February 26th, 2024 - On the Night of the Khatam

Dear TNY,

I was glad to have last week off and this week hath brought us “On the Night of the Khatam”. 

I watched American Fiction last week.  So it is inevitable that I make a comment about it and how it relates to you.  And this story is a good example from your decades long battle with quality to discuss that (spoiler alert: you aren’t winning it).  This story feels like a story that the white lady on the prize panel would love.  Which, of course, makes it bad.  I could not finish it.  Nothing had life in it.  It was just words.  Seemingly an endless train of them that never became more than black symbols on a white page.  They stood for nothing.  Broke no hearts.  Did not transcend a plane. Or create imagery or a narrative of any kind.  But culture!  Foreign!

Yuck.  But being mad at this is like being mad at Trump.  Yeah, he sucks.  But he’s the product of a failed country, half of the voters, give or take, still supporting and believing in him.  He is what the people want. Or what the people are told they want. Either way, the people, no matter how good and kind and wonderful they are, are choosing poorly (um, to be clear, choosing the other old cockstain is terrible as well, just a different kind of terrible).  Your fiction is what the people want. And the people are cunts and they want garbage and that’s a waste of resources, time, food, air, and pretty much everything else.  I’ve never really been good at being the people.  But I’m a cunt too so what does that matter?

I’ve never really been good at much, I guess.  The more you learn, the more you learn that you don’t know anything at all. A whole world around you being born, growing, expanding, breaking down, and returning to what was. And us, such insignificant, whiny, egotistical, inconsiderate little beasts in the middle of it, believing it’s all for us.

So much for us to unlearn before we can learn, and so little time to do all that.

I don’t really have much more to say.  I’m sad.  Frustrated.  Often shutting my eyes as tightly as I can and breathing through one moment to the next.

I’ve been told quite a few times that I’m really self-aware.  I don’t know if I believe that.  But I have been told, as I said.  But if this is what self-awareness buys you, then I recommend your illusions. 

Again, I’m likely not self-aware at all.  Just as blind as anyone else. 

But, weirdly seeking answers in Art, which is why I’m upset at you.  Because real Art captures the complexities of love and all the hardship that comes along with it.  Which as far as I can tell is what I need (I’d expand that to the rest of humanity, but I don’t want to speak for anyone (certainly there are some people in regions of the world that rhyme with malestine and schmisrael that could use more love)).  Although, I don’t even know if that’s true.  Because I don’t know a goddamn thing.

Nick