Reading Nitt-Witt Ridge probably won’t change your life in any meaningful way, but if you’re the right kind of person it can provide you access to an alternate hippie-freak universe that’s somewhat kinder and happier than the world we live in now (despite the occasional exploding hamster and the rampaging of a giant, vindictive, chrome robot-rooster)…. It may be a shaggy, Brautiganesque bong water bubble of a book, but it’s also semi-profound in its own laid back way and laugh-out-loud funny. Or at least I think so. But what the hell do I know, right?

—from the Introduction by Derek Swannson, author of
Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg.

NITT-WITT RIDGE is a work of fiction. When the names of “real” places, corporations, institutions, and public figures are projected onto Nitt-Witt Ridge’s fictional landscape, they are used fictitiously. All other names, characters, locales, and events are products of the author’s imagination or, at best, scribbled missives from the collective unconscious. Any apparent similarity to actual persons, living or dead or otherwise occupied is entirely coincidental.

The same applies to Derek Swannson’s Introduction, as well….

Author’s Note: There’s one exception to the disclaimer above. The portrait of Captain Nitt-Witt is based on my many encounters with Art Beal, the original Captain Nitt-Witt (pictured on the book’s cover). Art approved of everything I wrote about him. “You see things in re-AL-ity,” he once told me—a high compliment coming from a cantankerous old fart who lived alone in a nine-story castle of beer cans and abalone shells that was rigged with dynamite to explode whenever he felt like testing his theories on the transmigration of souls.

P.S. That bit of dialogue toward the bottom of Page 90 about fish eyelids atrophying due to the evolutionary benefits of googly-eyed terror comes from Art’s good friend, Peter Fels.

Copyright © 1991, 2007 by Three Graces Press, LLC
All rights reserved

 

In memory of
Art Beal
(1896-1992)
the original
Captain Nitt-Witt

 

FIRST EDITION

Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Three Graces Press, LLC, 56 West 22nd Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10010.

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