Surviour

 Ernst Hemingway once said that "critics are men that watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors." True words spoken by a fellow who probably knew a lot about critics. No one likes to be wrong, no one likes to be criticized. No one wants to be told that their grammar is shit, and that they couldn't spell CAT if someone spotted them the C and the T. But critics exist, they look at our production with a look of distaste that reminds us of a man who has smelt a large pile of dog shit on his Sunday walk to church. I suppose they serve some purpose, they keep us honest. They make us think over hard about the things we put on "paper" They make us look inside ourselves for the bon mot that makes them have to ponder what those words actually means.

There is the fun part of it, trying to out critic the critic. Make them ponder words they have to look up to see the meaning, make them ponder if the word coulour should have that "U" in it or not. Make them think, because when a critic thinks, he or she weakens the nation. They aren't creators, they are destroyers. They look at a misplaced comma or a lack of subject/verb agreement as an offense against God. They look at a split infinitive as a sign of retardation. Forgetting the Raymond Chandler quote that "when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so that it will stay split." And that is coming from Raymond Chandler a fellow who wrote a lot of very, very good books. Hell, even Star Trek tell us that "to boldly go where no man has gone before." Well, newsflash Rodenberry that is a split infinitive. 

Do we care? Maybe the more pedantic of us do. The ones who come down and shoot the survivors. The ones that are too afraid of the 'battle' of writing to give it a try, and prefer to pick apart the works of others. The ones that tell us that it is to go boldly, not to to boldly go. Those cunts, the ones that would probably take candy away from a baby on some sort of general principle. They don't build, they burn. They take apart the works of others because they have nothing else to do. They don't create, they can't create. If they did create they would have to be letter perfect or risk the charge of hypocrisy. 

They look upon the works of Joseph Roth like genius, and try to find a misplaced comma. They aren't reading for content they are reading to try to find mistakes. Mistakes happen, or else the critic wouldn't have ever been born. A fact they happily gloss over in their thinking. They are prefect, never a hair out of place, and stockings always straight. It must be a very, very dull existence to always be just so perfect. I'd wager that the critic has never had an original thought in their miserable life. They can't venture out on the limb of creativity, because out there lies split infinitives. Out here on the perimeter there are no stars. Out here we are stoned immaculate. We don't concern ourselves with subject/verb agreement. We don't know, nor do we give a good gods damn about where to place a semi colon. 

Semi colons, and colons can go merrily fuck themselves as far as we are concerned. We are not here to march to the beat of the grammar Nazi's drum. They can bend over, turn around, and go fuck themselves.  We are here to tell a tale, some of those tales are sad, some of them are scary, and some of them educate us in spite of ourselves. They tell themselves that if every little rule of grammar isn't followed, then there is no point in reading the text. They are small people, people who imagination has left far, far behind. 

Of course, the argument exists that we are just not educated enough to know or follow the rules of grammar, and perhaps there is something to be said for that. We just didn't pay enough attention when we were being taught to diagram a sentence. That we are too retarded to understand the simple rules of grammar. Perhaps we will never be able to square that circle. We write for content, we don't give two donkey fucks about grammar. Maybe that makes us look under educated. But, at the end of the day, we are worried about making you cry, or making you feel, not making you check off a box about split infinitives.