Diary

Tuesday, March 2 (cont'd)

Q: So POSTCARDS FROM POINT AND SHOOT will be an immobilized hero novel.

A: Yes. In fact, I call it POSTCARDS FROM POINT AND SHOOT: AN IMMOBILIZED HERO NOVEL.

I will sit in front of my typewriter and remember, or imagine, scenes from the Florida of my youth and early manhood. Also my present-day Golden Years, or year.

I expect my LDA grant to be a golden year, then back to work.

Q: Will you go places?

A: Yes, of course.

In DRAGGING UP I went to two book fairs, an art tour of Highway 30A, and a trip to Wewa.

I Drive to Wewa.

Q: Charles Willeford says that once a writer becomes a writer he disengages from life and writes out of his head, basically. He doesn't have adventures anymore. His life is boring.

He sits in a room and types.

A: He is immobilized.

I think that's true.

The longer a writer puts off starting to write, the more life-experience he is able to gather, to write about, once he starts writing.

Also, the longer he has to work at a day job to support himself, the more material he will have.

That's why Charles Bukowski and Charles Willeford are role-models for me.

They led rich lives. The possibility of staying at home and writing full-time came late, for them.

Imagine a student for whom it comes early. Who went to college, went to graduate school, got an MFA and started teaching in a writing program, winning prizes, publishing in little magazines supported by the NEA, getting book contracts because that was the next step in the career progression.

What do they have to write about, to tell us about, in their writing, except how to be efficient little yes-men? Sycophants and toadies, who have proven they are no threat to the machine they serve?

Corpo Hessians.

They might as well have gotten an MBA and gone to work for Enron.

Whatever they write is formula. Slick, contrived, calculated to the last effect.

Walker Percy said, paraphrasing Kierkegaard, that despair is having to read one more Erle Stanley Gardner novel.

Imagine having to write one, because that is what you are locked into doing.

Instead of writing a book like you like to read, a book that contains poetry, fiction, interviews, and letters.

Who would become a writer to write formula? To color within the lines?

Not me.

The wind blew up a gale, as I was going into
the Bay County Public Library, next to the marina.
When I came out, several men who sleep
in the bushes at McKenzie Park at night,
and read magazines in the library, during the day,
were outside, under cover, studying the conditions.
"Surf's up," I said, as I got in my car and drove away.
There, but for the grace of God, go I. An urban camper.
A dirtball. A homeless person.

When I lived in Delray Beach
I had several readers who lived
in the bushes behind the Eagle Army Navy
Discount Department Store. When I walked by,
on my way to the post office, Publix, and Neals Farms
Produce Market, with my net bag, like a European hausfrau,
they would raise their fists in the Cracker Power salute, and holler,
"Screed!" As if to say, "Win one for the dispossessed."
Small comfort afforded by the profession.

I took my Bryan Hand in to be framed at a shop on Bay Drive,
where our neighbor Jody has a studio, upstairs. Low-rent. The proprietor
asked me if I painted it. I said no, it was the cover for a book I wrote.
He asked me what the book was about and I said working for a living
and trying to make it as a writer. "Is it a tragedy?" he asked.
I said no, it was a comedy. Satire. Farce. Compare forcemeats.
Sausage-stuffing. Cannon fodder. Plato said the artist ground his wife
and family up for paint. Then we talked about how the artist was
the leading edge for gentrification of urban neighborhoods.
He was sweating out downtown redevelopment.
Condos and boutiques. Exclusive shoppés,
catering to yuppie tastes. Sun-dried tomato pizza.
I said it was one of those natural cycles, like Destin,
sleepy little fishing village, turning into Silver Sands
Factory Stores. A giant shopping mall of retail outlets.
Traffic jams and passive conversation.
Gastronomy has sunk into a desuetude.

The Nation gave Barbara Ehrenreich the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize
for Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Making It in America.
The prize carries a $100,000 cash award. Ehrenreich,
a frequent contributor to The Nation, a left-wing magazine,
also wrote Fear of Falling: On the Inner Life of The Middle Class.
The middle class were right to be afraid. They didn't fall. They were pushed.
By the Bush administration. Compassionate conservatism. Laissez-faire capitalism.
The sanctity of free markets. Apropos of the expression "free as a bird," John Cage
wrote, "They are not free, they're fighting over scraps of food." Down and Out
in London and Paris Nickel and Dimed was not. It was not People of the Abyss,
or Notes From Underground. It was to those books, or to anything I have written,
as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was to Hell's Angels and to Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas. Pipi-tease disco. My Tourist Vacation. I may just be pissed because
The Nation rejected Diary of a Contented Online Writer: An Experiment in Form.
I'm not in the kitchen, I'm in the oven.

One time I bought
a T-shirt in a gift shop
in Wewahitchka, Florida,
with the high school mascot on it,
an alligator with clenched fists,
standing on his hind legs, like Popeye,
ready to take on all comers. When, later,
I saw Ulee's Gold, filmed in Wewa, and starring
Peter Fonda, in a mall cineplex, in Atlanta, there was a scene
with teenagers driving around the IGA grocery store parking lot in 4 x 4s.
Friday Night in America. "Go, Gators!" I shouted. Nobody laughed.
I would have thought it was funny, even if I didn't know the Gators were
the Wewa High School mascot. Even if I thought the man meant
the University of Florida, whose logo the WHS gator looked a lot like.
"Seacrest Loyalty March" was from "Illinois Loyalty," with "We're loyal
to you, Seacrest High," instead of, "We're loyal to you, Illinois."
Everything little looks big in a mist.
Cheerleaders. Drum majorettes.
I wasn't popular.
I was sarcastic.