MONTREAL – Sealed in the “Monkey Chamber” beneath Redpath library, the thousand monkeys tasked with creating the next great work of English literature have succeeded only in filling their thousand typewriters with kilogram upon kilogram of monkey poop.montreal
“There have been monkeys at those typewriters since 1913,” said William deBooth, senior primatologist at the Redpath library since 1998. “But what they’ve created in that time doesn’t amount to much more than a mountain of poop, one or two short stories of arresting beauty, and a dang impressive number of dead monkeys.”
DeBooth says that most of the monkeys haven’t typed a word in over a week, having filled their Underwood typewriters so full of poop that they have grown comfortable flinging them at each other.
“It’s ridiculous in there.” said deBooth. “It’s like the writer’s room for The Listener, only with less excrement.”
“I’ve been telling them for years that they need to start putting diapers on those monkeys,” said Lydia Schwartz, typewriter repair specialist for the library. “But they always told me that it was part of the monkeys ‘creative process.’ Fuck this.”
“Fuck all of this.” Schwartz added, knocking a chock-full-of-feces typewriter onto the floor and choking back tears.
Although it has caused him to be isolated by his peers, the monkey known as “Bright Eyes” has not filled his typewriter with feces, opting instead to hunch over it for eighteen hours a day, typing the word “poop” over and over and over again.
“We don’t trust Bright Eyes,” said deBooth. “He has a dangerous mind.”
At press time, the University of Toronto announced that the tapirs with palm pilots that it keeps in a terrarium below Robarts library had been hired to ghost-write editorials for the National Post.
