On September 1, 1971, I rolled a sheet of bond paper, a sheet of carbon paper, and a yellow second sheet into my Olympia portable typewriter and started writing a murder mystery called OUT IN THE OPEN, from the epigraph from Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare:
There are experiments which are made with cunning and precision, because the outcome is divined beforehand. The scientist for example always sets himself soluble problems. But man's experiment is not of this order. The answer to the grand experiment is in the heart; the search must be conducted inwardly. We are afraid to trust the heart. We inhabit a mental world, a labyrinth in whose dark recesses a monster waits to devour us. Thus far we have been moving in mythological dream sequence, finding no solutions because we are posing the wrong questions. We find only what we look for, and we are looking in the wrong place. We have to come out of the darkness, abandon these explorations which are only flights of fear. We have to cease groping on all fours. We have to come out in the open, erect, and fully exposed.
If I finish it, August 31, 2006, NETWORK OF STOPPAGES will mark the 35th
anniversary of that act. NEWTORK OF STOPPAGES will be my 268th book. How I got from
there to here is the subject of The Empty Nest: My First 35 Years as a Writer.
I am writing a series of related books I call 40-Year Run. Maybe by the last
five years I'll sell something. Maybe I'll find a New York publisher for a book I
have written, and get paid money for it.
My kids are grown now. Brenda and
I are still together. It's not as hard as it used to be.
But it's pretty
hard. That's what makes the work so gratifying. Not everyone can do it.
I
not only produced a body of work, I invented a form to present it in, which goes
by various names.
Daily typewriting (self-explanatory), enema vérité (what
you see on the end of the fork when you really look), the paranoia-critical
method (I write, I publish it on the worldwide web, I write about what happens to
it, out in the world, and how what happens makes me feel. It makes me feel like I
need a tinfoil hat).
I also call what I'm writing Guy Lit, by analogy with
chick lit.
Guy Lit is what someone who doesn't want to fit himself into somebody
else's genre writes. It's a new genre. It combines poetry, fiction, narrative nonfiction,
essays, interviews, letters, the memoir, plays and screenplays, recipes, home remedies,
jokes, songs, literary theory, criticism, anthropological theory, site reports, restaurant
reviews, book, CD, and art-show reviews, reviews of plays and movies, anecdotes and
ravings.
It makes fun of people who go to school and get an MFA and write
what publishers say they are looking for. They are looking for the next blockbuster,
and you can't predict that from the last blockbuster. If there were a formula, they
wouldn't need writers, they could have a contractor gin them up, like they have contractors
line-edit books no one buys, now that they have laid everybody who knew what she
was doing off, because she made too much money.
Don't confuse Guy Lit with
the Big Dick Syndrome.
Guy Lit is the antidote to the Big Dick Syndrome.
My hero is a happily married man, who leads a simple life, with few possessions.
He had the integrity to follow his vision where it leads and the balls to stand up
to the careerists who have tarted-up and dumbed-down our literature, singing the
company fight song of whatever company will give them more money, more status symbols,
more conspicuous waste. Those guys have to buy their balls because they are empty
at the core. Hollow in the center. They lack street cred. Authenticity. My hero is
authentic.
The outsider, who sticks to his guns, over the course of a career,
or non-career.
He calls himself Old Folks. But he has also been called Art
"Home" Brew, compare art brut, Buck Sergeant, Alpha Male (pronounced
mah-lay), Black McGoon, Hylobates Lar, Albino Grizzly. As'hola, from Asi Yaholo,
or Crier of the Black Drink, invincible in battle, like Osceola, a war chief, not
a hereditary chief. Hadjo, or recklessly valorous.
Old Folks is a
hadjo motingator, and a moltin' 'gator is as mean as a change-of-life female with
the hives.
Women, the kind of feisty, no-nonsense women who became first-generation
feminists--that is, women my age--like Guy Lit.
Careerists, who do the company's
bidding, and rise in the ranks by becoming like white male careerists, don't.