Friday, July 31, 2009

COMETRADGY

It is never funny TO LOSE, or is it? Picture it: you are on a hell-vacation with your family, and your brother is repeatedly trying to draw you into heated arguments about how often cavemen had sex, and your mother is demanding to see the manager because the piece of Weight Watchers cake she ordered is too small, and your father is suddenly obsessed with The Phantom of the Opera and is making everyone sit in total silence while he blasts the soundtrack, and whenever Gerard Butler pushes a high moo out of himself he marvels, "Listen to that crystalline note! You almost can't believe how manly he is,"

and you have been telling your family all week long that even though you are a finalist you will not actually win, but they do not believe you, especially your mother, who cherishes a fond belief that she is psychic, and so when you say, "Remember how I told you I would not win? I did not win. These other humans won instead," they are completely unprepared and all pandemonium breaks loose: your mother is wailing, "Oh my God! Did they even read your wordplay?" and your sister is hissing, "Well excuse you for not writing the popular poems they wanted to read, all about race and the environment and getting raped," and your father is crying out, "HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED? I WISH THE PHANTOM WERE HERE."

10 comments:

steef said...

Whew. Dodged that bullet! I heard that the fellowship is actually paid out in cursed Incan gold, and that the recipients are doomed to walk the night for eternity, neither living or dead, uninspired, feeding only on the pages of unread copies of The Best American Poetry from secondhand bookstores (which are legion).

Admiral Farragut said...

I suspect that the judges have been dipping into the free grab-bag of pharmaceuticals that accompanies the grab-bag o' money from the heir to the Eli Lilly Drug Empire. They get stoned, play "Pin the Tail on the Nominee List" and then cry out, "We picked a winner! May we have more drugs and money now, please?" And wouldn't I love that job?!

Patricia Lockwood said...

Don't, Admiral! The winners are all very fine and deserving--I was hoping Jeffrey Schultz would win, because he also won a Discovery Prize earlier this year and I like a good coup as much as anyone.

Steef! Now that is a proper response. I could have used that at the time, to offset a little of the familial insanity that is IN NO WAY EXAGGERATED in these two journalistic paragraphs.

Richard Epstein said...

As it happens, I have a partial transcript of a 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature Committee Meeting. Here's what I have:

Wanna hear something funny?

Yeah, sure.

"Robert Frost."

Say what?

Robert Frost.

[Words cannot be distinguished through the guffawing, giggling, and the sounds, as far as I can tell, of people slapping their own embonpoints]

Okay, you ready to get serious? Here's what I say: Pearl S. Buck.

Well, sure, yeah, obviously.



That's all I can make out, but I don't think things have changed any since then.

RHE
P.S. I did place 27th in the voting for Most Likely in Our Neighborhood to Complete the Mutabilitie Cantos of The Faerie Queen, and Pearl S. Buck received no votes whatsoever.

Anonymous said...

well uncongratulations. you still rock, but you prolly know that

Radish King said...

No matter. You will win eventually because you're so fucking brilliant. It's just a matter of time and for crapsake you're only 12, so go ride your bike, whatever, and those big fat money prizes will seek you out because honey, you're the real deal. You've got it.

xox

Ron Jeremy said...

By the way, how often did cavemen have sex?

homo erectus said...

There's supposedly a correlation in primates between male gonad size and frequency of copulation. Frinstance, the more promiscuous species (bonobos/chimps) evolved magnum-sized junk, and they boff like there's no tomorrow (lots of episodes, lots of sperm competition). Gorillas, on the other hand, have teeny-tiny juevos, and slap nasties much less often than their smaller/bigger cousins. Hominids probably had in-between sized nads, but tended towards more frequent copulations (as it reinforced the more cooperative social structure & relationships within hunting-gathering, language-toting hominid bands).

Not-a-finger should've won, I feel certain. There will be no sex in my cave until my eyes stop raining.

Patricia Lockwood said...

I love you all so much and so deeply.

Ron, my brother's hypothesis was that cavemen did not have sex very often at all, because babies...attracted wolves. It is a conclusion that no previous anthropologist has ever reached, and therefore trailblazing.

Ron Jeremy said...

Tricia, me talented darlin', considering the current ratio of wolves to humans,does this mean that wolves had even less sex than our forebears because it attracted cavemen?