Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—Scrib
never called a book DOOMED, but he called a book CURSED BY FATE once.
CURSED BY FATE.
Going over the same old ground.
Drive to
Actually, having Crowbar publish Forty, and Blaster Al write an afterword to it, “Jack Saunders Revisited,” was a stroke of good luck. And winning an NEA grant, or a state grant, would have meant Scrib had to stop saying nobody official had ever helped him.
Things happen.
Are they a blessing or a curse? We don’t know. Plus, it changes.
What looks like a blessing turns out to be a curse and vice versa. Then sometimes the Spinning Fatalist reverses course and the opposite happens. Or the same thing, but with a different polarity.
For example, Scrib and Brenda got kicked off a dig, but Chief picked them up as his students.
Then Chief helped them get into Tulane, but they were weighed in the balance and found wanting at Tulane.
But Scrip saw the handwriting on the wall and stole the last year of his fellowship to teach himself to write.
But nothing came of the writing for 38 years.
But he got the word right on the page and the pages out to readers. He had a cult following. The Buzzard Cult. His coterie of steadfast readers.
Fate is neither a blessing nor a curse, it’s both at the same time, it all depends whose ox is being gored.
If five writers eat lunch together they will have five conflicting versions of what happened.
If five players are inducted into the Hall of Fame and I don’t know who they are, or were, are they really famous? Their teammates know. Somebody voted them in. They’re famous to somebody.
A book was written from its own inner necessity to be written. It assumed the form it needed to assume to express itself the way it turned out expressing itself.
All a writer could do was be true to the form, to follow the muse where it led.
Black is the
color of my muse’s heart. Black as
But, at the same time, you have to see the humor of it.
Scrib saw the humor of it.
His books were funny.
Satire is funny.
A spastic is funny.
Jerry Lewis used to make fun of spastics. Now they are his kids. Jerry’s kids.
The worst thing about being a spastic is the Jerry Lewis telethon.
Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. Jerry.
“Come on, you
cheap, redneck motherfuckers,” the ex-cheerleader said at the telethon in North
No, that was Texas Celebrity Turkey Trot.
Cheerleaders, drum majorettes, homecoming queens.
Revenge of the nerds.
I put the cruise control on 35, like the nerd’s father, a big line of cars behind me, shaking their fist.
“If you’d left a little earlier, you wouldn’t be late.”
The nerd’s father in Revenge of the Nerds was the farmer in Babe.
“That’ll do, pig.”
It’ll do.
Good enough for who it’s for. Who it’s for will find it.
Nobody else matters a good goddamn.
Do you want to be famous? Do you want to be on teevee? Talking?
Running your mouth. Debbil crabs, debbil crabs, debbil crabs.
“I, Mr. Baldwin? I brought you here in chains?” As Nelson Algren’s friend said.
James Baldwin and Margaret Mead having a rap on race in Redbook magazine.
Jane Goodall studying monkeys in the bush.