The goodle days are past and gone.

John Hartford

I'm not poor. I'm broke.

Willem de Kooning

I'm not scared of but two things: a dead person and a broke person.

Luke (porter who worked for me at Thalhimer's)

Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404

Copyright © 2005 by Jack L. Saunders, Jr.

Thursday, March 3

Art Brew wasn't immobilized, he just moved better sideways than he did straight ahead.

He brandished his big "show" claw at the enemy and shoveled in the food with the business claw, like Woodie Allen demonstrating how a Chinaman eats rice in Manhattan.

Enema vérité is what you see on the end of the fork when you really look. Sometimes, to see what's on the fork we have to eat with chopsticks.

"No Chinaman must figure in" is one of the rules Raymond Chandler gave for writing mysteries.

POSTCARDS FROM POINT AND SHOOT wasn't a mystery, of course, it was an immobilized hero novel, or underground writer procedural novel, with a recurring cast, the same location as other books in the series, a similar tone.

An author's voice.

Once a reader discovers an author's voice it likes, it looks for everything by and about the author it can find.

Brew called the he or she reader it.

He didn't like saying he or she every time the pronoun was indefinite. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or undecided. So he just said it.

For all he cared about sexual orientation, or gender, the reader could have a taupe Thalidomide flipper growing out of its ass.

Brew just finished writing a book. DRAGGING UP.

A book in which he resurrected himself.

He started a new book, the same day, as he did. POSTCARDS FROM POINT AND SHOOT. This book.

He threw himself a wrap party. As he did. Treated himself to a tray of portugaises, like Hemingway used to do when he finished writing a story he liked, in Paris.

The picture above may be on the back cover of Bukowski Never Did This.

It might not.

His publisher, Patrick Simonelli, LitVision Press, had hired a professional designer, David Barringer, to do the cover, so Brew didn't know what the cover was going to look like, except that he expected David Barringer to do a professional job.

Bukowski Never Did This was coming along. He had an ISBN number and an estimated page count.

288 pages.

A proper book.

So Brew was celebrating having a book about to come out, finishing a book about how that felt, and starting a new book about attending a small press conference in Tallahassee, his old college town, sponsored by the Florida Coalition for the Literary Arts, which included Anhinga Press, University of Tampa Press, and Fiction Collective 2, all three of whom had rejected Brew's books, in the past.

Was that a repetition or a rotation, as Binx Bolling might ask, tooling along in his little sports car from New Orleans to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, in The Moviegoer.

There's a funny story about The Moviegoer.

A. J. Liebling was in Louisiana researching The Earl of Louisiana when the book came out. He bought it and read it, liked it, and sent it to his wife, Jean Stafford, who was a judge for the National Book Awards that year.

She read it, liked it, and gave copies to her fellow judges.

It won.

Percy's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, was pushing another book for the prize, William Maxwell's The Chateau.

Knopf was pissed.

At Walker Percy.