EDITORESS: From a publishing pointofview that is the $64,000,000162 question.
AVID READER: At least that was the pathetic state of my "literary" loveaffairs before Morons Awake! burst upon the bestseller scene with its tantalizing promises of "psychosexual and sociocultural Nirvana to any average American (or Moronic) woman with the mental stamina, spiritual courage and physical fortitude to read it from beginning to end."
EDITORESS: Promises that, strictlyspeaking, don't apply to these Introductory Remarks—but which I've nevertheless tried my d**nedest to keep.
AVID READER: And you're success in doing so has been nothing less than brilliant!
EDITORESS: Well if that's the way you feel; and since technically you've yet to begin reading Morons Awake!—forgive me, but I don't understand what the h**l you're complaining about?
AVID READER: Based on the hints I've been dropping so generously—and what you yourself said only a few moments ago; it doesn't take a brain surgeon or rocket scientist to figure out what is, in the final analysis, the most rudimentary of riddles.
EDITORESS: Rudimentary or otherwise; now that this "minor detour" of ours around your reading of Appendix A has blossomed into an odyssey of Homeric dimensions I'm not about to prolong the b***dy thing by engaging in any more guessing games! As the Morons say when their cranial mettle is put to the test by some "Highbrowed Weisenheimer" or "Semitic Smart A*s"163 who asks them a tricky question: "Either s**t or get off the f***king pot!"164
AVID READER: In that case you leave me no choice but to lay my cards on the table!
EDITORESS: Lay away, my dear reader, lay away!
AVID READER: If that's the way you want it, sister; here they are—in spades! As we say in my neck of the bridgeplaying woods, "read 'em and weep!" If these Introductory Remarks of yours are an accurate preview of what's in store for me when I actually do begin reading Morons Awake! I'm afraid the real question I must ask myself is this: Whether 'tis better to enjoy the blissfulbutalltoobrief literary loveaffair a woman can only have once in her lifetime; or to settle for the cheap thrill I can always count on getting from the trashier sort of bestseller?
EDITORESS: And that's the "agonizing dilemma" you've been torturing yourself over for the past 40 or 50 pages?
AVID READER: Yes. I'm sorry for being so blunt in dashing your pieinthesky hopes for "awakening millions of American 'morons' like me to the sociocultural (and/or psychosexual benefits) of reading their first "literary masterpiece"—but try as I might I couldn't find a gentler way of letting you down.
EDITORESS: Oh, you poor, pathetic, ignorant, naïve, miserable, bedeviled, ridiculous, simpleminded, absurd, clownish, helpless, pitiful, muddleheaded, artless, misguided, gormless, bewildered, selftormenting, silly little adorable fool! I don't know whether to laugh or cry!
AVID READER: Neither do I!
EDITORESS: My emotions are no less mixed about wanting to put you over my knee and spank that saucy bottom of yours for being such a perfect dunce—or giving you the big fat everloving hug and kiss you deserve as my star pupil!
AVID READER: Haven't I already been more than adequately punished for merely attempting to circumvent the reading of that d**ned Appendix A?
EDITORESS: Hmmm. Perhaps this gauntlet you've been made to run has taught you a suitably painful lesson about the price one must pay for taking shortcuts on the road to Klutzian salvation.
AVID READER: If the choice were mine to make I wish you would just tell me what in the world I could possibly have said or done to trigger all these contradictory signals you're sending me!
EDITORESS: What you did, my dear, was simply scare the living daylights out of me!
AVID READER: Really?
EDITORESS: Really.
AVID READER: How so—if you don't mind my asking?
EDITORESS: By stirring up what seemed at first like just another of your teacupsized tempests.
AVID READER: But the more you thought about it?
EDITORESS: The more the d**ned thing seemed to swirl around what might very well have been a fundamentally fatal flaw in that Grandest Of All Artistic Designs by which a single bestselling book magically transforms a nation of Ugly Cultural Ducklings into a Supersociety comprised (for the most part) of Epicurean Swans.
AVID READER: Good God—are you telling me that in my role as the Spokeswoman for all those other semiilliterate readers of Morons Awake! I actually succeeded in throwing a major analytical monkeywrench into your messianic masterplan?
EDITORESS: The short answer to that is, I'm afraid—yes!
AVID READER: Well, I don't know what to say; except that maybe I—and the millions of rank and file "sow's ears" I represent—aren't the "hopelesslylost silkpurse cause" we're accused of being by those phallocentric utopians who pontificate ad nauseum on the superior IQ with which the male sex was endowed from the beginning of human history by that most divinelyinspired of all creators.
EDITORESS: Well, in my professional opinion you have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of IQwise. Far from it! The progress you've made since we began these Introductory Remarks of mine has been nothing short of miraculous.
AVID READER: Ta Ta!
EDITORESS: Nevertheless; it would be imprudent not to add a few cautionary notes to any future fanfares you blow on your own trumpet.
AVID READER: There you go again; raining on my parade whenever I show the slightest sign of rising above the mediocrity of that AllAmerican mindset on which your neoMarxist/Fascist/Egalitarian scheme of things is predicated!
EDITORESS: Don't be silly. The maximizing of your Neanderthal mentality to the uppermost limits of its Homo sapiens potential is what bornagain Klutzianism is all about.
AVID READER: Then why shouldn't I congratulate myself for having outsmarted a MENSAtype like you with that monkeywrench of mine?
EDITORESS: Because, my sweet; having seen those "cards" you laid on the table, I'm more confident than ever my "fatal flaw" fears were as groundless as yours are about the "onceinalifetime" nature of that "blissfulbutalltoobrief literary loveaffair" Morons Awake! represents to the female reader of fairytale fiction whose Sleeping Beauty fantasies have been repeatedly frustrated by a long (and tedious) line of EasyComeEasyGo phantom Prince Charmings.165
AVID READER: Would you mind regurgitating that mouthful of neoBaroque mush in an English I might have at least a fighting chance of grasping with my limited cranial capacity and attention span?
EDITORESS: Not at all. Nittygrittywise, what I said boils down to this: Despite the significant strides you've made so far, there is still a slight educational gap between us which must be closed before we can both join the author in the metaphysical (but not necessarily immaculate) ménage a trois that begins with the very first sentence of Morons Awake!. Does that help?
AVID READER: It depends.
EDITORESS: On what?
AVID READER: On whether all those fancy dustjacket blurbs you wrote to the effect that: "By diligently reading Morons Awake! from cover to cover even the plainest of Plain Janes will find herself well on the way to living happily ever after" and "The previously unpublished author of this Greatest of all American Novels is the answer to every housewife's hopes, prayers and dreams that she might be rescued from the curse of her sociocultural, psychosexual and/or marital/extramarital narcolepsy by the Magic Wand—or singularly seminal pen—of a literary mastermind" are the G*d's honest truth or just so much publishinghouse horses**t?
EDITORESS: Unfortunately, such a thorny question can't be answered with a simple yes or no.
AVID READER: I thought so!
EDITORESS: But, without splitting too many hairs, let me put it to you this way: While Morons Awake! is, in my expert editorial opinion, a novel whose singular seminality cannot be denied, it is also an irrefutable fact there are thousands upon thousands of other almost equally fabulous fish swimming in what is—thankfully for us women—a vast manmade ocean of intellectual spunk. No. The truly unique thing about Morons Awake! isn't its unprecedented triumph as a Bestselling Novel, Revolutionary Manifesto and Artistic Masterpiece; but in bringing off that triple miracle it also manages to provide its reader with a one volume Compendium, Syllabus, Lexicon, Microencyclopedia, Pseudoscholarly Smorgasbord and McGuffey's Reader For The AutodidacticallyInclined she can use to plan her future forays into that most magical of all Fairytale Kingdoms: the enchanted realm found in the fertile imagination of an Aeschylus,166 Agee, Akutagawa, Albee, Algardi, Andreyev, Andric, Antonioni, Apollonaire, Ariosto, Aristophanes, Asch, Auden, Bakst, Balzac, Barber, Barth, Bartok, Beaudelaire, Bax, Beardsley, Beaumarchais, Beckett, Beethoven, Bejart, Bellini, Belloc, Bellow, Benton, Berg, Bergman, Bernini, Bernstein, Bierce, Bizet, Bjørnson, Blake, Boccaccio, Boccherini, Boccioni, Böll, Borodin, Botticelli, Boucher, Brancusi, Braque, Brecht, Bruckner, Büchner, Buffet, Bunuel, vByron, Cage, Camus, Canaleto, Capote, Capra, Caravaggio, Cèline, Cervantes, Cèzanne, Chagall, Chaplin, Chaucer, Chekhov, Chènier, Chopin, Clementi, Cocteau, Conrad, Copland, Corneille, Coward, Dali, D'Annunzio, Dante, Daumier, David, DaVinci, Debussy, Defoe, Degas, Delibes, Delius, Diaghilev, Dickens, Donatello, Dostoyevsky, Duchamp, Dufy, Dürer. Durrenmatt, Dvorak, Eakins, Eisenstein, Elgar, El Greco, Eliot (T.S.), Emerson, Ernst, Farquhar, Faulkner, Fauré, Fellini, Flaubert, Frescobaldi, Frisch, Gaugin, Gautier, Genét, Gershwin, Giacometi, Giorgione, Giotto, Giraudoux, Gluck, Goethe, Gogol, Goldberg, Goncharov, Gongora y Argote, Goya, Grosz, Grünewald, Hals, Haydn, Hindemith, Hiroshige, Hochhuth, Hofmannsthal, Hogarth, Holbein (the Elder), Holbein (the Younger), Hopper, Ibsen, Ingres, Ives, Janacek, Joyce, Kafka, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Klimt, Klopstock, Kodaly, Kokoschka, Ku K'ai-chih, Kurosawa, Langland, Lawrence (D.H.), Leoncavallo, Lermontov, Li Po, Liszt, Lorca, Lutoslawski, MacLeish, Magritte, Mahler, Mailer, Malamud, Mallarmé, Manet, Mann (T.), Mann (H.), Marinetti, Marivaux, Marlowe, Masaccio, Massenet, Matisse, Matsuo, Mendelssohn, Michelangelo, Milhaud, Miller (H.), Miller (A.), Modigliani, Moliere, Molnar, Monteverdi, Mozart, O'Neill, Orff. Orwell, Ovid, Petronius, Picasso, Plautus, Poulenc, Pound, Poussin, Praxiteles, Prokofiev, Proust, Puccini, Purcell, Pushkin, Racine, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rimbaud, Robbe-Grillet, Rodin, Rossini, Rousseau (H), Rushdie, Sade, Saint-Exupéry, Salinger, Sartre, Schiele, Schubert, Shakespeare, Shaw, Shostakovich, Sophocles, Steinbeck, Sternheim, Stockhausen, Strauss (R.), Stravinsky, Synge, Tagore, Tanizaki, Tasso, Tennyson, Terence, Tintoretto, Titian, Tolstoy, Toulouse-Lautrec, Trollope, Truffaut, Turner, Twain, Utamaro, Utrillo, Van Dyck, Van Eyck, Van Gogh, Velazquez, Verdi, Verlaine, Veronese, Verrocchio, Wagner, Weill, Whitman, Wilde, Wilder, Witkiewicz, Wolfe (T.C.), Wyeth (N.C.), Yeats, Yevtushenko, Zeromski, Zuckmayer, Zwieg—
AVID READER: All right! Enough! You've made your point!
EDITORESS: You're not saying that just to shut me up, are you?
AVID READER: No, no, no. Nothing could be farther from my mind! I really am beginning to see a glimmer of enlightenment at the end of what's been a very dark tunnel.
EDITORESS: So; that tantalizingly long list of Literary Lions, Musical Musclemen and Artistic Amorists did manage to allay your fears that by reading Morons Awake! you might be left in a more or less permanent state of—to coin a pseudoFreudian phrase—postEpiphanal depression.
AVID READER: That's one way of putting it.
EDITORESS: Is there any other way to explain your eagerness now to make that Klutzian leap of faith you previously thought might result not in a blissful sociocultural apotheosis but a scandalous act of psychosexual folly?
AVID READER: Oh, there is another explanation all right; but it's one I hesitate revealing unless you sincerely mean what you keep saying about our being totally honest with one another.
EDITORESS: Of course I mean it! Good G*d, woman; I haven't come all this way only to bail out just before the runaway trains of our opposing thoughts on this matter collide in what promises to be one h**l of a dialectical bang!
AVID READER: Well then; this is how I actually came to experience my "moment of truth." While you were busy reciting that Who's Who of the world's most illustrious makeout artists I was able to browse through enough of Morons Awake! to satisfy myself it has a fighting chance of being what your dustjacket blurbs claim it is, namely: "The one and only bestselling novel to ever provide the average American housewife with virtually everything she needs for pursuing that solitary happiness which comes from appreciating the finer things in a life where she no longer depends on the kindness of strange men to satisfy her psychosexual needs."
EDITORESS: In the final analysis I suppose it doesn't matter all that much how the two of us found our way back to Square One as long as we've finally managed to do so!
AVID READER: Ah, yes—good old "Square One."
EDITORESS: I don't mind telling you; there were times when I had trouble remembering exactly where "good old" Square One was!
AVID READER: But now that we've arrived you haven't any doubts at all about where it is we actually are?
EDITORESS: Certainly not!
AVID READER: Then would you please be good enough to tell me since I seem to have completely lost my bearings?
EDITORESS: We are at that pregnant point in my abridged telling of "THE AMAZING TALE OF THE PROVIDENTIAL ROLE MR LEOPOLD BLOOM WAS FATED TO PLAY BY NOT WRITING THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL" when our hero has just arrived at work on what was to be the most eventful of all those previous occasions when he routinely clocked in for his "early bird" shift in the mail room of that midtownManhattan publishinghouse where he had been employed for the past 70 years! Does that refresh your memory?
AVID READER: Yes. Although the scenario you describe seems terribly remote; as if it came from some ancient epic dealing with the tragic consequences of hubrisG 167 rather than that alltoocontemporary yarn of sexual harassment in the workplace you started spinning less than an hour ago!
EDITORESS: I must confess to sharing your opinion about the "eternal aura" surrounding this (relatively) evanescentG conversation we are having!
AVID READER: You don't think these "tricks" time appears to be playing on us are a sign my collaboration in writing your Introduction to the Great American WakeupCall entitles us both to bathe in the everlasting glory of its author and the Moronic Mastermind whose martyrdom for the sake of saving Western Civilization inspired the novelizing of his massianic message, do you?
EDITORESS: Of course not! Frankly, my dear, I'm astonished you would even entertain such a preposterous idea, let alone proposition me with it!
AVID READER: Oh?
EDITORESS: Yes, darling. I think it's plain that, for the pettiest sort of personal reasons, you're attempting to exploit the intimacy I established with you for purposes which were strictly altruistic.
AVID READER: That's not fair! Considering the ordeal we've just been through together-not to mention all the other h—lish torments damsels in our distressed circumstances are routinely forced to endure168 I don't think I'm being at all selfish by seeking to extend my "fame" beyond those lousy 15 minutes granted to a complete nobody like me if she just happens to find herself thrust upon the stage of world affairs at a crucially climactic moment in the drama of human history.
EDITORESS: Don't you understand? Even if everything you say is true—and I have no reason to believe it's not—any sympathy I might have for your heartrending claims to permanent glory is neither here nor there! As an editoress I might have the power to influence the outcome of an author's bid for bookofthemonthclubtype celebrity, but in the final analysis his— and/or your—immortality is a matter that can only be decided by (for lack of a better word) the "gods." Besides, you foolish little opportunist; in practical terms what could I possibly do to satisfy your limelight lust I haven't already done by devoting so many of these precious169 pages to a discussion of your lessthan brilliant "career" as an extra in a crowd scene where 250 million Americans sleepwalk170 their way toward the cliff's edge171 of cultural oblivion? But don't get me wrong.
AVID READER: Believe me; I'm trying my d**ndest not to!
EDITORESS: We're not saying your role as spokesperson for those millions of women silently reading their first literary masterpiece172 isn't deeply appreciated by we whose editorial gestalt has been shaped within the ivycovered walls of an idealistic milieu where the pedestrian hopes, dreams, desires and passions of Mainstreet, USA occasionally get lost in the corporate shuffle of a midtownManhattan publishinghouse.
AVID READER: J***s, I wish you'd stop jerking me around this g*dd**ned mulberry bush and just say what the h**l is on your f**king mind?
EDITORESS: What I'm trying to tell you as diplomatically as I can is this: Your "reward" for helping us launch this Second (sociocultural) American Revolution will, regrettably, be that of all those Unknown Soldiers (and/or Soldierettes) who sacrificed themselves in the original struggle to gain our (geopolitical) independence.
AVID READER: Well, thank you very much—for absolutely nothing!
EDITORESS: We can understand where you're coming from emotionally, darling. But if you take a moment to reflect on what's involved I think you'll see your anonymity is in keeping with the Klutzian Admonition which states: "In matters where one is tempted to claim credit for advancing the cause of mankind's sociocultural betterment, humility is always the wisest policy."
AVID READER: That's easy for you, the author and your Moronic "Massiah" to say since your three names are headed for the History Hall of Fame while if I'm remembered at all it will only be as the "Avid Reader!"
EDITORESS: I assure you; if it weren't for Morons Awake!'s exceptional credibility problems the author and I would be more than happy to keep our real identities a secret—especially from the more fanatical elements of that international conspiracy to prevent its bestsellerdom. As for our "Moronic Massiah," you can hardly blame him for a saintly stature he only acquired posthumously; and-as you will learn later—after having spent his entire adult life in a state of self imposed quarantine to avoid being contaminated and/or persecuted by the pervasive antiIntellectualism of the Moronic society into which he was born. Additionally, had the choice been ours to make, the author, and (most certainly) I, would have preferred any handle other than "Jack F. Klutz" for a prophet whose fame would rival (and someday surpass) that of such Superhumanitarians as Aristotle, Jesus of Nazareth, Mahomet, Guatama Buddha, Girolamo Savonarola, William Shakespeare, Johan Sebastian Bach, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Walt Whitman and Mohandas Ghandhi; all of whose messianic monickers fall so much more trippingly from the tongue than does the one with which this Savior of Saviors was saddled by his wellintentionedbutwithoutapoeticalboneinherbeautifulblondebody Moronic Madonna.173
AVID READER: I assume that sob story about the "sacrifice" our humble little Miss Jayne "Modesty'sMyMiddlename" Playne is "forcing" herself to make in being canonized as a member of the Holy Trinity which rescued mankind from drowning in its own mediocrity is the best I can expect to get for my martyrdom in furthering the same noble cause?
EDITORESS: I'm afraid it is. Except to repeat—on the author's behalf—his profound gratitude for your having vindicated his "blind" faith174 in the average housewife's capacity for rising to the kind of lofty artistic occasion he has created between the covers of what purports to be "just another blockbusting bestseller." And, before we end this special relationship of ours, if you will permit me to speak for myself—on a womantowoman basis?
AVID READER: Why not? Although before doing so I should let you know I have yet to be persuaded you and the author aren't one and the same person—
EDITORESS: Ah—
AVID READER: Which makes your "womantowoman" proposition a dubious one. Unless, of course, the "author" of Morons Awake! is in reality an authoress?
EDITORESS: Naturally I'm disappointed you feel that way. But your suspicions in that regard don't come as a complete surprise.
AVID READER: They don't?
EDITORESS: No. Actually you've managed to put your finger on the one paradox of all those which have plagued my editing of this book from the start that, try as I mightily as I could, has proven itself to be quite insoluble.
AVID READER: Did I really and truly do what you just said I did?
EDITORESS: Yes, my pet; you really and truly did!
AVID READER: At the risk of sounding like a complete idiot could I ask you on what paradox in particular I managed to put my finger?
EDITORESS: To the contrary! Taking such risks is a sure sign you're wise enough to know you aren't nearly as smart as you think you are. As Klutz himself said in his Words of Moronic Wisdom: The road leading us to the bliss of erudition is paved with foolish, stupid and/or idiotic questions!"
AVID READER: That is reassuring.
EDITORESS: The paradox about which you're so curious is this: While the success of Morons Awake! as a bestselling novel hinges on the reader's belief in the otherwise unbelievable "facts" concerning: (1) Its author's bonafides as a 70plusyearold exambassador with a PhD in cultural anthropology who is making his literary debut by writing an artistic masterpiece; (2) The existence of an ancient European microstate called Moronia, and; (3) A child prodigy, adolescent mastermind and fullygrown (but murdered most foully in his prime) Renaissance Man par excellence whose IQ never exceeded 100—its impact as a Revolutionary Manifesto and Literary Masterpiece depends on cultivating in that very same reader a healthy skepticism about every word she reads in a book pretending it has a monopoly on the truth.
AVID READER: Wow!
EDITORESS: Does that answer your question then?
AVID READER: Believe it or not what you just said does explain the mixed emotions I've been having as a "Born Again NeoEgalitarian" who is nevertheless steadfast in her agnosticism when she is asked to accept the "divinity" of a "massiah" named "Klutz" who comes from a "country" called "Moronia" by a geriatric "first time novelist" claiming to be its former "American ambassador!"
EDITORESS: Well, since we seem to be on something of a roll let us deal with the point you raised a moment ago about the ambiguity of the sexual role—or lack thereof—I am playing in our relationship. Once again, a quotation from Jack F. Klutz175 might prove to be illuminating. "The advantage of a literary and/or artistic 'loveaffair' lies in the fact that since all of its psychosexual action occurs from the neck up, for any conceivably practical purpose, the gender (and number) of its participants is of little or no consequence."176
AVID READER: Does that mean what I think it means?
EDITORESS: That depends, doesn't it, on what you think it means?
AVID READER: It seems perfectly plain to me that when you cut through all of that "transcendental" Klutzian claptrap we find ourselves facetoface with the good old Mword!
EDITORESS: Excuse me, but just what "good old Mword" do you have in mind?
AVID READER: Are you seriously suggesting someone with your "editoress' expertise" in what makes the average housewife tick trashynovelreadingwise isn't intimately conversant with the good old Mword?
EDITORESS: That's exactly what I'm suggesting, darling. So you'll have to spell out the "good old Mword "for me before I can intelligently respond to whatever it is you're trying to insinuate by engaging me in this game of semantic hide&seek.
AVID READER: If you insist on making a g*dd*m federal case out of it, what I'm driving at is this: When you boil them all down, aren't those fanciful phrases about "literary loveaffairs," "sociocultural Nirvana," "saving humanity," "reversing the decline of Western Civilization," "the pursuit of psychosexual happiness," "the everlasting rapture of erudition," and "awakening 250 million Americans from their moronic enthrallment with the bliss of ignorance" merely euphemisms for engaging in what is only a marginally more "respectable" form of the mental m**********n a woman practices when reading those adult female fairytales in which the farthest fetched of her f*********n fantasies are fulfilled by an author from whose magical pen flows the stuff out of which she can construct a customized Prince Charming to jumpstart her dormant sexlife?
EDITORESS: I think that question indicates the time has come for us to end what began, after all, as only a "minor detour" brought about by your attempt to circumvent the reading of Appendix A. Besides; judging from the way in which you crafted it I'm not sure there's much more I should—or can—do to rectify your educational shortcomings! So; without any further ado let us say our fond farewells and return to those (more or less) conventional roles you and I were playing before we got tangled up in this little behindthescenes pas de deux of ours.
AVID READER: In the final analysis what choice do I have but to accept your proposal with this reply: The sorrow of our parting is suddenly sweetened by my realization that all of this has been but a prologue to the most passionate phase of the imaginary menage a trois whose unfolding begins with the first sentence of Morons Awake!
EDITORESS: Please, darling, don't misconstrue what I'm about to say as being another of my lefthanded compliments; but those extremely well chosen words you just spoke were taken right out of my mouth! And now, back to our story—
Intro Part 14 Return to Index
Footnotes
162 As we go to press for this edition of Morons Awake! the most recent industrywide sales figure for nonliterary (trash) fiction is closer to $640,000,000.
163 These Moronic epithets are comparable to the somewhat more elegant pejoratives—such as "egghead," "scholar," "nerd," "elitist," "genius" and "JewishIntellectual"—used by most Americans to verbalize their contempt for anyone with an IQ exceeding par for the egalitarian course.
164 Owing to the paradoxical streak of Puritanism running through their conversational ethos this popular example of Moronic folk wisdom is in fact generally articulated as follows: "Either es-blank-blank-tee or get off the ef-blank-blank-king pot."
165 Sometimes known as the Turandot Syndrome—or TS—this flingless frame of the female mind results from a woman's repeated failure to find a lover who comes even close to meeting her girlhood expectations for living happily ever after with the man unto whom she surrenders herself body and soul. Though less common among the readers of romance novels—whose tolerance for being flummoxed by false Nirvana prophets, pied pornopipers, gothic bunkoartists, literary gigolos and psychosexual charlatans is apparently limitless—cases similar to that apparently afflicting our AVID READER have been reported by some researchers into what is, for those whose livelihood depends on publishing the trashier kinds of books, more than just an academic curiosity.
166 The reader can use the ensuing list to (roughly) ascertain her Klutzian Brow Level (KBL) by checking the boxes of those cultural celebrities for which she can name at least one of his illustrious works. For example, in Aeschylus' case this would mean knowing he had written any of these 7 famous plays: The Persians, Prometheus Bound, Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants, Agamemnon, The Chloëphoroe or The Eumenides. The reader's KBL can be obtained by totaling the number of boxes so checked and applying the following table thereto: More than 250=SuperHigh brow (SHB); 225-249=Middle Highbrow (MHB); 200-224=Lower Highbrow (LHB); 175-199=Upper Middlebrow (UMB); 150-174= Middle Middlebrow (MMB); 125-149=Lower Middlebrow (LMB); 100-124=Upper Lowbrow (ULB); 75-99 Middle Lowbrow (MLB); 0-75 Lower Lowbrow (LLB)
167 Can this be a literary allusion (by way of my "Dirty Old" Leo Bloom and his randy precursor in Joyce's Ulysses) to the ordeal undergone by Odysseus for leaving poor Penelope in a fornicational lurch for 20 years while he was off trying to rescue some Spartan tart from her Trojan abductor? If so, it's nothing short of miraculous how much progress toward becoming erudite this runofthemill American housewife has already made in the course of reading these Brief Introductory Remarks!
168 I presume THE AVID READER has misconstrued my earlier references to the "hell hole" and "salt mine" conditions in which a Publisher's Reader routinely works as being somehow comparable to her life of domestic slavery. Nothing could be farther from the truth of course. Even languishing lovelessly at the bottommost rung of the bookpublishing ladder is manifestly more "romantic" than wasting one's womanhood in a permanently suspended state of conjugal animation.
169 An adjective having more to do with the average novel reader's impatience over having her prurient expectations put on hold by any prefatory preliminaries than it has with the value of my writing.
170 This is by no means an allAmerican phenomenon—as those quintessentially Gallic somnambulists demonstrate with such metaphorical brilliance at the end of Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
171 Can any literary image be more protoKlutzian than that of Holden Caulfield as he imagines himself to be a "catcher" of children who, in the bliss of their juvenile ignorance, fail to notice the precipice lurking just beyond the Edenesque field of rye wherein they frolic so free of care?
172 Excluding those whose (speed)reading was required in order to graduate from highschool and college.
173 Klutz was originally baptized George (for Washington) Thomas (for Jefferson) Harry (for Truman) Klutz. The highly unusual (if not miraculous) circumstances surrounding his second christening as Jack F. (for Fitzgerald) Klutz are described in Book Two of Morons Awake!. And in her defense it should be mentioned that (with the single exception of the faux pas in renaming him) Maria Bimbeaux Klutz was—by even the most civilized (non Moronic) standards—an altogether admirable mother. This is especially so if one takes her profound ignorance into account when admiring the saintly forbearance she exhibited toward young Klutz's Highbrow proclivities; an intellectual affliction which the Morons regard as a sure sign of nothing less than racial treason.
174 There was no shortage of doubting Thomases in the chain of corporate command to whom I argued the case this book had the potential for becoming a runaway bestseller because of the fullyfrontalized nature of the mental challenge it presented to a female readership unaccustomed to being treated by the book publishing industry as if—IQwise—they weren't second class citizens.
175 This time we are consulting his Sermon to the Sexually Handicapped, Disadvantaged and/or Chronically Deprived on the Equal Opportunity Aspects of Transcendental Intercourse. As always, since all of Klutz's writings remain sealed in the "Evidence Room" of Moronia's FIB headquarters, any "quotations" from them appearing in this introduction and the book that follows are a product of the author's photographic memory.
176 Despite the reputation he deliberately earned for being a "makeout artist" among the Middle- and UpperLowbrow coworkers with whom he socialized as one of Moronia's "solid citizens" in order to conceal his private persona as a Highbrow, it appears—from what little evidence there is—that, at the time of his death, Klutz was in fact a virgin.
Glossary
evanescent adj [L evanescent-, evanescens, prp. of evanescere](1717) : tending to vanish like vapor
hubris noun [Gk hybris](1884) : exaggerated pride or selfconfidence