The Death of Paolo Honorificas

In Memoriam; The death of Paolo Honorificas

An introduction By Scott Malby

"An introduction is the weirdest of forms.
It tells us something about our minds. It's
both a summation and a beginning. It’s usually
written after everything else is over but ends
up preceding what it actually followed.
" Paolo Honorificas, the internet poet"
I'm writing this memorial introduction because
Paolo is dead. At least we think he is. He's
not been seen at his favorite bar, flea market
or Laundromat for weeks. He was probably
murdered. Anyone who came into contact with him
could have done it. He was that irritating.
He possessed all the noxious characteristics of
a penniless poet. He was a liar and a cheat. He
was unable to tell the difference between his
own imagination and reality. He was always
writing things down and was both absentminded
and forgetful whenever it suited him. He got on
everyone’s nerves. He borrowed money from people
and never paid it back. He never ordered anything
at a restaurant but ate off of everyone else’s
plate. While in the process of stealing a half
used roll of toilet tissue, Paolo slipped off the
broken toilet seat at the Salvation Army and
successfully sued them for second degree bum
burns.

Like his writing, Paolo lacked wit and charm.
He was clueless. Everything went over his
head. He had a yellow, industrial smile and
was missing one of his front teeth. He was totally
tasteless. He was smug and arrogant. The zipper on
his pants was usually broken. He showered only
when he felt like it and most would agree he
would have been a far more successful writer if
he had felt like it more often. His aftershave
smelled like a strange mixture of garlic, urine
and stale beer. His one saving grace was his
ability to make us all feel both more fortunate
and superior in comparison to him. He was a hack.
Paolo’s lack of success is a lesson to us all.
Writers are self destructive. Their lives tend
to be one long anticlimactic series of messy ,
uneventful little procrastinations. What is even
more significant is that Paolo was a terrible
writer. His work is so bad it will never go
out of fashion. Future readers who stumble over
excerpts of his journal will find him just as
inane and inappropriate as we do today. A
hundred years from now conspiring writers will
continue to draw inspiration from the fact that
if he could get published anyone can. This leads
me to the two reasons why I am writing this
introductory memorial and not someone else.

While Paolo had many acquaintances, he had few
friends. Those of us unlucky enough to
know him drew straws to see who would write
this. I lost. These very words are coming at
the cost of my better judgment. The second
reason is that I was stupid enough to buy a box
from him at one of his frequent yard sales.

Inside the box was his postmodern journal. It
represented a pastiche of reflections, diatribes,
diary jottings, indecipherable musings and
fragmented, personal notes characteristic of a
frustrated unsuccessful writer in the first half
of the 21th. century. It thus can be read as a
historical document about failure in our time.
Future writers will find it invaluable regarding
what to avoid in terms of style, structure and
thematic presentation.

The fact is that Paolo had no literary life so
he made one up. He became the secretary of the
Lost Bay Poet's Society. This society met once
a month inside his head. Paolo was also a
columnist and reviewer for a number of internet
journals. This might well explain his many flaws
as a writer. His interviews were infamous. He
interviewed God one day and the devil the next.
He sought out and interviewed awful poets. From
the crypt of his own mediocrity he brought dead
writers back to life and proceeded to thoroughly
mangle his interpretation of them. His
interview with a naked William Blake continues
to cause me nightmares. Under the guise of
a Miss Puss Wuss, Paolo wrote mean spirited
unamusing advice columns of absolutely no
redeeming social value.

Paolo would be the first person to tell you
that he believed the internet was not a serious
venue for writers. He felt it was a flawed
medium filled with bad taste and questionable
writing. A place he felt thoroughly at home in.
A place where the not so good air their dirty
underwear in pretentious little ezines run by
junior wanna bees buzzing around the fertilizer
in someone else’s literary garden, unable to
tell the difference between a rare flower and a
common weed.

It was also Paolo’s contention that most online
literary journals were edited by frustrated
writers who started up their own electronic rags
primarily to establish a name for themselves and
be interviewed by editors of similar electronic
mags so that internet publishing could
become one smug family of like minded literary
pettifoggery. Let me hasten to add here that
this was Paolo’s take on an amazingly vibrant
scene and not my own. I couldn’t disagree with
Paolo more vehemently on this issue. I’m still
alive and writing. I depend on these journals
regarding publishing my own work. Palo be damned.
Even in death he manages to cause me continued
grief.

In reading Paolo's material it appears that he
might well have been a Sufi in disguise who
suffered too many brain hemorrhages. His mind
was held hostage somewhere and never ransomed.
Left field was his terrain of choice. You didn’t
have to know Paolo personally to realize how
far off base he was. You need only read his
questionable journal and you will
certainly discover that for yourself.

In editing and translating his journal I took
certain liberties. Paolo did not believe in capitol
letters, paragraphs or periods. He once told me
that writing for him was like climbing up the
tree of hard knocks and diving into a waterless
cement pool. Like most of his analogies I
tried not to search too hard for hidden
significance. In this particular case I did
ask him what he meant. I was surprised to learn
that as a child one of Paolo's hobbies was to
climb up trees and dive into empty cement pools.
I believed him. There is a certain disorienting,
concrete aspect to his elucidations that can be
explained in no other way.

Reality for him was ultimately found at the bottom
of life's pool. His warped mind and broken nose
bear testament to his forays into a realism he
continually found himself splattering against.
To his credit he would get up, dust himself off
and suddenly soar into inspirational flights of
fantasy before leaving his figural shape in the
cement again. Like his life his words are
accidents waiting for something awful to
happen to them.

My translation of his journal is incomplete.
Approximately a third of it has managed to find
its way into print. Working on it has been a
thankless, depressing task. I have found
neither satisfaction, money nor recognition in
the difficult job. Indeed, my reputation itself
has suffered. There were times I thought I was
turning into Paolo myself. My psychiatrist has
informed me that I can't continue with this
maddness . I'm running the danger of
developing a multiple personality deficit disorder.
Most significantly, Paolo's death has led me to
reconsider my own mortality. I've set aside
my own creative aspirations for far too long. It's
time I resumed my own work. It's my guess
that the person most upset by Paolo's death is
Paolo himself. I know if I were the one who
died I'd probably feel that way.
What about you?


Sincerely, Scott Malby
February, 2004

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