March 6th, 2023 - Snowy Day
Dear TNY,
Monday, February 27th, 2023 (not when this was “mag” published, but when I read it) and you bring us “Snowy Day”.
And who gives a fuck?
Goddamn am I tired of reading stories that do not fucking matter one iota to anyone but you and their creator. What an absolute piece of shit this is.
I know we have covered this ground before, but it always bears repeating if nothing is learned: does the piece matter if the quality of the writing doesn’t and there is no transcendence of the plane by the end of the work? No. The quality here is, at best, so so. I read all 8000 fucking words, and was here to read them, but was once again let down by your fuckstick magazine’s inability to understand what the actual fucking point of a short story is. Emote us, cunts. Do the fucking work to make our time reading the story worth it. Because if you don’t, after all 8000 words, we feel like your entire establishment is a waste of fucking human energy. Or, what I suspect to be more true, your readership believes this is important because you published it and will try to manufacture importance from a pile of dog shit.
So that we are clear, from a craft standpoint, the corporal is a mechanism to generate superficial beauty in the private (because the corporal represents the ugly side of the mirror). The private is a mechanism to express the author’s intent, which I still don’t know what the intent is; maybe it’s “can humanity overcome its militaries.” And the young lady is there as a placeholder for beauty, which the military destroys, and our conflict within the total destruction of said beauty lies with the private who is between worlds but who, ultimately, doesn’t survive in the end. Great. All the pieces are apparent, therefore the story is irrelevant, like that of a bedtime tale from a children’s book, one not written by Shel Silverstein. And the dialogue was as cornball and earnest as Emma Watson’s rendition of Hermione Granger in the first four Harry Potter flicks (let’s be real: ALL of them). I.E. cringefest to the max. Oh, and this story suffers from severe predictability. What I mean is that the ending was not surprisingly inevitable, it was just inevitable. And that distinction is why this story isn’t Art, but is merely the arrangement of letters on a page here to fill space so that you can sell subscriptions to people who don’t know any better.
When are you going to publish good works again? When do these pages serve humanity again? When do you try again?
I know. You won’t.
On my end things are fine. I’m producing wood things. I’m doing exercises. I’m eating less and have lost weight. Drinking less. Being more present. I am aware of the water all around me, that this has always been the water, and now it all weirdly matters as opposed to something I’m struggling to move through on my way to more water.
Oh, finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and have started Rick Rubin’s new book. Rick is a dunce compared to Pirsig, but they are actually both talking about the same nebulous thing: Quality. Something that cannot be defined yet can be identified by everyone on planet Earth with astonishing accuracy. Which I wholeheartedly believe. Except for you, TNY. The only way you could identify Quality is if you looked at what you aren’t publishing. Because what you are publishing…Christ fucking an oversized laying hen…is an abomination.
So, this is it. You’re shit. I’m living. And that makes your fiction seem that much more irrelevant.
Later, shitbirds.
Nick
P.S. the brevity of this post reminds me of The Valley Tavern posts of wooden boatbuilding school. Sitting at the bar, drinking Bud Light by the pitcher, trying desperately to find meaning in your publication and coming up short, but making life-long friends of Jess and Charlie, two beautiful souls out there making the world a better place one smoke break at a time. It’s funny how your shitass literature can really bring people together over how fucking bad it is. Daddy’s money well spent on your education, I guess.
