Why I'm Doing This.

The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz once said, "I like smuggling the most up-to-the-minute contraband in antiquated charabancs"--in other words, telling contemporary stories, dealing with contemporary themes, in traditional formats.

I'm with him. I'm a sucker for mixing up old-timey stuff with brand-spankin' new stuff. I like the vintage 1950's TV on the console of the Doctor's TARDIS in the new, rebooted version of "Doctor Who." I like the idea of a Stutz Bearcat tricked out with an MP3 player. I like the idea of air conditioning and elevators in old Welsh castles. Mixing up the old with the new benefits both concepts. It gives the new stuff a sort of gravitas, a grounding in something that makes it look traditional and comforting. Gives it style. And it gives the old a new lease on life, making it relevant in today's world. I like it when people can make the antiquated and the contemporary coexist. It makes them both cooler.

I'm especially fond of the way stories were told in the old days.

Time was when most major newspapers published serialized novels. After you got done with the front page, the classifieds, the Important News of the Day, you'd turn to the back page where there was another chapter of an unfolding story. Every week a new chapter would appear, which gave the reader the (probably unintended) feeling that he or she was actually living out the story with the characters. The reader would tear through the chapter, reach the end, and say, "And? And??? And what then? What's next?"

Nowadays, serial novels, if they're remembered at all, are considered kind of shlocky--hack-work pounded out on the quick and dirty for a cheap buck. But serious writers, and good ones, also serialized their work. Charles Dickens did. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle serialized his four Sherlock Holmes novels (A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Valley of Fear, and The Hound of the Baskervilles). Tolstoy and Dostoevsky published most of their novels serially. And in this country, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin as a serial.

It's a great way of telling a story, isn't it? There's a reason why so many people still watch soap operas and read comic books. Ongoing stories--serialized stories--happen, in terms of the reader's perspective, in what's called now "real time." They suck you in and leave you wondering, "What happens next?"

Not so many years back, my favorite living writer, Michael Chabon--himself no mean practitioner of the art of mixing up the old with the new--published his novel Gentlemen of the Road in serial format in the New York Times Magazine. It was great fun to read, and when he finally published it in book form, it retained the week-to-week character of the original version.

So I've decided to mix up the old and the new myself. I'm going to serialize here, in digital format, a book.

I wrote it some years ago, and it's sat gathering dust on my hard drive ever since.

It's called The Lowenman Papers. I was driving home from work one day, and this phrase began repeating itself in my head: "Julian Lowenman, eaten by books." I have no idea where the name Julian Lowenman came from. I've known Lowensteins and Lowenhaupts, but I've never met a Lowenman. Nor do I know where the idea of being eaten by books came from. But as I turned the phrase over and over in my head, an idea for a story began to emerge, a story of a man engulfed and eventually consumed by information.

Julian Lowenman himself is, of the characters I've created in other (unpublished) books, my favorite--as Lady Charlotte Bertie described Disraeli, "He is wild enthusiastic and very poetical." He's more than half-nuts, interested in everything, intense to the point of irritating, and really kind of a pain in the ass to just about everyone he encounters. I suspect that if I met him in real life, I'd want to hit him in the face with a sock full of gravel. But he was fun to write. If anyone actually bothers to read this, I hope you enjoy reading about Julian as much as I enjoyed writing him.

Maybe I'll take a stab at illustrating it, too. Anyhow. The Lowenman Papers. Enjoy.