54 Marriages in One Year! – The Foolproof Guide to Dating Without Dating, Sex Without Sex, and Marriage Without Marriage

Guest post by Dr. Chad Fortnight

Are you like me in that you simply don’t have time to follow through on long-term relationships due to a pell-mell non-stop no-time-to-breathe whirlwind helter-skelter schedule of 24-hour stuff that never seems to end? Do you regret the hours spent wasted in bars chatting to interesting and attractive people who it would take an absolute age to become closer to on date after date after date after time-eating date? Are you cynical about the prospect of keeping one partner for life, knowing full well the limited lifespan most marriages have in the modern world and the complications with kids that can cause? You need the ‘potential’ dating plan. A foolproof system that allows you to experience lifelong relationships over seven days, through a simple process of honing mind over matter.

Step 1. Choose a man or woman who appeals to you, and ask them out on a date. (If they refuse, you can attempt the following steps by merely observing the person from afar, but for now, it is advisable to start with a mutually agreed date). One the date has been scheduled, make a list of the aspects of their appearance that both appeal to and annoy you, and a provisional list of the traits that frustrate and delight you.

Step 2. Go on the date. Make sure the date is person-centred, not an activity. A quiet drink a restaurant or bar is fine. Ask the person about their past relationships, their family, their current occupation, their dreams, hopes, goals, and opinions on as many topics as possible. Make mental notes. (Taking actual notes is not advised, as it might ruin the prospect of the essential second date). Be sure to come across as interested in the person and make an effort conversationally yourself, to secure the second date.

Step 3. During the gap between dates, write down all the facts about this person and begin constructing scenarios that might arise in a long-term relationship—the fun activities together, sources of argument, incompatibilities, shared pleasures. Lie back on your bed and imagine as many of these scenarios as possible. To conduct a full ‘potential’ relationship, take each of these scenarios (or character traits) to an endpoint where the relationship will terminate. Squeeze as much pleasure as possible from the traits that appeal to you and take them towards the realm of frustration and departure. Here is an example:

a. Both like tennis. Scene: on tennis court where you banter and smile and laugh and have healthy fun. You don’t mind his or her competitive nature, until later he or she becomes determined to win and is less kind to you about your flaws. Arguments about balls being ‘in’ or ‘out’ spring up until the tennis stops completely.

b. Dislike of housework. Scene: when you are both married and have children and you are forced into doing more of the dishes and housework due to his or her domineering nature, and laziness in matters of domesticity. You may then decide to break up on the basis of this inequality and arrange visiting rights for the child.

c. Fondness for musicals. Scene: you indulge your partner’s fondness for this entertainment until it becomes clear they are completely shut off to other musical forms, and other forms of entertainment like books or cinema, and what you thought was a harmless trait has become an intolerable narrowness they refused to change.

Step 4. Second date. At this point, all the traits you dislike about the person should be amplified enough for this date to be the last—and good riddance. If you find you discover new traits of the person during the date that appeal to you, try to devise quick scenarios where these traits may cause frustration and unhappiness using the practice you have put in over the week. Remember to remain aloof on the date so the person doesn’t like you.

Man Bites Book

Proposed titles for Jonathan Coe’s new book (or, entries on this year’s Booker longlist):

The Salty Persistence of Malchester Puddleduck

The Tenuous Windmill of Alain de Loofah

The Groovy Kinesis of Bob Forthright

The Lubricious Purdah of Julian Fink

The Glottal Fortune of Zebediah Small

The Vulval Clavichord of Xerxes Ripwinkle

The Dynamic Furtwängler of Paul Starling

The Yogic Putrescence of Alison Shirtsmith

The Cocksure Bobblehat of Lydia Policy

The Dying Dingbat of Derek the Dingbat

The Fizzling Munificence of A.G.P. Archimedes

The Supernumerary Wiffle of Sir Nigel Piddlemiddle

My Latest Book

Blue in the Face: Confessions of a Bitter Smurf

Cast out from the magical land of the Smurfs, Billy Baxter has some things to say about his former colleagues. In this riveting and no-holds-barred account, Billy—formerly Sissassis Smurf—reveals how his colleagues used to fill his white hat with diseased sarsaparilla leaves, leading to nasty bug infestations in his hair. “They would seduce me to sleep with the magic flute, stick this rotting plant in my hat, then wake me up with a slap on the cheeks. It was fun at first, but soon maggots were coming out my nose. It was disgusting.”

Billy reveals how his attempts to widen the Smurf language fell on deaf ears. “I wanted to add more verbs into the lexicon, but all they wanted to say was Smurf-this, Smurf-that. It severely weakens communication to have one universal verb denoting all actions. I would ask for a glass of milk and Sassette would pull down my trousers. The animators hadn’t drawn the bottom half of my body, so I was a hovering torso for months on end.”

Billy was a talented Smurf innovator, but the other Smurfs were envious of his abilities, and suppressed his ideas. “I designed the packaging for the original berries cereal, and came up with Smurf pasta. Hefty and Clumsy couldn’t take being outdone and locked me in a shoe for three years. By the time they let me out they had become millionaires—for their brilliant cereal packaging and Smurf pasta. I was furious, and hungry.”

Learn how the Smurf BBB burnt down the Green Smurf village in a frenzy of racial hatred. How Lazy and Dreamy are ruthless capitalists, exploiting young Smurfs for cheap labour. How the original Smurfs, the Schtroumpf, were put into concentration camps and exterminated. How the flute with six holes is a standard flute with perforations. How Smurfs are adept at business English and political rhetoric, and often sell arms to Kuwait. All this and more in a shocking exposé of a deadly cartoon fear regime.

Order from Schtroumpf Memorial Books, Price: Dependent on Personal Skills

Excerpts From the Scots Translation of Calvino's "Invisible Cities"

I read the edition translated into Scots by Wullie Weaver. Here are a few excerpts:


Repulsive Cities ∙ 2

The red brick edifices tower over the populace, signifers of a forgotten dream, of a thought abandoned in the ailing conscious of intrepid colonial adventurers. A range of hominids patrol the looming DSS office walls, dishing out abuse to obese mothers and wageless wanderers. This is a city of broken faeces, a city of cross-eyed big brothers, watching from the skies for a sign of salvation, something to lift this horrible land to a brighter plateau. In every repulsive city there is a gem, a signal: the kindly arms of naïve temptresses.


Backward Cities ∙ 5

In a field of obtuse posies I come across a farmer, tilling the field with his bent hoe, straining crops into order. “Quaint vassal, wherefore the heart of this green desert?” I ask. “In the shiny breasts of my daughter, that’s where, oh-lordy-aye,” he says. Across the road I spy a girl with the face of this man, his features as though transcribed on her red-rosied skin. All around me, a tissue of incestuous progenies, mixing their colours, discussing the fastest route into hell, where redemption no longer achieves the mythos of a dream.


Pretentious Cities ∙ 1

Among the golden buttresses sits a Lord, his luxurious grey beard brushing the bespectacled inhabitants, reading from the Great Works. Etched in history, the builders and planners, their names spelt in flashing neon clouds, passing through the streets, filling the people with words and ideas. Down the street a gemstone, doused in the milks of the Great Poets, where scholars feed from, where the fools are sacrificed at the altar of knowledge.

The Books They Wouldn't Release

Leaked from three small presses, the early or unwanted manuscripts of two heavyweight writers and one other guy.

1. Green Frog – Martin Amis

Slated for release Nov 14 1989, then pulled following a tear-stained email from the author. All existing copies have been burned.

2. The Disgruntled Plaintiff – John Grisham

Written last year in Barbados, this hardcover edition was scheduled for publication in early January. The publishing editor committed suicide after Grisham returned the galleys, and the release was cancelled.

3. Stuff That Happened to Me on the Train Last Weekend – Mil Millington

This debut novel from the British humorist was slated for release in 1999 but was cancelled after a fire in the building destroyed the entire print run.

The Madness of The Mezzanine

Whenever I get onto a train I look for the seat farthest from other passengers as possible. If I’m going to read, I need silence, or near silence—I need at least five or six seats distance. Finding the right seat is an exact science. This night, coming home from a concert, I enter the car and there are people spread at an infuriating equidistance apart, almost positioned on purpose at four-seat gaps to upset my four-to-six gap rule. I walk past a few shaggy night-people, including a man lurking at the back who wants to rape me.

Once I’ve passed people walking up the aisle, I don’t want to turn around and go back if the seat situation is more favourable where I came from. I don’t want my behaviour to appear to these passengers, who watch you out of boredom, as odd, and I don’t want it to seem as though I’m dithering because I’m somehow repelled by their presence.* It’s important to have this sensitivity on a night train, when all passengers are potential rapists and murderers, until proven otherwise.

So I find a seat on the left row in between two solo passengers, with a gap of about three seats in front and two seats behind, with another man two seats ahead on the right row. There’s a group of women conducting a conversation up ahead, their voices quiet at first but getting louder from time to time, competing with the rattle of the train as it speeds up. This will pose the greatest threat to my undisturbed reading of the Nicholson Baker.

The Mezzanine requires concentrated reading and is not ideal for trains. It’s ideal front room reading.* The book’s protagonist discusses the exaggerated minutiae of certain trivial aspects of his life, from shoelaces to escalator etiquette, to the value of paper towels over hand driers, each topic getting more and more detailed until it becomes absurd comedy, Flann O’Brien style. I read for a few moments before a large giggle hits my ears from across the train. The women misled me. I had expected late-night sleepy train talk, instead I got a rowdier bunch, with one blonde shrieker the ringleader.

I push on, but it becomes impossible. My ears are picking up threads in the conversation, following the repeated half-drunk drivel about some bloke being a dick and someone needing to phone someone and tell him something about being a dick or something because he shouldn’t have said that, whoever he is, the dick. It becomes useless to keep reading knowing this will go on and on, this dick and this phoning of. There are frustrating lurches in the conversation when the woman shuts up, but almost invariably, she will start talking again when I get into a long sentence, forcing me to backtrack and read it again.

There are further dilemmas. I don’t have the greatest eyesight, and the lights on Scotrail trains are diffuse and dim. So reading the footnotes becomes a chore for me, trying to follow these complex sentences in the tiny font under appalling lights, and the darkness outside offers no additional help. I don’t want to bring the book right up close to my eyes, as that can effect my long-range vision, so I have to squint a little or focus really hard. If I’m focusing my eyes, I’ll stop focusing my brain, meaning I’m reading but not taking in the words, their meaning or what’s being said. So there’s no emotional response: no laughter, merely slavish word-counting. There is no point reading like this.

As the train picks up people from other stops, the pressure of concentrating my mind and my eyes becomes impossible, so I stop reading and wait until the women get off. When they do, I start reading again. At the next stop, the paranoia that a psychopath has boarded the train and wants to rape me in the bum becomes so great, I have to look up and make a quick assessment of the new passenger, check his psycho credentials. If he sits behind me, which he does, of course, I’ll have to keep one hand on my possessions, in case he should slide a hand through the half-inch seat gap and steal my valuables. (Or go for my penis).

When the inevitable happens, and I’m alone in the train with a man behind me, I get too paranoid and start thinking about rape and how terrible it might be to get raped tonight. I start thinking how awful it must be to be a woman and be paranoid about getting raped, but here I am, an ugly man, thinking about getting raped, so I’m there already. All I need are the breast implants. There’s no point reading now, not with rape and death on the cards. I start to get a little dour, thinking about other problems—financial, personal, familial—making each problem into something huge and insurmountable, until I can’t stand to even hold the book, so depressed and self-involved have I become in those four minutes.

Soon it’s time to get off. My only concern then is getting away from the rapists. All fourteen of them. Fast.

----

* This may be the case, depending on the smell of alcohol or cigarettes coming from each passenger. If there’s an especial stink, I will make allowances and escape to the next compartment, if available, or the farther end, if not.

* There are three categories of books: those to be read with extreme patience and concentration in my front room, with next to no sounds except outside traffic or my girlfriend clawing at her keyboard. (Ideally she wouldn’t be in the room, but I read a great deal, and we do live together, so it isn’t exactly plausible to get her to leave while I read. I could try, though.) The other two are bedtime reads: books that can be read while dozing off (to help dozing off). The other can be read on trains: potboilers, thrillers, etc.

My Latest Book

Kim Shattuck's Opinions on the Partially Deaf

For the first time in Britain comes the US bestselling smash. The outspoken singer/guitarist from leading indie rock band The Muffs lets rip on our hard-of-hearing cousins with some outrageous thoughts.

“How come they get them fancy hearing aids?” she asks. “How come we gotta shout whenever they talk to us?” she asks. “How come they never buy my records?” she asks. “How come I’ve been in a rock band for twenty years and I’m not partially deaf?” she asks. “Do partially deaf people mind if I scream in their ears?” she asks.

M.J. Nicholls, author of The Fishbowls of North America, presents a series of refreshing and frank interviews that ask important questions about those with poor hearing. The book challenges all we know about partial deafness and asks that important question: is it really a disability, or are they just moaners leeching our sympathy?

The UK edition contains a bonus chapter of PC terms for the partially deaf. Among them ‘half-ears’ and ‘whatsits.’ Order now from Gulchy Turk Books, £19.99.

My Latest Book

In my latest book, Roy Walker: Filthy Sex Beast, I expose the former Catchphrase host’s trail of affairs and sexual perversions.

Since the inception of Catchphrase, Roy has made it compulsory for the winner to sleep with him after every show. “Big or small, young or old, man or goat . . . send ‘em to me,” he was once caught saying on camera. It was in the contract of each winner to take a vow of silence and pleasure Mr. Walker until he was satisfied. One contestant says: “It would often take four hours, five tubs of lube, and six crew guys to get him off.”

My book delves deep into the sordid details of his sex life. The three-ways with Jim Bowen and Leslie Joseph. The all-night orgies in Bournemouth Travelodge (in a suite now named Walker on the Wild Side). The attempted publication of his book Suck What You See: The Secret Life of Game Show Host. Inserting his penis into the ears of audience members. His attempted rape of Mr Chips, the virtual catchphrase mime. All this and more!

The story of Roy Walker is an R-rated romp through the darker side of afternoon quiz shows. Available from Oct 12.

Rutland Bewks, £19.99

i am poet, hear me whimper

hello there. you might have seen me around. i am one of those people on the internet who writes everything in lower case. you might have encountered me on blogs, facebook, in ezines.

let me explain something to you. lower case is an artistic decision. m’kay? microsoft word capitalises automatically after each new sentence. well screw them, telling me when to punctuate! i refuse to indulge in this capital-ist society. together with my poet buddies, i will smash the system with my quietly incompetent grammar, and rein in the new dawn, whatever that means!

you might have heard of ee cummings. there are legions of writers who think this anti-capital-ist poet the most experimental and radical and boundary-breaking poet of his generation. well, he is. we are his children. we have no need for your big butch capitals. here is an example of my poetry:

i am the burn
on the hexagon
the small squirrel
in the cloak of now

burrow blood blue through
filtered
lens
like tom

or jane

or you

please buy my chapbook colors without you at lulu now thank you goodbye.

My Latest Book

In my latest book, The Casserole Dishes of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, I explore the hidden culinary talents of the 19thC poet and writer, known largely for her simple and sentimental verse.

In 1821, at the age of nineteen, Landon published her first book of poems, The Fate of Adelaide. She also revolutionised the casserole dish by introducing puce, ox blood, and hog rind to the humble stew. It was through her pioneering work in garnish development that her reputation grew, plucking the nostril hairs from goats and chopping them into manageable specks.

Serving her Goat Hair Casserole to the critic Laman Blanchard, he complimented her “magical fusion of the disgusting and the sublime” and went on to give her awful poems a positive review.

With the death of her father in 1824, Landon went into her most prodigious casserole phase, inventing ten new dishes. Among them was The Toffee Nipple which merged the shorn teats of heifers with melted chocolate and elderberries. The dish made her an international sensation, propelling her to stardom in the US. Meanwhile, she wrote and published her first novel, Romance and Reality.

My book examines this turbulent period in the young poet and culinary pioneer’s life, with contributions from Isobel Armstrong, Germaine Greer and Jeremy Clarkson.

Bambam Books, £14.99pp. Order here.

Interview With Alice Becker

My interview with the fêted author, taken from The Fuzzbox Pangina (June 2010):

Tell us about your latest book, My Crazy Family.

It is a tale of families, I suppose. Families and how they screw us up! Ha-ha-ha! In my last book, Auntie Janet’s Gallstone, I drew heavily from my experiences with my Auntie Janet. She is such a brave woman and I felt I had to tell her story, you know? I didn’t even think about it, I just wrote it down. In this book, I took a different approach. I looked at my family and thought God, what a bunch of crazies! This would make for such a funny book, and people could so relate. And judging from the feedback so far, I think they have!

Could you outline the plot for us?

Well, there isn’t a plot as such. I know, crazy right! I just sort of wrote down some of the anecdotes my family tells, or just snippets of conversation. Like one part of the book is just my dad, who is crazy, talking about the time he lost a sock behind the bed, then couldn’t find it for weeks. I won’t spoil the ending by telling you where it ended up! But this book is really, um . . . experimental. It has more in common with really great writers like B.S. Johnson or Gilbert Sorrentino. It’s like a more accessible take on those guys.

Do you have a good relationship with your readers?

Oh, totally. With my last book, I got so many letters from people saying things like ‘my aunt had her gallstones out too, I can sympathise’ and ‘your characters were almost believable.’ I was really moved by some of the feedback I got from you guys! I’m successful ‘cause I’m just like everyone else, you know, writing about regular people I suppose. I’m easy to read. I was discussing this with Mike [husband] by the pool yesterday. ‘Cept he wasn’t listening AS USUAL! He’d lost the keys to the Ferrari, AGAIN!

What advice would you offer young writers?

Write from the heart. Write from experience. Write down the day-to-day details of your life. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar. Just express yourself. Keep an ear tuned to the problems in your family, and write them down. Nothing is sacred. People love reading stuff they can relate to! No detail is boring or irrelevant. We are lucky in this country to have a print culture that encourages people to write the first thing that comes into their head and print it, almost without exception! As long as it is real. And about families. And real. You have to feel it. Did I mention that it has to be real? Ha-ha-ha!

How did you react to your almost immediate success?

I was totally blown away. I’d just starting writing when people were flinging awards at me. I mean, literally – agents came to my house and threw money at me when I was trying to write! It was little distracting to be honest. I mean, it can’t have hurt being married to the man who owns Penguin Books, and having a dad that owns Random House, and performing oral sex on every book reviewer in America, but I’d like to think it’s my talent that carried me to the top. That and the guy I paid to write my books for me.

Thank you, Alice.

Hey, no problem. I read some of your stuff, by the way. Couldn’t really get into it. Too many ten-dollar words. And it’s like you won’t let yourself open up. Just let it out, man! Don’t be shy, let it out! Stop hiding behind the dictionary, speak your soul and readers will come.

THANK YOU, ALICE.

OK. Don’t be rude. I don't see you winning any prizes, mister.

*

Alice Becker has published forty-five novels and three non-fiction books on writing. Her 1997 novel, The Mopey Girl With PMT, won the Picoult Prize for Page-Turning Brilliance That Appeals to Normal Readers with Regular Jobs That Don’t Have the Time to Read Books, What With Looking After the Kids and Doing the Housework and Trying to Maintain a Social Life.

M.J. Nicholls writes this blog. A short story he wrote a year ago and thought was too pants for publication, The Legend of Liz Armhole, appears in the latest issue of the Rose & Thorn Journal.

A Missive From Dave

Dear Unwashed Pleb Scum,

Comrades! The recession is upon us! Apart from learning to survive on one can of refried beans per month, citizens of the UK must rise up and unite in the Campaign to Fuck Arts Up the Ass (CFAUA).

The remit of the CFAUA is to drain money from trivial things like art galleries, literature, film trusts, so-called ‘creative’ university degrees, and redistribute funds into far more crucial things like schools. We must educate our children to read and express themselves, so that they can shut the fuck up and earn a proper living in call centres.

If you are a ‘writer’ you are at risk. You are a drain on the system and you must take the following course of action:

1. Stop writing at once! There is no place for the action of fictitious beings in favour of real action! Be honest with yourself: you have nothing unique to contribute to the arts. You are wasting your own time. We have enough literature.

2. Join the dole queue. Under our new Jobless Slave Bitches Scheme, for a recompense of £20.81 per month, you will be sent to work down the sewers. You will store up to four gallons of liquified human shit in your chest and throat until it is redistributed in a location no-one cares about, such as the North.

3. You must report to the Jobcentre every afternoon to have creativity slurped out of you by Bob. He left school when he was sixteen and knows the value of hard work, and he would like to tell you about it for nine hours a day. We will perform raids on your home when you are out to check for pens, computer documents or paints.

4. You are to have electrodes put in your brain. Any creative impulse you have will result in a powerful shock to every nerve ending in your body. If you reach five shocks, you will be pronounced clinically dead and your money will be stopped.

Yours in-this-together,

Dave Cam, Cambridgeshire Mansion #171

Writing For Short Story Contests

The Task Before Me:

Hello every writer in the world. I am a nameless representative from an underfunded arts council somewhere in an English-speaking country. We are currently accepting entries for our short story contest, themed around the invention of the pie crust.

If you have a short story between 2 and 2365 words about how bakers first kept pastry in an oven at the correct temperature to produce a crispy rim around a delicious pie, we want to read it.

We prefer sci-fi slasher stories set in Chiswick revolving around shoe assistants named Phil McSmiddy who live with their mothers and worship alt-rockers The Breeders, though we are open to other ideas (within reason). Send submissions by Morse or carrier pigeon to where we are. All submissions sent by mail or email will be napalmed.

This contest costs £28,030,928 to enter, payable only by a cheque written in blood paid into the Thurso branch of Dodgy Dick’s Private Bank. The contest is sponsored by Ad’ah Hukan Bahbad, deputy leader of Al-Qaeda. All proceeds go to suffocating children.


The Task Begins:

So. I have my instructions. I sit down to begin this story, the writing of which will cost me fat white bucks. I am paying the nameless representative for the pleasure of writing this story and submitting to his illustrious contest. Well, it must be illustrious, what with Richard Hammond on the judging panel and everything. OK. I take tablets to quell my raging spleen and start again.

I decide the subject matter is atrocious. I can’t possibly write a story with this tedious prompt, and doing so will be pointless, my story unreadable drivel, deleted instantly. I cry and take my self-confidence pills.

I start again. I pen 2000 words of pedestrian prose about Phil McSmiddy, inventor of the pie crust. It isn’t startling. It isn’t staggering. It isn’t the sort of dazzling new voice that wins Granta awards. It doesn’t burst from the page with vibrant originality, knocking the current crop of Granta bitches from their pedestal with its wow-this-is-the-best-story-in-the-fucking-universe brilliance.

It is good, readable, entertaining prose. No more. I cry again and take more medication.

I decide it needs more of an emotional angle. Stories that win contests have to be about human suffering cranked up to the max and characters surviving these bleak times. I rewrite the story from the perspective of Phil’s Lebanese torturer, replacing each fourth word with a staggering metaphor about the blackness of humanity. I proofread, weep, proofread some more, then send it out.

Four years pass. I am living in a small croft in Norfolk bogtrottrer country, surviving off mud and grass pasties. There is a knock at the door. A dwarf dressed in a poop-covered toga speaks: “I AM SORRY STORY BEEN UNCEESFUL, GOOBYE.”

That’s that, then. On to the next contest!

McSweeney’s Acceptance Criteria

Having read a few McSweeney’s issues now, I’ve noticed a frustrating similarity in the material they publish.

At first, I thought it was my anger or envy gene kicking in. Sometimes, during my manstruation period, I dislike everything I read, hate everyone I meet and banish everything I write to the eternal wastepaper basket. Right now, this is not the case. Despite the looming gloom of a Conservative government, I have been feeling chipper lately.

Just yesterday I permitted an urchin to tickle my sense of indignation. That shows how chipper I am.

So permit me to explain the problem using an alphanumerical system of bi-dividers. Here are the qualities that would seem to comprise the McSweeney’s Acceptance Criteria:

a) Sardonic Wistfulness

Characters in McSweeney’s look back on their Important Life Moments with detached slacker irony. They make the significance of those moments explicit without resorting to sentiment. Stories must resolve around one or more Important Life Moment (usually a death or family separation) and balance the emotional weight of this moment with humour or a turn of phrase that captures that unbreakable love (barf) perfectly.

b) Meandering Structure

Something happens at one moment in time. Then we go forward in time to another moment selected presumably for its significance or profundity. Then we keep skipping forward. Or backward. Or a character does this and does that but gives us no indication of when or why. Stitch these vignettes together in a vaguely coherent bundle for McSweeney’s success!

c) Flickers of Amusement

Sad to report, but McSweeney’s isn’t particularly funny. Perhaps its slavish devotion to quirky indie Americanness doesn’t help much. Dialogue is where the humour lies. Sometimes. It’s achieved either through explicitness (swearing or references to sexual acts) or gentleness (observational humour), though is light on wit for something so subversive.

d) Thick Curds of Morality

Oh yes. You are also allowed to write stories about moral concerns – wars dividing communities or various nastinesses in the world that expose man’s fundamental sickness. This isn’t a bad thing. But often we only keep reading the stories because we are too shocked to stop.

e) No Experimentation

Nope. Linear narratives written so six-formers can understand. No tricksiness or interesting typographical whims. Unless Mr. McS says so (and he doesn’t say so very often).

f) America Forever!

These stories ooze America. Americanness seeps from every vowel and consonant. So, cram in as many references to US products or TV shows for maximum McSweeney’s success. If your story isn’t American, then the spelling will be altered accordingly. Don’t dare write anything that wouldn’t work in an indie movie with Steve Carell.

Thus concludes my grumbles. Don’t get me wrong – McSweeney’s is still a thing of beauty and should be loved for its innovation. However, they need to shoot the editorial staff and bring in some fresh blood.

Otherwise, I suggest changing the name to McSnoozy’s.

PoMo Pete Wants a Mate

[Posted on Dating Site Flirt Box on 7/1/10:]

Hell-O there! Well, gosh dirt it, call me a salamander and curse my aunt Sally! How d’ye begin one-a these things???

I’m PoMo-Petey, I’m 1+1+1+20 years o’ age and I likes me postmodernism! Ho-ho! Me loves the wacko schizo funstuffs of them literary pranksters, how they holda reflection up t’the world of dusty old books and bend 'n' subvert what is possible on the INTERWEBS!

I like t’challenge the convenzional notions o’ human interactions! I wanna chance upon a wooman who hazz similar LOOPY notions of what can be achieved thru the genre-bending goodness of postmodernism!

We can read books upside down on the sofa! Eat kedgeree off the tum-tums of dogs and staple ideals to our brains! I want a woman to crack the eggs of the world with: crack ‘dem eggs, baby!

So hit me up if you like postmodern livin’ and let’s talk ideas!

[Updates to follow. Will Pete find a mate? Stay tuned.]