two weeks later. Maybe a month after that.

But at any point, no matter how much you space this out, as the time drains off your life, they can turn around and flip out on you for bothering them.

It's childish. Pathetic. But these people all but live for being this kind of asshole. When they want something, though? Hound, hound, hound, hound, hound. Demand, demand, demand, demand, demand. And how dare anyone make them wait five seconds.

It's awful. There's hardly any instances of, Write the amazing thing, send the amazing thing, get the appropriate response back in an appropriate amount of time from a person of competence behaving professionally. It isn't impossible, but it's very rare.

It's all just this drunken power trip. If they think you're better than they are, smarter, more accomplished in a legit way--that is, what you have you got on your own, often overcoming huge amounts of resistance with no one on your side, no one helping you out, and many standing against you, rather than had handed to you--better educated, more productive, they're gonna make you pay.

You've knocked on the door and asked to step into their wheelhouse. You can have in your hand, and be the only person who has this, the map to the fountain of youth which also has a soda fountain attached to it for the cure for cancer, and they'll delight in not letting you into the room. They love that more than they could care about the map in this metaphor. Or how that map could make them look as the person who did something with this map and altered the ship's course.

They're not thinking, "This amazing piece of writing makes my magazine better" or "It'd be so cool for my press to get to publish this outstanding book."

Hell no. They're looking at you. What you represent to them. How you make them feel about themselves.

They don't give a fuck about the writing. John Freeman told me I could write the Bible--which I guess he thinks is the best thing ever written, and he wouldn't publish it, adding that he has his friends to hook up. He sent me that in an email. I have, as they say, the receipts.

What an almost unfathomable piece of shit, right? More on him and his network soon. This guy is like the Moriarty of publishing.

It falls on you to coerce such people into giving you the time of day, no matter how comically overqualified you are, how outstanding the work is, how much better it is than anything they've ever published or received. They're playing grab ass with each other all the live long day.

And they're so damn fickle. You so much as breathe in what they consider the wrong way, or without that breath playing tribute to them as God, and you can be done. Banned. You're gone. Never to be replied to again. Ripped to the people like them in their incestuous network.

Who will then behave as though you just Lorin Stein-ed their spouse--which doesn't mean they have a problem with the Lorin Steins of their world--and burned down their house with their children in it.

No questions asked.

And not only is that what happened with Dennis Johnson--you know, massive fan of mine that he was--he then turns around and tells Mark Krotov, another editor at Melville House, that because he, Dennis Johnson now hates me, that he, Mark Krotov, should as well, never to respond.

Which is exactly what went down. These people are usually incapable of thinking for themselves. In their entire lives, they won't have a single thought that is their own, let alone an original thought of quality.

They're almost unilaterally visionless. They just repeat the same things, by the same types of people, the same types of stories, the same types of books, the same approaches to marketing as such, the same book covers, the same, the same, the same.

First off, people aren't buying books. They're not reading. Second of all, if people were going to read, if they wanted to read, if reading might become a thing that people do, there aren't books worth reading. The system isn't looking for them, and people come up through this system--and that includes the MFA programs--and those people aren't capable of writing things worth reading.

You have to be born with ability. Then, you must work to harness and develop that activity. You're not going to do that in this system, in these communities, seeking approval from these people as peers. You're going to become like them. You're going to write like them. Look for what they look for.

It'll all be checkpoints and trainspotting. You're not going to have those years, those decades, you would need, doing things the right way, untrammeled, brave in your explorations, rigorous in your self-criticism, unsparing of your own feelings, to begin to get good, never mind great.

The cupboard is barren, and nothing is growing in the fields outside.

Instead, you have people who want to call themselves this thing they aren't, have that be their special identity badge, get attention, be able to say, "I have a book coming out this fall," for the sake of saying it. Ego, the emptiness inside. Not writing. Not the art of writing. Not readers. Precious, precious readers.

The system pivoted. It takes bad things and tries to make virtues of them. A unique work is bad. But a formulaic work like a million others? That's good. Because then they can it's comparable to this, this, and this. Which really means, the people doing the agenting, the people doing the acquiring, the people going through the motions of selling and marketing need not ever use their damn brains.

They don't have to come up with anything themselves, change their thinking, open their minds. They pour. Just dump the same liquid into the same container but call it different things...that is just like these things, doncha know, and that's good. As it should be. No--as it must be.

And woe the person with anything original, amazing, potentially life-altering for a reader, and potentially culture and world-impacting.

What are the comparables?

We hear it again and again. You're asked that about your own work.

Someone putting out something of mine said that to me, and it's like, what do you want me to tell you here, lady? It's unique. It's obviously not like anything else. You want me to make something up? It's a bad thing that it's new?

That sounds insane.

This journal entry isn't even like anything else. This thing that's the sixth thing I'm working on here at 7:45 on a Saturday morning.

I'd say don't be fooled by any of the official stances, as if there's this logic (and commercial logic) and expertise behind all of it, but just about everyone is because they aren't invested. They say they care, but that's lip service. Almost the entirety of the writing world, across the world, in all its parts, is lip service. Lies, lies to self. Tokenism.

What they really want is the attention, and being able to put their agent's name in their Instagram bio, and getting to say they're working on a book when they're at a party before going home to start another week of writing jack shit and certainly nothing of value and fingering the cat.

Let's apply a little common sense, shall we?

Why would you write something like anything else--like something already written by someone else--if the paucity of your talent didn't determine that you had to?

This isn't a place/system for a potentially world-shaking genius. You'd think that's how it works, right? No. They want the canned, the formulaic, that which they've seen a million times before. Because when they get that shit from people like them, they know to do with it what they've done with so much shit just like it.

The agent gets the shit, and they can go to the book editor whom they've had lunch with three dozen times and sold them the same type of shit before. "Oh, Marcy likes this kind of shit, I can say it's just like this other shit she bought."

Krotov then becomes the editor of n+1, which doesn't just publish terrible fiction, but the kind of fiction that's so bad you laugh at it. Remember in A Hard Day's Night when George Harrison says words to the effect of "She's the kind of person that when she's on TV we turn the sound down so we can make jokes about her and laugh"?

Well, n+1 fiction is the short story version of this. As we've seen in prior prose offs.

It's also where Nikil Saval was an editor, putting forward this risible writing. For years I'd send him things infinitely better. But I wasn't the kind of talentless, connected, worm-weasel cryptid that he is, so I had no chance.

I knew I had no chance. Someone like me--and there's just me like me--has absolutely no possibility of being allowed to move forward--or have something published--by someone like this. That's just not how it works. Unless they feel like they have no choice.

But in the dark? In their twisted back alleys? In their rat lairs? With no light on them, no prying eyes?

They're going to make you pay. It's like they're going to get revenge for something you didn't do to them. Save be better, which is like the worst thing you can do to them.

You get to a point where it's been so long, you've known along--before you got started--and maybe you speak up some. You don't say the full on truth. That that person is a bigot, an idiot, a fraud, a joke of a human, editor, writer, thinker. They know. Believe me, on some level, they know they're nothing legitimately good.

And because they know, when you say the smallest thing, that triggers them. Triggers their self-doubt, and they explode in a totally disproportionate manner.

I said to Saval words to the effect of, I don't know, man, these stories seem pretty good, and some of the ones that have run, yeah, well, maybe not as much.

And he lost his mind. He starts saying how dare I question his authority, you're banned, never again will he allow me to speak to him!

Nut job. He is now, as I've said, a Pennsylvania state senator.

This world, right?

Let's get this done. Ever go to a party and there's this guy there and it's like his official role is that of party bore? He talks too much, thinks he's interesting because he reads some articles on Salon, but he's dumb, awkward, annoying, rude, has no social skills. He just wants to go off like he's impressive. Can't pick up on the cues that you think the opposite. Won't let you get away once he's backed you into a corner, and when you do break free, he finds you again not long after.

In these prose offs, we often encounter the short story version of that guy. And that's exactly how it goes with this story called "Unmasking Historical Legacies" by Angelo Hernandez Sias put forward by the bigoted classist Mark Krotov in n+1 as mentored in the ways of such things by Dennis Johnson of Melville House.

The beginning of a work is meant to pull you in. I can excerpt any portion of a work of mine--we can' jump in anywhere--and you'll be pulled in. I look at every line of a story as a beginning. Or as if they could be.

We're going to start with the beginning of this n+1 story. We aren't two words in before we have a reference to an Ivy League school. The characters in this story are actually introduced with the school they went to and the year they graduated in parentheses.

This is such loser fiction. Then you have to deal with the tedium. The pain of the slog that is trying to read something like this. You just want it to be over. Which means, you walk away. You have that choice. There isn't anyone who doesn't have to read this--and why would you--who is going to read it. Who will stick it out or has reason to.

Here we go:

Julio (Columbia ’20, English), in the winter of his final year of college, flew to Cape Town to Unmask Historical Legacies. Now, instead of Unmasking Historical Legacies, or as a means thereof, he was at a beach, swimming with a colony of penguins. He was swimming, rather, in the vicinity of a colony, the penguins having absconded to an inaccessible stretch, perhaps unappeased by the colony’s relative health — two thousand since a pair was planted in 1980, the flyer boasted — and aware that, thanks to humans, a measly 10 percent were left of the 1.5 million estimated to have populated the continent in 1910. Numbers had decreased due to the uncontrolled harvesting of eggs, the flyer explained, a peculiar adjective, uncontrolled, for the description of a highly organized system of plunder that involved, the flyer did not say, cooking down four hundred thousand penguins into fifty thousand gallons of oil in 1867. But those had been king penguins, said Sadiya (University of Cape Town ’20, classics), and these were African penguins, and while they shared certain experiences, and while there was value in comparing these experiences, one must not collapse geopolitical difference into a singular, ahistorical logic — You’re right, Julio said, treading beside her, I’m sorry for costing you the emotional labor required to educate me, an American, in geopolitical matters — Is it not enough that I educate you, Sadiya said, must I also forgive you? — If you must, Julio said, is it really forgiveness? Doesn’t forgiveness have to have, like, something volitional about it? — He’s a philosopher, Sadiya said — She’s an ironist, Julio said. They could not touch. Neither knew the distance to ground.

Neither? He did not know what she did not know. He did not even know what he did not know. Probably she knew exactly how deep they were. Probably she didn’t care. She was a better swimmer than he, that was clear. Her tread was even, autonomous. His was sloppy. Serviceable, but sloppy. The water around her was still and flat, until a few bubbles populated its surface. He asked her whether she had pooted. She blushed and declared herself physically incapable. He said he considered it one of his greatest physical assets, the ability to poot at will, and thus contributed a few bubbles himself. It was advanced, avant-garde flirting...

"Pooting" means flatulence. This is just embarrassing. It's not earthy or "real" or gritty or whatever. It's just embarrassing. It's embarrassing to write like this, to only be able to write like this, to publish this, to pretend that this is, what? Great?

Come on. Grow up.

It's so embarrassing that you feel embarrassed yourself. Second hand embarrassment. "She's an ironist." Good lord. "Neither knew the distance to ground." What? "It was advanced, avant-garde flirting."

Embarrassing. Embarrassing. Embarrassing.

It's so bad, and, again, embarrassing, that you can hardly even believe this is real, let alone that there's a system that exists in part to pretend that this is outstanding.

Can we get this fucker a Guggenheim please if he doesn't have one already?

Who do you think even knows what is meant by the first sentence? Honestly, what percentage of people out there do you think would get that? And if they did, so? It's flat. It's nothing.

What is this adding to my life? Anyone's life? What is it for?

Shouldn't it add to a person's life? Shouldn't it exist for some reason? That reason isn't "I went to Columbia myself."

The truth, though, is that that's what this fiction is for. It's what New Yorker fiction is for, and Paris Review fiction, Harper's fiction (save for that one time they got it right, before they fired the guy responsible), Atlantic fiction. And so that there are black words on a white page. You can't stay in business and, in the case of those venues, milk some money out of the well-heeled with more disposable income and insecurity and pretense than they have taste, self-awareness, and readerly authenticity. Trainspotting and filler.

That's really what it is. Rich people want to see references to exclusive hotels they stayed at. Over-educated going by degrees but ultimately uneducated types want to see their alma mater of Yale mentioned. And so forth.

This isn't reading. It isn't writing either. Or definitely not the art of writing.

This is, though. It's from a story I'll be finishing up later today in all probability called "Boom the Ball."

She made passes between legs but without seeming to toy with her opponents. Placed the ball in spaces teammates arrived at without realizing they’d been traveling there until they looked down and discovered what had rolled up to them. Ran along lines of sutures that were themselves far afield of anyone else’s perception or understanding of the larger, detail-obscuring whole, putting herself in position to receive a misstruck kick or double deflection like it was a brilliantly planned and executed pass from inception to reception and now that she’d gotten what she’d come for she could be on the move again.

And sometimes, in rarer instances that she must have felt warranted it, qualifying each as a special occasion within the context of this game, and perhaps beyond it as well, she let the ball get a few feet further in front of her before making a stutter-step advance of intensely rhythmic precision, a dance of syncopated, on-the-beat, off-the-beat elegance and exactitude, both compact and wide, closed and inviting, inspired and practical, publicly hosted and personally joyous, well-timed and outside of time, drawing back her kicking foot and then bringing it to bear with what may or may not have been her full force on this lone sphere atop all this flat ground, the acreage of existence, the mid-mornings of sport, and booming it between bodies and over heads through the various stages of its trajectory as though she were keeping everyone honest, and something about the world, too.

What are the comparables for the n+1 story? So much of this shit, right?

What the comparables for second excerpt? What's like that?

Nothing. Certainly not any of this.

And lest anyone think I'm not being fair by using the start of this guy's story and not the start of my own, we can do a mini prose of within this prose off.

Here, again, is the first sentence of the n+1 story:

Julio (Columbia ’20, English), in the winter of his final year of college, flew to Cape Town to Unmask Historical Legacies.

Here is the first sentence of "Boom the Ball."

Before I learned that just because pain isn’t time doesn’t mean it can’t extend indefinitely, I walked across a sweeping field housing two baseball diamonds on the day I once would have always called the most painful of my life.

Completely different stakes, levels. Obviously. But that doesn't matter here. Except insofar as to people like most of these people, it's a very bad thing.