TOOT SUITE (FOUR). September 1 - September 27 (2001). 100,000 words. Suent Scientific sells the Atlanta Product Realization Facility (APRF) to OFE, or Optical Fiber Enterprises. With an accent. OFÉ. I wait to see if I have been voluntarily (that is, involuntarily) retired in the Force Management Program (FMP). I print up and send out Wars, and Rumors of War, a pamphlet of poems about the World Trade Center attack, and two continuations. Duke Ellington wrote a collection of pieces called Toot Suite. Held together by the notion red. Toot suite means right now. TOOT SUITE was serialized, online, daily, as it was being written, in real time at The Daily Bugle. Held together by the theme vocation and career in conflict.
FESTIVAL. September 28 - October 26. 60,000 words. I go to Harvest Festival 2001 and hear Col. Bruce Hampton and the Code Talkers. Brenda and I drive to a state Forest Service park on the Florida side of the Chattahoochee River for a Potter Brown Memorial Pick-In. I drive to Little Turniptown Overnight Music Jam, in Ellijay, to see Col. Bruce Hampton and the Code Talkers, but they are not there. Nobody was there but a bunch of rough-camping hippies and the band Reggae Cowboys. Brenda and I drive to LaGrange, Georgia, to Hoofer's Gospel Barn, to hear a bluegrass festival hosted by the James King Band. 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.
SCHOOL OF THE SOUTH. October 27 - November 18. 56,000 words. Laurel Cottage Cottage Industries, me and Jack Neff's Atelier du Midi. I didn't cut my ear off, or shoot myself in the stomach. I write Robert Olen Butler, who is writing a story, online, at Inside Creative Writing, at his FSU web site, and tell him about Inside Vernacular Writing, at The Daily Bugle, but he does not reply. I drive to Lloyd, Florida, for the FSU Anthropological Society Hale G. Smith Memorial Pig Roast. Brenda and I drive to a bluegrass festival at Jack Wingate's Lunker Lodge, on Lake Seminole, in Bainbridge, Georgia. I buy Spring Creek Chronicles, tales of commercial fishing and hunting on the North Florida Gulf Coast. The buyer of APRF offers me a job, at work. For how long, no one can predict. But I made it through the transition.
DREAD CLAMPETT. November 19 - December 8. 32,000 words. A reggae-bluegrass fusion band, or, the influence of Americana, or roots music on the genre I have invented, crank-lettres, or enema vérité. Or daily typewriting. Dread Clampett is a PI, or private investigator, who writes in his spare time. Brenda and I spend Thanksgiving alone, in Norcross. Just as glad not to be on the road, driving somewhere, in traffic. Just us and Brenda's chickens. The television, the newspaper, the Internet, the PA system in the Fitness Center playing Yankee music and telling you the traffic and the weather. The treadmill, the strength machines, the medicine ball, the designer exercise togs, the fat grams, the calories, arugula and radicchio, designer water. Go spend money it's your patriotic duty. Buy, consume, waste. Pollute.
DIE TRYING: A DREAD CLAMPETT NOVEL, WITH ADDITIONAL FEATURES AT THE END AND WRESTLES ALL COMERS: THE DREAD CLAMPETT TOUR AND UNDER CONSTRUCTION. November 24 -December 30. 82,000 words. Brenda and I drive to Florida, for Christmas. Balder has moved into a trailer in Grayton Beach. Owen gets fired from the James King Band. Brenda gets in a fender-bender with a BMW. I stop posting all of every book at The Daily Bugle. I am paranoid about my co-workers at work finding out. I do start writing YU News Service press releases from Slap Out, Alabama, though. Art Brew is the Miami Bureau Chief. A parody news and disinformation syndicate.
THE GREAT LONG CONTINUOUS BOOK OF ART BREW'S LIFE, IN PROGRESS. December 30 - January 9. 33,000 words. Quit drinking coffee, go on a diet, and walk on the treadmill at the Fitness Center before work. I write publishers and literary agents about the book I just finished, DIE TRYING, and send poems, prose vignettes, and press releases to little magazines. I make up a pamphlet of news releases and poems called For Immediate Release and send it to people in Florida to thank them for their hospitality at Christmas.
TOO SMALL PRESS. January 10 - January 19. 30,000 words. "More freedom than Bukowski" shortened to "Too quirky for salt on the persimmon." Too big a job for a small press, too small-press for New York. Just right for Iceland. Brew gets a commission to report on a motorcycle show, with his point-and-shoot camera (Show us your tits!), and he goes to a theater in Little Five Points to see Col. Bruce Hampton and the Code Talkers, with Vassar Clements on fiddle. He's been wanting to see them since FESTIVAL. Brenda may lose her contract job in February. The plant I work in is shutting down the first week in February. I can take vacation or leave without pay.
PUTTY KNIFE BLUES. January 19 - February 8. 28,000 words. Uncle Wayne dies. Brenda and I drive to Parker, to discuss family business and help plan the memorial service. Drive back the same weekend. Owen auditions at Dollywood. He's working at a Book Warehouse, between bands.
A POSTCARD FROM SEASIDE: MY TRIP AROUND FLORIDA'S EMERALD, AND FLORIDA'S FORGOTTEN COASTS. February 8 - February 18. 47,000 words. Brenda and I drive to Parker for Wayne A. Brown's memorial service. We go to hear Owen and Balder play at Bailey's. Owen gets a call about an audition with a bluegrass band, a good one. Brenda goes back to Georgia with Owen and Jeannie, after the service. I spend a week with Balder. I drive around Florida's Emerald Coast, then around Florida's Forgotten Coast, writing the pamphlet of poems, The Beet Poet Tour, and the travel book, A POSTCARD FROM SEASIDE. I go to see Net Ban'd play at a pot-luck supper at Fermentations. Back at home, I finish writing my book February 18. I survive a lay-off at work. There's another plant shutdown in April, but at least I wasn't FMPed. This time.
DANCING ABOUT THE RIM OF THE CRATER. February 19 - March 6. 38,000 words. Brenda and I drive to Newport, Tennessee, to visit Owen and Jean, see their new cabin. Brenda survives a downsizing, at work. I write people about the book I just finished writing, A POSTCARD FROM SEASIDE, and start writing a new book, DANCING ABOUT THE RIM OF THE CRATER. Agents and editors, but also an author's support service (Enid Perll), who writes back, with questions. Answering her questions, I see that the book I have started writing, the new book, appends itself to the previous book, and observe this process with horror, as I know what it means. I call the two, together, SAGA-NOVEL: TWO SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVELS, COMPOSED OF FOILS, OR LEAVES. Jean has a meeting in Atlanta and Owen visits us, helps Brenda bottle five gallons of scuppernong wine. I cook pork on the charcoal grill. Porc-with-a-c, as Balder calls it. Yuppie mustard, yuppie vinegar. Without otherwise being much of a yuppie (homemade wine, homemade books, a homemade web site). Continue writing satirical columns making fun of the Bush administration's War on Totemism, not all believers in animism, just the evildoers who would use black magic against us, and call the Shadow Government the Mineshaft Gap, campaign contributors make the short list for luxury suites in the bunker. Everyone must be employed. The unemployed must be employed. The unemployable. They could find work if they really wanted to. What do you want to do--paint pictures? Dance? All get drunk and go naked, and lie in a great big pile? What are you, some kind of a hippie? A tree-hugger? A peacenik? DANCING ABOUT THE RIM OF THE CRATER finishes the series. I failed. Try again. Fail better. My theme, stated in four words or less. Try again. Fail better.
A NEW LEAF. March 7 - March 21. 35,000 words. I start a new book, but
see it is related to the two previous books. SAGA-NOVEL: THREE SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
NOVELS, COMPOSED OF FOILS, OR LEAVES. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis--a third act.
Who says the life of an underground writer has no third act? Two-headed doctor,
heal thyself. Cut out the jelly donuts, Elvis. Owen gets a job playing fiddle with
the Warrior River Boys. Elvis is blowed up like a dead pig in the sunshine, but
I'm just the picador to lance him. Two-headed doctor, heal thyself. I see what
I will write next, and how A NEW LEAF ends. I couldn't end it until I saw what's
next. What's next? Imagine a cross between The Anniversary Party and Last
Orders, only with misfits and weirdos, of which I am an unregenerate type. A
throwback, or Living Fossil. Trying to make art in a money society.