Oct 12th, 2020 - Suffocation Theory

Dear TNY,

I’m sitting here holding back a fat dump and I just finished “Suffocation Theory”.

I wonder what it must be like to write something like this.  Or maybe, rather, what I’m interested in is to be a fly on the wall in every room that this passes through on its way to publication.  To be a fly on the wall of every mind.  The author is sitting in some New York apartment, feeling that the whole world revolves upon that New York axis, so much so that they don’t bother to actually research this world, the one everyone else lives in, so they just make it up, and he or she bangs away at a laptop, tears streaming down his or her face while recording this “beauty”.  But really, this story just a fucking dream.  And like most of our (humanity’s) dreams, they are only interesting to one or two people close to the dreamer.  Coincidentally, like the rest of the fiction you publish, TNY; to those outside of your puffed up shit circle, it doesn’t matter.  Anyway, the author types the closing words on this “masterpiece”, howling triumphantly, and, with no editing whatsoever, emails it directly to you, proclaiming to have done it.  To have cracked the code of Art.

The email arrives at the magazine in the form of light and is handled by numerous TNY zealots who touch and fondle the tiny heartfire story, oohing and awing at how tender, how avant garde, how je ne sais quoi it is.  In my mind, it’s straight out of some David Lynch film.  Or maybe John Waters.  Multiple COVID-masked editors hand walk this glowing orb from the email receive chamber into the office of Deborah herself and place it upon the orb receiving station.  They all huddle close while she turns from her previous position (chair facing outward such that she can take in some abstract view of New York, promising more than enough knowledge of the world than one will ever need) to face the orb and all its glowiness (it’s orange, BTW; obvi).  As she moves closer, the orange light changes the shadows of her face, nearly mimicking that John McCain photo by Jill Greenberg, the one that was lit from underneath to intentionally vilify him (remember, boys and girls, back in the day when an honorable man like McCain was a worry?).  And as Deborah moves in, her aura is sucked into the orb and spat back out instantaneously, and she won’t be able to say why or how, but she knows everything will be okay.  That we are all beautiful.  All one energy striving, and faltering, to be loved.  Never knowing, though, that we are nothing but love, eternally forgiven, upon our passing from this plane.  Not by God.  Fuck no.  Or any other religious figure.  Because, if you think about it, religion (both directly and tangentially) is responsible for more human slaughtering than any other cause throughout human existence.  But I guess if your god says that other god is shit then we might as well fucking kill all of his followers.  Anyway, digressing. 

Deborah pushes down on the orb and it passes into a chamber below the desk and moves through a series of tubes, where it lands in the queue and eventually gets squeezed into every issue of TNY such that we all can fondle its magic at our leisure.  The world ever changed.  The world made better. 

Yeah. I’m sure that’s exactly what happened.

Also, zealots.  Everyone is one.  I’m one.  You’re one.  What I find super curious is that the hard right you decry, those deep middle America Trump supporters, you have exactly the same mentality, just with your own shitheap to worship.

Fuck, a positive.  I need to say something positive.  I can find one.  I can do it.  There was a good sentence: 

Color and light shift inside of me. 

Now, I’m going to argue that all color is light and so it’s a redundant description.  But I like the combination of the two words together.  The mouthfeel of them.  So I’ll allow it.

Wow.  I’ve really gone off the rails with this one.  I guess, once again, my beef is that it makes no sense that some random dream (whether this was one or not, it fucking sounds like one, and not a very interesting one) makes it to your pages.  How does this happen?  How, week after week, do you keep upholding one of the lowest standards in literature and people keep reading it?  Buying it?  Continuing to say it’s good?  Fucking Emperor’s New Clothes.

Goddamn it, I went negative again. 

I’ll try to be constructive.  I’ve brought this up before, this line from Donald Barthelme.  What must the wacky do?  Break our hearts.  And yet, mine is not broken from this story.  Not even close.  I found myself wondering about the painting I’ll do later today.  And why a tv must be disassembled.  And if you were going to commit the cardinal sin of once again misrepresenting how firearms function or, I shudder at the thought, how an IED functions (note that I would have fucking eviscerated you had you botched that one and would have done so with a sense of authority that this here meatbot rarely gets to feel). 

So, the major criticism that I have for the author is that if you can’t get outside of your own cleverness to see that this won’t break anyone’s heart, why do you even send it in (rhetorical question, because I know you can’t see past your own reflection and that’s why you sent it in)?  Make the changes.  Give me something to care about.  My heart is a fucking monster-sized empathetic beast.  Give it something to absorb and cry over.  Christ, two days ago I found a 75lb chunk of baleen on the beach; all the “teeth” were lined up, a hundred or so, fixed together with what looked like gum meat.  And I cried because that whale is surely dead.  It was born underwater somewhere out there, squirted out and then suckled at its mother’s teat.  Then it swam around, singing and dancing.  Flying.  And growing into a huge animal (by my standards, not its own, obviously).  I bet it laughed.  And saw shit I’ll never see.  And now it’s gone.  Leaving part of its mouth for some asshole who was smoking American Spirits and already crying because his soul has checked out and doesn’t seem to be coming back.  It’s all too much.  Too big.  Too beautiful.

I care, goddamn it.  I mean, I care so much about short stories that we are cusping on year fucking three of this project.  Give me something to care about.

Also, did you change your slogan?  Is it no longer “The Best Writing Anywhere.  Everywhere.”?  Because now all I can find is “The Stories that Matter.”  Still inaccurate.  Just less so I guess.  It’s much easier to land on a story that matters than the best writing, so maybe you are changing?  Probably not.

Alright, I’ve fucked off enough.  Time to drop that fat deuce. 

Nick