Letter Bombs

It is entirely something else now, but when I conceived of this blog I imagined it to be a conduit to my collection of plays at lulu.com. A year ago at this time I was brooding about not having a job and sending out dozens of resumes a week to various companies and hearing nothing back except a rare letter thanking me for my interest.

I was collecting unemployment at the time and working four to eight hours a day slamming out cover letters, fine tuning my approach to job hunting, and lamenting the old adage that says hunting for a job is the hardest job you'll ever have. At the same time I was writing a novel. Who in the hell is going to publish this? I thought as I finished a draft. It hasn't novelistic qualities at all. It's a mystery, but not really a mystery. It's a crime novel, but not one in the ordinary sense. It's social satire, but loosely constructed. It's an anti-war novel, but marginally concerned with war. It's a social novel, but has elements of the anti-social throughout. What is it? Well, I thought, it's slightly deranged, a stab at several genres at once and not a very good novel at all. But there it is, sitting there on my laptop, several weeks of work come to naught.

Then I discovered Lulu. I'd never heard of it, but searching the Web for publishers, I read a story about "print-on-demand." Lulu was mentioned prominently in the story, so I investigated. I soon learned how the concept works and I decided to give it a try. I got terribly excited, typing my novel up as per the web site's suggestions, decoding the Cover Design template (but not fully), creating an actual book. Before this happened you might say I was out of touch. I still am usually, tagging along behind the masses, out of touch with what is happening in the technological world, movies, science, contemporary lit, art, pop culture, etc.

Holy cow! This is the job I've wanted all along, I realized as I worked at making my own book. I don't need to write deferential letters to strangers trying to convince them that I am a sincere hard worker who will do their company proud. I can do this instead!

Well, one can't simply stop looking for paying work, which I haven't, but let me put it this way--I now spend more time with Round Bend Press than I do with my futile job search. (The economy is so bad in Oregon that I feel like quitting altogether and taking a tent into the woods; one would either die there or manage to live with the beasts. Or one could turn into a Ted Kacznski-like figure, writing incendiary tracts against capital. Without bombing anyone, of course, FBI guy. Not advocating anything here.)

I called my novel The Friends of Round Bend and self-published it at Lulu. The book wasn't ready to be published I discovered soon thereafter, having an assortment of typos and outright misspellings and a myriad of other problems (narrative, syntax, vocabulary, etc. etc.) All and all, a quite amateurish job filled with problems that I'd managed to overlook in my excitement to finally publish a book.

A slightly better issue of the novel is still up at Lulu. I decided in the end that until I rewrite it or completely lose interest in its possibilities, I'll just leave it there as a symbol of my subsequent efforts. It used to be said about Sherwood Anderson that he was a mediocre novelist and that short stories such as those he published in Winesburg, Ohio were as close to perfection as anything he tried. His novels were too episodic, critics said. They lacked the necessary cohesion of the novel form, which is organic and fluid in structure. Winesburg, Ohio is indeed an unstructured, informal novel inasmuch as all the stories in it are interrelated. It is pastiche and glimpse, but not novelistic in the usual way we define the concept. As short stories however, the book is masterful.

The ideal novel wouldn't have chapters; it would open with the first sentence and each subsequent sentence would make perfect sense relative to the previous sentence and the next sentence, so that if one sentence fell out of the novel the entire structure of the thing would collapse and be indecipherable. In a sense, this is what Hemingway was talking about when he said his method was to write "one true sentence" at a time until a story was told. To banish the extraneous would then be the ultimate goal, giving the novel a ringing truth like the best haiku. A long novel would break into a myriad of haiku moments. No padding or flowering, simply the author's voice giving recognition to a moment or an object or a thing. Nothing would even need happen in the novel if this were the case; it might perfect nothingness.

In my novel, Round Bend is an imaginary coastal town in Oregon. Here I tried to set the place in a physical reality drawn from an amalgam of known possibilities:

from The Friends of Round Bend

Located at Cold River’s confluence with the ocean’s quay, Round Bend Port has a natural beauty that is only partially obscured by the hub-hub of industry. Over the course of a century Round Bend grew around the bay with a careful purpose; to keep the scenic quality of the place and to maximize its potential as a port and center of commerce. It stayed small for many years, but like elsewhere in the 1950s witnessed growth and a realignment of accompanying challenges.

Now, some of the charming old buildings from an earlier era rose up from the bay’s shores, refurbished and aglow with red brick, while a smattering of newer condos and offices were designed to unobtrusively fit in. To the northeast, climbing the tree-covered slope of the Coast Range’s foothills, stood the homes, in various stages of decay or renovation, of the first developers of Round Bend’s boom times. The community had once been a leader in the export of logs, but with the shrinking of the timber industry throughout the region wood shipments had steadily fallen through the past decade or more.

There were other signs of sickness as well. Where three lumber mills once kept the community gainfully employed, one remained. Consequently, the businesses that once catered to them died slow deaths, replaced by start ups in new technologies, new recreation, new everything. Round Bend’s striving entrepreneurial class was making a great effort. Time would tell. Were things better now in Round Bend, or worse? The answer more or less depended on what the individual did or didn’t do with those opportunities that were available.



TS