Diary

Saturday, February 19 (cont'd)

One time Ernie Pyle drove around the American Southwest, talking to people, and filing six 1,000-word stories a week for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain.

That's a lot of copy, if you don't know.

Sometimes I write six 1,000-word pieces a day, at The Daily Bulletin.

My idea was I would go to things like the Possum Festival, in Wausau, the Worm Gruntin' Festival, in Sopchoppy. Mule Day, rattlesnake round-ups, gopher races.

I would collect the pieces into a book and I would ask my local mullet-wrapper, the Panama City News-Herald, a part of the Freedom newspaper chain, to serialize the book, like the newspaper out in Marin County serializing Cyra McFadden's Serial, as she wrote it. The Panama City News-Herald, a Freedom newspaper, always turned me down, and I would get cranky and hung-up about rejection, like the Indians who tried to sell Thoreau a basket, door-to-door, and, when he declined to buy one, said, "Do you mean us to starve!"

Thoreau didn't care if they starved or not.

The Panama City News-Herald didn't care if I starved.

If I wanted to write for the Panama City News-Herald, I should write what they would publish. Not what I knew they would not publish.

What was I--an injustice-collector?

Ernie Pyle was popular with the troops. The foot soldiers. The GIs.

Hemingway hung out with officers. He liberated the Ritz Bar, in Paris.

He went on safari, after the war, and killed big game. He fished for billfish and tuna in the Gulf Stream, with department store owners and magazine publishers.

In Bukowski's words Hemingway was riding with the enemy.

I don't remember if the Bukowski story "Riding with the Enemy" contains the line "This is what killed Dylan Thomas," or the story "This Is What Killed Dylan Thomas" contains the line "riding with the enemy." Bukowski went ten rounds with Mr. Hemingway and beat him.

I went ten rounds with Bukowski and beat him.

But I didn't beat the Panama City News-Herald. The Panama City News-Herald beat me.

On the other hand, Richard Nixon said a man isn't finished when he's beaten, he's finished when he quits.

If I don't quit, sell out, or turn bitter, I win.

I used to have to report what I had done all week to my bossman, so she could include it in her report to her bossman.

Last week, I:

• Started writing a book.
• Gave myself an LDA grant, after talking it over with Brenda.
• Quit my job.
• Signed books at booksALIVE 2005!
• Agreed to give a presentation to the Panama City Writer's Association in May.
• Agreed to participate in the Panhandle Writers Guild book festival in September.
• Sent a manuscript to a publisher in Mexico Beach, per her request.
• Made a fan of Ollie, the owner of The Red Bar, who said I could sell my books in the gift shop.
• Drove to the Eileen West Gallery, to see the current show. Called on Big Mama's Hula Girl Gallery in Grayton Beach and Collaborations, on Highway 30A.
• Went by Woodie Long's Gallery of Art in Santa Rosa Beach.
• Corresponded with Jeff Klinkenberg and saw the shape that DRAGGING UP is going to take.

I'm not a slacker. I was just a round peg in a square hole.

This is what I should be doing. I am doing it. I am a happy man.

When John Steinbeck wrote East of Eden, he wrote letters to his editor, Pat Covici, on opposite sides of a ledger, so that, if you had the ledger, you could see how the letters and the manuscript of the book related to each other. The letters were later published as Journal of a Novel, but you couldn't tell from the two books what went where. By alternating sections I call "Novel" and "Diary," and dating entries, you can see the interplay between the two clearly, in DRAGGING UP: ART BREW GIVES HIMSELF AN LDA GRANT (LAST DITCH ATTEMPT). It's like a roman-à-clef and the key, or Elgar's Enigma Variations. A roman-à-clef wouldn't be a roman-à-clef without a key. But sometimes the key is buried so deep no one knows what the key is. I don't know what's nonfiction and what is fiction. Just because I call it a novel doesn't mean novelists agree it is one.

From: Jack Saunders
To: Damon LaBarbera
Subj: New Book

I am serializing a book, daily, as I write it, at The Daily Bulletin.

It's a continuation of the book that's coming out in June, BUKOWSKI NEVER DID THIS: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF AN UNDERGROUND WRITER AND HIS FAMILY, which follows a similar form.

It's like an Inside Baseball or Kitchen Confidential of the writing game. From the perspective of a flea with a hard-on, hollering, "Raise the bridge."

I call it a Florida novel. Call myself a Florida writer.

The Florida writer is the one left out of the year-end round-ups of Who Is the Florida Writer? What Is the Florida Novel?, and the Florida novel is what that feels like, to be left out of the year-end round-ups.

It just adds to my cachet.

Q: Thoreau said when you simplify your life, the rules change. New rules apply.

A: I started that process when we moved back to Florida and moved into The Empty Nest.

It's just now starting to pay off.

Q: If you'd cashed in your annuity before, it would be gone now, and you'd have nothing to show for it but pamphlets about driving to Panacea.

But by saving it until you had a reason to spend it, a cause to spend it on, it seems like things are finally beginning to break your way.

A: It feels like it. And that brightens my mood. Lightens the palette.

I don't feel cursed by fate.

Doomed.

I see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Maybe 250 books was a Rubicon I had to pass.

Maybe I saw it was foolish to keep storming Parnassus.

Maybe when I stopped pushing the resistance collapsed, and I just walked over it.

Maybe I was propping it up.