short fiction
A fragment of a letter concerning multicultural understanding; or, should it be an enquiry into multicultural understanding, a fragment? Where the rest of this letter is, is not important. How we, the editors, know that it is or was a letter is not something we are going to get into here except to say that the letter as a form of writing, that is, a genre of writing—and letters are part of a form part of a genre, if you wish, that runs along the course of the essay, that is, the personal essay as it has developped, again we insist, since Montaigne’s Les Essais, the initiator of a particular kind of prose writing we have taken to be as close to nature as anything in writing could be, but isn’t. The two great genre’s of modernity—and that is modernity as we can call it since a time we could also call post Renaissance, are the Essay and the Novel. These are the forms that dominate our literary life. I could also add the Short Story as it has its beginnings in the nineteenth century writers who were its greatest practitioners, and among them I would have to place Poe and Hawthorne near the top, and yes, I say the top because I am not adverse to creating hierarchies of attainment or quality in writing. But then the letter as a form of essay could be of a different style of essay writing, and we are certainly not talking about academic essays, that is, thesis driven essays as we also used to like to say in college, or in my freshman composition classes; although I did also introduce the personal essay, and used personal essay assignments to help shift focus onto academic essays, essays of criticism, or essays in defense of a thesis. Know your audience was one of the mantras in my class.
Let the words themselves speak what should be heard because they do speak something to a reader if his or her eyes can listen to what is spoken by them, and we do say speak for words, words in their origin through the medium of speech, language is speech, that’s what speech class was supposed to be in High School, language, communication; all, or should I say any, communication has a rhetorical position; a shopping list is there to convince you what you need to buy. Haven’t you found yourself debating with your shopping list, any to do list you might have composed? Here then is the letter, or the fragment of one:
A Letter Concerning Multicultural Understanding
Let’s not address the social evils of greed, both personal and institutional, but let’s lament that this greed is in fact not more multicultural,more diverse. We certainly will become a better society if there are more of every other bureaucratic category of human able to fuck his fellow man or woman in the ass uninvitedly.
Let us not address the problem of prostitution, let us say for example, but instead let us make sure that prostitutes are representative of all ethnicities and races . . . which, of course, they are; so,. we are not sure where he or she is going with this, except that it does say something about how social ills are generally addressed by us, only poorly in the means that attempt to address them, the absurdity with which we address social ills, which you could infer is how we also address race and racism—let us not address the human dimensions of racism, let’s only address it topically—which becomes the irony of how we address racism because racism itself is a topicality, a hyper focus on the topicalness—it is even less than topographic; topography is a little more delineated than racism allows itself to be in the matter and the manner of considering other human beings. Yes, let us make sure that everyone has an opportunity to be equally racist against every other one of us seems to be where are headed
Let’s not address the problems of power in itself power against the People, only that we need more African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Women in the power structure set against the People. Perhaps African American People will accept a reaming from power if there are enough African Americans in the power elite fucking them in the ass uninvitedly (which is of course to suggest that there could be pleasurable fucking in the ass if it is consensual fucking in the ass, as I have noted that there are women who enjoy being fucked in the ass when it is invited, which is completely other than how women have been fucked in the ass traditionally by men, and how homosexuals could enjoy fucking in the ass and scream with delight instead of the once conceived pain, which isn’t the reference to a person being a pain in the ass as we say when someone is a ball breaker; but then homosexual coitus in the rectum is not the way anal coitus is enacted in prisons or by gorillas who like fucking other apes in the ass as a means of imposing hierarchy—we have to separate consensual sex between two males and anal rape in prisons, and I do not want to think about all those niggers from whatever Hood fucking other niggers in the ass and what that’s all about).
Everyone to his familiar devil.
Satan does not come to a devout Catholic woman in the garb of a Rabbi, but in the vestments of a Priest. Cain is Abel’s brother and most people murdered know their murderer.
As we announced early on, a letter, a form of the personal essay taking itself even liberties with rhetorical structure that the personal essay might have, a structure in rhetorical form that certainly deviates from that of a thesis driven academic essay—or should we say that the academic essay deviates from the more loosely put together personal essay as exemplified by those written by Montaigne who everyone should still read, especially anyone who either does or only pretends to write essays, most assuredly many of the bad practitioners who get paid to write the drivel they spill on the page like so many babies do their drool—it is amazing who gets paid to do what they do today with the written word . . . but semi-literacy general all over America, and more than a generation of systematic under-education, has left us not only with the barbarian conservatives at the gates, but with an inability to discern the literary from commodities written.
The Falling Leaf Review 