On Your Mark
SHORT. December 22, 2010 – January 31, 2011. In progress. Home for the Holidays: Work and Television at Granny and Grandpa’s had no Christmas in it. Well, it was about work and television. Plus, it had Thanksgiving. Jean managed the kitchen at the Down Home. Owen came in with Southport seaboots and a cooler full of shrimp and asked her to cook them for the band, or asked her for a pot so he could cook them, and she volunteered to do it for them, as she didn’t want strange fiddle players cooking in her kitchen. Anyhow, she set her cap for him and the rest is history. We saw Ella and Eb at Thanksgiving. I make up a 12-page pamphlet with a list of the books of my stack, Great Wall of Books. Then I add eight pages of explication and publish an expanded pamphlet. I send this pamphlet to a person at the FSU Alumni Association and to the director of the Division of Cultural Affairs, in Tallahassee. We keep Rowan New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and take him back to The Red Bar Sunday afternoon. I buy Lyn Lifshin’s Ballroom and review it. I send her a copy of the review. She can’t tell from the review whether I liked the book or not, so I redo it, and send her a copy of the revised review. She likes it. She mails me a file of a manuscript to All the Poets Who Have Touched Me/Desire, in preparation, and I review it, in a pamphlet, Reply to Lyn Lifshin. I send her ten copies of the pamphlet. I was calling Cultural Operator “A Long-Form Picaresque.” I change the subtitle to Writing from Four Decades. In homage to Claire Tomalin’s Separate Lives: Writing from Three Decades. Her husband, Michael Frayn, wrote Noises Off. The noisemakers are off here in Point and Shoot, Florida, in my little slice of paradise. It was all one life, though: nothing happened. Again and again. For forty years. Here and there. I moved, in search of gainful employment. A writer can live anywhere but an unpublished, or underpublished writer has to go where the work is. Where the day job takes him. The real immobilized hero in modern fiction ends up in the Old Soldiers Home. I’m not eligible for the Old Soldiers Home. Brenda’s old home place in Parker is kind of an Old Soldiers Home, an Old Writers Home. I am home. We scuffle and make do. We soldier on. I revise Great Wall of Books by adding to it. I put Blaster Al’s turd picture on the back cover. I change the subtitle of Cutural Operator from Writing from Four Decades to An Agony in Eight Fits. The snark was a boojum, you see. It’s not a long-form picaresque it’s a PM novel. For post-masterpiece. It follows Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, the unknown masterpiece. What’s the unknown masterpiece? The first 412 volumes of my stack. I drive to Panacea on a day-trip. Take my camera. The Volcanos of Wakulla County. Me and Brenda looked like Meryl Street and Chris Cooper in Adaptation. That is, I don’t look like Clint Eastwood.
TALL. January 26 – February 18. 38,000 words. New Orleans. Graduate school. I dig at Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia. Standing tall. Riding high in Crested Butte. Picking cotton in high cotton. Beware when your dream comes true. The man of hubris is punished by the gods. Minor chord. Take off like a striped-ass ape. Brenda’s truck dies. I have a wrecker tow it to a garage. My mechanic gets it running. Maybe it will hold out until I sell a book and can buy a new vehicle. I get a book I ordered from a gallery in Canada before Christmas that was lost in the mail (or lost in the UPS). Amazing Letters: The Life and Art of David Zack. Edited by Istvan Kantor. I look forward to reading that. Blaster Al sends a painting of me in a tinfoil helmet with a fossilized turd around my neck. I put the painting on the cover of Great Wall of Books and add eight pages to Rev. 2. “Cultural Operator: An Agony in Eight Fits” and “Book Plan and Outline.” The missing piece of the puzzle. I get the art book from The New Gallery, in Canada, and send them a pamphlet, in thanks, for mailing me a duplicate. I nominate myself for the Florida Artist’s Hall of Fame and submit a pamphlet in support of my candidacy. I attend a symposium on censorship in the public schools at booksALIVE 2011! and mail a pamphlet to a panelist, a classroom teacher, who has fought the county school board on behalf of books, and freedom to read, the online editor of the daily newspaper, who moderated the symposium, and the marketing and public relations coordinator for the regional library system, who hosts Banned Books Week at the public library every year. Three people who will read my pamphlet with some appreciation of the accomplishment a list of 420 books represents, and appreciate me picturing myself as a man wearing a tinfoil helmet with a coprolite around his neck and having a reader who can paint a picture, not something every local crackpot hermit has. I change the subtitle of Cultural Operator from An Agony in Eight Fits to Blogger Makes Good. I don’t know if I’m a cobbler sticking to his last or a dog returning to his vomit. But (1) a cultural operator is marginal, between the underground and the mainstream, and (2) Cultural Operator shows how I went from writing what I thought would be mainstream novels, to writing underground novels, correspondence novels, which I exchanged with fellow mail art artists, through the mail, to writing and publishing books in real time on the worldwide web, books that look like an online journal (OLJ) or a weblog (blog), and replying to reader comment (or not replying), in the books.
Book Two: Journeyman
SKINNY. February 19 – March 25. 66,000 words. We drive to Tallahassee for Grant Peeples’ CD Release Party for Okra & Ecclesiastes and a Dread Clampitt concert the next night at the Legion Hall on Lake Ella. Stay in a La Quinta Inn for two nights. I rent a Chevy pie wagon for the trip. I go to the Fine Arts Museum on campus to see the Jim Roche show, Glory Roads. I join the museum to get the catalogue. Reading the catalogue, I learn that Jim Roche and David Kirby, a writing professor at FSU, both got mid-career grants from the NEA. Kirby is married to Barbara Hamby, who also teaches writing at FSU. She’s a poet, too. They are both well-thought of in the writing community. Loved, by students and colleagues. This is enough to give Spike Lee the red ass. Tallahassee always gets me going. I am jealous of George Firestone who has a building named after him. I am jealous of Richard Kostelanetz who got a two-week stay at an arts colony at Cape Canaveral, or Eau Gallie, or some place like that. Like where Zora Neale Hurston died. Zora Neale Hurston was a Florida writer. Stop this. Stop. Write about Penland. Write about being a working man in his prime. I hear from Tom Mott that all the film festivals he submitted Cracker Jack to rejected it. He promises to send me a copy of the movie. I decide to write a book called SYNCHRONICITY: A DOCUMENTARY about my reaction to the film. The first part, “Book, Interrupted,” contained two sections, “Preproduction” and “Principal Photography.” Then Tom asked me not to write about the movie online until he had finished making it, so I broke the book off. Well, the movie’s finished. Now I’ll write, “Book, Resumed,” which will contain the third section, “Exhibition and Distribution.” Showing parallels between my experience as an unpublished, or underpublished writer, and the difficulty the movie has, getting shown, and being sold. It’s the same problem, actually. I wasn’t making it up. I sucked Tom Mott into my vortex. The black, insatiable maw. The horror, the horror. The Snapping Pussy of Doom. Vagina Dentata. Familiar leitmotif in myth. I add OR, INTO THE VORTEX to SYNCHRONICITY: A DOCUMENTARY. I decide to publish “Book, Resumed” as a stand-alone piece called Cracker Jack: A Catalog. An artist’s book, with color illustrations. A beautiful book. Tom Mott sends Cracker Jack Screener.
FAT. March 26 – April 30. In progress. I add Subject Commentary on Cracker Jack, a pamphlet, to the end of SYNCHRONICITY: A DOCUMENTARY, OR, INTO THE VORTEX. Owen and Jean rent a house on the beach for a week. Owen catches two redfish and sells them to Stinky’s. Owen and Balder play at Shoo Mamas in Santa Rosa Beach and we go out on a worknight to hear them. I am invited to present two sessions at Spring Word Fling and make up a pamphlet to hand out: Approach to the Craft: The Writing Life and Going Public: Outing Yourself. My computer dies, so the pamphlet is in longhand. It’s an outline, in two parts, “Writing” and “Publishing.” When I get my computer back I can’t make the hypertext links work in Internet Explorer. Windows is changing something automatically and I don’t know how to make it stop. I don’t post FAT online. In fact, I don’t upload the last day of SKINNY. I just stopped doing it. New York can’t fire me I quit. If you only have four readers you might as well have only two. I change the subtitle of Cultural Operator from Blogger Makes Good to Beet Poet Makes Good. I grow beets in my garden and make borscht when I kill a rooster. The social networking media marketing defeated me. I don’t want to be your Facebook friend. I write books I can’t sell. So what? That don’t make me a bad person. Just odd. A throwback. Me and Bill seeing Where the Hot Wind Blows at the Delray Drive-In. From The Law, by Roger Vailland. Apropos of beat writing. Beat writing was a subculture. We go to Kyle and Jackie’s wedding. Brenda bakes the wedding cake, as a gift. She also sews them two potholders and writes them a letter about marriage, children, old age, gardening. She likes to garden. She plants bushes that attract butterflies and songbirds. At the wedding, several people ask me why I have stopped posting to The Daily Bulletin. I can’t let the Buzzard Cult down. I have to solve the problem and get back on the air. Brenda suggests I get on a cable modem. Nobody uses dial-up. It’s too slow. Tom Mott said I have to do this. I can’t let a machine beat me. Just say on the web site that half of SKINNY and half of FAT were redacted because of mechanical difficulties. I figure out if I don’t test the links in Internet Explorer it can’t change them. So I key the links in, upload the files, and check the links online. This works. I am back on the air. What a relief. I write a poem called “In My Room.” With my scanner I can recycle mail art from my friends. Reuse it. Add to it. Blaster Al sent a watercolor around, “Her Breast-Shaped Pears,” a full-figured woman, and friends added to it, and sent it to me. I hung it on the wall of my writing studio. That was several moves ago and I don’t know where it is anymore, but Owen recognized the work of many of the artists in the show Franny Mae Rutkovsky hung at the Governor’s Square Mall when he was 14 from seeing their work in my eyrie. The work men do lives after them. Beside a man’s work, his life is small potatoes. Ernest Hemingway said. And he should know. When he could no longer do it he blew his head off. From the electric shock treatments. I still remember. Unless I am imagining it. And what difference does it make, artistically. Dreams are real. Nights of camellias and hallucinations, Henry Miller said about dark-roast pure-coffee at The Shadows in New Iberia. I did it at work. On company time. I did it at home. In the second bedroom. The house must have had three bedrooms. I did it in the dining room? Cussing the teevee and drinking? I was approaching meltdown. The end of my active drinking. I change the subtitle of Cultural Operator to Becoming America’s Greatest Writer. Am I dreaming? Is this real? I shit in a bucket. I rename Cultural Operator: A Chef-d’Oeuvre, or Principal Work Cultural Operator: A Chef-d’Oeuvre of Daily Typewriting.
Get Set
Book Three: Master
SMART. April 19 – May 4. 26,000 words. I changed the subtitle of Cultural Operator from Becoming America’s Greatest Writer to A Chef-d’Oeuvre, or Principal Work. I get on a cable modem at home. No more dial-up modem. I still shit in a bucket, though. Don’t want to outgrow my raisin’. A serial, there are continuities. There is some repetition. I rename Cultural Operator: A Chef-d’Oeuvre, or Principal Work Cultural Operator: A Chef-d’Oeuvre of Daily Typewriting. I change the subtitle of Cultural Operator to My White Leviathan of Daily Typewriting. I change the subtitle of Cultural Operator from My White Leviathan of Daily Typewriting to The Last Beat Poet. Why? Because I must be paranoid. If I can’t sell a book to New York in 40 years there must be a conspiracy against me. All the other beat poets got published. Why not me? They can’t all be not good enough. It must be a conspiracy.
DUMB. May 5 – May 22. 28,000 words. I sign up for the Athletes of Seacrest reunion in July. I think I’ll rent a car and drive downstate for that. Like Jim Harrison writing The English Major. I’ll call myself The Anthropology Major. Perhaps The Dirt Archeologist. I change the subtitle of Cultural Operator from The Last Beat Poet to A Picaresque. On the Road was a picaresque. Moby-Dick was a picaresque. Cultural Operator is an immobilized-hero picaresque. I drive to Panacea for a Coastal Senior Seafood Platter. I drive to Delray Beach for an Athletes of Seacrest reunion. Get my picture taken by the Y. A. Tittle statue. What have you been doing? Well, I’ve been writing. What have you written? Well, it was blacklisted. I change the subtitle of Cultural Operator to 40 Years of Writing. I see that Cultural Operator: 40 Years of Writing is five books, not four, and the last book is called A Letter to a Friend, or From a Friend. The last book takes place in Panama City and may or may not end in August. That is, it may run short (or long). It’s just letters. An online journal (OLJ). Entries in a weblog (blog). I’m just another blogger. The great American novel turned out to be a blog. I change the subtitle of Cultural Operator from 40 Years of Writing to The Great American Novel. No, wait. I change the subtitle of Cultural Operator from The Great American Novel to The Swinette-Picker of American Letters.
I dream of playing the swinette on stage, at Americana music festivals, selling my books at the record table afterwards. A swinette, you stretch two horsehairs across a hog's ass and pick it with your teeth. Brew mounts the steps, walks across the stage with great dignity, takes a stuffed Miss Piggy doll out from under his robes, lifts her skirt, presses her butt to his face, and squeals like a stuck pig. Great cry and little wool, as the Devil said when he sheared the hogs.
Book Four: The Post-Masterpiece (PM) Novel
PULP. May 23 – June 2. 20,000 words. I make reservations at the Colony Hotel for July. I decide to spend a night at the Rod & Gun Club in Everglades City. Cultural Operator is “fishing stories.” Seven-word pitch: Thoreau at his 54th high school reunion. We move to Panama City. Delray Beach had lost its charm. I didn’t work for IBM anymore. No reason to stay. I read Randy Wayne White’s Ultimate Tarpon Book and Gulf Coast Cookbook. He needed a better art director. I pitch PULP to the Slush Pile Editor at Lyons Press. Send them a 20-page writing sample, single-spaced. Loose sheets, like a Buzzard Cult member would print out at work. I rename Cultural Operator: The Swinette-Picker of American Letters Poets in Their Dotage: A Life on Paper. I was going to call it 40 Years of Mail Art, but it was the small press movement before mail art and cyberbabble after. What remains is printing up and exchanging booklets with friends like Blaster Al, Crowbar, and Eery Billy Haddock. DKA Post and E. J. Barnes. To me, Poets in Their Dotage is more like The Jimmy Buffett Scrapbook than Randy Wayne White’s Gulf Coast Cookbook. Although it does have recipes. It’s all fishing stories. “Death of an Unpopular Poet.” We’re all unpopular. We all die. So what? The first song on Kind of Blue is called “So What.” I was influenced by bebop musicians. Stand-up comedians like Lenny Bruce. Lick your leg for a quarter, lady? Abstract-expressionist painters like Willem de Kooning.
SLICK. June 7 – June 16. 14,000 words. I change the name of Poets in Their Dotage: A Life on Paper to A Poet in His Dotage: 40-Year Run Revisited. We keep Ella, Eb, and Rowan, the weekend of the Davis Family Reunion, which Owen and Jean come down for. Brenda buys Owen’s truck and gives her truck to Balder, who’s going to convert it to electricity. Balder comes over for the family reunion, so it’s several generations, if you count aunts and uncles. Brenda’s parents’ generation are dying off, and I don’t feel good. For the first time I feel old. I can’t keep up with the grandchildren. I get down in my back from the coffee, or dehydration. It’s so hot. I sweat a lot. I soak my sheets through, like Duane in Rhino Ranch. There are so many things I didn’t do.
Go
Book Five: A Letter to a Friend, or From a Friend
SCIENCE. June 17 – June 29. 16,000 words. Short for “The Mop-Up Work of Normal Science.” I move to Panama City, to Brenda’s old home place. Brenda stays in Atlanta to sell the house and wait to be laid off. I am on sabbatical. I open a new web site, roman-feuilleton.com. From foil, or leaf. The old Junior League cookbook was called Bay Leaves. Bay County. We live on Parker Bayou. You can see the water from my bedroom. There is a breeze off the water at night. You can hear the Friendship when it cranks up in the morning. I need the backwater. I need to be out of the mainstream. The mainstream doesn’t want me. It hurts my feelings. I feel rejected, spurned, not wanted. Disrespected. So what. Suck it up. Oprah’s booked. Oprah has her fish to fry. America has Oprah. I retreated. I sequestered myself. I withdrew. This is where I can work the best, without distractions. I created a life for myself and this is where I ended up. It’s not an accident. There must be some reason for it. Some meaning to it. If the television bothers you. don’t watch it. Just post your books on the Internet. Give pamphlets away to friends and readers at The Red Bar in Grayton Beach. I change the subtitle of A Poet in His Dotage from 40-Year Run Revisited to Under Erasure.
ART. June 30 – July 14. 23,000 words. Panama City. Short for “Turning Scrap into Art.” Think Picasso and his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Einstein and his Special Theory of Relativity at the Lapin Agile, the visitor from the future…Elvis Presley. Steve Martin making banjo jokes nobody but Owen catches. I’m going to take Susan to the Seacrest Athlete Reunion as my date, or as Bill’s stand-in. She’ll take my picture under the Y. A. Tittle statue. LitVision Press publishes Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family and I take a year off to drive around the Redneck Riviera selling it, and write about doing that. I cash in the annuity I rolled my pension distribution over into and give myself an LDA grant. Last Ditch Attempt. I drive to Delray Beach for the Seacrest Athlete Reunion, drive home. The Y. A. Tittle statue was behind a locked, chain-link fence, so I couldn’t take my picture under it. But I shot the statue from behind the fence.
Book Six: The Ending Crowns the Deed
REMAIN A WRITER, FORSAKE ADVANCEMENT, FIGHT BURN-OUT. July 15 – July 31. 27,000 words. I make up the 48-page pamphlet Seacrest Athlete Reunion, send it out. At the reunion I got a coffee cup with the school motto on it, Finis Coronat Opus. The ending crowns the deed. That’s about it. That’s what it amounted to. The ending crowns the deed. I make up another 48-page pamphlet, The Ending Crowns the Deed. The poems are just rolling out. The literary criticism, literary theory, self-interviews. I see that the last book of 40-Year Run is called The Ending Crowns the Deed, and consists of two books, REMAIN A WRITER, FORSAKE ADVANCEMENT, FIGHT BURN-OUT and KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY. I wrote another pamphlet, 40-Year Run. I think the three pamphlets, Seacrest Athlete Reunion, The Ending Crowns the Deed, and 40-Year Run, make up a short book, which I call PRAXIS. “Praxis: practice, as distinguished from theory; application or use, as of knowledge or skills.” I ended 40-Year Run remembering practicing in the old Delray High gym. I remembered reading Claude Lévi-Strauss arguing with Jean-Paul Sartre about praxis in the last chapter of The Savage Mind, “History and Dialectic.” In July 2011 I drove to Delray Beach for a Seacrest High School athlete reunion. I played basketball and baseball for Seacrest and I was in the band, during football season. Because I played basketball, I wasn’t in the Pep Band, the small combo that played at basketball games. I fished, spearfished, and body-surfed in high school. My brother Bill and I played tennis. Bill didn’t go to the reunion because he’s dead. I stayed at the Rod & Gun Club in Everglades City on the way down to Delray Beach and remembered fishing for snook and tarpon in Chockoloskee Bay and the Ten Thousand Islands with Bill. I stopped at the Clewiston Inn for breakfast. When principal photography ended on the movie Tom and Christina made about me, Cracker Jack, I spent a weekend in Clewiston, an old football rival of Delray. Don Knotts had died and Larry King was all-Don Knotts, all-weekend. Delray Beach reminded me of Mayberry RFD when I was growing up. Seminole Indians would walk in from the Everglades and trade frog legs for bolts of cloth. I guess the theme is you can’t go home again, or you can, but it isn’t there. It changed. Along with the television, the social networking sites, and the fast food restaurants on the interstates. Shit used to be blacker and richer. All satirists are conservative. I’m Lord Buckley. The Last Beatnik. Kerouac with a small desktop computer. Bukowski & a Ballad for Gone America. Dueling circus-midget revivals in supermarket parking lots. I was a hotwalker at the polo fields in Gulf Stream. I walked polo ponies. My principal let me leave school early two days a week if I would bring her a bag of horse shit for her roses. The fix was in. From there to college writing programs was a short jump. That’s how the patronage is handed out. That’s how you integrate yourself into the money society. Thoreau said if he repented of anything it was of his good behavior. What demon possessed me, he asked, that I behaved so well? I guess PRAXIS is ON THE NECESSITY OF VOCATIONAL DISOBEDIENCE. I change the subtitle of A Poet in His Dotage from Under Erasure to A Trilogy. I make a 48-page pamphlet, Turbot, of the first 46 pages of KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY. The Bahama turbot is a triggerfish. I send a copy of the pamphlet to the mail art show at the library. I have it to send off as a writing sample for Hurricane Season: An Immobilized-Hero Novel, or, In My Room, a 12-book series I will write next. A novel about writing a novel. Without worrying about selling it. If I couldn’t sell 40-Year Run I won’t sell Hurricane Season. So what? After 40-Year Run I can write anything I want to. I am writing Hurricane Season because I feel like it. Imagine a book with an unpublished, or underpublished 424-book series behind it. Talk about the tip of the iceberg. Talk about having gravitas. My book is a veritable Frankenstein’s monster of daily typewriting. A very Mary Shelley’s Frankensten.
KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY: A NOVEL, WITH POEMS. August 1 – August 31. 42,000 words. William S. Burroughs told Jesse Bernstein, “Keep it in the family. Stick with your friends.” The Ending Crowns the Deed is a collapsed opposition, as with identical male and female models in Liquid Sky. And probably forms a sixth book of A Poet in His Dotage: A Trilogy, rather than a new series, of one pair of books. Keep it in what family? Why, the Buzzard Cult. My coterie of steadfast readers. Dread Clampitt appear at a Backstage concert series at the Marina Civic Center and Jennifer Jones, Bay Arts Alliance, asks me to open for them, as a local writer. I speak briefly on being a writer. The publisher of Bay County Bullet tells Brenda, before the show, they are looking for writers and I get the idea of writing about local artists, musicians, writers, theater, and movie people. I pitch a column to her and start writing pieces. I make a list of local artists. I am calling my next series, Hurricane Season, List-Driven Fiction Since September 1971. I start driving around and talking to people. That is, I get out of my own head. This opens the writing up. The short pieces turn into The Roots Music, Folk Art, Vernacular Writing, Regional Theater, and Independent Film of Highway 30A and Neighboring Hick Counties: A Guidebook. I change the name of A Poet in His Dotage: A Trilogy to A Poet in His Dotage: The Last Three Books of 40-Year Run. I see that the next series of books is not Hurricane Season: List-Driven Fiction Since September 1971 but The American Dream: Self-Publishing Since Readfest ’76—Before the IBM PC. Books, dates. Milestones. I guess 424 books in 40 years is a milestone. Without selling one to New York or Hollywood or winning a grant or a literary prize. It isn’t bragging if you did it. And it isn’t complaining if it happened. It’s what happened.