Todd Heldt gave an interview with Meg Tuite at Connotation Press. He was angry that we posted excerpts from this interview, so he filed a DMCA complaint. It is extremely funny that someone who stole hundreds of dollars from a 12-year-old girl’s medical charity is trying to say we stole his pretentious poetry.
Below is an summary of Todd’s interview with Connotation Press and a critique of his stories that are more entertaining than the stories themselves.
Meg gives Todd the softball “what was your inspiration” and the best he can come back with is “mytho-biographical,” “I’m as good a stenographer as I am a liar,” and “real life is always the funniest show going because everything is so absurd.” He is so soaked in Gen X irony that he doesn’t know that it’s not a substitute for wit.
He wrote an entire novel about drunk toga-wearing Elvis hunts and failed handjobs but reads like a philosophy major just discovered David Foster Wallace. He admitted he was “fundamentally unfair” to real people and hope they forgive him. A bold move, confessing to being a dick in print while acting like self-awareness is a reasonable defense.
The political tangent is pure gold. Todd’s writing a rock novel and suddenly goes into a full TED Talk about Freedom Fries, Ashcroft covering the Spirit of Justice’s boobs, and how liberals were called terrorist sympathizers. He’s so mad about the Bush years that he had to “dial it back” and then put it back in after reading Ed Vega.
He turned congressional cafeteria pettiness into literary inspiration like it was the fall of Rome. Then he immediately pivots to “I can’t name my next book Blame Ed, he might get mad at me.” The man is dead, Todd. He’s not reading your Amazon reviews.
But the greatest part of this is when he actually shares his writing with us. Todd turns a mediocre tug from a virgin named Tracy into a 900-word existential crisis involving Def Leppard, surface tension, Bosc pears, My Bloody Valentine, and how rock and roll destroyed his ability to feel feelings.
He spends more words describing your own chafing and musical taste than the sex act. “I hate music because none of it is ever right” right after naming seventeen bands like he’s submitting a mixtape to High Fidelity.
This is not literature. This is a cry for help wrapped in a sophomore-year creative writing assignment. The whole thing is soaked in that very specific early-2000s “I’m a sensitive guy who hates everything but also I’m hilarious and also politics are ruining my vibe and also remember when Rod Stewart drank dog semen?” energy.
The real art in this piece is that a man who steals money from a little girl’s medical charity holds himself in such high moral regard while posing as a sensitive writer when he’s nothing more than a self-important child who uses literary pretension to cheat on his wife.