The world is insane and we are living in the end times. It’s true and I believe it. Reading this, you are probably thinking Davis has lost his nerve, has lost his mind, and has finally become so disinhibited that he’s now taking dictation straight from his Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Maybe he’s blown a synapse and has embraced Third Wave Christian Fundamentalism the way we always felt he would—the retconned hillbilly sci-fi apocalypse version, replete with heavily armed cyber-trucks, food riots, red sky, and the Beast of Revelation.
You would, of course, be wrong about everything. See, by “end times,” Davis is really just talking about the publishing industry. And by “publishing industry,” he’s really just talking about the MFA industrial complex. And, by that, he just means, “things that have never so much resembled airborne feculence of a certain incendiary variety,” which is to say, shitfire, but flaming shit simultaneously as an abstraction, a pungent metaphor, and a distinct and tangible possibility aimed directly at your face.
Yes. It doth burn, my son.
As the Bard says: everybody cool until someone find a way to light the toilet on fire. And it is only then that you will see the truth, wherefore it flusheth not. And flameth. And flyeth. Do I over-analogize and mixeth my metaphors? Do I protest too much? I do. But then again, the more I think about it, I do not.
So these are the end times. You know it and I know it. The Seven Seals have been opened: plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, and plop, like little corks in a fancy restaurant, where none of the wines come in the screw-top variety—i.e. none of the sort that I could normally afford. No one said the apocalypse came cheap.
But why, Davis, you ask, is someone with your prodigious vocabulary and piledriving wit reduced to cheap-wine analogizing and end-times prophesizing on an obscure writing blog nobody reads?
Because, dear reader, the world is off its nut and therefore I can say what I want.
Because I cannot be cancelled.
Because you may put a bullet between my eyes but these words will still travel around the world like 1950s TV Superman, faster than a locomotive and a speeding bullet.
Because maybe I don’t care anymore
— about desperate creative writers snapping and barking for scraps at the literary publishing table (consider: extreme levels of desperation can be a prelude for mental illness, and my brother in Christ, let me remind you that no one is more desperate than a disenfranchised literary fiction writer without, perhaps, even an obscure writing blog where he could relieve such burning feculence as might arise and converge);
— about the ambient cruelties of the “process,” the writing process, as if it were some arcane monolith out in the desert that we only had to discover and teach ourselves to read in order to possess the writing success formula of Akhenaten the Great. And this must be conflated with the dominant publishing-and-marketing process because we all know that something we can’t successfully monetize is merely a hobby;
— about all the bad, ignorant, often deranged advice that accompanies this;
— about getting ghosted by a magazine because, after accepting one of my stories, someone decided that my writing was too “cis het” for their aesthetic (yes, one of the editors told me that and all I could do was laugh—at myself for submitting a story to them); shame on me;
— about the status anxiety and paranoia of the MFA creative writing students running said magazines and the slightly former MFA students still convinced that the “personal” and, by extension all art, must be “political.” And they are therefore afraid to read Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, or Flannery O’Connor because some inherent taint of uncoolness might rub off on them. Someone on a slick magazine I no longer read made a list of “red flag novels you should avoid” (as if this were Soviet Russia: I have not read, yet I condemn . . . ) and I couldn’t believe To the Lighthouse was one of the red-flag offenders.
And I most emphatically do not care about 20-something housecats with studio MFA degrees mean-girling me on social media after seeing my profile picture. For they are domestic and furry and harbor a deep love of kibble and do not read the books I read. No. This is Black Mirror. This is Tesla with machineguns. This is dystopia. This is not a bowl of Friskies, your clumpy sandbox, and a warm loving stroke-job from your beta readers. I’ve never had beta readers. I barely have alpha readers.
Instead, dear reader, in this time of dread and perdition, I’m asking for REPARATIONS.
Hear me out. On my dad’s side, given my Irish and Welsh ancestry, I figure the British Crown owes me at least a few million pounds for generations of colonizing, rape, murder, and impressing my ancestors into divers forms of servitude including, but not limited to, indenture and outright slavery. To say nothing of the fact that this eventually caused my people to flee to Canada, something which, in itself should add at least another million pounds sterling to the tab.
And then, naturally, there’s my mother’s Armenian heritage, which includes those ancestors fleeing Constantinople with whatever they could carry to escape an actual genocide—not the hyperbolic, figure-of-speech kind referenced on the internet along with “micro aggressions,” but the real thing. Henceforth, I’ve written a very firm letter to President Erdoğan, specifying certain payments that shall be made directly to me by the government of Turkey (the closest we can get to the Ottoman Empire—we’re all doing our best here). I have allowed for installments if he finds that necessary. I’m not an unreasonable man, which I’m sure President Erdoğan appreciates.
In my estimation, the reparations due to me for various forms of historical persecution visited on my ancestors by at least two world powers should be enough for me to purchase a small turret in Scotland, doff myself Lord Davis of the Moors, and declare prima nocta for as long as my reign shall last.
Davis, you say, you’re insane. To which I retort: NO! The world is insane. I just want my baksheesh. And if you don’t want to be “problematic,” you’ll stop with the micro aggressions and pay up. Everything that rises must converge. That means you, your wallet, and me.
What? You don’t have any baksheesh to make merit for the sins of your fathers against mine? You say this is crazy because it all happened generations before you were born and you don’t even know those assholes? You say you went to an expensive master of fine arts writing program, but all you got was a stupid T-shirt and “good luck” and an invitation to have dinner with the chair of your thesis committee while his wife was out of town? You say you’re broke? You were too cis-het for small-magazine fame? Bummer. No baksheesh for you, either. Perhaps it’s time for you to fall back on your trust fund. Surely, someone with your amount of privilege . . .
But I was talking about the end times, about the Seven Seals (plop!) and the horrifying Lovecraftian spectacle of fecal matter travelling through the air at speed. Phosphorescent fecal matter, no less. As in “banned by the Geneva Convention but still used in certain third-world proxy wars.”
Hallelujah!
Hare Krishna!
Give me your stinkin’ baksheesh that I might cleanse it and admit you to paradise!
You know you want it.
We went away from there and stopped at the Fountain of the Virgin. But the water was not good, and there was no comfort or peace any where, on account of the regiment of boys and girls and beggars that persecuted us all the time for bucksheesh. The guide wanted us to give them some money, and we did it; but when he went on to say that they were starving to death we could not but feel that we had done a great sin in throwing obstacles in the way of such a desirable consummation, and so we tried to collect it back, but it could not be done.
—Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
The Writing Expedition 