Jet Reid
JetReid Literary Agency
232
Meserole Street, #15
Brooklyn, NY 11208
Dear Jet Reid:
Take my last book. Please.
Imagine if Ernest Hemingway had combined parts
of A Moveable Feast, his posthumous memoir, with The Sun Also Rises
(working title FIESTA), an autobiographical novel, to show how the two forms cross-fertilize,
and shape each other, what trouble he, an unpublished, or underpublished writer,
would have had finding a commercial publisher for it.
What would he have
called it? A Moveable Fiesta? Fiesta--The Running of the Bulls at Shakespeare
& Co., the Louvre, and Brasserie Lipp?
Further imagine he had used
real names, in addition to fictional names, and real language, in addition to the
watered-down language writers were forced to use then.
Imagine that he had
written more than 250 books, and had posted more than 75 books online, daily, as
he wrote them, on the worldwide web, and not sold a word to New York or Hollywood.
How would he pitch himself, that he didn't sound like a crank, a nut-case, or a hopeless
amateur?
That's where I stand.
If I even try to summarize OLD FOLKS
AT HOME: A FLORIDA CRACKER'S SUNSET CRUISE, you can see the checklist flashing, "Off
the Scale," "Does Not Compute," "Abort, Retry, Ignore."
Or imagine May Sarton pitching Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year,
Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year, and At Eighty-Two: A Journal to
a publisher if she wasn't already May Sarton, and had an audience.
* * *
After I finished writing SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL: A CELEBRATION, OR, I WOULD LIKE
TO THANK THE ACADEMY, my 250th book, I wrote a book called Bukowski Never Did
This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family.
Pat
Simonelli, LitVision Press, asked to publish it. The Underground Literary Alliance
(ULA), to which he belongs, endorsed it. Jeff Potter, Out Your Backdoor Books, another
ULA member, is going to distribute it.
I quit my job and cashed in an annuity
to spend a year promoting and selling the book.
It's due out July 15. There's
a book release party scheduled for July 16 at Philly Zine Scene, in Philadelphia,
where I am supposed to read, and host a workshop.
But just before he sent
it off to the printer he lost his day job. I don't know what is happening.
He doesn't write, he doesn't call.
I don't know what is happening.
But it don't look good. We're in a tight spot, boys.
* * *
Thoreau said that once you simplify your life, failure isn't failure; new
rules apply.
I did that and it's true. But the iron law of wages still applies.
I need money to live on, even to live simply on. To live a life of voluntary poverty.
I would like to write a book updating Walden. A year in the life of a contemporary
Thoreau. It would touch on economics, neighbors, family, etc., only instead of being
a bachelor I am a grandfather. Also, instead of feminism making a hero of people
like May Sarton and Doris Lessing, Guy Lit has yet to reach a male consciousness
the way feminism appealed to oppressed women. Guy Lit is still pissing in the wind.
Albeit with a big dick.
The Big Dick Syndrome lives. Look at Bush's War on
Totemism. "Nuke Mecca."
He calls it the War on Totoism, but we
know what he means. Run, Toto, run. The inmates have taken over the asylum.
I would like to find a publisher who would serialize a dozen books, written over
a year, publishing them online, first, then publishing them in a uniform ink-and-paper
edition, with a design to the series.
I will write a dozen books, a book
a month.
The books will combine several literary forms.
How will
a bookstore classify them? By the author's voice. By my name. Sui generis.
The fact that they're not like books in one genre is a plus.
What platform
do I have, what credibility? I have street cred. When all is said and did and done,
I did it.
I am a cult writer, with a 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 conflict.
I was trained as an archeologist. Indeed, sometimes I call myself the salvage archeologist
of the Mall Builder culture.
Cult writers--like Phil Dick, Jim Thompson,
Charles Willeford, Charles Bukowski--either wither of their own weirdness or cross
over to the mainstream.
But they don't cross themselves over, by bearing
down harder. They need some disinterested third party, some risk publisher, to see
the potential and exploit it. To develop the resource. Establish the brand.
All I can do is tell industry professionals about myself and wait for something to
happen.
I enclose a copy of my cv and a list of the books of my stack to
date.
* * *
Would you be interested in representing me if I wrote a proposal to write
a book a month, beginning in September, 2005, for a year, telling what it's like
to try to be a writer like Thoreau in George Bush's America? A book to be serialized
daily, like a blog, then published, as a book, with a lag for production, afterwards.
The books forming a 12-book series.
Do you think you could find a publisher
interested in sponsoring an event like that?
It would be an event, and would
garner publicity just for being what it is. You don't discover a writer like me every
day.
A writer who kept going, who did not quit, turn bitter, or sell out.
It's an obstacle course, and not every writer reaches this point. I'm out here by
myself. Alone in my private glory, as Henry Miller said when he came back from Europe
and surveyed the competition in America.
I would call the series The Empty
Nest.
A man works for a living, he raises a family, and then he writes
about what he has learned, out in the world.
A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer.
Failing that,
I'll publish it at The Daily Bulletin, and send them the books at the end
of the month. I just don't want the series having appeared on the web to stigmatize
it as unedited ravings.
Given that its unedited-raving quality is part of
its appeal.
Is this something you'd be interested in pursuing?
Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404