1. The First Nine Novels. After
a year as a DIY fellow, where I stole the last year of my NDEA fellowship in anthropology
at Tulane University to stay at home and teach myself to write, I work as laborer
and clerk, writing in my head at work and typing it up on the dining room table,
after work. Larry Schlueter has a friend print up a 64-page chapbook, Playing
Hurt, a book that asks what colored town will be like in Utopia. The first nine
novels include REJECTED POEMS, and a collection called RACE, SEX, AND LIBEL, which
includes the nonfiction section "The Books in My Life," in addition to
two novellas. So they aren't all novels. One is poems. And THE NINTH NOVEL contains
a play. Brenda stays at home and has two babies. I am the family's sole support.
2.
My Chronicle. I get a job with a desk and an electric typewriter, access to
a copying machine, enough money to buy books, subscribe to little magazines, and
for postage to send things out and start writing shorter pieces, poems, prose vignettes,
letters to a friend, telling what I thought I was doing and how I felt about what
happened to the work, out in the world. I concatenate the pieces in order of composition,
number the pages, give book-length portions names, beginnings, middle, ends, not
necessarily in that order, and call the result my chronicle, after Céline's remark
that he didn't have time to answer the gazettes, he had his chronicle to finish,
his endless, or enormous debts to pay. I answer the gazettes in my chronicle. I work
as a technical writer and an information specialist, for the state, but lose that
job, file a grievance, and get blacklisted as a troublemaker, in a company town.
I go back into archeology and work on two digs, one as a demolition laborer. Brenda
puts Owen and Balder in nursery school and goes back to work, then into the field,
to survey Big Cypress Swamp. We move back to my old home town of Delray Beach and
I take a job in the bank my father had been on the board of directors of. My grandfather
sells me the house behind his house, The Cottage, on an agreement for deed. I publish
the pamphlets that make up Screed, then John Bennett, Vagabond Press, publishes
Screed. I quit my job and go on tour for the book. My tour is bicoastal. Winter
Park, Florida, and Ellensburg, Washington.
3. Ten-Year Run. I go to
work for a blue-chip computer manufacturer as an information developer. They urge
me to think outside the box. To challenge authority, question the received tradition.
You can make a wild duck tame, but you can't make a tame duck wild again. They urge
me to be a wild duck. I do my best. I say that PC doesn't stand for personal
computer, it stands for pubococcygeus, the muscle women contract when
they squeeze their pussies shut. I call the small, desktop computer we make Big Red,
the Snapping Pussy of Doom. Vagina Dentata. Did you hear the one about the woman
who went drift-fishing with 27 guys the other night? All she got was a red snapper.
I call what I am doing underware, by analogy with the hardware and the software.
Books that seek to get at the infrastructure, or underlying form of what the small,
desktop computer is going to mean in everybody's life. This is like Deconstructing
Harry. I deconstruct my employer. I delf-destruct. I shoot myself in the foot.
My grandparents die and I inherit their house. Clement Greenberg said Jackson Pollock
had some ten-year run. Ten-Year Run was the 35 books I wrote after Screed.
In ten years. I found out that when I left the company, by mutual consent, assured
that quitting would not be held against me, my manager ticked Do Not Rehire on my
exit interview, and was damning me with faint praise to prospective employers. I
move to Panama City and live in a trailer behind Uncle Wayne and Granny Brown. The
boys move up and joined me. Brenda sells the house in Delray Beach and moves up.
We buy a house on Martin Lake, two acres on a point with 119 live oak, pine, magnolia,
and dogwood trees, a deck, a dock, and two tin outbuildings, or sheds, The Slave
Quarters, where I write, and Bachelor Hall, where Owen lives between bands. Owen
has dropped out of high school and gone on the road with a bluegrass band. While
I was at the computer manufacturer I wrote and published Common Sense, Full Plate,
Blue Darter, and Lost Writings. After I left, I wrote and published Evil
Genius and Open Book, mortgaging our paid-for house to pay for it. I drove
around barnstorming for poetry and wrote Forty about doing that. Popular Reality
published Forty. My 40th book.
4. The Great American 20,000-Page Novel.
Larry L. King made fun of a man writing a 10,000-page novel. I saw that I had written
a 10,000-page novel and was working on a 10,000-page sequel. I was writing a 20,000-page
novel. The great long continuous book of my life. Brenda is out of work for 18 months
and I am out of work for 24 months in a three-year period. We lose our house in the
transition to a post-Cold War economy, during the Reagan-Bush recession. We move
back into the trailer behind Uncle Wayne and Granny Brown. Balder graduates from
high school and joins the Marines, to be a bandsman. We declare bankruptcy. With
no bills, we can live on what Brenda makes maintaining the computers at the state
prison in Wewahitchka. I drive around the Gulf Coast, writing and publishing pamphlets.
I apply for a grant and am turned down, but I get a book title out of it. DIARY OF
AN ANGRY WOULD-BE WRITER. I attend Schmooze II, at the stately Crowbar manor, in
Jackson, Michigan, and meet Crowbar, who published Forty, Blaster Al, who
wrote an afterword to Forty, "Jack Saunders Revisited," John M.
Bennett, Lost and Found Times, whom I would read with, later, and whom I had
been appearing in little magazines with, for 25 years, and Roger Jackson, who was
to commission, and publish, several chapbooks of mine, including one about attending
Glamourcon '99 and having my picture taken with nude model, actress, dancer, and
bikini-lawnmower-service operator Glori-Anne Gilbert. Imagine Kilgore Trout doing
that.
5. 40-Year Run. I see that I am writing a series of books I call
my stack, or 40-Year Run. A stack is an unpublished, or underpublished shelf.
I have invented a form to present it in. Daily typewriting. I take a job out of town,
in Atlanta, a corporate job, with benefits, like health insurance, and retirement.
At a fiber-optic cable factory. I am online at work. I rebuild my credit, Brenda
moves up, and we buy a house in Atlanta. I give myself a web site at home, when I
sign a 30-year mortgage, at age 60. The Daily Bugle. I begin serializing a
book a month, online, daily, as I write it, at The Daily Bugle. That is, I
am writing, and publishing, books, in real time, and the books are interactive, in
the sense that I respond to comments from readers, after I think about them, in the
books. These are both new developments, compared to my earlier practice, made possible
by the worldwide web. I can also link to other web sites and include color pictures
in my books. I am fast, cheap, and out of control. I do not realize that these qualities
are not as prized by conventional publishers as they are by me, and my coterie of
steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult, named after the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex,
a revitalization movement that swept the Lower Mississippi Valley just before and
after European contact like a hula-hoop craze, or flying saucers, or The Twist.
6.
A Legend of the Underground. I read in Lansing, Michigan, with John M. Bennett.
The trannies like us. Transsexuals. Crowbar changes her name from David Crowbar Nestle
to Susan Crowbar Poe. I am invited to be a headliner at the Underground Literary
Alliance (ULA) Legends of the Underground reading, off-off-Broadway. George Plimpton
and the Paris Review crowd, the Village Voice, and Shout magazine
came to the press conference, but the reading was less well-attended. I am laid off.
I go on early, reduced-benefit social security. With 10 weeks separation pay, 26
weeks of unemployment, and one 13-week extension I have a 49-week sabbatical. Brenda
and I sell the house in Atlanta and buy her old home place in Panama City from her
brothers and sister. I shut down The Daily Bugle and start up roman-feuilleton.com.
Balder gets out of the Marines and starts a band in Grayton Beach, Dread Clampitt.
I found I have two groups of readers I didn't know I had. Young people Balder's age,
who are into roots music, folk art, and underground writing, and women my age, first-generation
feminists, who despise careerists, of either sex, and admire independent people of
either sex. Especially an independent man who held a marriage together and raised
two fine sons. I go back to work for a year, to start paying off our house. I shut
down roman-feuilleton.com and start publishing The Daily Bulletin.
A small press publisher asks to publish my book about working full-time, writing
a book a month, and publishing the books on the worldwide web, and keeping up with
the household chores and the parenting, now grand-parenting, since Owen and Jean
got married and had Ella Blue. Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of
an Underground Writer and His Family. I quit my job, cash in an annuity I rolled
my retirement over into, and give myself an LDA grant to promote Bukowski Never
Did This. Last ditch attempt. I read at Philly Zine Fest 2005 and give
a workshop on DIY publishing. I sign up for an exhibitor's table at Zine-A-Polooza
2005 in Atlanta. Sending out a proposal for a series of 12 books, published monthly
on the Internet, or a query letter asking a publisher to reprint a book composed
straight into the Linotype machine, without mediation by Editing, Legal, Sales, or
Marketing, I realize what lunacy that is, and decide to stop publishing on the worldwide
web, write a proper book, and see if I can interest a commercial, mainstream house
in publishing it. Publishing 75 books on the worldwide web in five years, self-publishing
172 chapbooks, pamphlets, and four-page sheets, writing 265 books without selling
a work to New York or Hollywood isn't working for me. The tapeworm is consuming the
host. I am digging my own tomb. My achievements work against me. Time to straighten
up and fly right. Time to go straight. Can I do it? That's the drama of it. And the
plot. Or is it the theme?