The Black Memoir
Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—One time Scrib had the idea of publishing a newsletter called Low-Rent Cinéaste. He would review old movies that video stores had in their back title inventory, and suggest them to viewers who liked certain new releases that were currently popular.
If you liked Edge of Darkness you will like Payback.
If you liked Payback you will like Point Blank.
No relation to Grosse Pointe Blank.
He relied on his memory, a paperback guide to movies on video, with indexes for directors, and actors, and a hardbound reference book in the library that was updated every year, like Contemporary Authors, only for movies. Motion Picture Guide (MPG). I use IMDb now, at home.
He couldn’t interest any video stores in distributing it to their customers, free.
He thought if one would give it away, it would be so popular the chain would pay him to write it, and give it away at all their branches.
The managers of the video stores didn’t know as much about their prodeck as Scrib did.
They did plenty of business without bothering to cross-sell old titles. Just on new releases and porn films (in an adults-only back room).
Scrib had a small, desktop computer, a PC clone, a Commodore Colt, with two diskette drives (low-density, 5¼” floppies), one for the program disk and one for the data disk.
He used DOS 3.2 and WordPerfect 4.2.
He was able to set the type in newspaper columns, so it looked like a real newsletter.
He had a dot-matrix printer that printed near-letter quality (NLQ), but if the newsletter took off, he would use a laser printer at a Kwik Print shop.
As I say, it didn’t take off. No takers.
Flash forward 20 years.
Scrib has a
computer at home, on the worldwide web. He
has a hard drive and a modem. A color
inkjet printer. He publishes a web page,
The Daily By-Catch. One of the things he writes about at his web
site is he reviews movies he watches, books he reads, plays, concerts, and
art-show openings he attends, book fairs he goes to. This weekend he is going to booksALIVE 2010! at
His last book,
SCRIB, was about conferences he attended, like booksALIVE, Folk Fest, in
He didn’t try to sell his reviews to anyone.
He did try to sell the books the reviews were a part of, along with essays on literary theory, self-interviews, prose vignettes, poems. Areas not interested in agenting (ANIIA).
The reader knows how that turns out.
Scrib knew a free-lance writer who pitched an idea to a magazine, they turned him down, and a few months later the magazine came out with his idea, written by a staffer for the magazine.
You can’t copyright an idea.
Ideas are in the air. Ideas are free, like bottled water. If you have a backstage pass.
Charles Bronson made a detective movie (The Stone Killer, with Martin Balsam), that had one of Goya’s black paintings in it, Saturn, eating one of his children. Scrib tried to tie the idea of film noir in with Goya’s black paintings. Goya was tired of being a court painter, was going deaf, and was painting for himself, or painting what he believed.
Included in Scribs newsletter were essays on topics like film noir.
Or black novels. Or the black memoir.
Derek Raymond wrote a memoir about writing black novel like I Was Dora Suarez, The Hidden Files.
Scrib called it a black memoir.
He had essays on the black memoir in books like SCRIB ONLINE.
Little 750-word squibs.
Scrib was a squib writer.
A squib was a small firecracker. A pissant. Pop, pop, pop. Fizzle.
Philippics, jeremiads, and pasquinades.
A squib was a pasquinade.