We killed two hours in a Border's, reading.
Ate lunch in the Tallahassee Mall. Spent two hours in a Barnes & Noble, reading.
We had to eat at the food court in the mall, because the Picadilly cafeteria we ate
in last time had gone out of business.
So much for the vegetable plate.
* * *
We're in the Econo Lodge by the Cracker Barrel, near I-10. Rain and gusting
wind.
I can get a vegetable plate for supper.
* * *
We saw a lot of cool people, in the bookstores, and heard a lot of cool conversations,
on cell phones, as cool people talked to each other, and posed, in their costumes,
with their props.
We saw some cool consumer magazines.
I saw a man
reading Backpacker.
He didn't look like much of a backpacker to me.
I guess he was researching which backpack to buy.
Where would he go to do
it? Would that take an outdoor adventure magazine to research? Or would he do it
in bookstores in the mall? Backpack.
With a decaf latte.
* * *
I read a book by Diane Roberts last night. Dream State. Eight generations
of her mover-and-shaker relatives.
Queen of the May.
She dedicated
her book to her old English professor at FSU, Jerome Stern.
I think Jerome
Stern considered me an amateur because I was self-taught, and broke obvious rules,
like I didn't know what they were.
When I was in anthropology, and some pothunter
wanted to talk to me about his arrowhead collection, I gave him short shrift. He
didn't follow the archeology rules, which I had gone to some pains to learn.
Maybe that's how Stern saw me.
Maybe if I was a professor in a writing program
I would consider zinesters, and people who serialized novels on the worldwide web,
or called books that weren't novels novels, hopeless amateurs.
* * *
I just got Underground Writer Makes Good from Four-Sep Publications.
I can take it to zine fest and give it out at my workshop on do-it-yourself publishing.
I can say, "This will explain."
Stern wrote a book called Florida
Dreams.