The Beat Poet Line at Career Day

 

 

      A Moveable Feast if Hemingway hadn’t sold a book, and doesn’t think he’s going to sell one before he dies, because the zeitgeist changed, while he was writing his summation; there can be no summa popologica of Jack Saunders, he wasn’t popular, he was too literary, or not literary enough.

 

                        One-line pitch

 

 

BAY LEAVES:  AN ONLINE NOVEL, EDITED FOR PUBLICATION contains 325 short, numbered chapters.  It runs 86,000 words.  It’s about combining writing, work, and family, for 40 years.  It’s a heartwarming success story.  It’s also funny.  The way Tropic of Cancer is funny.  Or Naked Lunch.  An Indian, shitting in a bidet.  A dildo named Steely Dan.  If it’s not funny it’s scary.  Prophetic.  It’s dark.  Worse is coming to worst.  It’s topping itself.  How do I top this?  Explode?  Spontaneously combust?  It’s dangerous.  It’s risky.  You can’t be serious.  It’s satire.  What kind of a village idiot makes a cat’s cradle out of cobwebs?  Cat’s Cradle was a book by Kurt Vonnegut.  127 short, numbered chapters.  You might have seen a copy of the paperback on display at Banned Books Week, in your local public library.  I read banned books, and sometimes I write them.  The book was published in 1963.  In 1971 the University of Chicago awarded Vonnegut his Master's degree in anthropology for Cat's Cradle.  They had turned down an earlier thesis.

 

BALONEY AND VELVEETA CHEESE ON WHITE.  26,000 words.  By analogy with Charles Bukowki’s Ham on Rye.  The American schoolyard has beat me again.  No takers for BAY LEAVES.  BALONEY AND CHEESE asks how did I get from graduating from college magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Outstanding Senior, in 1968, to Occupy Kinard and Frink, or, whatever happened to the Great Society?  40 years of Nixon happened to the Great Society.  He punished the hippies.  Then the middle class punished itself by electing George Bush twice, or letting him steal the election twice.  Thoreau was a crank.  Kids threw rocks at Thoreau, on his walks, trying to knock his hat off.  I wear hats.  Wingnuts try to crash my server.  Who is your leader?  What does Occupy Kinard and Frink mean?  What do you want?  I want to sell a book.  I want to be on television.  Doesn’t everybody?  Don’t you, Gentle Skimmer?  I want to be Grace Metalious.  I want to be Jacqueline Susann.  Don’t hate me because I’m rich and beautiful.  Don’t hate me because I’m a swamp trollop.  Swamp trollop is a persona.  Autobiography is fiction.  I am the principal investigator (PI) of my own PI novel.  No Chinaman must figure in.  Multicultural, a literature that leaves out Hick Lit isn’t complete, it’s strangely flawed.  W. Mark Felt, when he wrote I Was Deep Throat he had Alzheimers’s and couldn’t go out and promote it.  This may have happened to me.  Too little, too late.  What an ending!  I can’t remember.  I think I am supposed to.  Grousing about the television.  Hey:  it’s television.  Hello?  I publish Swamp Trollop.  Swamp Trollop establishes my street cred as an Old Southeast Hand.  More men have walked on the moon than have dug up a greenstone celt from an Archaic midden on the Aucilla River.  I start calling BAY LEAVES and BALONEY AND VELVEETA CHEESE ON WHITE, together, a two-book series, or a book in two parts, Cranky and Hung-Up About Rejection.  I publish To Live Is to War with Trolls.  Cranky and Hung-Up About Rejection is like A Moveable Feast.  818.5203.  American literature in English, miscellaneous.  Or, as Hemingway said, “This book is fiction.”  Imagine if Hemingway hadn’t sold a book.  Would he have kept writing?  Would he have not committed suicide?  Would he have been cranky and hung-up about rejection?  Would you be?  The title means I am not cranky and hung-up about rejection.  I am at peace with myself.  I could have been cranky and hung-up about rejection.  That would be the easy, the popular thing to do.  As my hero, Nixon, said.  Did Nixon give up?  He was not a quitter.  He was as crazy as a shithouse rat.  But he didn’t quit.  Well, he did quit the presidency.  But he kept writing.  He gave a little advice from time to time.  Talk about a man who felt sorry for himself.  Pray with me, Henry.  Can you imagine praying with Henry Kissinger?  Kissinger praying with Nixon?  What a quinella.  They were going to punish the hippies?  Punish me?  I would punish myself, thank you very much.  I would bang my head against the stone brick wall of the world’s indifference until it rang out like a bell.  I change the name of Cranky and Hung-Up About Rejection to Throwback:  A Two-Fisted Novelist in a Facebook and Twitter World.  I wasn’t popular.  That’s the plot.  Same plot as Ham on Rye.  The Beat Poet line at Career Day.  Ha ha, there ain’t no Beat Poet Line at Career Day.  I change the name of Throwback:  A Two-Fisted Novel in a Facebook and Twtitter World to Beat Poet Line at Career Day.  I combine BAY LEAVES: AN ONLINE NOVEL, EDITED FOR PUBLICATION and BALONEY AND VELVEETA CHEESE ON WHITE into a single book.  112,000 words.  427 chapters.

 

 

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