Prose off, binoculars but not toy binoculars edition: Story by Guggenheim winner Paul Yoon in The New Yorker v. Fleming story

Saturday 5/2/26

Let's do another one, shall we? Minimal prefatory remarks.

Paul Yoon. Highly connected publishing person. No talent. Same type of writing every time. Married to Laura Van Den Berg. Received a Guggenheim grant--$40,000--for his work on the very same day she did for hers.

You're meant to believe this was totally on the up and up, and the timing for these two highly connected people without talent receiving their latest undeserved handouts just happened to work out that way.

This is from Paul Yoon's "The New Coast" in The New Yorker.

I came back down. Retracing my path along the river, I watched a man from the settlement who was a stonemason climb into a military truck to be taken to wherever it was he was needed. I found Mrs. S and helped her with the laundry. I carried the basket up to her shanty and we hung the clothes to dry, and then she told me to go and help a neighbor who was patching her roof, so I did that.

The dogs never left my side, resting beside me when I rested, their chests moving like small waves as they breathed.

I wondered if dogs ever dreamed of the moon. The sky.

To my surprise, I fell asleep quickly and deeply that night. I had no dreams. When I woke, my brother was lying beside me, eyes open, holding the tin box he kept buried behind the shanty with the little money he had saved. The morning leaked through the holes in the wool blanket hanging over the entrance.

“It could be her,” he said.

I wasn’t fully awake yet and had no idea what he was talking about. Shadows passed by outside, the holes in the blanket going dark and then light again. I could hear a fly buzzing somewhere.

“It could be her,” my brother said, again. “At the orphanage. On the new coast.”

He opened and closed his hands, and, as I thought of all the times we had said that to each other, he told me he had been granted a day off and that we were going to go right now on the train.

To see for ourselves. If she was there.

“Right now,” he said.

I rubbed my eyes; the fly vanished.

“It isn’t new,” I said.

“What?”

“The coast. It isn’t new. I don’t know why people call it that.”

I thought he would smack me on the head or get up and tell me to hurry, but he did nothing, he just lay there, the tin box now balanced on his chest as he continued to open and close his hands in the air as if the answer were there in his palms.

It occurred to me that I had not seen him write a poem in a while.

There's never anything in the language. Listless, flat, lifeless. Barren. Unmemorable. It's inert plastic. You know how some actors learn their roles in a foreign language phonetically? This is like the writing version of that. It reads like dictation that someone took down. This isn't the art of writing.

It's how everything by Yoon reads. How everything by him will ever read.

Anyone could do this. AI could have done it. It doesn't have distinguishing traits. There's nothing that makes it stand out at all. There isn't anything you can cite, talk about, point to. There's nothing to underline, write in the margins.

Words are spelled correctly and you get complete sentences. That's the best you can say. It was spellchecked.

Obviously there was going to be something about a writer writing in it. You would have been surprised if there wasn't, right?

And now the obliteration c/o the infinitely better work by the infinitely better writer. And also the better person, because one doesn't advance in this system, and isn't permitted to, without being a bad kind of person.

“We’re going to fuck,” Rachel announced before we’d barely begun moving like she had to get the words out now or never. “Thomas and me,” she clarified in case I’d taken her to mean Mr. Margolis who Rachel had a crush on earlier in the year or some ordinary living boy.

Then she added in quintessentially awkward Rachel fashion, “We are going to rock and roll,” and I declared no, that’s not happening, almost, I realized, like Rachel was my kid, but her jaw tightened and she pushed back by saying Thomas deserved happiness and a life, given all he’d been through, even as a parting gesture.

“And if he goes out while going in,” she concluded, “I’d be happy knowing I helped.”

When my dad used to tell me that you should be your brother’s keeper, I asked him what if you don’t have a brother, because I didn’t. I wouldn’t have minded, but a brother or a sister wasn’t anything I wished for. Santa didn’t see “Baby sibling” beneath “Binoculars but not toy binoculars” on my Christmas list.

There was Rachel, who was like a sister. But I didn’t want for what I didn’t have, because it felt like what I had was what I wanted, even if I didn’t consciously say that to myself, though I likely would have if pressed on the subject by someone like Mr. Margolis, except I didn’t know him at the time.

One year, Rachel gave me a Valentine’s card she’d made after having first said that this card, special as it was, and as much as she meant it, didn’t also mean she wanted to marry me, because she would someday marry a boy—but only if I also thought this boy was amazing and “really super truly” the boy for her—though we would continue to live close to each other.

She still had fresh Crayola caked under her nails along with some backyard dirt, as if she’d biked over the second she finished the card because she couldn’t wait to give it. She’d drawn this heart in a blue sky on the outside that took up practically the whole front. Only the thin edges of the heart were red—it looked like thread—and there were clouds in its open middle where clouds would have normally been anyway like they were a part of something beautiful without needing to alter their daily routine.

Inside the card she wrote, “I would stitch all of my love in the sky for you.”

We had recently learned that a stitch in time saves nine, which was confusing, but sounded important.

When my dad said, “Be your brother’s keeper,” he spoke as if both to me and to the air, making me think of Rachel’s card. He clarified that it was an expression—the first few times, that is, until I guess he figured he didn’t have to anymore.

And he’d ask whether I followed him, which was how he finished these talks, and when I would ask questions if I had any. I said sure, because as I was saying, sure works that way, and you like to follow people you love. That doesn’t mean you can’t follow your own heart. But two clouds usually go in the same direction.

What can you even say after looking at those two works back to back?