FLATUS
Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Donald Hall is the new Poet Laureate of the United
States.
He says one addresses the Poet Laureate of the United States as PLOTUS,
by analogy with POTUS, the acronym for President of the United States.
Heap
was the Florida Chronicler Contender of the United States. FLATUS.
Flatus
was gas. The adjective was flatulent. Compare fart.
Heap
was an old fart. As a title, FLATUS didn't amount to a fart in a whirlwind. But
it meant a lot to Heap.
What did the Chronicler Contender do? He rode around,
talked to people, saw sights.
He went and saw for himself, reported back
what he found. He was a report writer.
Heap just read The Return of the
Player, by Michael Tolkin.
Publishers Weekly called the book "a
powerful dark comedy that transcends the shopworn genre of Hollywood satire."
In the book, people in the movie colony talked about The Hero's Journey, by
Joseph Campbell.
Heap was an antihero, a hero with scant resources. An immobilized
hero.
And SQUIBS was an immobilized hero novel.
The immobilized hero
novel was a subliterary genre identified by Charles Willeford in his critical study
New Forms of Ugly: The Immobilized Hero in Modern Fiction.
When New
Forms of Ugly came out, Heap was living in Delray Beach.
Willeford inscribed
his copy, "To Razz Heap, immobilized in Del Ray."
Now Heap lived
in Point and Shoot. Was immobilized in Point and Shoot.
Little day trips
was the best that he could do. I Drive to Panacea. Side trips.
He
would write poems in a Big Chief tablet and publish poems in a pamphlet himself,
or as Garage Band Books, the name of his publishing, or self-publishing outfit.
Montgomery Ward Snopes called his filthy postcard operation out of Jefferson, Mississippi,
Atelier Monty.
Heap's pamphlets were like filthy postcards.
He recently
read a book called Postcards From Ed, meaning crank environmentalist Edward
Abbey, and he once wrote a book called A POSTCARD FROM SEASIDE, in which he sent
himself a postcard from Seaside asking himself to write A POSTCARD FROM SEASIDE.
Fuller Warren considered two postcards from Blountstown a draft.
Fuller Warren
was the governor who first passed a law banning cattle from public highways, bringing
Florida into the modern world (1949-53).
And what was a postcard but a squib,
what was a chronicler but a squib writer?
"To Razz Heap, FLATUS. Immobilized
in Point and Shoot."
As the cockroach said to Gregor Samsa, in the movie
Naked Lunch,
Just remember this. All agents defect and all resistors sell out. That's the sad truth, Bill. And a writer, a writer lives the sad truth, like anyone else. The only difference is, he files a report on it.
SQUIBS was Heap's report.