minor beef[s] is a new feature where you can express your literary gripes, complaints and pet hates …
Is there a writer you despise who is getting too much praise? a lauded critic whose opinions suck? a trend which makes your skin crawl? Let us know …
My beef is with myself, with my inability to locate, in the abortive attempt of art to transcend the bedraggling concerns of the everyday, anything more surprising than my own fear of death. I am afraid to die. I am afraid to mean nothing. So I jury-rig a minor immortality out of memorable phrasing, memorable images. But what do you remember of the last novel you read? Has it permanently encamped in your psyche? What was the protagonist’s name?
I can’t remember either.
Books aren’t monuments, and no one reads anyway. So why write? When it takes hours a day, years of such days, and there is no guarantee, increasingly no hope, of steady publication. What metaphysical reward will my persistence win? The Recognition of Being a Great Writer? No one recognizes an unpublished book as even existing. No one congratulates you on a folder full of finished drafts. And when I do finally strongarm some micropress without an editor or marketing department into hurriedly outsourcing the “publication” of my manuscript to a print-on-demand factory that uses mechanical-pulp, high-acid paper, the sort that yellows more quickly than an addict’s teeth, it will be seen only by the same hundred who condescend to Like, without slowing their distracted scroll, the book stack pictures I cringingly post on X, that corpse of Twitter. Forty will buy copies. Twenty will read. One will DM me a cliche of praise. Two will DM me lengthy, specific criticisms.
It’s not that I fail. It’s that this is what succeeding now looks like.
Would it be worth it if I could sell 50,000 copies? I don’t know. That’s like dreaming myself into a giant. I have no idea what it would feel like to lumber around a hundred-feet tall.
So why do it? Do I imagine publication as some gateway to fascinating friendships, conversation, community? If I do, then why not skip the decade of hard labor and instead write fawning profiles of the people I want to befriend? Fascinating people prefer coverage to competition.
Do I think God will admire me? No. I don’t think God reads anymore. Nothing contemporary, at least.
Yes, there have been moments when the well-considered idea met its ideal expression, when words and thought glided together like costumed figure skaters, and in those moments, I thought, This feeling justifies anything – years of work, hundreds of rejections. But is that feeling better than belly laughing or holding the daughter I might have conceived had I made more money, not sunk all my free time into these books, these books, these books? I don’t know. What I do know is that the writing is bad today, that it hardly ever ices over anymore.
Tenacity does not imply hope. I write, query, submit daily, without hope. The habit supplants hope. I call it purpose, this purposelessness. I warm by a fire that gives no heat.
I am still so afraid to die.
minor literature[s] 