June 22nd, 2020 - Grief

Dear TNY,

It’s a hard drizzle on the coast of Oregon where I am writing from today after having finished “Grief” and what is there to say?  A lot, it turns out, most of it not about the story.

The US is in turmoil right now.  Every single media outlet is pushing out material that’s slanted to their agenda.  Agendas.  Every fucking place.  It’s exhausting.  Even as disconnected as I am, I’m still awash in misinformation from the right and left and I’m fucking tired of it. 

Speaking of, I saw that your parents, Condé Nast, have gotten into a little bit of their own racial trouble.  I’m a big fan of the Bon Appetít YouTube stuff and was somewhat shocked to see that the minorities on the channel really were tokens as I suspected, and not treated as equals (which I didn’t expect, as that’s fucking ludicrously dumb).  Not that I think their value as humans was or is as tokens (not at all, actually; Sohla is my favorite (Sohla, if you read my shit, which you don’t, you fucking rock)).  No no.  It’s just that if you go look at the drawing at the top of Bon Appetít’s YouTube page, it’s all the colors and sexes of the rainbow.  So much so that it looked, to this viewer, like it was engineered.  Turns out it was.  And they didn’t even have the decency to handle the engineering well.  But why would they?  Elite whites rarely see past their own arrogance.

Which brings me to you, TNY.  You’re likely not under the gun for this sort of engineered diversity, what with your stories by every crayon in the box, are you?  Not with how well you have planned it.  No way.  But to this reader, it feels engineered.  Feels like you are casting aside one of the best parts about Art.  Race, sex, gender, age, et al…they can all be stereotyped in a single look.  But Art, Art can be ingested blind.  You likely have one of the largest slushpiles in the world, and you refuse to use it in favor of your diversity engineering.  And as long as you keep all the crayolas represented, then you won’t get fucked with, right?  But what’s the sacrifice?  Spoiler alert:  Literature.  By cherry-picking agenda stories that represent all voices with no regard to the writing, you lose focus on the literary merit of the writing.  And I’m going to write this in all caps so you know I’m serious about it:  I DON’T BELIEVE STORIES THAT CONTAIN NON-WHITE MALE AGENDAS (TRADITIONAL AMERICAN LITERARY CONTENT, WHETHER ALL OF US LIKE IT THAT WAY OR NOT) ARE LESSER BECAUSE THEY DON’T CONTAIN THESE AGENDAS; I BELIEVE STORIES THAT ARE SELECTED BECAUSE THEY CARRY ANY AGENDA, NO MATTER THE CRAYOLA OR CULTURE, ABOVE THEIR LITERARY MERIT DO NOT BELONG IN THE CANNON.

I get the inherent argument that can be made between All Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter.  I can see both sides and agree and disagree with points made either way.  There will always be hostility when you take something away to give it to someone else, even if it wasn’t deserved or earned in the first place.  But I say again, this is literature and literature can be blind.  It doesn’t have to be like a social agenda.  But this story feels like that.  Taking away the place where stories once had literary merit and replacing them with agenda.

This story isn’t my kind of story.  It’s mostly summary and introspection.  It’s not new content in literature.  It isn’t fresh or painted elaborately (think about how “The Things They Carried” made you feel about the Vietnam War the first time you read it, and then think about this story for comparison).  For its content, “Grief” is actually pretty beige.  Because it doesn’t do the one thing that literature has to do, which is get us to care.  Which, I know, seems insane for me to say considering the atrocities committed.  But storytelling doesn’t work if you can’t get us to care, no matter how horrific the reality.  And that’s the writer’s job, and editor’s job, to understand that.  Not just to believe that what happened was bad, so we should publish the story.  But to augment the story such that the reader fucking cares.  I mean, guys, this is the heart of literary Art.  John Gardner covers this in The Art of Fiction (which you should check out because its glory might help you):

…to build up a complicated argument, we need abstractions.  If we wish to think usefully about wildlife preservation, we must abstract the dying white rhinoceros at our feet to dying white rhinoceroses in general, we must see the relationship (another abstraction) between dying white rhinoceroses and dying tigers, etc., and rise, finally, to the abstraction “dying wildlife.”

When something is too big, we can’t handle it.  When it’s the size of one person, say George Floyd, we can hang our emotions on it.  Basic storytelling does that.  I got more from Chappelle’s “8:46” than I will from any other media outlet covering our current social issues.  Because Chappelle is a fucking storyteller.  And I called a personal friend who retired from the police force to get the other side of the story; I did this for the same reason:  Storyteller.  This story, “Grief”, isn’t the story that’s going to do it for me.

And that shouldn’t take away from the author’s experiences, right?  Because the art isn’t the artist.  I think we all want the art to be Art.  Mostly, it isn’t.  But that’s what should keep you coming back as the writer and doing that writing work.  To make shit better.  To make people care.

I don’t even want to write this review.  Yeah, I check my IP.  I can surmise that some of your folks and some folks in Africa have been, very recently, discussing the letter I wrote about “Cattle Praise Song”.  And this shit will all get taken out of context.  Feelings hurt.  Etc.  Blah blah blah.  Listen, I don’t give a fuck where you are from or what your fucking color is, your gender, your sexual preference, the circumference of your nipples, whether your belly button goes in or out, or the amount of lower back hair you have.  Could give two fucks about it all.  I care about Art.  And its preservation and growth.  That’s what I write about.  But who fucking knows?  Everybody twists the world the way they need to see it.  Twist away, I guess.

I’m sorry that happened in the world.  I’m sorry it still happens.  And I’m sorry it’s always going to happen.  We are apes and it’s ignorant to lose sight of that.  I don’t have a platform big enough to change that shit, though, so I teach my boys to respect others and be good humans.  And I try to do the same.

That’s it.

Nick