Parallax

What is going on in Walter’s head this whole time? Why does he vacillate between ravenous interest and apparent obliviousness? Is he darkly brooding over Harlow, with whom he seems to get along, however inconsistently, who was able to persuade him—him, the elusive Walter Shirrey—to join her at Baci this evening? Is he considering Jessi, with whom he is exchanging a restrained sort of banter, by whom he seems at least mildly intrigued, especially, and incongruously, by her most recent painting? Is he more concerned with the glorified Thad and his poetry, the self-appointed foci of the evening so far? Or is he, for some reason, interested in Diana, Faith and Eli, who have barely entered the story yet, although they’ve been sitting at the table the whole time?

No: in fact, he has been distracted by the opacity of his own thoughts, among other things. He was having trouble remembering what he was thinking about. He was frustrated with his inability to focus on anything he really cared to think about, overtaken as he was by storm clouds and flurries that blocked his reasoning and demanded his full attention. These flurries came in storms and in whispers, irregularly, and when they came they take no prisoners, so to speak; it was like a mutiny in his brain, all thoughts hastened to obey the new deviant subject as soon as it appeared, leaving no room for continuity; not one thought is capable of staying back and fighting for the original topic. He is struggling to regain control over what goes through his head, instead of being pushed along with wherever his mind took him, and it is a losing battle.

For awhile, he’d been thinking about his magazine, Parallax, and the troublesome direction it had been taking lately, which caused another level of anxiety. Some background: Walter Shirrey was well-known to a very small, dedicated group of people as the founder and editor of the cutting edge literary magazine/literary circle, Parallax, which provided its followers sporadically with a collection of contemporary literary fiction and poetry, often falling into the categories of experimental and maximalist. He had become something of an underground celebrity in the few years it has been circulating because of its innovative and writer-centered structure: that is, what was in its inception a journal quickly turned into a series of urgently attended meetings and discussions. All that started because when Walter came across a submission he wanted to publish, he first needed to know something about the piece that wasn’t in the query letter, and was practically incapacitated with curiosity that could be sated unless he spoke to the writer himself, something which struck him and all who knew of him as the misanthrope he was, odd. What happened was, he would receive a submission in the mail or on the computer, and upon reading it, if he liked it, which was often, would be too intrigued—inevitably, it was uncanny how inevitable it was—he would obsess over it for hours without leaving his desk, and finally he would overcome his shyness and contact the submitter, asking for a personal interview, that had nothing to do with their previous publishing credits (as they often showed up expecting) but entirely with their agency in writing what they’d written. Agency was Walter’s word. He wasn’t really interested in the writers’ other works, as they earnestly tried to tell him in edgewise, or their C.V.s or any of those sundries. What he needed to know, and what many of then couldn’t grasp, and so their interviews with him went on for hours, sometimes until the sun rose, was what specifically made them write a certain part of their piece, or sometimes the whole thing. His rabid fixation while sitting as his desk apparently masqueraded as indifference in actual conversation. He was obsessed with finding out from the mouth of the writer what it was that made him or her write what they did. The first submitters to his magazine were heartily bewildered; some didn’t show up at the appointed time; some actually came and withdrew their work after the interview; but some stayed up all night with him in his all-encompassing confusion, and those came to be the first disciples of Parallax.

What happened from there was that word spread, and people interested in these things heard more and more of an eremitic editor who insisted on meeting the people who submitted work to him, and actually had the affect of making people’s work better, which was not at all what he was trying to do, make them change it, even if they only made one change after that initial meeting, but pretty much everyone who met with him felt compelled to make at least one revision and then resubmit it, often winding up with another such meeting, not because Walter insisted on a revision but because in his questioning they had come upon something they hadn’t hitherto come upon that inspired them to change something, and he needed to know what catalyzed the change. And so his reputation saturated New York, and then emanated: this man was creating a magazine in which people knew each other, because oftentimes he would schedule meetings all in the same hour or afternoon, and the submitters elect would run into each other while waiting for him, and then they’d sit in on one another’s interviews, and soon they weren’t one-on-one but rather groups in which one person’s work was ripped apart in the best way possible—that is, he didn’t rip them apart in the negative way you imagine professors and workshop facilitators ripping a manuscript apart, but he did the positive counterpart, he tore sentences into shreds that made you pay a ghastly amount of attention to every word of your own writing, in a way you didn’t really do before, although you might have thought you did, but this was different; he had a way of identifying their strengths, not dwelling on their weaknesses, finding phrases of beauty and patterns in grammar and the littlest nitpicky things that arrested him so much he just needed to know where they came from. And by hearing their strengths they were able to build on them, and so their weaknesses diminished, and they became passionate about sharing their work and hearing others’, and they began to listen differently, they listened for strengths instead of faults, and so the participants came to see one another as geniuses of contemporary short fiction or poetry, they saw just how much potential was in themselves and one another, and they remained loyal to Walter because it was his initiative that had triggered this phenomenon, and that’s how Parallax spread, as those meetings continued even when he couldn’t be at them; it was a magazine, but it was like a community, an ad hoc assembly of people who were passionate about the same things but didn’t know one another from the grocer and liked their own work but were accustomed to hearing what was wrong with their stories, not what was right.

And so, by word of mouth alone it spread; in the Venn diagram of readers of and contributors to Parallax, the circles overlap a considerable amount (an image which lends itself to the cover design quite nicely, thanks to one more visually inclined subscriber, whose submission necessitated another nightlong gathering of the minds). Funny, it is now generally likened to an independent publishing house, with fans and friends of scattered throughout the country, and some say it is one that can weather the next economic storm because of its loyal and active and interactive following, who believe Walter has revamped the model of literary journals, taking the hierarchy out of contemporary literature and returning the power to the writers. And because the caliber of the writing has been so consistently high, literary critics and established magazines and MFA programs across the country had slowly started to pay attention to this fanciful new magazine, the word magazine having come to connote, re: Parallax, both the paper publication, which subscribers saw as a mere side effect of what was the other part of the sobriquet “magazine,” the gatherings; at first it (Parallax) was flagrantly ignored, then grudgingly acknowledged, then wholeheartedly criticized, and now wholeheartedly praised. It had thrived because, while critics made their cynical comments and lamented aloud the loss of discipline and standards and Dickensian integrity in the literary world, writers at every level of skill and education flocked to Walter’s creation, a haven of creativity, a print journal from which you were just as likely to get rejected but at least in the essential part would be heard and your strengths validated. The more the critics disparaged it, the more submissions Walter received, and he was inundated with submissions of all conceivable media and requests for invites to his next workshop and people asking for letters of recommendation, and he had to limit it to fiction and poetry only, and he came to require a submission before one was invited to a workshop, and so people who had read but never been interested in writing fiction or poetry, wrote fiction and poetry, if only to get an iambic foot in the door, and a couple found that they really liked it.

And but what else happened was that the magazine got so big that he couldn’t possibly respond to everyone and request an interview tête-á-tête (as he still did even though every single one of them turned into group efforts, now), and so the ones who had been with him since the beginning, the writers that is, began to form offshoot groups who could almost “facilitate” the way Walter did, like journeymen and -women. Of course naturally they were mistaking the point of Walter’s little powwows as for the betterment of the writers and the building of community when really it was for Walter’s own intellectual satiation, and neither Walter nor the journeypeople knew that there was such a misunderstanding, despite the fact that both their intentions were clear (the journeyers thinking Walter was teaching them something by insisting he wasn’t trying to, Walter not really hearing them when they tried to discuss it with him). Nonetheless they were a raring success, and newcomers to Parallax understood that they wouldn’t get to meet Walter who was now a fairly impressive celebrity in that particular annularity unless they were really good, and were often surprised and thrilled just to meet kind of a great-great-apprentice of his, someone who’s learned from one of his protégé’s protégés, hoping earnestly to move up in this new weirdly unbeknownst-to-its-creator hierarchy. And of course these new rings of strength-based passion-enthused writing workshops with their new cohort of leaders were not limited to Walter’s geographic area, but instead were now popping up all over the country, like the Suzuki method.
So about the fact that on this particular evening in this new social milieu, Walter was drinking moodily away his woes about the magazine, you might be wondering, because it seems that Parallax is really popular, and it is, but the woes it brought him were magnified by the accumulation of guilt he felt by passing over so many submissions unexplored. Note, though, again that it wasn’t guilt that he wasn’t giving a writer his or her proper due. It was really a very self-interested urge that drove him to contact the person and explore with him/her the source of their creation; it was his own desire, craving, really, to find out where certain turns of phrase had come from, why they chose a particular gerund, what made them indent here and double-space there, in short, why did you do that—and the better the submission, the more inflammatory his curiosity, so his new time crunch brought about by the onslaught of submissions forced him to weed out the best ones sooner and with less deliberation.

But the woes that were magnified by that guilt were these: that it did not have the literary oomph to carry it out of its nascent years into a respectable adolescent. That words were passing before him, waiting in his inbox at this very moment, that offered clues to the questions that haunted him, and he was missing them. But the woe that burdened him most of all: that the critics were lying.
To generalize in the interest of brevity, he was not satisfied, but also not overly concerned about the trend toward mediocrity he had been seeing lately from his writers, either; these things wax and wane; what disturbed him profoundly were the responses that had been coming from reviewers who were usually quite harsh. Where they would normally laugh condescendingly at Walter’s editorial style and try to prove by their scathing scrutiny that his was a magazine for amateurs, a circus for self-conscious neurasthenic journalists, a pandering, top-heavy, lenient, quaint but ultimately unsustainable and ineffective support group (belied, surely, by their own attention to it)(the amateur part), they now sang his praises. They loved it. They raved that Parallax had never seen more talent and was churning out innovative, rocking new material that would surely launch it, once and for all, onto the path of becoming a national literary powerhouse (something he wasn’t sure he wanted, given his increasing unease with every incoming ignored email). They equated it to a new school of thought emerging in the literary tradition; they compared it to Semina and 1950s Manhattan coteries, celebrating the return of literature to the people, the meiosis of readers and writers. They threw around various studious-sounding names with varying degrees of legitimacy and pedantic self-importance; they had most recently agreed quite pompously on “reactive postmodernism,” dubiously heralded as a more respectable spin-off of hysterical realism, a phrase that meant nothing to Walter except the threat of complete misunderstanding, of passionate support for a direction he did not wish to take, of a near mutiny, of his position being compromised by the hype and imminent paparazzi and the type of weird glamour reserved for iconoclastic hermit-writers. Yes, that they could be lying haunted him in the extreme, the idea that they were doing this on purpose to deceive him and as a ploy to overthrow him was foremost in his mind, because really, that was what they had wanted, and this was the best way to do that, by lulling him into a sense of complacency and then…what? Instead of trying to pretend he wasn’t on the stage, as they had for so long, never bothering him, barely even reaching him with their pitiful attempts at savagery in his direction, while he was far too busy tearing through the poetry of people who might conceivably have some valuable insight; instead of pretending he wasn’t there, they (the critics) were shining all spot lights on him, making him squint and make mistakes, inviting onlookers to see his flaws in the bright light under which no literary house could stand. They proclaimed that Walter was finding his niche as an editor, that the publication had overcome the last of its obstacles as a grassroots organization and was now ready to continue expanding as a stable entity, ready to enter into a relationship of equals with universities, journals and MFA programs nationwide. Walter, they said, was a genius who inspired genius. And if it was a ruse, it was damn good one, and if they were trying to get him to fuck up, they just might succeed.

Yes, this concern did weigh heavily on his mind, but it would be false to say that it was powerful enough to stave off the aforementioned chaos that reigned too, the unannounced intruders on his mind that redirected his attention to something trivial; it was as if his mind were in cahoots with the critics and was sabotaging his efforts at formulating an intelligent response to this outside threat. Sometimes the chaos masqueraded as reasoning, and he did not realize that it was an imposter until it was too late, before his mind was off on another tangent, and all previous ones mattered not at all. He often found himself embarking on a long line of seemingly complex reasoning only to return to his original premise later and spot a glaring discrepancy, rendering the previous hour or two a waste, and then forgot what the premise and ensuing discourse was altogether. Or, other times, he would be enjoying a rather normal thought-train, but then without warning it would veer off track, into another train or off a bridge or in some other nightmarish metaphor that conveyed certain thought-death—what is this? Why such morbid imagery? Why so many mixed metaphors? Well, both are in keeping with Walter’s mind right now: it is dark, and dangerous, and haphazard, and subjects came and went like weather, without concern for whether he was interested in them.