September 24th, 2018 - Poor Girl

Dear TNY,

Here’s the thing about “Poor Girl”:  It sucks.

Why do I do this?  You never change.  After having done this for ¾ of a year, I’ve got some assumptions I can make about this piece.  It’s a translation, for sure.  Because a native English speaker wouldn’t use such clunky phrasing.  Not that translation pieces are bad.  No, “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” is grand.  It’s that this piece itself is bad.  The other assumption is that this author must be someone of note.  Because the piece is very reminiscent of “Ladies’ Lunch” of last year’s TNY garbage name-based publishing ilk. And these things get in your rag because the author is noteworthy while the storytelling is garbage.

So, you’ve gotten yourself some name.  Some foreign culture. So what? For people who tout diversity, this shit smacks of the actions of uppity, affluent white folk trying to prove they have diversity.  See!  Look here!  We publish international stories too!  Blech.  Fuck off.

Here are some questions I am asking myself.  Why do I take the time to develop characters?  Why do I try to strike a good balance between scene and summary?  Why do I try to push a fresh idea and then watch it unfold naturally while I emphasize the crispness of it with (hopefully) unique language?  Why do I edit over and over again, ensuring that each scene or line of dialog is doing double work?  Why do I agonize over details, making sure I pick the ones that strike the right mood or image, take the reader’s attention off of the writer’s choice in details and put their attention on how vivid the world is?  Why do I try so hard when you are telling the world that literature is trash writing?

Why are you the fucking Bud Light of literature instead of Westvleteren 12?  And why do I continue to care so much when you do not?  I don’t know.

So, while you’re making a suit of armor out of beer cases and jousting with your frat buddies, I’ll be sitting under a tree in an otherwise open field while fat, white clouds tumble by.  I’ll be alone, a copy of Nine Stories in my hand, a labelless brown bottle propped against a stone beside me.  I’ll have just closed the book, not having finished it or anything like that.  No, I closed it because I will have been struck by the sound of the wind across the field and how, if close my eyes lightly, it sounds like I’m flying.

Nick