Prose off: Justin Taylor story that is exactly like every other Justin Taylor story b/c what else could he possibly do in n+1 put forward by system stooge-bigot Mark Krotov v. Fleming story

Saturday 6/7/25

If you've ever read a Justin Taylor short story, you know it's just him. It's always just him. Nothing is invented, because he is incapable of invention. Instead, it's a fictionalizing of his own life, which really just means the label that he chooses to call his fiction, all of which is indistinguishable from his other fiction. It's all Brooklyn and insider-baseball writing program references, allusions to books that only are read by literature grad students and usually not read so much as name-checked for what is used as intellectual clout with these people, not really having any knowledge about anything. He looks like they want a white male to look, and is as one of them as one of them can be.

Thus, there will be Justin Taylor fiction in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope--you know, the usual venues for this kind of person of no actual ability--and The New York Times Book Review, for no other reason than that someone like Greg Cowles recognizes Justin Taylor as a card carrying system member, will have him write a book review at the same intervals throughout the year. That's how it works. This person is granted six reviews, this person four, this person two. The time passes, it's time to assign them another one for reasons that have nothing to do with ability, insight, merit, and on and on it goes, no change, ever, nothing actually worth reading, ever. No legitimacy.

In a world of trillions of things coming at people, bombarding them, why would you read any of this? Answer: You wouldn't. You only would be familiar with it, and go through the motions of reading it, if you were Justin Taylor or someone like him within that system.

He's from Florida, and so you get Florida again and again and again and again and again in his fiction because IT'S JUST HIM.

He can't create anything. He's a man without an imagination. But sure, one of the best fiction writers. Makes perfect sense. And I'm not being sarcastic. These people are entirely full of shit. So, this is how people like that are going to act, because it's obviously false. This guy couldn't invent something to save his life.

Today I saw a Justin Taylor story in BOMB where our friend Raluca Albu can be found when she's not working for team AI to help bring about the end of art in which the first person narrator is named Justin. Didn't even bother to come up with a different name. But sure, fiction. This is from that "story":

“and there is a new benzodiazepene called Distance,” he wrote in a poem called “Cassette County.” Both poems I’ve mentioned are from his book, Actual Air (Open City, 1999).

Isn't that unbelievable? Who does that? These people do. That's grouped as fiction. And it's just an entitled, pretentious, perpetual MFA'er--doesn't matter that he's not an actual MFA student anymore--who is so full of himself, and yet so empty and lacking, and so pompous, that he's putting in the name of the small press--that no longer exists--and the year a book of poems came out, to say, "See? I know this kind of thing, that's how well read I am."

This is from the same story:

And since the book came up earlier and will probably come up again, let me mention a scholarly breakthrough I had the other day, when I discovered that David Berman took the title of Actual Air from Faulkner’s novel If I Forget Thee Jerusalem (Random House, 1939), whose title is itself pinched from Psalm 137, and Faulkner’s publishers hated it so much they forced him to change it to The Wild Palms.

What the hell. Not even going to try and do fiction. Tell a story. Just going to do this classism bullshit that the truly stupid and vain and insecure have to rely on, and then tell a soulless, mentally unstable editor like Raluca Albu that it's fiction, and in it goes because a person like Justin Taylor is recognized as the right kind of person by people just like them.

Imposters, all.

Who wants to read that? What does that mean to you? If you didn't go to grad school for literature, if you don't have an MFA in creative writing, how can this possibly mean anything to you?

And even if you did, how can it mean anything to you? Because you've heard of that press and you once read some Faulkner but not that Faulkner? The recognition of the proper nouns is a reason to read something?

I don't believe that. I don't believe anyone would voluntarily read this because they wanted to actually read it and, more importantly, wanted to keep reading it. I think a certain kind of person--that is, someone who is like these people--would read it to say that they did, but that's just performative BS. Cosplaying being an intellectual, or for credit in their incestuously evil system.

You just write more of this twaddle, for no real purpose, in it goes, for these other reasons, you get your books deals, your occasional appearance in The New Yorker, a Guggenheim at some point or other. You have all of these people publishing your work, putting you on lists of "Ten books to read this summer" and they don't even like your crap any more than I do. Think about that. They don't think any higher of it than I do. But that's irrelevant.

Isn't that amazing?

You can't follow the career of someone like this. Any of these people like this, and they're all the same way. It's the same shit every time. So if they're six books deep into that career, who the fuck cares about book seven? It's not going to be different. There's no journey, no arc, no new forms, inventions. There's no, "I can't wait to see what he's coming up with this time." It's all the same time, every time.

But book number seven comes out, and the same people in this warped, backwards, anti-writing industry think, "Oh, that's by so and so, I'm meant to praise it" and "Oh, so and so has a book coming out, we'll have to get that on the Fall Must Reads list," or "So and so has a book coming out, ask his agent if he has a story and we'll publish it."

And of course it's sight unseen. A book comes out, and if you paid attention to any of this, which I'm sure you don't if you're a normal person, you'd see that that shitty writer has four shitty stories in The Paris Review, Harper's, Granta, The New Yorker. Gee. I wonder why and how that happened. They must have had four remarkable masterpieces that were vetted and selected on account of how special they were.

Everything is a backroom deal. Guggenheim, things I just mentioned. Nothing is real. Nothing happens because anyone thought what they read--glanced at--was any good.

That's just not how it works. And if you think it's any different after seeing the examples of all of this bad, awarded, hyped, propped up writing in these pages, I don't know what to tell you. I can tell you that there isn't a single example of anyone defending the honor of the bad writing I put up on here by these people. How could you? And if you were stupid enough--and probably drunk enough--to try, you'd do it anonymously as a kind of shit post, because you'd know. Can't not know.

The lifelessness of all of all of the writing by these people blows my mind. It's like they've all mastered how to never have the smallest bit of life, of anything real, slip through. Even when the prose isn't technically terrible, there's no life. Like the best it can be is some corpse on a table that hasn't decayed yet. But there's never any fucking life. Do they have no life in them? Is life lost on them? Do they possess no understanding of life? Do they lack the ability to convey the essence of life? To create what is itself life?

I think we all know the answers to those questions. I think publishing people do, too. I think all of these writers do.

The writing has to have the life or it's not great writing. There's no way you can compensate for not having that life. There's no substitute.

Anyway, prose off time. This is typical Justin Taylor, because anything by Justin Taylor is typical Justin Taylor. It's from a story called "My 19th Century," which was published by n+1 and its editor Mark Krotov, same vaunted venue that also gave us the likes of Mark Doten's "Piss Trump" and where former editor Nikil Saval, who is now a Pennsylvania state senator, once threw a temper tantrum when I suggested that maybe the likes of "Piss Trump" wasn't outstanding fiction ("How dare you question my expertise") and probably not better than anything I'd ever written in my life, but bigots are going to bigot, aren't they?

My bad mood had lost its luster, my heartbreak its halo; even my self-hatred had grown stale. I was leaving the city against my will and in timorous stages, trying the patience of friends who couldn’t keep up with the shifting goalpost of the final goodbye. Or, for that matter, with my exacerbated sense of martyrdom, as though the very word “martyr” weren’t exacerbation enough—to say nothing of “against my will.” My intended had taken a desirable job and insofar as I neither had a job nor desired one, we were going where her job was. She, indeed, was there already, sipping rosé on the sublet lawn in the fresh-start province, looking good in a loose dress, probably, one of those ones that ties around the neck and doesn’t have much back to it, so how is she even wearing a bra—or is she?

There was love and money in abundance to be grateful for.

I was having a tough time bearing these salient facts in mind.

With the furniture gone, and all utility switch-off dates duly set, my last task (self-assigned) was to finish liquidating my library. I was losing whole generations of my readerly life, my writerly self; was wracked by freedom and horror, which I was finding nestled comfortably together, twins in the cradle of my despair.

At first I’d been lugging Whole Foods bags full of hardcovers on the subway to the famous used book store, taking whatever I could get for them. And also taking the store up on its apparently generous offer to “donate” the discards, sparing me having to carry them home, which of course I would not have done. I would have abandoned the bags on the sidewalk out front, same as any other scorned seller, which in turn explained why the famous used book store accepted that which it refused: concession masked as courtesy. This, at any rate, was what I’d thought until this morning. I was walking through, ready to deposit another weary load, when I saw my signed copy of The Discomfort Zone, which they’d sworn was valueless, standing faced out on a table, practically spot-lit, tagged “vintage” and priced at 20 percent above retail. I stormed out, bags of books still clutched in aching arms. Clearly I couldn’t “donate” them now, nor leave them outside the store, where those shitfuck vultures could still get at them, but that didn’t mean I was going to lug the stuff all the way home, either. It was too early in the day, and too late in the game, to get my ass kicked back to square one.

So I hauled the books down the subway stairs, went through the turnstile with swipe card in teeth, edged my way onto a downtown train. A few stops later a transfer afforded me the opportunity to ditch the bags by a wooden bench on the platform before descending further into the hot concrete catacomb to catch my Brooklyn-bound train. The plan—I can’t quite say “the hope”—was that some lucky hobo would find my leave-behinds and take some solace in the art contained therein. But that made little sense, since I am not one who believes that art can—or should—console, heal, improve, or save you. And in all likelihood, the hypothetical hobo would be pissed at the deception—grocery bags minus groceries—or maybe the bags would get If You See Something Say Something’d, wind up fondled by the bomb scare-robot, shut the whole system down for an hours.

I forfeit my rooting interest in the frictionless function of civic life.

You see what I mean. And it's the same shit every time because what else is someone like Justin Taylor really going to do? When you don't have any ability, having ability isn't an option. And when all you could ever be is one of these people and get whatever you get for that reason alone, you're going to lean into that. You have no other choice. And that's how it is for all of these people. Which is why the system is what it is. Otherwise, who could get cool stuff and be propped up?

Also: If you have a story narrated by a writer type, he should probably know what the word "fact" means.

And it's always this fictionalized writer crap, too. The name-checking, the itemizing, their buzz words and phrases. Pavlovian chimes for poseurs. Brooklyn, my library, this book I'm reading, signed copy, Whole Foods (gotta score those classism points). It's not interesting just because it's you. And you don't have the ability to make any of those things interesting. This isn't storytelling. It's listing shit that happens to be contained in sentences so that others can skim those sentences and think, "I know that term, I know that one."

It's the opposite of what reading is supposed to be and also great writing. And it doesn't matter if you stick in that "insofar" and it did it properly. Though, in a world where hardly anyone can, that's what is made to pass for writerly skill.

I think of it almost like sports radio. Ever listen to how dumb the hosts are on sports radio? How lacking in knowledge? Sophomoric? Inarticulate? Annoying? It's potty humor and drunk uncle stuff. But what happens when they start taking calls? Those people are even worse. They can't make a single sentence come out of their mouths. The host can say, "And we're back, let's take some calls," but if one of the callers was the host and they tried to say that, it'd go, "Um...ah...you know...wait...I was...um...so, like, yeah, we was sayin', um..."

That's kind of what you get here. Someone like Justin Taylor can make the sentence. Other people can't make a sentence. Because we're an illiterate nation in an illiterate age. Think of how insanely low that bar is. That's not a standard. It's like, "I can drive this car down this empty road" and people applauding because others crash ten times going two hundred yards.

We look at some of these awful stories by these awful writers--the George Saunders story from The New Yorker is a good example--and as soon as you see the thing you know what idiocy it is. But that doesn't mean that being able to read a sentence in another story makes that story any better. It has to do something. Otherwise, the best it is is...what? Grammatically correct?

But I was talking about life. And how writing can't be great unless it contains life. And the more life writing contains, the greater it is. There's no work-around with this. That's how it is. This is from a story which will be officially finished by tomorrow.

Everyone, he tried to believe, has what they want to hide for fear of being compromised otherwise, but if people knew that that’s how it was from person to person, they wouldn’t worry about these things and if they didn’t worry about these things they’d have a lot less to worry about in total and if people had a lot less to worry about overall maybe they’d be better at going out and finding happiness and if that’s what everyone was doing and you knew they were doing it and they knew you were doing it, then he wouldn’t be so unhappy himself.

He’d say words to this effect to himself from time to time, accepting that they were theoretically true, but also rejecting them—in his gut—as relevant to him. He probably was some horrible exception. There’d have to be a whole different set of rules for him. Bad rules.

Others may not have had valid arguments for making sure their vaults stayed sealed, but the same couldn’t be said about him. He had good reasons for his omissions. Which is to say, sufficiently bad stuff that you needed to keep out of view or you were cooked. You’d be mocked, scorned. They didn’t still do tarring and feathering, but if they did? He’d make for quite the charry, festooned, flightless bird.

Nothing ever changed in his life. Right down to what he wore at night. Last he checked, the ex wasn’t a doctor anymore. Even that had changed. The most recent result for her and her practice that came up in one of his online searches was from years ago.

People don’t stop being doctors, though, unless they retire or they’re dead. She couldn’t have retired already. Maybe there’d been a horrible accident. An icy road. A truck that misjudged the turn. Or a disease that wasn’t known about at all on a Tuesday which was revealed as being stage four on a Wednesday. Or a heart attack. Woman have heart attacks, he contemplated.

Was he wearing the scrubs given to him by a now deceased medical practitioner?

That would pretty much say it all.

Or perhaps she was in a new line of work. Having had her fill of doctoring she became an engineer. A professor. A coach for the overcoming of trauma. There are all these avenues in life and you don’t require so much as a blinker signal to turn down any of them, and he’d only gone how he’d always been going.

This was a horrid train of thought. A death train of thought. He needed to pull it together. Regroup. Deep breaths. No—slower breaths. There was a difference; the latter facilitated the former but the former didn’t guarantee the latter. Get it right. Today was a waste but that didn’t mean tomorrow would follow suit. It was promised to be every bit the new day for him as anyone else.

That’s it—start tomorrow.

But each time that tomorrow came and he awoke only to realize that his back hurt again, he knew that this was just another day and it didn’t stand out as a start seems like it should, but was instead the latest entry to the endless middle that felt the same as any other he might have remembered if there was anything to remember about them. Or not actually endless, because he’d eventually die, thus bringing the events of the middle to a close without ever having a natural winding down period or him knowing that he’d entered the last phase. It terrified him that the only way the days might change was by being all over.

He honored those thoughts as the worthiest of adversaries, which made for a solemnized battle with his anxiety and fears as they threw ever longer shadows across the surface of what he called his life, demanding of himself that he resist the temptation to add, “For lack of a better term,” but often failing even in that.

Bouts of productivity and a redoubled commitment to being properly hydrated were yoked in service to inverting what he grew increasingly certain was a lost cause, but at least his body had adjusted so that he didn’t have to use the bathroom as much as he did before.

Come the early evening, he’d formally admit what he had really known all along: He’d lost again. By a lot. The contest was never close. His legs had lacked for the necessary juice. Lactic acid had permeated all his muscles. His spirit. His fight. In a manner of speaking.

But the afternoon was in its final phase. Some hope there. The day was becoming more tomorrow than it was today. Kind of. It’d end and he would not. So there was that.