The snow-haired senior’s banal conversation echoed loud in the wide, high-ceilinged restaurant, talk of pensions, politics, truisms concerning a penny saved, and the echoing inanity was cover for the whispered confession between beautiful, well-dressed strangers concerning the things they’d done that they thought terrible and significant and amounted, really, to a celebration of wrong, the narcissism of guilt, or at least that was how it seemed to the sad, plump young woman in the corner who overheard them from behind the partition of booth and who had only recently lost her mother to cancer, her job to the recession, her self-respect to tattooed, pierced men at dive bars who forgot her name while fucking her. The dog was chasing the cat past the open window of sepia-toned memory, echoic bark after echoic bark as the girl focused only on the noise and left her body to become the sound, but the closed window with the blinds drawn was where the young girl stood being touched by her stepfather, and nobody ever looked in, and the girl grew up with the secret and ended up at the restaurant on a leaden gray October noon nursing a hangover, face pinched and swollen, makeup applied hastily and so unevenly with the thick shimmery eye-makeup, so that one eye blared peacock and one sunk dully by contrast, seemed fixed as if staring just beyond where the young woman was gazing. That was how it seemed to the fellow sitting at an adjacent table, anyway, who was observing the young woman with undue, almost predatory interest, intending to invent her story and so steal it, though he imagined he would return to her some dignity through compassion of representation, by letting her pain be rendered in an essential and properly cold manner that was necessary to the artifice of art, and he was only arriving at the beginning of it, the first glimmer and pang of it, when he glanced up from his keyboard and realized the young woman was gone. And then there was nothing else to say.

At htmlGIANT, Roxane Gay wrote an interesting piece about how grammar is often poor in work submitted to her as an editor at PANK. She also notes that since PANK moved to an online submission manager, some writers will submit and withdraw and resubmit five times in a day. She wondered about the role of the internet and e-submission in driving these trends; commenters responded that they found it hard to keep up with the Joneses whose names were all over Google Reader, that online writing was performance and response. One commenter said, tongue-in-cheek, "Here, here, Roxane!"

My own response follows:

Yup, "here, here!"

Trying to keep up with the most-published bloviators of the interweb, to get your name out there through frequency of publication, is the wrong reason to write. Of course we all would like to immediately be acknowledged as God's gift to English prose, but fame and fortune, or even the recognition that comes with the visibility of being prolific is entirely the wrong reason to write. In fact, I would suggest such an approach does much to drive the sort of sloppiness Roxane decries. Form is necessity in a work of art; grammar is that part of form that enables meaning. It's one thing for a beginning writer who doesn't know grammar to understand that it's ok, as you learn to pay attention to grammar, for form and intended meaning to diverge a bit. It's quite another for a writer to attach their name to something which is unforgivably slipshod, unproofread, or dashed off. If as Joseph Young suggests, there is a performative aspect to writing as it occurs in the world of the internet, that may indeed be it's own thing-- shenanigans in comment strings like htmlgiant, trickster trolls having their amoral fun at the expense of the pious and serious, participatory, living communities of people interacting. But I would argue that such writing is necessarily different from the sort of work that belongs in a journal of the quality of PANK or of TNY, that actual fiction or nonfiction that aspires to say and mean something significant ought to, as made objects, be made with care. I have been guilty of the submit/withdraw before-- usually caught up in that first heady flush of creation, before you begin to understand what's not working (a year seems sound, indeed, if not longer). But none of the work I've ever withdrawn or resubmitted has been grammatically sloppy... it's more that I made significant edits after realizing something important about the story or essay in question. And I think every time I have done a withdraw/resubmit, I've regretted it... it's usually been a sign that the story or essay in question wasn't ready yet. It is a problem if online submission managers encourage such indulgence... but it's surely on writers to wait until their work is complete. Maybe that's not true of writers who aspire to the mediocrity of broad popular recognition, but for any writer whose work has significance and integrity, Flannery O'Connor's dictum ought to hold true: "Absolute accuracy of expression is the sole morality of writing."

I live in a city where all anyone really cares about is that the football team is ranked first. It is a lovely, provincial little college town, a gentle, slow sanctuary still living in the simultaneous legacy of the sixties and the success of Nike, a town of lean, hungry, swoosh-adorned runners and graying hippies who have been stoned so long they no longer remember precisely what they were protesting, though they are sure, SURE, it is something important, man. It is hard to remember what is important here—this city is nothing if not uninspiring and dull, as unvibrant a place as it is comfortable. It forces accommodation to its narrow boundaries and small horizons, its pretense of relevance. The green team is good! We’re the bottom of the top tier of universities! We have bike paths and vegetarian options!

I am exhausted with it, and refuse to become it; my whole life, I have never belonged here, and that has never been more true than today. I am restless and wallow in discontent; I am bored; I am increasingly bitter, not at the cards I’ve been dealt but in the ways I can play those cards in this town. Give me the mirage of a glittering victory, the shimmer and shine of it, the Shangri-la, the hope however false. Give me skyscrapers, not retirement homes like the tallest building in this town. Let there be something bigger than the football stadium, some dream beyond the BCS and the perfection of Bud. If I don’t leave, it’s not that I will give way, accept diminishment and mediocrity. It’s that I’ll go up in flames for the sake of heat and light.

Americans today need to learn to listen.

We require less of what we ask for and more of what we’d prefer not to recognize.

In the echo chambers of the internet, we have become convinced that it’s enough to hear ourselves speak. Our individual actions expand to tremendous proportions, and are accorded broad importance: we are all artists, every hack who can play a chord a rockstar, every narcissist who can type a writer, everyone who ever rented a room and added furniture a designer. We are all beautiful and all our children are outstanding and everything we do, from breakfast to bedroom and toilet inbetween is worth celebrating and sharing. We all know better than heads of state and captains of industry, and the proof is in our audacity: we said so in our blog, we twittered boldly, we declared so in caps in the comment string of a story in the New York Times and linked the article to our Facebook where our friends all agreed with our superior gloss. Or, better yet, we ignored the difficult, untidy, and complex, and our refusal to look meant we, the people, had spoken: nothing happens at all anymore unless we care to notice.

We are navel-gazing, but our midsections are not so amazing, are swollen with consumption, fat with the swill of our bloviation. We require less of what we ask for and more that looks beyond ourselves.

Try it: look up from the screen you’re staring at. Put down your e-reader or smartphone and regain the world. The problem is not the screen, or even the semblance of connection that is in fact unsubstantive; there is nothing wrong with the availability and dispersal of information. The problem is that out the window the sun is shining with a particular cant and hue that you may never see again. The problem is that a few miles away a child is watching his mother slip a needle into the tender skin of her arm while the fridge groans with emptiness, and half a world away a woman is being stoned to death because she is in love and prideful men believe words in a book mean atrocity is justified, and somewhere else a solider is firing on a child hurling a rock, and higher walls are even now being built between nations, and men’s limbs are being hacked apart, demagogues are banging fists to podiums that are pressed to the temples of the poor and disenfranchised, and the icecaps are melting, the peace is failing, the nukes are unsecured and another girl who would stand and speak has been shot through the throat, and listen, right now, in your own home, in your own hand you are loading another page, tired of being lectured to, exhausted with listening, and you’re right.

You’re not the problem.

We all are.