April 24th & May 1st, 2023 - The Stuntman
Dear TNY,
I have been sick for a few days, but I dragged my ass out of bed for “The Stuntman”.
And what a disappointment it was.
This motherfucker is almost 10k words long (the only good news being that you are skipping a publication next week so if I divide it by two it’s actually shorter than most of your stories when spread over two weeks). Now, to appropriate that many pages there had better be something tender and wonderful contained therein. Some love. But there wasn’t.
The subject of this story appears to be visual art. And sure, yeah, let’s do that I guess. But that’s a hard pull for any author because they are trying to recreate the images of many paintings in the readers’ minds. But the point of art is that it needs to stir an emotion up by itself, so if I can’t fucking see the thing, whether or not it’s good, then I can’t be stirred by it. Right? The narrative is a degree of separation. Because my emotions are the real estate of importance here (something you fail to recognize constantly, TNY), my emotions now have to interact with squiggles on paper (words) that signify splashes of color (visual art) in order to blossom. That concept seems like a bridge too far by itself. But with this, it’s made even harder because the fucking narrator describes the art, and then proceeds to tell us what it means, thereby taking away my agency and replacing it with their agenda. WHICH IS HOW YOU KNOW THE FUCKING ART HAS FAILED TO BEGIN WITH. I’ve said this a million times, if the art needs to be explained with a little plaque next to it, then it didn’t work. Furthermore, the narrator is “plaquing” their own existence as well as D and his wife’s. This whole fucking story reads like those goddamn plaques. Does Michaelangelo’s David need a fucking plaque? How about Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog? The answer is fucking no. Let the goddamn art do the work.
In addition to this entire story being completely pointless as it endlessly explains itself, the narrator has no apparent connection to the artist and his wife? Maybe? Maybe they are a reviewer? I don’t fucking know. It was not made apparent to me. So why should I care about either party? The relationship is unclear. So, no empathy on this end. This entire story could have gone on without D and his bullshit and no one would have noticed.
Oh, and there is no craft in this at all. It reads like it has forgotten there is a reader on this end and it only exists to please the author, like a mirror. The proof being my favorite line, used multiple times: This is how I imagine it. Do you know how I know this is how you imagine it, dickface? Because you wrote the fucking story. That’s fucking understood. How goddamn dumb do you think we are?
And finally, the dumbest shit in the whole story: the narrator having a shitfit over being punched in the head. By a woman! The woman part is so funny because it seems like the author chose to use a female predator to explore gender roles. Whoa! Color me surprised. Anyway, after hearing the thoughts of this narrator for close to 10k words, my only conclusion is that the perpetrator of the hit must have been telepathic. Because if I had to sit there and listen to the MC think, I would have punched them to shut them the fuck up too. If that punch derailed this train of thought, even for a moment, it was worth it.
Also, you got punched in the fucking head. Get over it. Do you have any idea what people on earth go through? Like, someone is getting raped right now. Another is being murdered. A child is getting cigarettes put on out on their arm right the fuck now. Ukraine is at fucking war and Russians are cutting heads off and putting it on the internet. Husbands are catching their wives getting railed in the ass by the neighbor as we speak. And wives are getting herpes from their cheating husbands (not that there is anything wrong with herpes, per se (docs are saying in 50 years, we’ll all have the herps!), it’s just that I’m thinking that maybe the wife didn’t want them stuffed up her hoo-ha from some other girl’s coochbox, you know?). There’s a child soldier in Africa with an AK-47, right the fuck now, being screamed at to kill someone and he’s crying his fucking eyes out but he’s going to pull that trigger because it’s either that or he’s getting killed. Fuck, he might get killed anyway. Oh, how about the sweet 16 party in Alabama this week? How about the bank from last week? How about any of this shit? Sweet Christ, how fucking precious is your life that it hinges on getting punched in the head? How fucking basic are you?
You know, awhile back I used to be part of a really cool collective. It was a podcast/magazine/creative explosion and it was the most fun I had literarily in longer than I can remember (in fact, FTNY was born out of the implosion of that thing because I missed engaging with literature but no longer wanted to depend on other people because, as you know, you can’t depend on anyone but yourself). And part of that concept involved me editing a story for a woman from Canada, a nonfic essay, about how her apartment got broken into by three methheads and those methheads kicked the shit out of her and her boyfriend. And it was a good fucking story. It had empathy. It took risks. It was something. And the people in that story stood the fuck up and kept going. Their lives didn’t hinge on that act. Also, as I’m reminiscing, I’m realizing how much I miss working as part of that collective. Alas, not doing that again.
Anyway.
Back to plaques. The thing about art is that it needs to be accessible AND transcendent without explaining itself. This story, as a story, isn’t either yet it tries to explain how it is. And the contents of the story, the art, also don’t do the work. It’s all written with the level of elitist analysis that actually destroys art. I wonder if this is how it’s always been, this being art. Or is this a product of the 20th century. Because right now it seems like we have an abundance of people who believe they are awesome and what they do is awesome and the education they have is awesome and none of this can be questioned. Like, no one thought to ask the question, “is this good?” It’s all overeducated, false-confident, under-abused, baby-soft-handed, inexperienced, emperor’s-new-clothes-believing idiots.
Come get me. Bring the human dolly. Like in Silence of the Lambs. Strap me in and wheel me the fuck out of here. Because I obviously don’t belong here anymore.
Fuck it. I’m going outside.
Nick
P.S. I had issues posting this missive to the interwebs and had to reach out to Customer Support and start a trouble ticket and all that jazz. In doing so, I saw how fucking stupid this whole endeavor was, this being FTNY, as I was explaining away the point of this website and all these dumb letters. Like, if I have to explain it to Customer Service, because I’m embarrassed to be associated with it, then why am I even doing it? Maybe I should explore that more. Who knows. Or maybe it’s just…fun. It’s funny to me. And serious. Sometimes beautiful. Mostly sophomoric. Sometimes, it’s love. Maybe that’s enough.
