A co-worker found an article in Wisconsin Trails magazine about my Bulwer-Lytton Award winning bad sentence, and sent the magazine to me. I was delighted that the editor not only had some complimentary things to say about my bad prose, but had even hired an illustrator to draw it. Here is the story and drawing.
I had no advance knowledge of the story or drawing, but I was very heartened to have inspired anyone to do anything. So I Googled around and found the guy I was pretty sure was the illustrator. I emailed him and asked if he drew the cartoon, and if so I thought it was a great job, and asked he would be willing to sell me the original artwork. I asked another couple of questions about the origin of the story – did he do the drawing and get the magazine to bite on it along with a story, or did the magazine give him the story and commission him to draw something. I’m sure there were no weird “stalker fan” vibes or anything close, just a friendly letter of thanks and interest in his work.
The next day I got a very brief reply saying yes, that was his drawing, and if I ever “came through town” we should have a cup of coffee together. But no other info, no answered questions, no offer or refusal to sell the art.
And lo and behold, when I reply, I get an Sys Admin “undeliverable” email returned saying that his mailbox was set not to accept mail from me. I was stunned on two fronts – first that such an innocuous email should make him switch me off; and second that his email system would TELL me so. I would have though that at worst my email would be routed into a spam box, and he would never see it, and all I would know is that he didn’t care to reply.
I don’t think this guy is some kind of privacy freak – he’s a professor at a major state university.
Anyway, FUCK YOU, guy. I don’t want to mention his name, because he might be enough of an asshole to sue me.
And, because I wrote a nice thank you note to the editor of the magazine that also didn’t get a reply, fuck you too.
He probably doesn’t think it was actually you, but rather some random person who just wanted the artwork. It might not be malicious. Maybe something that can actually be tracked back to you, like a physical letter, might be better.
Since I was asking him to sell me the art, more accurately to quote me a price, not give it to me, I can’t see why it would matter to him whether I was the real guy or not.
It’s Gerald’s penis and balls. And shrinkage would be, IMO, kind of expected during a catastrophe.
I will give this some thought – especially if I win again this year.
Wild guess… perhaps he thought you were slyly probing for evidence to build a copyright infringement case and sought legal guidance from a source who suggested it was in his best interests not to talk to you anymore.
That was a long and rather bulky sentence, but I didn’t reckon you’d complain.
Some people are still shocked that doing such a thing is possible. You may have disrupted his perception of himself as an internet-savvy privacy maven, or some such.
Maybe he meant to whitelist your email but ended up blacklisting you by accident. You’ll never know, unless you drive by his house every ten minutes until he shows up. Start stalking him–that’ll teach him to block your emails!
I think it’s kind of odd that a magazine would write an article about you and not tell you, let alone ask for any comments. Although I know this happens (my mom was the victim of a serious crime a couple of years ago and there were all kinds of stories about it and almost nobody called to let her even know they were publishing anything.) It’s still weird though.
As for the illustrator, is it at all possible that his email is screwed up?
Well, the article wasn’t about me so much as about the contest and the winning entry, and I’m sure their interest was that I’m in Wisconsin. And the very meager info about me, including my incorrect age, is clearly from a couple of AP stories that came out in the first few days after the contest results were announced. The story is pretty much on par with a couple hundred stories that came out in August. Most were very slight re-writes of the AP stories – I actually spoke to maybe a dozen reporters, probably fewer.
I don’t know how likely it is that he somehow screwed up his email. I have a yahoo account, and I wouln’t know how to do this if I was trying. His email was a university account – so maybe he has more options to decline emails than I. I did resend the email, and got another “undeliverable” auto-generated reply. That doesn’t say anything, of course, about whether he did something in error.
There were a couple of very negative stories I found about this contest, suggesting that the contest and I were contributing to the downfall of society by dumbing down literature. One specifically took me to task because I suggested that college was the source of my writing skills. I said “There is a certain degree to which academia prepares you to write badly”, because I had started thinking about all the stilted prose I wrote as an undergraduate.
I was really amazed that anyone could take this shit so seriously – dumb fucks have no idea how to have fun. Maybe I just ran across a couple of my ill-humored critics. Except the illustrator used to work on The Simpsons, according to his bio, so I really dunno.
I’m thinking that having an asshole with a sphincter is the next best thing to having hands with opposable thumbs, as far as ability to grip a pencil is concerned.
Your winning sentence, which I read long before I knew about its SDMB connections, is substantially better than the illustration. Thank you for it. When I first read it, I thought it was spectacular. I still do.
I suggest a regular letter if you are interested in the artwork. I consider it unlikely he deliberately black-listed your email address. There are other causes for an “undeliverable” response. I assume you have rechecked the email address…
I do not understand your consternation at the lack of a reply to your thank-you letter.
