Aschematiston: The use of plain, unadorned or unornamented language. Or, the unskilled use of figurative language. A vice. [Outside of any particular context of use or sense of its motive, it may be difficult to determine what’s “plain, unadorned or unornamented language.” The same is true of the “unskilled use of figurative language.”]
“The bouncing corn dog hit me in the ankle—it’s stick stabbed me in the ankle like an angry knitting needle steeped in revenge on the edge of unfathomable cryptic incidences without valor or heroism—just a random wound on life’s fabric—the vulnerable skin—the bag of life.”
This is fictional, although it is hard to identify it as such. I am a writer looking for a break among the rubble of hope, meeting out failure and displaying it in front of so many eyes. It used to be anybody with a stylus could bang out stories in cuneiform on clay tablets. It took so much effort just to write, only the gifted could afford to put in the time and effort it took to write something. The very first story ever written was about a Turkish shoe salesman who is beheaded for selling uncomfortable shoes to the Caliph. The Caliph’s Minister of Footwear purposely gave the wrong size to the shoe salesman because he had seduced his wife with a pair of golden, jewel encrusted, running shoes. When she put on the shoes, they made her run to the shoe salesman’s house every night at 8:00pm. On her way one night, she was run over by a chariot. The chariot cut her in half, but a Genie took pity on her for her foolishness and put her back together and restored her life. But there was a problem: the Genie put her together backwards. Her butt faced frontward, so her feet faced backward. She wore a rear-view mirror on her shoulder so she could see where she was going. It is said that this is where the saying “ass backwards” originated.
Now, everybody has a computer. Everybody can become a writer. Every day, every publishing house receives an avalanche of email, proffering poems, short stories and books that nobody reads and that are responded to with short stock phrases: “Your work shows promise, but send it somewhere else,” “Your work made my eyes water, not with tears, but trying to make sense of it,” “Thank you for your submission. Please make this your last.” Their rule thumb is to randomly choose one manuscript out of every 25,000 manuscripts. This is why there’s so much crap being published. The only place that actually reviews manuscripts is China where there is a surplus of cheap labor. “Big Mao Press” is my favorite. They publish everything I submit, but they don’t pay royalties. They send me a framed picture of Mao and a copy of his “Little Red Book.”
Don’t let me discourage you with the truth of the futility of your hope to be a writer. If you aspire to be a writer, you will fail, unless you give “Big Mao Press” a spin. There’s no shame in being a Commie dupe. You won’t be the first or the last. Melania Trump’s book “Living With a Piece of Shit,” was published by “Big Mao Press” and she can’t even write!
Anyway, I am going to sort of give up on writing. Once, I wanted to write the great novel, like “Atlas Shrugged,” or Herbert Hoover’s “American Individualism.” But alas, it isn’t meant to be. I have completed one book: “The Talking Fire Hydrant.” I intend to submit it every day to a different publisher. Once I’ve exhausted them all, I’ll submit it to “Big Mao Press.” In the meantime, “Big Mao Press” has sent me a mail-order editor all the way from China—she and I travel in the vintage Chevy generously provided by the Chinese government. We drive to military installations, and take pictures in preparation for writing a travel guide together tentatively titled “Goodbye American Pies.”
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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