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(SCENE: A table at the back of the Blind Poet.)

James: …I don’t wish to upset you, but there is presently so much to publish on the website that some contributions will inevitably have to be postponed until a later date…

Tychy: But all of those which end up being published seem to be your boring book reviews, and all of those which are “postponed” are my contributions…

James: That’s unfair. I agree that the book reviews are tedious – I can’t understand how anybody can read them – but they attract more traffic to the website than anything else. And those who end up on the website because they have typed “Poe Black Cat” or “Babo Melville” into Google are more likely to read your fiction than those who follow the WordPress tags.

Tychy: But why can’t you just publish everything immediately?

James: Well I have calculated that the website has some regular readers – about forty or so – and I think that they would prefer the website to be updated regularly and with short, readable articles. When it comes to your contributions, I did post “Impotence,” which was very clever and funny.

Tychy: But not “Biggy,” which was intended as a companion piece? Or “Letter from the Man in the Moon”?

James: The “Man in the Moon” is very original and will definitely be published, although it rather gets under the feet of my “Revolutionary Romance” essays which I want to post in the coming weeks. I’m undecided on “Biggy” – that story features lots of words like “penis” and “wanked” which attract the wrong sort of readers to the website.

Olaf: I recently read a very weird piece on your website called “The Hyenas”…

James: I wrote that one. It was inspired by some lines in Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1936), which, to quote from memory, describe “the hyena, hermaphroditic, self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer, potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler, camp-follower, stinking, foul, with jaws that crack the bones the lions leave, belly dragging, loping away on the brown plain, looking back, mongrel dog-smart in the face…” Hemingway tells a story about shooting a hyena and watching it pull its own intestines out – “jerking them out and eating them with a relish.”

Olaf: Is that story true?

James: Well I had a little research session on the internet. I watched videos on Youtube of hyenas eating antelopes alive and I listened to recordings of their crazy laughter. And they are absolute devils. The female hyena has a virginal phallus and she gives birth through it. After suffering this dreadful ordeal, she will likely witness her litter tearing each other apart. Hyenas eat animals alive, feet first, and they eat everything – hair, skin, bones. Before investigating the hyenas I had not believed in evil, but they convinced me of the existence of real devilry. There is something uncanny and otherworldly and indescribably awful to hyenas. My fictional account of them was, however, just innocent sadism.

Tychy: I thought that “The Hyenas” was pure cynicism. You thought that a story about being eaten alive by hyenas would attract hundreds of visitors to our website…

James: It didn’t though. There was some literary worth to the story, however – it was an attempt at a Blackwood’s sensation tale, a promising genre which has inexplicably declined within modern literature.

Olaf: What was the point of “John McCain’s Vietnam Diaries”?

James: It was brief and light, but to make more of it would have required too much research. John McCain is an absolute pig – a very nasty piece of work – and whilst his torments at the hands of the Vietnamese are widely cited, the Western media refuses to acknowledge that he spent two years bombing Vietnamese civilian infrastructure. It must be possible for a news organisation such as the B.B.C. to identify living individuals whose parents were killed, or whose school was destroyed, during McCain’s bombing raids. It’s just a question of matching the dates of his raids to the targets which were hit, and there exist records of both. Perhaps one could even calculate the number of deaths for which he is personally responsible.

Tychy: You commissioned a review of Obama’s The Audacity of Hope (2006) from me…

James: Indeed.

Tychy: That sort of thing interests you far more than it does me. The Audacity of Hope is impressively well written for a Presidential candidate – and Obama has a knack for anecdote – but its otherwise rather flimsy and inconsequential. He apparently takes both sides on the abortion question, but he neither defends nor dismisses the idea that the state should police a woman’s body. It’s unclear what he thinks a foetus is. He analyses American foreign policy disasters, the rise in domestic immigration, and the decline of the nuclear family with some insight, but he concludes that its just best to take a practical, pragmatic approach to these issues. He seems to be a social democrat and he apparently believes that the U.S. economy is in long term decline and that the state must intervene to fund education, research, and development. Yet America’s deficit is gigantic – and aggravated by its perpetual wartime economy – and if Obama wins in November, he’ll spend most of his Presidency just trying to balance the books.

James: I was more interested in the personal angle… his showroom life…

Tychy: Well Obama lets on that he’s a sort of corny, Fred-Flintstone, hopeless Dad, whose wife is always right and whose kids are always wisecracking. He is one of these infuriating politicians who believes that the state should intervene to arrest the decline of the family, by championing families, subsidising them, and educating people about how to be families. I object to those who call themselves family politicians but who don’t trust people to lead decent lives and who assume that the family will never become popular amongst a force as dark and as philistine as their electorates. But Obama’s argument actually acknowledges a sort of economic determinism. He presents himself as an ordinary American dad, struggling to spend time with his family, and he promises to ensure that American parents have access to childcare and paternity leave. Curiously this forms the climax of his book and it represents a sort of leftish intrusion into the traditionally conservative territory of family values.

James: Your review of The Audacity could have alternatively contributed to a historical survey of campaign memoirs. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a memoir of Franklin Pierce, if I remember correctly – although I’ve never read it.

Tychy: Some of the post Civil-War Presidents such as Grant must have produced some interesting campaign material. But I’m more interested in the sort of individual who personally aspires to rule America and who then launches himself at the White House like a missile. Their memoirs have to carefully balance the messianic with a conspicuous ordinariness, so that the ordinary American can both identify with the candidate and identify them as a man destined to lead millions. When reading Obama’s account of America’s past and destiny, personality and citizenship, and society and culture, one recalls Walt Whitman’s panorama of America: “And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”

James: I suspect that you would end up writing an untidy article.

Olaf: I had an idea to write up something for your website – a joke – but James said that it was not good enough.

Tychy: Let’s hear the joke.

James: I tell it better. Prince Charles is walking through the Royal Botanic Gardens and he sees a sort of rockery – a splendid floral display. Charles spies a man tending the rockery and he approaches this man and strikes up a conversation. “Superb rockery,” he enthuses, “…and how long have you worked at the Botanic Gardens?”

“Actually,” admits the worker, “I don’t technically work at the Royal Botanic Gardens. I live in a hospital because I’m very unwell, but they let me out for one day a week and I come here to tend to my rockery.”

Prince Charles is aghast. “But you’re such a talented gardener… it seems absurd that you do not have a full time job here. I will personally speak to the chairman of the Botanic Gardens and ensure that you are given a job immediately.”

Tears well up in the gardener’s eyes. “Will you? Will you really?”

“I promise.”

The gardener clasps Charles’ hand. “And you won’t forget?”

“I will not!” Charles insists.

Prince Charles is walking away when a largely rock smacks him on the back of the head. He turns around.

“And are you sure you won’t forget now?”