Field Book
We used to use a K&E field book, in the field. The pages were waterproof.
I called a book Field Book once. Well, a pamphlet.
It had a picture
on the cover drawn by Jack Neff.
A workingman, in overalls, sat at a bench.
He was reading a pamphlet called Field Book. His lunchbox was open.
In a high tower behind him, and above him, a woman looked down.
His wife.
His paycheck was hers.
He could read for escape, but you could tell she disapproved.
If he worked harder, or had a little better attitude, he could get promoted to foreman.
Now, I just use black marble Composition books. Top Flight.
They used to
be made in Chattanooga. They're made in Brazil, now.
You make foreman, you
get laid off anyway. So what's the point?
I called a book COMPOSITIONS once.
COMPOSITIONS. Working as a temporary technical writer for IBM. Quit writing newspaper column. Sail diatribes and broadsides out into the void like tarpaper shingles. Paint can lids. Student composition books. Floppy disks. The Cow Chip of Doom.
I quit writing my newspaper column. Quit writing query letters. I was just
sailing them out into the void. They'd come back like a boomerang, aimed at my head.
It was too discouraging.
* * *
I finished the first part of SQUIBS.
35,000 words.
SQUIBS: TEAM WUPPIE DRIVE TO NEW ORLEANS. December 21 - February __. In progress. Spend the week between Christmas Day and New Years Day at Graytona Lodge in Grayton Beach. The Saunders Brothers play at Cerulean's, in WaterColor. I pitch SQUIBS to LSU Press. I send the first week's work to Andrei Codrescu, Exquisite Corpse. The rejection slips for GULF COAST BLUES dribble in. I send the complete MS to River City Publishers. I am invited to enter a show called Text at the Gallery Above. I write a pamphlet, Text. I will sell it the next day at my book-signing table at booksALIVE 2007! I see that SQUIBS is divided into three parts. Part One, Preparing To Go Into the Field, Part Two, In the Field, and Part Three, Back in the Lab.
The book has turned into a more ambitious undertaking than just a sketchy
account of a five-day road trip. More like one of Virginia Woolf's late novels.
* * *
At the end of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller tells of
applying for a Guggenheim.
When the rejection letter came, he read over the
list of winners, and their projects.
He repeats some of them in an addendum
to the book.
At the beginning of the book he says he hoped to get an advance
to live on while he did the travel.
He got one, but it was $500 instead of
$5,000, and the book he and Abe Rattner envisioned--a huge affair with color plates--was
not possible: it would be too expensive to print.
It was a compromise, and I hate compromises, but that's America for you. "Next time you will be able to do as you please"--that's the song. It's a dastardly lie, but to palliate it you are given hush money.
I am financing the trip myself, with the last of the money my mother left
me when she died.
I have rented a full-size car.
I will take out
the insurance, and not worry about being wrecked, broken into, or breaking down beside
the road.
We are going by rental car, thank you very much just the same.
And not an economy car, a compact car. No, a full-size car.
* * *
I'm taking a couple of Composition books with me.
Brazil.... I think
of the music playing in the movie Brazil.
The working title of Brazil
was 1984½.
I'd call SQUIBS Down and Out in Paris and London½.
Down and Out in Point and Shoot.
Douglas Fairbairn, who wrote Down and
Out in Cambridge, died with Alzheimer's, not knowing he had ever been a writer.
I'm not down and out, I'm going in the field. Anybody can relate to that.
Go, man, go.
Take notes in your field book.
Take pictures with your
point-and-shoot camera.
Instead of having an affair with a lonely farmer's
wife, take your wife with you. Have an affair with your wife.
Eat well.
Talk about old times. Laugh.
Whatever old people do.
Take pictures
of the grandchildren to show Larry and Hazel.
Off on a quest, taking the fair maiden with you, the fair maiden a bit long
in the tooth.
