to be producing the same item.”
“Oh really. Your metaphors and similes lately are all about excrement. Honestly, I think this book will be the best yet. Now some business. Do you want to do the Asheville Book Festival?”
Norma was insensible to his opening a kitchen drawer filled with airline miniature liquor bottles. He opened two Chivas Regals into his new cup of coffee. “Speaking of excrement, will Forrest Wrightway be there? Will I have to sit on a panel beside him?”
“I’m sure he will be there, since he lives in Asheville. I take it the answer is no. How about the Public Library Book Fair in Goldsboro?”
“Is there never anything from a university? Did you…”
Norma did that thing she did, a quick intake and release of a breath that signaled effort and disappointment. “Yes, I called a number of university reading series, but they have other bookings this season.”
How long had it been since a university English department had wanted him as a guest lecturer? Backaways, for sure. The academic and literary types don’t have much truck with Mr. Jarvis these days. Mind you, when they have a state literary festival or some fund-raiser to raise lucre for the library, who do they call to fill the tent? It’s either me or Anne Rice or Pat Conroy with a line around the block while the Algonquin and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Grove and Vintage and Holt and Norton authors, the MFA-program parasites, les artistes, who couldn’t sell five thousand books collectively, cluster and lurk and complain to each other at the cocktail parties, make a meal out of the hors d’oeuvres like starving undergraduates, brag about who endured the least attended event, wear their obscurity proudly—always ready to be assured, on cue, in rotation, that The New York Times or The Washington Post or some momentarily venerated blog said just-wonnnnnderful things about their last title. How they all cling to each other in the literati life raft, what a comfort they are to each other—
“Yes or no to Goldsboro?” Norma prompted.
Gaston was in that brotherhood once, after the first two underselling books; that was him thirty-some years ago, clustered with the Real Writers at such functions, envying the money of the Shit Writers, wondering how they managed to write schlock so poorly and earn so much money. Now not a one of the literati would deign to come over and talk to old Gaston Jarvis—Gaston Jarvis who would embrace them and praise their (nearly invisible) masterpieces! Gaston Jarvis who understood their plight! No, they leave him to his crowded corner fending off the blue-hairs and the neo-Confederates and the tyrannical book club presidents encountered only when his books come out, who pick and choose titles for some little library system in some trailer-filled red-clay goatpen of a county, who expect to be treated like Marie, Queen of Romania, paid court to, given obeisance … ah ah ah, Mr. Jarvis, you wouldn’t want us to not select your novel as the Cow-pat County, Georgia, Book of the Summer! You arteeestes ever wonder with whose profits the Germans (who run all of American publishing) pay for your little literary exercises? It takes a Gaston Jarvis or two to pay for your little writing hobby, your linguistic divertissements, to underwrite your little post-divorce, post-modern, post-plot-and-character twaddlings excerpted in some online gazette read by three people associated with some lefty Massachusetts rag that serves as a slurry pond for all the Fine Fine Writing cranked out from the medicine-off-the-back-of-the-wagon snake-oil MFA mills throughout the Northeast …
“No, fuck Goldsboro!” he said.
Mrs. Meacham shook her head. When he started becoming a “sewer mouth” it was time for Norma to take her home.
And time for Gaston to head to Charlottetowne.
To repeat, Gaston Jarvis had a respectable mini-chateau northeast of Myers Park, but no one who knew him ever expected to find him there.
“Oh really. Your metaphors and similes lately are all about excrement. Honestly, I think this book will be the best yet. Now some business. Do you want to do the Asheville Book Festival?”
Norma was insensible to his opening a kitchen drawer filled with airline miniature liquor bottles. He opened two Chivas Regals into his new cup of coffee. “Speaking of excrement, will Forrest Wrightway be there? Will I have to sit on a panel beside him?”
“I’m sure he will be there, since he lives in Asheville. I take it the answer is no. How about the Public Library Book Fair in Goldsboro?”
“Is there never anything from a university? Did you…”
Norma did that thing she did, a quick intake and release of a breath that signaled effort and disappointment. “Yes, I called a number of university reading series, but they have other bookings this season.”
How long had it been since a university English department had wanted him as a guest lecturer? Backaways, for sure. The academic and literary types don’t have much truck with Mr. Jarvis these days. Mind you, when they have a state literary festival or some fund-raiser to raise lucre for the library, who do they call to fill the tent? It’s either me or Anne Rice or Pat Conroy with a line around the block while the Algonquin and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Grove and Vintage and Holt and Norton authors, the MFA-program parasites, les artistes, who couldn’t sell five thousand books collectively, cluster and lurk and complain to each other at the cocktail parties, make a meal out of the hors d’oeuvres like starving undergraduates, brag about who endured the least attended event, wear their obscurity proudly—always ready to be assured, on cue, in rotation, that The New York Times or The Washington Post or some momentarily venerated blog said just-wonnnnnderful things about their last title. How they all cling to each other in the literati life raft, what a comfort they are to each other—
“Yes or no to Goldsboro?” Norma prompted.
Gaston was in that brotherhood once, after the first two underselling books; that was him thirty-some years ago, clustered with the Real Writers at such functions, envying the money of the Shit Writers, wondering how they managed to write schlock so poorly and earn so much money. Now not a one of the literati would deign to come over and talk to old Gaston Jarvis—Gaston Jarvis who would embrace them and praise their (nearly invisible) masterpieces! Gaston Jarvis who understood their plight! No, they leave him to his crowded corner fending off the blue-hairs and the neo-Confederates and the tyrannical book club presidents encountered only when his books come out, who pick and choose titles for some little library system in some trailer-filled red-clay goatpen of a county, who expect to be treated like Marie, Queen of Romania, paid court to, given obeisance … ah ah ah, Mr. Jarvis, you wouldn’t want us to not select your novel as the Cow-pat County, Georgia, Book of the Summer! You arteeestes ever wonder with whose profits the Germans (who run all of American publishing) pay for your little literary exercises? It takes a Gaston Jarvis or two to pay for your little writing hobby, your linguistic divertissements, to underwrite your little post-divorce, post-modern, post-plot-and-character twaddlings excerpted in some online gazette read by three people associated with some lefty Massachusetts rag that serves as a slurry pond for all the Fine Fine Writing cranked out from the medicine-off-the-back-of-the-wagon snake-oil MFA mills throughout the Northeast …
“No, fuck Goldsboro!” he said.
Mrs. Meacham shook her head. When he started becoming a “sewer mouth” it was time for Norma to take her home.
And time for Gaston to head to Charlottetowne.
To repeat, Gaston Jarvis had a respectable mini-chateau northeast of Myers Park, but no one who knew him ever expected to find him there.
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