Absolute Gentleman

One of my flaws in character, and that sounds a little harsh, but I’m not sure what else to call it, is the way I rebut — the way I disagree with people when I think they’re making an incorrect statement or assessment, or when there’s some kind of action I deem an injustice.

This entry is an exercise in disagreeing like a normal person.

I like to blame this disease on the fact that I was raised on Long Island, a place, along with Florida, that could break away from its tectonic-freaking-plate, float to Greenland, Europe, Africa, whatever, and would not be missed at all.

Of course I’d want most of my family off the Island, but I’d probably leave Billy. Mostly because Billy is delusional, and doesn’t think he needs anybody.

My disagreement is with a writer who posted, on a social networking site, that he was just accepted for publication in a literary magazine. To set the scene clearly, so you don’t have to read my mind, he is also the director of a rather excellent publisher, and this literary magazine is a bit of a third or fourth-tier publication, assuming, as I do, the first tier is Paris Review, Granta, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker; second tier, or first tier A, is something like McSweeney’s, Fence, Tin House, Zoetrope All-Story, Virginia Quarterly Review; and third are magazines like Post Road (awful type, horrible arrangement, terrible layout, good writing) and the 1500 other literary magazines in the Boston area, Ninth Letter (who spend all their grant money on website development, apparently), The Cottahatchie Review or whatever you call it, Florida Review, Georgia Review, Your Mom Review, etcetera.

The one I’m talking about is a third tier.

So this writer/publisher, who I respect a lot (‘whom’ I know, but ‘who’ is how I’m saying it), because he does wonderful things for the publishing world, for writers, and for kids, makes it known that he was published in this third-tier magazine. It’s an exciting time, to be sure. How awesome is it when someone acknowledges your diction and syntax and chooses to have it representative of the vision they have for their magazine. I do not disagree with his excitement at all. He deserves to be excited and to let those who admire him know about it.

But then he started saying things like, “I can’t believe they accepted that piece…” “I threw that thing together in, like, one day…” and so on (These are not direct quotes, but are the root of my discomfort.)

This really bothered me for two reasons.

One: On behalf of all of us who (not ‘whom’ but ‘who’ this time) write, and on behalf of all those who work endlessly on their writing with little acknowledgment because their submission ends up on a slush pile that is not even read, I’d like to say that writers do not want to know if a published writer just threw a doodle together and submitted it. They really don’t, even if it’s true. It cheapens the work, makes the writer look like a jerk, despite the fact that he is not, and it reflects poorly on the publication in question (he named the publication in his jottings), even if it is a third-tier literary magazine.

Two: The writer in question publishes books. He publishes very good books. The literary community is about knowing one of the editors or being a famous writer, and it is rarely about being published as an unknown. Every editor and publisher has a backlog of favors to grant to friends that will last him two or three years. My point is that he can’t think, can’t even remotely think, that his thrown-together story/poem was accepted on the merits of its brilliance, that his being an editor didn’t play a significant role in the decision, that this wasn’t the initiation of a not-so-inconspicuous back-scratching exercise, that will be cashed in sometime in the future, when enough time passes that the writer in question wouldn’t suspect such distastefulness.

These literary publishers are the same ones that whine about how The New Yorker only publishes John Updike and Alice Munro, and what they are not realizing is that they are, in essence, doing the same thing and perpetuating the problem by doing so at the ground level, at the seedling stage, where promising young writers are supposed to get their break, where we should be reading the freshest, most innovative material.

My only hope is that he doesn’t reach up to scratch their backs.