My conscious life can be summarized as a jittering shambles of guilt and regret punctuated by moments of manic ingenuity. At least five minutes of every one of my waking hours is spent contemplating something I should have done differently. Even so, I have never–not for a second–regretted not pursuing a MFA or other creative writing degree.
Check out this controversy regarding the recently announced Pushcart Prizes. It’s really something:
I cannot come up with a reasonable metaphor that would fit these accusations of plagiarism. Two hobos fighting over an empty paper cup? Naw, that doesn’t work. A paper cup has some utility. A group of children bashing themselves in the head with meat tenderizers, trying to prove which of them is the stupidest? That don’t work either, since it’s got some kind of comic appeal.
We are living through the nadir of American literature. Especially poetry. Good god, especially poetry. Instagram has made stars out of young men and women who have literally read fewer than 5 books their entire lives. And instead of pushing against this, the literary establishment has embraced it, declaring it elitist–possibly also racist, sexist, transphobic, fat-phobic, and/or cis-centric–to insist that a person has to actually read books to be considered literate. Access for all! they shout. Especially for the undeserving!
I-I am overwhelmed with anger. There so many things I should be screaming about right now.
There is, for example, a writer named Carmen Machado, who accused Junot Diaz of “verbal sexual assault” because he very politely disagreed with her interpretation of his (not very good) stories. In a fawning profile in Vulture magazine, Machado is praised as a literary wunderkind. The profile’s author gently brings up the fact that leaked audio from Diaz’s “assault” appears to contradict Machado’s claim, since the author was very polite throughout. This causes Machado to double down on victimhood status. “Why was he fucking lecturing,” she demands. The obvious answer is because he was literally giving a literal lecture at the time, but this does not get pointed out.
Machado’s work is bad speculative sci-fi with a woke ege, the sort of stuff that would have gotten laughed out of the writers room of the horrible 80’s reboot of The Twilight Zone. And yet Machado is now widely heralded as both a literary genius and a social justice sage. She squeals about the plight of creatures like herself–unfairly under-appreciated simply because she lacks talent and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever–even while reaping rewards that spawn entirely from her being in possession of certain identity markers.
There is, for another example, another widely praised lady poet who recently posted her frustration with the “mediocre male entitlement” of a cabbie who dared to say that he, too, had considered writing a book. Her poems are stuff like “The stars / are large / my heart / has stars in it.” She is critical darling who receives money to read that stuff out loud (that’s it–all she does is read it, people don’t throw pies at her or nothing). And yet she, too, is a victim, due to the impudence of a working class cab driver who had the temerity to speak to her as if she regarded him as a human being.
These fucking people. These gormless, moist, dead-eyed fucking people, same as the mental defectives who sat the fiction workshops I attended in college–only now they’ve been given control over nearly every aspect of American culture. Every tone is now watered down, every sense of danger snuffed out, every interesting urge tranquilized so as to comport with the hideous neurosis of these coddled mutants. The result is not just limp and unintelligent literature but widespread cultural rot and political impotence–the celebration of meanness, a complete disregard for honesty, the demonization of human touch, and the outright condemnation of beauty. We live on a decaying planet, and yet as the world burns we are denied even the warmth and color of fire. Every day, everything becomes more grey and and more celibate.
And if–if giving control to these people actually produced any of the effects it was supposed to, then maybe I could live with it. If things actually were safer or more equitable, if there was some sort of plan in place to avert civilizational collapse within the next few decades, then I’d say fine, great, turning the Ghostbusters into ladies was worth it and I’m glad we’re no longer allowed to use the word “lame.” But nope. If anything, the opposite has happened. The left’s embrace neurotic meanness has engendered fierce backlash and made political unity all but impossible. And we’ve ruined everything not for some sort of greater good, but solely for the material advantage of a handful of talentless hogs.
2087
stormborns
yousharknotpass
annaxmalina
discoholicmusic
