WikiLitter: Thinking outside the box can be messy

Getting paid to write fiction (and poetry) has always been always a crap shoot.

Some people get published with little more effort than a subtle samba hip-thrust. If they get published young, they may treat us to the same saucy move for decades to come. There is nothing wrong with this I suppose. Some people, after all, still by disco music, but it is hard for me to call this art or serious literature.

For me, writing has been more like a death-defying leap from my burning apartment building. After all these years, I am still stretched out in mid-air hoping that my fingers will find a three-inch bit of window sill in the building next door to hold on to. It is a leap of faith of mine to think there may be a like-minded person among the seven billion out there, who might want to read what I write, but ….

No joy again in 2010, however - my thirty-fifth year of submissions. I suppose I have learned something through the years, though. The Canadian Journal of Euthanasia, for instance, writes kind rejection e-mails: “Dear Sir, please be advised that we do not publish fiction or poetry. This is a non-reply e-mail address.”

I don’t know why I feel this urgency to render my experience of the world in words. It may be akin to the man who had, “See, I told you I was sick” written on his tombstone. Still, I know my experience is not an uncommon one. Many other writers spend their lives trying to learn the right samba moves and get published to no avail. In fact if I miss the ledge, I will only drop a few feet before I hit the topmost layer of bodies piled up from the alley seventeen floors below. Years ago, I suggested to my fallen comrades that we should have a magazine called The World’s Biggest Losers, but all I heard back was moaning. I attribute this to the fact that you don’t always land in decorous positions after defenestrating yourself.

There’s nothing wrong with losing, of course. When Bill Clinton headed the recent US bid for the World Cup games, he probably didn’t read Sepp Blatter's rule in the fine print that said the games had to go to a country that has never had them before. When Russia and Qatar were announced Bill looked stunned. For those of us who can lip read, he said over the top of his Ben Franklin Specs, “Beautiful game my ass!” So it goes.

As I’ve written before in My Doomsday Book, most fiction and poetry contests are probably either Ponzi schemes or illegal lotteries. They have their own agenda, and (if you could find the fine print) one might read: we exist for the publish-or-perish professors and students in MFA programs. If you can’t create turgid prose full of stale metaphors that only anemic academics with tenure could bare to read, go elsewhere. Another might say: we’re looking for the next smash TV series or movie. If you can give us the next Chuck or Snakes on a Plane, we want to see your work!

Of course there are small college magazines, some with pretty fair reputations, but they publish so infrequently they tend to recycle old issues without anyone seeming to notice. As a general rule they have suck-ass football teams, too. I have my web cam on. Can you read my lips?

The contest gatekeepers are smart people. I am sure they’d say, “Talent is cheap. What we’re looking for is a writer who exhibits craft.” I know writing talent is widespread, but craft sounds like a canard to me. When I think of craft I think of those wooden woodchoppers run by propellers that you stick on top of your mailbox. But craft is big business to writers and educators so they push this abstraction. In fact they’ve sold so much of this craft idea over the years that on a windy day a small US state stands a good chance of getting airborne. The word style, as in le style, c’est l’home, I understand, but craft as art escapes me. Drive down the street and you see chopper-choppers on this side and chopper-choppers on the other side, but if that’s what they mean by art I might as well be a Barbie Doll stuck in an extra roll of toilet paper wearing an antebellum knitted dress.

The Internet hasn’t helped, either. It’s a great leveler, but who wants to watch a football game from ground level? You can’t see anything and this is the problem with literature today. Thirty years ago, the people who ran fine arts and literature sat up in the owner’s box, but today they’re down at field level being jostled by drunks like the rest of us. The end result is nobody now has a clue what’s going on. When someone cheers, we all cheer.

When you think of it, the whole thrust in past years has been to level the field, to bring everyone down to ground level where myth, spirituality, and the human condition are reduced to a brown looking duck sauce. The Da Vinci Code tried to level Christianity; social media tries to bring down coherent conversation, and WikiLeaks tries to bring down western civilization all together.

Whether or not you believe our cultural decline simply mimics our decline as an economic power, there can be no doubt the process is a leveling one, not a rising one. In America today, a great book here or there is going to have no more impact than Brett Favre becoming a spokesperson for Midol.

So if you cant beat ‘em join ‘em. I’ve created a format called WikiLitter(ature). No rules here baby, common sense or otherwise. Here’s the first chapter of my new page-turner called: Don’t Think Twice, Especially If It hurt The First Time.

Chapter one through, oh I dunno, make up a number you’re tight with.

The boy wizard saw the cat scratchin’ in his Wikilitter box. What could it mean, Boywiz he wondered?

Moxie! Julian Assange drinks it (when he can get it for free of course)

Just then Harshbush the evil robotic flying dog barked: You must bowl a perfect game of 301 or I will publish pictures of your conception – and thinking meat comes form the Deli, you’re not going to believe it - OMG!

US study finds Neanderthals were not only obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave clean and reverent, but now also omnivorous! Who Knew?

This is the last thing Boywiz he remembered before he went AAK (asleep at Keyboard) with his nose hitting the touch-pad, accidently sending his prize winning submission to the Canadian Journal of Euthanasia and causing someone else to be the hero of my narrative. Thank God!

Contrarians, Christmas, and Curmudgeons
(Chong Khae, Thailand)


I yell at the TV. I’m like the employee who passed a note to Ken Lay during a meeting where he was trying to reassure everyone that Enron was in no financial trouble that read, “Are you on crack?” I hear a spokesperson for the deficit commission say that 92% of all new jobs come from corporations, and in the next segment I hear a politician say small businesses are the job creators. What! Fortunately, I’m the only English speaker in the house, so the Thais just look at me, raise their eyebrows and mutter.

I suppose this makes me a contrarian. Most issues that baffle me are political or economic, but some are personal, too. When I look back at my life, I sometimes think I could have played the hanging pig that CSI agents stab with various knives and implements to find the correct murder weapon. Leo Durocher once said that good guys finish last and while I’m not in last place by any stretch of the imagination, I admit that slogans like Wait until next year have a very hollow ring. CSI Billy Bob pulls a meat cleaver out of my back and casually explains as if it were a public service announcement that pigs have the same anatomy as humans. I yell, “You think that matters?” I’m that type of contrarian.

I am a contrarian, but I draw the line in places. For instance WikiLeaks seems more like a bad joke to me than in the mainstream of contrarianism.

1st man: Do you have any naked pictures of your wife?

2nd man: No!

1st man: You want some?

It’s that kind of a bad joke. It also seems like an example of European preference for process over product and seems one of those in-your-face issues that the ACLU loves. I yell, “Where is the ACLU on this?” Clearly, I’m circling this issue, waiting for road kill, I suppose.

Contrarians don’t see the downside in all things; they simply admit that there is a downside in all things. Granted, I’m on the short end of the argument most of the time, but you do the best you can. It’s like filching yesterday’s newspaper out of a trash can in the park you now call home and reading that cell phones may cause brain cancer and then seeing your ex-wife drive by in the new Volt your alimony check just bought and yakking away on her mobile. You want to yell, “Talking on a mobile and driving is against the law!” but hold your tongue. I’m that kind of a contrarian.

Contrarians are different than those self-appointed arbiters that see the rottenness in all things. I have a friend whom, on the first day I met him at nine-years-old or so, said, “Your father’s an old fart.” He said the word fart with such huge disdain that I was sure he invented the word. All through high school, whenever I heard the word (and I heard it a lot) I’d smugly think, hey, I know who invented that word. It wasn’t until much later when I read Tristram Shandy and saw the word in print circa 1759 that I had an awakening. I raised my eyebrows and thought, “Well, the boy was well read for a nine-year-old.” I’m a Laurence Sterne kind of contrarian.

Contrarians have good memories of America, too, just fewer than NY Yankee fans. One day I was outside in the driveway washing the car. Don’t get me wrong the car was broken and as I was unemployed I couldn’t afford to fix it, but it was just one of those glorious days where being inside and yelling at the TV just seemed wrong.

Three evangelicals approached me and gave me a magazine explaining how awful the Day of Judgment was going to be. “What do you think about that, brother,” the main dude asked? I wanted to say that I was already a Seven Day Adventurist, but I respect the religious views of others, and, at that moment, I also saw my oldest boy, then nine or so, trying to light bushes next to our house on fire with a book of matches he had found. I nonchalantly walked over - hose in hand - to the burning bush and put out the fire. The three evangelicals followed me across the lawn like the police cars chasing O. J, Simpson. “Well?” the man asked again. “If the Day f Judgment is going to be this bad,” I said holding out the magazine – they all nodded enthusiastically, “then I suggest we enjoy this beautiful day even if God is getting ready to sucker punch us.” The evangelicals took back the magazine and left. Contrarians believe that God works in mysterious ways, too, the Yankees notwithstanding.

I’m writing this because Christmas is coming and I don’t want people confusing the word contrarian with curmudgeon. My father use to pick fights with my sister and I right before Christmas to reduce expectations of getting a pricey gift. For the two weeks before the 25th he was one of the most contrary individuals you would ever want to meet. But he was no curmudgeon.

I live in Thailand now which is not yet a Christian country. This is anecdotal information so I could be wrong. At any rate, I have no fear of roving bands or radicalized Presbyterians showing up in the middle of the night and burning a question mark on my lawn. Usually, you don’t even notice Christmas here. I’ve heard that Santa has a place down in the islands, but he never shows up until after Christmas. Santa is kind of a contrarian, too, when you think about it.

The late Ed McMahon is my idol, not because he was the spokesperson for the Publishers Clearinghouse lotteries and died broke, but because he once said that he never went out drinking on New Year’s Eve because that was when all the amateurs went out drinking. Almost all contrarians take Christmas off for pretty much the same reason.

So Merry Christmas to all. In these tough times it may be well to remember the words of Teddy Roosevelt: Small fare and great good cheer make for wondrous welcome.* See you in 2011!

Forrest

* Teddy Roosevelt was a President of the United States. I mention this for those illegals who may be tired of waiting for blanket amnesty and thinking of taking the citizenship test. I don’t know if Teddy Roosevelt will be on the test and now that you can take the test in your native language his name may translate as Doraemon or Hello Kitty for all I know.

All rights reserved by the author Forrest Greenwood. The wrongs you can do anything you want with.