Baksheesh

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

How to Be Good

Black Swan is Midsommar. Stop talking, Winston.

Hollywood has never seemed more Orwellian in its insistence that it is the repository of everything admirable in culture and that it represents the right side of history. We know Hollywood will hold its own mother down and pull the gold out of her teeth with a pliers, but it prefers to pretend otherwise. And no one wants to dwell on this as long as the entertainment keeps coming. With streaming, the rapaciousness of the entertainment center of the world is even harder to see. Hollywood says it’s your friend. In reality, it’s INGSOC conformity and you’re awful if you disagree.

Streaming technology is as 1984 as it gets.

The tragedy of streaming content is that it never goes away. It’s in your house, up in your perceptual field, at all times. Even when you’re not watching, you’re getting emails reminding you to log back in. Back in the halcyon days of Blockbuster Video, a pretentious, emotionally manipulative stinker might show up on VHS, but there was a bit more personal agency involved in renting and watching it. It wasn’t accessible unless you physically sought it out. It was a tangible thing and you weren’t quite such a passive blob of content consumption—seeing the movie demanded that you get up, at least temporarily, from the couch.

You also didn’t have the same plausible deniability if you found yourself watching a lousy film. At some point, from the rental store to the final credits (if you made it that far), you had to remind yourself that you put down good money for the thing and brought it home. You did it to yourself, friend.

In the worst cases (Tree of Life? Vanilla Sky? The English Patient? Legends of the Fall? Crash? Life as a House?), you may have admitted that you were powerless against the overwhelming pretentious hype-suction and were thereafter drawn into a vortex of melodrama against your will. Then you may have made a searching and fearless moral inventory and resolved never to relapse again. Sometimes, bringing back drippy garbage from Blockbuster could be a cathartic, healing experience, like going out with the guys while on Antabuse. The best lessons are the ones we teach ourselves.

But now, with streaming television and movies, everybody’s on the juice 24/7 and done learning. You can now quietly demean yourself with bullshit Hollywood affectation and faux-political posturing every month for a discreet subscription fee. Nobody has to know. You don’t have to look the Blockbuster cashier in the eye and say, yes, I want to rent The Fountain. You can violate yourself, from beginning to end, with all the pungent streams you desire in the privacy of your home. Draw the curtains. Click on I Am Love. It’s okay.

You might occasionally feel a twinge of self-criticism—why have I watched Babel 15 times and The Maltese Falcon only twice? What does this say about me? But there are certain politically coded stinkers that remain beyond criticism, no matter how fetid and endless their streams may be. Those are the films you are permitted to enjoy without needing to painfully reflect on why you are doing it to yourself. Or if you do happen to wonder, the Party has provided a simple thought-stopping idea: because I am a good person.

The Party tells me I enjoy Magnolia for its drawn out emotional exploration of human meaning and compassion in the San Fernando Valley, a concept which, in itself, is astounding. Thankfully, it’s streaming right now on Netflix. I watch Magnolia because I am good. It provides an emotional release and ultimately represents the best parts of me. I enjoy what is good because I am a good person. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Thank you, Netflix. I feel happy. Let’s watch it again.

What’s going on in my brain? Why is George Orwell haunting my laptop?

Ideally, a movie will go through a production funnel that starts with a compelling idea, and ends with a completed feature. Along the way, there will be setbacks and workarounds, windfalls and compromises. And as Rachel Ziegler, the most likeable actress in Hollywood, has so famously put it, “That’s Hollywood, baby.” * But we do not live in an ideal world, which means the “completed feature” can come into being before its concept. That, too, is Hollywood, baby. In fact, that’s even more Hollywood than Hollywood. **

A film is sometimes made and then the hype apparatus around it tries to make it into something. Is it a trenchant commentary on the state of race relations in inner-city schools? It could be. Is it a masterwork of ironic feminist critique? It could be. Is it a moving historical epic in which unrequited love is cast against a tapestry of chaos and war? It could be. Let’s see. And if we can’t “position” it—

A book publicist once asked me how I’d position my second short story collection, Cruel Stars. I said, “Wut?” She took a deep breath and said, “What are the books on either side of it in the bookstore?” Then I took a deep breath and said, “Well, the one of the left is, of course, my first collection, Gravity. The one on the right is the collection I’m just finishing, Living the Dream.” She nodded slowly at something over my shoulder.

—does it even exist? Art is nothing without the marketing because marketing is what communicates The Message, the values of the Party. It explains why you are good, why certain things should make you feel happy and sad, and why this should matter to modern audiences. And if such an explanation is impossible or requires too much scaffolding, the Party might want to delay the release or even consign it forever to the vault.

But those of us who are not Party members, who are not on board with what passes for the New York Times concept of the right side of history, may object that this seems untoward for everyone concerned—like pushing a baby back in so the birth might be restarted more strategically, in a more profitable and impactful time.

Most unfortunate. When something is created, you can’t uncreate it so it can hit the zeitgeist more advantageously. You can only change it. And generally the more post-hoc changes and delays you make to a creative product, the more it becomes a horrific golem, an accidental parody of a commercial concept, instead of a coherent piece of art. Put differently, one usually does not do a thing and then justify or position it without making a mess. No, no, I’m not criticizing the Party. Don’t look at me like that. I’m merely making a small, harmless observation . . .

This brings us to the example of Black Swan and Midsommar, which is the same horrendously pretentious, emotionally coercive movie.

Black Swan is now available again on Netflix. We might say it’s been raised from the dead one more time thanks to the always-already necromancy of streaming video. It’s definitely a film approved of by the Party: a break-up story, masquerading as feminist folk horror, in which the main character, Nina, is romantically involved with herself and finally decides it’s not working out.

There are certain inchoate feelings loudly expressed. There is a certain amount of weeping and there are various episodes of emotional violence that we are encouraged to think must mean something. Sympathizing with her struggle (even if she would seem repellent and self-involved to non-Party members) means you are good. You get the message. You are indeed on the right side of history.

Midsommar is the same break-up story, masquerading as feminist folk horror, in which the main character is also romantically involved with herself and finally decides it’s not working out. Sympathizing with her struggle (even if she would seem repellent and self-involved to non-Party members) also means you are good. Criticizing this Frankenstein’s monster of highly telegraphed political position statements means you are a counter-revolutionary, a subversive, not of the Party. You are bad.

To be fair, there are some hapless men who travel through the scenes of these movies like runaway spaceships soon disappearing beyond the rings of Saturn, behaving awful or squeamish or unreliable according to the plot-furniture needs of the moment. At least one of them is immolated in a bear suit, which might be interesting if we could bring ourselves to give two shits about him. Instead, we think, well, there he goes. He’s a crispy critter now, kids. Woo.

The reason Black Swan-Midsommar is a good example of Hollywood’s shallow, monosyllabic politics is that these films (or we might say, this film) are actually very overt in their need to seem right and to make you agree that they are. They’re the same yoked-up melodrama we’ve always gotten only now repositioned as edgy and essential, now back in our homes, telling us about politics and social justice, and not going anywhere.

They’re pretending to be one thing (folk horror) as a container for another thing (third-wave feminist critique) and are actually neither. They’re telling us that if we like this, if we watch it many times, if we digest it, if we approve of it, we “get it.” We’re in the know. We’re correct. And so we are good human beings. 2 + 2 = 5. Of course, this is abject bullshit.

Why is Florence Pugh having a hysterical meltdown throughout the movie? Stop talking, Winston. It doesn’t need to make sense. Just go with it and you’ll be safe. There is no need to think critically or make small, troubling observations. All you need to do is accept that she is sad. You may cry with her if you wish. That shows solidarity and that you are loyal. Yes, you are a true believer . . .

Unintentional Orwellian patterns are ubiquitous, especially in the pop-culture mediated by Hollywood, which is most pop-culture. Orwell wasn’t just concerned about totalitarian communism, his deeper project was criticizing thoughtless social conformity in general.

For example, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, one of his largely forgotten novels (perhaps because it cuts a little too close to middle-class status anxiety and the obsession with money), the protagonist, Gordon Comstock, gives up on art to make a modest living in advertising. What is art without marketing, the novel asks? In the end, when he discards his poems, Comstock concludes it really is nothing.

Ultimately, there is no accounting for taste. There is also no accounting for technology. And when taste and technology coincide, there is no accounting at all. Black Swan and Midsommar would have flashed through the pan with a lot less “positioning” had the big streamers not put them in perpetual rotation—unlike many far superior and less ideological films, which blink out of existence on streaming platforms all the time.

We hope Hollywood goes on a retreat in the mountains and finds itself, comes to terms with its pathological need to always be class president, and decides to stop bullying its audiences. But the aspidistra’s airborne and, let’s be honest, nobody knows how to land.

—

* Interestingly, it’s the same when writing a novel, only you get to create all your own obstacles, betray yourself, meddle with your own story, make all the compromises, and know from the beginning that you’re not going to get paid.

** There is no point in arguing that a particular production “isn’t mainstream” or isn’t influenced by Hollywood in whole or in part. The global movie industry in general and streaming technology in particular has had an enormous centralizing effect on film. “Indie” is now a flavor. It is not a substantial alternative.

The Denazification of Substack

What of the anarchist dream, the Stateless state, the Commune, the autonomous zone with duration, a free society, a free culture? Are we to abandon that hope in return for some existentialist acte gratuit? The point is not to change consciousness but to change the world. I accept this as a fair criticism. I’d make two rejoinders nevertheless; first, revolution has never yet resulted in achieving this dream . . .

— Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, “Waiting for the Revolution”

I don’t dislike Margaret Atwood, her writing, or even her calculated political statements. I’m also no fan of naziism, fascism, totalitarianism, communism, a great amount of capitalism, and many other attendant economic, political, and social -isms that have historically resulted in murder, dread, and misery. Let me foreground what I’m about to write with these declarations so that I am less likely to be assaulted by the more popular online usage of the term “fascist,” which generally means, “this is someone saying something I don’t like.”

Well, nobody likes an online Nazi. Knowing this and apparently feeling like she needs to juice up her clout on the S.E.C.—if Hakim Bey has the T.A.Z., maybe we can also acronymize the Substack Echo Chamber of disenfranchised journalists, desperate content creators, thirsty influencers, publicist-operated celebrities, and unappreciated YA fiction writers—Atwood came out with “Substack’s Dilemma” two days after Christmas.

Goes like this in five easy steps:

1. Substack has terms of service that forbid accounts which incite violence.
2. “What does ‘Nazi’ mean, or signify? Many things, but among them is ‘Kill all Jews.’”
3. “Is Substack violating its own terms of service . . . by permitting Nazis to publish on it? I’d say yes.”
4. “You can’t have both the terms of service you have spelled out and a bunch of individual publishers who violate those terms of service. One or the other has got to go.”
5. Ergo, the Denazification of Substack.

Seems utterly reasonable, right? It doesn’t at all seem like a textbook false dilemma with a morally unimpeachable message offered by a midlist novelist, who got famous five years ago when her intersectional feminist dystopian novel got adapted by Hulu. It doesn’t at all seem like she may be worried that her 15 minutes are up. Denazification is, after all, a hot topic these days.

After reading Atwood’s syllogism, a cull seems very much justified, not just to hold Substack to account—since it was impossible to do that with Elon Musk, thereby offering a bit of emotional closure for all those who felt their blue checks on Twitter ceased to have meaning—but also for the common good. And we shouldn’t blame the author of The Handmaid’s Tale for adding a little indirect thematic fan service at the end: “So, one or the other, dear Substack. Tell us which. I am sure you mean well, but you are young and inexperienced, and did not think this through. It’s not too late! You aren’t doomed to the dystopian nightmare!”

Atwood would know. She rose above the legion of other dystopian sci fi authors to be seen as the foremost dystopian nightmare expert, self-evident proof being that she’s now stinkin’ rich from the Hulu series. She seems to be, in particular, an icon of self-published YA dystopian nightmare fiction writers who’ve migrated from Twitter, WordPress, and fan fiction sites to Substack. And, wow, there really are a lot of them these days, creating beautiful, dangerous, misunderstood female protagonists with names like “Wicker Handbag” and “Callindra of Region Fifteen,” who ride against the windmills of patriarchy.

Of course, the slavering, yet incredibly zeitgeist-sensitive, hordes of Substackers, determined to add their voices to anything that promises engagement, have immediately reposted “Substack’s Dilemma” with all the usual Twitter-style sycophancy, bless them. It’s all so brave, so right. And it was truly something to see two days after Christmas.

Consider the Kitten

When I see something ignorant, robotic, and false being held up as brilliant, innovative, and true, I think of how good my life must be. I tell myself there will always be stupidity and hypocrisy in the world, especially in writing and publishing. I remind myself that it’s better to feel compassion for people caught up in mistakes than criticize their blindness. And I admit that I’m fallible.

Yet there are moments when human nature undercuts my better judgment and I feel willing to kick the kitten that just vomited something on my doorstep. I’m not proud of such feelings. But no matter how much I meditate, no matter how much Thich Nhat Hanh I read, there’s a cruel, stony part of me that just doesn’t care. It’s a hard world, Fluffy. Get off my porch.

I quit smoking 20 years ago. Everyday some part of me still wants a cigarette, which is probably why the characters in my short stories smoke. At least someone still gets to enjoy it. But I’ve had some great writing insights over cigarettes and coffee—more, I’m inclined to think, than I do now, even if my caffeine consumption has grown to replace the nicotine. I have clean lungs and a rapid heartbeat. I’m wired but not as wise.

This might be the root of my intolerance. Some writers really need to start drinking again. They’re not able to produce unless they do. Maybe if I went out and bought a carton of Camel Lights, I’d look at many of the insipid things currently promoted as quality writing and smile along with the alcoholic cigarette ghost fume of Jack Kerouac, who once declared in a letter: “I don’t know; I don’t care; and it doesn’t make any difference.” That’s it. Light up. Nothing matters.

Long ago, at the University of Montana, I found myself on a smoke break during a one-day-a-week, four-hour creative nonfiction workshop that nobody wanted to take. There were five or six other MFA-program degenerates in the class. We couldn’t get the workshops and literature sections we needed due to a writing professor having a midlife meltdown the previous spring (which included loudly and publicly criticizing his terminally ill wife, sleeping with his students, physically threatening other faculty in the hall, and declaring that he thought we were all imbeciles). Of course, he had tenure. So he went on leave. Now it was almost Christmas. And we’d signed up for electives to kill time and keep our tuition waivers flowing until the search committee hired a temporary replacement. Morale was low.

When English studies people fall, they fall hard. This is known. We were all trying to keep it together. Hence multiple smoke breaks behind the five-story, brutalist classroom building in the dark, snow up to our knees. There was, I should admit, a deluge of alcohol being consumed that semester. Cocaine was too ambitious and, honestly, too expensive. But whiskey in Montana? Shit, it came out of the water fountains.

Andrea was my smoke-break buddy. She’d go out the back of the building and lean against the parking lot hydrant. I always ran into it because it was covered in snow. Paying attention to things like hidden fire hydrants seemed to require a volume of positive life-affirming energy I just didn’t have. So I barked my shins on it regularly. But that was Andrea’s bitter smoking spot. Out in the desolate lot in her enormous down jacket, she was a shadow and a tiny ember. I’d walk over and stand next to her. We wouldn’t talk much. The protagonist in every one of Andrea’s stories was Taylor Swift. Once you know that, there isn’t much left to say.

She spent a lot of time obsessing over Lauren, a fellow student and the darling of the department, whose dad was a media executive and had paved his daughter’s way to a book deal and literary fame well before she came to grad school. This was the ostensible origin of Andrea’s bitterness. No one suggested that, apart from having family in publishing, success might have been more forthcoming if Andrea hadn’t made every story about Taylor Swift. But nobody knew anything. If her collection of stories had gotten published alongside Lauren’s novel and Andrea had gone on a big book tour, everyone, especially the faculty, would have seen it as a sign of the new literary age, the new 20 under 30. But as it was, Lauren remained the “it girl.”

Sometimes we talked about Lauren, who no one ever saw in class because she was skiing in Vail or visiting friends in Spain or doing a book tour or attending a gallery opening. We had to sit in a bright classroom that smelled like hospital disinfectant. We had to read each other’s boring attempts at fiction-adjacent prose and make helpful comments. And when we weren’t doing that, we had to talk about things like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Year of Magical Thinking, and the rhetoric of Vietnam war propaganda. Meanwhile, Lauren was living the life.

Maybe Andrea forgot what I remembered: I was here to talk about those things, not to lead the life. This was not real life. This was a sub-dimension, a demimonde, an absurd mirror world where we could obsess about each other, be jealous and competitive over silly things, and wind up reading texts we never wanted to read in classes we never wanted to take. A small part of me knew it was glorious and someday I’d look back at it like a weird fairyland where I had seemingly unlimited hours to write and think and talk about art. And maybe that radiated outward because I always seemed to cheer Andrea up on our smoke breaks, even if we didn’t talk all that much.

But the smoke break I remember so vividly was the one where Andrea pulled out a hardcover of Lauren’s recently published novel and handed it to me without comment. I’m not going to name it because Lauren and her novel are real and the book is still in print. I’d read parts of it in previous workshops and I knew, just as Andrea knew, that it was garbage.

Lauren had everything necessary for meteoric success and it didn’t hurt that she was charming, smart, cultured, and gorgeous. But she couldn’t write. Years later, I’d hear that her prestigious publishing house performed a very invasive round of edits to the point where subsequent drafts were almost ghostwritten (maybe ghost rewritten). But I chalked that up to jealous post-program rumors. Now, I’m not so sure.

I remember angling the book so I could see it in the light from classrooms, snowflakes landing on the pages. I remember Andrea blowing a funnel of smoke at my face, as if to say, “See?” or maybe “Take that, you cheerful moron.” Take that. Take it and like it.

I handed the book back, and said, “Good for Lauren.”

And I remember Andrea shaking her head, smiling at the corners of her mouth, taking long drags, saying, “Yeah. Good for Lauren.”

I don’t know what became of Andrea. After the program, we lost touch. I know Lauren didn’t publish another book. She got her degree and disappeared into the soft world prepared for her since birth, a world in which Andrea and I would never set foot. And to be honest, I don’t blame Lauren for anything. In the arts, you have to use everything at your disposal, every advantage you can, to do what you’re called to do. If I’d had fancy connections and book deals, I’d have been leveraging those things. Andrea would, too. Without a doubt, there’d be a book of short stories with Taylor Swift’s face on the front and Andrea’s on the back.

But sometimes, when I see the same things over and over, when I see the vampires and shills of the publishing world salivating over the shitty writing of a young, attractive first-book all-star, who—let’s be honest—can’t help that she’s young and attractive or that her writing is shit, I don’t feel all that compassionate. I don’t blame her. I feel angry at the cynicism in the marketing. I know she’s a lost kitten who only wants to be loved. But when I read something like this about to come out with a Big Six publishing house, I might feel inclined to kick her off my front step:

In the little courtyard off Piazza di Santa Maria, the robins are flitting like a crimson rain around the fountain and the statues of great writers no one remembers. The sky is sad, overcast, and the wind from the café carries the scent of patriarchy and the tears of the forgotten whose poems will never be spoken. You sit across from me in the melancholy breeze, sipping your Cinzano, your long lashes seductive and unaware of the robin at your elbow, and I am brought back to the fields of San Salvador. The robins are joyful, but soon they will cry.

I wonder if this person’s parents are famous designers or wealthy investors or successful movie producers. I hope so. Otherwise, the sky will truly be sad after this book gets pushed out to pay some business debt that has nothing to do with its author or its contents.

My smoke breaks with Andrea may have taught me more than the classes we were in. At least I’m still working. I hope Andrea is, too. Now I can look back at our writing program with a certain amusement, maybe amazement. I am not a monster, most days. And I wouldn’t say no to anyone who wants to write a book and happens to have the juice to put that book in front of a large audience. Better this author than an AI; though, an AI might write it better.

In my more generous moods, I want to bless anyone who cares about literary fiction enough to get involved and try to make some. But the Andrea part of me, the skeptical, hard-hearted part, is still standing in the snow, thinking, “What the fuck?”

Don’t Weep for the Oompa Loompas

I loved Roger Ebert’s wit and lack of pretention. His movie reviews in The Chicago Sun-Times often struck a delicate balance between honesty and generosity. He had a great sense of film history and he’d contextualize Hollywood stinkers in ways that made them interesting as artifacts of a silly and unforgiving industry.

Over time, I found his approach to be applicable beyond the movies: first accept that there will be a lot of garbage in a given field or system. Then understand that garbage can teach you as much, if not more, than quality if you’re willing to pay attention. That is, if you can continue watching, if you can manage to withstand it and keep your lunch down.

Sometimes, I have a near visceral reaction to pretentious media, especially when it comes to literary fiction and nonfiction. I can trace it to when I was getting a master’s degree in writing and every other literary novel seemed to be about an attractive young woman on the east coast exploring bisexuality and working in an art gallery. Most of the stories submitted in my workshops were also about that or something very close to it. I spent my MFA depressed, alienated from a literary scene steeped in cloying trendiness.

Besides, I didn’t know how to write about that stuff, even if it was required reading in my classes. My characters, as one of my instructors put it, were rather from the “low end of the service economy.” And that dog wouldn’t hunt if I wanted a career as a writer. So she hoped I had plans after graduation. Maybe sell some insurance or, you know, the Navy. Half-drunk at a faculty party, I laughed and said something like, “Don’t do me any favors.” She didn’t.

The formula was ubiquitous in those years and seemed to whip my professors into a lather whenever one of the Big Six offered up another clone—probably because my professors were working writers trying desperately to stay in step with what their agents and editors demanded. Then Candace Bushnell anthologized her New York Observer columns, which applied the formula to a type of harder-edged, jaded, status-anxious Manhattanite and everybody wanted to be Carrie Bradshaw.

I tried to channel my inner Ebert when writing critiques of the new Bushnellian short stories coming across the table. I drank my Milk of Magnesia and tried to learn. And I did learn at least one thing: marketing is rarely about art even when art is being marketed. But the artists don’t always realize this. Everyone’s just trying to do their best. Everyone just wants to be loved in a world that won’t love them back. So what’s it gonna take? Go ask Candace.

By the time Sex and the City hit HBO, 9/11 had already seared itself into the national consciousness. So naturally the usual illicit love triangles, existential crises, career failures and ineffectual husband stories that had been previously set in five-bedroom homes, fancy restaurants, galleries, and uptown lofts—with an odd chapter sometimes taking place at a resort in Vail or, saints preserve us, on a boat off the coast of Mallorca—now featured explosions.

I was advised to rewrite my current novel and make the protagonist a fireman. A well-known British novelist, who I’d previously considered above all this, published a divorce novel almost identical to his previous divorce novel, save that the new one was set not far from ground zero at the World Trade Center. My former classmates, now selling insurance, preparing to ship out on aircraft carriers, or working in the low end of the service economy, were suddenly writing stories that read less like quotidian Nobel Prize Alice Munro and more like overheated radio dramas from the 1940s.

Maybe Ebert got his compassionate take from “Sturgeon’s Law,” formulated in 1957 by science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, who declared in a column for Venture Science Fiction that “ninety percent of everything is crap.” Subsequent writers reformulated this as: ninety percent of everything is garbage meant to hold up the ten percent that isn’t.” Sometimes, this is referred to as “landfill theory.” Still, if we’ve learned anything from modern horror movies—a genre that seems densely compacted with trash—one does not take the landfill for granted.

So I tried to embrace the new NPR-coffee-table terrorism fetish like every other young writer planning on attending the next AWP conference, but it was hard. Hard to keep down. Hard to contextualize as just another trend. Reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close helped because I thought it was really good. Maybe I’d read it differently now, but I remember thinking Foer’s 2005 novel was the only good thing I’d read with 9/11 as a backdrop. I started to wonder whether the New York publishing industry had the potential to become less squeamish, less trendy, less risk-averse.

Nevertheless, when David Foster Wallace killed himself three years later and Little, Brown, and Company jumped at the chance to publish his unfinished Pale King, it seemed like a new low. The marketing around the book wasn’t about pushing units anymore or the possibility of an HBO special somewhere down the line. Maybe no one knew what it was about. Maybe the reptilian DNA of Little, Brown’s sales reps had finally asserted control and the lizards were running amok in a wild frenzy, fucking and consuming everything in sight. Then again, maybe I just hadn’t been paying attention.

I had a Skype meeting with an agent around this time who looked very much like the students I used to see coming out of the London School of Economics when I’d get off the Tube at Holborn: impeccably clean, flinty expression, driven, deeply unhappy. She asked me what the books on either side of my novel would be in the bookstore and didn’t smile when I said, “Well, that depends. What bookstore are we in?”

I should have said, “On one side we have The Pale King. On the other, of course, is Emperor’s Children—it culminates on 9/11, don’t you know.” She knew. I knew she knew. And she would have approved. Messud’s Emperor’s Children is the Sex and the City of 9/11 literary opportunism. For some inexplicable reason, I didn’t say anything like that. We simply looked at each other for a moment and she wished me good luck.

We’ve come a long way since then; though, it seems like we’re doing the same dance to different music. Much has been made of the wokification of publishing, whatever that means, and the censorship of Roald Dahl, whose work in its untreated form has now been adjudged dangerous for the youth. I suspect this has something to do with Millennials and Gen Zs being really, really, really, really sensitive and therefore risk averse. More than we ever were. In some ways, I suppose it’s good to be that sensitive. In others, perhaps not so good. And Roald Dahl’s estate better watch out. Because now they’re saying the Oompa Loompas are the “subject of some racial controversy” and I have no doubt they’ll be evaluating the corruptive influence of Switch Bitch and Esio Trot before long.

Still, the cynical insensitive Gen X voice in the back of my head says commerce will undermine equity, safe spaces, and sensitivity readers in the end. The scaly reptiles of the publishing industry are mostly nocturnal, preferring to stay hidden during the day. But when they catch the scent of profit, they invariably rise up and stop doing good so they might do well.

Then into the landfill will go yesterday’s social justice homilies along with the newly expurgated Bond books and whatever Dahl stories were rewritten by an administrative assistant at Penguin Random House using ChatGPT. And there will be a new renaissance of insensitive fiction and non-inclusive speech. Well, the grave’s a fine and private place. If Fleming and Dahl are turning in it as a result of all this bad noise, who really wants to know? Maybe the AI rewrites will improve between now and the next big thing.

I’m reminded of one of Ebert’s funniest reviews: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) which, in the first sentence, he called “a horrible experience of unbearable length.” Unwilling to pull punches, as this seemed like one of the few movies Ebert really hated and resented having to watch, he wrote that “the movie has been signed by Michael Bay. This is the same man who directed The Rock in 1996. Now he has made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Faust made a better deal. . . . The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal.”

That always makes me laugh. Yet, this was not one of Ebert’s most compassionate reviews. It was one where the balance shifted conspicuously from generosity to blistering contempt. Maybe it was his age or the fact that he was definitely of a less sensitive generation, less concerned with being non-offensive, and it was starting to show. But there’s no denying that his serrated wit could sometimes reach neoclassical dimensions. And that may be why we read him—not for how much safety and inclusivity his ingenium could provide, but for how dangerous he could be.

Reading the News with a Gelid Eye

Sam: Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt. That’s the first thing they teach you.

Vincent: Who taught you?

Sam: I don’t remember. That’s the second thing they teach you.

— Ronin (1998)

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, guess what? For all intents and purposes, it’s a duck. Constructively, it should be treated like one. We don’t have to ask if something’s really going on or if someone’s really behaving a certain way or if some horrific event is really happening according to plan and it’s all fine so just relax. We don’t have to probe for sincerity and reasonability. We only have to accept one truth: people hide, lie, and attempt to cover their horrific mistakes.

The truth gets obscured behind spin. Sometimes, people get killed. Sometimes, they disappear. Sometimes, Jimmy Hoffa gets buried under the 18th hole of a Florida golf course. It comes out years later, but by then, everybody just shrugs. Some things are so well concealed that we’ll never figure them out. And sometimes it’s better not to know.

We don’t have to waste time and energy speculating and trying to sift truth from falsity. All we have to do is look at intended and actual outcomes. If your partner comes home smelling like a strange cologne, you don’t have to ask whether she’s cheating or whether some bizarre twist of fate led to her getting sprayed with random eau de toilette on her way to the metro. You only need to note the instance and keep your eyes (and nostrils) open. If it happens a second time, it’s a case of “fool me twice, shame on me.” But let’s be honest: you already knew from the beginning.

It’s the same with political events. If it looks like someone’s lying or prevaricating or taking some other sort of evasive action, you don’t need to engage with the reasonability of their countermeasures. You only need to ask two questions: what does it look like on the surface? And who stands to benefit? Note the instance. Keep your eyes (and nostrils) open.

If you do this, fake news has no power over you. Fake news is momentary lying and you don’t care about the lies of the moment. You only care about what you see over and over, which fake news cannot affect as easily or as consistently. Note that the accusation of “Fake news!” is also a form of media gaslighting and damage control. Whenever you notice people screaming that, look at them more critically than before.

But we don’t need to dwell on the concept of fake news. We only need “news” and a bit of critical thinking. Here’s an example from the Vietnam era (since Saigon just fell all over again): “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” a statement most commonly attributed to journalist, Peter Arnett.

What you should take away from this statement: the village is (probably) destroyed.
What you should disregard: “We had to” (abdication of responsibility for the decision) and “in order to save it” (moral justification).

Responsibility shifting and self-justification on moral grounds are classic rhetorical countermeasures when large groups of people have been or stand to be murdered for the sake of someone’s re-election strategy or financial profile.

Don’t you believe it. Read the news, but read for that nugget of information embedded in the spin. Just remember: ask what it looks like on the surface and ask who stands to benefit from it. Then disregard everything but what might be the facts. You don’t have to be a detective. You merely have to see the duck flapping away.