My boyfriend calls your magazine “middlebrow drivel,” but I disagree. Given your considerable limitations, which I see no need to waste time enumerating here, I think you’ve done a fine job with what you’ve been able to throw together. I’m sure your family is very proud of you.

Moving right along to my real reason for writing, I must confess that while skimming your infrequently-published zine-thing I’ve taken a certain guilty pleasure in the irritated rants in which you single out examples of contemporary writing that rub you the wrong way. I’m not entirely sure if my enjoyment comes more from identification with your judgmental positions or pleasure in your discomfort. No doubt they both factor into my appreciation of your squirming.

That said, do you have any choice Dwight Garner quotes this time around?

Vicariously,

Mean-Spirited in Missoula

Dear Mean-Spirited,

Given the enormity of the shitshows we are facing as I write this in late October 2020 (which we will continue to face to a lesser or much, much, much greater degree depending on which way the great electoral horrorfest goes in November), lately I have a hard time making mountains out of stylistic molehills found in magazines and newspapers, at least when it comes to most journalism. Don’t get me started on our reactionary, subliterate troglodyte (apologies to troglodytes) Shithead-in-Chief’s barely comprehensible tweets.

However I remain at heart a petty observer of other people’s shortcomings when it comes to writing, and probably much else. Though he’s a smart guy, your man Mr. Garner does tend to indulge in ridiculous excursions into deep space while sentence-slinging, so why not pick on him? Lord knows we all need some cheap laughs these days.

I have neither the time nor the focus to scour Garner’s reviews of the past year to assemble much of a collection of trainwreck word play for you. Fortuitously though, I did find one paragraph that I happened to clip and save a while back. Here you go: In a piece listing noteworthy books read by New York Times reviewers in 2019, Garner writes, “I didn’t mean to reread Samuel Pepys’s diary again, but I picked it up and inhaled it like a Popeye’s chicken sandwich.” He doesn’t mention any post-inhalation indigestion, so I assume that was a pleasurable experience.

Hope that provides a partial scratch of your Garner itch, and thanks for the kind (?) words about my mag.

With Coffee,
The Editor

I am writing because my teenage son recently picked up a copy of your sleazy magazine in a dingy bookstore he frequents far too often for my liking. My son didn’t show me your publication — he only confessed to buying the damn thing when I confronted him with it after finding it hidden in a copy of Scientific American. 

The issue in question has a lengthy attack on Big Tech companies, and elsewhere in your bile-infused tirades you took issue with increasing “disparities” in income between rich and poor in the good ol’ USA. 

I don’t usually read the elitist snobfest New York Times, but my brother, who I’m proud to say is a senior aide to Senator Dianne Feinstein (my favorite Democrat — go DiFi!) sent me a column by a fellow named David Brooks. Mr. Brooks is clearly much smarter than you. The column ends with these paragraphs:

Successful executives are doing what’s best for their companies, gathering as much talent as they can. This isn’t evil. It’s not exploitation.

The job of public policy is to make it easier for everybody to do what successful people are doing. Productivity is the key to national prosperity. Every time we increase productivity for one person, we all thrive a little more, together.

I couldn’t have said it better myself! It’s time for you to join the winners and realize that you can’t stand in the way of progress! Though based on your obvious loser mentality I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Angrily,
Disgusted in Dubuque

Dear Disgusted, 

First of all, congratulations on having written the very first letter to be published in our new, though perhaps not improved, online edition! I hope you will appreciate the historical import of this brief moment (oops, almost gone!) as much as I do.

Secondly, I in turn have a paragraph for you, taken from an interview with the late great Gore Vidal. In regard to your question of me, Vidal captures my feelings exactly: 

I exist to say, “No, that isn’t the way it is,” or “what you believe to be true is not true for the following reasons.” I am a master of the obvious. I mean, if there’s a hole in the road, I will, viciously, outrageously, say there’s a hole in the road and if you don’t fill it in you’ll break the axle of your car. One is not loved for being helpful.

If I live to be, oh I don’t know, a bit older than I am now, I couldn’t come up with a better answer to your inane ravings. 

Lastly, as my mother used to say, who cares what you think?

Impatiently,
The Editor