On The New Yorker’s Recent Editorial Decision

not actually a poem

To the editors:

I know all of you over at The New Yorker have recently received a lot of letters ranging from mildly disappointed to mindbogglingly vitriolic as regards your recent editorial decision to remove your idiosyncratic treatment of words with repeating vowel sounds--as you already know, the plan as of right now is to remove your placement of diaeresis marks over the second consecutive vowel, as in words like “reelected”--and I posit that these complaints, though they range in mood, are pretty much all wrongheaded. I mean no offense to those who have taken the time out of their day to send them and thus actively try to improve their favorite magazine, but almost all of the ones that I have read focus erroneously on the concept that The New Yorker is losing its “New Yorker-ness”. To ascribe a loss of perceived “personality” to a small stylistic change is completely ridiculous, and suggests a pedanticism that may actually end up stymieing positive development in a magazine such as this one. No--my problem lies in the story of a man named Jesus Barrios. Barrios, a 29-year-old living in New York, was tragically shot twice in the head, the two bullet marks almost miraculously equidistant from each other as well as from the eyes about three inches above which they lay. The brain damage caused by these bullet wounds was so severe that, for twelve days, Barrios experienced the sensation of peering out through the holes in his forehead and looking down upon his own eyes as they stare blankly at various doctors and family members doing their best to save the life of a man who had all in all accomplished a whole bunch of nothing in 29 invariably sad and useless years. Thirteen days after the bullet wounds entered his head with mathematical precision and formed little irrevocable circles that facilitated the transmitting of neurological signals of which the cumulative message was “please help me,” Barrios died. Though surely learned journalists like yourselves know of and subsequently resent the frequently bogus writerly cliché of the “small stories”--the largely ignored physical and emotional journeys of people like Barrios; the types of stories that garner Pulitzers and praise from snobbish critics who lament the downfall of news writing (who usually forget that the majority of media-watching and -reading Americans realize that most of what they’re watching is trash). This is not the case here; I’m not advocating anything except perhaps a casual glance at a normal reader of The New Yorker as they glaze over any article that happens to include a repeating-vowel word and thus the characteristic diaereses. Behold the unanticipated look of shock in their eyes; see them struggle to face down their own inner demons contained within those two immaculately placed dots. Barrios’s struggle was one whose tangible aspects only serve to lend weight to the fact that its deeper psychological implications are the ones that we spend each day pushing to the back of our minds. Remove the diaereses, and you keep Barrios, and human emotional development, dead.