October 11th, 2021 - The Ghost Birds

Dear TNY,

Monday.  “The Ghost Birds”.  Who gives a fuck.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times:  I’d rather watch 18 clones of Kim Jong-un gang-rape the last panda on earth to death, all while listening to the soundtrack of shovels scraping on sand-covered concrete, while I perform self-mutilation on my arms with old, dull Sawzall blades, after which I dump isopropyl alcohol into the wounds, and that’s about the time that team Jong-un is finishing up on the panda corpse, their identical chodes glistening with now extinct blood, which is when I get on a giant punji-pogo stick and end the reign of team Jong-un, one by one, and afterward I mourn the panda by slicking myself up in its blood and wearing its skin and doing any sort of spiritual dance that is non-culturally appropriated, before I curl up and sleep at the skinless carcass, my soul rendered crusty, sticky, and exhausted…I’d rather do all that than read a Karen Russell story.

I know, I know.  I’m not supposed to call out the author.  Man, I just can’t help it.  I have been made to read her work in the past, and voluntarily done so as well.  Same result each time:  It’s not literary enough to be literature and it isn’t interesting enough to be airport literature.  It’s like this weird grey area where, for me, like this story, it’s just enough nothing to be irrelevant but not enough anything to be infuriating, which then pisses me off because the amount of seconds the world over that are wasted reading it.  And do you want to preach to me about the world dying at our hands, birds being gone and such?  Who the fuck are you trying to convince to change with this piece?  Karen, the ubiquitous Karen, the middle-aged, affluent white woman?  Because that’s who is going to read this.  And that’s who is going to tell everyone about how good it was.  And that’s who is NEVER going to change because it’s someone else’s fucking job, according to her, to change the world.  And if one was so concerned with the environment, why not NOT publish a waste of paper like this and save all those trees and energy necessary to make a magazine, let alone the energy used to give access to this online?

Ugh.  Now I feel bad.  That Karen Russell is going to read this and get mad/sad/suicidal/vengeful/etc (and not appreciate my Jong-un storyline).  And hey, Karen, it’s not my bag, okay?  What you do isn’t my bag.  And what I do may not be your bag.  I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.  I still want to go grab a beer with you and talk about…I don’t know…stuff.  Maybe not writing.  I think we have very different ideas of what should and should not be canon.  And that’s cool.  Opinions and assholes.  Yeah yeah. 

Anyway, the story.  It spends forever sounding self-important about the explanation of how the world ended.  Then it spends forever talking about ghost birds.  Then it spends forever to get to the place where it puts its characters into peril.  Then when they are in peril, the action scenes are cut.  As in, dude says he’s going to climb.  Then he’s on the ground with a broken leg.  Like, the one fucking interesting moment of tension is on the cutting room floor.  And the ghost birds at the end?  I don’t care.  The 7300 words prior to those dumbass birds that disrespected the artform of literature ensured that I couldn’t care.

Again, it’s not my bag.  In this ilk, I’d rather read Stephen King.  He’s more literary AND his plots are fucking on point.  And, at least the old shorts he did, he’s not so self-absorbed that he believes he can waste our time without repercussions.  That being said, I haven’t read anything by him in the last decade because I’ve been doing other shit.  I thought Different Seasons was a nearly perfect collection of storytelling when I read it back in the day.

Well, I’m sure I’ve made someone mad.  Look, these are just words.  And I still respect what she’s been able to do with her career.  This shit is just one man’s opinion.  So, I hope we can all decide to get along without blowing up each other’s lives.  Hey, this shit was in TNY, right?  I’m sure the mentally deficient staff and readership (now, I want to be clear: the staff and readership are voluntarily mentally deficient, they choose this, time and again, for no goddamn reason other than willful buttfuckery; I’m not claiming the staff and readership are intellectually and developmentally disabled, which I would not do, nor would I diminish the experience of the latter group, which I respect and support) are super pumped about it and money was made.  Huzzah!

Nick