Prose off, If you had to sex the answer edition: Story in Conjunctions put forward by arrogant, log-rolling anuran Bradford Morrow v. Fleming story (are we yay about this?)

Saturday 6/21/25

I wrote yesterday that we'd be doing another Conjunctions prose off, the hardest thing about that being that when you go to the Conjunctions site to find a story to use for the slaughter, it's almost impossible to know which one to do with. The first story you see makes you think, "That is the worst writing I've ever seen," but then you click on another, and you think, "Then again..." and on it goes.

Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow owes every single publication he's ever had to cronyism. He's a pretentious, juvenile, gas bag fossil. Bard College, where Conjunctions is based, rightly realized that Conjunctions was pointless and shut it down a few years back, which led to other talentless people like Joyce Carol Oates writing letters to Bard about what a cultural institution Conjunctions was, how important it is to the world--I'm serious. Vital to the world for slapping out the shit it does for reasons of incestuous evil.

Bard was like, "Ugh, we don't need this flack from these nut jobs, whatever, it's just a few thousand dollars to float this ridiculous thing, ain't worth the headache" and said, "Fine, Conjunctions can carry on," and gasbag Morrow took this victory lap in the form of a letter to the readers--there's an oxymoron for you--at the Conjunctions site saying that hopefully Bard had learned the error of their ways.

A flaccid prick of a man. It's typical of these people, but still you think, "My God...the arrogance of this twit." Hook up culture, you say? There's no hook up culture to rival Bradford Morrow publishing system-style hook-up culture. There isn't a scene out there that comes close.

You can read about Morrow elsewhere in this journal, like with the emails he'd "accidentally" send me in an attempt to insult me. One time he made a joke: "He's so immature he makes me want to sneeze." You have to understand: To a dick like this--an out of touch, not clever, not intelligent, pompous dick--that's the epitome of wit. I'm being serious.

He would have stripped down and ogled himself in the mirror after that in celebration of his bon mot. "Ah, Bradford you heady fellow, another day in which your formidable mental gifts made themselves known as only they could."

Believe me--that's the mindset of this kind of moron. A delusional loser who has to bury themselves deep within this fantasy world/subculture of theirs where the truth is not permitted. And gets to be a childish, envious, petty dick whilst thus ensconced.

Imagine that you're in your seventies, and that's all you did with your life? Espousing being like this. With miserable fucks like you. You never cared about writing, reading. Any damn reader in the world. Giving anyone a reason to read. Touching someone's heart, their soul. You couldn't make a bigger waste of your life if you tried. And going along with all of that is being a terrible, pathetic little person. And the matchless arrogance. Which isn't the same as having pride in what one does and is able to do and has worked to be able to do. It's not truthfully stating what one does without false modesty or with bluster. Just saying the truth when the truth ought to be said.

No. This is unfounded arrogance. An arrogance of entitlement, of what someone like this believes is birthright. What they will do is surround themselves with yes people who are just like they are. They are far removed from reality. They hate reality. They hate truth. They hate legitimacy. Then write nonsense and blame other people for not "getting" it--those stupid, stupid peasants who aren't seeing any of it anyway. But those so-called peasants are almost always smarter than someone like a Bradford Morrow. He just had money and sat in places that the peasants didn't. He doesn't know anything about anything, man. Writing. The arts. The world. Reality. People. The world.

Being human.

But right now, let's get this prose off out of the way, because just seeing writing this bad put forward by a bigot like Morrow churns my stomach and I need to get things done. This is the start of Kirstin Allio's story--there's another oxymoron for you--called "No One Leaves" from Conjunctions. You'll love it.

NO ONE LEAVES

No one leaves the house anymore, not from work, from imagination. “Distant wars make me feel like a bad person.” To confess is to break one’s teeth, in Kurdish. No one lives within their mental map of others’ futures. “My husband still has his baby fat at fifty!” What’s faith? None of the physicians have openings. “Did you say opinions?” What is wrong with people? Childhood? Irony? “I know it when I see it.” A storage unit for holiday decorations. “They were yay about that.” Pinecones dripping plastic. The pioneers were cynics. Money, politics, intentional or unintentional poetry. Poverty makes a sign for stump grinding seem sexual. “Several people have told me I’m lonely.” Full disclosure, fall is over. The opposite of solitude is profanity, a failure of silence. “We’re trying to language feeling going forward.” A fallen tree a figure of speech leaving a lived-in space leafless.

Our NEXT MEETING IS A JOINT MEETING

You’re in your feels, flushed by the fact that there’s no who at the back of everything.

It falls to you to kill the lights to see the stars, terminuses of beginning, breath of bewildered prophets ballooning old jars.

You’re told to toon out your parents’ ingratitude, ingratiating as a nonprofit. There’s a place (you’re told) where choice is an aphorism, an ice age of underexploited expenditure where anyone can say it but only you can see the permission structure.

Pressuring the farce (don’t be sad) blows a fuse to a machine age and you’re a mastodon. With other munchers. Myth busters. Lawn eaters. The meeting covers the ground.

MYTH

was math, matter divided by pattern. All gods were metadata.

*

An airplane was a chaise lounge pushed along by a well-tended hand from a glossy ad for a vacation from language.

*

Gratitude was guilt, grief the scapegoat. How to find a needle in a haystack? Burn the haystack down.

THIS PAGE LEFT

This page left emotionally blank, silent.

Gestation. Guiding

question, a female manifesto? Manifestation. My fief and turf, my description (pattern) of fiction (matter) is fiction (          ). If you had to sex the answer, soaked as the worm in the worn handle of clear liquor, where would you touch me?

All that touches turns toward green. To promote myself is to break character with the built environment.

(I tried to hold onto her, but there was something green in my posture. Not pride, but not wanting to be a predator.)

PRIDE AND PREDATION

Me: young hair/old face

Her: young face/old hair

Breast of burden/bird

Of prey: does the question pre

Date the answer or the answer

Predate the question?

Me: a runaway

From feelings, her

A feeling of running

Toward danger. Me

An end-run around lying

Down with dogs dreaming of lions in the long

Shadow of the grave

Stone gas pump—

Get up, brush the high

Stakes off. Between

Us, it’s just not working

Beauty exists in the sphere

Of hurting. In the heartspace

between us, one heart between us—

UNFORMED AND UNCONTENTED

Insert pain here. In great detail.

Insert silence. If you fall in love with a solution, make sure it doesn’t become mainstream, a mannerism. Like sniffing between sentences. Sucking air through the spaces in your teeth to cool it down.

Enter the dog, long-suffering as any dog caught up in human business, but ass backward, an eye on the back of its head, an anus. Cerberus? As a representation of time, it could go either way, the underworld boulder on the up side or the downer of the tale. If you believe what you see, you see what you believe. Reality replaces psychomyth as the secret structure of the host culture.

What are you fucking doing? Seriously, what are you doing? What is going through your brain to produce this crap presumably intentionally? Or can you just not help it?

You write that and you're like, yep, nailed it, what art I have made? "Toon." That's deep how you did that misspelling.

Imagine if anyone cared about this shit the outcry that there would be? The mocking? Or if anyone actually saw it and writing mattered to anybody?

I would be too embarrassed to live with myself if I wrote that way. I'd be so ashamed.

But please, definitely, get in touch and tell me how that's awesome. Is it "You're in your feels"? Amazing. Is it "ingratiating as a nonprofit"? It's probably that. That's genius.

Bradford Morrow, wow: What a bigoted waste of skin you are. You moronic, full of shit toad.

But sure, great writing. Prize-winning writer. Outstanding art.

It is impossible for anyone to believe that doesn't suck. You can do whatever behind close doors with no one asking questions and no chance of anyone saying the truth, but you would not get on a stage with me in front of thousands of people if we could arrange that and have a conversation where your thesis is that this is masterful.

You put this shit forward, and you couldn't do a better job if you tried with everything you had to show someone else, anyone else, that you are full of shit.

You're a fraud, an IMPOSTER since we're doing the caps thing, you're playing a part because there's nothing else you can do and no one at all holds you accountable or cares or notices because all eyes are off somewhere else, because this is what you put out. You're not to be taken seriously. You're a punchline to a bad joke.

But it's amazing, huh? You want to bet your life on that if you're an editor who publishes the likes of this? Your kids' lives? But it's subjective, right? The hell it is. Eating dog shit is subjective, it can be really tasty. Stop it.

The subjective defense is what people without a single brain cell say, or people who do the same garbage and can't do any better and and aren't strong enough to be honest with themselves that they suck at this thing they do and which they do for no reasons actually pertaining to doing that thing well.

What part did you love the best if you're one of these liars? This?

Reality replaces psychomyth as the secret structure of the host culture.

Wow. Incredible writing. Thank you. I'll be thinking about that often going forward in my life. Or this?

If you had to sex the answer

What are you doing? I'm sexing the answer, duh. We should sex the answer. Hey, look, if you have to sex the answer...

Is the short story collection that this person won an award for based on writing the dumbest things possible? Because I can see merit there.

But we're not ever actually talking real merit, are we?

No, sir, we are not.

Can you even imagine electing to chose to read the above of your own free will? To spend time reading more of that? A book of that? Voluntarily? Not because you were shackled in a dungeon and this was being put in front of you and your choices were to read it or have the skin scraped off your back with a dull blade.

Anyway, I mentioned a brand new story I'd written. So let's finish off this latest prose with the start of it. Ready? I should tell you, too, by the way, that Conjunctions' thing is cutting edge, innovative literature. You know, work where you get things like "You're told to toon out" and "They were yay about that" and "You're in your feels" because that's obviously cutting edge, whereas I just constantly invent new modes of narrative.

If you self-profess that you're old at forty, what are you at eighty? Super old?

The people who make declarations about themselves in this manner don’t allow for qualifiers, gradations, twists, states, renewals, realizations, possibility, the wide-eyed wonder of seeing for the first time, or efforts of lucubration and lubrication regards precious parts.

Old is old is what they mean.

I am old.

But how could being old last that long? Where’s the sense in the math?

And if you’re old at eighty, what are you at 100?

You’d have to be young to make it that far.

As kids, me and my friends would argue as to the logistics and viability of frying bugs with a magnifying glass and the light of the sun.

The prevailing wisdom was that you probably could, but all any bug needed to do was keep moving and it’d be a bitch to set them ablaze or cause them to crack open and dissolve—there were rival schools of thought—with your death ray.

They’d win and you’d lose simply because they kept going. You could still stomp them, but that would have been like being a bad sport.

We were poised to try once with this red ant on the sidewalk in front of my house.

“Not that kind,” a friend cautioned, I think because he believed sunlight was a form of sustenance for red ants that explained their coloring and a concentrated blast would make the ant stronger.

We couldn’t find a black ant, though, and this girl who was with us said, “Ants are only around when you don’t want them,” which turns out to be true about a great many things, as figuratively befitting the thronging nature of ants.

I used to have this pity party piece. In middle school I told a friend that this other friend of ours didn’t like me. The latter was the first person I thought of as a lifelong friend in a “how it’s meant to be” way because that’s what we’d always been. Duo-ed. There wasn’t a start that I recalled. Rather, perpetual has been. Our friendship numbered among those truths you hold as self-evident—self-existent—like how your phone number was your phone number.

I have this idea that if I was in a hotel room and it was four in the morning and I was going to shoot myself, I’d first call all the phone numbers that had belonged in part to me during my life that I could remember, and I can remember them all, just to see who might answer.

I don’t know why I think like this.

Sometimes I feel as though there is nothing we want more than for someone to make us believe that it will get better, unless it’s to say that they want us back, which is unlikely to make things better in the manner that we actually need them to be better.

Why do I say “sometimes” when I mean “often”? Why do I say “often” when I mean “practically always”?

Further than that, I’m not prepared to go.

The friend with whom I shared this concern said, “No, relax. It’s all good. I’ll call him and ask if he wants to do something Saturday, and you can listen in without him knowing and you’ll see that he likes you and it’ll be cool.”

The call was made, an outing was proposed—a game of basketball at the nice court with the fresh paint and clear lines in the middle of town you had to get to before the older kids turned up—and this kid said, “I don’t want to go if he’ll be there, he’s a fucking loser.”

For a couple years after, while it remained feasible, I’d utilize this anecdote for heartfelt bonding moments, like with a girl. Back when you bandied about terms like “soul mate” without laughing at yourself and prior to learning to modulate your tone such that you could count on someone finding your use of the term at least semi-ironic.

I was baring my heart in my mind, regardless of whether the words sounded rehearsed, which they basically were.

This happened to me. And yet, here I am, vulnerable with you.

I had no idea what the real stuff was. And what it wasn’t. It must wash over you first, which only means anything if you’re also taking it in.

“You don’t know what you don’t know, son.”

Well, no shit, Jack.

Which proves Jack’s point. Jack knows that. You’re in the dark.

Roads with dips and bends make me comfortable. They feel like they belong to home, even if they’re in a town I’ve not been to before.

I think I’d like to live there, with turns you can’t see around because you’re not meant to regardless of how rounded they might be.

These are streets that look as if they need pruning for all the overhanging branches, though cutting back those trees would compromise a foundational spirit, which is itself impossible to do in that spot. It’s as though the place has been people-proofed.

The homes have rusted items outside in the yard that keep rusting. They’re supposed to rust. The don’t belong in the garage, let alone the house, which isn’t directly a matter of refinement, station, or class.

They may be tools of some trade with which you’re not familiar. For outdoor work of an indeterminate but longstanding nature. Or pertains the sea.

Or outdoors antiques that no one with a right to be on that property thinks of as antiques but has absorbed as a part of life. As ever they were.

It hardly matters if these objects and edifices are never touched again by those who own them right now.

What do you know...that's a little bit different, isn't it? Kind of not hard to see the gap in quality.

But that's the problem with a Bradford Morrow and so many of these people. They look at the junk we saw in the first example, and the kind of person who wrote it, and they're not threatened, are they? How could you be? They don't think that person is smarter, more talented, better. The pathetic ego is left protected.

This isn't about readers. Making the best work available. It's about all this other nonsense.

Ultimately, the whole world that these people have built is about nothing. It happens to exist, in that they're in it, but it might as well not exist. The only impact it has on the world is the part it plays in there being no great writing.

Insofar as someone like a Bradford Morrow has a legacy, or is part of a legacy, it's that. And being a terrible person on top of it, but which is also a big part of it, and, truthfully, a huge part of the appeal for a person like that.

Yay?