Generally, my work is really subtle

Lots of ways to engage your audience and impress upon them how intelligent you are,

Or

Generally, my work is really subtle.

An especially good way to draw peoples attention to your work is to mess things up and by this I mean spellingwise or other – you want attention whether it’s positive or negative! The point is to grab that shit! Writers are like rugby players! If you get things like your intent to deliberately misspell stuff and generally be a wanker out in the open at the beginning of your essay, it tips your hand and people realize that you are not a retard mentally handicapped person, but are in fact tongue in cheek, haha a tricky writer just like my professor! My dad who represents mental patients says that the word retard is the new nigger. Be extraneous and extemporaneous! Make them groan and whinge (Word 2008 says that “whinge” is not a word, but I totally speak British) and hit the dictionary.

Ambiguity serves great purpose in writing an argument I think, as does citing Joyce cause he lends credibility to not making a whole lot of sense either, right? I hear no one understands Finnegans Wake except for people who are into it, but I suspect that they’re just faking it. I kinda dug A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because Joyce lets you see more of himself, but Dubliners I did not like because it felt sterile. My employer David Kamp agrees. Ambiguity is good because if people can’t understand you, they might presume that it’s because you’re so much smarter than they are. I personally am brilliant though, so if I can’t understand you I presume it’s because you’re a retard mentally handicapped person, or an average person trying to sound smart.

Junot Diaz says that there’s a psychic connection between writers and dictators, and I think he’s right. You have to be pretty arrogant to think that anyone wants to read your spit, dribble and drool soaked absorbent bib of an essay. I used that “absorbent bib” line in an argument I once had about Michael Thomas with my friend and occasional writing tutor who first introduced me to n+1, who will probably not like this essay because of how self-aggrandizing it is. But my point is that if you don’t cultivate a truly odious personality, you will be easy prey. A good writer, like Kirby (who is not a writer, but a character in Super Smash Bros.) consumes the personality of others, and you don’t want to be a comestible. I think that Sun Tzu said something along the lines of “keep people guessing” and I’ll say that’s good advice.

I want you to be arrogant, because nothing irritates me more than pretentious people worrying about being pretentious. If you don’t feel like you can hold your own, read more – the smoke and mirrors ability to cite other authors will make you feel more secure and your work more easily defensible to other people who are into quoting things. An example of this would be: “Oh, you don’t remember Murakami going velociraptor on Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone, zeroing in especially on his opposition to charity?”

I once got drunk under a highway overpass in Seattle with a bunch of homeless kids.

Where is your red pen now you marginally cognizant ape?!?!

As I said in class the other day, sweeping generalizations are awesome, as we all know in our hearts of hearts but I don’t want to waste space deliberately perpetrating clichés cause that shit’s small bore. Instead, I’m going to go get dinner now and then come back and maybe write something really safe cause college is so goddamn expensive and I ain’t a rich kid and can’t afford to fuck it up. My younger brother once wrote a sad poem about being dumb and his teacher submitted it to a children’s poetry anthology; it was published with all the spelling errors corrected. Eventually he dropped out of school. Glad I stuck to it, maybe someday I can buy a Porsche.