Toil and trouble

Thursday 1/20/22

I came up with an idea for a novel tonight. I'll work it out in my head as I do the rest of what I'm doing. But I'm going to rewrite Macbeth for the modern world. It's going to be about the modern couple, in suburbia, with fake causes, empty lives, a marriage not working, worries about how to pay for college for the kid. The need for power and attention, no matter how trivial that power and attention. How little it means in the grand scheme of the world. I know how I'm going to do the three witches. There will be a Scotch whisky collection, fantasy football, neighborhood BS, a town FB group. I have to work out a lot of the plot, but I pretty much already have the tone and voice. I have the opening scene, which takes place off of Harvard Square. I'm also pretty sure I have the title, and the name the Macbeth character, which is not Macbeth, but then again, it also is. It's clever how I've done it. America is a country rammed with empty lives and desperate needs. I know so many people who have gotten ostensibly all that they want out of life, and yet, they are so unhappy. In bad, loveless marriages. Getting wine drunk. Looking at how many years they have left. How many decades. Calling themselves old when they're in their thirties and forties, as if they can't wait to die. Seeking validation in places where no validation can come. Staying married for all the wrong reasons. Trying to justify those reasons. Retreating to social media. I'm going to have to think. But it will all come to me. A queue of novels is starting to form here, and I need to get them all done. But the process for this one is now engaged, and the characters will tell me their stories.

It's amusing--and depressing for what it says about our world--what a raging, racist, narcissistic, delusional sixth grade-level poetry hack that Amanda Gorman is. Every so often she'll drum up some coverage for herself, because the fifteen minutes that never should have happened--given that there are millions of middle and high school kids who can write poetry just as well, or just as badly, if one prefers--are running out. She is pure racism. And pure fourteen-year-old doggerel. An op-ed in The New York Times. You know what's funny, as in horrifying? I was talking to the film editor there about doing something on the Let It Be film. She was interested, until word reached her that she is supposed to shun me, which she immediately did, because someone told her to. She then commissioned a piece on the genius of Yoko Ono as a performance artist because she was seen knitting in the Get Back docu-series.

Delusional, misandrist, hack garbage. You could have had the piece from the best writer there is, who knows more about the Beatles than anyone, who has written so memorably on them over and over again, in prose that no one can touch, with ideas that are always brand new, nothing that has ever been said before, but you wanted delusional, misandrist, hack garbage, because of course you did.

Imagine writing something that stupid? Imagine being that stupid? Being that empty? Then you get someone equally stupid and empty to say, "Great! Do it!" That devoid of substance? Integrity? Our intellectual culture is straight-up offal. I saw this other Amanda Gorman interview--some of the people I know say this line to each other now, because it's so eye-rollingly ridiculous--that she waits for the universe to breathe musings into her. That's an actual quote, from a three question interview (the second question was about her fashion sense, and what that has to do with being a poet; no joke; you could look it up; the last question was about what she was reading now, and you know--I don't need to tell you this--that hell no, there could never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, be something listed there by a white person. It would be everyone you expected, the flavors of the month, who were the right skin color, as deemed by the industry, because it has nothing to do with the work. Imagine reading a book--or pretending to--because of the color of someone's skin. Is that more stupid, or is it more evil?).

Breathe musings into her. Showing, of course, that she has no idea what the word "musings" means, but eh, fuck it, right? Who does? Just race hustle. Use one vapid cliche after another. Nothing but vapidity and cliches that are so general and sufficient in their total puffery that they wouldn't work at a bloody pep rally at good old Generic High. And be an even bigger lying narcissist than you are a race hustler.

I hate race hustlers. Merit. Merit. Merit. Merit. Merit. Merit. Merit. Skill. Ability. Show me your actual talent. That is all that should matter. The only reason anyone has ever bought an Amanda Gorman anything is so that that person can tell themselves they're one of the good ones. No one ever has, and no one ever will, answer the question, "What did you do Friday night?" by saying, "Oh, I had a nice glass of wine and read an Amanda Gorman book." Impossible. It's bought to pay the bridge toll of white guilt, and to help shitty people pretend that they are not that shitty, though when you buy a book simply for this reason, you're really getting up there, shit-wise. Because that's buying a book to have the self-congratulations of the transaction, and to display it as proof of your would-be decency in the conspicuous spot at your home in White Suburban Guilt Land. What's the thing people say now? Gross. You want to talk racism? This is actual racism. Her, and then them. The clientele who bought the book for, really, one reason. That's not treating a person like a person, or a writer like a writer. That's treating them like a skin commodity. And it has nothing to do with actually reading anything.

I asked someone if they thought that people like Gorman could actually believe they weren't awful at writing. Like, does she believe if she was a seventy-two-year-old fat white guy, and wrote that twaddle, that anyone would publish it? That it'd even get slapped up on one of those thousands and thousands of random literary magazine websites? She'd be at the Super Bowl? Because that wasn't an imbecilic pairing anyway. That made sense. That wasn't just jammed in there.

And the person answered me by saying that most people are crazy, and can get themselves to believe anything. I mostly agree. But I think on some level--and it is the level that counts the most--that these people know. It's not a skin color thing. We've talked about plenty of white writers, male and female, in these pages who are dreadful, who are given award after award after award. And they suck ass at writing. I think they always know. I think life for them is a battle of trying to keep what is known as utmost certainty, from reaching the surface level of their thoughts. I think that's all their lives come down to. I don't think you can suck that much at anything, as most of these people do at writing, and think you're muscling up on in there with the people who have actually been great at it. I don't think they can do that any more than some JV basketball kid who never gets off the bench can think he'd beat 1992 Michael Jordan one-on-one. I think that's why they're so miserable. And I know it's why they hate me. Because I am the real thing. It's nothing I've done to them. Sure, names come up on here, and things are documented, and people are exposed, but my journey went on for a long time before I began to share any of that. I had no choice. They left me with no choice. And the little hand movements things? The gesticulating? It's such a clown act. Such sixth grade slop-fest cartoon poetry. It's not even poetry. It's sentences without the punctuation. I'm not going to link to the op-ed. One can look it up. She talks about being so important that she almost didn't do the inauguration thing. Right. You delusional liar. You lying, delusional, talentless, narcissist. Who, of course, comes from money, and went to Harvard, because that is how this all works.

Breathe some musings into me. Breathe some freakin' musings. That's awesome. What a world this is.

Anyway. You have plenty to keep you busy, sir. Do what you need to do. Maintain the faith in your outcome. You require no witches. Keep going.