Friday 11/22/24
We'll return to the fiction of The Baffler for this prose off, as selected by editor J.W. McCormack. Here we have another of those bouts in which I am really in for it, because this time we'll be featuring Pulitzer Prize finalist in fiction Ed Park, and we know how it went recently in that prose off with Pulitzer Prize fiction winner Joshua Cohen and his short story in The New Yorker, and I think we're all still bobbleheading over that one.
Here's all I need to tell you about Ed Park for starters, before we get into some more things later. He's hyper-connected in publishing. He co-founded The Believer, which is as Brooklyn literary culture as it gets (not that Park lives in Brooklyn--you can find him on the Upper West Side). He was an editor at Amazon, the publisher who put out that "Single" by the charming and talented Halimah Marcus, who likes to order her interns at Electric Literature--a hive for these people and incubating den for their incestuously evil culture--to publish her work should they land a (temporary) gig elsewhere. Park then worked as an editor at Penguin Press, and he teaches at Princeton.
Sounds like we can expect some high-level writing here, right? I'm worried. Are you worried for me? Because this guy is amazing, according to the publishing system.
I know, I know--I'm teasing. Because we all know how this is going to go. It's just a matter of putting it up. So let's get to it, shall we? This is the start of Ed Park's story, "Machine City," from The Baffler.
I’m not an actor, but I was in a movie once. Bethany Blanket cast me in her student project my sophomore year at Yale. In one scene, I was made up to look old, with a wrinkled brow and a wig streaked white with talc. This morning, in the elevator at work, I saw that face again. A devastating start to the day.
Machine City was a half-hour two-hander. It screened the weekend before winter break, at an unheated auditorium in the law school. You could see your breath. The Yale Herald called it “baffling” but doled out three and a half stars—grade inflation. Tickets were four bucks. Sixty people came to the first showing. I don’t know where the money went.
I just searched for the movie online. No trace, thank God. The internet barely existed when I was in college. Email was an impractical novelty. You’d send someone a message, and weeks might pass before they saw it. The message invariably ran something like, just saying hello on this crazy machine, have a great day. You could only check email at a few terminals sprinkled around campus. No one had a modem back then, and the phones had coiled cords.
Bethany and I crossed paths thanks to the god of student housing, that minor deity who put us on the third floor of Entryway D of Saybrook College, overlooking Elm Street. Each floor held a pair of suites plus a single. The bathroom was unisex. I roomed with two of my freshman year roommates, Anselm (econ) and Sang (biology). Anna, Steph, and Eunice were in the mirroring suite. Bethany, a junior, had the coveted single.
My Bethany Blanket knowledge was scant. I knew she woke to the hopped-up strains of “Two Princes” at 6:30 every morning to go jogging in East Rock. She had an Anglo surname, but I sensed nuance about the eyes. I’d seen her lounging on Cross Campus with her California friends, whose rad intonations constituted a foreign language. She had a T-shirt that said Got Milk? Later I found out her dad was an attorney for the U.S. Dairy Farmers.
The first time I said more than hi to Bethany was a brisk Friday in October, and now everything leading up to that moment comes back to me. I remember going to the dining hall with Massimo. The son of an Italian diplomat and a Mexican plastics heiress, he was born in Jordan, spoke with a faint German accent, and had attended a prep school near D.C., where he’d led a barbershop quartet and played lacrosse. To his parents’ dismay, Massimo wanted to be a writer. He was revising a story for his advanced fiction seminar. He was going to work on it in the Saybrook library afterward. He had written “Untitled” at the top.
“You’ve got to put something there,” I advised cheerfully.
“That’s the title,” he sniffed. “‘Untitled’ is the title.”
He was in a seminar taught by Trevor Stoops, author of Trapezoids.
When I first read that, I thought a number of things. One of them is what I always think when I read any of this work by a system person like Ed Park: Can any of these people not write the dumbest, tritest shit?
It's a question with an inevitable, unavoidable answer of "no," but I ask it anyway, largely because no matter how many times I see the bad work from these people, such that I know it's all these people do and all they can do, it still blows my mind that any system could be this fake and corrupt.
Then I thought, "Bethany Blanket? Really? This is what you're doing, huh? That's what you're going with? Bethany Blanket? Are you fucking kidding me?"
This name itself is so stupid, that I thought maybe it was a real name. No one would create this name and think, "Yep, that's the name! Nailed it. Perfect. Bethany Blanket."
But no, not a real name. That's the name that Ed Park thought was best. You know why? I know how these idiots think. He thought it was creative because the last name is a common noun and first and last name start with the same letter. Which he regarded as poetic and musical. Believe me: This guy admired the hell out of himself when he first wrote that down.
Bethany Blanket.
That's how simple these people are. Consider how simple you have to be in order to think that way.
I'm Carl Cashmere!
Bethany Blanket is like a name that was rejected from a brainstorming session for a Rankin-Bass holiday special.
Deep, brother. You're so creative.
And what do you know--Yale! Whoa! I am so, so, so shocked that we have a story set at Yale. To be honest, before I started this prose off, I didn't know Ed Park went to Yale. If you asked me, Yale would have been my first guess. But when I saw Yale right up front at the start of this story? I knew it. Because these people cannot invent anything. They can't think up anything new, they have no imaginations. If their soul--one of which they may not possess anyway, but we'll leave that aside for now--depended on it, they still wouldn't be able to invent anything. They cannot do it.
They have no stories to tell. They can't write. There's never anything of any value. No entertainment value, no artistic value. There's never anything in any of this. There's no point for it to exist. It exists simply so that these people can be these people in this incestuous system that itself exists so that people of the system can be the people of the system.
That's their fun little tautology.
That's literary publishing.
There is nothing else to it. That's all it is. There's nothing else to it and that's why everything within it happens.
And that's a Pulitzer Prize finalist right there, boys and girls.
(Who is worse at writing? Ed Park or Joshua Cohen? That's more like a fair prose off, but the truth is, they're equally bad--these people all suck to the same degree, in the same way. There's no separation between them. It's all the same worthlessness. Then, awards must be given out, praise must be heaped, deals must be done, Best of Lists need to be fashioned, and if all of the writing is the same, and there's no separation, what are these things then going to be based on? That's right--other stuff. Box-checking. Connections. Color. Gender. Money. Say that last one again. Because it's a big one. And you also want to be a terrible person. You can be a criminal. You can be a rapist. A thief. A plagiarist. A bigot. A racist. Sexist. Bereft of any ability, any knowledge, any expertise. Any honor. Any morals. Not a problem here, so far as they are concerned, so long as you are deemed one of them. And, frankly, you better be a number of those things I just listed, if you want them to count you as one of them.)
Look at the garbage on the losing end in these prose offs. How many of them have you seen by now? I'm doing all of the "best" venues and the most awarded people and all of that. And when has it ever not been garbage from these people? When has it ever not sucked? When has it ever not laughably sucked? When has it ever not made you think, "Seriously?"
Ed Park is going to do the Yale thing, because went there. He's going to do the skin color thing--gotta do the skin color thing if it's available to you when there's nothing else you can do anyway. He's going to do the insider-baseball literary pseudo-intellectual culture thing. Were you to keep reading--and I know, you won't, because why the hell would you--you'd shortly encounter references to a Tom Stoppard play and a Terry Gilliam film, but not in a manner to bring a reader along for the ride, but rather to leave them behind. Because make no doubt about it: This is classism. This is someone who wants someone who didn't go to Yale, who doesn't catch an offhand, devoid-of-context Stoppard reference, to think that they're below them. And you know who's like that? An insecure person. A dumb person. A bad writer.
Who is this for save other people who arise in the morning and say, "You know what? I'm a huge douchebag, but perhaps today I can be even more of a douchebag and a bigger pretentious fop than I was last time I was awake."
That's who this is for. And it's not even for them. It's for nobody. It exists so pretentious, cringe-inducing douchebags can go, "Ah, yes, douchebag stuff." They're not reading it. They're just looking at it and seeing that the boxes of the douchebag template are checked off. "Oh, yes, got one, there's one, there's another, check, check, check."
No one reads this, no one wants to read this. Like all of this from these people.
Pulitzer Prize finalist in fiction. Best fiction in the world. There it is.
I'm sure you thought it was amazing.
Wait, what? You didn't? Are you sure? Are you screwing with me? You didn't think that was amazing? Are you high? You didn't think that was brilliant? Pure genius? You can't be serious. That wasn't genius writing? What about the part with the Yale roommates with the very diverse names? Did you miss that? You must have missed that. Anselm and Eunice? What about Massimo? You can't tell me that using the name Massimo isn't genius. Don't even go there. What about this part?
He was in a seminar taught by Trevor Stoops, author of Trapezoids.
He made that up. I'm serious. That's how good Ed Park is. There is no Trevor Stoops. There is no Trapezoids. But you see how he made it sound like there was a Trevor Stoops and Trapezoids is this super important book, and it's so important, this book that doesn't exist, that he didn't even have to say anything about it?
Go ahead and pick up your jaw from the floor. I'll wait. And there you were telling me that's not undeniable brilliance.
Pulitzer Prize finalist. That's as good as it gets. (And this man doesn't have a Guggenheim yet? What the hell is up with that? Can we get Ed Park a Guggenheim this year? That's coming, right? That's gotta be coming. I know you'll fix that, Guggenheim committee. Ed Park: Guggenheim 2025. No brainer. We're talking Bethany Blanket-level imagination here. You think anyone out there could think up something like Bethany Blanket and doing some stupid story about their time at Yale that they're going to call fiction? You're crazy. Award him!)
I can't compete with that. Right? That's how this works, yes? Couldn't do something that great. Couldn't come close.
My knees are a'tremblin' as I contemplate actually going through with this prose off. Maybe I never should have stopped drinking and I could try and down some courage first. But no. I'll try and be brave.
Try and be brave as I put something here that every last person who looks at this will know is infinitely better.
Actually, come to think of it, I guess I don't need to be that brave to do that.
Ready? Here's the start of something of mine:
My aunt Dot has been dead now for quite a few years, though there are some who would say that she wasn’t ever very much alive. She was my mom’s aunt, and thus my great aunt, but we weren’t related by blood, given that I was adopted.
Her younger sister was the person I’ve always thought of as my good grandmother and went by the moniker of Grammie. Upon my adoption to the people I viewed from the start as my real mother and father, Grammie loved me immediately. Flesh and blood were meaningless to her; love was not. We were tight.
Over the years Grammie and I would watch lots of Red Sox games on her crappy relic of a TV from the days of original airings of The Twilight Zone that was twice as deep as it was wide. She came from a generation when people called African Americans “colored,” and would casually lapse into her throwback terminology, not understanding what she was doing wrong, but if there was a bigger fan of brawny Red Sox slugger Mo Vaughn in the world, you’d think it must have been Mo’s own mother.
Grammie also gossiped a lot about her sister Dot. Aunt Dot was what you’d call very old school religious. She was a spinster. An actual spinster, not in the way we bandy the term about to reference a forty-year-old cousin who hasn’t been on a date in forever. There was this vague familial rumor that once—around the time of a mid-century war, so either WWII or Korea—she was “sweet on someone,” but everyone knew this was more of an attempt to gussy up a little mystery to Dot’s otherwise drab backstory. Theoretically there’d been some slow dances at a town community center, when young couples were expected to keep enough space between them for the Holy Ghost, ensuring that the virtues of their Puritanical forbearers remained alive and well, but even encounters of this hardly hot-and-heavy nature felt like a stretch, if you knew aunt Dot.
Dot’s principal interests in life, it seemed, were the Lord, prune juice and talking about her bowels, and terming people fat—to their faces. Other people said hello, how are you, how have you been, but Dot sized you up, looking from your feet to your head, shaking her own considerable gourd as her gaze locked onto your midsection, no matter what was going on there—you could have a washboard tucked under your shirt—and then she would inform you that, alas, you were a porker. (In her later years, Dot came to resemble Gollum, which made her judgments on your level of fitness seem to have a yet more sinister certainty behind them. Once she even touched the belly of a much younger aunt of mine, and I half-expected her to say, “My precious!” as she poked around, feeling for flab.)
The prevailing opinion was that aunt Dot, well, kind of sucked, but that was part of her charm, that idiosyncratic level of orneriness. You admired her consistency, after a fashion. Plus, she made for great stories, and everyone—though never in front of her, of course—did an aunt Dot impersonation at cookouts that invariably prompted someone of a somewhat sympathetic nature to say, “Poor old Dot,” while still laughing all the same, and the members of the gossip gang each took a big, long sip of their drink, a kind of toast that was never made official as such, like Dot didn’t even get that.
Dot’s recounting of her bathroom battles with her blocked passageways had a Homeric quality to them, and her saving deus ex machina in these epic sagas could involve anything from forceps to her fingers—I shudder anew as I recall the triumphant tone in her voice in relating that necessary method of success, for she always prevailed eventually, whatever it took—to apricot brandy to some lines from Paul to the Galatians. You could be seven-years-old and that wouldn’t prevent her from divulging her recent multi-hour torments of baneful constipation, and how she had come through, fatigued, but lighter, less blocked, more, presumably, flowing. She viewed her bowels as a battle front. The battle front might not have made for polite conversation, but it was where the news of the day came from, and you couldn’t stint on the news of the day any more than you could if you were Walter Cronkite. It was just the way, I figured, of the adult world, but it was also never too early to indoctrinate children in the realities of the front, whatever form it took—no more so than telling them that hell was real, and hell hurt, which was a line Dot perpetually had at the ready.
Dot, as I suggested, was very anti-hell. She relished a good fire and brimstone lecture, though, about what hell would be like if you landed there. These were joyless talks. Grammie, meanwhile, was full of vim, explodingly alive. She delighted in her grandkids and spoiling them. She was big into mischief, forking over a ten-dollar bill to you that she couldn’t really afford, with a fast, thrusting, “take it, take it,” action of her hand behind your mother’s back after these payouts had been exclusively forbidden by one’s parents. She even had the eye twinkle thing going, such that she possessed some Santa Claus swagger, grandmother-style.
Grammie wouldn’t stop smoking or playing the lottery, both of which activities Dot disapproved of, being regarded as vices, and after she died we discovered piles of notebooks written in these intense numerical ciphers that amounted to my grandmother’s life work of numbers theory, which I think may have cracked open the universe for her like when Wagner got to the end of his Ring cycle. Let’s just say that she won a lot.
I'm going to say...just going out on a limb here...that's not very close. I'm going to say that no one could possibly think it's very close. I'm going to say that holy shit, wow, what a pasting that is.
The last thing any of this is about is the work. That has nothing to do with it, save that when these people encounter work that separates from the slop pile of all of the rest of the work, they want to make sure that work is locked out because of the contrast it provides, and because it wasn't done by one of them.
I'd say that's been proven here. A lot of things have been proven here, haven't they?
You know what this is like? It's like giving the MVP to someone who hit .023 with no home runs and a single RBI that was the result of being intentionally walked with the bases loaded as a favor because of being connected and checking various boxes that have nothing to do with performance in a league where everyone has the same stats. There is no incentive to write well in the publishing industry. There is no one who can deliver the goods on the field. With the ability that requires and commitment, focus, effort, and total dedication to the work and getting better.
That leaves one person who jacks it 500 feet every time he steps into the box. But he's not connected. He checks none of the preferred boxes. And his work reveals, in the sharpest possible relief, the difference between himself and everyone else in the current system, and that is not going to be rewarded by the people of that system, intent on preserving that system.
The MVP--and all of the awards, whatever form they take--in our hypothetical will go to that person who can't so much as swing the bat without falling over, as the plants in the crowd--who are lifted from the same system--cheer and say, "Wow, you are the best out there! Look how good you are! Hall of Famer!"
Bethany Blanket.
Bet you wish you were that creative, right?
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