40-Year Run (cont’d)(3)

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Ten-Year Run

SCREED. Working at the bank. Begin printing up and mailing out pamphlets, at Brenda's instigation. Hear back good things from readers. Nominated for position of Poet Laureate of the State of Florida.

FEAST OF FLOWERS. At the bank. Decide Screed is a book. Begin trying to raise money to publish it. Poet Laureate named. Begin calling self Poet Pretender. I'm the echt poet, the incumbent an impostor.

PO-BIZ. Po-Biz as usual. Apply for Guggenheim Fellowship, State of Florida Individual Artist Grant, NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Florida Endowment for the Humanities grant. Begin writing book reviews for little magazines. Get money to publish Screed from mother. Quit the bank.

THE TWENTIETH NOVEL. Begin writing column for hometown weekly paper. Screed published. Work first job as consultant, or independent subcontractor. It isn't the second novel that makes you a writer it's the twentieth.

SOUTHERN GOTHIC. File for unemployment after free-lance editing job is over. Awarded 13 weeks. Write book during that time. Pay Scott Meredith $250 to read manuscript.

VISIONS OF FLORIDA. Scott Meredith calls SOUTHERN GOTHIC "unpublishable." Hear back on grants. Answer: no. Give reading in Winter Park. Rent car, drive around state, write about it. John Bennett flies me to Seattle for publication party of Black Messiah. Read out there, go on trip selling Screed, Black Messiah, and the Vagabond Anthology out of back of John's van. You ought to try to sell a Henry Miller Festschrift to a militant lesbian feminist Third World socialist bookstore. Begin to hear from readers about Screed. Begin to appear more frequently in little magazines. This book could have been a turning point, but wasn't. I took the path not taken, and write about what it's like to do that.

PLUM NELLY. No publisher, no job, no money, no prospects. Beaten. And what beat you, he thought? "Nothing," he said aloud. "I went out too far." End book, end series, spring to easel, begin next book. New book, different book. One book, same old book.

THE GROANING BOARD. A transitional book. Between Against the Grain and Goat Song. Enough is as good as a feast. Or, it's always the darkest just before the pitch black.

COMPOSITIONS. Working as a temporary technical writer for IBM. Quit writing newspaper column. Sail diatribes and broadsides out into the void like tarpaper shingles. Paint can lids. Student composition books. Floppy disks. The Cow Chip of Doom.

UNTHINKABLE. On permanent with IBM. Begin making side trips in new Ford Ranger pickup truck. Buy Correcting Selectric III on Employee Purchase Plan. Apply for position of Chronicler Laureate of the State of Florida. Refused. Begin to call self Chronicler Contender. Show IBM first part of UNTHINKABLE, in which I propose a new product line, underware: books that seek to get at the infrastructure, or underlying form of what the small desktop computer is going to mean in everybody's life. Sell it in the stores where they sell the hardware and the software they manufacture.

SOLDIER'S PRAYER. How I quit drinking. Finish first book for IBM, a Quick Reference manual for the word processing program I call See See Writer in my book. Resubmit UNTHINKABLE. Communications lost the first one. IBM declines to publish it. Declines to let me write books like it for my job. They tell me they are not in the publishing business, although they are the second largest producer of printed material in the country, behind only the Government Printing Office, and ideas are their stock in trade. An unfettered exchange of information is their rice bowl. Wrong.

1984. Resort to pamphlets again. Print up Outfit Art, Open Letter, See See Writer. Send them to Scott Meredith, as a professional courtesy, as he's mentioned in them. He offers to read them for $200 apiece. Write "An Open Letter to Scott Meredith," offering to let him read them for $200 apiece. Piece reprinted in Small Press Review. A lot of mail on this one.

A LONG SEASON. More pamphlets. More open letters. Begin submitting whistle sheets to mail art shows.

HACK WRITER. More folios. Publish Journal to Stella. Enter PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Contest. Apply for NEA grant. Apply for state grant.

A MODEST PROPOSAL. Submit another book to IBM, A MODEST PROPOSAL, this one typed up on the system, with a glossary and index.

ADVENTURES IN THE MEAT WORLD. Enter Goodbye to Archeology in Governor's Screenwriting Competition. Submit Career Development Plan to IBM. Also done on the system. Apply for Fellowship, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Do not win an NEA grant. No Florida grants to individuals awarded this year. Apply for next year's grants. ADVENTURES makes five books I wrote in 1984.

WARPATH. Show Common Sense to IBM. Publish Common Sense, Full Plate, Blue Darter. Don't win PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Prize. Don't win Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Fellowship. Don't win Governor's Screenwriting Competition. A MODEST PROPOSAL and Career Development Plan disappear into the Black Insatiable Maw of IBM. Could it be because I say that PC doesn't stand for Personal Computer, it stands for pubococcygeus, the muscle women contract when they squeeze their pussies shut? Call the PC Big Red? Vagina Dentata? The Snapping Pussy of Doom? Man, I drew back a stump.

SWAN SONG. Begin recording audio cassette tapes. Ask the State of Florida to designate me a Living Fossil. Ask the state to buy my house and turn it into a museum, with me the curator of my own collections. Travel to Panama City, St. Petersburg, Key West, Cocoa. Publish Lost Writings.

TRANSITION. Enter Governor's Screenwriting Competition again with a novella, Watch Florida Grow. Turn the treatment into a screenplay, Lethal Yellowing. Don't win state grant. Don't win NEA grant. Apply for booth at The Delray Affair, a local street fair.

OUT IN THE OPEN. Write and send out MANIFESTO, a reminiscence of ten years in mail art. Drive to Tallahassee for opening of mail art show. Write play about it, Living Fossil. Start calling my coterie of steadfast readers the Buzzard Cult. Write a Speak Up and go Open Door at IBM. Lose. Quit job. Turned down for booth at Delray Affair. Hold counterfair, The Dreyfus Affair - Banned Books, in my front yard. Make video tape of myself reading Living Fossil