Daily typewriting was the process, the
method, the practice, if you will, and Old Folks's stack was the artifact, the result.
If you wrote several thousand words a week, week in and week out, the pieces formed
themselves into books, especially if you were trying to form them into books, and
the books formed themselves into a stack, if you were trying to form the books into
a stack.
A stack is an unpublished, or underpublished shelf. An unedited,
or underedited shelf.
John Irving says, "I can read the same sentence
forty times. I can read a 1,600-page manuscript ten times."
Old Folks
wasn't interested in doing that.
He was interested in writing 40-Year
Run. Seeing where the writing took him.
Old Folks called his stack 40-Year
Run.
Well, now he called it 33-Year Run. Didn't want to jinx
himself by talking about books he hadn't written.
The book Old Folks had
just finished writing, A SUMMING UP, was volume 263. The current book, OLD FOLKS
AT HOME, was volume 264.
Old Folks called this updating the register.
At the end of every book he updated his cv and the list of the volumes of his stack.
In fact, that's about all he got out of writing. He got to see the registers updated.
The books weren't published, they weren't sold in stores, they weren't talked about
on television, they weren't taught in school.
Every once in a while a relative
would say, "Still writing, man?" and Old Folks would say, "Yes."
The relative would ask, "How many books are you up to now," and Old Folks
would tell him.
He knew the man would laugh at him behind his back.
Not with him but at him.
Go ahead and laugh, monkey boy.
I have been
trained to disassemble and reassemble reality through my own kaleidoscope. That
means deconstruct and reconstruct it. Like Harry Block, blocked writer, in Woody
Allen's Deconstructing Harry.
In only two years I can write about
going to my high school class's 50th reunion. The Class of '57 had its dreams.