Florida
Writer
ROOTS MUSIC. 83,000 words. 320 pictures. I write ten pamphlets about my career in the
small press scene, mail art, zines, ezines, the online journal (OLJ) and the
weblog (blog) and send them out to my coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard
Cult, named after the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a revitalization
movement that swept the Lower Mississippi
Valley just before and after
European contact. I studied cargo cults
in college. And I dug at Lake
Jackson, a Buzzard Cult temple mound with a copper
breastplate of the long-nose god, who might have been a female warrior. Some feminist scholars think so. Then I make a side trip to Sneads, Florida,
where Potterfest is held, comparing hot sauces and pepper vinegars. Eating oysters. Saying shit and making biscuits. Hoecake and tomato gravy. The Cracker Table. All genius is local. 2011 was a productive year for me. I wrote and sent out 40 pamphlets. I posted even more than that at my web site, The Daily Bulletin. I think 2012 is going to be my year. I can’t do anything about New
York or Hollywood
but I can fill my year with daily typewriting.
Will I cross over from the underground to the mainstream? Will POTLICKER JOURNAL be the book that does
it? That’s the drama of it. The drama of it. A lot of repetition. I’m not a dog returning to his vomit I’m a
cobbler sticking to his last. I start
writing SNEAKING PAST THE GATEKEEPER. I
have snuck past the gatekeeper. I am
doing it. What’s to stop me if I don’t
snooker myself? I change the name of
SNEAKING PAST THE GATEKEEPER to SEASIDE BLOG.
I see that POTLICKER JOURNAL and SEASIDE BLOG form a pair of books, Roots Music. I am tracing my roots. How did I get here? What does it mean? Am I a Florida
writer? Am I a Wewahitchka, Florida
writer? Am I a vernacular writer? Oh, shit.
I have given myself a web site, The
Daily Bugle. Minor chord. Fate motive in Faust. I make a 16-page
pamphlet called Roots Music and send
it to an agent as a writing sample. I
see that Hardhat Snood is a
pamphlet. I make copies to send
out. I expose myself as a racist. Well, I’m clad in the hardhat of
righteousness. I don’t think I’m a
racist. As Tom Mott says at the end of Cracker Jack, we need more discussion
about this, not less. We need to talk
about it openly, not guardedly. I apply
for a Summer 2012 fellowship at the Mailer Writers Colony and submit a 40-page
writing sample. I make up a pamphlet, Writing Sample. I can send the pamphlet out with query
letters for Roots Music. My book is like a web log. A story, a poem, an interview with
myself. A book or record or movie
review, an art exhibit, a concert, or a play.
A list. Lists. Does it end?
No, it just stops. Charles
Willeford concludes New Forms of Ugly,
“For the moment, man writing about man writing thwarts Armageddon, and there
are enough highly literate readers in the world for the immobilized hero novel
to exist as a sub-literary force in the corpus of modern literature. Will any immobilized hero ever find his way
through the labyrinth of his mind to his perfect, absolute Zero? His white leviathan? One does not think so.” I think I did it. With Roots
Music: Immobilized in Parker, Florida. It takes taut strings to make music. I am humming like a tuning fork. I resonate.
I set up and hum. I have found my
resonant frequency. Ha ha, too high of a
pitch. Dogs can’t hear it. I am talking to myself. Raving like a madman. Send you to Chattahoochee. Jim Woodruff Dam. The woods are full of wardens. A potlicker is a cur dog too sorry to
hunt. Roots music, folk art, vernacular
writing, independent film. Do it yo’self
(DIY).
MY PULP GHETTO IDEAL. 62,000 words.
201 pictures. MY PULP-GHETTO
IDEAL is a book that tells how I was able to create a body of work, my stack, invent
a form to present it in, daily typewriting, and find a medium to get it out to
my coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult, through, self-published
pamphlets and a web site on the worldwide web.
Daily typewriting is a mélange of poems, short fiction, and essays (book
reviews, movie reviews, CD reviews, reviews of art exhibits, live concerts, and
plays), plus literary theory, about What Is the Immobilized Hero Novel, Who Is
the Immobilized Hero Novel Writer, What Does He Think He Is Up To? An ape can brachiate faster than a forest can
recede. I’m not immobilized, I just
don’t like to leave my writing room, in case the writing come and I not be
there to receive it. Charles Willeford
wrote about the immobilized hero novel in New
Forms of Ugly: The Immobilized Hero in
Modern Fiction. He said his aim was
to popularize the term. To get literary
critics to use it. But I think his real
goal was to encourage other writers to write immobilized hero novels. To carry on the tradition. I have met the challenge. Stood the test. I stood up to the plate. I took my turn at bat. I wanted to see how I, a hopeless amateur,
would do against major league pitching.
Seedy and stove-up as I am. An
old bitch, gone in the teeth. A botched
civilization. Civilization is
botched. So what? It’s all we have. It’s the given. Les
donnés. Marcel Duchamp called his last construction Étant donnés. What will you do with this, sports fans? That’s
the drama of it. MY PULP-GHETTO IDEAL
summarizes what I did. I wrote for 40
years without selling a word to New York
or Hollywood. I went to school, I worked, I got married, I
was retired. I went on a Sunset
Cruise. A Farewell Tour. In my head.
While looking for, or working at, a job, the kind of job an old flat-affect
reject can get in a recession, if I get one.
Or sells a book. Maybe I’ll sell
a book. Maybe I’ll sell MY PULP-GHETTO
IDEAL before I seize up and collapse into my computer monitor, which I call
Macy’s Window. The last section of MY
PULP-GHETTO IDEAL (before I took the ordered headings out and just numbered the
entries in sequence) was called Florida Writer.
It was about Zora Neale Hurston’s final decade as a writer, when she
couldn’t find a publisher for Herod the
Great. I define a Florida
writer as one not included in the year-end round-ups of “Who is the Florida
writer? What is the Florida Novel?”, not
invited to the seminar in Key West. I define the Florida
novel as a book about that that feels like.
I combine ROOTS MUSIC and MY PULP-GHETTO IDEAL and call them Florida Novel.
THE
THOUSAND-YARD STARE AT THE MIDDLE CLASS JOB FAIR: OR, REFLECTIONS ON THE DECADE BETWEEN 62 AND
72. 60,000 words. 250 pictures.
I begin writing An American
Original. I change the name to Scufflin’:
An Autobiography of Jack Saunders.
Then I change the subtitle to On
the Necessity of Vocational Disobedience.
It’s a writer’s duty to attack the warheads. I change the name a couple of more
times. I don’t remember. I know it’s an account of my four stages as a
writer, with an emphasis on my last decade, from 2002 to 2012, The
Post-Masterpiece Novel. I end up calling
the book THE THOUSAND-YARD STARE AT THE MIDDLE CLASS JOB FAIR: REFLECTIONS ON THE DECADE BETWEEN 62 AND
72. Four-word pitch. Thoreau meets Lenny Bruce. I simplified my life and all I got was a
Dread Clampitt T-shirt. Well, 445
books. But am I finished…?
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