Dear ___:
WRITER ran 82,000 words. It’s organized by day. I posted it on the worldwide web, daily, as I wrote it, at The Daily Bulletin (www.thedailybulletin.com).
I call the book
an immobilized hero novel, after Charles Willeford’s New Forms of Ugly: The
Immobilized Hero in Modern Fiction.
I am immobilized in Parker,
WRITER contains poems, prose vignettes, interviews with myself, book, movie, music, and art reviews, literary criticism, literary theory, query letters, crank letters, replies to rejection slips—it’s the log of a working writer, an experienced writer, a writer reaching the end of a 40-year career outside the mainstream, in the underground, beneath the underdog, as Charles Mingus says. Beneath the jazz musician.
Beat poet. The last beatnik. An anachronism, or living fossil. Like discovering a coelacanth, or hunting down and killing Bigfoot.
There are no undiscovered masterpieces, no neglected geniuses, slaving away, in the bookdocks, unheralded and unsung.
I sing the body electric, the body electronic, the body integrated circuit, smaller, faster, cheaper.
Andrew Keen says the Intenet is killing our culture.
I say the Internet is keeping it alive, and WRITER is the living proof. It’s also a record of how that’s done. As it happens.