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Hearing the Nino Rota score reminded me of Fellini, which reminded me of La Dolce Vita (the film that gave the world “paparazzi”), which reminded me of the wild parties in that movie, which reminded me that we have two Bret Easton Ellis books to give away.

La Dolce Vita by Sketchmovie

Here is this week’s assignment: In 1,000 words or less, write me a tale of the after-after-party. What happens after a night of excess, overindulgence, and behavior you wish you didn’t remember? Why is everyone yelling at you? How did that bowling alley get inside your skull? Who are these people? How are you going to explain that video? Is that a sloth?

It doesn’t have to be in the first person; it could happen to someone else. The prize: Less Than Zero and its sequel, Imperial Bedrooms.

Start feeling that hangover.

You have until Sunday, 26 September at 12 noon to post your entries in Comments.

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

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Thank you for the first entry. We know time is a fluid concept, but we said AFTER.

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The first entry has been deleted upon the author’s request.

As for the second entry the Yucch-meter nearly self-destructed at the line, “He immediately succumbs to the ground” and was forced to reboot for its own sanity.

It’s that kind of contest.

HELP.

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Thursday. The Yucch-meter is rebooting and will resume service later today. Meanwhile here’s visual, properly out of focus.

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With the exception of Evan’s short and nasty shocker, the entries feel like the same story submitted eight times. They all suffer from obviousness. There are some details that stand out, and we don’t mean the disgraceful attempts of entry #4 to ingratiate himself with the Yucch-meter (There is a way to do wink-wink nudge-nudge self-referential in-jokey comedy. It is not with a sledgehammer). rani’s description of the self-inflicted bites is the sort of detail that makes a story seem real. angus25, cochise_miz and ariadnespins all use obvious pop culture references (The Bride? Audioslave? White Stripes?) to signify how “hip” they are.

We move that the word “hip” be retired and replaced with “pelvis”.

Here’s a depressing thought: Your notions of debauchery are identical. The more far-out you think you are, the more you are like everyone else.

Is that all you’ve got? And why so serious? Is that guilt?

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The Yucch-meter is back after a full day’s rest and recuperation. There’s nothing like 11 straight hours of sleep to recharge the battery. Now to work.

ralphwaldo: Thank you for not beginning your entry with some variation of “Shet pare, I got so wasted last night.” You have the germ of a story here—young man, faithful household retainer, dying mother, the Eros-Thanatos sex-and-death thing. The Jake character could use some personality. You need a hook.

winnerific: Oy, this time from the “Shet mare, I got so wasted last night” school. But the voice is interesting and the jumpy tone of the internal monologue is sustained throughout. Is this drawn from real life? Do not be the nanny.

jake: Aha, the Raymond Carver-ness. No mention of what had transpired the previous night, but the reader gets that alcohol was involved. Good.

Momelia: Hysterical! You have staked a claim on the comic-absurdist territory in these contests. While reading this piece I imagined Meatloaf and his giant breasts in Fight Club. Could you be…the gay Chuck Palahniuk?! (Newsflash: Chuck Palahniuk is now openly gay. Making Momelia…the straight Chuck Palahniuk?)

dibee: Brilliant. Makes way more sense than Inception. None of that “But you said we had to do A or B would happen. But wait, there’s C! No one’s ever tried it, but it could lead to D!” And the dialogue is solid. You should write movies.

Ejia: That’s bizarre, but it is entertaining. Too much hyperbole. And you can’t just spring the demons on the reader, there has to be some clue early on that the supernatural is involved. You know, the gun that will be fired towards the end.

shadowplay: An engaging (literally) plot is drowned in overworked, often awkward prose. The reader is so preoccupied with untangling the syntax that she may lose the plot altogether. Just tell the story, don’t complicate matters. Complication does not equal depth.

macbookpro: Clever, getting biblical on this challenge. Sodom and Gomorrah did get nuked for their debauchery. I like the part in Genesis that comes before this one—where Abraham has the chutzpah to negotiate. What if I find 50? 40? 20? What if there are ten? Then there’s that disturbing part where Lot’s daughters get their father drunk. Ewww.

2Qt2BSTR8: We are joined by a bruha. You had us at “Revens, honey, revens…” Will see die in a car crass, sipwreck, or avalans? Good use of detail, and the song references are used as atmosphere rather than descriptive shortcuts.

quocksock: We weren’t sure we could publish your story as it is fairly graphic. However we do feature the winners of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Bad Sex Awards, so why not. Unlike many bestselling romance novels, your story is intentionally funny. At least we hope the funny is intentional. We can’t wait for the cannibalism sequence.

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Here’s the last batch of yucch-meter readings.

Ejia: The classic Twilight Zone story works not just because it contains a clever twist but because the reader feels something for the protagonist, be it pity, disgust, or a sort of kinship. The character in your story is merely smug, and not smug enough to be repellent. The words are used correctly, they are arranged in the right sequence, but behind them, what.

kindler: I had to read this over before I got that the narrator is male. Maybe because the speech is a little affected. Perhaps the narrator could describe the women in more specific terms than “lovely, lively”, and by specific I mean “a bit knock-kneed, but long legs”, etc.

jediknight: The punchline is lost in all the “exotic” details.

kittymarie: There’s an adage, “Form follows function.” If the protagonist feels humiliated, why does she sound thrilled? As my friends who work in production would say, “Walang audio-video lock.”

With that, the yucch-meter is going on vacation.

The Sesame Street parody.

Check out Peter Bradshaw’s takedown of Eat Pray Love in the Guardian. “Sit, watch, groan. Yawn, fidget, stretch. Eat Snickers, pray for end of dire film about Julia Roberts’s emotional growth, love the fact it can’t last for ever. Wince, daydream, frown. Resent script, resent acting, resent dinky tripartite structure. Grit teeth, clench fists, focus on plot. . .”

LONDON — After she died earlier this month, a frail 89-year-old alone in a flat in the British seaside town of Torquay, Eileen Nearne, her body undiscovered for several days, was listed by local officials as a candidate for what is known in Britain as a council burial, or what in the past was called a pauper’s grave.

Known to her neighbors as an insistently private woman who loved cats and revealed almost nothing about her past, she has emerged as a heroine in the tortured story of Nazi-occupied France, one of the secret agents who helped prepare the French resistance for the D-Day landings in June 1944. . .

Read her obituary by John F. Burns in the NYT.

For all the wartime women spies who fought against the Nazis I propose the words written on Buffy Summers’ tombstone.

“She saved the world. A lot.”

That sentence just fried my synapses.

Photo of Franz Kafka at the National Library of Israel.

Kafka left written instructions to his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts, diaries and letters unread. Two months later Brod signed a contract to have Kafka’s novels published. Thank you, Max Brod, for being a shitty friend.

Now there’s some legal wrangling over the remainder of Kafka’s papers, which Brod left to his secretary Esther Hoffe, who left them to her septuagenarian daughters Eva and Ruth, who keep them in a Tel Aviv apartment with a hundred cats.

Should we worry about those papers at all when they were supposed to have been burned?

Read Kafka’s Last Trial by Elif Batuman in the NYT magazine.

Lydia Davis writes short stories. Some are two pages long, some two lines. And something actually happens in them.

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How Difficult
by Lydia Davis

For years my mother said I was selfish, careless, irresponsible, etc. She was often annoyed. If I argued, she held her hands over her ears. She did what she could to change me but for years I did not change, or if I changed, I could not be sure I had, because a moment never came when my mother said, “You are no longer selfish, careless, irresponsible, etc.” Now I’m the one who says to myself, “Why can’t you think of others first, why don’t you pay attention to what you’re doing, why don’t you remember what has to be done?” I am annoyed. I sympathize with my mother. How difficult I am! But I can’t say this to her, because at the same time that I want to say it, I am also here on the phone coming between us, listening and prepared to defend myself.

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Ten Stories from Flaubert by Lydia Davis in The Paris Review.
Excerpts from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis in NPR.

Quezon City police director Chief Superintendent Benjardi Mantele gestures as he presents some of the confiscated ‘double dead’ meat during a press briefing at Camp Karingal yesterday. BOY SANTOS. Philstar, 22 Sept 2010.

Continuing our discussion of how we have adapted the English language to suit our requirements:

“Double dead”. Diseased deceased livestock butchered and sold as fresh meat. (They only die twice.)

“Holdupper”. Someone who commits a holdup/armed robbery.

“Carnapper.” Someone who steals a car.

“I’ll tell you to the teacher.” Literal translation of “Isusumbong kita sa teacher.”

“Standby” or Istambay. One who stands around doing nothing; a bum. Derived from “on standby”—waiting to be deployed.

“You stop that or I’ll throw you this!” Yaya scolding her charge at the supermarket.

I remembered our favorite commentator on language, William Safire. I googled him. He died a year ago on September 27.