live lit

He finished reading the pages of prose - eight of them, single spaced, no paragraphs - and thrust his hips and, subsequently, his genitals towards the small crowd. Live Lit had become quite a thing in the city, and he had been grooming a handful of promoters for the last few months for a slot at one of the bigger monthlies, assuring them via essay of his immense worth and acknowledging his contextual placement within the canon (whilst simultaneously proclaiming the – in fact – superfluity and obsolescence of it resultant of his own ground breaking work), and plying them with emailed collations of his own grandiose profoundly unfunny tweets, really just his usual prose efforts broken often awkwardly into 140 character segments, until they at last relented, gave him the opening slot one Tuesday night. The silence was harsh, even hostile.

“Clap then you dumb fucks, he sneered.

“Fuck off and fuck off hard,” said one already drunk punter, who’d come for the local boy they were calling “the next Patrick O’Brian”.

“Clap? What the fuck for?” said one of the promoters, half-hiding behind his own notes.

“You ignorant bastards,” he said, holding his rolled-up manuscript aloft like an incredibly valuable prize. “You just listened to genius. Fucking genius. So fucking clap.”

“Look, if I could anticlap I fucking would,” said some joker. It raised a laugh at least, more of a response than his whole text had managed.

“You pretentious arse,” said one of the two present women. They were both scheduled to read later, and both were incredibly popular. No doubt their extensive fan base didn’t bother showing up for the opening acts, fucking bleeding hearts.

He threw the manuscript across the room. The pages separated - he found it very hard to read from stapled pages - and fell barely a foot in front of him. He wouldn't gather them, he thought, and did immediately.

“This is a fucking joke,” he said. “All of it. Live Lit? LIVE SHIT. You twats wouldn't know literature if it fucked your wives.”

“Listen to yourself,” said an especially angry performance poet. He turned up at all these events - even the exclusively prose-focused ones - and did his ‘thing’, a loathsome outpouring of pointing and shouting and saying zilch. “Never heard of grammar?” A roar of assent carped round the room.

“You have no fucking idea,” he said. “NONE. I’ve ‘heard of’ your ‘grammar’. What the fuck is this, eighteen-fucking-something-something? Grammar. Grammar’s the instrument of the middle classes, a shackle on the freedom of expression and creativity. I shit on your grammar!” People were getting up, to piss or go to the bar. It was worse than the heckling, which was a dialogue at least. “Paragraphs are for shit,” he said, yearning for the focus back on him, “for people too fucking lazy and thick to try. You've got to expect to work for your pleasure, for the reward of fucking ART! You want to get laid, you work at it. You want to eat nice food, you work at it. You want to watch Tar-cocking-kovsky, you fucking work for it! Work, you arseholes! You’re all CUNTS!”

“Just shut yourself up chap,” the poet said, his practised tone conciliatory and desperately patronising. “No one minds struggling to listen if there’s something to hear, yeah?”

“Think about it friend,” the promoter said. Opinion validated he was no longer hiding behind his notes. Arial. What a cunt.

Led by the poet they applauded when he left.