I ended my last book, I DRIVE TO FAIRHOPE, ALABAMA, "Genius Hick was writing a book called READFEST 2006."

I am writing a book called READFEST 2006. Who is Genius Hick?

Genius Hick was the Balzac character in Ed Sanders' Love and Fame in New York.

Balzac's Comédie humaine was 90 novels or novellas. I have written three times that many books. Without selling one to New York, Hollywood, or a major regional or fine arts publisher.

Sometimes I compare myself to Genius Hick.

I know you can't copyright the name of a book. I don't know if an author can copyright the name of a character.

All I mean is something like, "I hit the ball like Mickey Mantle." That doesn't mean I think I am Mickey Mantle.

Sometimes I think I am a character in somebody else's book.

But I don't want to steal another writer's character.

Maybe I'd do it if I were writing parody, as Alice Randall did with characters from Gone With the Wind in The Wind Done Gone.

This is not parody. I am not Genius Hick. Although I often am mistaken for him.

This is complicated by, in mail art, artists often use more than one name, use other writers' names, use other writers' characters' names, write as each other, etc.

I also wrote, at the end of I DRIVE TO FAIRHOPE, ALABAMA, "Postmodernism must be deconstructed."

I don't think anybody cares if postmodernism is deconstructed or not.

I am not a racist, I am sous rature, or under erasure. They're trying to wash me away.

Who is they?

I don't know, alas. Sometimes I fear I am imagining it. It's all in my imagination.

Penury and Limbo in Panama City: A Pretty Fair Country Writer in a Subgenre Filled with Second-Raters.

No, wait. I already used that subtitle in Greatest Hits Boxed Set: A Pretty Fair Country Writer in a Subgenre Filled with Second-Raters.

Trying to fit my greatest hits in a boxed set would be like Cinderella's ugly stepsisters trying to cram their feet into her glass slipper.

I'm not a genius. But I'm better than a lot of writers who are more successful.

A. J. Liebling said he wrote better than faster writers and faster than better writers.

Fair Writer was writing a book called PENURY AND LIMBO IN PANAMA CITY.

Understatement is praise.

He all right.

Maybe I am a racist.

Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, said, "I am not a Communist, I am a canoeist."

I am not a balloonist, I am a feuilletonist.

I had a business card that said, "Jack Saunders, Vernacular Writer."

But I wasn't a vernacular writer, I was a funicular writer. All funiculus means is cord. Play it like a zuzu.

I am a pretty fair country swinette-picker.