Prose off, steel yourself for a big shock edition: Story about a writer (what a surprise!) by Guggenheim winner Jess Row put forward by one of the ultimate Brooklyn lit bro frauds in J.W. McCormack

Friday 3/20/26

Yesterday we had an expansive prose off entry here in which myriad related things were discussed, but this is going to be a minimalist one.

Jess Row is among the chosen people of literary class system. He has no ability, the same as all of these people, which takes no time at all to prove. Everything by someone like this is the same. It will be about them, lightly fictionalized. And it's often about writers. Stories about writers. Referencing other writers.

Because people like Jess Row are incapable of inventing anything. They don't possess an imagination. They have no ideas. They have nothing for anyone except, of course, people like Baffler fiction editor J.W. McCormack, whom we've discussed a number of times in the past.

He's on the lookout for Jess Row types. The hallmarks of Jess Row types. It's even important that you look a certain way, and a Jess Row checks that box, too. It is always better to look unathletic here.

You ready? Here we go. This is from Jess Row's short story in The Baffler, "The Assassination of Henry Kissinger."

After graduate school, over in a flash, I moved back to Portsmouth to finish my novel. My parents owned an apartment building there, the Stafford Arms, and they let me stay in a vacant unit as long as I pitched in with management duties. This mostly meant collecting checks and attending to the tenants’ small emergencies. It didn’t go well. My writing depressed me. My novel was set in a nuclear missile silo in North Dakota in 1969. The three servicemen guarding the missile drop acid and nearly set off World War III. It was supposed to be called Chartered Trips, after the Hüsker Dü song: I was aiming to hit the center of a Venn diagram comprising Pynchon, DeLillo, Dr. Strangelove, and Cormac McCarthy. None of my teachers had told me what a terrible idea it was. Though Vas had. He’d taken me out for a beer at the Scratcher the spring of our first year and given me a detailed explanation, which in retrospect was the only valuable thing I learned in those two years. “The problem is that you have no investment in these characters,” he said. “This is an idle book. I can tell that you don’t really care, in the book, if the missiles get launched or not.”

I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ. Why does it always have to be this shit? Fiction about fiction. Working on my novel, graduate school/my MFA, references to Cormac McCarthy, Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon.

Who is this for? Honestly? Who is this meant to be read by so that something significant and real can be gotten from it?

You are terrible at this. You have to know that. All of these people have to know on some level what imposters they are. Which helps explain their behavior right from the jump towards someone they know is not. You can't honestly think this is any good. "I was aiming to hit the center of a Venn diagram..."

We get Crown Heights and Flatbush, accounts of the various drafts of the novel...there's just no one who could care about this save someone who wants to play "spot the class references" and equates mentioning places in Brooklyn and pretentious male authors with great writing, but mostly so that they can think, "I live in Brooklyn and I know those great writers, I've pretended to like those books, which means I'm very smart, I am quite great myself, and that's before we start talking about my MFA."

This isn't reading. It's not for reading. It's a form of trainspotting for insecure, multi-degreed but under-educated flaneurs and hollowed-out egotists. A truly pathetic form of self-administered back-clapping.

And all of it is just the most vanilla, mediocre, shit. And it manages to be so entitled at the same time, on account of the obvious classist element. The "one of us" thing.

And Vas, really? What, we got Vas Deferens here? Is Vag coming over later from NYU with a draft of her latest personal essay on the patriarchy?

I can't conceive of doing something this stupid and pointless, let alone repeatedly being rewarded for it.

As if you didn't know already what a joke the Guggenheim is and how that really works, like with the example of husband and wife Paul Yoon and Laura Van Den Berg who just each happened to deserve the award on the same day--because sure, that's totally believable, before you even look at their bad, boring writing which is as bad and boring as this guy's bad, boring writing; but they're all hyper-connected, and that's the trick of it--then let me just say that before I started writing this entry, I didn't know for sure that Jess Row had a Guggenheim.

But I knew how he connected he was. There was zero surprise seeing him, too, in The Baffler when I looked at that site for the first time in many months. It's just how it would be because of the connections, the lack of talent, the sheer aridity of the subject matter, and what a person like editor J.M. McCormack is himself all about.

I assume the Guggenheim, and then just do a quick check to see that I'm right. And I almost always am. Again, The Fait Accompli Club. If that person doesn't have one, it's coming soon, because they're the right kind of person. I always know. It's so easy.

You think this guy's agent sits there reading this and goes, "Wow! Another masterwork! I'm loving this! I'm blown away! How grateful I am to be able to enjoy and represent such amazing art by such an amazing artist!"

That's just an impossible thing. But these liars act like that's how it is. Nothing is real here. And not even in the creative-sparking kind of way of "Strawberry Fields Forever." It's just barrenness and mirage structures and these people acting like they mirage structures are actual skyscrapers made of real steel.

Meanwhile: I'm finishing up the story from which this comes. It's called "Open or Closed."

We didn’t know whether to leave the door open or closed after. Half open. A crack. What the unsuspicious percentage was.

I remember the tweaking of the gap amidst these silent deliberations better than what preceded them. His hand on the knob slowly pulling before letting go at a possible point of that could do it. The innocent aperture.

Then mine pushing the door back a couple inches as if playacting a role in someone else’s ritual of removal, and his again with its crucial, capping adjustment, the last beat before a somber, eyes lowered, almost respectful, this needs to be correct moment of ostensibly shared judgment, four hands now motionless by four sides for the final determination, agreement coming in the form of two people backing away.

Gee, what do you know...kind of different, huh?