Publish…or Perish

A paper — my paper — passes from the professor’s hand to that of a student, and then to another, and another, and so on until it comes back to me. Paper in hand, it’s now my turn to read as I first glance skeptically around the classroom. Some eyes are kind, expectant, encouraging. Others, most others, are fixed elsewhere — on shoes, on fingers fidgeting with car keys, on cell phone dial-a-dates — just not on me.

I stand and start anyway.

“A young man falls in love with an older woman, and they have a short but torrid love affair. She, however, is carrying a lot of baggage — and he’s no porter.”

I look up briefly to see whether the pun arrests approval. It doesn’t. I return to my page.

“She picks up her baggage and leaves.

“As might be expected where duty rivals devotion in a young man’s heart and purse, he writes a long and torrid novel about their short and torrid affair — by which he hopes to purge his pain and make a mint. He doesn’t; not a dime. No one wants his novel. The love scenes result in many dates with rabidly curious agents, all of whom are one-afternoon stands. The agents know the book won’t sell — that the writer and his novel are both lost causes. But he’s cute.

“One agent with a heart, however, tells him after short sex to cut, cut, cut. Obligingly, he does. The long and torrid novel becomes shorter, much shorter, then shorter still. The man has found a new rhythm — and a new lust. His novel becomes a novella, then a short story. He submits it to magazines and literary journals of weight, all of which reject it. He resolves to further cut.

“At last, he has a piece of micro-fiction resembling a haiku — right down to the Japanese-sounding syntax.

Boy meets girl by day;

they fuck much.

But come the night, they finish such.

“It rhymes and has one syllable too few for a true haiku. He insists it’s really only half a syllable, but people aren’t buying — his explanation or the rhyming haiku. He has it printed on the front and back of a T-shirt and walks the streets like a billboard — never mind the arms and legs. Passers-by rapidly scan the first two verses on the front of his T-shirt, but their eyes avert when he tries to make contact. Instead, heads look straight ahead — and only then turn to read the last verse once he’s passed them by.

He dies, slowly, of neglect and discontent — and is buried in a potter’s field next to other unloved and undernourished poets.

The end.”

I sit down to silence. Stunned, I expect (given my fledgling writer’s grandiosity) as if awestruck. And yet, I note there’s not a wet eye in the house. Pins — if they could now be dropped — would sound like thunder. The professor clears his throat.

“That’s your synopsis?”

“It is, sir.”

“Uh-huh. And your hook?”

He has me on ‘hook,’ but then I’m mercifully reminded that ‘those who can, do; those who can’t…’ “The hook, sir, is in the brevity. Pith, I feel — .”

“You feel?” Is this supposèd hook of yours about feeling? The muscles in his face could teach rattlesnakes how to snicker.

“Pith,” I continue notwithstanding, “is the thing. It’s tragedy on a tight leash, a short string, sir.”

“I see,” he says — but clearly doesn’t. His eyes and hands are already busy with his pile of others’ papers. I can see he’s getting set for the next read without further comment on mine, and that I’m going to miss my chance if I don’t act. It’s now or never, I think.

“Art is dying, sir. Pith in pulp is the new watchword.” He abruptly stops shuffling and looks at me over the top of a pair of tortoise-shells, professorially-reclined. I take a quick breath and continue. “We have to keep pace — or we, too, shall die. You and I. All of us here,” I conclude with the sweep of one hand, now a little less grand for the opportunity of summation.

More pins could drop in the silence that ensues. Quislings, I think. MFA scumbags. Sniveling snarklings. This is a club no part of which I want.

“Then you’d cater to conformity, Mr. D.?” With that, he cuts me almost to the quick. And yet, I can now taste the blood of his liberal hypocrisy dripping from a well-tenured tooth and claw.

“No, sir. I’m a survivor. I want to produce. But I’d also occasionally like to consume.”

The atmosphere grows tense. Authority figures are a thing I’m still struggling with, and this one is no exception.

A smirk something like heat lightning begins to form upon his rumpled lip. “Well, Mr. D., perhaps you’ll one day find your niche in Annual Reports. Big business pays well for that kind of thing, you know,” he says as he leans in over his small stack of papers and wags an omniscient index finger. “They like brevity, pith, and numbers.” The last word positively oozes from his lips as he lets a glance pass over his surrounding pride of little cubs. He gets the gallows-nod he’s clearly seeking in hushed murmurs and chuckles.

Fucking sycophants!

I realize it’s over, that I have nothing to lose. “Publish or perish, sir,” I say as I stuff my synopsis into my backpack, stand again, then push my chair in under the table. “Publish — ”

I walk to the door, open it and step out. The room remains silent as a stone unturned. I know — perhaps others do, too — that nothing he’s written in over a decade has been published; that he’s washed up and over the hill, a has-been. I sling my backpack up over my shoulder and stick my head back in through the door for one parting punch.

“ — or perish,” I say, letting the last word sound like a death wish.