If you want to make money, you don’t attempt anything new. You start a series that can go on and on, whereupon the publishers don’t have any crisis of decision to resolve. I don’t want to work like that. It always seemed to me that one of the principles of writing is you should enjoy the actual writing, the feel of something evolving under your fingers, under your keys. You must try to please yourself, to be your own judge Often you fall flat on your face. But there’s such pleasure in trying something that is new, or passes for new.
Brian Aldiss, interview in Locus, January 2008
SCRIB. January 23 - __________. In progress. Cacoëthes Scribendi had a restless urge to write. Also, he realized that he was in show business. Like a clown. What genre is SCRIB. Jack Remick said Screed was, “…the first piece of American fiction that is not a novel.” It is not only not a novel, it is not fiction. It’s all true stories, Kerouac said, about his Duluoz Saga. John M. Bennett called a book of my poems fishing stories. SCRIB is stories about the writing game. People are interested in the mechanics of a craft. Remember The Violent World of Sam Huff? SCRIB is STORIES OF SCUFFLING AND MAKING DO. Who knows if it’s true. Who would know. Does it ring true to you? You will know. You have a built-in shock-proof shit-detector. Clown is an act. Making a spectacle of myself is an act. You see that, don’t you. The purpose of satire is to bring about change. That’s what makes it different from other forms of comedy. Satura means mixed plate, or medley. Everything under the sun. But its motivation is to improve society by ridiculing society’s foibles and peccadilloes. Using obscenity, pratfalls, fart jokes, dogs humping the knee. Think of Lenny Bruce. You can’t say that. Think of George Carlin. That’s not allowed. Think of Brother Dave, Beloved. Of course, Brother Dave was crazy. He had a swastika in his dressing room. He thought nightclub owners were Jewish. Maybe I’m crazy. How would I know? Brother Dave satirized Earl Long, Governor of the Sovereign State of Louisiana, by saying. “I be damn if I’m crazy.” To the head of the state police, hauling him off to the mental hospital in Mandeville. Long ride with Uncle Earl in the back seat, dog-cussing you. Scrib Online shows SCRIB as it is being written, and discovers its form, and shows where it fits in Jack Saunders’ Stack. Dan Garber corrected me on the definition of satire. I thought satura meant full plate. It means medley, or mixed plate. Hodge-podge.
CRITICAL FUDGE: THE AMERICAN DREAM IN MELTDOWN. Projected.
Just before fudge turns into fudge, or glops up and is ruined, the
molecules are spinning around, in existential uncertainty. This is critical fudge. Nothing makes sense. Nothing works. Look at