Reductio ad Absurdum
Q: Man of Letters: A Summing Up is a reductio ad absurdum of what you are doing wrong, as a writer.
A: How’s that?
Q: It’s too long, it’s too complicated, it’s too literary, it’s too obscure.
A: What can I do?
Q: Finish it.
A: Okay. Then what?
Q: Put it away.
A: Okay. Then what?
Q: Write something different.
A: Different how?
Q: Shorter, simpler, more accessible.
A: Okay.
Q: Easier to classify.
A: Okay.
Q: One book.
A: Okay. About what?
Q: What do you know?
A: How to create a body of work and invent a form
to present it in. Without selling a word
to
Q: Why would a person do that?
A: To find out what he’s made of. Writing is a test. Of character.
Life is a test.
What do you do
with your life? How do you be true to
your responsibilities to others and to your own finer qualities, which may not
be highly valued by a materialistic society, a society that puts working within
the system first. In school, the
military, or a career working for corporate
Q: Now you’re cooking. The plight of the creative artist in
You are an
artist. You live in
What do you do?
How do you put the foundation under the dream?
It’s the same question Thoreau asked.
A: Thoreau died.
He moved back in with his parents.
He was a
boomerang child.
Q: You’re going to die.
You have no parents to move back in with.
Your boomerang can’t find a home. You’re like a homing pigeon that got hit by lightning. It degaussed your magnetic direction finder. Fried your circuits.
Your circuits are fried.
A: FRIED CIRCUITS. The whole country. Nothing works.
Our circuits are fried. We have information overload.
The lies and bullshit overloaded the built-in shock-proof shit detector.
It went haywire. The information society went haywire.
It became too
surreal. We’re stunned. In shock.
Catatonic. We stare at the teevee
with a thousand-yard stare. Huh? Is this
what I worked for? Is this the American dream?
I did everything right.
I graduated from college.
I made Airman of the Quarter.
I had a Good Conduct medal with one oak leaf cluster.
I was an Outstanding Senior.
I was an NDEA fellow.
I gave a goat a month to a Haitian family through the Combined Giving campaign.
Q: I looked up fried circuits in Google.
It’s a rock group out of
A: CRITICAL FUDGE.
Q: I like it.
The American dream is melting down. It’s like a melting clock in a Dali painting.
Wavy Gravy, the Grateful Dead hanger-on.
A: CRITICAL FUDGE: THE AMERICAN DREAM ENTERS MELTDOWN.
Q: Cacoëthes Scribendi writes white papers for the Point and Shoot Institute (PSI). So much pressure.
He is a suede-o intellectual.
That’s his job. To stroll and ponder.
He is on his uppers. The soles of his shoes are worn out. From strolling and pondering.
A: My shoes are garbage.
Q: Jesus, he wears Birkenstock sandals. No wonder.
He looks like a Goddamn beachcomber.
So it’s a novel?
A: Yes.
Q: It’s satire?
A: Yes. When reality is surreal, surrealism is realism.
No. It’s a straight, naturalistic novel. About a world in critical fudge. Can’t decide whether to go ahead and become
fudge or glop up and be ruined. The
title is from George Timmins, a lifeguard.
Head lifeguard in