Trade Shows
TRADE SHOWS.
August 15 – August 31. 21,000
words. I started 40-Year Run: A Celebration
two weeks early. Sometimes the books
snap themselves off. WE’RE NO.1! did
that. I meant to go to August 31, but
when they’re over, they’re over. End it,
and start the next book. The same day,
or the next day. Remembering my first
trade show sends chills down my spine. I
knew then I would not make it in academia, but I thought letters was
different. I jumped out of the frying
pan and into the fire. Belles-Lettres in the Hour of the Wolf,
a play on the subtitle of Camille Paglia’s “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,”
“Academia in the Hour of the Wolf.”
Which is it? 40-Year Run: A Celebration
or 40-Year Run: Belles-Lettres in the Hour of the Wolf? Why, they’re the same, don’t you see? It takes taut stings to make music. Knut Hamsun said that in A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings.
I have this dark, Norwegian streak.
I’m like the Norwegian Blue Parrot.
Not dead. Pining for the
fjords. I write a pamphlet, Root, Hog, or Die. I don’t know whether to sell it or give it
away at the Dread Clampitt gig at the American Legion in Tallahassee, at the
Gulf Coast Writers Conference, or at the Bay Arts Alliance FILM FLAM
independent film series premier of Back
From the Dread. Dread Clampitt 2005-2007
AD. I write another pamphlet for the
writers conference, Jack the Raver, Happy
at Last. What do you have to
do? Storm Parnassus. Hit the brick stone wall of the world’s
indifference with your head. Maybe if
you get your bell rung it will wake you up.
Wake up! You can’t do anything
about it. It’s out of your hands. You control the writing, not what happens to
it. Also, if you can’t go long, go
short. Drop-kick it. The theme of this years writers conference is
Getting Published, so I write one more pamphlet, Writing as Growth: Getting
Published. I see that TRADE SHOWS is
not the last book of Generation of Strainers: A Life on Paper, or the first book of Forty-Year Run: A Celebration, but a stand-alone book, by itself,
just in between. I wrote the great American novel and all I
got was a T-shirt. All it was was this
book. A misfire, a rimshot, a dud. Not an A-bomb, a squib.
