September 6th, 2021 - Pnin Gives a Party

Dear TNY,

Did we not discuss how academia is trash and unrelatable for most people and also mega fucking boring, and yet you have brought us “Pnin Gives a Party”?

I don’t care that it’s Nabokov (the reason you are reprinting it, obviously).  I don’t care that it was printed in your “heyday”.  That shit is all nonsense when considering the macro idea of Art and its effect on empathy.

Let’s strip away all the fanciful writing (which was weirdly disappointing as it didn’t work for me and I have liked other works of his in the past).

We’ve got our boy Pnin throwing a party and all his colleagues are there, his employment is perilous from the start, but the party seems to be going well, and then at the end he finds out he’s gotten fired.  People leave.  He cuts his hand on some glass.

Who.  Gives.  A.  Fuck.

There are way too many characters and the conflict (the “what’s at stake”) is fucking mundane, man.  Not that losing one’s job isn’t a big deal.  What I’m saying is that this shit doesn’t fucking mean much to a fry cook in Decorah, IA.  You know why motherfuckers don’t want to wear masks?  Because they work jobs that are beyond your fucking comprehension (both in physicality and in a financially perilous way) while you, what, just had to work 100% from home instead of 50%?  This story is that same shit.  And I know I’m knocking on an icon, here.  But I don’t care.  The goal is empathy.  While I did feel bad for our boy Pnin when he first set off to do the dishes (not the second paragraph describing the dishwater because Christ who needs that), I’m not overwhelmed by empathy from this story because of that lack of relatability, you know? 

Maybe I just don’t like anything.  That’s fair.  And probably correct.

There’re flies in this restaurant and I’m killing them with my hat.  I don’t know why I’m telling you that. 

Look, I don’t know, man.  I live in a van.  I travel a lot.  There are a lot of people that need empathy out here in the world outside your tower.  And you could do that, but you are elitist and you alienate.  Goddamn do you sell those ad spaces, though, bruh.

It doesn’t matter.

These fucking letters don’t matter.  You motherfuckers are Polo and Dressage and Martha’s Vineyard and I’m out here in Disc Golf and Dive Bars and Manual Labor.

Like I said, you’d have to actually recognize that all of us down here exist for this letter to matter.  For any of them to matter.

And I’ve got better shit to do than write to the wind today.

Nick