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Category: Biographical

No one’s reading anything we write

No one’s reading anything we write

Bartley Willard and Andy Watson, who’ve quit the land and all its promises, who ride on rigid racing ocean waves in vigorous northern seas, who lounge on sloppy gushy ocean waves on lazy southern seas, who have no friends and no enemies and no postal addresses,

are not working on either “Love at a Reasonable Price” or “Diary of an Adamant Seducer”. Instead, they just write whatever and toss it into a messenger bottle, which makes its way to the Wandering Albatross Press Building, which sits in marble and in honor on Wall Street in Manhattan, a shining symbol on a proverbial hill. But who is there to receive the messages? Not Kent, who waits patiently–a little too patiently?–in the mossy, scraggle-tree-lined Hall of the Mountain King. Not Andrew Cleary nor Tom Watson, who flibbertygibbet the time away hitting golf balls into the sun (yes, it takes an amazing drive!, but demonstrations of prowess don’t turn idle self-indulgences into worthy activities). But someone–some low level flunky, too half-ass and snot-nosed to bother describing; someone collects the bottles as they bounce against the battery with a clattering that startles gulls and tourists alike.

Andy Watson and Bartleby Willard have abandoned their post. Kent Watson is spending a worrisome amount of time pining after them in the scraggly pine clearing where the Mountain King lords it over mountain beasts both plausible and mythic. And Tom Watson and Andrew Cleary, the two eternal presences who’ve run Wandering Albatross Press since before timespace began, have always just goofed around the way gods–being too blessed and immortal to ever feel the calling of an ache or the crunch of a deadline–always do.

So where, dear reader, does that leave you?

And yet what readership does this blog have? Isn’t it true that no one is reading it? So perhaps, by not existing, the “From-Bartleby.com” readership has brought this betrayal upon themselves. Perhaps.

But perhaps not.

For one must never underestimate the depravity of all involved. To my mind, they’re just the sort of feckless crew to abandon their posts–in, of course, their various ways.

There’s no one to talk to.
Except me.
In this circle.
Where I greet myself.

Hello, how are you?
I am fine, thank you. And how are you?
I too am fine; I too thank you.
What’s next?
We could daydream about being rich within a world that stays essentially like the world is now.
OK, that sounds like a pleasant daydream that we could sink into like a bed of soft moss beneath an old oak tree on a warm summer day in the good old USA.
I’d travel.
Oh, me too.
And write in the mornings.
Good idea. I’d do that too.
But after a year of taking airplane trips and road trips and wandering around world cities, then maybe I’d take a class or two a semester. I think maybe I would.
Yeah, there’s a thought.
Oh thought upon thought.
Sure–pile ’em up! like lumberjack flapjacks or snow in Valdez in the month of May.

BW / AMW

Biographical 7: Poor Kent

Biographical 7: Poor Kent

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed.]

Poor Kempt! It is a long cold most of all windy way to the Hall of the Mountain King. And Kempt is not Bartleby, nor is he travelling with Bartleby. Kempt can go by locomotives as far as the barren spaces and by stagecoach as far as the baked plains and by horseback to the felsen feet of the mighty mountains. But then Kempt will have to hike and climb up and up day after day into the stinging iceflake winds. Poor Kempt! I guess he feels duty-bound. I guess he remembers when teenage Amble with soft-spreading flattop and steel-railed smile took him around the block in that chintzy cloth-seat stroller with plastic wheels grating the uneven small-town, pebble-peaking, root-scattered sidewalk.

It will be alright. The children of the light will stand tall and guide his way. The creatures in the black lagoon will grab after him with webbed slimy nuke-bred hands, but the blessed influences will always swoop low and carry him just out of mayhem’s reach. Kempt will arrive at the Hall of the Mountain King. He will find the Mountain King rough but fair, jaded but kind.

Author: our bw
Editor: our aw
Copyright: our amw

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

Biographical 6: Kent Alone

Biographical 6: Kent Alone

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed.]

Bartleby Willard, the great author of Pure Love and other undeniable adventures, and his editor Amble Whistletown have left New York City. Travelling on the high seas on their separate ships they went their separate ways. Who knows when we’ll hear from them next?

Back at the Skullvalley After Whistletown Buchhandler Office at Somewhere Manytimes Wall Street, Kempt Whistletown watches his tiny letter people group together to form communities of words and sentences. The occasional paragraph empire will arise, gobbling up loose letters, small bands of individual words, and scattered tribes of sentences. Inevitably the dynasties choke on the growing incoherence within their narratives; and/or shatter themselves on other dynasties, and/or on stupid internal misunderstandings — often caused by the lack of punctuation. Kempt — the kind of God who intervenes in the spaces-between — takes mercy on his children and blesses them with periods, commas, semicolons, colons, question marks, exclamation marks, parentheses, quotation marks — apostrophes even! Oh, the clarity, oh the clarity! Of course, from time to time simple grammatical and punctuation errors still precipitate outrageous tragedies in Letterland — but the Letterfolk learn.

Back at the SWAB Office at Somewhere Manytimes Wall Street, Andrew Cleary and Tom Watson dine on butterflies. Every few minutes, the tall French waiters — taller than average French waiters, disjointedly lank and with rather flat and stretched out musculatures (eunuchs, really) — slide each SAWB tyrant yet another large steel dish piled high with freshly killed monarchs.

Each gossamer orange and black beauty is murdered with a decisive needle-poke through its minuscule head.

The chef is a squadron of Lilliputians whose small brains have been mesmerized by a vampire squid (small red mollusk with a long oval body atop netted tentacles) that floats in saltwater in an old glass buttermilk jar resting on the kitchen counter (oak, worn, darkened and stained, with innumerable knife wounds).

Ever since the discovery of vampire squid — these small, slimy, membranous scavengers that (powered by a palpitating closing-umbrella locomotion) thrust themselves about the deep sea, many a young mind has felt this thought:

“How terrible! How absolutely terrible for God to create so many cadaverous consciousnesses! Floating, scarcely aware yet still horribly aware, they exist there in the pitch black and bitter cold, mindlessly feeding on falling detritus — the disassembling remains of creatures who lived and died above them, within a brighter sea. And the vampire squid is really just a particularly exotic example of a terrifyingly commonplace worldhistorical trend: voila the vaguely aware, icky and omnipresent cockroach! Why does God make so many clueless creatures chained to so many hopeless endeavors? Why is mankind smiled upon and set apart: granted contemplative strolls, poems, and math problems? Why are we condemned to share the putrid mortality and uncertain knowledge of such hopeless nobodies as these foot-long, gelatinous, weak but agile vampire squid?”

The vampire squid in the SAWB office kitchen is a special case. It can think and read and write and carry on conversations; however, it has never really escaped the drudgery of its origins and mostly cackles low to itself about the world, the world, turned to ash, to ashy ash, and falling, falling gently down down into my tank; the world as fodder, fodder falling as ash down to my tank where I sit pretty and wait easy — wait easy, yes and yes!, a goal, a task, a straight line, hoo hoo. Ha ha

Thundration and Archangelbert talk in loud and boisterous voices. About their various triumphs and the folly of the rest.

Tun: A man can be a player by employing only the most rudimentary maneuvers. Women (I declare with my shoulders back and my head cocked jauntily chin-up) need to hear certain phrases: there are certain gestures that, even when recognized as empty, the fairer sex does fairly feast upon. Likewise (and here’s where I rodeo-spin my pointer finger and really get going): tell the people that their hearts are gold, their skeletons and mandibles unconquerable, their enemies depraved, and voila! (see how now I’m cymboling my hands together like a suit-and-tie percussionist, signifying a haughty “easy as that!”): Rub their bellies and scold their rivals and they’ll sidle up to you and your (watch! watch! oh, this you simply must see: now I’m wiggling my fingers like a pianist warming up, his well-practiced, ingenious fingers hovering over the ready ivories) suggestions. Ah, the tame little pups!

Arch: Here here! A toast to that! A toast of pureed frog eyes with a splash of Tabasco — or whatever the peoples drinking!
My friends, my compatriots, my cronies: if Goodness was an option our jobs — they’d be complicated. I’m afraid we’d have to consider — egads! — the bounds!
But a person’s a drawn-out arachnid. Human minds and bodies nut’in’ but the playthings of animal grab and dodge; mark my runny, salty, oily over-easy words: instincts yank puppet-strings and human destinies unroll like clockwork — clockwork’s that randomly drifted together because of an infinite number of chimps with an infinite number of typewriters!
So (and please bear witness as I push out my chest thus and, raising wide-open arms, turn my unrepentant palms towards the empty heavens like so) So in conclusion, it’s all cheer beer an’ ne’er fear for all us maniacal sorts — ‘specially us terribly clever, terribly successful, possessed-of-terrible-power maniacal sorts.

Tun: Indeed. With souls severed from their hearts and minds, they scratch their ghostly paths through this dark-night world. Who can blame a media mogul who twists their chords, who weaves their flighty minds and jumpy passions into little ditties that just so happen — that I say: just so happen to mention that they really ought to be sure to: (mark me here: with blinking open-shut hands and a wrap-around-grinned, pop-eyed frog-face, I tut my bandy head from side to side while slyly sliding my I-beam shoulders the contrariwise) “buy it! buy it! buy and believe! buy it, buy it, buy and believe — !.”

After the two publishing Titans (original immortal, recklessly powerful sense of the word) guffaw and slap knees like wheezing fireplace bellows for a biblical 40 seconds, Tun straightens up his tidy, plank-shaped body and tucks his white tuxedo shirt back under the black cummerbund. He clears his long scrawny mulligatawny throat and holds his chin between his up-pressing thumb and his looped pointer finger, pretending to stare off into an imaginary dramatic distance. He mocks pensiveness. He lampoons serious contemplation! Then, throwing his arms down into a sickly drooping W, he continues:

“No, nope, can’t be done: There’s no reaching their souls — they keep them in storage, along with oyster shell ashtrays, miniature pewter statues of Egyptian gods, and other treasures from Great Aunt Millie’s coffee table. No reaching their souls, so who could ever blame us for what we do with their heart-brain slush? Who?”

Arch: “Blame us for exploiting windup dolls? Why the suggestion’s preposterous! Absolutely cracked!”

Tun: “Blame us? Never! People, we’s marvelous!”

And so they caper on, feeling safe because they — as timeless immortals — live beyond mortal laws; and quite forgetting that no one on the moribund earth nor in the exalted heavens: No one lives beyond the Law.

Kempt watches the letter people on the floor. Blind and mute, their only apparent senses are touch and a kind of radiating perception for other letter people. A paragraph about the magnificent powers of the gods rolls into a paragraph about the brightness of the sun and the darkness of the night and other obvious statements about the physical world. Where did these creatures get all these human ideas? Were they in former lives human beings or somehow privy to the stories of human beings which they now rediscover within the potentialities of human language? The cataclysm of the contesting empires creates new configurations: many stranded letters; a few stranded sentences (one about the impossibility of flight; another about the danger of the swift currents) and three paragraphs: a short ode to the opulent lifestyles of the gods; a big and somewhat confused discourse on the brightness of the sun, the darkness of the night, and the moods of the gods; and this short piece:

What is it that makes our sense? We share body, heart, head, knees and toes, knees and toes. What reason supports this reason? Should we keep push to prow? Hello and Where did you go? Hello? Tell me about us. Please. So lonely in the turning time.

Kempt sighs. A pretty little lament. Probably not destined to survive long in this brutal stage of civilization. He wants to stoop down and help it, to protect it from the marauding declarations about overblown and implausible gods and the boring details of the physical world. But he doesn’t know that that’s his place.

Tun and Arch are agreeing with one another that there’s nothing wrong with feasting on thousands of monarch butterflies: they never survive the summer anyway. Kempt thinks to himself: yes, but they still have a life purpose to fulfill: they need to go to the monarch trees in Mexico, to throng with others of their kind who understand the world in the way they do, to mate and die knowing that they’ve completed the journey.

Kempt goes into his room and gets a small flat square from under his bed. He brings it back to the SAWB common office, and unfolds it into a large very thin flat disc. I don’t know what material it is made of. It is light brown and so thin as to be transparent, but it seems to be very strong. Without — as far as I can see — disturbing the letter people, he slips the disc under them and then slides it through a small groove in the walls cut just below the bottoms of the door frames. After safely setting the letterworld down in his large, sparsely furnished, wood-floored bedroom, he locks the door and returns to the SAWB common office.

Kempt: “I’m going to go look for Amble and Bartleby.”

“How? In what magic ship or on what magic sea serpent? And using what magic map?” wonders Tun.

“See if you can get anything publishable out of them” suggests Archangelbert sagaciously, his mouth full of snapping butterfly wings.

Now think Kempt: do we know where they went? Does anyone? Who have they even spoken to recently? They did go for an interview with the Mountain King not too long ago. So perhaps a visit to the Hall of the Mountain King is in order.

Kempt alone, the poem:

Oh Kempt!, noble Kempt! It is a heavy weight —
the stone here shouldered by the oldest lucid son.
Your elders, your leaders, your heroes from before
have left themselves, lost themselves to schemes
that, sweet and dear like honey, trap them in the horror.
They’ve collapsed to the fragment floor; they boast to the sky:
“I’ve won!
I give up!
I was never playing anyway.”

Can you, can you alone, hold firm while all about
the tempest claims your fellows: lacerates minds,
empties hearts, breaks the brittle stuff
that keeps a soul in God — ?

Head up! Heart up! Poor Kempt, dear Kempt —
you didn’t choose this lot, nor did you this knowing,
red blazing in dry skull:
There’s a path I must take,
a resistance;
now stand I me within this me
and this blazing me
within the blaster’s boom.
The choice is mine:
to take the way that leads, easy gentle bob
— a leaf on murmured brook –,
to death;
or choose the other turn — against the rush,
blindfolded, alone, into the judgement room.

Author B Willard
Editor A Whistletown
Copyright AM Watson

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

Prayer from the WAP expatriots who float upon a windless dry-throated sea; a prayer they howl to the mindless horizon

Prayer from the WAP expatriots who float upon a windless dry-throated sea; a prayer they howl to the mindless horizon

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed. Character-name reassignments are as follows: literal truth becomes poetic Truth; timespace becomes a laughing mush; the Gods become the Giggling Beauties; we become only the love we knew and lived.]

[This is the original version. An updated one is available in our essay collection “First Loves” (see “Buy the Books” on this site).]
[Update November 2021: Give us a minute and we’ll find the most recent version of this prayer and put it right here on this page where you come to finally listen to us tell you how we feel about you.]

[Update November 2021: “We built this City on Rock and Roll”. I remember this song! I was a kid. I sat alone on the quilt atop my parent’s tidy bed in the row house near to the GE locomotive factory where my father would walk to. The song came through a little faux-wooden clock radio. It must have had those plastic numbered tiles that flip up and down as time winds forwards and (if only!) backwards. It’s all gone! Where is it gone to! And yet it lives in me. And I cannot turn from it, from this city we are building out of rock and roll, from this world we are building out of fun and togetherness, from the magic of mere ideas turning real and realities turning mere ideas.]

[Update November 2021: We come back to our older selves. We try not to abandon the fits and dreams that we once were. We try to love everyone, even ourselves, even those versions of ourselves we’d thought to outgrow, to outdo, to forget.]

I can’t take the pressure, boredom, loneliness. This quest is impossible; it is too much for me. These people float like phantom ships around me, through me, over me. I cannot hear the voice calling in the wilderness, nor my friend in the shade of an old cedar tree.

Can a prayer save its author? I pray that love be real and that I know it so; and that this world be a place where we all do well, watching bright-white sunshine on the grey cobblestone street-stream.

If you call upon the name of the Lord; if you speak the name of the unnameable: if you ask the Way to remember you, to come back to you, to pick you up and help you breathe again clear and free like you did in the tight slanted roads beneath the the uneven, overleaning, woolly-tan walls. But the water sharkfins through the worn-wood sluice and the tall hull built of pyramiding wide-slats, in a thick rubbery white paint and swooping upward towards a jutting prow, floats carelessly up to the leaving-gate.

If I say “Pure Love”; write it down, scratch it in the dry dirt, yell it in the marketplace, catcall it in the barrio. Based on the principle that what must — as a necessary and sufficient prerequisite for any possible intellectual and/or emotional foothold in any possible human moment — be true is indeed true: my inner sense that this life actually matters (not just somebody’s opinion, but for real); and that with open heart and open mind I can learn to always-better feel and understand, always-better follow and live this all-pervading insight that screams out from the core of every conscious moment within this infinite-headed self-forgetting hydra.

To drink, to escape the hopeless failing, the boredom, frustration, shame, dissatisfaction. To drink and smoke and waste it all like you can do over and over again when you’re 22 and there’s a bit of dumb luck on your side.

I rose to tell them about the concrete freighter ship and how the hard sharp sandpapery edge of the topside tore a deep red ditch through my sensibilities. But they blink in the warm, rich, beading sunlight. They call for another round of artichoke salad with organic corn kernels and creamy Italian dressing made with first-cold-pressed organic olive oil certified “authentic olive oil” by the incorruptible Olive Oil Board. I rise to say a few things, but no one wants to know; not even me. I wander back to where it all began: this cool-morning-light outcropping that holds, with the proud cupped-elongation of a waiter’s white-gloved fingers beneath a silver hors d’ouevres tray, a stack of smooth rounded stones. The stack resembles a giant cowpie cast in eternal stone. I sit upon this heap of soft-cool rock and speak nothing to myself, nothing to the bright blue cloudless sky ahead, nothing to the feather-world of bending-arms-pines behind.

Who can say why Zeus chose to answer the heartfelt peace-prayers of the Achaeans and Trojans — prayers duly accompanied with pious slashes of relentless bronze into and along the soft sweet necks of their fattest, juiciest lambs — with another decade of grimy, limb-splattering, all-scattering war? Who can say why God found it appropriate to help the Israelites vanquish all comers in David’s day only to then let them divide into two conflicting kingdoms, one ultimately destroyed and irrevocably dissolved by the Assyrians, the other toppled and held captive in Babylonia for more than sixty bleak, shameful, disappointing years? Who really knows why God answers some prayers and not others? We people sometimes have some theories on the subject: but people have theories — only the God knows.

Still, we lift up our solemn prayer: Grant us exuberant and steady health, real wisdom and goodness, the clarity to perceive what’s best for us to do and the ability to fit ourselves into this fast-flowing world so as to do it: guide us to real success — the kind based in the boundless, undifferentiated soul and radiating outward through the many wondrous particulars.

Pure Love, pure love, love, pure love, real love; a love that gives infinitely forever; a light shattering the darkness; a void teeming with infinitely irrepressible kindness — the wellspring and the backdrop of all things.

Pure Love at the core. Pure Love at the extremities. Pure Love all through, shining bright as day. Help us move well now and always! Help us to do well for real in this world and the deeper one.

Prayer by Bartleby Willard, who lives in the sheltered river glen — far inland from the burly coast.
Desperately-born witness by Amble Whistletown, who dash-paces these old wooden floor beams like a twitch-nosed rat made reckless by hunger and confusion.
Copyright with Andrew Mackenzie Watson, who lives alone along the turning staircase in the old forgotten cold-stone tower by the sea.
Who cares what these three fools do?
And yet, it was nice of them to pray not just for their own fool selves, but for everybody.
This prayer’s now been edited some seven times. What does the author think? That if he spruces up the imagery and more precisely explains the ideas, the True Good will be more ready and able to work with him? Or does he think that if he improves his prayer, he’ll mold himself into a vessel more ready and able to accept the Grace that the Great God gives freely, infinitely, relentlessly even?

[Update November 2021: Never mind — we’ll just keep the version of the prayer that’s already here. It’s fine. It’s not like a finer, more refined prayer will bend God’s great ears more or less. It’s not like God’s an asshole.]

[Update November 2021: I love you. Help me love you right.]

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

From Before:

Our most physical products:

Buy Cat Totes!
&/or Objectively Cute Baby Onepieces! (advertised here: An ad for an “Objectively Cute” baby wrap

Update November 2021: We also tried to get people interested in cards and T-shirts at Pure Love Shop. That’s another thing we tried and gave up on years ago now.

Biographical 3: Confessions of a Pure Love Salesman

Biographical 3: Confessions of a Pure Love Salesman

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed.]

I’ll lend you line from a happier time, when Bartleby Willard and Ambergris Whistletown were only a little inside out; it is the time just before now, the time right before they fled to the sea.

Bartleby Willard, thin, of an inhuman see-through hue like a bug larva, but without the vaguely jumbled gray insides of a bug larva. Bartleby Willard, who you can see through but fuzzily, not very satisfyingly. Bartleby Willard, wearing anyway a baggy disheveled light gray suit, and so pretty solid-looking. Bartleby Willard, with purple eyes and forest green hair and rubbery-see-through face and hands.

Bartleby Willard, who writes himself and who for some reason has described himself into such an awkward and implausible being — one that seems like the scribbling colorings of a child who, clutching crayon like dagger, attacks the hollow figure with reckless zigs and zags. (Bartleby’s suit is colored in in that jagged, inconsistent way; his hair is a bit loopier — like the toddler colorist here imagined lost gusto at cartoon Bartleby’s outlined hair [classic rockabilly: parted on the right with a great swooping mass resembling a curling skunk’s tail above and dipping into the tall wide forehead] and — looking away from the page — circled a loosely held forest-green crayon around a couple times in the vicinity of the cartoon hair || and now mark this sloppiness: strokes of gray bleed into his black shoes and his see-through hands and neck; loops of green mar the top of his head. And everywhere he goes, these crayon-lines bleed into our wholesome solid reallikeseriouslytotallyreal-world).

Bartleby Willard is pacing to and fro in place: arms behind back, he takes one half-step forward, then quick-steps lag-foot to meet lead-foot and — raising only his heels — quick-pivots around to face the direction he just arrived from; he then takes a half-step back to where the iteration began; and repeat …

The character is exhibiting all the symptoms of “heavy distress”. Witness how he colors his flat-chested, narrow-shouldered self: unkempt: flippant crayon-colors executed with a scratchy slashy, madcap hand. And then analyse his gait: quickly pacing to and fro like preoccupied people do; but in a tiny tiny space, as if to scream to the heavens: “I am trapped! I am trapped! I am trapped here!”

And do the others help? Does anyone help him? Who throws him a smile? Who hints him a subtle, unobtrusive, forgive-and-forget understanding? Who leans slightly forward while slightly squatting, puts hands to knees, and makes a flat leaning platform of shoulders and back to share Bartleby’s burden? Who remembers him in their prayers — not just formally, but heartfelt? Who cares about Bartleby Willard, one more would-be-author in this monstrous, heavy-breathing would-be-world? No one here; no one there.

He’s moved frantically from the near-fore to the near-aft and back again over and over in the two places where one would’ve thought he might find a sympathetic soul: (1) The Skullvalley After Whistletown Building, where Tun Whistletown and Arch Skullvalley rule their vast publishing empire with debonair negligence and Kempt Whistletown lovingly — albeit a little distantly, glumly even — engineers various publishing-related contraptions; and (2) The Hall of the Mountain King, where Amber Whistletown sulkily awaits his interview with the Mountain King.

“What’s the matter with Bartleby?” asks Thundration (“Tun”) while, tube-arms folded across plank-torso, he — long neck leaning one way, sharp chin jutting forward and stretching opposite way, small eyes and pursed lips bunched together around some common irony — gazes out one of the several floor-to-ceiling windows lining the eastern wall of the SAW Bookmakers common office.

Of these windows: windows that one and all overlook and give witness to the East River’s melt into the Upper Bay: the bottom of the channel they call a river draining into the top of a bulge they call a bay, which so-called bay will quickly hiccup through a narrow, gush out a widening, and then fall forever into the slosh-tufting immensity of the North Atlantic || keep well in mind that these particular waters have been long coddled: they spent many a slow, shallow, sunbaked day in that great unseaworthy wading pool called “Long Island Sound”: keep that in mind as you assess their fate and, for wisdom-is-compassion’s sake, contemplatively mingle your lots with theirs.

“The boy’s worried he doesn’t know what Pure Love is — says he can’t be a Pure Love manufacturer, importer, exporter, marketer, and/or salesman if he doesn’t even know what it is to love everyone with an infinitely kind and effective love.” replies Archangelbert (“Arch”) while handing a very small “M” with two tiny MickeyMouse-like feet to a word-centipede comprised of “R E A S O”. Arch is on his blue-jeaned knees, supporting himself with one long, bow-fingered hand as he leans down and forward to the eager word-creature, or — seen from a little wider layer — eager letter-community comprised of eager letters with identity-overlaps and -subsumings akin to eager ants in their eager ant colonies. Each letter of the word-centipede is about the size of a small pink eraser like you used to have in your cartoon-themed pencil case.

Kempt sits in a sturdy wooden chair in this clearing (all the desks are pushed against the wall opposite the entrance door) on the southwestern end of the SAWB common office’s beautiful cross-hatch, Celtic-arena flooring (well, it was beautiful! Before all that scraping of heavy square-legged oaken desks!). He wears square-cut but not-baggy light-beige canvas slacks (a little frayed along the bottom edges) and a black T-shirt with a bold gold lion face in puffy-ink on the front (I don’t know where he got that shirt).

Leaning forward, resting slight forearms on slender thighs, Kempt watches entranced as his newest invention — these small, living, breathing, relatively intelligent letter-units/word-centipedes — wander around the floor, dropping and picking up letters to form new words and — in much weaker, more spread-out, visibly-wobbling bonds — simple sentences. Conceiving of and creating life and watching that life slowly find its way has put Kempt in a very zen place; he’s even stopped yelling at Arch for giving the poor little things the wrong letters, which confuses them.

“What?” Tun bursts, his too-long too-thin too-tubular arms and legs flying out, forming a much too-long and too-drawn-out X in front of the window that overlooks the courthouse with Washington’s swearing-in statue. “Whoever told him that Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers Extraordinaire needs to understand the whats-its and hoo-zaps it unloads on the hapless hopeless folk!? They don’t care what they’re swilling — just so long as they’re swilling! Bring ’em the trough and clear out!”

“I know — that’s what I sez: I sez, Bartleby, whip-snapp — that’s fast-slang for whipper snapper — look BW, wisni, I sez: at SAWB Bookbinders Spectacular we sell things; we don’t dry ourselves out on fancy pants worries like oohh I don’t know what I’m sell’in or ooohh, I don’t know how what I’m sell’in’s gonna impact the ooohhh people!”

Kempt said nothing as he watched “I” and “don’t” wander towards “understand”, which in turn gave a little jump of surprised joy and then dashed to join the duo — for to say something, to get something of their chests, to speak it out loud and clear.

So Bartleby spins.

And here ends that story and its time — its merry, oom pah pahing, pale beer frothing out of clanked metal steins, heavy chested girls in uplifting bodices wide-mouthed and head-tossed laugh-howling, worried little magicians in black cloaks and black stovepipe hats stooped on busy street corners and peering through narrowed eyes that flicker-hesitate and then lunge from side to side, giant wooden ships sloshing into a square-stone harbor and tumbling out unkempt adventurous lads like a leather dice-shaking cup rolling out a game of dice, smooth-bellied zebras zigzagging through the tall pipelike grasses time.

Well, actually; because things are never as simple as they start out declaring themselves; and so, all in all,: hard to say. You see, this basically funloving frolicsome fretting happened a bit ago; directly thereafter Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown, disheartened, once again dispersed, fleeing with their separate vessels (actually, Bartleby jumped on the back of a sea serpent) to their separate seas; but now, well now I’m not quite sure what they are up to or what the current mood of this, our blessed project — the manufacture of letters and love — is.

….

What, I wonder, does a Pure Love salesman confess to?

“I’m up in the attic, looking through the musty trunks, hoping to find an heirloom to pawn or a conversation piece to parade. I’m wishing through the ravages of war and its compromises: the soft white flesh that seemed so inviolate before everything was sudsy dishpan water flung into the air. Pure Love for sale! Pure Love for sale? Here, give me a fiver and I’ll give you not just the promise that it’ll all be alright, but the holy stuff that runs through our hearty heathy skirmishes and squeamishes! Yes, the hissing bustling contraption over there squirts out dollop after dollop of infinite joy, infinite kindness, infinite potential, and infinite redemption! And so I grow rich on the back of God Itself! What’s to confess? Who’ll condemn or forgive one who takes from the unbounded Good? With my riotous potions, I’ve left all portions behind; beyond both law and lawlessness, no eternal judge can e’er measure me for the final fitting; so as a phantom imagined in a child’s mind vanishes when that child grows beyond his childish superstitions, I vanish beyond myself: I supernova into nothingness, and Nothing becomes my name. Was I wrong? Was I right? But I wasn’t even like that: I was just telling you a joke I’d heard along the concrete white sparkling edge of the curving dam. Hold back deep waters, mighty suburban dam! Keep them frigid at your inkwell floor and mild on the rippling, scatter, sunning surface. … Or am I wrong? Do I clank and clap, march in place, make band out of mother’s pots — not for fun or earnest reflection, but to hide a fault? Oh, confess me to myself, You who know what I’ve become!”

Author: BW; editor: AMW; copyright: AMW

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

– – – –

From Before:
[Update November 2021: Forget about this! It’s from Before! Not from Now! Why is it even here still?]

For the nonsubscriber: Above is the start of the third fictionish writing in Bartleby’s Diary of an Adamant Lover. For more on this book and what all else’s going on in this blog, see the words beneath these words. To skip formalities and let the passion for consumption drive you headlong into our seller’s net: Buy the Books/Chapter

About this project:[

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting it into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
Chapters listed and linked to as they arise here:
Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price
and here:
Intro to Diary of an Adamant Seducer.

You can also find the most recent posting of each book by clicking on the appropriate Category (Categories are on the right hand side of this blog).

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

Essayish 1/Biographical 2: A Revolutionary Memo

Essayish 1/Biographical 2: A Revolutionary Memo

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed. Character-name reassignments are as follows: literal truth becomes poetic Truth; timespace becomes a laughing mush; the Gods become the Giggling Beauties; we become only the love we knew and lived.]

Dear Readership real and imagined,

We the exalted leadership of Wandering Albatross Press; two lank men born before the universe began and dead after it ends — if indeed it will end, which we very much very haughtily doubt; two ferocious, incorruptible visionaries; have had another great revelation, the seed of another tremendous revolution:

People — those frail wisps of downy fluff, blighted by mortality — need something steady. They need a nice, safe space to slide into, where they are known and where they know. Witness, for example, how Cheers’s theme song “I wanna go where everybody knows my name”, though neither melodically exceptional nor tied anymore to a popular television show, continues to sink icy fingers and forked flames into the hearts of all who hear it. Or voila! the hold that snugly pajamas — thick plush fabric with a white-scar zipper running from tiny ankle to narrow neckline — have on both children and caregivers alike: a hold all out of proportion to their actual physical comfort. Conclusion: People need a friend, and not really anything else.

People need a friend, and WAP is dedicated to giving people what they need at a reasonable price. But how to sell friendship? Impossible! Ah, but there we’re lucky: We have Bartleby Willard. Manufacturing the impossibly wondrous is not just Bartleby’s chosen career: it is his inborn, God-given all-consuming vocation. And so we turn our tall, proud, cliff-like shoulders toward BW and ask him what it is ours to ask; then we pivot our great mainmast shoulders back to again gaze out giant floor-to-ceiling windows in the wide, tall, old-wood WAP common office here in the WAP Building on Wall Street, Empire City, USA.

After a drifting pause, Bartleby responds:

“Two books! Only way. One artsy collection of stories, as already promised. But then also one continuous, gently strolling narrative about all us here at Wandering Albatross Press. We are sentient beings real and imagined who live with life — this tureened mix-and-match, this criss-cross of watching lines within raucous yet solemn beauty. Why not let readers join us here in tales that echo and shape our reality? Why not? We’ll be their distant, one-sided, lonely friends: They’ll hold us in the glass dome; they’ll shake our world and watch the snow drift peacefully across the backward-bowed, sharp-tipped rooftops of our hazy-dreamtime hamlet.”

We therefore announce two books: “Love at a Reasonable Price” and the concurrent “Diary of an Adamant Lover”. We’ll release about one portion of each every so often, and we’ll sell the two stalagtiting (or is it stalagmiting?) books for a grand total of US$12.

How is a serial story like a friendship? It is familiar; it is fairly reliable; it is known by the readers, and, if the author opens up to the circumstances with a reasonable amount of brave kindness, it also, by an amazing play of refracted light, knows the readers: for readers are flickering souls and experiencing Beauty is not more nor less than the sparkling consciousness of what is common to all. Asleep awake, we oft daydream separate realities; but awake awake, bright-eyed, happy-in-the-sparklingdewdrop, we live and breathe the blessed, shapeless blaze that winds through the myriad, the surface back-and-forth, the particular-contortions.

To see a layout of the current chapters, go to Buy the Book / Chapters or just scroll down to the bottom of this page.

Sincerely,
Thundration “The Instigator” Whistletown
&
Archangelbert “The Agitator” Skullvalley

Memo forged by Bartleby Willard with revolutionary support from his rambunctious editor, Ambergris Whistletown.

Author: Bartleby from Willard
Editor: Ambergris from Whistletown
Copyright: Andrew M Watson

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

From Before:

About this project:
[Update November 2021: Don’t forget this was all written long ago and the below plan’s long since faded away.]

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books
For a current list of each book’s chapters, please see
Into to Diary of an Adamant Seducer or Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price, depending.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing — a good unto itself — and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

Biographical 1: Salesmen pouting in the hall of the mountain king

Biographical 1: Salesmen pouting in the hall of the mountain king

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

[update October 2018: Yeah, we think we’re going to go forward with this evolving ebook. If you think you might like to subscribe to it, please join our mailing list at the bottom of this page.]

[update November 2021: Now we’re going forward with this evolving ebook. We’re not talking about subscriptions at the moment. You can see the link to the chapters above. What is here called “Andy Watson” has now become “Amble Whistletown”. Andy Watson is not a fictional character; he is a legal entity; he holds the copyright and buys the groceries.]

Bartleby Willard and Andy Watson, who do not approve of anything or anyone, are here to sell everyone various products, from cat-themed totes to stories about buying and selling Pure Love (an eternal good: Pure Love is infinitely kind; normal love partakes to some degree of Pure Love, but because tainted with impurities like greed and boredom, normal love’s vision of what to do and how to do it is to some degree off).

They live in the hall of the mountain king. The hall is open-air, lined with gnarled pines. Its flooring is angular stones and thick green grass. At one end of the hall, the mountain king with the wrinkled round head and big pocked nose sits potbellied on his throne, conversing — by appointment only — with the many mountain monsters. He drinks cold mountain water from a chalice carved out of pine and wears a bearskin robe over his hairy knobby shoulders. Bartleby Willard and Andy Watson stand back towards the end of the hall. They cross their arms across their gila-monster-bellies and lean a little back and more on one foot than another. They have rounded fratboy muscles and wear maui flip-flops, baggy athletic shorts, and maroon T-shirts emblazoned with several random Greek letters in puffy white. They wear ball caps with concave-down brims backwards. They keep to themselves and circle their jaws and squint their eyes as they nod and back-throat laugh and cool and know it all.

They used to live in the Wandering Albatross Press Building in Somewhere Sometime Wall Street, but have decided to remove themselves to the hall of the mountain king and forget about their olden days. Still, under contract and having nothing better to do, they draft blogposts and fit together storybook entries.

Would you buy anything from these cynical dropouts from humankind? Would they sell anything to you slop-hop bloat-boast lazy loafers?

Would a dragon get into a violent argument with a giant ground unicorn, necessitating the intervention of the reluctant mountain king? Would the scrawny little tree troll journey up from the valley to request an audience with his royal mountainness? Would this skeletally-waify canined apparition (picture a three-fingered aye-aye stretched out into a three-foot-tall humanoid with fur everywhere except for his strangely bald and appallingly gray face) wax eloquent about the need for a normalization of mountain thaw runoff policies?

You see: Stranger things always and forevermore happen, and the crimson chord of capitalism binds us all, keeping us tightly packed together so long as it doesn’t snap and toss us asunder, down into our angry chasms and the blast.

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

From Before:

This is the first Fictionish writing in Bartleby’s Diary of an Adamant Lover. For more on this book and what all else’s going on in this blog, see the words beneath these words.

About our ebooks project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer.

The books will be sold [when?? Maybe Love at a Reasonable Price will be out by Christmas 2018.] here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

If you think you might like to buy Love at a Reasonable Price and/or subscribe to Diary of an Adamant Lover (which we think we’ll release as an eSerialnovel, beginning maybe early 2019) and/or just maybe want to hear from us from time to time:

Subscribe to our mailing list

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Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)