While I was mingling with the yahoos on the Ted Stevens Interweb of tubes and tools on the tunnel to nowhere the other day, I came across a site that promises to match living losers with the most important writers ever to despoil the Earth by analyzing their style against a fancy how far is the old algorithm in and giving you a nifty badge you can put on your Web site to show how ordinary and clichéd you really are.
The root of analyzing, of course, is anal, which is sometimes also referred to as the Eerie Canal. I had a business card once while working for a government agency that read: Dr. Faustroll, Management Analyst, paid for by miserable fucks just like you. Each time I got a new box, I sat at the kitchen table at home, smoking dope, drinking alcohol, and highlighting the anal in irridescent yellow, using markers also paid for by your miserable tax dollars.
Did you ever see a great writer's asshole? Here's one.
Many of the greatest writers on the planet were monumental assholes. Many others struggled mightily to achieve a competent level of assholism and failed. Some pulled their assholes down over their ears to keep their brains from spilling out to where zombies could smell them and suck the gray matter out of their auditory canals like marrow from lamb chops and those tasty bones you can use in making risotto, which is a rice dish that doesn't involve soy sauce.
This isn't my asshole being touched up at a local gallery during a First Thursday celebration of assholes in the arts, but it does bear a striking resemblance to a certain political scientologist who aims to refudiate the kinds of divisionary intercourse that has bivalved this great notion of peripathetic fucks for more than two embarrassing centuries.
I only bring this up because I apparently write like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. approximately 20% more frequently than I write like David Foster Wallace. I also write like Jonathan Swift, John Berryman, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Mario Puzo, and Arthur C. Clarke.
The only living people that I supposedly write like are Dan Brown — although I think the roadside attractions I fixate upon are more like those of Tom Robbins — and Chuck Palahniuk — who lives in Portland, Oregon, for Christ's sake — a cluster of benign polyps in the asshole of America even less interesting than Indianapolis — and is the only alleged male in a group of writers that the Oregonadian called "the hottest writing group in Portland" and who still think that anyone can help them. Perhaps these represent my feminine or faggot side. Analysis sometimes gets inappropriately deep, as my old priests often grunted while driving home the message during my acts of contrition.
I'll keep trying to find an excerpt from my strong feminine side, and I won't be surprised to find out I'm more like Emily Dickinson or Anne Bradstreet than Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton.
We're all doomed, assholes. If you are writing with pen and paper or on a keyboard with software, you are about to lose out to the Osamas and other cave dwellers whose pictures have been conveying more than your words ever will.
By the way, I randomly pasted several excerpts of Sarah Shakespeare Palin's inestimable philosophical work and she writes like Stephen King, Margaret Mitchell, Isaac Asimov, and Vladimir Nabokov, which indicates there's a reason she likes to look at Russia from her porch. I had no idea Sarah was a reputiated pedophile. I thought she was just a less than cunning stunt.