Q: What’s the plot of KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY?
A: Irascible “Razz” Heap, compare Incredible Hulk, hears about an entertainment fortnightly that has gone over to a weekly, and needs a content-provider to cover the arts scene and write an occasional book review.
This is just up his alley.
He knows a lot of artists, musicians, and writers, from Panama Cith on over to Highway 30A, a hotbed of arts activity. He can report on his friends. And arts administrators. Arts bureaucrats in the public (and private, not-for-profit) sector.
He starts writing.
Soon, like Incredible Hulk, undergoing a transformation, he turns from the reporter with a necktie, bureau chief of the YU News Service, a parody news and disinformation syndicate, to Jack the Raver, with the stub of a pencil for a nose and slobber running down his chin.
|
|
|
Instead of writing for the Point and Shoot Weekender he writes for his own web site, The Daily Raver.
Q: And the characters are the people he interviews?
A: Partly. Plus his family, his wife’s co-workers, and members of his coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult.
Heap is a cult writer.
All cults are small. By definition.
Q: The setting is the Redneck Riviera. What’s the theme? Vocation and career in conflict?
A: A leopard can’t change his spots.
Was he a cobbler sticking to his last or a dog returning to his vomit?
Q: Which is he?
A: Time will tell. We can’t know. Is you is or is you ain’t an existentialist.
As Monk says, “The music is on the horn. Play it or throw it away.”
Q: I see.
A: Once you choose wrong, you can’t see the choice you made. You have to choose right to keep seeing it. But that makes people think you are a Johnny-one-note, or hung up about rejection.
Q: Are you hung up about rejection?
A: A subplot is will I finish writing 40-Year Run without selling a book to
Q: That’s tomorrow.
I think you will.
A: It looks like it.
