[Matchup #36 in Tournament of Bookshit]

I know what you’re thinking: clearly the answer is “Having an opinion about MFA rankings.”

But we have to work with what’s given us which means other possible solutions (“Garamond,” and “Fetishizing experimentation while hating on those who fetishize narrative” among them) are left unavailable as is information seemingly vital to out trial. Do these online literary journals actually have sub-editors? Are these bowties pre-tied? Is this a wedding? If the editor-and-chief marries a sub-editor does the sub-editor move up in rank? Does the rank require a uniform? Does the uniform require a bowtie?

Clearly the answer is “Writing a Story That Uses the Word Pus.” 

But we must consider this in the abstract if we’re to find the real. Therefore we must imagine a world without editors-in-chief of online literary journals and a world without bowties which will allow us to discover which one we would miss most. It’s like that great movie about whether or not the world should have had a Jimmy Stewart. We should have had one. And we did. Thank you, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Or, if we imagined a place without both, we would know that through consideration of that world, the best world, the answer is “Starting a Smug Tournament.”

If we lived in a world without bowties, what would we have? Barely a half dozen other kind of more socially acceptable tie options and that’s excluding the bolo which is not even nearly socially acceptable (the bowbolotie, however, is, though it, unfortunately is not a thing). And yet conservative commentators’ Adam’s apples would flap limply with the vibrations of their thoughts on the flat tax and the golden age of baseball. And yet young hipsters constructing a look out of only a fedora would look like incomplete sentences. And yet we wouldn’t know who probably has an opinion about Evelyn Waugh. Because the bowtie is not a utilitarian object its users would simply go without. Or, more likely, start wearing buttonhole daisies. If they weren’t doing that already. They are probably doing that.

So the answer is clearly “Absurdist Short-Shorts.”

But a world without the editors-in-chief of online literary journals, well, it’s nearly too grim to imagine. Except it’s not because this might be the world most already live in. Let’s go back to that Jimmy Stewart classic The Magic of Lassie and imagine the following conversation is applicable for our purposes instead of about Lassie, the giant invisible rabbit.

Me: Why you know me, I’m  [the editor-in-chief of an online literary journal]?

You: A what?

Me: Zulu’s petals!

Okay, so maybe it doesn’t take us very far. I blame my own lack of knowledge about Jimmie Stewart and not the man himself. The point, perhaps, is that the lay person lives in this dark and scary world without the editors-in-chief of online literary journals already. They wake up, go to work, sire someone named Zulu, watch Rear Window, all of these things without once being presented with the business card of the editor-in-chief of an online literary journal (Not that any editor-in-chief of an online literary journal has such a thing for fear of offending all the other people in the online literary journal corporate cafeteria). If a person was presented with such a thing—let’s call this hypothetical person Everybody, Seriously Like Everybody—he or she would surely take it tweezered between fingernails just as they would if presented with the bowbolo tie. It, simply, is not a thing to them.

But a thing it is, even if just. And a thing it can be to everyone. That’s why clearly the answer is “Having Interns.”

Wait, no, I didn’t ask the most important question. Is the online literary magazine Narrative Magazine? It’s not? Good.

“Calling yourself the editor-in-chief of an online literary journal” wins. Clearly.

Zulu’s petals for everyone.

- Adam Petersen

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WINNER: Calling yourself the editor-in-chief of an online journal

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