40-Year Run (cont’d)(4)
TYPEWRITING
COLOSSUS. Laid off by CRC. Brenda out of work. Her unemployment benefits exhausted and mine
not started yet. At one point, zero
income for the family. With a four-figure
mortgage payment every month. Meet two
old chums, digging at the Port of Panama
City.
Travel to Fort Walton Beach
and Tallahassee, in search of a
job. Meet Jack Rudloe in Panacea. Drive to Ocean Springs,
Mississippi, to the Walter
Anderson Museum
of Art. Read about Roy Hargrove playing
at Sonny Rollins' annual Carnegie Hall concert.
Write about my days in the Air Force band with Bobby Bradford, working
as an archeologist, working as a technical writer, and writing bebop novels I
can't get published. Sort of like Walter
Anderson decorating pots at Shearwater pottery because he couldn't sell his
paintings of birds and crabs and lizards.
Drive to Atlanta with Balder
to buy a secondhand trumpet.
A
TALE OF TWO CITIES. The two
cities are Delray Beach and Panama
City, mediated by a third, Tallahassee. Write the Division of Cultural Affairs asking
them to coordinate the purchase or donation of the original manuscripts of The Great American 20,000-Page Novel to
the State Library or the FSU Library and the publication of the entire series,
either by getting the legislature to appropriate the money or by finding a
philanthropist to subsidize the venture or some combination of the two, by the
University Press of Florida. Brenda
takes a job teaching Spanish and French in the high school she graduated from,
Owen dropped out of to go on the road with a bluegrass band, and Balder
attends, and I take a job (in Panama City) writing operating manuals for a
dustpan dredge being built at a shipyard near the Walter Anderson Museum. Add a glossary, which starts with making a
distinction between a folk and a classical tradition, goes from there, to racism, to white racism, to the full politically incorrect magnolia. The University Press of Florida says they only
publish scholarly or literary work of local or regional interest. The State Library says they don't buy
manuscripts, Archives does. The FSU
Library says they're broke and the Division of Cultural Affairs does not
answer. So much for intermediaries. Anything you have to do, you have to go on
and do yourself, as Roland Kirk says.
However. The cultural operator
sets up and resolves oppositions in his life.
It is his métier.
CULT
WRITER. Begins with
"Blockhead: An Explosion in a Charnel
House," a glossary that introduces the volumes that follow. An expansion of the appendix to the previous
book. "Folk Hero: One Life in the Bebop Novel Business"
switches between fiction and nonfiction, the past and the present. Inspired by The Hero's Journey, a coffeetable book about Joseph Campbell's
life. "Manifest Destiny"
continues from where "Folk Hero" left off. I realize, at the end, that "Blockhead,"
"Folk Hero," and "Manifest Destiny" form a single book,
about a writer and his coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult. CULT WRITER.
"Manifest Destiny" contains a documentary-length
screenplay. "The American
Dream," like Straight, No Chaser.
SALVAGE
ARCHEOLOGIST. Explores the
similarities between writing unpublished, or underpublished novels and working
as a demolition laborer, OPS (Other Personal Services). Sections are "Banned" (formerly
"Worm the Arts"), "Off the Rails" (from a quote by Norman
Mailer), and "Working Stiff." I answer questionnaires to a survey,
"The Emotional Lives of Writers and the Development of Their Work." I
shoot short pieces out into the void.
Folios, which together make up 96 pages of loose sheets about writing,
working for a living, getting laid off, being blackballed, and so forth. I call SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST a
post-masterpiece novel, implying that CULT WRITER is a masterpiece.
YARDBIRD. An anti-masterpiece. Thesis and antithesis yield synthesis, which
becomes the new thesis. I disappear into
the writing, working backwards to my two hitches in the Air Force, and even
further back, to high school, where my heroes were Charlie Parker, Jackson
Pollock, and Lenny Bruce. I haven't been
busted I have been reverted to my permanent rank. YARDBIRD also deals with the effect of racism
on the oppressor, predicting a white backlash the way rap music foretold the Los
Angeles riots.
It shows how I became a salvage archeologist, and then a cult writer,
out of having no other way to go, given my character and the nature of the
heathen society I write in, ending back at the beginning of
"Blockhead," with me telling A1A stories, which see. "Broke-Dick Dog" adds itself to
YARDBIRD. Brenda laid off.
OLLA-PODRIDA. Covers my first twenty-some years as a
writer, telling what I thought I was doing in my work, what happened to the
books, how I felt about what happened, and what I did about how I felt. It's a one-volume rendition of the ground I
cover again and again in my stack. Its
publication should arouse an interest in earlier, unpublished, or
underpublished books. I am the best
undiscovered writer in America,
and my discovery is an event whose time is nigh. I'm going to burst on the scene like a ripe
papaya. I discuss the effect the
different ways I made a living had on the form my work took, and how the reception
of my work influenced the shape of subsequent work, tracing my development from
apprentice, through journeyman, to master, and beyond. What is beyond master? Senescence, decline, repetition,
imitation. The kind of fate I was
protected from by having every word I wrote suppressed by New
York and Hollywood. Until now.
The debut novel as last gasp. Or
last gasp as debut: I have not yet begun
to write.
PEARLS
BEFORE SWINE. THREE DIGS. Alligator Point, Tallulah, the Navy
Base. THREE DAY JOBS. Student, laborer, clerk. THREE DIGS II. The Shadows, Andersonville,
the Old Capitol.
TEN-YEAR
RUN REVISITED. THREE DAY JOBS
II. The Bank, IBM, A&T (to
furlough). THREE SABBATICAL YEARS. New Orleans/Penland, The Cottage, Pawpaw's
House. THREE DAY JOBS III. A&T (after recall), CRC, IMI.
STAGE
FOUR. THREE MEDIA. Pencil, typewriter, computer. THREE STAGES.
Apprentice, Journeyman, Master.
THREEPENNY (BEGGAR'S) OPERA.
Banal, From the Trenches, To Drain the Swamp. Brenda takes a job as an Office Automation
Specialist at the new prison in Wewahitchka.
My work at work picks up. Owen
moves into one of the outbuildings. He's
still playing fiddle with the Gillis Brothers hard-driving bluegrass band, but
staying at home between road trips.
Balder's a junior in high school, playing trumpet in the marching band
and running track.
EIGHTY-SIXED. Call new series Daybook. Change the name to White Elephant. Have character write a roman-feuilleton called BAY LEAVES.
New character. Same old
character. The second half of the Great
American 40,000-Page Novel, under way.
Staggering 'til it falls. Call
the first volume of White Elephant
BIGFOOT MUST DIE. Randall Polk
serializes my catalogue raisonné,
that is, this, in Plexus. Not alone in my private glory. Just a suffering pilgrim, like everybody
else. As common as gully dirt. In 1992 I wrote eight books. Decide to take 1993 off. To rest.
To disappear back in the swamp and hide out. Bigfoot lives! There's just no category for him in the
County Fair. He's off the scale. A sport or freak of nature. A monster, as we say. Adapt "Bigfoot Must Die" for the
screen. Storm on in to FLORIDA
- STATE OF THE ARTS. AND SHUFFLEBOARD
TOO! when The Book Lover's Guide to Florida leaves me out. A gazetteer of one Florida
writer's Florida. End with a story, "Florida Ramble: A Mood Piece for Three Voices." Not
based on the travel book by Alex Shoumatoff.
Enigma Books asks to see the manuscript to BIGFOOT MUST DIE. I finish this the day I get his letter and
send him EIGHTY-SIXED. Start writing
HOME TRUTHS.
THE
LIFE OF THE MIND. Begin HOME
TRUTHS, the story of my life until I went away to college. Followed by RUNNING AMOK, from FSU to having
a spiritual breakthrough. Up to my new
life, the life of the head, the heart, and the balls, all working in sync. The life of the mind is unbalanced. Out of kilter. Looking for a ground. I plant my seat at the writing desk. But get up when I'm done. To every thing there is a time, and a
purpose, and a place. I write for the
desktop, not the desk drawer, and shoot it out into the void, and let what
happens to it happen. Start calling my
small press DTP, or Dawn of Time Productions.
In desktop publishing before IBM PCs. Laid off.
Out of the blue. A disaster.
CUSSEDNESS
AND GUMPTION. Outtakes, letters,
interviews, a cross between Camille Paglia on E and a Spalding Gray monologue.
Or either a documentary, like Charlotte Zwerin's film about Thelonious
Monk. Root, hog, or die. Root and snort, elephant, and live. In Orwell's story. Which will be read as long as there are
people. A white elephant, of course, is a useless or cumbersome artifact just marginally too valuable to
discard. Segue into PAYDAY. There is no payday for the artist. Or every day he doesn't sell out, turn
bitter, or quit is payday. That's the
breakthrough. I look for a job and walk
on the beach and write on CUSSEDNESS AND GUMPTION, which I realize is the last
volume of the series Bebop Novel,
that began when CRC had laid me off and I was walking on the beach, looking for
a job, and writing the book that turned into TYPEWRITING COLOSSUS. Plus ça
change, plus c'est la même chose.
The structure is trochal, as they say in the quarterlies. A snake, swallowing its tail. Familiar Buzzard Cult motif. Go to the Jazz Fest in New
Orleans. Add Jazz Fest '93, a book of poems, to
CUSSEDNESS AND GUMPTION. Bank says the F
word starts at the beginning of next month, the third month no payment received. Add on PIONEER. Two six-book years in a row, counting CULT
WRITER as one book instead of three.
Segue into JUST SAY NO: THE
MAKING OF BEBOP NOVEL, which turns into SHOUT IT FROM THE HOUSE TOPS. Work as a consultant, writing a grant for a
community mental health center in Fort Walton Beach. Quit standing vigil for my life and get on
with the job. It's not a job, it's a métier.
A calling. A call. The trumpet creeper shall sound! It shall creep. It shall inch forward dialectically. Except when it fulgurates. Bugle
from buculum, the diminutive of Bos, the genus of cow. Just crack the Cow Whip of Doom. Every day is Judgment Day to the artist. Spring to the easel of a morning and don't look
back. Or forward. The word NOW
ticks like a bomb thrown through a window.
Add THE DAILY BULLETIN. From buletta.
The diminutive of bull. Anatomically correct, if not politically.
TEAM
WUPPIE. Two willfully
underemployed professionals. Sections
are The Wedding, The Honeymoon, Interlude, The Party, DIY Fellow,
Writer-in-Residence, Winemaker, Pamphleteer, and Demolition Laborer. Covers a dig at Alligator Point, in which
there is a mutiny, and retaliation. A
dig in Tallulah, Louisiana,
that was uneventful, except to develop character and show new
relationships. A dig at Port
St. Joe and
the Navy Base in Panama City. Graduate school in anthropology at
Tulane. Hero finesses them for the last
year of his fellowship to teach himself to write. Potter's helper at Penland School of
Handicrafts, near Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Writing full-time now. Works as laborer in a feldspar mine. Runs a winemaking shop in Winston-Salem. First son born. Works construction, in a factory, as a
janitor. Fired for stealing six rolls of
toilet paper. Moves back to Florida
and gets a job as a technical writer in Fort Walton Beach. Second son born. Publishes pamphlets. Stage One (The First Nine Novels) becomes
Stage Two (His Chronicle). Moves to Tallahassee
to work as an Information Specialist for the Department of Commerce. Wife goes back to work, as
zooarcheologist. Sacked. Files a grievance. Blackballed.
Goes on dig at Andersonville Prison.
Digs at Old Capitol. Wife goes
into the field, to Big Cypress
Swamp. Takes the boys to Delray
Beach to stay with their grandmother.
TEN-YEAR
RUN. Sections are Pamphleteer
II, Novelist, Mail Art Artist, Novelist II.
Works in bank. Publishes
pamphlets. Wife works for
telecommunications company. First novel
published by independent press in Washington
state. Quits the bank. Writes column and book review for hometown
paper. Travels, reading from work in
progress. Sells books in Seattle,
Portland, and Eugene,
Oregon, with publisher. Takes job with computer manufacturer. Tries to get them to let him write underware
for his job. Books that seek to get at
the underlying form of what the small desktop computer is going to mean in
everybody's life. Active in the mails. Writes screenplays, a play. Publishes several chapbooks, with help of
friends. Quits job, mortgages house,
writes, promotes, and distributes two novels, at places like Fantasy Fest '86
in Key West and Miami Book Fair
International. Another independent press
brings out a book about doing that.
Stage Three dresses out as 35 books in ten years. Without selling a word to New York/Hollywood.
SALON
DES REFUSÉES. Sections are
Training Specialist, Senior Technical Editor, Publication Manager, Consultant,
Novelist III. Moves into trailer behind
wife's mother's house and looks for job in Panama City. Finds job, sells house in Delray
Beach, buys house in Panama City,
finds job for wife in Panama City. Kids move one at a time. Changes jobs.
Laid off. Wife laid off. Takes new job and writes 14 novels in two
years. Laid off. Bank talking about foreclosure. Credit cards maxed out. Draws unemployment and looks for work. Works part-time as a consultant. As your consultant I advise you to kiss the
middle class goodbye. Success is getting
used to being who you are. Stage Four is
the Post-Masterpiece Novel. What's the
masterpiece? Bebop Novel, a kind of a ne
plus ultra of daily typewriting. The
series immediately before Dithyramb. What do you do after writing Bebop Novel? You write Dithyramb.
A
DIFFERENT DRUMMER. Playing drums
in the high school band, Sunday-painting with Nineball Jones, and fishing with
my brother Bull. Reading "Waiting
for Godot" in Theater Arts
magazine in 1953. Dropping out of high
school and going in the service. Being
in an Air Force band in Waco, Texas. Overseas, on Okinawa,
a dispatcher and Form 5 clerk. Getting
out, living at home, and going to Palm Beach
Junior College, in Lake
Worth. An
idyllic summer with Bull before he got married and went into business with my
dad, running a filling station, and I reenlisted in the service.
DIAMOND
IN THE ROUGH. My 75th
novel. Electronics tech school in Biloxi,
Mississippi. A GEEIA squadron in Japan. A SAC base in Albany,
Georgia. Living on Singer
Island and working at the computer
factory in Palm Beach Gardens. Going to Florida
State University
and majoring in anthropology. Graduating
magna cum laude. Switching specialty to
archeology after the summer on the Aucilla and the weekend digs at the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge. Courting Laine and becoming engaged to be
married. Being selected to dig at
Alligator Point with A. R.'s hand-picked
crew. Fly to Seattle,
to paint my mother's house. Dithyramb written between May 23 and September 16, 1993, in Parker, Florida. What do you do after Dithyramb? You write Daily Typewriting. Which see.
GULF COAST
BLUES. I. Dahoon, former dirt
archeologist and Cajun chef, travels around the contiguous Northwest Florida
Gulf Coast counties of Jefferson, Wakulla, Franklin, Gulf, and Bay, revisiting prehistoric
burial mound, midden, and Spanish colonial sites he dug, restaurants he dined
in, and sweatshops he worked at in his quest to earn a gainful livelihood,
write the great continuous 40-year epic of his life (22 years down and 18 years
to go), hold his end up at home, since his wife works full-time, and sell a
book to New York or Hollywood, or to an independent press for more than
contributors' copies. A natural history
of the writer as bricoleur, or
handyman. Dahoon, a magna cum laude
graduate of Florida State
University (B. S., Anthropology,
1968), calls himself a professor of Cracker Studies, without portfolio.
EAT
MY DUST. Clyster Engine, under
the impression that he is the great Jack Saunders, writes about moving to New
Orleans and working with the Camp
Street winos at Kelly Labor. Attending Tulane as a graduate student in
anthropology. Failing the qualifying
exams for not holding his nose right.
Appropriating the last year of his fellowship to sit at home and teach
himself to write. Digging the slave
quarters at an antebellum plantation in New Iberia,
Shadows-on-the-Teche. Moving to the
mountains of Western North Carolina to live poor and
write, Brenda pregnant. He drives to New
Orleans, New Iberia,
and Avery Island
to walk the ground, compare Louisiana
oysters to those of Apalachicola, Florida.
SIMPLIFYING. A catalogue
raisonné of the books of my stack, the jobs I've held, and the houses we
have lived in, which tries to find relations among the disparate parts. Isomorphisms.
Parallels. Back from New
Orleans, trying to get my shit together so that I can
live life at the tip of my nose and appreciate what I have, even though we're
on the verge of losing our house to the bank.
I have no job and my unemployment compensation benefits have run
out. Drive Owen to Tallahassee
to audition for Opryland in the ballroom I was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in,
25 years ago.
FREE
JAZZ. Transfer Oxditch Chair
from Gulf Coast
Community College, where I'm not
wanted, to the Bay County Public Library, where anybody can rent the computer
with the bubble jet printer. Fix up my
ten-speed bicycle, Straight Ahead. Start
eating seven-grain cereal and going on a walk after supper. A new espresso bar, Panama Java, opens up on Harrison
Avenue. Apply
for job as Executive Director, Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida. Owen gets a job with a hard-driving bluegrass
band. See that Side Trips and Dithyramb
form a metaseries, Free Jazz, which
combines with Bebop Novel to form the
meta-metaseries Scufflin'. Meta, changed, not mega,
big. Qualitative change, not
quantitative change. An emergent. From the saga-novel to enema vérité: something new under the sun. The old eternal verities of the human heart
in conflict with itself. An old story,
old as the hills. It's all true stories.
SCRAPBOOK. Continue writing ICONS, a book of poems,
started when SKETCH BOOK ended. Try to
set an example for Ebenezer Scrooge à la
the Crachit family, as I prepare for the débâcle: soldier on.
Apply for NEA grant in fiction with a story from EAT MY DUST,
"Roman-aléatoire." See that Scufflin'
contains two more volumes: DEBACLE and
REVIVAL. Apply for state grant in
poetry. Compare East Bay (Polecat Bayou)
oysters, gathered by canoe, to those available in stores. Drive Owen to North Carolina to join James
King's band. Come home on back roads of
Georgia, US-319, all the way to the Sopchoppy cutoff there at Medart, where I
pick up Hwy 98, and home. Madcap Titan
of the Dustbin, making art out of scrap.
September 16 to December 31, 1993:
Side Trips. Now to find a job. Like Owen.
Just the right job. I didn't get the job, Mom. But we're hanging in there. Always merry and bright! And keep the aspidistra flying.
DEBACLE. See that Culls
is not a great continuous 40-year epic, but a great continuous 100-volume
novel, the end of which is two to three years away. That is, within striking distance. I bear down.
Rename ICONS TROLLING FOR FEMINISTS.
Balder goes to New Orleans
to see about enlisting in the Marine Corps to be a musician. Auditions with the band there. Passes.
I am turned down for job with the Visual
Arts Center
without benefit of an interview. No
money for anything but groceries and utilities.
The bills keep coming in, with their ears strapped back. Combine SKETCH BOOK and TROLLING FOR
FEMINISTS and call them BROKE-DICK DOG.
GRAND
RETRIEVAL. Balder enlists. He goes to boot camp in October, then six
months of music school. I begin book of
poems, HORRIBLE WASTED FOOLISHNESS. Add
to end of BROKE-DICK DOG. Finishing up Scufflin'. By taking the horn out of my mouth, which is
how Miles Davis told Coltrane to resolve his long solos. By prying the computer out of my fingers. I end my book, I stop drinking coffee, I
watch what I eat, I go for a walk after supper, I replace fear with faith,
depression with optimism, anger with a peaceful calm, and envy with
magnanimity. I turn the other
cheek. Walk the extra mile. Truth, Justice, and the American
Way. And
garlic. A musette bag full of rice and a
song in my heart. Perhaps a mess of
shrimp, a surf clam, or a speckled-speeder crab. A cockle shell, a left-handed whelk. The
Arthur Bidness Cycle. Unemployed,
employed, unemployed... supply next term
in series. I look on tempests and am
never shaken. I am serene. I am at peace.
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