September 25th, 2023 - The Narrow Way
Dear TNY,
My head and face are sunburned and it’s another Monday and you have brought us “The Narrow Way”.
It’s an interesting piece. The language is fucking fantastic. Here are some examples:
It was the time of the high winds: the roof came off Aaron Weber’s stable and blew away; the palm trees bent over so far their hair beat the ground.
Susana, let’s play cows and calves, she’d say, and lift up her nightie to offer me her tit. Her armpit hairs tickled my face like corn floss, and the inside of her arm smelled like warm ashes and bonfire smoke. I sucked on her tit as if I were the little calf that Jacinta the cow had just dropped, and Olga had to cover her mouth so she wouldn’t wake Father and Mother.
We went back to the stable to feel the music. It was raining. The sky was electric, gashed with lightning that lit up one cornfield, then another. Thunder boomed. Jonas’s nose was crooked from the punch; that was just how his face would look now. He rolled the metallic ball in the palm of his hand. The music bounced off the walls. A lightning flash: Olga lifted up her skirt, giggled, spun around. Another flash: Jonas chased Olga and threw her to the ground. She dug her fingernails into his face, laughing uncontrollably. They had forgotten about me.
What I like about the language is how plain it is, yet how rich it is. And there’s a freshness to the word choices, that some are finding new ways to exist (…so far their hair beat the ground). This is the kind of piece that feels delicious in the mouth and you just roll it from cheek to cheek, tonguing it as you pass it back and forth.
But does it have meaning? Does the piece transcend? No, not in my opinion. In fact, it appears to start from nowhere, pass through nowhere, and continue on to nowhere at the end. Like, in terms of Vonnegut’s beautifully simplified (and correct) story arcs, it has none. So I checked where the story came from. And, of course, it’s a section of an upcoming novel. Now, don’t get me wrong. I liked reading this. But it goes directly against what I think the pages of your magazine are for. It seems like you are using these pages as commercial space for the publishing industry (and while I will recognize that the publishing industry desperately needs help, because people don’t fucking read anymore, I’d argue that better content could change the industry because the people you actually need to spend their hard-earned money on books don’t like your fucking high & mighty “literature” and aren’t spending money on it OR the books that are available are just plot driven trash, which don’t connect the way this artform is supposed to so why would people bother with their money or time, so both paths alienate the non-reader and their innate desire to feel things deeply and instead cater to a different tier of douchiness than Marvel movies or a bajillion sequels, but douchiness all the same; what I’m saying is I firmly believe that the industry should print work that actually fucking means something, that does something to our souls, instead of catering to fools and academics, neither of which know their ass from a hole in the ground). So great. You waste these pages to sell more books, likely because you got paid to do so by the publishing house.
I think your pages should be beyond the tendrils of capitalism, though. The magazine is paid for by readers because of the other content anyway (I know plenty of TNY readers and none of them like the fiction (let that shit sink in you fucking dummies)). So if you have pages, and you can put whatever you want in them, why not publish Art for no other reason than for Art’s sake? Why not change the world? Why not break people’s hearts and then stitch them back together again in ways that create lasting empathetic changes in the people on planet earth? That’s what you could do. But instead, you are a famous actor holding a Diet Coke, perfectly framed, in a movie about aliens taking over the earth. Dumb. Super dumb. Dumb as a fucking post level dumb.
Ah yes. Sorry. A “post” is a shaft of material, metal or wood or even concrete (popular with the Nazis and can be seen surrounding vacation destinations like Auschwitz), that is affixed in the ground (usually buried a couple of feet deep) and when many posts are installed in such a way that they line the edge of a property, or delineate pastures, then fencing materials can be strung between them to create borders for, say, humans or other animals. I know it’s likely that you have never seen a fence post. Or installed one. And it’s very unlikely that at the age of 11 years old your father said you needed to dismantle a fence so he took you and your brother outside, across the little ditch that your washing machine used to drain in, that you also farmed crayfish from using traps you had built from leftover cage material from creating the rabbit enclosures (raised for meat, of course), and your father proceeded to use a highlift jack and a chain to remove the old, metal fence posts, showing you how to wrap the chain in such a way that the force of the jack pulling up on it only served to tighten the chain further, and keep it from slipping up the post, so that little by little the post would be resurrected from the earth. Yeah, I can imagine that you didn’t do that.
So, the writing is good. It’s delicious. But the narrative is shit because it’s not meant to stand alone. And did publishing this serve your actual purpose? Do I want to buy the book? No. Why not, even though the writing is good? Because you fucking turn me off with how you use your pages. I don’t want your fucking commercial. Stop it. Stop doing all this shit and do your fucking job. Rebel, you sonsabitches (or daughtersabitches or whatever you identify as; if that’s as a fucking tree, then you lignumsabitches). Stand for something. Push back. Champion Art. Or get the fuck out of the way and let someone else do it. We are living in the ashes of this civilization. And you’re going to, what, stand there and sell us more shit we don’t need because that’s what we’ve always done? Get the fuck out of town.
I went swimming yesterday. Got a sunburn as I haven’t been out in a while. I’ve been in a weird funk here. It’s hard to dismantle a life, which is the task of the hour, even if you want to leave. It’s just difficult. That’s all. I’m nearly done with it. I have more to be excited about than, maybe, I ever have. There are so many reasons to live. But that doesn’t mean I’m not sad selling my things and living in an empty apartment with a mattress on the floor, each day more shit disappearing. But that’s life, man.
So there you have it. Another story in the books. And me, realizing I should have understood how the highlift jack worked at 11 so that when I was 24 I wouldn’t have had an open fracture of the face in Iraq from a highlift jack incident whilst changing a tire around the tail end of a 36 hr shift while moving my body at high speed to avoid an ambush and also making up for the lackluster performance of my team member, Lumpy, who was an amazing EMT, once saving a man’s right arm before my eyes, it looking like a hotdog that was microwaved too long without pre-poking it with a fork for the steam to escape, Lumpy, reaching in this man and securing the artery, Lumpy, also being a terrible EOD tech and his hustle was fucking nonexistent. What I’m saying is I miss my father and should have paid attention to what he was trying to show me instead of always being afraid of fucking up and getting yelled at. But instead, that night in Iraq, I flew backwards through the air with some of my left ocular orbit, and the outer and inner bones of the left side of my nose, broken and also as I was flying, my legs twisted and flipped so violently that I ripped the crotch of my DCU’s across the roundness of my left testicle, causing severe bruising, and I proceeded to land in the dirt, kicking up a huge cloud of dust that was noticeable immediately because all the Army personnel surrounding me switched from UV light and night vision to white light and a million beams of washed over me, the sound of men’s gasps coming from somewhere behind those lights. Then blood. Then sticking my pinky up my broken nose when no one was looking and pushing my face back out like one would do with the dented fender in a car. Anyway, what I’m saying is I should have known better. Which is likely what almost everyone can say about everything they do that ends up hurting them, but life wouldn’t be that interesting if we only did shit we knew would turn out well.
WHICH IS WHY YOU SHOULD TAKE SOME FUCKING RISKS AND PUBLISH BETTER SHIT.
I’m out.
Nick
