From: Jack Saunders
To: Katherine Cowles
Subj: Query for THE ABOVE-GROUND REVIEW
Dear Katherine Cowles:
THE ABOVE-GROUND
REVIEW, AN ONLINE JOURNAL (OLJ): WRITING
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL ON THE WORLDWIDE WEB tells how I wrote 378 books
without selling a word to
The book is set in
Parker,
The story ranges back over the 38 years I have been a writer, since stealing the last year of my NDEA fellowship in Anthropology at Tulane to stay at home and teach myself to write.
I wrote the book in two months, December 2009 and January 2010, so it covers the holidays, Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Plus Martin Luther King’s birthday.
I have published ten books myself, or through small presses. I have written a bylined column for three different newspapers. I used to appear at crafts shows and street fairs, poetry-readings and book-signings, and give presentations at book fairs and writers conferences, but don’t do that much, anymore. I have self-published 242 pamphlets, chapbooks, fliers, and four-page sheets. Nobody writing today has done this.
First 10 pages of THE ABOVE-GROUND REVIEW
The Days of Wine and Roses:
I Discover My Vocation
Art Brew went out to the charcuterie for forcemeats.
On his bicycle. Art “Home” Brew, compare art brut.
a sheet of carbon paper, and a yellow second-sheet
into my
Began writing my stack, 40-Year Run. Each book
is related to the one before it and the one after it
in a straight, unbroken line. Last book, I watched myself
having a nervous breakdown. School, military service, work.
Old age. It’s the old age that gets to you. It’s the cumulative
effect. Through meadowland towards a closing door,
that wasn’t there before, a door marked Nevermore.
No, that’s “The Days of Wine and Roses.”
These are the days of sackcloth and ashes.
Mea culpa, I brought this on myself.
The man of hubris is punished by the gods.
I stood out. When all the other moths turned black,
from industrial melanism, I stayed white. The birds got me.
Aiee, The Phantom. Shades of Horace Tapscott.
I was a graduate student in Anthropology at Tulane.
I had a three-year NDEA fellowship. National Defense
Education Act. Most employers feel a degree in anthropology
is not immediately convertible to profitability. Also, if I was in
a PhD program, why did I drop out? Why didn’t I get my degree,
and become a college professor? When I found out what they wanted me
to do, I didn’t want to do it anymore. They wanted me to cheat and lie
and bear false witness. But we will want you to cheat and lie and bear
false witness. Where do you think you are? Neverland?
Who do you think you are? Michael Jackson?
Shades of Bobby Bradford. I found two lps of his
in a record store off campus. Flight
for Four and Self-
Determination Music. I was in the war with Bobby.
In
and Sting on the educational channel. Instead of jazz.
Now it’s pipi-tease disco. Crossover music. It’s as bad
as Miles when he went commercial. Say it isn’t so.
It is. Get used to it. Forcemeat related to farce.
It’s opéra bouffe. Balloon Boy. The Party Crashers. Tiger Woods.
My printer died.
It lasted five years.
The new ones don’t support Windows 98.
So I had to upgrade my computer. I bought a used one.
Windows XP. Is that the one with all the bugs? The patches?
No, that was
is being copied from the old one to the new one. My old data.
I am writing poems in a Big Chief tablet. Heap Big Heap Writer.
Irascible “Razz” Heap. I am my own paparazzo. Sometimes I call
my stack a heap. The name is thus eponymous. Autochthonous?
From under a rock. Genius loci. Spirit of a place. What’s the place?
Point and Shoot,
Razz Heap was a senior fellow at
the prestigious left-wing think-tank in
Point and Shoot,
Institute (PSI). So much pressure. He wrote
white papers on a variety of topics. Politics, the economy,
local color. Sometimes he wrote black papers. Black is the color
of my muse’s heart. Redneck noir. Hick lit. What was Hick Lit?
A combination of the memoir and the novel. Autobiography is fiction.
With poetry mixed in. He was a poet. A beet poet. He cooked beet tops
out of his garden. He made borscht whenever he killed a rooster.
I got a barrel of flour and a bucket of lard, no hard times blues
I got chickens in my back yard.
Flash forward 38 years. Write in the present and flash back.
The asynchronous history. The antinovel. The antinovel isn’t
instead of, it’s in addition to. Heap was his own antihero.
A hero with scant or meager resources. It all counts towards 40.
Heap was going to write until
Whether he was through or not. But not until then. Until then
he would keep going. Keep moving forward.
He would soldier on.
I call IT ALL COUNTS TOWARDS 40 a PI Novel.
For post-inaccrochable. What you write when you can’t sell
what you write. But also, I am the principal investigator (PI)
of my own researches into why the book assumed the form it did.
Why can’t I fit myself into a conventional genre? Why do I insist
on combining forms into some bastard, homemade golem out of
Isaac Bashevis Singer. See luftmensch. A man who walks on air,
or with his head in the clouds. An AIR. Pronounced A-I-R.
Anthropologist-in-residence.
Heap gave himself a DIY grant to learn to write.
Do it yourself. He stole the last year of his fellowship,
signed up for Thesis, to draw his stipend, stayed at home,
and wrote. He started writing. He made the great leap of faith.
His gait was saltatorial. “Lester Leaps In.” “Little Willie Leaps.”
“Leap Frog.” “Bebop and Beyond.” “Hick Lit.”
The Shape of Jazz To Come. The Shape of Daily Typewriting Now.
Heap could trace his development back to when he started.
The books formed a straight, unbroken line. Each one was
related to the one before it and the one after it. Its structure was
longitudinal. It
looked out to sea like an
Impervious and grand. Tall. Weathered. Being eaten away
by erosion. All grammars leak. The rules change.
Even as we go by them.
Old age is, I forget.
Q: What is daily typewriting?
A: A cross between what Truman Capote said about Jack Kerouac, “That’s not writing, it’s typing,” and what Milt Jackson said about Dizzy Gillespie, “Every time I hear Diz play, I think: `He was just now developing into what you heard tonight.’”
I am just now developing into what you read right here.
In fact, by the time you read this, I am somewhere else.
But I’ve got the time lag down as short as I can get it. I am composing directly into the Linotype machine, no rewrite man, no one from Editorial, Legal, the Business Side.
Just me, direct, to the reader, at my web site, The Daily Bulletin.
Also, I respond to reader comment in my book. In real time.
I am writing, publishing, and answering critics, or fans, in real time.
Kerouac said his Duluoz saga was written on the hop, instead of afterwards, in a cork-lined room.
Straight, no chaser.
Live. No safety net.
No overdubbing later, in the studio.
It has an immediacy. Feeling.
The urgency.
Q: I see.
A: Yes.
Contact Information
Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books