Three-Ring Circus:  Combining Family, Work, and Writing

 

 

FAMILY.  December 25, 2009 - ________________ 2010.  In progress.  I start writing Double-Sawbuck (XX):  Twenty Months of Daily Typewriting, with JANUARY 2010, but see that I am writing a series of three books, Three-Ring Circus:  Combining Family, Work, and Writing, and change the name of JANUARY 2010 to FAMILY.  I read the second book of Larry McMurtry’s three memoirs, Books, Literary Life, and Hollywood, Literary Life.  I read Books when it came out.  I look forward to reading Hollywood.  When it comes out.  He compares the three books to Somerset Maugham’s The Summing Up.  He says he always wanted to be a man of letters, like Somerset Maugham, and now he is one.  I am a man of letters, grunt jobs, and shouting at the wife and kids about money, unemployment between jobs.  Not the circus clown, the guy who cleans up after the elephant.  And writes about it.  Dead-end jobs and rejection slips.  It’s a comedy.  It’s farce.  Farce related to forcemeats.  He went out to the charcuterie for forcemeats.  On his bicycle.  I read Robin Kelley’s Thelonious Monk:  The Life and Times of an American Original.  I read My Life in France, by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme.  She was an American original too.  Lawrence Block says I am an American original.  That and 25¢ will buy me a cup of coffee.  “And his life is an open book.”  When was Open Book?  1986.  24 years ago.  Sic transit gloria Monday.

 

WORK.  January 11 – January 19.  22,000 words.  I see that THREE-RING CIRCUS:  COMBINING FAMILY, WORK, AND WRITING is a book in three parts rather than a series of three books.  I hear a Wilbur Harden/John Coltrane record on the afternoon jazz show, The Complete Savoy Sessions, a two-disk set, and order the CD.  Whoa—who is this?  Where did he come from?  Where did he go?  He had a nervous breakdown and disappeared.  That could have happened to me.  It didn’t.  I see that WAKE UP:  CHRISTMAS IN PARKER and THREE-RING CIRCUS:  COMBINING FAMILY, WORK, AND WRITING combine to form The Above-Ground Review:  An Online Journal (OLJ).  Lord, how am I going to sell a book in five parts?  It’s like a master and four alternates.  But which take is the master?  Why, the first one, of course.  Then I see that The Above-Ground Review combines with Notes From Underground to form Banned Books.  Or Weighed in the Balance and Found Wanting.

 

WRITING.  January 20 – January 22.  8,000 words.  Writing isn’t work, because you don’t get paid to do it.  On the other hand, if nobody pays you for it, you own it.  It’s yours.  You can write it the way you want it.  And publish it in real time.  That’s the trade-off I made, knowing, after the first 20 or 30 years, what I was doing.  I drop the idea of combining The Above-Ground Review and Notes From Underground.  I rename The Above-Ground Review.  From The Above-Ground Review:  An Online Journal (OLJ) to The Above-Ground Review, an Online Journal (OLJ):  Writing the Great American Novel on the Worldwide Web.  Is it an online journal or a novel?  An online journal is a novel if you’re a novelist.  I see that WRITING is in four parts, Apprentice, Journeyman, Master, and The Post-Masterpiece Novel.  What’s The Post-Masterpiece Novel?  Notes From Underground.  What’s the masterpiece?  Bukowski Never Did This:  A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family.  I change the title of Notes From Underground from Notes From Underground to Notes From Underground:  A Post-Masterpiece Novel.

 

 

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