Faulty Predictions

Editorial Decisions

1 Editorial Decisions We were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. We met on Wednesday afternoonsat3p .m.inthesquishyorangechairsinthecornerofthe school library where the sun streamed in through large windows. We wereaneditorialboard,andwelikedthistermverymuch—wethought of how good it would look on our college applications under the word “Activities.” That year we named our literary magazine Semicolon; we found beauty in the semicolon, which we deemed underused and underappreciated , especially by our classmates, the ones who couldn’t tell the difference between a colon and a semicolon if their lives depended on it. Soon we would be off to Georgetown and Dartmouth and Wellesley and Stanford. We would become English majors. We gossiped about how our classmates, those who never properly grasped English grammar, would go to large, overcrowded state schools. This is how our magazine worked: we accepted anonymous submissions from students in our school, we took turns reading the submissions aloud, then we discussed them and voted on what we would allow into our magazine. Somehow every issue contained mostly work by the editorial board. “It’s completely fair,” we said. “The submissions are read anonymously.” Yet we could always sense when a submission had been written by one of us—maybe because the author got suddenly quiet, stared at the rest of the editorial board with wide, expectant eyes, nervously rocked back and forth until a decision had been made. But we told ourselves the magazine consisted of mostly editorial decisions 2 our own work because our writing was just better, more vivid, cut closer to the soul than everyone else’s. There were words we liked, words we sought out in the submissions : malaise, chaos, ennui, angst, brokenhearted. Here is the first poem we accepted for the fall issue: My brokenhearted heart beats onward like a soldier m-a-r-c-h-i-n-g and I wonder how many more years of this chaos my soul can endure. We knew brilliance when we saw it. We gasped at the poignancy, the universality of the message. We especially liked the word choice. Later, when we went to college, we learned to love other words: patriarchy, Foucault, hegemony, Derrida, pastiche, postmodern. We loved the word “postmodern.” It was like a Swiss Army knife, good for helping us out of jams, multipurpose. Examples: (1) “You don’t understand my student documentary film because it’s postmodern. It’s not meant to be understood.” (2) “Moby-Dick is a very postmodern novel employing the technique of pastiche.” (3) “No, Mother, I did notlearntodresslikeahoboatcollege.Thismismatchingisanintentional postmodern statement.” Each fall, we needed to replace the seniors on our staff whom we’d lost to college. This is how we chose: we asked all interested parties to editorial decisions 3 write a three-page essay about a story or poem that was in the last issueofourmagazine .Weaskedforaclosecriticalanalysis,butwhatwe really wanted, what we were hungry for, was praise; we wanted to hear that we’d put together a magazine that rivaled the New Yorker. Unlike our submissions, these applications were not submitted anonymously . We wanted to make sure each person we chose was qualified in every way; we wanted to make sure our new members would truly fit in. OneafternooninearlySeptemberwemettochoosetwonewmembers to join the editorial board. There were nineteen applications to go through. We felt powerful, easily dismissing essays we found too simplistic, too narrow-minded, too full of flowery prose. We were especially critical of spelling errors; we shook our heads and declared that spell-check can’t help you if you are, in general, an idiot. We spent an hour tossing applications into a growing pile in the center of our circle, and then we came across a stunningly good essay. The essay was written by one of the two boys in the long black trench coats. They were boys who always looked sullen and miserableandhadpale ,acne-speckledskin.Theydyedtheirhairthecolorof coal.Thetwoboysinthetrenchcoatswerealwaystogether;we’dnever seen one without the other. We could barely tell them apart. The boys always came into the library when we had our editorial board meetings. They sat at a table in the far corner of the library, the darkest part, where no sun shone in. They read comic books that we thought were from Japan. We’d caught glimpses of the violent and bloody covers. “What a cliché,” we said, staring at their trench coats. “If they want to be so different, they shouldn’t dress like every other depressed kid in...