Upon Receipt of Our First Hate Letter

Success is measured in different ways by different people. A musician probably experiences it the first time he hears one of his songs on the radio, an author when he receives a letter saying a magazine wants to publish his first short story. However, we at Barrelhouse realized how successful we are the other day when we got our first piece of hate mail. Frankly, I’m disappointed it took a year and a half. I figured our brand of foolishness would stick in the craw of all sorts of people a lot quicker than that.

But what o.mitevski@hush.com lacked in speed he made up for in intensity. We must have really got to this dude because not only did he send his rant to the poetry email account, but he copied the fiction, nonfiction, and online boxes as well.

Now, being the discerning, considerate editor I am, I had to consider—given that the word “submission” does appear in the subject line of his e-mail—that this was a legitimate attempt by O to have his story posted on the Barrelhouse website. Unfortunately, even as a parody of an anti-fan letter, which I assumed O’s piece was when I responded, it didn’t quite cut the mustard. Just for laughs, I’ve pasted O’s letter as well as my response below.

Now don’t forget people, we still have to reject this piece three more times—once from the fiction box, once from the nonfiction box, and once from the poetry box. So please, feel free to write a response to his sub and post it in the comments section. Hell, respond to him directly if you feel like it. That’s his actual email address above.

And yes, I totally realize that this is quickly becoming far too much like that episode of The West Wing where Josh finds out there’s a website about him and becomes obsessed with it, but I’m really bored at work and O’s letter was too much fun to pass up.

So without further ado, take it away O:

Dear Barrelhouse,
I came upon your website from webdelsol and wonder to whom do I send the cleaning bill for my keyboard? Your site, which conveyed not only your pretensions, your false claims to anti-academic leanings but also your sheer lack of intellect, taste and capacity, forced me to puke all over my desk thereby ruining my keyboard. Someone there must take responsibility for this. When you say things like: "...if you haven’t read Yeats, you aren’t a poet yet..." one must wonder what rock you imbeciles crawled out from under? I mean the sheer audacity that you sit there telling people what does and does not qualify them as poets just makes my mind riot but that you choose Yeats as your God-of-all-poetry and then claim a low-brow position for yourselves? YOU ARE IDIOTS! Worse than this, you are inconsistent and self-contradictory idiots which makes you simply hypocrits [sic].

It is smarmy worthless dolts such as yourselves that are doing more harm to the future of literature than anything else. You are simply further degradations of culture that American idiocy represents and it is going to give me great pleasure to demote, trash, bad-mouth, despise and ridicule your magazine at every opportunity to every person I know.

You, all, collectively, disgust me.
O.

My response:

Dear O.,

Thank you for your submission to the online edition of Barrelhouse. We really appreciate the time you took to put your manuscript together, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to pass on it.

First, we’ll get with the positive feedback. The best thing about “Just a Note” is the voice; it really works. Your ability to adopt the personality of an elitist dickhead masquerading as a populist dickhead is impressive, mostly because your narrator pulls out all the stops: massive overstatements, the distilling of an entire publication’s ethos down to one sentence, epochal overreactions, and remarkable inattention to detail (as in, how does holding Yeats in high regard make someone an academic? How does holding Yeats in low regard make someone an anti-academic? Perhaps these are ideas you can further explore in a second draft?). This guy covers all the bases. What’s more, you keep his voice consistent throughout. Not everyone can generate the Ignatius J. Reilly-esque harangue you’ve managed to provide and have it come off as genuine, so good job.

You must’ve worked at this for days.

However, as stated above, there are some problems with your piece, predominately the rampant use of clichés. This is most notable in the opening paragraph, the bit about vomiting on your keyboard and blaming the people who offended you so much as to raise your bile. It’s something that’s been done to death, meaning you probably could have found a more original way to begin. But, it should be noted that your narrator’s attempt to turn this cliché on its head—by using his keyboard rather than his suit/lunch/cat—was valiant, though failed.

And finally, even though overstatement is an important component of effective parodies (as we implied above), the best ones are those that extend just over the line separating reality from delusion while, at the same time, retaining a semblance of believability. This being said, we feel you went too far at only one point in “Just a Note.” You state, “It is smarmy worthless dolts such as yourselves that are doing more harm to the future of literature than anything else. You are simply further degradations of culture that American idiocy represents.” You are obviously a big fan of Barrelhouse to say this because it drastically overstates the ramifications of the size of our, admittedly, limited readership. If Barrelhouse increased its subscription rate by a factor of 10,000, if it was sold in every book store on the planet (from our lips, to God’s ears), if people handed it accolades like the National Magazine Award, it still couldn’t possibly have the effect on literature your narrator implies. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would honestly believe that a literary magazine, of all things, much less one with our readership, could cause any lasting harm to the 400 years of beautiful tradition that is American literature, a tradition encapsulating writers as diverse as Anne Bradstreet and George Saunders, Mark Twain and Phillip Roth, Edgar Allan Poe and Toni Morrison. The only thing that could stop that train is the total decimation of the planet Earth; Barrelhouse certainly isn’t up to the task, no matter how much we suck.

No way. It’s just too crazy.

Anyway, these are the totally subjective opinions of one reader, so take them for what you will.

And thanks again for your submission. We hope you find a home for your work in the future.

All the best,

Joe
One Fourth of Team Barrelhouse
http://www.barrelhousemag.com/

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