tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656468.post113466077243207109..comments2024-03-28T13:18:28.238+00:00Comments on Grumpy Old Bookman: Jack Saunders: an underground legendMichael Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11338398159818400930noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656468.post-32014319169407564872020-09-16T09:23:00.856+01:002020-09-16T09:23:00.856+01:00In this article understand the most important thin...In this article understand the most important thing, the item will give you a keyword rich link a great useful website page: <a href="https://www.desksta.com/" title="instagram viewer" rel="nofollow">instagram viewer</a> Sophie Gracehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09769321133171248409noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656468.post-1136688863241584172006-01-08T02:54:00.000+00:002006-01-08T02:54:00.000+00:00Rohnda Void,A deft little piece on Jack Saunders, ...Rohnda Void,<BR/>A deft little piece on Jack Saunders, his works and the writer as Hercules or Wonder Woman. Jean d'Arcs, knights in white satin, actually reaching the end.<BR/>Loved it. And thanks for mentioning old Ivan.<BR/>Have had a look at your site. Whoahh. Extremely hip.Not trendy hip. I'd better have a couple of coffees and read again so I can fully appreciate.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6656468.post-1134783024437687742005-12-17T01:30:00.000+00:002005-12-17T01:30:00.000+00:00Grumpy Old Bookman:You sure have a way of engaging...Grumpy Old Bookman:<BR/>You sure have a way of engaging interest.<BR/>Jack Saunders. Yeah. Maybe Ivan and his Anglo namesake should hang around together. Or maybe not.<BR/>There is the British snobbery of U and non-U. I am hardly British, but anglicized enough to know the difference (many of my profs were Brits). Non-U writers can be a pain in the butt. Sometimes my pen-pal Gerard Jones is a pain in the butt. There is this "underclass" desire to conrol, almost sociopathic. And self-defeating, bucause how much can you control if you're a delivery parts driver, say with a weekend crack at dispatching. Then, full of positive thinking and on faulty information, you go on to control. Or try to. But you don't know that its a world of quantum mechanics, in science and in human relations; you may be at your strongest when you think you were at your weakest and someone's style of self-eprecation is not a statement of fact, but a style. Our Larry Zolf, s sometime writer out this way (very old now) is a master of self-deprecation, but the man is an achiever in humour, writing and radio. Try to control a guy like that, parts delivery driver.<BR/>So what can we make of the little bit I can see of Jack Saunders?<BR/>Well, something of an original thinker, in his own mode. Attractive way of thinking. You almost end up aping his style.<BR/>But the Sysiphian task: The same ball of dung rolls right down the ramp and into your face. Been there.<BR/>I have this far had three-fourth of my Black Icon novella published in a provincial magazine because I was friends with the editor. I had a column in the self-same TOPIC magazine and it made things infinitely easier. After that, nothing. Twenty years. Nothing.<BR/>That's about the time Jack and I should maybe have started hanging <BR/>around together. Then a blip. I submit a novel to the old House of Anansi Press out here and it gets rejected. I get drunk with a girl from the Ontario Culture ministry and she says I have some money to give away to writers. "I have to give it all away or I won't get any more money to give away to writers. Go back to Anansi and get them to okay it so I will have a budget next year." Back I go to Anansi, and surprisingly, the editor, James Polk, say he will okay the grant.<BR/>I go to the Ontario Arts Council.<BR/>Here I meet a bureaucrat, more or less of my own backroung, but just off the boat.<BR/>"I got job. You no got job. Four hundred dollars will hardly get you drunk." (I related this story to another blogger and she said I was a xenophobe. Me? Against my own kind, though a tad arriviste?).<BR/>Anyway, I got the money, but still no offer to publish. The editor sent me to an agent who was no longer in business.<BR/>Jack and I hanging around together, I suppose.<BR/>Ten more years of drought.<BR/>I somehow got my hands on some money and printed my Light Over Newmarket through a company I'd set up.<BR/>Surprise. Reviews, two of them in the Newmarket Era and York Region News. I ran for public office and got two more good reviews. But still no publishing house, still no cigar.<BR/>Now I am online, and though there was an initial excitement, things are very quiet.<BR/>I must say that during these dull periods I did land a privat docen't job as creative writing instructor on the strengh of my modestly published work. I was good at it, but no tenure, and no novel published by any real house.<BR/>I was, I suppose, U, that is to say, university trained and kind of IN. But not in enough to crack the Canlit egg.<BR/>So I guess now that I am old bedraggled and dumpster-diving, maybe Jack wouldn't even want to hang around with me.<BR/>Scratch one dreamer?<BR/>Well, maybe not. As you observe, you can start a small cult, a supporting army. It's there, but they are all saying, "We're counting on you. Where the hell is the magnum opus, published by Knopf, say?"<BR/>I guess it's again at this point, that Jack and I have to hang around together.<BR/>The book, she is writ.<BR/>But hardly anybody is noticing it.<BR/>Shades of James Branch Cabell, and his observation that among writers,<BR/>Cheers, the rain seems to fall on the published and the unpublished.<BR/>(Or am I misquoting from Dubliners?)<BR/>Cheers,<BR/>IvanAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com