140-Beauty

Last week, British thespian Stephen Fry announced a contest to judge the world's most beautiful tweet. The avid twitterer and sorta-incarnation of a certain Irish-aesthete-epigrammarian will judge this contest as part of The Guardian's Hay Festival, a literary 'woodstock of the mind' currently happening somewhere in the middle of Wales. (Guess I missed that bad boy back in aught five, on my way from Bath, England out to the Pembrokeshire Coast). Fry, seen here in a great old sketch (with Dr. House looking even more like Briggs / Luke Hatton), will announce the winner of this competition on June 6th. Therefore, this week at Uptown Problems (as well as on twitter), I will be practicing my hand at beauty and brevity, and submitting my efforts to the contest. This exercise is a nice extension of the six-word Hemingway Challenge that I'm occasionally fond of. So, be warned: For the next three days, I will be putting certain potentially florid / weird / maudlin tweet-length writings out into cyberpace. I'm eager to see what exactly Fry, the kinda'-contemporary-version of that dandy-witticist (or, as Ricky Gervais puts it 'poof'), deems 'beautiful' in the 140-character form.

Speaking of Oscar Wilde, I wonder if I could ever be put on trial for a controversial piece of writing. And then sentenced to a pretty-much-fatal jail term because of it. But, what sort of scandalous subtext could they find in my writing? Maybe that every single character is secretly really, really tall. That'd be it. And then my cross-examination would go something like this:

Lord Davenport (with powdery white wig): "Mr. Hatton, I refer this courtroom to page sixty-three of your short story collection So, Does This Hotel Have a Pool? at which point the 'good buddies' Herbert and Todd are speeding down the freeway after a blue VW Jetta. Mr. Hatton... are these men tall?"
Me: "To be tall in the eyes of man is but to be short in the eyes of God."
Lord Davenport: "But these men ARE being tall together, are they not Mr. Hatton?"
Me: "They are of an appropriate equal height to spot each others' elbows and then high-five."
Lord Davenport (flustered): "Are WOMEN tall in your stories, Mr. Hatton?"
Me: "Decidedly not. Although the character of 'Shannon' in my story "Sh*t or Get Off the Pot" consigns herself to never wearing heels once she becomes engaged."
Lord Davenport: "... yes, engaged to a man who ..." (shuffles manuscript) "you condemn as 'boisterous' and 'overbearing.' Is this the meaning of being 'short' in your eyes, Mr. Hatton??"
Me: "My eyes see as partially as anyone's, Mr. Davenport. For to be tall or short to anyone requires only a trick of the light and a lean of the hips."

In jail, I'd send long letters to Shaq and the Jolly Green Giant.