The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun

It began as a holiday.

Arthur Howitzer, Jr., college freshman,

eager to escape a bright future on the Great Plains,

convinced his father, proprietor of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun,

to fund his transatlantic passage as an educational opportunity

to learn the family business

through the production of a series of travelogue columns

to be published for local readers in the Sunday Picnic magazine.

Over the next ten years, he assembled a team

of the best expatriate journalists of his time

and transformed Picnic into The French Dispatch,

a factual weekly report on the subjects of world politics,

the arts, high and low, fashion, fancy cuisine, fine drink,

and diverse stories of human interests set in faraway quartiers.

He brought the world to Kansas.

His writers line the spines of every good American library.

Berensen,

Sazerac,

Krementz,

Roebuck Wright.

One reporter known as the best living writer

in quality of sentences per minute.

One who never completed a single article,

but haunted the halls cheerily for three decades.

One privately blind writer who wrote keenly through the eyes of others.

The uncontested crackerjack

of grammatical expertise.

Cover illustrations by Hermès Jones.

Famously gracious with his writers,

Arthur Jr. was less courteous with the rest of the magazine's staff.

Oh, no, what's that?

I need a turkey.

Stuffed and roasted on a table with all the trimmings and pilgrims!

His fiscal management system

was convoluted but functional.

Give her 150 francs a week for the next 15 years

against five American cents per word, minus expenses.

His most repeated literary advice,

perhaps apocryphal, was simply this...

Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.

His return to Liberty

comes precisely 50 years after his departure,

on the occasion of his funeral,

by which time the magazine's circulation exceeds

half a million subscribers in 50 countries.

A willow hamper containing umpteen pins,

plaques, and official citations

of the highest order is buried at his side,

along with an Andretti Ribbon-mate

and a ream of triple bond, Egyptian cotton typing stock.

He received an Editor's burial.

In his will, he stipulated that

immediately upon his death, quote...

The presses will be dismantled

and liquefied.

The editorial offices will be vacated and sold.

The staff will be paid ample bonuses and released from their contracts,

and the publication of the magazine will permanently cease.

Thus,

the publisher's obituary will also serve as that of this publication.

All home delivery readers will, of course, be refunded, pro rata

for the unfulfilled portion of their subscriptions.

His epitaph will be taken verbatim from the stenciled shingle

fixed above the door of his inner office.

Berensen's article. The Concrete Masterpiece.

Three dangling participles, two split infinitives

and nine spelling errors in the first sentence alone.

Some of those are intentional.

The Krementz story, Revisions to a Manifesto.

We asked for 2,500 words, and she came in at 14,000,

plus footnotes, end notes, a glossary, and two epilogues.

It's one of her best.

- Sazerac? - Impossible to fact-check.

He changes all the names and only writes about hobos, pimps, and junkies.

These are his people.

How about Roebuck Wright?

His door's locked, but I could hear the keys clacking.

Don't rush him.

The question is, who gets killed?

There's one piece too many even if we print another double-issue,

which we can't afford under any circumstances.

A message from the foreman. One hour to press.

You're fired.

Really?

Don't cry in my office.

Shrink the masthead, cut some ads, and tell the foreman to buy more paper.

I'm not killing anybody.

Good writers. He coddled them.

He coaxed them. He ferociously protected them.

What do you think?

For myself?

I would start with Mr. Sazerac.

These were his people.

Ennui rises suddenly on a Monday.

Through the time machine of poetic license,

let us take a sight-seeing tour.

A day in Ennui over the course of 250 years.

The great city began as a cluster

of tradesmen's villages.

Only the names remain unchanged.

The Bootblack District.

The Bricklayer's Quarter.

The Butcher's Arcade.

Pick-pocket Cul-de-Sac.

On this site, a fabled market,

vending all forms of victuals and comestibles

under a single vast, glass-and-cast-iron canopy,

later demolished, as you can see,

in favor of a multi-level shopping center and parking structure.

Like every living city,

Ennui supports a menagerie of vermin and scavengers.

The rats which colonized

its subterranean railroad.

The cats which colonized

its slanty rooftops.

The anguillettes which colonized its shallow drainage canals.

After receiving the Host, marauding choirboys,

half-drunk on the Blood of Christ, stalk unwary pensioners

and seek havoc.

In the Flop Quarter, students.

Hungry, restless, reckless.

In the Hovel District,

old people.

Old people who have failed.

The automobile.

A mixed blessing. On the one hand,

the honking, skidding, speeding, sputtering, and backfiring.

The emission of toxic fumes and filthy exhaust-pollution,

the dangerous accidents, the constant traffic, the high...

Fuck!

Department of Local Statistics.

Average rainfall, 750 millimeters.

Average snowfall, 190,000 flakes.

Eight-point-two-five bodies are pulled from the Blasé river each week.

A figure which remains consistent despite population growth

and advances in health and hygiene.

As the sun sets, a medley of unregistered streetwalkers

and gigolos replaces the day's delivery boys and shopkeepers,

and an air of promiscuous calm saturates the hour.

What sounds will punctuate the night?

And what mysteries will they foretell?

Perhaps the doubtful old maxim speaks true.

All grand beauties

withhold their deepest secrets.

"Rats, vermin, gigolos, streetwalkers."

You don't think it's almost too seedy this time?

- No, I don't. - For decent people.

It's supposed to be charming.

"Pick-pockets, dead bodies, prisons, urinals..."

You don't want to add a flower shop

- or an art museum? - No, I don't.

A pretty place of some kind?

I hate flowers.

You could cut the second half of the second paragraph, by the way.

You already repeat it later.

Okay.

We take as the subject of tonight's lecture,

the great painter at the vanguard

and heart of the French Splatter-school Action-group,

Mr. Moses Rosenthaler.

Widely celebrated, as you know,

for the bold dramatic style, and colossal scale of his middle-period,

in particular, of course, the polyptych-tableaux known as...

Ten Reinforced Cement Aggregate Load-Bearing Murals.

He remains, in my opinion, the most eloquent

and certainly, the loudest artistic voice of his rowdy generation.

How does this pivotal piece come to find its way

into its unique position as a permanent installation here

at the Clampette Collection?

The story begins in a mess hall.

The exhibition, Ashtrays, Pots, and Macramé,

a group show of handicrafts by amateur artisans

incarcerated in the lunatic section of the Ennui Prison-Asylum,

might, perhaps, have been omitted from the annals of art history,

had it not been for the inclusion in its number of a small painting

by Mr. Rosenthaler, who was, at that time,

serving a 50-year sentence for the crime of double homicide,

and the observation of that work by a fellow inmate,

the Levantine art dealer Mr. Julian Cadazio,

who, by fateful coincidence, happened to be imprisoned

in the adjoining annex on a charge of second-degree sales tax evasion.

Guard.

Who painted this picture?

Citizen 7524.

I believe that unit designates maximum security

for the demented and deranged.

Are you able to provide me an escort and a Friendly Visit Stamp

for immediate use?

Simone, Naked. Cell Block J. Hobby Room.

I wanna buy it.

Why?

Because I like it.

It's not for sale.

Yes, it is.

- No, it isn't. - Yes, it is.

- No, it isn't. - Yes, it is.

- No, it isn't. - It is, yes. It is.

All artists sell all their work. It's what makes you an artist.

Selling it. If you don't wish to sell it, don't paint it.

Question is, what's your price?