Friday, November 26

After getting sacked from my technical writing job, in Panama City, Florida, I got hired by a community behavioral health care center in DeFuniak Springs, as a grant writer/community relations coordinator. The drive was a long commute. I compared The Golf Courses of Red Bay, Florida: Sandy Pines Home Sites and RV Park to The Covered Pedestrian Bridges of South Walton County (Seaside). Robert Kincaid takes photographs for National Geographic, I can't even place my photographs at the National Lampoon.

So I wrote a book called THE SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST OF FLORIDA'S CO-OPTED COASTS: A MEMOIR OF 38 YEARS OF GRACIOUS CRACKER LIVING. 60,000 words. This is like Carl Hiaasen writing Team Rodent and then asking Disney to publish it. Disney isn't just an amusement park and spin-off cartoon-logo figures for Michael Jordan to appear in television commercials with. Disney is a publishing company, a TV network, and a movie studio.

Was I nuts? No, I was real. That is, fictional.

Robert Kincaid was an Avalon romance. Robert Kincaid was Fabio. I was Art "Home" Brew, compare art brut. An outsider artist. America's greatest living unpublished, or underpublished writer, perhaps the greatest unpublished, or underpublished American writer ever.

I wrote DECLARING VICTORY: THE UNDERGROUND WRITER (ART BREW) WHO CHANGED THE ART OF NOVEL-WRITING , POSTING HIS DAILY TYPEWRITING ONLINE, DAILY, FOR YEARS. 68,000 words. DECLARING VICTORY is about how Brew wrote 249 books without selling a word to New York or Hollywood, winning a grant or a literary prize, a writer-in-residence position or a stay at a writers' colony. Although he was a headliner at the Underground Literary Alliance's Legends of the Underground reading off-off-Broadway.

Brew realizes that SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST and DECLARING VICTORY are not a series of two books, 248-249, as he'd thought, they are a book in two parts: LUGWAH: ALONE IN HIS PRIVATE GLORY.

A glossary and index complete the book. The glossary is 10,000 words. An alphabetical list of terms cross-reference each other, and show how what I am doing is (1) sui generis, and (2) the shape of literature to come. Like Ornette Coleman was The Shape of Jazz To Come. The index will be useful to readers who study the book, to biographers, and to literary critics.

We see LUGWAH (138,000 words) in the process of development, as it discovers its form in the data, rather than having some off-the-shelf form imposed on it, in advance.

The Celebrated Jumping Mullet of Bay County, Florida. Actually, Parker Bayou, Florida. Jump, mullet, jump. Owen and Balder open The Saunders Brothers: The Doghouse Sessions with "Jump, Mullet, Jump." This is a book about combining writing, work, and family. I held a marriage together, raised two fine sons, created a body of work, my stack, and invented a form to present it in, daily typewriting. We get the flavor of what it was like to do that. The glossary defines stack and daily typewriting.

I went for la gloire. I hit the big door prize, as John Prine says. In spite of myself.

Christopher Carduff
Black Sparrow Books
David R. Godine
9 Hamilton Place
Boston, MA 02108-4715

Dear Christopher Carduff:

Several books ago I could see a milestone yawning, up ahead. My 250th book.

I wrote two books that combined themselves, added a glossary and an index, and became LUGWAH: ALONE IN HIS PRIVATE GLORY.

Lugwah is what Lewis and Clark's sign-talker, Drouillard, called la gloire. Drouillard's Indian name was Followed by Buzzards. I call my coterie of steadfast readers the Buzzard Cult, after the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a revitalization movement that swept the Lower Mississippi Valley just before and after European contact.

I define terms like lugwah, and Buzzard Cult, in the glossary.

When Henry Miller came back to American from Europe, he surveyed the literary scene and decided that he was "alone in my private glory," although unheralded, and unsung.

That's me. No one else has written 250 books without selling a word to New York or Hollywood. Or Boston.

I enclose a description of LUGWAH, a copy of my CV, and a list of the first 250 books of my stack.

Would you like to see the manuscript of LUGWAH?

It runs 138,000 words. Not counting the index.

Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404

If you want to see a sample of my writing, John Martin published a small, gratis booklet, Charles Bukowski, to give to friends and supporters of Black Sparrow Press.

From: Jack Saunders
To: Thomas Pochari
Subj: Writing Sample

I write a book a month, on average. Sometimes they are memoirs, or autobiography, and sometimes they are novels, or collections of prose vignettes, and sometimes they are nonfiction, and contain essays, book, movie, or record reviews, and sometimes they are collections of poetry.

My alter ego is named Art "Home" Brew, compare art brut, an unpublished, or underpublished writer who works full-time and writes before and after work, sometimes at work, where he surfs the Internet reading five or six blogs a day and writing satirical pieces of about 500 words on topical events. Attached find three examples, "Rug Burn Origin Hush-Up," "RFP," and "The Senility Prayer."

I collected the columns in two manuscripts, BUSHWA BLUES: THE HERO-WITHOUT-EMPLOYMENT and FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: THE YU NEWS SERVICE BULLETINS FROM SLAP OUT, ALABAMA, OF ART "HOME" BREW, COMPARE ART BRUT.

YU News Service is a parody news and disinformation syndicate of which Brew is Miami Bureau Chief. He is hiding out in Slap Out.

You can find out more about me at The Daily Bulletin. There you will find my CV and a list of the books of my stack, to date.

If you'd like to see one of the manuscripts, I stopped trying to sell them, due to lack of interest.

If you'd like to have me write a satirical column on current events, I could do that. I'd sell you first serial rights, and include the columns in my books.

Let me know if you are interested.

Brenda and I were eating leftovers, and starting to watch Dr. Strangelove, when the phone rang.

It was a publisher, Thomas Pochari. He puts out an online magazine, World Affairs Monthly.

He is trying to raise money to publish a book.

He saw my name in connection with an agent in an Internet search on another topic, looked up my phone number, and called me.

He asked me to send him a sample of a couple of 500-word satirical pieces.

I sent him three Art Brew columns making fun of conservatives, President Bush, the War on Totoism, and the Homeland über alles Security Czar.

He describes himself as a conservative.