Karl Wenclas

“Trump’s New Ballroom”

NEW FICTION

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, I know, editors aren’t supposed to run their own work on their litmags, but I do it anyway. You might say I’m the Donald Trump of this modest little literary site.)

He dreamt of a ballroom.

A big ballroom. BIG. In capitals.

An actual dream.

He’d first had the dream at age twelve. Or maybe seventeen, when he was a cadet at a military academy, sleeping in a dorm. A lonely time.

A vivid dream. The dream said, “Build the ballroom.”

But he’d had the first dream when he was twelve and his father took him to a big, beautiful hotel in Manhattan, or maybe Paris, or Zurich, and the hotel had a large ballroom. He’d seen ballrooms before, but not like this ballroom.

He’d said to himself, age twelve, looking at it, “That is one big beautiful ballroom.”

That night in the hotel he had a dream about a ballroom, not just any ballroom. HIS. Which meant it was the biggest most beautiful ballroom anyone had ever seen.

Now he was building his dream ballroom. Finally at last. The Big One. At the White House, which he now owned. Because he was the President.

Oh, he knew, everyone told him– aides he could fire with a move of his little finger– “But you don’t own it. You live in it but you don’t own it.”

But he owned it. He was the President and he owned it. And so he was changing it, to make it the most beautiful White House with the biggest most beautiful ballroom ever seen. It was why he’d become President, he realized. The motivation. To build the ballroom.

“Don’t put that pillar over there!” he yelled at a foreman in a white hard hat.

You knew who the foremen were because they wore white hard hats, not blue ones. Or yellow ones.

“Read the blueprints! Doesn’t anyone read blueprints? And don’t connect the copper wiring to the glass wiring. Do not do that. They don’t connect. You do not connect them!”

Sheesh! he said to himself.

Aides scurried around him and moved him in different directions, but they didn’t know. Only he knew. KNEW.

Which is why he was President.

Tractors roared, earth moved, wings of the White House crumbled before his eyes, concussions and visions of noise and chaos, and he loved it because he knew when it was over, the project complete– tiles gleaming and gold statues positioned everywhere and the richest, wealthiest most famous guests, trillionaires and kings– he knew, KNEW, all the effort would result and had resulted in the world’s biggest and most beautiful ballroom.

-Karl Wenclas

An Excerpt from “The Advisor” by Karl Wenclas

NEW FICTION

Allison had been his personal assistant for two months. As long as anyone had lasted in the position, she’d been told by one of the security men, part of a phalanx of security men. The job was wearing. Simply being in the Advisor’s presence was exhausting. The man had a draining personality– a combination of brilliance and admitted quirkiness. He was always “on.” Like an actor on stage, but the stage never left him. Which was how he’d achieved so much– owning seven highly valued companies and now Chief Advisor to the President– who he treated as one more necessary human appendage. The Advisor, via an enormous campaign contribution, had in effect bought the Office: its occupant and the political party attached to him.

“What’s next?” the Advisor asked Allison in his unusually accented voice, eyes boring in on her. Strange eyes, dilated, never resting, always focused like a high-speed camera on some object, idea, or person.

They drove along in one of his cars, she sitting to the right of him in the rear seat. “His.” He owned the automobile company, had given it its prominence. Not the truck. They never rode in the company’s highly touted truck, which resembled a spaceship and like his spaceships had been spontaneously combusting of late, like out of a Dickens novel. “The workers,” he’d told Allison privately. “They’re sabotaging me.” In his peculiar ultra-Randian philosophy, everything was the fault of “the workers.” Flipside to the opposite philosophy, which stated all achievements were due to “the workers.” 

Allison had no philosophy herself, though she found herself imbibing more and more of his. Her main concern in this tumultuous time was staying employed.

They sped along in the most advanced model of the sedan. XJVC3. Or something. Which she often confused with the legal name of his youngest son, who she, like the rest of the staff, referred to as Sparky, under the care of a variety of nurses and assistants.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

“Art Exhibition”

AN EXCERPT FROM THE LOUD BOYS

As Van made preparations, his new business partner, Fake Face, attended a charity event in a well-guarded suburban enclave, repository of most of the area’s remaining wealth, much of it held by the progeny of deceased industrialists. His smiling rubber mask fit well with the artificial smiles and insincere greetings of other donors. The fundraiser was at a local art gallery. The gallery’s current exhibition was titled “Connectivity”– partly financed by a grant from a Fake Face tax shelter. Fitting the theme, electrical cables spread across the floor like black snakes, connected to strange-looking purple steel machines and giant video monitors displaying the latest in certified NFT art.

“EMBRACE THE CHAOS”

flashed on and off in lime-green letters on a large electronic screen in the ceiling. “We’ve blown the building’s circuits three times already!” the gallery’s curator in a near corner bragged to a circle of wealthy patrons.

“Oh! So glad to meet you again!” a wealthy blonde matron of fifty gushed to Fake Face– they’d met previously at a fundraiser for an animal shelter.

The woman’s ninety year-old husband had recently died, leaving her his fortune. Money to spend and time on her hands. She’d had plastic surgery– her cheekbones were ridiculously pronounced, turning her unobservable eyes into narrow slits. Her lips were swollen balloons. Her skin had the consistency of wax. Both obscenely rich individuals who’d made their wealth in mercenary ways peered dutifully at slabs of AI-generated artworks adorning the walls: either meaningless black-and-white blips and blots, or colorful scenes from unproduced cartoons, with the exaggerated glowing plastic quality of all such AI concoctions. Images of inhuman red-purple-blue figures with distended forms and exaggerated eyes. Illustrations for a madhouse. Mirror reflections of the crowd.

The pricey gallery was an island of insanity in a sea of tragedy.

When Fake Face turned to speak to the woman, she saw his shifting eyes and sensed his real face behind the rubber facade, smelling his sweaty intensity.

!!!

(Based on real happenings? The Loud Boys is now available via Nook, Kobo, and Kindle. A paperback version is coming.)

The Prisoners of Dwight MacDonald

A RANT

(photo of chateau d’if prison c/o travelfrance)

We’re imprisoned by our own attitudes.

We’re held back by the preconceptions, prejudices, and stereotypes with which we address the world. They become invisible jail bars around our minds. We construct a fortress around our accepted ideas– stone walls that an army couldn’t break through.

One sees this in every aspect of life– including in the literary realm. Writers and critics cling to rules laid down sixty-four years ago by a handful of intellectual pundits, most notably Dwight MacDonald in his 1960 Partisan Review essay, “Masscult and Midcult.”(An earlier essay by Clement Greenberg in the same publication, edited by Dwight MacDonald, set the tone.)

UNBREAKABLE RULES:

No Kitsch! Whatever kitsch is. Anything which might entertain the public.

Beware the Public! No masscult, midcult, on the edges or in-between.

Allowed: Completely inscrutable, alienating, pretentious and goofy examples of upper-class overeducated posturing known as the avant-garde.

Whither the fate of the prisoners of Dwight MacDonald?

They sit cautiously in their antiseptic modernist-designed offices and rooms. No art adorns the walls– only a single beige baize stripe (the walls themselves are gray) in the style of Barnett Newman, and a distorted portrait of a sparrow, meant to symbolize one of their captured-behind-glass idols, Proust.

The prisoners wait for: something. Not commutation of their sentences. They love their sentences– both kinds. They sit carefully at cold metal tables writing sentences on laptops, well-written one-direction sentences– always very well written, carefully screened: they rigidly police this– more and more sentences, always more of them, long ones, jammed impressively together in ever-longer paragraphs on more and more pages– Infinite Graphomania– and the sentences are acceptable if they’re intellectual, not passionate or emotional; not too much plot or excitement; no outbursts or melodrama– that would be kitsch– the sentences are permissible, approved, allowable, laudable just as long as they don’t engage the stray incautious reader in any way.

-Karl Wenclas

(These thoughts to appear someday in a planned book on the technocracy.)

The Importance of Contention

ONE OF the reasons the literary scene today excites no one is there’s no genuine debate, much less dissent, much less contentious no-holds-barred free-for-all argument. Instead: “We’re all good.” “I’m okay, you’re okay.”

THIS APPLIES at all levels, high and low– but is most notable among the prestigious literary crowd. They think: What’s prestigious about unloosening your metaphorical bow tie, jumping off your high-horse stage and engaging face-to-face nose-to-nose with the audience?

That was the strategy utilized by pro wrestling (egads! literati exclaim) to grow from a marginalized weirdo spectator “exhibition” non-sport to a central cultural phenomenon. Mad interviews. Good guys and bad guys. Storylines. Personalities.

Elements of a strategy which was borrowed successfully, to a far more modest extent, by what soon-enough surpassed sleepy baseball as America’s #1 sport: the National Football League, aided by an upstart cable network named ESPN. Analysts and panelists dissecting disagreeing comparing pro-and-con aspects who’s #1, who’s starting, what’s your team coaches players doing WRONG have to reform do better refine those tactics or you’ll be buried by better teams, better players.

The literary game? The lit game has sucked since the Beats. Today: nearly comatose literary poets reciting in delicate voices making zero eye contact staring rigidly at a sheet of paper, no interaction, negative energy, the audience listening politely, falling asleep– the same genteel world that raucous upstarts of the Underground Literary Alliance invaded before they were frozen out by mob boss mandarins while simultaneously the recession of 2008-09 knocked half their number into couch surfing, or sleeping in inoperable pickup trucks, or vagabonding on the streets.

Needed: Energy! Disagreement. Raised voices of outrage saying, “Our work, ourselves, our art, our voices MATTER!” Enough to fight for. Or over. THEN the general public will take notice.

-Karl Wenclas

(One forum for debate and disagreement will soon be the Maximum Literature popcast. See the first test episode here. We’re seeking guests; participants. If you have recommendations or suggestions, pass them on!)