A Peek Behind the Curtains at TDE

Flannery O'Connor suffered fools gladly, but only in her stories. When it came to the craft of writing, she suffered fools about as well as Stalin suffered kulaks.

After reading a batch of short stories from aspiring writers, she told the students that their stories weren't stories. They were lectures or writing designed to make a point, but not stories.

I gotta imagine her Georgia drawl sliced deep into those students. It reminds me of the professor who, after getting an especially stupid response from a student, said, "That's not even wrong."

O'Connor then spiced her criticism by telling them the job of writing is pretty pedestrian, about as glamorous as digging a ditch and just as earthy: tactile and grubby.

No point, no lecture, no layered meaning, and definitely no glamor: just the sweaty effort of telling a story. That, she said, was the craft of writing and if anyone comes to the craft with a different aim, he's little better than a whore who says she's doing it out of charity.

Alright, she didn't really say that. She was too fine a Christian woman to say such things.

But her characters damn well said such things.

Her characters said and did a lot of things she wouldn't, so much so that T.S. Eliot stopped reading her stories. For a man like Eliot who cherished fine writing, that would've been like Hunter Biden walking away from a line of coke, but Eliot said the slashing realism of her stories was too unsettling for him.

The dangdest thing happened in O'Connor's stories, though.

Meanings emerged. Points were made. The grotesqueries of modern life were splayed out like fish on a cutting board.

O'Connor's approach and results were a testament to the proper working of the brain's hemispheres.

Based on her personal letters and every biographical anecdote told about her, O'Connor was a woman with a beautiful brain: one balanced like Elrond's, with a vigorous left hemisphere serving its right hemisphere master.

Her left hemisphere dug those prose ditches. From placing the comma to figuring out how that road in the woods fit into the narrative, her left hemisphere performed the craft. Explicit effort, goal in mind, maybe even a wretched outline tooled out next to her.

But the right hemisphere was in control, and it quietly put meaning into the left hemisphere's story, almost like the left hemisphere was building a giant wooden horse and didn't even notice the right hemisphere stocking it full of Greeks. And when Trojan readers brought the horse inside its walls, they didn't know it either, until the meaning unfolded in the dark.

Scheske, How the Frick Are Flannery's Short Stories Relevant to the Aggressive Essay Style that Has Taken over TDE?!?!?

I thought about stopping the apology there, leaving y'all to WTF? about it.

After ginning it over, I decided to explain the point of the O'Connor anecdote, even though that's about as much fun as telling someone you've made a charitable donation in their name instead of getting them a Christmas present.

Here goes:

In the arena of the essay, the lesson behind O'Connor's writing is the (non-)aim of the new TDE.

Essays aren't short stories and I'm no Flannery O'Connor. She died at age 39 with a brilliant corpus, so to speak, of writing. Me? I'm slow. It took me 39 years to appreciate that no writing is worth its pixels if it doesn't first tell a story or, in my case, entertain the reader.

So even though I have points and agendas, I no longer push them. I sit down to entertain, using every tool at my disposal: anecdotes, analogies, absurdities, alliteration, atc.

Is TDE still Catholic? Yes, very much so. Its Catholicism might be as submerged as an abused girlfriend in a double-quilted Dutch oven, but it's there: orthodox, traditional, straighter than Andrew Tate shotgunning Tlando-laced Red Bull.

But I am finished writing sermons, lecturing, or giving advice. Those are jobs of a rogue left hemisphere that thinks its opinions need to get out there.

Meanings will emerge and points will often be obvious. I write essays, after all, and an essay needs a leaping off point, but any point or meaning is first in service to humor. Humor, entertainment: all else be damned.

Today is the day of comedy and satire. Laughter is crucial if we're going to restore mental health to our Kafkaesque culture of surreal idiocy. I'm stepping to the plate to take my comedy whacks at it.

Perhaps that makes me a jester, maybe even a clown, but that's alright. Some men, Max Beerbohm noted, are only meant to juggle:

'How many charming talents have been spoiled, he wrote, 'by the instilled desire to do "important" work! Some people are born to lift heavy weights. Some are born to juggle with golden balls.' Max Beerbohm was, obviously, among the jugglers. Joseph Epstein, Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives.

Me? I'm trying to juggle the shit out of those balls.

Will I be everyone's cup of tea? Of course not. I'm not even my own cup of tea sometimes. Humor is quirky, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable. Why did I chuckle nonstop during Napoleon Dynamite but a close friend with a similar sense of humor loathed it? Beats me.

But I ain't worried about it. I'm just gonna keep juggling and imagine readers are laughing.

And if you're not, that's alright too.