The Magog Prize for Literature
by John McGroarty
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: The dilemma of being awarded one of the most valued literary prizes of the twenty-third century.
_____________________________________________________________________
When my words were wheatI was earth
When my words were anger
I was storm
When my words were rock
I was river
When my words turned honey
Flies covered my lips
– Mahmoud Darwish
The Magog Prize for literature had become one of the most valued literary awards for all the writers, poets, scribes and Pharisees of the late twenty-third century APMD (Anno Post Mortem Domini) Earth. Especially by the Pharisees, who, triumphant once more, had moulded and sculpted the world after their own navel-gazing image. It was awarded biennially for “the writer who has done most to promote freedom from all responsibility except to the eternal and proper values of the individualistic Magogian Spirit”. It was, in short, one of the greatest heights that any APMD writer could reach in the age of Gog. The culmination of many years of ball-busting attention seeking and distancing oneself from the common masses (as is rightly proper in the case of writers, of course, of course, of course). And, more importantly, it was the first step towards that greatest literary jewel of all, the Grand Gog Prize of Prizes for Eternal Art.
When Mark Moloch (not his real name) first heard the news he was one of the speakers at a highbrow Harvard debate on the “Future of Demonasia”. It was an all-star cast: the slippery bien pensant, masterchef, and nit-picking polemicist and author of “Why Mother Theresa is a FAR INFERIOR Moral Being to ME”, Kristofer Kitchens; Marty Simian, that cutting-edge unrosy proser and author of “Let’s all Laugh at the Poor”, “Suffer the Little Demon Children”, and his splendiferous psychological farce “I’m Better than You, Dad! Sorry, Dad!!”; and the renowned atheist and Oxford Professor of Barnyard Animals, Reggie Smyth, author of the bestselling “The Greedy Giraffe and other just-so stories for scientists who don’t understand physics”. The question under robust discussion was “just how much should the peoples of Demonasia have to suffer until they get their house in order?”
Moloch was considered a Chicken, that is, he was of the (learned and pondered) opinion that the Demonlanders should only be sternly rebuked and led with a firm hand into the modern Gogian century and not eviscerated, every Demonman, Demonwoman, and Demonchild (the position of the Mad Hooded Vultures (MHVs), as they were called in the Chicken press). When Moloch was informed by the press of the decision to award him the prize his face first formed itself into his famous impish puckered smile, and then, on second thoughts of the gravitas of the occasion, recontorted itself into an appropriately distant icy glare. This lasted for a couple of minutes, but the emotion was too much for the big best-selling Pharisee and he took off his owl spectacles and, burying his baldy graying head in his hands, burst into a flood of joyful alligator tears.
Ah, but how fleeting joy is! Then comes the torment. The barrage of emails, letters, anti-him tweets, squawks, and editorials in the Chicken press, the Reality Deniers (as both the Chickens and the MHVs called those completely opposed to their positions) berating him in the street. Some of them even had the bad taste to talk hysterically about dead Demon children, and twice some heartless son of a bitch had sent him images of the dead children via email. He cared too, damn it all. He was a Chicken. He wanted the best for the future generations of the great land of the Demons. He knew what was best for them. He tough loved them all.
Moloch fell into what is known in the scribbling trade as a writer’s crisis. He wished he had never been offered the prize, never made certain friends, never attended dinner parties with the Chicken intellectual glitterati, in fact, never allowed himself to be connected in any way whatsoever with the Chickens and the war on “Demonasian terror”. It was his pride, his desire to be the greatest living Gogian scribe to blame. It had blinded him. He remembered with a touch of remorse, and a smidgeon of embarrassment, how he had felt uncontrollable liver-strangling jealousy when he had heard that the great Japanese writer Miko Muchacaca had been awarded the prize two years before. How he had scoffed at Muchacaca’s weasel words and his incomprehensible metaphors. The author of such fabulous literary triumphs as “Trying to Read Kafka in a Cubicle of a Noisy Public Lavatory”, “Chicken Stew, Potatoes and Baby Carrots, 1968” and “Chicken Wing Burning” had compared the individual to a wind-up chocolate Easter Bunny in an oven with the heat being constantly turned up a few notches. Muchacaca had said that he would always be on the side of the Easter Bunny, no matter the consequences, or how brown and sticky his fingers got.
Mark Moloch had laughed long and hard, laughed until he thought he was going to pop a testicle or explode a kidney (thankfully for the world of literature, neither of these disagreeable possible outcomes came to pass). How he had scoffed when Muchacaca had stated that he was not writing in order to receive a prize. No way, by no means. “When you start getting prizes then you are a washed up octopus in life’s changing room unable to find a jersey to fit. A castrated egg of a human soul,” he said, to much embarrassed toe-curling among fans before disappearing down a psychedelic spiral staircase into another dimension. Ha ha ha, hee hee hee. Moloch had curled his toes and sniggered up his sleeve. Now he was deeply distraught and having to listen to his psychic wife’s dark forebodings of doom 24/7. Sally Moloch, Ancient China scholar and one time love of his life become thorn in his flesh. He just wanted to get back to what he did best. He longed for his student days, before success, before his seer spouse, before he had ever heard of the Magog Prize. The days on the Mad Malkie Frazer Creative Writing Course for Angry Young Sons of the Military. He had been the biggest talent in the semi-circle around Malkie, even greater (at least in his own head) than Malkie himself. His dark autistic stories reflecting the world spirit of dark autistic times that were his (though he didn’t seem to know it at the time). And it was true, he was the spirit of true literature back then, of the siphoning off of pain. Of all the lonely loveless hours. Then Moloch had hosed it all out of himself, made a full recovery, and signed up with the Chickens. Now he just wanted to get back to the autistic writing. Sit at the thou-shalt-not-judge feet of Mad Malkie once again.
He sat down at his worktable and looked over his notes. He couldn’t decide what to work on: his novel or a long short story he had been dipping in and out of for a few months now. The novel still lacked a real narrative voice and he had only written a few chapters. He couldn’t decide which technique to use; it had to be groundbreaking and traditional at the same time so that it would place him in the eternal stream of Gogian literature. Defoeian? Joycean? Woolfian? Mad Malkian? Pinteresque? No, not that last one! Bloody softy! The idea was to set it over one day during the massive demonstrations against the needless deaths and maiming of thousands of innocent people in the great central plain of Demonasia as the Army of Greater Gog attacked in pursuit of oil (can you imagine, Moloch, the father of small children waiting, waiting, waiting for the just war to begin?).
Moloch’s main character, Sid Cushing, was an evolutionary psychologist and millionaire neurosurgeon to the stars (aren’t we all nowadays?) whom Moloch hoped to use to reflect all of the nuances and deep psychological angst of those who thought that the war was a just one (one day Moloch had had the idea that a true writer is also a chronicler of his times, Oh that I were Tolstoy for our days!).He put his plot map aside and picked up the manuscript of the short story he had been working on: Flatline Sinic Algebra. That was more like it, getting back to his old self. It was a story about a young writer with marital and financial problems who starts spending more and more time ignoring his wife and studying some books of ancient Chinese algebra as translated by the enigmatic Victorian adventurer and pickled body part collector Quentin Buckle (weren’t they all back then?), whose nose the writer kept in a jar of formaldehyde on his writing desk (coincidently Moloch also had a pickled brown nose on his desk bought one sticky July day in a Soho joke shop). The story was that if you can pronounce and really understand the deep meaning of the equations then you fulfill the old Alchemists’ dream of turning everything into gold. Moloch already had the ending and he started hammering away on his keyboard, his mind floating off ethereally into the realm of autistic prosy.
His deep scriptural wanderings were disturbed by Sally hovering around the door and then sticking her head into the room. He had told her a million trillion times not to disturb him when he was writing. She didn’t seem to understand. Understand the nature of his greatness. That one day he would be one of the eternals. Remembered down through the ages. Like Horace, Virgil, Dante. He would be studied and written about in learned places. There would be competitions among the common people to memorize and recite his work. For he would be loved as a great writer and as a man of the people. Like Dickens. He imagined the streets lined for his funeral. His final resting place in Saint Paul’s. But, this was the but: all of this could not come to pass unless he was left alone when working, if no wife from Porlock (it’s what he always said) knocked at his study door every five minutes, IF HE WAS NOT BLOODY WELL DISTURBED IN HIS GENIUS!!
“Don’t go, Mark, don’t go and pick up the prize. They should be completely ostracized. You can never reason with a bully. A bully with total control. All powerful. It’s true, that cliché, that power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely, please, darling, don’t go, I beg you.”
Moloch counted to ten. He swung round in his chair.
“I’ve told you before about disturbing me when I’m working; how can I become the greatest writer of our time if I am not allowed to work?” he snorted hysterically in a failed attempt at self-mockery. “I will go to Magog and I will make a strongly worded speech to tell them to change their policy towards the Demons asap. Is that OK for you?”
“It’s been tried before. They won’t listen. They just use people to whitewash their international image. It’s a criminal regime that impoverishes and slaughters innocent people. Tomahawk missiles against bows and arrows. Oh, Mark, please.”
Moloch could hear that phrase, that oh, Mark, please, echoing through the crevices of his skull over and over again and he felt that it would never stop. Something had to be done. Then he had an idea.
“Maybe, you’re right, darling,” he began, “I won’t go, I’ll write out a statement and send a Demon to pick up the prize for me. That’ll show them.”
His wife’s face lit up.
“Oh, Mark,” she sighed, “that’s the man I fell in love with. Wait half an hour and we’ll have a nice lunch.”
Moloch nodded his head.
“Yes, but I need your help with something first,” he said.
“I want you to translate this Chinese phrase for me,” he said, pointing to the crucial sentence that would turn the speaker into gold, not give the power of gold spinning. Moloch puckered up at his cleverness.
His wife looked over his shoulder.
“That’s Confucius,” she said, “is it for a story?”
“Yes, exactly,” hissed Moloch, and held his breath in anticipation.
“It says: Whom shall I deceive? Shall I deceive Heaven?”
Moloch waited for the flash and the disappearance of his wife in a puff of gold. But nothing happened. She was still there, still in one piece, still his aggravating conscience voice.
“Yes,” she was saying, “the interrogative pronoun is preverbal, that’s the ancient question word order.”
“Ah,” thought Moloch to himself, just before thinking nothing more, “it should be: I who deceive, deceive heaven …..” (DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!)
Then there was a blinding flash of golden light filling the room. The light expanded and Sally Moloch had to close her eyes tightly and throw herself down onto the carpet. After a few minutes the light receded, a yellow sea withdrawing, and she got up and looked around. Mark was no longer there and the whole desk and corner where he had sat had transformed itself into a hard gold coloured metal.
Sally moved around the desk: “Mark? You’ve gone too far this time. Getting mixed up with necromancy. Mark? Mark??”
She looked down at his desk and there was a little gold statuette in an exact likeness to her husband next to a solid gold computer and mouse, and shiny mouse pad. His little tea mug, his “lucky writer’s mug”, with “Just Write!” printed on it was glowing in the light streaming in from the English country garden at the back. There were butterflies fluttering and birds warbling in the hedgerow. The shed door was ajar. A rake was propped on one side. Mark Moloch’s face was frozen in a smirk, eyebrows raised and glasses slightly set forward. You could see the top row of his golden teeth. They would follow you no matter from what angle you looked at the statue in the future (it ended up in the curiosities section of the British Museum). His bowtie and tweed Americano were splendidly flaxen, the buttons like little mirrors for those over inquisitive souls who got up too close. Sally was horrified at first but then, suddenly feeling a great burst of freedom, started to laugh hysterically. Her manic laughter rang out madly, dancing and pirouetting off the hard objects in the room. She picked up the statuette and went into the front room. On the mantelpiece above the fire there was a row of classics held up at either end by two Staffordshire dog figurines (wee wally dugs Moloch used to like to cry mockingly in an affected Scots burr). Sally removed one of the dogs and slipped the little figure of Moloch onto the shelf. He sat there staring straight ahead grinning. Next to him was a copy of “War and Peace”. And then a line of classics shooting back to Homer. Sally sat with her head cocked watching for five minutes and then got up and went into the study and picked up the pickled brown nose, which was now a splendid tawny gold hue. She went over to the statue and stuck it onto the face between the haunting teeth and the specs. She then turned on her heel and went into the kitchen and started to make lunch for one. Whom shall I deceive, she thought, while chopping some lettuce, shall I deceive Heaven?
Swearwords: None.
Description: The dilemma of being awarded one of the most valued literary prizes of the twenty-third century.
_____________________________________________________________________
When my words were wheatI was earth
When my words were anger
I was storm
When my words were rock
I was river
When my words turned honey
Flies covered my lips
– Mahmoud Darwish
The Magog Prize for literature had become one of the most valued literary awards for all the writers, poets, scribes and Pharisees of the late twenty-third century APMD (Anno Post Mortem Domini) Earth. Especially by the Pharisees, who, triumphant once more, had moulded and sculpted the world after their own navel-gazing image. It was awarded biennially for “the writer who has done most to promote freedom from all responsibility except to the eternal and proper values of the individualistic Magogian Spirit”. It was, in short, one of the greatest heights that any APMD writer could reach in the age of Gog. The culmination of many years of ball-busting attention seeking and distancing oneself from the common masses (as is rightly proper in the case of writers, of course, of course, of course). And, more importantly, it was the first step towards that greatest literary jewel of all, the Grand Gog Prize of Prizes for Eternal Art.
When Mark Moloch (not his real name) first heard the news he was one of the speakers at a highbrow Harvard debate on the “Future of Demonasia”. It was an all-star cast: the slippery bien pensant, masterchef, and nit-picking polemicist and author of “Why Mother Theresa is a FAR INFERIOR Moral Being to ME”, Kristofer Kitchens; Marty Simian, that cutting-edge unrosy proser and author of “Let’s all Laugh at the Poor”, “Suffer the Little Demon Children”, and his splendiferous psychological farce “I’m Better than You, Dad! Sorry, Dad!!”; and the renowned atheist and Oxford Professor of Barnyard Animals, Reggie Smyth, author of the bestselling “The Greedy Giraffe and other just-so stories for scientists who don’t understand physics”. The question under robust discussion was “just how much should the peoples of Demonasia have to suffer until they get their house in order?”
Moloch was considered a Chicken, that is, he was of the (learned and pondered) opinion that the Demonlanders should only be sternly rebuked and led with a firm hand into the modern Gogian century and not eviscerated, every Demonman, Demonwoman, and Demonchild (the position of the Mad Hooded Vultures (MHVs), as they were called in the Chicken press). When Moloch was informed by the press of the decision to award him the prize his face first formed itself into his famous impish puckered smile, and then, on second thoughts of the gravitas of the occasion, recontorted itself into an appropriately distant icy glare. This lasted for a couple of minutes, but the emotion was too much for the big best-selling Pharisee and he took off his owl spectacles and, burying his baldy graying head in his hands, burst into a flood of joyful alligator tears.
Ah, but how fleeting joy is! Then comes the torment. The barrage of emails, letters, anti-him tweets, squawks, and editorials in the Chicken press, the Reality Deniers (as both the Chickens and the MHVs called those completely opposed to their positions) berating him in the street. Some of them even had the bad taste to talk hysterically about dead Demon children, and twice some heartless son of a bitch had sent him images of the dead children via email. He cared too, damn it all. He was a Chicken. He wanted the best for the future generations of the great land of the Demons. He knew what was best for them. He tough loved them all.
Moloch fell into what is known in the scribbling trade as a writer’s crisis. He wished he had never been offered the prize, never made certain friends, never attended dinner parties with the Chicken intellectual glitterati, in fact, never allowed himself to be connected in any way whatsoever with the Chickens and the war on “Demonasian terror”. It was his pride, his desire to be the greatest living Gogian scribe to blame. It had blinded him. He remembered with a touch of remorse, and a smidgeon of embarrassment, how he had felt uncontrollable liver-strangling jealousy when he had heard that the great Japanese writer Miko Muchacaca had been awarded the prize two years before. How he had scoffed at Muchacaca’s weasel words and his incomprehensible metaphors. The author of such fabulous literary triumphs as “Trying to Read Kafka in a Cubicle of a Noisy Public Lavatory”, “Chicken Stew, Potatoes and Baby Carrots, 1968” and “Chicken Wing Burning” had compared the individual to a wind-up chocolate Easter Bunny in an oven with the heat being constantly turned up a few notches. Muchacaca had said that he would always be on the side of the Easter Bunny, no matter the consequences, or how brown and sticky his fingers got.
Mark Moloch had laughed long and hard, laughed until he thought he was going to pop a testicle or explode a kidney (thankfully for the world of literature, neither of these disagreeable possible outcomes came to pass). How he had scoffed when Muchacaca had stated that he was not writing in order to receive a prize. No way, by no means. “When you start getting prizes then you are a washed up octopus in life’s changing room unable to find a jersey to fit. A castrated egg of a human soul,” he said, to much embarrassed toe-curling among fans before disappearing down a psychedelic spiral staircase into another dimension. Ha ha ha, hee hee hee. Moloch had curled his toes and sniggered up his sleeve. Now he was deeply distraught and having to listen to his psychic wife’s dark forebodings of doom 24/7. Sally Moloch, Ancient China scholar and one time love of his life become thorn in his flesh. He just wanted to get back to what he did best. He longed for his student days, before success, before his seer spouse, before he had ever heard of the Magog Prize. The days on the Mad Malkie Frazer Creative Writing Course for Angry Young Sons of the Military. He had been the biggest talent in the semi-circle around Malkie, even greater (at least in his own head) than Malkie himself. His dark autistic stories reflecting the world spirit of dark autistic times that were his (though he didn’t seem to know it at the time). And it was true, he was the spirit of true literature back then, of the siphoning off of pain. Of all the lonely loveless hours. Then Moloch had hosed it all out of himself, made a full recovery, and signed up with the Chickens. Now he just wanted to get back to the autistic writing. Sit at the thou-shalt-not-judge feet of Mad Malkie once again.
He sat down at his worktable and looked over his notes. He couldn’t decide what to work on: his novel or a long short story he had been dipping in and out of for a few months now. The novel still lacked a real narrative voice and he had only written a few chapters. He couldn’t decide which technique to use; it had to be groundbreaking and traditional at the same time so that it would place him in the eternal stream of Gogian literature. Defoeian? Joycean? Woolfian? Mad Malkian? Pinteresque? No, not that last one! Bloody softy! The idea was to set it over one day during the massive demonstrations against the needless deaths and maiming of thousands of innocent people in the great central plain of Demonasia as the Army of Greater Gog attacked in pursuit of oil (can you imagine, Moloch, the father of small children waiting, waiting, waiting for the just war to begin?).
Moloch’s main character, Sid Cushing, was an evolutionary psychologist and millionaire neurosurgeon to the stars (aren’t we all nowadays?) whom Moloch hoped to use to reflect all of the nuances and deep psychological angst of those who thought that the war was a just one (one day Moloch had had the idea that a true writer is also a chronicler of his times, Oh that I were Tolstoy for our days!).He put his plot map aside and picked up the manuscript of the short story he had been working on: Flatline Sinic Algebra. That was more like it, getting back to his old self. It was a story about a young writer with marital and financial problems who starts spending more and more time ignoring his wife and studying some books of ancient Chinese algebra as translated by the enigmatic Victorian adventurer and pickled body part collector Quentin Buckle (weren’t they all back then?), whose nose the writer kept in a jar of formaldehyde on his writing desk (coincidently Moloch also had a pickled brown nose on his desk bought one sticky July day in a Soho joke shop). The story was that if you can pronounce and really understand the deep meaning of the equations then you fulfill the old Alchemists’ dream of turning everything into gold. Moloch already had the ending and he started hammering away on his keyboard, his mind floating off ethereally into the realm of autistic prosy.
His deep scriptural wanderings were disturbed by Sally hovering around the door and then sticking her head into the room. He had told her a million trillion times not to disturb him when he was writing. She didn’t seem to understand. Understand the nature of his greatness. That one day he would be one of the eternals. Remembered down through the ages. Like Horace, Virgil, Dante. He would be studied and written about in learned places. There would be competitions among the common people to memorize and recite his work. For he would be loved as a great writer and as a man of the people. Like Dickens. He imagined the streets lined for his funeral. His final resting place in Saint Paul’s. But, this was the but: all of this could not come to pass unless he was left alone when working, if no wife from Porlock (it’s what he always said) knocked at his study door every five minutes, IF HE WAS NOT BLOODY WELL DISTURBED IN HIS GENIUS!!
“Don’t go, Mark, don’t go and pick up the prize. They should be completely ostracized. You can never reason with a bully. A bully with total control. All powerful. It’s true, that cliché, that power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely, please, darling, don’t go, I beg you.”
Moloch counted to ten. He swung round in his chair.
“I’ve told you before about disturbing me when I’m working; how can I become the greatest writer of our time if I am not allowed to work?” he snorted hysterically in a failed attempt at self-mockery. “I will go to Magog and I will make a strongly worded speech to tell them to change their policy towards the Demons asap. Is that OK for you?”
“It’s been tried before. They won’t listen. They just use people to whitewash their international image. It’s a criminal regime that impoverishes and slaughters innocent people. Tomahawk missiles against bows and arrows. Oh, Mark, please.”
Moloch could hear that phrase, that oh, Mark, please, echoing through the crevices of his skull over and over again and he felt that it would never stop. Something had to be done. Then he had an idea.
“Maybe, you’re right, darling,” he began, “I won’t go, I’ll write out a statement and send a Demon to pick up the prize for me. That’ll show them.”
His wife’s face lit up.
“Oh, Mark,” she sighed, “that’s the man I fell in love with. Wait half an hour and we’ll have a nice lunch.”
Moloch nodded his head.
“Yes, but I need your help with something first,” he said.
“I want you to translate this Chinese phrase for me,” he said, pointing to the crucial sentence that would turn the speaker into gold, not give the power of gold spinning. Moloch puckered up at his cleverness.
His wife looked over his shoulder.
“That’s Confucius,” she said, “is it for a story?”
“Yes, exactly,” hissed Moloch, and held his breath in anticipation.
“It says: Whom shall I deceive? Shall I deceive Heaven?”
Moloch waited for the flash and the disappearance of his wife in a puff of gold. But nothing happened. She was still there, still in one piece, still his aggravating conscience voice.
“Yes,” she was saying, “the interrogative pronoun is preverbal, that’s the ancient question word order.”
“Ah,” thought Moloch to himself, just before thinking nothing more, “it should be: I who deceive, deceive heaven …..” (DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!)
Then there was a blinding flash of golden light filling the room. The light expanded and Sally Moloch had to close her eyes tightly and throw herself down onto the carpet. After a few minutes the light receded, a yellow sea withdrawing, and she got up and looked around. Mark was no longer there and the whole desk and corner where he had sat had transformed itself into a hard gold coloured metal.
Sally moved around the desk: “Mark? You’ve gone too far this time. Getting mixed up with necromancy. Mark? Mark??”
She looked down at his desk and there was a little gold statuette in an exact likeness to her husband next to a solid gold computer and mouse, and shiny mouse pad. His little tea mug, his “lucky writer’s mug”, with “Just Write!” printed on it was glowing in the light streaming in from the English country garden at the back. There were butterflies fluttering and birds warbling in the hedgerow. The shed door was ajar. A rake was propped on one side. Mark Moloch’s face was frozen in a smirk, eyebrows raised and glasses slightly set forward. You could see the top row of his golden teeth. They would follow you no matter from what angle you looked at the statue in the future (it ended up in the curiosities section of the British Museum). His bowtie and tweed Americano were splendidly flaxen, the buttons like little mirrors for those over inquisitive souls who got up too close. Sally was horrified at first but then, suddenly feeling a great burst of freedom, started to laugh hysterically. Her manic laughter rang out madly, dancing and pirouetting off the hard objects in the room. She picked up the statuette and went into the front room. On the mantelpiece above the fire there was a row of classics held up at either end by two Staffordshire dog figurines (wee wally dugs Moloch used to like to cry mockingly in an affected Scots burr). Sally removed one of the dogs and slipped the little figure of Moloch onto the shelf. He sat there staring straight ahead grinning. Next to him was a copy of “War and Peace”. And then a line of classics shooting back to Homer. Sally sat with her head cocked watching for five minutes and then got up and went into the study and picked up the pickled brown nose, which was now a splendid tawny gold hue. She went over to the statue and stuck it onto the face between the haunting teeth and the specs. She then turned on her heel and went into the kitchen and started to make lunch for one. Whom shall I deceive, she thought, while chopping some lettuce, shall I deceive Heaven?
About the Author
John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His long short story Rainbow, his novel The Tower and his short fiction collection Everywhere are McStorytellers publications.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.