Tuesday 5/7/24
What is the appeal of bigotry? What does it do for a person?
And yet what we see with bigots is how important their bigotry is to them. To the detriment of their self, their life, their business, their soul, their humanity. Why is bigotry so vital to such a person?
There has to be little else there. Little else within them. Little substance. Little conscience. Little self-awareness. Little intelligence. Little decency. Ethics. Honor. Self-respect. Kindness. Humanness.
Which brings us to our latest prose off.
We can go in every kind of direction with these prose offs. I try to mix things up in the approaches, because what never varies is just how bad the writing is from that other person that was put forward by someone else who is all about discrimination, like a Gerald Maa at The Georgia Review, who would be a good person to put the above questions to.
These people are protected for one reason: They've made it so that no one cares about them and the work they publish. The only people who see it are people as false and filthy as they are. McDonald's could put rat heads complete with eyes staring out at you in the chicken nuggets and no one would say anything if no one went to McDonald's or even knew what it was or that McDonald's restaurants existed.
This is how it works at a place like The Georgia Review, where Gerald Maa's discrimination is given a free hand, and the joint is wallpapered with the shittiest writing a person can do. Not the shittiest writing there is. I'm putting this a specific way. The shittiest writing a person could do if they attempted to do the shittiest writing possible.
This time, I'm going to do a paragraph v. paragraph prose off, but first allow me to apologize to you here at the outset before I subject you to what is the first paragraph of Munachim Amah's "The Things That Bury Us" in the new spring 2024 issue of The Georgia Review.
I feel bad inflicting this on anyone. You're not going to be able to make it through this paragraph, and I'm not asking you to. No one would actually read it if they didn't have to, and who has to? All you have to do is look at it. Let your eyes scan over it. I'm not trying to stop you from reading it. I just feel bad, because it'd be like saying, "Here's some vomit, put your hand in it, isn't that gross?" You don't need to put your hand all the way in this, so to speak. The paragraph is 910 words long.
Let’s take a moment to talk about Nnamdi Odimegwu, whose father when he was alive was called Jonas Odimegwu—a man full of himself and full of life, who stayed mostly at home on weekdays, went out in the evenings to down bottles of beer with his friends, and came home sometimes drunk, sometimes clearheaded, to grab his wife by the waist and sing her an old, tired song, a bulky man, close to the ground, who made his wife laugh with his theatrics half the time—and his wife, Nwoye Odimegwu, a no-nonsense school principal who had grown up Catholic and had been a member of the Mary League and Charismatic, had loved God fiercely all her life, whose only criteria when at thirty-seven Jonas came for her was that the man who would marry her had to fear God as fiercely as she did, because any other cross—drunkenness, joblessness, laziness—was a small thing compared to a lack of faith, and so when he came to whisk her into matrimonial life, he himself nearing forty, brandishing the kind of faith she wanted in a man, a mass goer, a communicant, a devoted member of the Catholic youth organization, she did not have any misgivings about the life ahead of them, did not doubt once that they would be happy, and so said yes I do and till death do us part as they were joined in holy matrimony at the cathedral, in the presence of bishops and priests and church groups who prayed for them and sang for them and gave them shiny wedding gifts, their marriage a bittersweet thing in those early years, for he was devoted in his love of God and the Catholic church, and he made her laugh with his jokes and silliness half the time, and sometimes he brought her grilled bushmeat from evening outings with friends, regaled her with stories, sang Celestine Ukwu to her with a sweet croaky voice, sometimes Oliver De Coque, sometimes Bright Chimezie, while she, Nwoye Odimegwu, danced to the sound of his voice, moved her body to the rhythm dictated to her by the man she loved, yet sometimes she stood in front of him and told him he had to change, when he drank too much and came home a terrible mess, when he stayed in bed and missed the day’s holy mass, when instead of helping out with the chores he walked around the house in his wrapper like an overgrown baby or sat at his desk staring morosely at his books, told him to stop lazying around and make himself useful in the house, to grow up and start being a man like his mates, but he cajoled her every single time, reached for her waist, planted a kiss on her cheek, told her she would see, change was coming, and Nwoye, who was not unused to waiting, who had waited patiently for a Godfearing man to come into her life, indulged this man, her husband, let Jonas woo her with his big smile and swagger, his charm that endeared her and the small town of Ifite-Awka to him, a blessing to have a Godfearing man who was not a complete ignoramus, a man who could make you laugh, make you feel like you mattered, and Nwoye told herself she would wait—for the Lord is faithful and does his thing in his own time—all of this before their baby boy arrived, a hope, a prayer, a thing she loved with a ferocious love, and it marveled her what this child did to Jonas, Jonas who from the day the child was born did not go out in the evenings to drink, Jonas who stayed beside the cradle all day watching the child, Jonas who changed napkins and washed dishes, as though a spirit had come into the house with the child and possessed him, and a few years went by as the baby morphed into a full person before their very eyes, went to kindergarten and nursery and primary school, and took his first holy communion when he was nine, during which he was selected to take the first reading at mass, walk all the way to the pulpit and bellow those words out of the Bible like a prophet, so eloquent, so confident, so full of himself like his father, which filled Nwoye with joy unfathomable, her son standing there on the holy altar in his glorious white shirt and shorts, her son letting out those words from the Bible without once biting his tongue, and she loved him (and loved him!), the boy who at nine could read anything in English and in Igbo, just give him anything and watch the boy devour it, and she told God this, told God she would offer Nnamdi to him, for everything she had in the world belonged to him—her house, her family, her job, her son—and so every morning she took Nnamdi to the holy mass, took him to afternoon choir rehearsals that stretched into long nights, to Block Rosary meetings where children gathered in front of the grotto like the three children of Fatima kneeling before the Blessed Virgin, all the while whispering a prayer in her heart to God: that this boy, with all his heart, with everything in his being, would know God deeply, would seek God and serve him all the days of his life.
Again, I'm sorry. I know. Painful. If there's a torture version of reading, it would be trying to read this stuff. I appreciate you bearing with me. I'm exposing people here. A rancid system of almost unilateral bigotry. This is what it comes down to. What has to be done. This isn't pleasant for anyone. It's not pleasant for me. You think I want to do be doing this before I write a feature this morning? (Is this pleasant for you, Gerald Maa?)
I hope you didn't actually try and get through it, but it's necessary to keep showing just what is happening here with modern fiction and why, and I don't want to drive you away because you think you cannot handle another one of these awful stories--or so much as a line from one of them--by these people.
I get it. There's nothing you'd less rather look at. But that's tantamount to the goal of a Gerald Maa and all of these people.
Do I even need to tell you--if you didn't click on the link to the story in full--that the whole thing is like that? That everything this person writes is like that?
Because once you've seen one thing by one of these people, you've seen everything else they've ever done or will do.
Why do you think Amah is in The Georgia Review? Remember, according to the publishing industry, The Georgia Review publishes the best fiction in the world. As does Granta with Motorollah. We don't need to go through a list right now. It's all the same. It all sucks. Why do you think Gerald Maa has him in there? What might those reasons be?
Hmmm. You think it might have to do with things that have nothing to do with writing? Do you see how it never has to do with writing? Not good writing. Do you see how it has a lot to do with surface things? What are some of those things? See how it has everything to do with being one of them?
The next paragraph in that story is 1254 words by the way (all of the paragraphs of the 4100 word story are of similar length).
Do you think that's because it had to be that way, in order for the story to be as good as it could be?
Or do you think it was someone with no ability, a talent-bereft bullshitter, who is working with nothing, has nothing to say, no story to tell, who says to himself, "Time to be creative!" and then decides long paragraphs would be the way to do that, in order to get an even bigger obtuse-fraud to say, "That is a person who should have work in my acclaimed, prize-winning journal."
We've talked a lot about word count here in this entry. How many words can someone use and still say absolutely nothing? The story we've just seen says absolutely nothing. It's impossible to give a fuck about it. I actually mean impossible. If someone said to you that they spent a lot of time in life reading such work by such a person, that it was their passion, a hobby, the way that some people listen to the music of Miles Davis, to re-use a recent example along these lines, you would think they were full of shit or lying. Because it's impossible to believe.
"What are you doing tonight?" says one person to another on the train home from NYC to CT at the end of a work week.
"You know me, I'll be reading Munachim Amah."
Again, impossible. It's impossible for this conversation to take place, and it could never take place, because it's impossible to like this writing and want more of it.
Just as no one could say, "I'm listening to my four hour loop of nails on a chalkboard with my new headphones," or "I'll be sticking my hand in a bucket of vomit until the kids get home. Can't wait."
Best writing in the world!!!!
What? No? Really?
Time for that other part of the prose off. This is a paragraph of a new one of mine. It's eighty-eight words. And it does more in those eighty-eight words than any of these people will do in their lives. Combined.
He meant both physically and not physically—something closer to spiritually. In the first case, because she’d actually been so sick. Made to have been so sick. In the second, because a vital spark had been doused for the time being. The wick was too too wet for relighting as of yet, but nor was there a guarantee that it’d ever be dry again or a match close enough to hand. The spark of life doesn’t operate on premises of promises. And now there’d been whatever this was.
And again: Gerald Maa expects me to believe, or anyone to believe, that what you just read from Munachim Amah--or scanned for four seconds and thought, "Good God, look at that crap"--is better than anything I've ever written in my life, and I should pay him to tell me that. He wants my credit card info, so he can deliver that totally legitimate--right--news.
3000 times in a row, if need be. An endless amount of times.
He wants me to pay him to discriminate against me.
What a bigot does is shut and lock the door to a given group, or a given person, automatically. There is nothing that group or person can do to have that other person open the door unless something forces that person to do so. Left to their own, it's automatically shut and barred.
This is the definition of bigotry.
We all know what is happening here. We all know why. We all know what Gerald Maa is. Same with Raluca Albu, Christopher Beha, Michael Ray, Mark Warren, J. Robert Lennon, etc.
And we all know what Colin Fleming is going to keep exposing Gerald Maa as.
I'll stop when you stop it.
Otherwise: I bury you. I dig you up. I bury you again. I dig you up again.
And I'm just going to keep at it--no matter who you are--until the discriminatory practices cease. You can keep hating me all you want once you've been made to stop acting in those discriminatory ways that are so easily provable and this work gets its actual chance. But you hate me for virtues, for the things I am and can do that you are not and could never do. Not things I've done to you, or wrongdoing on my part.
I could care less if you hate me if you're one of these people, because I know why--a lot of people know why--and I know what you're all about. And you know why, too.
All I care about is the quality of the work. You know, the last thing in the world you care about, save when you're threatened and enraged by the quality of someone else's.
