The American Dream: A
Fresh Start
THE AMERICAN DREAM. September 1 – September 19. 30,000 words.
I continue writing The Roots Music,
Folk Art, Vernacular Writing, Regional Theater, and Independent Film of Highway
30A and Neighboring Hick Counties: A
Guidebook and embedding it in THE AMERICAN DREAM. Am I still chasing the pipedream, after 40
years? Why not? 40 years is an arbitrary date. I wasn’t any different the day before, or the
day after. You finish a series, 40-Year Run, you begins a new series, The American Dream. The same day, or the day after. Or the day before. You take a shower, get in the car, and drive
to the next rodeo. The next wrestling
arena. Billy Boy and Bad Boy Hines. Hunter S. Thompson writing wrestling
promotion for the Playground Daily News
led to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. You can see where the wave crested, and
started to recede. THE AMERICAN DREAM is
in the tradition. I see that 40-Year Run is the first 424 books of Great Wall of Books and that The
American Dream: Do it Yo’self is the
next 76 books. I rename 40-Year Run, et seq Great Wall of Books. I stop
writing Guidebook. I rename it dotMobi-Dickwad: A Guide for the
Perplexed. A whaling ship was my
Harvard and my Yale. I wasn’t the
captain I was the third mate. Ha ha,
there ain’t no third mate on a whaling ship.
I was a deckhand. I write a
pamphlet to give out at the 12th Annual Gulf Coast Writers
Conference, Flogging a Dead Horse: The Fool Who Persists in His Folly Becomes
Wise, and send it out as a writing sample with a proposal for dotMobi-Dickwad: Mexican Bus Fumes in Paradise. Wasting stamps. But you have to cross the t’s and dot the
I’s. Wrote a zine for Banned Books Week,
and to hand out at the writers conference.
Garage Band Books Week 2011. I see that THE AMERICAN DREAM and WRITING
BOOKS IN ART TIME are a pair of books, or a book in two parts, The Poster Boy for Marketplace Censorship. Banned books is news. I am sitting on a gold mine. I wrote 40-Year
Run without selling a word to New York
or Hollywood. This is about what that felt like. Ha ha, get over it. Life goes on.
You have to see the humor of
it. An artist, a failure, a man MUST
PROCEED. I change the subtitle of The American Dream from Do it Yo’self to A Fresh Start. The whale
with its six foot penis, in repose.
WRITING BOOKS IN ART TIME. September 20 – September 26. 11,000 words.
If you write books in art time you don’t expect them to be published by New
York, reviewed in mass circulation newspapers or
slick magazines, or taught in schools with MFA programs in Creative
Writing. Studied in university English
departments. It’s ephemera. Trash.
Too easy. Unprofessional. A professional asks who will read this? What’s my projected market? What titles do I consider myself in
competition with? How much money will I
bring to my own promotion and what kind of a presence do I already have in the
media?
What kid of fizz.
Fizz—I’m a dickwad of jism. I’m
the turd in the punchbowl of American letters.
I’m the hard turd Elvis died trying to shit. Compacted.
Dense. Harder than poverty. Just a good old boy. A southerner.
A redneck. Writing Hick Lit. I call Chick Lit Chick Lite. I call New York The Oprah Show. How can you find a publisher for the great
American novel when you insult Oprah?
Are you balmy? Are you daft? Oprah NOW, Orpah then, Oprah forever. I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it.
nooprah.jpg
Turn off the television.
It’s rotting your brain. The
Oprah Show is what New York has
to be snooty about? Money? Money for what? You don’t need money to write the great
American novel. Just sit down and write
it. In your spare time. If you don’t watch television you’ll have
time. The long title of The Poster Boy for Marketplace Censorship was
It Isn’t Bragging If You Did It: The Poster Boy for Marketplace Censorship. How I Wrote the Great American Novel in My
Spare Time. I shorten it to Poster Boy. Who wants to be a poster boy? Jerry Lewis was a poster boy. Ira Hayes was a poster boy. Maria Shriver. Carmelita Pope. I snap WRITING BOOKS IN ART TIME off, add
DOTMOBI-DICKWAD: MEXICAN BUS FUMES IN
PARADISE and THE AMERICAN DREAM to it, and call the resulting book Bay Leaves: A
Roman-Feuilleton.
FEUILLETONIST: A MEMOIR. September 25 – September 27. 5,000 words.
I add FEUILLETONIST: A MEMOIR to
the end of BAY LEAVES, as Part Four.
This brings BAY LEAVES to 80,000 words.
Oh yeah, I shorten the title of BAY LEAVES: A ROMAN-FEUILLETON to BAY LEAVES. The book ends with a query letter saying I
kissed my own ass goodbye in Macy’s Window.
Then saying I call my computer monitor Macy’s Window. “It’s full of four-color ads, for things I
don’t need.” I begin a new book, HEAP
LIVES! Not a part of BAY LEAVES. A new book.
About what happens to BAY LEAVES.
Of course nothing might happen to BAY LEAVES. Why would anything happen. Life goes on.
HEAP LIVES!
September 28 – September 30.
3,000 words. I see that HEAP
LIVES! goes on the end of BAY LEAVES: NOT
A NOVEL. I’m alive. I can write anything I want. I just have to figure out what to write. I answered the question of whether I can do
it or not. I can. But should I?
Am I allowed to? Is there some
unwritten rule against it? Did I break
some rule?
NOW’S THE TIME. October 1 – October 6. 7,000 words.
I change the name of BAY LEAVES:
NOT A NOVEL to BAY LEAVES: A
NOVEL IN FOUR NARRATIVE MODES, LIKE JOHN DOS PASSOS’S TRILOGY
U. S. A.
I take out the headings of Parts Four and Five and make them a part of
Part Three. Why not—it’s my book. I am editing. Then I change the name of BAY LEAVES: A NOVEL IN FOUR NARRATIVE MODES, LIKE JOHN
DOS PASSOS’S TRILOGY U. S. A. to BAY
LEAVES: A NOVEL, EDITED. Of course, all novels are edited, but mine
leaves in more than most. That is, it’s
BAY LEAVES: A NOVEL UNEDITED, or BAY
LEAVES: A NOVEL, EDITED in the sense expurgated, bowdlerized, tarted up and
watered down, I wouldn’t do that, would I?
I haven’t yet. That’s why I am
unpublished, or underpubliahed, by New York. Edited
is a comment on New York, on
publishing, as an industry, and on a writer’s conditions of production. Ha ha, so what? I edit that to AN ONLINE NOVEL, EDITED FOR
PUBLICATION. Of course I edit. Just, as
I go along. I add “Now’s the Time”
to BAY LEAVES: AN ONLINE NOVEL, EDITED
FOR PUBLICATION. Decide to write a book
about becoming an American original. AN
AMERICAN ORIGINAL.
An American Original
AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL. October 7 – October 13. 12,000 words.
I add “An American Original” to the end of BAY LEAVES: AN ONLINE NOVEL, EDITED FOR PUBLICATION and
begin a new series, A Post-Masterpiece
Novel, with BALONEY AND VELVEETA CHEESE ON WHITE, compare Charles
Bukowski’s Ham on Rye. Steve Jobs is “the most celebrated,
successful business executive of his generation” (Time, October 17, 2011). Successful business executives are the
problem, not the solution. He said, from
his writing room, where he plodded away at a Microsoft XP machine that wouldn’t
let him insert a picture in html in Windows Explorer, he had to put an extra
step in, and you had to click on a link to the picture. It takes a village idiot to do what I did. A bricoleur,
or knacker in an abattoir. To make a
cat’s cradle out of cobwebs.
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