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Prose off: Story in Granta vs. Fleming story

Thursday 11/23/23

I'm not going to tarry long on this--I have too much to get to right now, for these are big days of creation here, as all days are, but I'm presently in the grip of my aims for this week--but how about a prose off?


We'll do one with a story in Granta, and a story I'm working on this morning. We'll be swinging back to Granta in the near future. There's a lot to get to with these people.


But here's the set-up: Granta is supposed to showcase the best fiction in the world. But the fiction in Granta is terrible. Granta is run by a billionaire heiress bigot named Sigrid Rausing who is abetted by another bigot named Luke Neima as deputy editor.


Should Fleming be saying these things? Yes, he should, because all of this is overt. How bad the writing is in Granta is overt.


Why that writing is published--and this is something I will tell you more about soon enough--isn't for reasons of quality, but rather reasons of caste and connection. And someone being terrible at writing.


The difference in quality between these two works...well, it's laughable, isn't it? It's not debatable, it's not "Gee, Colin, that could go either way."


Because I couldn't say what I'm saying right now, could I, if it was sort of close? But no one thinks it is. So here we go. Prose off.


This is from "Family Meal," by Bryan Washington. It's the most recent fiction I saw on their site. I began writing this entry before I even looked. Here you are:

Most guys start pairing off around one, but TJ just sits there sipping his water. Everyone else slinks away from the bar in twos and threes. They’re fucked up and bobbing down Fairview, toward somebody’s ex-boyfriend’s best friend’s apartment. Or the bathhouse in midtown. Or even just out to the bar’s patio, under our awning, where mosquitoes crash-land into streetlamps until like six in the morning. But tonight, even after we’ve turned down the music and undimmed the lights and wiped down the counters, TJ doesn’t budge. It’s like the motherfucker doesn’t even recognize me.


For a moment, he’s a blank canvas. A face entirely devoid of our history.


But he wears this smirk I’ve never seen before. His hair tufts out from under his cap, grazing the back of his neck. And he’s always been shorter than me, but his cheeks have grown softer, still full of the baby fat that never went away.


I’m an idiot, but I know this is truly a rare thing: to see someone you’ve known intimately without them seeing you.


It creates an infinitude of possibility.


But then TJ blinks and looks right at me.


Fuck, he says.


Fuck yourself, I say.


Fuck, says TJ. Fuck.


You said that, I say. Wanna drink something stronger?


TJ touches the bottom of his face. Fiddles with his hair. Looks down at his cup.


He says, I didn’t even know you were back in Houston.


Alas, I say.


You didn’t think to tell me?


It’s not a big deal.


Right, says TJ. Sure.


I don't think you think that's awesome. You know who I think thinks it's awesome? No one in the world. Why would they?


This, meanwhile, is from my own "Finder of Views." Just some of what I was doing--in part--this AM.


He tried his hands at first, attempting to block out the motions of the bodies as he peeked between his fingers, opening and closing them as need be, but then it felt as if his own body was involved and he’d become a part of the action, complete with simulated apertures. The colors were often the same, unless Mason sought out a certain type of production, which made it seem like he had preferences—what might be termed “his thing”—but that was bad territory on top of bad territory, as if pouring quicksand from one spot over quicksand from another when you could limit yourself to a single-source horror.


The voice of his daughter Lauren was often not as he remembered it from life, being pitched in a higher register. She likely never exceeded 115 pounds. Her voice had been heavier than one would expect, thick and grounded. Reliable. Only a wise person would sound like Mason’s daughter sounded, he’d always believed, grateful in all of the times that he heard it that its distinctiveness had never worn off and he was able to think, “Oh, I like that, that’s neat,” taking note of how he took note without ever once trying to.


Whereas these days she tended to squeal as if she’d suddenly been made cold, to which she was amenable on her end, like this was what was meant by the term shiver of delight. There were instances, though, when she sounded exactly like herself, the way she’d talk to him over the course of twenty-five years when the sound of that voice both took Mason aback and pulled him in, even when she’d simply asked if they could order pizza for dinner.


The first couple of years were vocally different, of course, with burblings rather than words, effused placeholders for more orderly methods of communication that were to come, but he had neither ranked, separated, nor discounted any expressed form of who she was. He always felt like he understood her. Until now, when he was unsure whether he had ever understood her at all, or if she’d been trying to tell him something he couldn’t recognize because he was too busy not being what she really needed him to be.


His wife would hate him if she knew what he watched. But he didn’t really watch what he watched. He was a finder of views, which is different.


It's Bunker Hill Creative Writing 101 vs. something on a totally different level. And that is so obvious. It's obvious not just to most people who were to compare, or almost all, but to anyone and everyone who was to do so.


Here's the bio for Bryan Washington:


Bryan Washington is a National Book Award 5 Under 35 honoree and winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize. He received the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award for his first book, Lot. ‘Family Meal’ is an excerpt from his novel of the same title, forthcoming from Atlantic Books in the UK and Riverhead in the US.


Riverhead is where we'll find executive editor Calvert Morgan, a truly terrible human being--and luncheon fan--who is as big a fraud as you'll find in publishing (which, as we know, is no small feat), and whom we'll also get to soon enough.


What a joke this entire system is.


That's the best writing in the world, eh Granta? You just got lit up by the best writer in the world. One that you'd decided long ago to discriminate against because he's nothing like you are.







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