Scrib
Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street
Pancho needs your prayers, it's true,
but save a few for Lefty, too.
He only did what he had to do,
and now he's growin' old.
Townes Van Zandt, Pancho and Lefty
Ha ha, the dead letter office meets the dead pecker bench.
Cacoëthes Scribendi, Scrib
Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Copyright © 2010 by Jack L. Saunders, Jr.
Cacoëthes Scribendi had a restless urge to write.
He woke up in the morning with the writing roaring in his head.
He wrote to still the voices.
He was like a mental patient, wandering around, muttering to himself. He was like Little Joe Gould. Only his secret was, not that he wasn’t writing, but that he was posting every word he wrote on the worldwide web at his web site, The Above-Ground Review.
If you want to keep what you are doing a secret from New York, post it on the worldwide web.
Scrib didn’t like to call what he did a compulsion. That belittled it.
He had worked hard to establish his rhythm. Over many years of hardship and misunderstanding.
Why did van Gogh paint? Why did Mozart compose? Why did Melville write?
Were they psychological cases, freaks or sports of nature, or were they men who had trained themselves to do what they did and did it whether their accomplishment was recognized by anyone else or not?
What would they have done with the worldwide web! What had Scrib done with it. It was laughable. A joke.
The Above-Ground Review. Are you balmy? Are you daft?