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Prose off (foodstuffs edition): Standard boring pretentiousness from Granta put forward by myopic classicist billionaire heiress editor Sigrid Rausing v. Fleming story

Thursday 5/30/24

Before we get into some real-life rancidity with Granta's mindless, entitled, fake as can be, classicism obsessed, discrimination-loving editor in chief, Sigrid Rausing, how about a prose off with a new story she's slapped out there in her magazine for all of the typical reasons, which has a food component, versus one I just wrote, which has a food component as well?

We'll do the beginning of each. They both start with the word "she," so they line up pretty well.


I'm sure this will be close, don't you? Or maybe I should say I'll be lucky if if it's close, given that, you know, you're supposed to think that Granta features the best fiction in the world, all of which is beyond the scope of my meager abilities, according to Sigrid Rausing. I'm sure that's very true. I'm sure everyone would believe that it is. I'm sure that Sigrid Rausing thinks it, and that she's not, in reality, a massive, vile bigot.


Now that we've covered all of that, let's take a look at the start of Reena Usha Rungoo's "Dite."

Ready? Here we go:


She collected stamps when she was younger, then switched to books, degrees, and – when she moved abroad – white lovers. Later she returned to the familiar, and turned to teas. The careful, deliberate steps of preparing her tea became a habit, and, as with most habits, it was folded in with ingredients and histories preceding her.


She bought teas from regular stores and specialty houses, on errands to the local grocer and visits to her home island. Friends indulged her and added to her hodgepodge collection. Once, on her birthday, a lover took her on a surprise trip to the Davenport and Sons tea house, and she came back home with quite the loot. In this way, we grew into uneven rows of boxes and tins on her shelves, a dry garden tended by love and ritual.


Back home on her island, household altars were commonplace, erected in a special room in the house or assembled in a dedicated corner of the living room. Some altars housed statues and images of goddesses, garlanded with flowers. Others held pungent incense and the photographs and personal belongings of dear departed ones. Irreverently, Durga liked to think that her boxes and tins, fragrant and framed by a pell-mell of old teapots and chipped mugs, were her altar.


Then she gave us up. We know exactly when it happened.


It was when Durga came back from Dadi’s funeral in Mauritius. Her grandmother’s passing had emptied her heart of home, even as her travel bags were heavy with the familiar foods of her childhood. Sifting through them, she carefully removed a sealed envelope and an unassuming blue box labelled ‘Bois Chéri Vanilla Tea’. She placed both at the back of the shelves, behind the rest of us, hidden from view. She threw out the food. And then, as if the newcomers had tainted us with their presence, she avoided us for a long while. Almost a decade elapsed as we gathered dust and waited patiently.


Ugh. I know. I know, I know, I know. What is more tedious than trying to get through the shit that these people write and that people like Sigrid Rausing put forward? How can you be that boring?


The thing just drips with the attitude of someone so entitled, and yet so talentless that it's impossible for them to make you interested for a fraction of a second in anything they write, have written, will ever write.


But thankfully they got in the word "lovers" a couple times there right at the start. These idiots love that word. They think it's sophisticated and grown up, but also daring. I'm serious. That's their version of, "Brazzers is free!" You know what I'm talking about. Think of how repressed and messed up you have to be to think like that. How broken. Sheltered. Removed from reality.


Want to see Reena Usha Rungoo's bio? Okay:


Reena Usha Rungoo is a Mauritian writer, scholar, teacher, speaker, and mother. As an islander, an African and a diasporic South Asian, she uses the language of fiction (whether as a writer or a literary critic) to speak on how colonial violence infiltrates our beings, our languages and our desires, and on the creative ways in which we resist. She is an assistant professor of literature at Harvard University.


Yeah...that tracks, doesn't it?


Anyone who uses the word "diasporic" to describe themselves is just...again, ugh. That parenthetical qualifier is so pathetic and needy, too. These people show you their insanity without even knowing they're doing it, because they have no self-awareness or awareness of anything.


Seems like those are things you should have if you're, I don't know, being touted as someone who writes some of the best fiction in the world, all of which--this being but one example--Sigrid Rausing expects anyone and everyone to believe is better than anything I could ever do.


Except she doesn't. Right, Sigrid? What she never figured would happen is that her blatant discrimination would be made publicly known. Didn't enter her weak little mind.


Imagine asking someone what their fiction was about, and they said, "How colonial violence infiltrates our beings"?


I know the answer to this question, but I'll ask it all the same: Do you see the lifelessness--the complete absence of any actual life--that permeates all of the shit by these people? What is more lifeless than the stories each of these people write?


If there's a corpse--and I know that's a word that perks up the likes of a Rausing--there's still bacteria on it, and that's some life, but there isn't even the writing version of microbial life in any of this fiction.


Meanwhile: I mentioned writing a story last night. That was before I wrote an op-ed this morning on the Negro Leagues. The story happens to pertain to food. One kind of food, actually. It's called "A Thing for Cucumbers," which means and leads to many things in the story, and the lives of those involved.


Here we go:


She had a thing for cucumbers. Growing them, eating them, knowing when a cucumber was on the cusp of going bad and needed to be put to use before it was too late. She liked the smell of cucumbers growing in the garden and washing the last of the dirt off of them in the sink and how the seeds slid around in her mouth but never got stuck between her teeth. She liked the idea of pickles but less so the taste because after all it wasn’t the true taste of a cucumber. She just felt a particular way about them. They were her thing, so far as vegetables were concerned. Corn has a certain romance to it for other people, due to the harvest and autumn and scarecrows, but she liked summer most of all and it was undeniable that summer was the best time for cucumbers.


He, meanwhile, appreciated her avidity. She possessed a green thumb which was like the outdoors version of being handy. Plus, with all of the salads he had lost that last bit of weight he had figured he was going to be stuck with forever. Life was on a pleasing course.  

They were trying something one night because they were playful like that and a cucumber was gotten from the fridge, rinsed under the sink, and incorporated into the evening’s extracurriculars.


“Pretend it’s someone else,” he trilled, and she replied, sotto voce but sparklingly so, “Who do you want it to be?”


That was a tricky question because he didn’t have an answer pre-planned and if you said, “I don’t know” or “You pick,” you lost the flow. But fortunately he got an idea within spontaneity’s window which also kept the color motif intact and in a fateful moment of presumed triumph he crowed, “The Green Giant,” and in the cucumber went. It was a nice night.


Quite the concept, isn't it? Having life in a story. A story itself being a form of life. Seems pretty obvious that that should be how it works, right? That the goal isn't actually to bore people out of their fucking minds with pretentious, lifeless, nothingness?


When I was putting this together today, I honestly didn't know what story to pick from the front page of Granta's fiction section. They all suck equally. I went with this one because of the foodstuff angle. We can get to the others later, if need be. But holy shit, there is never any let up in how bad the fiction these people write is. You'd think that sometimes you'd be like, "Oh, okay, that was kind of decent," but it just doesn't happen.


"A lover took her on a surprise trip." To get some tea. Yeah. That's fucking fascinating. What value you're adding to our lives.



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