This is a memoir from 1997-2002 with a Nam flashback when I cheated Death. I was in Morocco on 9/11. Call it luck or fate.
Humor and Satire dance with Courage and Creativity.
Travel meets storytelling, creative non-fiction and social autopsy in exile.
This is a flawed masterpiece.
He is a peripatetic traveler, literary outlaw, and street photographer. As a Vietnam Veteran, international TEFL facilitator he lives loves and laughs in Asia south of the moon.
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In Cadiz when citizens were old, toothless, white haired, slow and content with life, residents in Europe’s oldest city attended a different church every Sunday.
Family was all. Spanish culture fostered an implicit understanding of the collective.
Simplicity. Serenity. Harmony married balance. Yin-Yang.
The dancer and the dance are one.
Generations walked in the Parque Genoves along the Atlantic admiring sculpted trees. Well-dressed spoiled children whined and complained to their compulsive-obsessive guilt ridden parents.
Parents organized pram races for amusement, a new spectator sport. GO baby GO from birth. Spin them wheels.
A daughter supported her mother. Their olive faces had identical furrowed lines, brown eyes and black eyebrows. In drab gray clothing they turned their heads in unison glancing at the same thing. The only difference between them was time.
One morning I decided to get my beard trimmed before tripping on it and shattering fragility. I folded up a narrative map, finished coffee dregs, lowered jazz volume and backed up empirical forensic data evidence. I slipped into yellow wool socks and worn sandals.
“I’m off to see the Berber, I mean barber,” I said to blind Omar writing on the balcony. He spilled, smelled and spelled green racing ink on yellow legal paper. He loved the beautiful messy process.
Omar laughed at this tongue slip. “Ha. I know where to find you. Oh, by the way, a letter arrived today.” He handed it to me.
“It’s for you Omar. It has a New York postmark.”
“It’s from a literary nerve agent about my query letter from a gravedigger’s quarry. Please read it to me.”
Dear Mr. Omar,
Thank you for your recent submission to our literary agency. We read your cover letter and synopsis.
The Typist, Butcher, and Gravedigger is an obtuse title. Very bizarre indeed and we see a lot of eccentric, abnormal, unconventional, unorthodox, and supersonic weird work fly through here. We have peculiar stories stacked in a slush pile higher than Everest. We are drowning in words seeking a life preserver believe you me.
You are a fine writer yet we feel there is enough for here for five or six books. Less is more. We suggest you pick one time or geographical place and flush out the narrative with more exposition. We would like to see character development and social and political realities in 60,000 words. No more, no less. KISS for readers.
Boil it down baby. Refined elegance, if you will.
To make money in the publishing business we need mainstream books that appeal to the general reader. We are looking for our 15%. Publishing isn’t a business. It’s a casino.
As you know, 175,000 books were published in this country last year. Your typical hardcover book sells for $25.00. You, the author, make $3.00, if that. It’s a hell of a deal we’ve got going here. The shelf life of a book is, at best, four months and the mid-list is the Kiss Of Death. Remainders are shipped to furnaces in Ohio where illegal immigrants play with fire at Fahrenheit 451.
Give us a product with a platform. Our marketing department will drive literature consumers to independent bookstores before they kowtow to corporate giants and e-books, mind you.
Historically many cultures boil books and weave clothing rags from the raw material. The insight of your stories reveals your passion for weaving threads from diverse locales. We suggest you consider this viable and lucrative publishing option.
Imagine the reception when readers arrive wearing your book! You will autograph fashionable apparel. Paris and Milan catwalks will be filled with exotic tactile textile places like Tacoma, Vietnam and Spain starring blood donor clowns, terminally ill children, Tibetan monks and this is only the beginning.
We’ll live with addicts, a dying American father receiving ice from his son, a bipolar manic suicidal woman, Native Americans celebrating a Ghost Dance and secret oral languages transmitted on your loom of time.
Your prescient awareness of 9/11’s catastrophic global aftermath is psychic. It’s a sensitive subject considering readers want happy fiction. You need to edit references to fear and economic terrorism.
Cut the heavy, deep and real shit.
Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled. Fear is ignorant bliss.
All your nomadic adventures from surviving Vietnam to your transformation in a 26,000-year old Paleolithic Spanish cave were tales from beyond wild.
However, it’s a hell of a thread speaking of weaving metaphors in a nonlinear literary gonzo style.
We couldn’t decide if your work was a dispassionate detached journalist, a raving Vietnam veteran or a wandering mystical blind man. Get help. See a therapist or a shrink-wrapped doctor with a degree in abnormal personalities. Fast. Act now before it’s too late to save you from this dreaded literary disease.
Before closing I will relate one experience to you. The strangest thing happened in our office. One of our junior readers with a liberal arts degree making $30,000 a year suffered sensory overload while reading your manuscript and dozed off in a souk.
When she woke up she called herself Touareg, the noble ones, speaking fluent Tamashek. We didn’t have an interpreter for this oral transmission and called emergency services. They removed her from the premises citing The Patriot Act as justification.
She will be missed wearing her iridescent nacreous coruscating cobalt blue Moroccan robes begging from shadows where Poverty and Despair raise their children. Where one person supports thirteen and 90% of the population is unemployed. Where children are exploited w/o labor laws. Where parents see education as a waste of money and time.
Uncontrolled population growth, lack of job opportunities, substandard education and no medicine are unpleasant global facts.
Handle With Care.
Please do not let this decision encourage you. We mold our client list from the many submissions we receive. The selection is subjective and based on our bottom line.
Money.
We hope you find an agent brave enough to consider this epic mess. Thank you for contacting Creative Artists Blink.
We wish you every success in your writing endeavors.
Sincerely, Just B. Kind, Literary Agent
Hanoi
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