Prose off: Story by Laura Van Den Berg, as "one of them" as literary fiction people get, put forward in The Baffler by one of our favorite frauds, J.W. McCormack, v. Fleming story

Wednesday 7/9/25

Laura Van Den Berg is as one of these publishing people as you can be. Everything she writes is the same. Mannered, uneventful, dry, empty, safe, stakes-free, boring. All of her fiction is like going into a room in which there's nothing but white walls and track lighting. There isn't anything to see, to think about, to feel anything about, to care about. AI writing has more soul to it than a Laura Van Den Berg story or book. Any Laura Van Den Berg story or book. Want to put it in music terms? She's Pat Boone to AI's Little Richard. And you should know what AI is.

She's monied without any merit-based reason to be so. It's just how the peerage works. She's without imagination. Without talent. She could be a cardboard cutout--which happens to breath--representing the ideal byproduct of the MFA system. The Stepford Wife style of fiction writing. She has no knowledge about any subjects. Her work features fripperies. Nothing important. Ever. Gewgaws of the unlived, unexamined, unimportant life. Her stories are distillations of nothingness with capital letters, commas, and periods. They're bereft of ideas, innovations, memorable language, humor, consequence, passion, an understanding of human nature, or what has ever made a damn person human.

They exist for one reason alone: To be one of these people and be given what comes with that for no other reason than being one of them.

If Laura Van Den Berg is capable of knowing anything, and if she only knows one thing, it would be that this is all true. That's how it works with these people. They usually know what frauds they are. They hate themselves for it. Doubt themselves constantly. Hope that no one exposes them. Surround themselves only with people who are like them and are similarly motivated not to be exposed, and to say no truths, because truths in the enemy to these people. The stuff of their nightmares. Because nothing about them is true. Not the things they want to be true, anyway. This is why they will also attempt to suppress, block, and lock out anyone who is not like them; that is, anyone who is really the things they wish and pretend to be, because such a person represents the ultimate threat to them. And that is the mirror right up in their faces, with nothing to do about it but face the truth.

They can't do that. They won't do it. They'd kill--allowing that their cowardice didn't get in the way--to stop it from happening. Instead, they just go behind backs. They rig the system. They pay a certain amount of lip service outwardly, but that's just so they can get away with more where it all really goes down.

Laura Van Den Berg only associates with people like her. She is the definition of achievable if you are one of these people or, for some insane reason, aspire to be, because there is nothing there. Nothing to her. Nothing to her writing. It has less depth than the paper--were you to measure it--on which it's printed. Or the screen across which it goes. There is no puddle in the world that is shallower than anything Laura Van Den Berg writes.

She married the male version of her in Paul Youn. What's equivalent to a form of inbreeding is paramount to these people. A few years back, both of these writers received a Guggenheim--that's a $40,000 payout for each--on the same day, because that's how fake and rigged the Guggenheim is. The people bestow the award/payment thought this would make a compelling story, two writers under the same roof who write separately just by coincidence being totally deserving of their honor at the same time.

Right. That's pretty believable. How much is swampland going for in Florida these days? Anyone got a bridge I can buy?

If you see one of her stories, you have seen them all. The voice never changes. Nothing changes. Nothing matters. It's placebo fiction. Sugar pill fiction. There's more volume and life in a single breath of bad, stale air than there is in the whole of her output.

Which makes Laura Van Den Berg, and what she represents, and how achievable she is, how devoid of anything actual or substantive she is, just about the perfect writer and the perfect conception of what a writer should be to the frauds and sycophants and idiots and bigots and cowards of the literary fiction portion of publishing at every level of the industry, be it the literary journal, the press that publishes Laura Van Den Berg's books that knows all of this to be true as much as I do, the people who hype her, praise her books in reviews without so much as reading them, put her on their lists of "Ten books you must read this summer!", excerpt her work, anthologize her work, advertise her work, and on and on.

And there is no one in the world--by which I mean, the world of these people, because none of this goes any further, not really--who can refute any of this. You can read Laura Van Den Berg sentences. They have subjects and verbs and punctuation. That's not a standard, though, is it?

There's an unctuousness to everything she writes. A "I'm one of you, you know what to do" quality. She plays to these frauds and sycophants. She knows they want to enter that barren room with the dull, safe lighting and nothing, really, to see there at all. She's a tract housing fiction writer. Nothing to offend, nothing to make you think, nothing to make you feel. It's plain yogurt. There's never a surprise on the bottom. You don't have to feel or think anything. But there's a daintiness, and these people like that, because they feel swaddled. In tedium. They know what they're getting. Nothing will happen. The pulse won't quicken for a single second.

Someone who was featured in LitHub--a website that is like a tree fort for this kind of talentless, broken, unethical, husk of a person/writer--wrote me once to say that LitHub exists for no other reason than to pump up the Laura Van Den Bergs of the world. LitHub's editor is Jonny Diamond, a man who once stole money from me because John Freeman told him to. What do I mean by stole money? I can't get much more literal. Take money from this person in order to have it be your own. We'll get to him. I'm going to do him up properly in these pages.

And we'll get to Freeman. If Laura Van Den Berg represents the "ideal" MFA/publishing system writer, then John Freeman represents the ideal publishing system editor. He's latent evil. This guy lives deep inside of his own asshole, and sufficiently enamored of himself that he takes those surroundings as the divinely ambrosial glen made like all good things by the god that is himself. Doing his entry--or series of them, really--will take some work, because he's connected to so many people. It's kind of like publishing version of the Epstein list. Freeman is married to Nicole Aragi, who represents our boy Junot Diaz. But I'm not doing this now. It's gonna be done right when it's done.

So it makes perfect sense that one of our favorite frauds, J.W. McCormack, fiction editor of The Baffler, is going to publish anything Laura Van Den Berg writes. He doesn't need to read past her name at the top of the page--or in the subject field of the email that Laura Van Den Berg's editor wrote him--and it's going in.

It's...something...how many people come to this site every day to look at entries in this journal about J.W. McCormack. I log on, I make a check of things, and people are reading about this guy. At all hours of the day. Also Wells Tower. And Emily Stokes. Sadie Stein. Among others. Some stuff is going to be tweaked moving forward, to make sure everyone has the best chance of having their time--and often their extended time--in the sun. Their repeated times.

I don't even need to pop in the hyperlinks right now to take you to earlier entries about J.W. McCormack, since apparently everyone's finding them on their own anyway. Which doesn't mean that when I do include a link that's not the case. The search function on this site will also take you to relevant prior entries about this dreck-wired fraud.

Here's the thing with fiction in The Baffler: It tries to be all edgelord-y, typically. Given that these writers are essentially empty convenience story plastic bags that somehow manage to wield a pen or strike a keyboard, that means laughable stylistic overreaches. Like kids pretending to be what they think some kind of grown-up is, but getting it all wrong, such that when you walk past you laugh and think, "Oh, that's cute," only these are soulless vipers, who would wait for someone to turn their back before trying to get another soulless viper--so it's not their neck on the line--to bite that person in the heel as they slither off. In other words, you don't think, "Oh, cute." You laugh. Derisively. Because the writing is always that bad. Childish. Pathetic. Desperate to be thought of as this thing it so plainly isn't. We can link to an example of this just so you know I'm acting in good, honest faith.

This isn't what Laura Van Den Berg does in the slightest. Her work is as laughable, but for different reasons. In the above example, the fiction is akin to someone building...I don't know...a fort in the playroom, and saying, "Look how crazy my fort is! I am so creative!" and it's like four pillows balanced unevenly. Whereas, Laura Van Den Berg writes what I think of as doily fiction. It's just a thousand doilies. Or ten thousand. A million. Doily after doily after doily. Identical doily. You can look at the doily. Doilies. Is it offensive? I mean, it's a doily.

Do you come home at night and stare at doilies? Because that's what it'd be like to spend your Wednesday evening after working reading Laura Van Den Berg. Okay, staring at doilies is better than sticking your toe in the door and slamming the door six dozen times until your toe falls off. So there are worse things. It doesn't hurt to stare at doilies. But you're fucking staring at doilies.

These are the standards, huh? These are the standards of excellence? Doily staring? Because I'm told by these lying bigots--and the Guggenheim lying bigots--that Laura Van Den Berg is amazing at writing.

Back to J.W. McCormack. He's gonna publish this story anyway. No matter that it's incongruous with the edgelord fiction he normally puts forward in The Baffler. He's saying to other people, "Not quite right," when he looks at their stories, because he's not actually looking at anything, really. He's looking at the person. Are you the right kind of person? Are you one of us? Are you nonthreatening to a loser like me?

Because J.W. McCormack is a bigot. This is the very definition of bigotry. Remember what I said about lip service above? This is an example. Issuing the lip service makes it easier--or so these people think--to get away with what you're really doing where it counts. He's putting Laura Van Den Berg in, no matter what, because he knows to do that when he sees her name.

These are horrible people. You think this is about writing? It's never about writing, except insofar as these people hate anyone who can actually write work of quality and value and that might actually matter in this world. Because none of this shit does. You could make it a rule that every person on earth has to read something by Laura Van Den Berg every day, or else they die at the stroke of midnight, and that work still wouldn't matter. Wouldn't make a dent in who or what we are, no matter the extent of the exposure. Wouldn't truly mean anything to anyone, save as something you had to do, like, I don't know, have that bowel movement. There it is, bowel movement accomplished. And there it is, Laura Van Den Berg story read for the day. They wouldn't even be on the same cultural or societal or personal or spiritual level. The person on the toilet might at least have something to think about (as Montaigne recognized). That's never going to happen with anyone who reads a Laura Van Den Berg story.

So let's get it to it, shall we? I apologize: I felt it was important to be thorough about this writer and what she represents, what her place in this system says about the system. This is is the start of Laura Van Den Berg's "Cake," as selected for publication by J.W. McCormack, in The Baffler this month:

The cake has become a problem. In the back of the car the three women try to solve it like an equation. Rita sits in the middle, squished between Hilda and Seraphina, the golden cake board flat against her thighs. Rita, nearly six feet tall, has made a commitment to use her height to her advantage. No more shrinking away. But in the car she must slump to avoid thumping her head.

The cake is a giant vanilla sheet cake. It was served at a retirement party for a manager at the company where Rita works, wheeled out on a rolling table with Now You’re Dead to Us! written across the top in sapphire icing. She is an assistant, just like Hilda and Seraphina, though they have been at the company much longer. At this point in the night Dead to is all that remains of the lettering. In the car, Rita counts up the Dead to people in her life: her mother, her older sister, and her ex-boyfriend, who worked overnight at a hospital and came home smelling of cigarettes and bleach. Plus, the younger version of herself who tolerated too much. Who allowed bad things to happen.

The car hits a pothole. The cake quivers on the golden board. A loose hunk slides off the scalloped edges, and now Hilda has cake in her shoes. The three of them gasp. At a red light, the driver twists around, demands to know just what they’re doing back there.

“We’ll fix it,” they say, like good assistants. “We’re so sorry.” Even though they have no idea what to do. The cake didn’t seem like it would be such a problem when they were leaving the party, which was held in a stately townhouse, in a neighborhood so pristine the sidewalks glistened. The party was Rita’s first company function; she arrived in her nicest clothes, a black scoop-neck dress with low black heels, a black bucket purse, and her lucky yellow windbreaker. On their way out they were stopped by the manager and owner of the townhouse—older, elegant—in a blue silk dress. She appeared in the narrow vestibule insisting that they take the cake home.

“You can share it with your roommates,” the woman said. “Or just eat it yourselves. The three of you are skin and bones!”

No one stepped forward. Rita could sense the desperation crackling underneath the mask of the woman’s generosity. It was too much cake. Too much! It was Rita who reached out with her long arms. She was finding her impulse to accommodate hard to shed. Leaving the party together bound all three to the cake. Hilda held open the townhouse’s heavy front door so Rita could slide out sideways. Seraphina ordered a car on her phone. Rita was relieved. Her phone is ancient, and she forgot to charge it before the party, and by now it’s nothing more than a hard dark lump in the bottom of her bucket purse.

“You’re the first stop,” Seraphina says to Hilda. “And you have a roommate. You should take the cake.”

“My roommate can’t eat gluten,” Hilda replies. “She says the smell makes her ill.”

At her stop, Hilda slides out of the car. She moves with a slight limp because one of her satin shoes is stuffed with cake. The streetlights are ablaze. It looks like she’s passing through a short tunnel of light to reach her building.

The cake lurches on the board every time the driver sails over a bump or makes a sharp turn, and now Seraphina is claiming her fridge is too small.

“City fridges, you know? Also, sometimes I sleepwalk and do things I can’t control or remember. I could eat that entire cake in the middle of the night.”

Read the rest of it if you like, and you'll see that nothing happens. It's all like this. See what I mean about doily fiction? Every single story and book by Van Den Berg is this way. Frippery fiction. Can you read it? Sure. You can read the back of the mayonnaise jar. Is that really our criteria for great writing? You can read it?

Why would you read it? What is the point? What does this add to your hour, your day, your life, your heart, your soul? Does it entertain you? Compel you? Inspire you? Enrich you? Does it give you direction? Courage? A laugh? Does it thrill you? Teach you? Enliven you? Does it give you hope? Does it make you ask questions? Does it give you answers?

Or is it just a fucking doily you're looking at because this guy--me--said, "Have a look at this?" Take me out of it. I'm not here. Why would anyone read this? Why would anyone who read a book of this read a book exactly like it? Four books? Five books? None of which are any different?

Why? Loyalty? To what? To whom? You've been brainwashed? Who brainwashed you?

No. It's said to be read by publishing system people, who also don't care about it. I mean, sure, they care in that they can look at this and it's nothing. They are nothing. This is less about like attracts like than it is that a person who is nothing is comforted by other people and things that are also nothing. It's like a pacifier--a binky--for these people.

These are adult babies who are ill-equipped for the world, reality, the truth. Hence, their system. They are also the least equipped people to serve as stewards for good writing, great writing, literature, art. Think about that. I am choosing these words carefully. I always do. We're a borderline illiterate society. And for all of the people who don't read, who are bad at reading, these people of this system are more pernicious when it comes to reading, when it comes to readers, than those who haven't read a book right now in the last five years. Because if you got something great to those people, it would stand a chance with them. But the system people who do what they do over and with a Laura Van Den Berg? No.

The cake has become a problem indeed.

Only, I don't think this is quite what she meant by that.

Meanwhile, here's a little something I've been working on...

Having written down the percentage of his brain that he’d be able to give up and still know his name and what rain was, the man slid the piece of paper across the table between himself and the tyrant.

“No,” the tyrant repeated, pushing the paper back. “It’s not enough.”

“But you didn’t even look at it,” the man pleaded, his voice breaking into a thousand useless pieces.

“I don’t have to,” the tyrant replied.

The tyrant made as if to clap—but stopped short of submitting to the task of actually bringing his hands together—and the man was ushered from the room by underlings and detained within another space until he figured out something suitable to part with.

Whenever he had an idea about what to give, he rang a bell, effectively summoning himself.

Time and again he was brought before the tyrant to make an offer that was rejected before being returned to where they kept him.

He brainstormed. He got creative. He offered his heart (symbolically), his dreams (actually), his hopes (desperately).

But the tyrant wouldn’t budge.

Then came a day when the man was placed upon the carpet in front of the tyrant despite not having rung the bell, because there honestly wasn’t a single thing he could think of anymore.

His final effort had concerned a silver filling in a tooth at the back of his mouth. He’d offered it in part as a joke of madness and defiance resulting from his ordeal and some kind of commentary on what it had done to him, but also as if this were all an unspeakable riddle that itself might be soundlessly solved with a drop of precious metal from the very recess where once his voice was to be found.

But the filling didn’t double as a solution, and again the tyrant—who at least paused, as though he were going to say something else, before laughing—concluded, “It’s not enough.”

And now there he was, despite laying off the bell.

“I can’t think of anything new,” the man told the tyrant, his words darkened with the knowledge of someone who knows they won’t really be heard. “I have suggested all.”

“Not all,” the tyrant corrected. “There’s more. There is always more.”

The man shrugged and dropped to his knees.

“Take what remains of my life,” he told the tyrant. “It can at least be all over.”

“That won’t do,” the tyrant countered, his tone crumbling what remained of the man’s heart. “You will go and get your wife.”

“Why?”

The tyrant didn’t have to answer to anyone, but he preferred to in this instance.

“Because it will mean more to me when I tell her to go and get your children.”

Oh. What do you know. Kind of a bit different, right? You think J.W. McCormack wouldn't know that? You think any of these people wouldn't? How could you not? Is that even possible? Of course it isn't.

Look at the gap, the gulf, whatever you want to call it. There's no comparison between these writers. Can't do it.

Therein is the problem. I'll tell you what another problem is: You want to be in this system, you do a version of what Laura Van Den Berg does. Otherwise, you won't be allowed to sit at the table. So now you have people who can't write. There is no cavalry. You got me. I'm the cavalry. But anyone else here does some version of her shit. Like I said, she might as well be the exemplar for these fakers and sycophants.