Bill Cotterell
From: Jack Saunders
To: Bill Cotterell
Subj: Old Times
I was just writing about appearing at the Miami Book Fair in a booth next to some
guy who was backing left-wing regimes in Central and South America. Needless to say,
he got a lot of cross-talk from refugees from Castro's Cuba.
I thought his
name might be Radical Jack Lieberman, and looked Radical Jack up in Google and got
a hit on your column about the pork chop legislature passing an academic freedom
bill to protect conservatives from liberal college professors
.
You mentioned
McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Charley Johns Committee.
Stanley Marshall.
I remember those days. In fact, I just wrote a column on The
Great FSU Shit Controversy, at The Daily Bulletin.
I'll be at
a book fair in Tallahassee Friday. I won't have a booth. My new book is still in
press, and my old books are shopworn.
I'll be wearing a white T-shirt and
a gimme cap from B & B Feed & Seed, Wewahitchka, Florida, with a picture
on the T-shirt of me rescuing Miss Weekiwachee from The Creature From the Black Lagoon,
wearing a gimme cap with a picture of an anatomically correct boar hog on the front,
a sort of a post-modern Bubba Po-Mo.
Maybe I'll see you there.
A
columnist always needs material for a column.
Crank Letters
Q: Do you ever hear back from people you send these crank letters to?
A: Sometimes.
But I called a book LETTER FROM AN IMAGINARY FRIEND,
once.
Q: No, it was a series of books called Letter From an Imaginary Friend: One Year in the Life of an Underground Writer.
A: Oh, yea.
Q: And you sometimes call the genre you write in crank-lettres. By analogy with belles-lettres.
A: Yes. So the letter writing has a literary purpose. It moves the
books along.
It's easier to imagine a letter being read than a prose vignette
or a poem or an essay. A diatribe.
A letter has an addressee. What does the
immobilized hero novel have?
Charles Willeford wrote, at the conclusion of
New Forms of Ugly,
Today there are still enough highly literate readers in the world for the immobilized hero novel to exist as a sub-literary force in the world of literature. However, as the electronic impact of immediate information forces literature of all kinds into microfilms where it can be stored and forgotten, the immobilized hero novel will gradually disappear. Instead of man reading about man writing about man writing, immobilized hero novel readers will be reduced to small groups of semi-literate men reading the immobilized hero novel as small groups of graduate students meet today to read Beowulf.
I am writing Beowulf, again and again, for a smaller and smaller audience.
My audience is smaller today, on the worldwide web, than when Jack Remick compared
me to Beowulf, when Screed came out.
Q: So you write immobilized hero novels?
A: Yes. Willeford inscribed New Forms of Ugly, "To Jack Saunders, immobilized in Del Ray."
Q: How do you inscribe your immobilized hero book?
A: "I hope you like Dragging Up."
Q: Everybody likes to drag up.
A: Not everybody. That's why so many people still work.
Q: Why do you call DRAGGING UP an immobilized hero novel?
A: I don't do anything but sit in my room and type. Putter around the house in the afternoons. Watch television with Brenda after supper. Two couch potatoes.
Q: You went to two book fairs, an art tour of Highway 30A, and a trip to Wewa.
A: That's not as much as commuting to DeFuniak Springs every day.
Q: You range over the state, from Fisheating Creek to Melrose, where Al Burt lives.
A: Harry Crews.
Harry Crews wrote an essay called "Why I Live
Where I Live."
Q: That's where his job is. Gainesville.
A: Harry Crews published a book called Florida Frenzy. He wrote
an essay especially for the book telling students not to write genre fiction, to
write literature.
The rest of the book is recycled "Grits" columns
from Esquire.
And the publisher, University Press of Florida, told
me they only publish books of scholarly or literary excellence. In rejecting a proposal
of mine.
I told them they were a closed shop for faculty members with the
union card. That my books had scholarly or literary excellence and a good part of
what they published was potboilers for the publish-or-perish crowd. It was ticket-punching.
Academics getting their ticket punched.
Q: I bet they liked that.
A: No, they didn't.
Q: Willeford's New Forms of Ugly was rejected by a commercial press
as too literary or scholarly and by a literary or scholarly press as too commercial.
Just like you.
A: He's not like me, I'm like him.
He was that way first.
But I'm proud to be like him.
He's my hero. My immobilized hero.
I wrote an autobiography once, changed the hero's name to Art Brew, and called it
a novel.