Letter to Tropical Fish Hobbyist

Dear editor, Tropical Fish Hobbyist:


Recently I have been submitting my work to an assortment of national and local magazines and newspapers. In my unbalanced letters to these various editors, who I have no serious hopes of working with, I frequently mention my submissions to your magazine, Tropical Fish Hobbyist. When I do this it is generally in the nature of a light joke, as in "I am submitting my work to many of the major national magazines: Time, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Tropical Fish Hobbyist." This may not seem terribly amusing to the editor of Tropical Fish Hobbyist either because you are defensive about being the editor of Tropical Fish Hobbyist, you feel there is absolutely nothing funny about having tropical fish as a hobby, or it is not a very amusing joke.

On the other hand you might find it quite funny, which would be nice, because I don't have a lot of fans and it would be heartwarming to have the tropical fish community on my side.

But no matter whether you find my comment amusing or not I feel a little bad about it. It's always easy to make fun of the little guys, and all you have ever done, in this age of the Internet, is survive against amazing odds. That cannot be easy! You still look big and glossy and like a real live magazine. Newsweek folded. Life folded, twice. Time looks like a pamphlet now. The cat and dog magazines rebranded from "fancy" to "ster" and have merged so as to cut their publishing frequency in half. I'm not sure what happened to Bird Talk, but I haven't seen it around lately. And there you are, bold and beautiful, on my library shelf like it's still 1982.

Good for you.

No, I'm not making fun of you.

Also, if I'm going to be telling all these other magazines I'm submitting to that I'm submitting to you as well, I don't want to be a liar. So, enclosed, you will find some of my work. As you will see none of it has anything to do with tropical fish. But you may also notice that it is unsuitable for publication in pretty much any other magazine you can think of, so why not send it to you as well?

Besides, I have an idea.

I only say this because now that we've ironed out our differences I think we have excellent rapport. I think we'd work well together. So I propose I write a regular column for you at Tropical Fish Hobbyist. It would be something like:

The Complete Neophyte's take on tropical fish
or
Ask someone who doesn't know anything about your tropical fish hobby
or
The non hobbyist talks tropical fish

Usually when I write editors I assume they are a kind of deadened, institutional bureaucrat clutching vainly at their precarious hold on power, leeched in conservatism, and I have to try and talk them into reconnecting with their joy and humanity once again only I can't because I am not good at marketing. However, you have kept Tropical Fish Hobbyist going against horrible odds, you have kept your humor and sagacity, and whatever power you have as editor of Tropical Fish Hobbyist is probably modest enough to not have corrupted you. So I figure you probably know what you're doing.

I'm just saying I trust you to decide what the title of my regular column should be.

I look forward to working with you, but I have also enclosed a rejection form letter for your use in rejecting me. Just in case.


In fish (tropical variety), yours,





F. Calypso

You won't believe what George Clooney and Brad Pitt are doing in this picture.

 No, sorry, no picture. This is what is known in the trade as clickbait.


But wait! Don't leave! I am here to help you. I am going to teach you an anti clickbait game to save you from disasters like this in the future. It is also a game designed to save the Internet itself.

Hey, there's some more clickbait for you:

The game that will save the Internet!

(no, don't try and click that, you're already here).

But before all that let me explain a little about clickbait. Clickbait is a classic con. Yes, your beloved Internet is a giant con game. One of the key elements that makes cons successful and that identifies them is that they involve their victims in the responsibility for what happens. Your hunger for a shady, but easy, buck, for instance money deceptively spirited out of Nigeria, is what causes you to be ripped off. You are not just robbed, but you are left sharing guilt in your own robbing and are less equipped to find, seek, or get justice for what happened.

And so it is with clickbait. If you click on a juicy bit, like "You won't believe what George Clooney and Brad Pitt are doing in this picture" you find every single time that it is not all that interesting, not as interesting as it seemed like it might be. When you see through to your tiny bit of attention being heartlessly mined by a con artist for one one-hundredth of a cent in ad revenue, you also have to face the soullessness of your own interest. You have to face that you clicked out of your own free will. What was it that you actually expected to see? What would have made it worth it?

There is nothing that deep down would have made it worth it.




Okay, I'll break my no pictures rule.





 Here is the George Clooney and Brad Pitt picture I originally promised:

Brad Pitt removes a dangerous splinter from George Clooney's neck!

I do not make a hundredth of a cent off of your visit to this blog. I am only here out of love. Well, and a little bit out of hate, but not hate of you. So I hope you will forgive me for the clickbait, which is your fault too, but I am not blaming you because I am here to help.

And thus to the game that will save the Internet.

Whenever you see something on the Internet that is not specifically what you were looking for, something leading, something that seems to promise, something that urges you to click, just stop. I am asking for only a single second here. In that second devise the answer to what you will find.

If you're an animal lover this will melt your heart.

No, don't click that!

Imagine. 

A kitten is being swept away in a flood and a Labrador deftly scoops it out of the water by the scruff of its neck. A turtle carries a flamingo on its back over rough ground. A hippo nurses a baby chicken. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Simply believe whatever you made up and go, click free, on your merry way. If you can't come up with something, no matter how silly, if it's all too much for a second of your imagination to conceive, that's okay. It's probably not true clickbait in that case anyway, and you can click on it if you like.

And that's the game. It's good for your imagination. It's good for you. And it's good for the Internet. All the Internet's succulent looking fruit that is hollow or rotten inside will then fall to the ground. There it will break down and compost. And from that rich loam a fertile, new, beautiful Internet will

Hello?

Hello?

Are you still there?

Oh, fine, I give up,

here.

A rejection letter for me

Dear Editor:


Enclosed below is a brief rejection form letter for your convenience. Simply check off the appropriate boxes and send it in the enclosed envelope. Your feedback is essential for us in formulating a positive rejection experience for you and your magazine.


Dear Mr. Calypso:

I have

___ read
___ skimmed
___ glanced at in an irritated way
___ endured

your submission. I regret to inform you that your work is unsuitable for publication because

___ it has absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter we publish.
___ you did not actually submit any work for us to look at.
___ we fear everything beautiful.
___ no one here can tell if you're kidding or not.
___ we have much bigger plans for you, partner.

For your information I found your writing to be

___ simultaneously banal and profound,
___ brilliant but completely unsuitable for publication in any media anywhere ever,
___ amusing but in the incorrect font,
___ sadly lacking in celebrities and diet tips,
___ a pastiche of mid career James Joyce and the comic strip Garfield,

and I hope that you will

___ consider us again in the future.
___ accept this 2011 Pontiac Vibe as a token of our appreciation.
___ stop wasting our time with this nonsense when our magazine is dying.
___ give Princess Mononoke another chance as it really is one of the great masterworks of Japanese animation.
___ continue with your "writing" as you seem to find it very clever.


I wish you

___ much
___ gobs of
___ rich
___ all

success in your future endeavors.


With

___ kind regards,
___ cold goodbyes,
___ vaguely harassed salutations,
___ more affection than I might have thought,
___ an offer of lifelong friendship,


I am _______________________________________



enclosed:

___ my own more cruel rejection letter.
___ a 2011 Pontiac Vibe.
___ our submission guidelines.
___ a signed, first edition of Ulysses and an early original Garfield strip said to be about me, as tokens of my encouragement.
___ nothing. It's not enough that I filled out your ridiculous rejection form letter?

Letter to Rolling Stone

Dear editor, Rolling Stone Magazine;


I have recently begun writing many of the great national magazines- Tropical Fish Hobbyist, Boating, The New Yorker, Cat Fancy (now Catster!)- about publishing my fearsome short essays that have been so unpopular on the Internet. However, the fact that I almost never write about tropical fish, boats, or New York has, I feel, hampered me in this endeavor.

On the other hand, despite writing occasionally about Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and reasonablist politics, all bailiwicks of your magazine, I have not, until now, considered approaching your magazine with my ink-stained fingers. Don't worry though, you are every bit the magazine that Boating is.

So what changed, you ask.

I had a visitation! It was, like, a mystical visitation of destiny!

I know. Exciting, yes?

Hunter S. Thompson came to me in a vision.

I was typing at my computer in my basement late at night when, suddenly, there he was. He had to stoop because my basement ceiling beams are pretty low. He looked a bit thin. He was fiddling nervously with a pen. He glanced at me and started talking.

Unfortunately I couldn't understand a word he said. You at Rolling Stone would surely know him far better than I. Did he always mumble so horribly? And if it was just the mumbling I could perhaps have figured out some of what he was talking about, but he talked so fast.

As Hunter S. Thompson faded out of my basement and continued what I hope is not a permanent march to obscurity, I was left alone in the night to puzzle out the meaning of our mystical encounter. But crippled by my inability to understand a word of his gibberish I had to give it up and chalk it up on the list of things I will never understand about this world.

Then I saw it. He left his pen behind. It was sitting on the cold cement floor of my basement. And get this, the pen read "Rolling Stone Magazine"!

At least, I think it said "Rolling Stone Magazine". The black print on the pen is so faded away that one can only mostly guess at the letters. It also might say "Road and Track Magazine" or "Runner's World Magazine". But no matter what it says I am confident that this is a sign, an important sign of destiny. So I am sending you, Road and Track, and Runner's World Magazines all the following samples of my work.

I look forward to working with one of you.


Kind regards,



F. Calypso

American disdain for soccer

I became a soccer fan a scant 14 months ago through the keyhole of Lionel Messi, the smaller-than-your-average-athlete soccer genius. Can you be a genius at soccer, or, really, any sport? No. I only said that about genius because I get carried away. But when one is carried away it looks exactly like genius. Lionel Messi is, if you pour over the soccer part of the Internet, either "the greatest player of all time", "probably the best current player", or "not fit to wash Ronaldo's shorts".

I followed Messi from his second place finish with Argentina in The World Cup (an alternate way of saying "his loss in The World Cup") into a brilliantly successful season with his "real" team, FC Barcelona (the FC stands for Football Club, something it took me about four months to figure out). Then I followed him into a pointless summer with Argentina again and now back to a new season with Barcelona.

This has been my training ground for soccer. As per my nature I am now certain that I know vastly more about soccer than I actually do. In this I apparently have about a billion people for company. And in this journey of less discovery than I think, I have been recurrently aware of a major soccer question:

What is wrong with the USA?

The rest of the world is soccer crazy. It is the world's sport and the world adores it, but here in the USA we can not care less about soccer. Oh, we play it, plenty, but we don't care.

Our poor taste has been sited. People have blamed our gluttonous hunger for scoring, of which soccer often has little. And others have mentioned our long lack of a true, world class soccer hero.

But no. It is none of these. I have been following soccer for just over a year, and I am here to tell you that the American lack of interest is not really even our fault. Indeed, we are being sensible.

The real problem is that world soccer is, for lack of a more refined word, stupid.

No, not the beautiful game. After all, I speak with soccer being the only sport I am even interested in these days, and I think it is the best sport I have ever followed. It requires speed, athleticism, coordination, inventive movement, endurance, and strength from everyone playing. And, crucially, it confers no particular advantage to size, a quality in many popular American sports that by default eliminates more than 99 percent of the talent pool. The NBA for instance isn't really made up of the most talented basketball players in the world. It's made up of the most talented basketball players who are also 6'3'' and taller. How many people do you know in that category?

So if soccer is the better sport by virtue of sheer egalitarianism, what's so stupid?

Like many stupid things it's a little complicated, so we will make use of another comparison.

Baseball.

However absurd one wants to say the sport of baseball is, with its innings and bats and endless standing around, there is little wrong with its structure. No matter how many leagues there are in the world, if you can, if you are good enough, you will play in the Major Leagues. One league, all the best players, all evenly measured against the same competition. The teams play for five or six months and the best teams go to playoffs. Many of these playoff games establish the two strongest teams who then face each other in The World Series. The best team wins. It's simple and sensible and the majority of American sports are conducted along the same lines. Not only does it determine the best team of the year, but the players are equally measured against each other, one person's batting average is fairly comparable to another player's batting average, as are their home runs or earned run averages.

So imagine a neophyte American soccer fan faced with world soccer. Or if you are that neophyte, well, I dread trying to explain it to you.

The best soccer players in the world will play in any of five or more different leagues, most or all of them in Western Europe. Messi's league, in Spain, for instance, will play a many months long series of games among themselves. When it's done whoever has the best record just... wins.

"Is it over?"

"Yes, we lost, but so did the second place team, so we're the champions, although there are still three games to go."

Thrilling stuff.

But wait, if you're missing tournaments, we've got tournaments too. Separate from Messi's league, called La Liga, all the teams of Spain have a tournament that winds through that same season. So it's those La Liga teams plus the Spanish teams not really good enough to be in La Liga, thus all the same teams with a bunch of much worse teams thrown into a big tournament that has nothing to do with their regular leagues. I refuse to tell you the name of this tournament because I have so much more cluttering of your mind to go.

So perhaps then you wonder if there isn't a tournament that puts all the best teams in the world together. Yes, thankfully there is. It runs simultaneous to that All Spain tournament (fine, The Copa Del Rey) and the La Liga season. It's called the Champions League and it includes the best teams in their leagues and a group of other teams that qualify in some way that I'm not clear on. This is the closest thing to a league of leagues, an NBA, NFL, NHL, or MLB. Except, sadly, it's not a league, it's a tournament, and mostly you qualify for it the year before it happens, which is a bit... delayed.  Also, of course, it's interwoven with all their other unrelated tournaments.

I was pretty exhausted after all of these, but then, during what I took to be preseason this year, various championship games or "cups" came up. I think there were two or three more. They seemed to me like pointless pre-season games, but people would also talk about them as meaningful competitions that truly mattered. Championships. 

In addition to this ten month season there are short breaks during that season for, and a summer almost entirely involved in, playing for one's national team. So Messi, for instance, during his less than two months off had to race over and play with Argentina, a country that for some mysterious, possibly insane reason that only they know, hates him. This isn't just every four years for the World Cup. These national teams appear to have all sorts of semi pointless games going every year.

Then there is the weird issue of how these soccer players all have to wear advertisements on their jerseys. Picture a Minnesota Vikings jersey, but with a giant 3M logo on the chest instead of, say, the team's name. You get an odd European/USA role reversal: craven capitalism in the sport and players who get no proper vacations in Europe, vs. American sports with tradition, restraint, and very generous summer or winter vacations for the athletes.

This is just a sketchy overview of world soccer and the slice of it I have become acquainted with, but acknowledging the limits of my understanding I think it may only get worse as I learn more. It may be the most beautiful game of them all, but it's a bit of a Gordian knot as well. And I say this as one still newly smitten with soccer, wishing my country shared my fascination: There is nothing unreasonable in staying away from this horribly, insensibly managed sport. 

But then, of course, there is the American fascination with the bizarre and unethical world of Collegiate Athletics so we might not want to get on too high a horse.

Letter to Vanity Fair

Dear Editor of Vanity Fair:


Originally I thought that the Internet would be the perfect place to publish my stream of brilliant short essays. Eventually I had to admit that the Internet was a horrible place for my brilliant short essays. The Internet does not like brilliant short essays at all! In fact, it turns out, and I think as a magazine editor you'll appreciate this while recognizing that it is probably not safe for you to ever say it out loud, that the Internet is a terrible, terrible place, with a dark, evil hold on the world.

Once I realized that the Internet was poorly suited to my work I wondered if magazines might be, in contrast, well suited to my work. I fortunately work at a large library and have been at leisure to glance at a wide selection of magazines. It did not look promising. Most magazines are subject based: dogs, cats, boats, celebrities, trains, fashion, fashion, fashion, backpacking, celebrities, computers, and so on. This wouldn't be so bad if they didn't seem to all take themselves so seriously. I am more by nature a satirist, or a spiritually guided mocker, and convincing the editor of Tropical Fish Hobbyist to publish an intensely self referential satire on fish tanks that reflects on the perfidy of god seemed from the start to be a decidedly uphill battle.

So imagine my delight when my eyes fell upon your magazine, Vanity Fair. Just at the title we are a perfect match. I am very fair. Perhaps you can already sense my measured judiciousness in my introductory letter to you. And I am also extraordinarily vain. For instance, the reason I don't much manage to write useful, magazine publishable articles about dogs, cats, boats, trains, fashion etc., is because I am so much more inclined to write about what a splendid, important, and for the ages, writer I am. I am also prone to throw around the phrase "Prophet of god" a lot.  Of course, my vanity merely seems justified and fair to me.

Fair vanity.

And thus: Vanity Fair.

I know. Amazing.

I have included some of my most strikingly vain (but eminently fair) work, and for most magazines I would consider that to be way more than enough. But your magazine and I clearly have something special between us, a sympathy, a kind of destiny. So I am going to make a generous offer to you, one I would never make to any other magazine. In my casual perusal of your magazine I detected that you had an interest in celebrities; celebrities in nice clothes, celebrity interviews, celebrity discussion, and celebrity profiles. In our collaboration I am willing to help you out with this. Send me a celebrity, any celebrity. I am conveniently located in Minnesota, which is easily locatable between New York and Los Angeles. I am available to meet with the celebrity at my house on any Thursday, just so long as it is during the day. I would be glad to put together one of those interview/profile articles that your magazine so seems to relish. Naturally said piece will be almost entirely about me, but I think that would be the best thing that could happen to your magazine at this time- not, you know, circulation wise, but rather spiritually speaking and in the sense of getting all your juices flowing again. 

So let me know what celebrity will be coming over. Also ask them if they like coffee drinks as I have a Mr. Coffee Pump Espresso Machine that makes a surprisingly good cappuccino.

I'm very excited that we'll be working together.



With kind regards,



F. Calypso 

Letter to library journal

Dear Editor, Library Journal:



I have written an increasingly unsuccessful blog every day for two and a half years now. Originally it was mostly about working in a library, but now I like to focus primarily on how incredibly good the blog is. The only time I waiver in my firm belief that my short, daily essays are among the first cultural masterpieces of the 21st Century is when I go back and read them. Man, that can be sobering!

But who wants to wallow in disappointment like that? So I immediately start writing new ones to get the old feeling back. Fortunately it's easy to get the old feeling back.

The main difficulty of publishing on the Internet is that, for all its majestic power, its breadth, utility, ubiquity, and technological wonder, the Internet is just a highly glorified TV set. It is not mostly like a TV set in its basic content, nor in the nature of its amazing facility. No, it is most like a TV set in its almost magical ability to make everyone who looks upon it significantly more stupid. This is not, mostly, a misanthropic condemnation to express my own superiority. You and I both are not exempt. The second we head off to look at Reddit's front page, Facebook, the weather, or, alas, whatever your own magazine's presence is on the Internet, instantly and reliably we become less complex, less individual, less thoughtful, and less intelligent than we normally are. Picture someone on the Internet, through whatever device. Now add in their drooling ever so slightly and the picture is corrected.

The important thing here about this fact is that the Internet is not the ideal audience for me because I require a high level of reading comprehension, like James Joyce.

So naturally I have started to consider more the ancient venue of print. I'm not sure about magazines, but I thought they would be worth a look. And because I work in, and have written so copiously about, libraries I thought I would look into library magazines. 

This is where you, as an editor of a library magazine, come into the picture. Just in case you were still wondering. Which you probably weren't.

But here's the difficult part. I believe in you, so I hope you don't take it too hard.

I have worked in a large, excellent (grading on a curve), busy, inner ring suburban library for 21 years. I have kept my eyes open. I have thought deeply about it. I have read up on it. I have even conducted my own mad scientist variety research into it. Yes, and I have written about it. Your magazine covers an astonishingly narrow slice of library reality, functionality, and, most of all perspective.

I understand that criticizing the magazine one is submitting work to is not a recipe for success. I also understand that submitting work entirely different than the sort of work that is actually in the publication I am submitting to is also not a recipe for success. But allow me to let you in on my secret power. I just discovered it recently:

I have no expectation you would ever publish my work in your magazine. I merely know that you should. So I have nothing to lose.

You may like being an editor. But it is hard for me to see that publishing the magazine you are publishing could be quite as fun as it could be, or as impassioned, or as ennobling. But that's all there for the taking.

Libraries are still wild, biological, mysterious, analog, and unreasonable. They are conservative on the outside, but at their terrifying core they radical and ungovernable, anarchist and socialist, atheist and inventing new gods on the fly. 

But you know this.

Besides librarians, libraries are peopled with custodial staff, clerks, pages, shelvers, volunteers, interns, student workers, authors and performers. And speaking from that vast population of workers, contributors to library life, all wildly outnumbering the librarians, I would say that one of the first things those of us with restless, library adoring minds learn is that, aside from book reviews, there's nothing much for us in your magazine.

I'd like to crack that door a little. The fresh air will be good for you. Give me a regular column. Phrase it how you like; voice of the opposition, the alternative view, from the clerk's perspective, the other library of the future. 

May I further suggest that you think to yourself: "This is the worst sales job I have ever experienced in all my tenure as editor. But if I only buy the things that are well sold, I will always be buying the pitch and never get the thing itself."

Shake, shake, shake.





Yours in library solidarity,




F. Calypso

Screaming

Children scream at my library. Children cry, throw tantrums, shriek, and howl. Their blood curdling yowls can sound like birds or monkeys, but mostly they sound like unimaginable tortures are being inflicted; they are boiling in oil, on fire, slowly being eaten by machinery. Mostly children seem to have a pretty good time at my library, but sometimes they don't. In the library's defense a fair share of children's screams of unhappiness are directly connected to their having to leave the library.

I have long thought there are two kinds of people who work the front desk of my library here. One kind hears all that screaming and feels sympathy primarily for the parents, and the other kind hears all that screaming and feels sympathy mainly for the wailing child.

To give away my strongly felt position on the matter, though I admit a small handicap of not being a parent, I will simply state this: many times, when I see the screaming start, it is clearly the parent's fault. And every time I see it continued it is the parent's fault. The children, if you are carefully looking, give the parents a chance every time.

And the only real way I have ever seen it properly prevented, or ended, is through patience, attention, and presence, that is to say, through love.

Letter to The Believer Magazine

Because the title may throw you if you don't know the magazine, The Believer is not some sort of religious magazine, but rather is a very prettily produced literary magazine somewhere vaguely out at the forefront of American Culture.





Dear Editor of The Believer Magazine:




I am writing to let you know that I am not submitting any of my writing for publication in your magazine. I have included none of my short essays, no works of cultural criticism, and have provided no SASE for your response. Ideally you would recompense me for the cost of the first class stamp I am using to send this letter to you, but I am sympathetic to the tight budgets you likely operate under.

I do not withhold my work as a protest. I have nothing against The Believer Magazine. It seems like a very nice magazine. When the library I work at first started carrying your magazine our teen librarian, Marcus, who is our most eclectic, sophisticated and devoted reader, was very excited. I thought "Oh, maybe it's the sort of magazine that would carry my highly idiosyncratic short essays!" I looked at your magazine. It seemed quietly cool. It immediately felt like everyone involved in it was slightly famous and knew loads of interesting people. It looked like it would be fun to read, and interesting, but not, you know, too fun or terribly interesting. It seemed like the sort of magazine that wouldn't  publish any of my work in a million years, I mean, if I proposed said publishing, which I won't. But the truth is there are mostly far worse matches for my work out in the rest of the publishing world.

Is my work good enough for inclusion in Believer? Yes. I am a genius. I am one of the greatest writers of our time. But that doesn't make my work popular, or appealing. Brilliance is just one small ingredient for an artist. Like if you were a painter, a painter with greater technique and skill than Caravaggio for instance, but you exclusively used invisible paints.

That's totally me.

But why, you perhaps wonder, would I write you and not submit any of my work for publication?

I hate rejection. 

I'm already dangerously prone to bitterness. Rejection, never a stranger to me, just acts as a goad to that bitterness. I have learned to be careful. And submitting my work to you does not feel like a good idea.

So, unfortunately, I have to reject your magazine and any application it might make or interest it may or may not have in publishing my prose. Your magazine will be worse without me, yes, but not so as anyone in the world will notice.

I wish your magazine much success and hope you fare better with other writers.



With kind regards,



F. Calypso

Letter to Wired Magazine

Dear Editor, Wired Magazine:




I think of you as the fundamental spokesmagazine for the Internet age. You are the magazine of record for the tech oligarchy. Which is funny, because you are a magazine. A magazine.

Or maybe not so funny to you.

But even though your beat is the Internet and all its far flung villages and outposts, I don't hold it against you. The Internet was a beautiful dream. It was so beautiful a dream no one can let it go. So now the dream is part of the engine driving the machine. All the denizens of the Internet chase the dream, like hamsters on a wheel, never getting there, but ever driving the machine on.

But that's probably not how you see it. Which is kind of why I'm writing you. 

As the editor of a major national magazine you are no doubt keenly aware of the position of ombudsman. I thought I could be a sort of ombudsman for Wired Magazine, but then I looked up the meaning of ombudsman. As an independent agent responding to complaints against institutions I quickly realized it's not quite what I mean. I mean something more in the nature of being the voice of the opposition. Perhaps the closest historical antecedent would not be ombudsman, it would be Court Jester, or fool. Did you know that Queen Elizabeth is said to have rebuked her fool for not being severe enough to her? Which, speaking as a fool, I think was likely a no win situation for that fool.

As an agent of the opposition in so many things I do believe any voice that is strong needs a little opposition. I think any subject that has a magazine devoted to it should have a court jester, so to speak, on staff. Dog Fancy Magazine should run a column by someone making fun of all things dog, perhaps someone very fond of cats. Fortune Magazine should have a regular writer to mock the rich, which would be easy, because they are assholes, and Wired Magazine should have a witty essayist to regularly hold up the Internet and its sprawling territories to ridicule.

I propose myself for the job. Enclosed are some samples of my bitter work. You won't like it, but the Internet has sealed its perfect success so well that you're all gonna suffocate in there. You need to crack a couple of windows, or, better yet, hire me and I'll throw some bricks through them.


With kind regards,






F. Calypso

Letter to The City Pages

The City Pages is our local events weekly newspaper in the twin cities. Many a rival paper has come and gone...




Dear City Pages Editor,


I understand.

No, I really do. It is a cruel world out there for an urban weekly. There's all the fly-by-night competition, gunning for your tiny market share. There's every one of your good writers eventually going on to more prestigious jobs or giving it up because it's all so thankless and low paying.

And then there's the Internet. The Internet is cruel. Powerful, ubiquitous, agile, and monstrously large, it eats everything except for the too little things, the things keeping a low profile, the things that lay flat to the ground, cowering.

You are a survivor. You cut every extraneous piece of The City Pages you could. Every feature went. You were like a family trying to survive a famine. Bread, no butter, and not much bread at that. So no comics. No saucy, chatty columns. No off kilter advice letters. Indeed every scrap of entertainment had to go. You went down to one main article, the reviews, a smattering of local news, and you hung on for dear life.

No, I'm not making fun of you, I mean, for the most part. And I am not at all chastising you. It is not for me to waggle my finger at the one who has lived through all this.

But here, now, dear editor, lift up your head a little, out of the dust. The Twin Cities Reader weekly newspaper is gone, long gone, long ago killed by the cruelties of your business. The Onion, as a local weekly, has retreated back to its Internet empire. Vita Mn (or whatever that was), has folded up shop. The Internet has seized all it will seize. It still hunts, but what big game is there left for it?

Look around. Yes it is a bombed field, wasted, a field of dust, but it is yours. It is cleared for you.

You survived.

When I started this letter to you I thought I was going to submit some of my writing to you. But now I feel it would be taking advantage. 

So let me just say, yes, now is the time to rise once again from the dust, see what you can do in this hard new world. Dare to give life again to your emaciated weekly newspaper. Go slow, maybe a single cartoonist, an advice columnist, a witty, regular essayist, paid just a little. But not me. I will not cravenly press my ambitions after all you've been through. I think you just need a friendly voice and a reminder.

Piece the joy and the fun carefully back together, little by little. City Pages is alive.

You are alive. 



Yours truly,



F. Calypso

Clerk insurance

With all my co-workers now leaving, or threatening to leave the library for assorted questionable reasons, I am here bracing for all the new employees. It's best to be prepared for all that breaking in and advice giving.

The first advice I give is "Say yes to the insurance!"

I know that clerking is not the same as being a Doctor. And if we had to pay what your average Doctor has to pay for malpractice insurance I would not dream of suggesting it. But malphabetical insurance is inexpensive, and the protection it gives is extraordinary.

I have been sued only three times in my 21 year library career. I am very proud of this statistic. Many of my colleagues are embroiled in a lawsuit practically every month. But still I carry the malphabetical insurance. It is worth it for the peace of mind alone.

The first lawsuit against me was in '98. I was accused of inaccurately shelving a book that led to a student's reduced quality midterm report. The plaintiff claimed lifetime earning losses of $185,000 based on a lesser grade, resulting in lower class standing, leading to getting into a less prestigious University, concluding with diminished career success. I did not have insurance at the time and was sweating bullets as the case approached trial. Fortunately it was easily determined that "649.1" does indeed come before "650.023" in the Dewey System, and the case was dismissed before trial.

My second lawsuit was in 2005. I was accused of calling someone a "snill mann". I had malphabetical insurance at this point, and though I paid attention to the legal process, I didn't have to. They took care of everything. I believe the plaintiff may have won a token award for his duress, despite "snill mann" meaning "kind man" in Norwegian. But the award was so small my malphabetical rates didn't even increase.

Three years ago I accidentally pushed a book cart full of non fiction books over the stairwell's edge causing it to tumble down the staircase, killing six. This was the third lawsuit. I still wisely had the full level of insurance. I didn't really even pay any attention to any of the court cases. My premiums did go up a touch after this one, but, whatever.

I do feel a little bit bad about the incident, though. I guess my second piece of advice would be: Be careful with those overloaded non fiction carts, it's all too easy to squish patrons.

Letter to Catster

Dear Editor:



I have in the past idly thought of submitting my relevant work to Cat Fancy Magazine. Unfortunately Cat Fancy seemed editorially uninterested in my abiding cat issue: the supremacy of cats in all things over dogs. I attributed much of their reticence on this matter to their also publishing the dreaded Dog Fancy Magazine. So you can imagine the burst of hope I felt when Cat Fancy shut down and became Catster, a hip, vital, contemporary, pro cat magazine, one no longer absorbed in the pointless fussiness of cat breeds and grooming, but rather one ready to get down on the ankle level with cats and see things from their perspective.

And then imagine my sadness when I discovered Dogster, a publication apparently closely tied to Catster, like a consortium of Southern Baptists and Satanists working together.

But I decided not to give up hope. I decided to let fly my optimism for Catster. I resolved to submit one of my edgy, modernist, information age, unretracted claw, cat essays to you and let the chips fall where they may.

So I looked through my long library of essays and was shocked to find I don't actually ever write about cats.

Go figure.

How little we know ourselves!

But since I'd already prepared my envelope and collected the pertinent information regarding the contacting of Catster I figured I'd just sort of dash off a couple pieces.

They are amazing.

But don't trust me on that, as I am consistently delusional when it comes to the quality of my work.

Still, you might enjoy them. You might even like to consider me for a regular column. I could do both magazines, working as the (much needed!) voice of bitter dissent on Dogster.

Thank you for your time and, in advance, for your glowing praise.


Yours truly,


F. Calypso

My handy publications submission letter

Dear

___ Magazine Editor:
___ Newspaper Editor:
___ Mailroom Intern:
___ Department of Homeland Security Agent:


I apologize for contacting you with a form letter. I simply submit too many irrelevant and unpublishable pieces to media such as yours to write a bespoke letter of introduction. However, as you see, the form I use is able to be specifically tailored to you. I hope this thin patina of personalness will help endear me to you while still limiting my workload.

Please consider the following

___ blog post
___ essay
___ short story
___ pithy quote
___ collection of barely legible post it notes


for inclusion in your publication. I have

___ read
___ never read
___ occasionally browsed
___ looked at the pictures in
___ become aware of


your magazine or newspaper, and I feel that my work would

___ look especially pretty trumpeted loudly on your cover.
___ be a poor match for any publication, so why not send it to yours?
___ fundamentally alter the nature of your publication for the better.
___ halve your circulation numbers, but don't you think you've gotten a bit too big for your britches?


For your response I have

___ enclosed a SASE.
___ included my address. Stamps are not cheap, and I am not made of money.
___ included my address and a bank routing number for your first payment.
___ left no contact information whatsoever.


I hope you will also consider

___ running my work as a regular column and thus catapulting us both to fame and glory.
___ eating better and getting more exercise.
___ reconsidering your decision on this.
___ sending me a letter about how you enjoyed my submission but will never publish it.


I thank you in advance for your

___ time and attention.
___ condescending dismissal.
___ weird and frankly unprofessional response.
___ fawning praise.
___ unusable advice that is nevertheless well meant.


Yours truly,




F. Calypso

An explanation of letters

It started a few days ago. Many more are coming. It's the letters. Letters to publishers, letters to agents, letters to magazines, and letters to newspapers. I have begun writing letters to submit my work for publication in the most ridiculous ways possible. Grandiose, clairvoyant, critical, silly, my letters are, oh my goodness, like clerkmanifesto blog posts! Wait, they are clerkmanifesto blog posts.

I have for a time wanted to submit some of these, now nearing a thousand, essays to a wider audience. The Internet stopped letting me even try, and I am now the only person banned on all 988 million websites. If you aren't already familiar with this blog and you try to look for it on the Internet all you will find is pictures of toasters. I don't know why toasters. It's an automated response to... me.

So I started thinking about going at readership the old fashioned way, with books, publishers, agents, magazines, and newspapers. But when I looked into it I quickly found that:

1. Nothing I write appears to match anything being published anywhere.

2. The submission process is touchy, boring, bureaucratic, and requires stamps.

3. I loathe rejection.

4. I'd rather keep this fun. Wealth, fame, and glory would need to come in under that basis.


So I decided to remain blisteringly over confident in my work. I decided any paper or magazine should bend to meet my work. I decided to freely ignore the normal conventions of the submission process. I decided to freely insult the editors I was writing to, albeit in a friendly manner. And I did everything I could to set aside any attempt at success, marketing, reasonableness, or professionalism. 

Suddenly I started blossoming letters! You should be seeing quite a few.

Will I send them?

It could happen. If the Nobel Prize won't come to me, I am willing to go to the Nobel Prize, so long as the path is strewn with flowers. 

Dear New Yorker Magazine

Dear New Yorker Magazine,



The New Yorker Magazine is a legendary magazine representing the heart of the deep literary history of New York City. It has published many of the great literary figures of the past 90 years, and has stood at the epicenter of American culture. Which is why I am eager both to publish my work in your brilliant and amazing magazine, and to one day read a copy of your magazine.

Unfortunately, never having read The New Yorker, except for an occasional cartoon, leaves me unclear on whether my work is of a suitable nature to be published in it. For instance, my writing is almost never about New York. Is that a problem?

But as I debated whether to send any of my writing to The New Yorker I realized that I publish my work every day on the Internet, which I know is entirely, almost comically unsuited to my writing, as are all the other venues I consider for publishing: Cat Fancy Magazine, my neighborhood newspaper, and all known publishing houses. Generally speaking my work is oddly unsuited for publication anywhere. So sending along work to a magazine not knowing if it's a suitable venue is far ahead of the curve for me. Indeed, I suspect it is my only chance, slim though it may be.

There is this though:

A few years ago I wrote The Eleven Secret Secrets of Writing and for some reason gave it to an older co-worker under some random burst of confident energy that led me to think she might enjoy it. This woman, now retired, was a person who revered The Great Gatsby and would have heard of your magazine and possibly even submitted a story or two to it in the 1970's. She read my piece and enjoyed it in the mild way people occasionally do with my writing when I haven't upset them with it. She had a suggestion for me as well. "You should submit it to The New Yorker. They won't publish it, but they might get a kick out of it."

It was quite a compliment. And what a dream come true prospect!

That concludes the account of my historical connections with your esteemed magazine. I herewith submit some random pieces for your consideration under no illusions that we have any kind of a future together. 

But this was fun. You New Yorker people are great listeners!



Kind regards,


F. Calypso




                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Dear literary agent 2

Dear Literary Agent:



You are probably wondering why you have not heard from me before.

It's not personal. I have meant no criticism of your expertise or of your talent as a literary agent. I am sure you are a terrific literary agent. Indeed, I feel that you alone are up to the grave and complex challenges of representing a writer such as myself.

Furthermore I have not neglected or forestalled writing you for fear of your disinterest in representing me. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Of course you'd want to represent me! That would be like The Cavern Club not letting the Beatles play, or Moses refusing the Ten Commandments.

I hope that doesn't sound over confident.

No, the only reason I have delayed contacting you is because I have been concerned for you. Now you are a simple, salt of the earth literary agent. You are kind to cats. You contribute as you can to the home for retired literary agents. You work hard. You are a good person. What happens when you become my literary agent, when you face and triumph over the legendary eight epic challenges of the literary agent, when the home for retired literary agents is named after you, when you can afford to have cats cloned to your specifications, when a '96 Pol Roger 2000 Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill Brut tastes harsh to your tongue, and when book publishers return your phone calls within a week? 

Who will you be then?

But then I woke up this morning and I thought that, in as much as I know you, which I don't, not even a tiny bit, you will be fine.

You will be fine. You can handle it.

So let's do this. I look forward to discussing absurdly lucrative book deal bids with you in the near future.



Yours truly,

F. Calypso