Last week, Dread Clampitt were out of
town, so Old Folks and Brenda didn't see them.
They asked them how the gigs
in Alabama and Atlanta went.
They went well. The band closed the show, in
Alabama, and had a good crowd, and they opened for another band in Atlanta, and the
other band drew a crowd.
Next week they're going to Colorado for three weeks.
They're playing a bluegrass festival at Telluride, and have entered the band contest,
there.
That will get them some exposure.
* * *
They played in Pensacola Saturday night, and some of their fans went over
there to see that.
Old Folks and Brenda caught up with what their friends
had been up to.
Suzette gave Old Folks a couple of Owen quotes.
She
said she used to hear Potter Brown quotes from people, and now she heard Owen Saunders
quotes.
* * *
Driving home from Grayton Beach, they stopped at the Gourd Garden, which
is now East Lake Nursery.
Brenda bought some plants and a book, Florida
Butterfly Gardening.
When they pulled up, a man in an East Lake Nursery
T-shirt--he could have been an owner, he could have been an employee--looked at Old
Folks like he had spotted a movie star.
He recognized him from his web site.
He was a fan of Slim McElderry, and had looked McElderry up in a search engine and
gotten a hit on Old Folks.
They talked about Slim, and Jack Rudloe, and Jeff
Potter, who published both of them.
Small world.
* * *
On the way home from East Lake Nursery, Old Folks bought some baby back ribs
to cook, and sweet potatoes, and yellow corn. At Publix. Brenda would make a Cole
slaw from leftover cabbage.
They ate that and watched a tape of the BEA conventions.
They watched the end of Barbara Ehrenreich and all of John Irving.
* * *
John Irving's 11th novel is his fattest one ever. He spent seven years writing
it, and visited several North Sea ports researching tattoo artists.
He read
from the opening of the novel.
It didn't make Old Folks want to read the
book.
Brenda said, "I quit watching this. It was boring. I taped it
for you."
Old Folks wanted to watch it, to see if it got any better.
Old Folks never understood the success of The World According to Garp.
He asked Dick Vajs about it and he said it read like it was written by a guy who
was raised in a house full of women.
It did.
* * *
Seven years to write a book.
Say a man made $50,000 a year, plus
health insurance--that was Barbara Ehrenreich's goal, in Bait and Switch--that's
$350,000 he would need to live on while he wrote the book.
That meant a publisher
felt the book would earn enough money so that 15% of the profits--the standard royalty--would
equal or exceed $350,000.
That's a lot of copies.
For a book Old
Folks wouldn't read. And he was a reader.
* * *
Old Folks was sending Karl Wenclas $20 for fliers.
He was paying
his own way to Zine Fest.
* * *
Old Folks thought he'd better write something to read about Bukowski Never
Did This, at the reading he was supposed to do, at Zine Fest.