Critical
Fudge:
The American Dream
Enters Meltdown
Always work in a despised medium.
Blaster Al, paraphrasing Fredric Brown
Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Copyright © 2010 by Jack L. Saunders, Jr.
Letter From a Distant Land
Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—Cacoëthes Scribendi normally went barefoot, but he wore his flip-flops when he went into the bank because the fingernails hurt his feet.
Scrib was a
senior fellow at the prestigious left-wing think-tank in Point and Shoot,
He wrote white papers on a variety of topics—politics, the economy, local color—and posted them at his web site, The Daily By-Catch.
When he heard back from readers he replied to their comments at the web site. That is, in the book.
He was writing the great long continuous book of his life at The Daily By-Catch, like Thoreau did, in his journal.
Or Kierkegaard, another town crank, who kept a journal.
Scribble, scribble, scribble—eh, Mr. Kierkegaard?
Scrib called the book he was serializing, online, his journal, JOURNAL OF A SMALL-TOWN CRANK.
What genre was it?
Was it a memoir, a novel, narrative nonfiction, poetry?
Scrib called it crank-lettres, by analogy with belles-lettres.
He tried to make the columns read like a letter to a friend, or from a friend. Such as one might write a kinsman from a distant land, as Thoreau said. A simple and sincere account of his own life.
“For if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me,” Thoreau said.
Scrib’s columns were syndicated by the parody news and disinformation syndicate YU News Service. Scrib was the Point and Shoot Bureau Chief. He had a Press card with his picture on it.
“I’ve got a story here that’s going to break this town wide open, Chief.” “Who do you think owns this newspaper, son?”
Scrib owned The Daily By-Catch. He owned the series of books he wrote, JOURNAL OF A SMALL-TOWN CRANK. He didn’t own YU News Service, but they hadn’t censored him yet, and most of the newspapers that ran Scrib’s columns agreed with his outlook, and wouldn’t censor him. If anything, they egged him on. That’s why they subscribed to YU News Service. The more outrageous the column the better.
It was the best of all possible worlds, for a writer, and Scrib considered himself Fortune’s favorite child. The luckiest man alive.
How did Scrib make a living? Did he get paid to write?
He was on social security. And he worked a contract job from time to time, when he could find one. His wife worked. He was a latch-key husband, or houseperson in the home.
His wife had a househusband before it was cool.
She also kept backyard chickens and had a hay-bale garden. Scrib did most of the cooking. Most of the shopping. Most of the housework.
He wrote a book called THE CRACKER TABLE once.
The cracker table was an actual table.
And an actual chair. The cracker chair was like the Bowditch Chair in American Archaeology Gordon Willey held at Harvard.
Scrib had been trained as an archeologist.
He called himself the salvage archeologist of the Mall Builder culture.
He called his
coterie of steadfast readers the Buzzard Cult, after the revitalization
movement that swept the
Scrib had a cult following. He was a cult writer.
His cult numbered in the high-one, low-two figures.
Do you have a cult? How many people are in your cult?
Would you rather be Steven King or Franz Kafka?
High-one, low-two figures was just about right, to Scrib.
Henry Miller said it was no insuperable burden to pay the reader to read your work.
Henry Miller’s
books were banned in
Scrib read banned books and sometimes he wrote them.