I got a job with a desk and a typewriter, access to
a copying machine. I had money for postage.
I bought small press books and subscribed to
little magazines. Jim and Cindy Miller gave me
an International Directory of Little Magazines
and Small Presses. I started writing shorter pieces.
I concatenated them in order of composition, numbered the pages,
gave book-length sections titles, and called the whole bolus my chronicle,
after Céline, who said he didn't have time to answer the gazettes,
he had his chronicle to finish, his endless, or enormous debts to pay.
I answered the gazettes in my chronicle. I included query letters and
replies to rejection slips. Letters to Larry and Hazel about
what I was trying to do, what happened to it. How I felt
about what happened. I included longing and regret.
I read everything Bukowski had in print. I saw that
he was coming at the events in his life again and again,
now in this genre, now in that, and then collecting
the pieces by genre. Poems, short stories. Novels.
Later books of letters. Books of interviews.
I put those in, as they happened.
My books formed a longitudinal record.
I saw that I was writing a collected works,
or oeuvre complète. I saw this
in 1976. Since then, I have
just been adding to it.
That was it. The form.
The paranoia-critical method.
Enema vérité. Stark-nakedism.
Daily typewriting. Hick Lit.
What you write when you live in the sticks.
You must be a racist, a sexist, and a homophobe.
You must be provincial. You must be unsophisticated.
No, I'm just on social security. I have to work, but not
until after the first of the year. I am on sabbatical.
I gave myself an at-the-house grant.
I am updating in our time.
at the end. At the end, Hemingway wrote
A Moveable Feast. I am writing Immobilized in
Point and Shoot, Florida. Me and my $6 typewriter.
Windows 98 and a dial-up modem.
My coterie of steadfast readers.