META-MONKEYS AND THE FINE ART OF LINE JUMPING

Well, I’m finally back. I have crossed the finish line of the crazy contest that I entered and have, in fact, written a novel in a month. Less than a month, actually. More like three weeks. So, there it is. It isn't literature, it won’t win any national awards, but more importantly, it’s DONE.

Doesn’t matter anyway—I don’t even think of it as the rough draft of a novel, I think of it as notes, the skeleton and the rough rough rough draft of a screenplay. And, just as soon as I can find someone who is more proficient at teaching word processing programs tricks they are resistant to learn, the finished and formatted work will burst forth from its cocoon, ready to fly out into the world. Or something like that.

In finishing this project, I have observed some odd things. In this contest, the goal is to JUST WRITE, not anything else. You don’t get a dozen free donuts or a year’s supply of pre-packaged rice food, nor will Ed McMahon show up at your door with a 3’ x 5’ cardboard check. (Where the hell do you cash one of those anyway?) Conversely, if one does not write the requisite fifty thousand words, no one will show up at your door to haul you off to the Penitentiary for Wayward Writers, your family will not be notified, and no one will call you names as you walk down the street. This is the kind of contest that is about the journey, not the outcome.

This concept, however, seems lost on many of those who entered. It is possible to view a list of all of the thousands of folks entered in the order of word count, and to do so is an exercise in the absurd. Although they verify that you have indeed crossed the fifty thousand word mark, it is up to the individual writer to post their actual word count. There are those who would claim that they have written more than nine hundred thousand words, in three weeks mind you. You do the math and tell me how likely a story this is.

There is also the option to link to your novel if you have posted it on-line as several brave souls have. Most of those in the two to nine hundred thousand range have not done this, which I suppose is to be expected. Of the few who will submit to external scrutiny, there is an odd trend which I am trying to understand.

Granted, a novel written in only a few short weeks is bound to have some mistakes, plot inconsistencies, etc., but some of the “stories” I’ve read are just around the bend. This is a summation of several plots….

I wrote a story and the story went like this.
I wrote a story and the story went like this.
I wrote a story and the story went like this.
I wrote a story….on and on and on.

Now I’m willing to stretch quite a loooooong way in the name of experimentation and I’m just as meta as the next monkey, but this just makes no sense to me. What kick does someone get from cutting and pasting the same sentence over and over and over? Is there some hidden meaning the sense of which I am unable to grasp? Or is it, as one friend has suggested, the manifestation of a hidden inner longing to see one’s name at the top of a long list?

I can picture a really burned out twentieth century literature professor stuck in some po-dunk town in New Jersey, swearing under his breath about the heathens in his department who just don’t understand his genius. He’s been passed over again for the cushy jobs and feels the pressure to publish something, anything, just to keep his job. Night after night, shot after shot, the coffee and alcohol collide in his system as he stares at the blank computer screen in his office late into the night. Suddenly, he starts to giggle. Laugh. Then a full-out Mad Scientist Cackle tears forth from his lips. He’s got it. He is THE expert in meta-fiction at this one-horse college and he’s going to show them, buy god. It is a work of genius, an eloquent expression of the futility of art in the modern age, the symbolic flopping down at the feet of a nonexistent god. There is nothing left to say which hasn’t been said, nothing left to think which hasn’t been thought, nothing, nothing, nothing….

If Shakespeare were alive he would write a story like this.
If Shakespeare were alive he would write a story like this.
If Shakespeare were alive he would write a story like this.
If Shakespeare were alive he would write a story like….

I went to a poetry reading in New Orleans several months back. It was primarily filled with academics who had attended a convention that week, as well as the very few of us who had left the “affiliation” slot blank on our applications—independents were very few and far between. So what are the academics doing? I wondered…

Most of them, not surprisingly, are doing what they’ve always done. Train tracks and meatballs, withered dreams and the symbolism of inertia, winos and prostitutes, etceteras and etceteras. But what about the meta-guys? I wondered. What the hell are they doing these days? Sure, post-modernism was dead when it began—that’s what it’s all about—but what are people DOING with it? What exactly, is the method utilized for beating the dead horse?

Random poetry generation. Sure, an interesting idea, but cheap. Very cheap. It’s all been written, it’s all been done, boo hoo, boo hoo, oh look at the wretched state we find ourselves in here at the end of the twentieth century, already in a century which begins with a 2. We miss our 19’s, yes we do. Dredge dredge dredge… Nothing left to do but recycle poetry from this sickly canonical stew…

Lines of poetry. Data bank. A few “original” lines (though none of them believe in the concept of originality anymore) thrown in for flavor and the ego rush of hearing your own words sandwiched between Whitman and Blake. Sense? What sense? Nothing makes sense in the modern world. It makes a kind of sense, but only to those who know, those who understand, those who accept that there isn’t anywhere else for literature to go.

You know, I just want to smack these guys. Hard. Then I want to take them way out in the desert to the edge of the Grand Canyon and make them stare into it until their attitude adjusts. No sleep, no food, no water—just keep staring into the chasm until you understand. Disillusionment is a good thing—it is just the disappearance of illusion—but if you haven’t seen anything meaningful behind all that, then you’re not looking hard enough. Stare into the void…stare into the void….

But alas—although I am not familiar with all of the laws of this abstract body the monkeys call “a nation,” I can pretty well guess that this type of activity would be considered illegal by some, and those some probably have guns. I doubt that they would understand that the end justifies the means, that it is all in the name of art, that the post-modern burn out professors of academia really need a little meta-physical lift. The road to enlightenment is always unorthodox—maybe I should just go from college to college hitting them with sticks.

But somehow I doubt that these poor disillusioned sots are at the root of the hyper-exaggerated word counts or the cheesy cut and past jobs which I have recently viewed. I think that next year I’ll enter twice—once as myself and once as Dr. Disillusioned, Ph.D. Under the former pseudonym, I’ll write a novel, a BIG novel, with seventeen hundred million words. I’ll put up a link, I’ll let my message be known…

This is a really cheap cop out.
This is a really cheap cop out.
This is a really cheap cop out.

Then I’ll write a paper about it and apply to grad school.