Sunday, February 16, 2020
Dear Publisher, let me explain
Dear Publisher:
Please consider my suite of 2,000 essays for publication. Before you dismiss them as not particularly interesting, or whatever fancy publishing term you like to use, allow me to explain something; I am using some very advanced literary techniques! Some of these are so advanced I had to invent them myself. And I just wanted to explain them to you so you don't walk away thinking my work isn't particularly good. It's only not particularly good to the lay reader, or the casual reader, or the reader who doesn't know about the very advanced techniques being used.
Let me ask you this: How many random readers on the street, when given a page of Finnegan's Wake to look over, would call it "good"?
Only one, but he is going to talk to you for a very long time about things having nothing to do with the page you have given him because he is very lonely.
And my point is that James Joyce was using some very advanced techniques!
"Are you," You inquire haughtily "Comparing yourself to James Joyce?"
Oh my god, this is super exciting. Usually no one understands what I'm trying to say. Thank you! Yes. Exactly.
Here are my techniques:
1. Using a thousand words to say what can be said in just a few words.
It's a beautiful, beautiful comment on art that I have now made 672 times.
2. Humble vanity.
I'm kidding about being a genius. I kid about it to be kind and understanding to you because you are too lazy to ever see the vast panoplies of my genius. But this is not your fault. Seeing things ahead of their time is insanely difficult.
Also I might be wrong.
I'll be pretty sure I'm wrong in about, oh, six hours, laying awake in bed thinking "Oh my god, what did I write?!"
But four years from now I alone will read this once again and think:
Actually, that's not that bad.
3. Just when it starts getting really, really amazing I shoot it in the head.
What I'm going to say next is too beautiful for our corrupted world. I'd like to hear it as much as you.
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