I finish writing GULF COAST BLUES. I think
it's a good book, but I don't know where to send it, and I get a little down. Then
I see what I am going to write next, and realize I have the money to live on while
I write it.
Brenda and I drive to New Orleans to visit Larry and Hazel, our
friends from Tulane. They have a copy of the manuscript of every book I've written.
They keep them in the second upstairs bedroom of a guest house behind their house.
The archive, I call it.
I got behind on sending them manuscripts after Hurricane
Katrina disrupted mail service and want to deliver two linear feet of single-spaced
manuscript-a year's work.
I have written 290 books.
Brenda is going
to film the archive for a documentary an underground filmmaker is making about me
as America's greatest living unpublished, or underpublished writer, perhaps the greatest
unpublished, or underpublished American writer ever.
While there, we tour
the city, and visit the Bywater Studio of Dr. Bob, in the Ninth Ward. We drive to
New Iberia, where I dug the slave quarters at The Shadows, when I was just starting
out. Henry Miller wrote about visiting The Shadows in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
My book is more like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson.
On the way home we visit the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, in Ocean Springs.
When I get home, I finish writing the book.
SQUIBS: TEAM WUPPIE DRIVE TO
NEW ORLEANS. 55,000 words.
I think it's a good book, but I don't know where
to send it, and I get a little down. Then I see what I am going to write next, and
realize that, while I don't have the money to live on while I write it, that never
stopped me before.
Writing the book, I watched the Pusher Trilogy,
with the featurettes on the three disks. These added to my appreciation of the movies.
I include Six Parts in ADDITIONAL MATERIAL. These run 20,000, 10,000, 7,000, 7,000,
1,000 and 7,000 words.
I attend a book fair and an art exhibit in which I
have entered two self-published pamphlets, Text and Plagiarism.
That is, I comment on the form the book is taking as it is being written. I respond
to reader comment in the book. The book was published online, daily, as I wrote it,
at The Daily Bulletin (www.thedailybulletin.com).
107,000 words. With
visits from the children and grandchildren at Christmas, trips, book events. A bluegrass
concert, a job search. Dread Clampitt at The Red Bar.
Three months in the
life of an underground writer and his family. Of America's greatest writer. Unheralded
and unsung.
The heavens rejoice when a new star enters the firmament, Emerson
said.
Of course, he also told Walt Whitman, "There are renunciations
and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass as a fool and a churl, for
a long season."
35 years is long enough. I am approaching critical mass.
I'm going to erupt, like the Wakulla Volcano. Like Zero Zilenski's kingfish.
An explosion in a charnel house.