Eureka Coal Company was founded in 2004 as a multi-media enterprise, beginning inauspiciously with the printing of Christopher Bair's Settlement in that fall of that year and creation of the American Journal Bureau in June 2005.  Allowing that the enterprise has seen sabbaticals, years of self-censorship and moments of grave doubt over the last ten or twenty years, we are still relevant in a semi-literate era.  A longer essay in Notebook elaborates on the journey of writing under this banner, and it simply suffices to say here that we are a boutique publisher with certain literary pretensions and we will eventually live up to those pretensions, given the spectacular successes and failures involved with doing something like this.

William Tell Collective

Conceived in 2007, William Tell Collective is a subsidiary of Eureka Coal Company, serving as the media venture's publishing franchise.  In practice, the terms and units are interchangeable, while a Collective effort is generally committed in the spirit of synergies and teamwork (hopefully).

A Premier Internet Resource

An online initiative for those netizens who desire communion with the literary universe embodied by William Tell Collective, urbs antiqua fuit serves as an interface with the entire roster of our writers as well as an experimental vehicle for new works such as the Notebook series of essays, novellas and minutiae.  In addition to these promotional endeavors the cultural tablature known as swish offers readers a forward-looking way of thinking, acting and doing.

American Journal was the penultimate gesture of braggadocio.  It was the heavenly victory of style over substance.  To this day, it is less a book than it is a phenomenal event in the birthing of the new millennium.  It baffled me, and still baffles me, how such a trivial, quaint thing as a blog could revolutionize media and make the average and anonymous rich and famous, render mysteries banal, portray the mediocre as fabulous, and present the dark and swarthy as righteous and exemplary.  Yet the ephemeral, apocalyptic fever of that work has been and may never be captured in an adequate format, even though it was the blogger’s blog, the layman’s blog, every man's blog, blog of the century, blog of the decade, blog of the workingman, blog of blogs, a blogger’s journey, a blog for dummies, the blog you have to read, the blog that time forgot, the world’s most controversial blog, the blog that you dig, the blog that ate New York, Poor Richard’s blog, the blog you depend on, the blog of the sick, the blog of the damned, the black man’s blog, the white man’s blog, the blog more trusted by web readers than any other, the blog that people before computers would have read, the blog you wouldn’t tell your mom about, the blog that 8 out of ten dentists would recommend, the blog that ate my balls, the blog to end all blogs, the blog that makes you look cool to your friends, the blog that blew everyone away.  Whereas its actual composition was effortless, any subsequent print or electronic edition requires endless editing and studious attention to detail.  I don’t understand it.  Not only are most or all of the contributors dead or missing, the most explosive and sensational subjects of the journal have withered into abject non-entities, having been annihilated by the Kardashian scandal, the Obama Presidency, Lady Gaga, the iPhone and as Rasmus Stolzenberg has bitterly rued, its third-millennial, neo-paganistic “Cult of Steve” accessory which propelled Apple's iconic founder Steve Jobs into such lofty spheres of Paradise so as to join Ford, Carnegie, Watt, and Edison in order to be revered as a captain of industry, as well as Occupy Wall Street, Jared Lee Laughner, and even Justin Bieber’s now-legendary faux paternity suit.  All of which goes to show how much I pissed away on my populism... here I was, demanding sacrifice and pushing the envelope, when the powers that be had merely to push a few buttons and sink the whole damn thing I’d been glorifying like a madman into a vapid sea of garbage-infested divertimentos.  It was exquisite how the world changed after 9/11.  The country united, the good fight was fought, and the world was saved, just so that tabloid readers could eat their own shit.  You could see it coming a mile away.  And I accept complete responsibility for this pathetic mess.  But I don’t cry for American Journal.  I don’t think anyone else does, so why should anyone start?  I just wish that there was a way to make some amends for the sins I’ve committed those years, where my hubris relegated basic respect for human values and sanctity of human life to the pig toilet of Western Civilization, and blinded me to the consequences of my Machiavellian machinations, those schemes of mine and my associates whom I joyfully enabled, that regretfully lead to the backlash of adolescent fervor, a veritable backwash that will deny literature, scholarship, profit motive, compassion, courtesy, culture, leadership, education, religion, governance, humility, deference, respect for elders, property, erudition, physical fitness, tolerance, freedom, defense, nutrition, exercise, femininity, sexuality, discipline, vocabulary, philosophy, history, astronomy, psychology, music, and piety. 

The daydream du jour… when will a film be made based on my life?  Issues like plots, actors, if I have a cameo, the director, title, audience, oscar noms, autobiography adaptation or screenplay collaboration, leads, casting.  Would one of my novels substitute for cinegraphic purposes?  These are a few of the many issues complicating my reveries.

If such a film were made in my own life I would certainly star in it, I would be the lead even if I were a hundred years old.  Of course that would be an interesting movie whatever the circumstances.  I would even make a pornographic movie if the opportunity presented itself.  As long as it were tastefully done, of course (soft-core, I guess, unless somebody teaches me to use a whip). 

• Christopher Bair

SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life.

(From  André Breton's 1st Surrealist Manifesto)

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