Home for the Holidays:
Work and Television at Granny and Grandpa’s

 

 

OCTOBER.  October 15 - October 31.  20,000 words.  Brenda and I go to see Grant Peeples at a New Moon Concert in Cook Bayou.  He gives me a jar of LeftNeck tupelo honey and a Crown Royal bottle of Revolution Pepper Vinegar without the blue felt sack.  I am ashamed to ask for a Peeples’ Republik Band T-shirt.  I am glad I am not working at the L. A. (Lower Alabama) Folk Life Center for the Haunted Trail foolishness and the Pumpkin Patch.  Do you know how bad a rotten pumpkin smells.  I prepare for Local booksALIVE!  I always have a writing event to look forward to if it’s just springing to the easel of a morning.  I read Luis Buñuel’s My Last Sigh and realize how much I was, and still am, inspired by the surrealists.  Also, how many of them were flat broke for most of their lives, and scorned the ones who weren’t.  First they drove out Dali, then Max Ernst.  Or Dali became Avida Dollars after hooking up with Gala.  I see that 40-Year Run could be called Sacked and Blacklisted:  The Poster Boy for Marketplace Censorship.  Why don’t I call it that?  That’s just the conditions of production.  How long I held out is the point.  Did I falter?  Did I weaken?  Did my resolve wear away?  Did I stay true to the beau ideal?  To the mail art credo money and mail art don’t mix?  Savage Bell meets Jack Collins at MagnoliaFest.  He plays “You Might Know Jack” for him.  Written for the movie Cracker Jack.  Eh?  What?  Is that ready for release?  Is it out of postproduction and ready for exhibition and distribution?  Could it use some bonus features?  You reckon they’ll fly me to Studio Zuse for audio commentary?  I’d drive but I don’t think the family car, your father’s Oldsmobile station wagon, will make it.  I attend first day of Local booksALIVE!  I am a local writer.  But that’s not a bad thing.  How many other writers have written a Great Wall of Books?  That was the only way I could do it.  Before and after work, on periods of unemployment, at the house, at the job, on the job, you write on the job, are you balmy, are you daft, they will find out, and you will have privacy issues.  You will be sacked and blacklisted.  Yes, but I will get a 40-Year Run out of it.  It’s a cost.  Look what I got!

 

NOVEMBER.  November 1 – November 30.  40,000 words.  Brenda stumbled and broke two bones in her ankle, plus cracking a third bone.  She heard them snap.  We had to call an ambulance to get her to the hospital—Rob and I couldn’t lift her.  Rob and Sue were visiting.  We were walking from the motel to a restaurant.  The restaurant was closed for the winter.  Closed for the recession?  An orthopedic surgeon repairs the injury.  She didn’t get to vote.  As it turns out, our side didn’t lose by one vote.  It was the predicted bloodbath.  It’s listening to them gloat that I don’t like.  They aren’t gracious winners.  I see that I am writing long-form fiction.  After 40-Year Run, The Post-Masterpiece (PM) Novel.  I always like to know what I’m going to do next.  The PM novel is a picaresque.  Plus reportage.  And the black memoir (BM).  Black is the color of my true love’s stool.  Or, shit used to be blacker and richer.  Ezra Pound.  I read The Black Mass of Brother Springer and start thinking of Charles Willeford.  In 1958.  "Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor."   Brenda gets high speed internet so she can work from home.  Her work issues her a portable computer.  I act as a courier, schlepping charts back and forth.  A dogsbody.  Officially, I am a volunteer.  No pay, but subject to the rules.  About like the writing.  What if I don’t believe in the rules.  In the writing.  What if I break the rules.  Bend the rules.  Willeford said, “I'm not really breaking the genre, just bending it a bit.”  What genre is that?  The PM Novel.  After you’ve written a life’s-work you can do anything you want.  I don’t heed to discipline.  It would behoove me to.  I ain’t behoven.  I read The Burnt Orange Heresy.  I read The Shark-Infested Custard.  I think about Charles Willeford speaking at the Miami Book Fair in 1986.  I didn’t go to hear him, but I bought a Xeroxed copy of A Guide for the Undehemorrhoided from Dennis McMillan.  McMillan told me he and Willeford decided I could write, but I would never be published by New York because I was too “out there.”  I took that as a compliment.  To be called “out there” by Charles Willeford.  (Coincidentally, Norman Mailer called me “off the rails.”)  I realize I am part of the stealth literary movement mail art, that came and went without anybody noticing.  Mail art and money don’t mix.  I start calling myself the king of the smash-mouth poets.  Smash-mouth football is particularly violent.  Luther Bissett was an actual football player.  Plus a multiple-use name in mail art, like Monty Cantsin.  An open pop star.  The writer is a movie star, or a rock star.  Think Henry Rollins, with his tattoos.  The beau ideal is to work in a pulp ghetto.  I am doing it.  I look up Creative Thing on the Internet and see that he is unemployed, biking to job interviews.  His extended unemployment benefits (EUB) exhausted.  Mine were exhausted a year ago.  The job search is like a snark hunt.  That is, absurd.  Existential.  Ridiculous.  The Murngin Boojum.  I see what I am going to write next.  A series of eight books called Cultural Operator.  In fact, I write the last poem of 40-Year Run.  Ho hum, it’s all in a day’s work.  We go to Grayton Beach for Thanksgiving, see the kids, babysit.  Eat until we founder.  The truck makes it there and back, but barely.  I am living under my own carbon footprint.  But how do I extricate myself from modern times, go back to living virtuously?  How do I simplify my life?  Life gets more complicated.  I am confused.  I can’t do everything I used to.  Conservation is a personal virtue.  But how do you practice it in a consumer culture?  That’s the $64 question, doctor.

 

DECEMBER.  December 1 – December 21.  30,000 words.  Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Brenda and I watch the Beatles Anthology.  I read Keith Richards’ Life.  I read Patti Smith’s Just Kids.  About her and Robert Mapplethorpe.  Starting out in New York City.  You could call Home for the Holidays:  Work and Television at Granny and Grandpa’s Retrospective:  Songs of Longing and Regret.  And yet, I don’t regret anything.  I don’t want to be anybody else.  I’d like to finish 40-Year Run, but I can do that standing on my head.  I am asked to address Gulf Coast Writers.  I write and give away the pamphlet Pace.  About my pace.  My stride.  Giant Steps.  Pace means peace.  Also, “I beg to differ.”  I write about Nixon, the old bête-noire of the hippies.  I bring not peace, but a sword.  Did you think you could shut me up?  I feel like Jeff Daniels reading from my work in The Squid and the Whale.  I guess I’m not that bad yet.  Hitting on coeds.  Or was I?  You’re just like your father.  Noah Baumbach writes about the East Coast elite.  I write about living next to a trailer park and keeping chickens.  Reading Just Kids makes me want to re-read Edie.  About the Chelsea Hotel, Andy Warhol, The Factory.  Max’s Kansas City.  What did I miss, out here in the sticks, eating hoecake and tomato gravy?  I had the life I had.  I got 412 books out of it.  Although some of them were short.

 

 

Home | About | Mail