OLD FOLKS AT HOME: A FLORIDA CRACKER'S SUNSET CRUISE
Book I. Florida's Forgotten Coast. May 18 - June 10. 34,000 words. A travel book, a restaurant guide, with hints on ecotourism. A wine tour of Northwest Florida, like Sideways. A trip down Memory Lane. Longing for the old plantation. The darkeys in the song didn't long for the plantation, they longed for the old folks at home, on the plantation. They longed for kith and kin. Compare uncouth. Uncultured, crude, boorish. White folks ain't like us. Book I is a cultural ecology of the mullet culture, in which I visit Indian sites I dug, places I worked, applied for a job at, was let go from. Retired to.
Book II. Florida's Emerald Coast. June 11 - _________. In progress. I see that Book II is about the corporate cubicle dot-com culture, which I contrast with the mullet culture. I worked in the corporate cubicle dot-com culture, and most of the people who are moving to Florida's Emerald Coast, or come on a visit, work in it.
Book III. Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park. Projected. My WPA Guide says the black people and white people in Northwest Florida (and Lower Alabama) have more in common with each other than the poor white trash have with Captain Charley. Only the Republican Party's Southern Strategy keeps them divided and conquered. But as the wife-beater says to Henry Chinaski in Barfly, "That's just in the nature of the way things works: I don't like you and you don't like me." Perhaps he said "you don't like me and I don't like you." Just because I despise Captain Charley and have a lot in common with black people doesn't mean that, in the aggregate, I have to like them. They don't, in the aggregate, like me. They think I'm Captain Charley.
Sarah Jane
From: Jack Saunders
To: Sarah Jane
Subj: The Mullet
Culture
I am writing a book comparing the mullet culture
to the corporate cubicle dot-com culture. I wrote about Panacea
in Book I. I drove through there last week.
I have a book coming out next
month. Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and
His Family. I think. My publisher lost his day job.
He doesn't write,
he doesn't call.