Julian Koosman

Julian Koosman (1971–2013) Born and raised in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, Julian Koosman considered himself an "adventurer" above any of the monikers that have been bestowed upon him. After graduating Oneonta State College, he set out for the West Coast chasing the ghost of his idol, Jack Kerouac. He landed in San Diego and turned north, up through Los Angeles and San Francisco, which didn't seem as magical as it was during his first trip there a year earlier. He continued north along the Lost Coast of Northern California, through Oregon, and finally to Seattle. After a couple of weeks of checking out the bars and the bands in the Emerald City, Koosman felt he had neared the end of the road and that he had to settle somewhere soon, but, despite the scene looking so appealing from the distance of the Northeast, Seattle felt "too corporate". There was one last city on his radar, north across the border, a place he had heard was marijuana-friendly and the people less uptight than in the States. Upon arriving in Vancouver and knowing that he had to set up his base here or go home, he ventured into the office of the Journalism Department at the University of British Columbia armed with undergrad transcripts, writing clips, and the travelogue he had been keeping since leaving New York. He was soon enrolled in the Masters program. Despite scoring good grades after two semesters, however, Koosman was not happy in the "Amsterdam of North America" and set out for the real Amsterdam, possibly chasing the ghost of his true love but instead encountering Edward Chidlington III at the legendary In de Olofspoort. Over many jenevers, Chidlington, an editor at the fledging business & industry publishing company Burtlesbush in the UK, listened with great interest as Koosman told him about his fiction writing and about a 2,000 page manuscript he had been working on that was set at his alma mater. The next day Chidlington read some of Koosman's work and promptly offered him a job at Burtlesbush. He set Koosman up at his flat in London, and at Burtlesbush Koosman reported on the food service industry—work that he would describe as "soul crushing"—so much so that, instead of writing in the evening as originally planned, he sought relief from his frustration in the pubs of London. He eventually recognized that he was heading down a similarly sad road that Kerouac had traveled after his initial success that began with Big Sur, where the author bounced back and forth between San Francisco and Big Sur suffering a nightmarish cycle of always wanting to be in the other place, and then the end of the road with Satori in Paris, where the his hero is an old-beyond-his-years 43 and a sorry shell of himself who can't seem to do anything besides get drunk (said the New York Times in 1967: …Kerouac has to be the center of attention, drinking, brawling, singing, and then writing the next morning, the next month, the next year with an awful hangover and no sense of artistic continuity). It was after reading Satori where Kerouac stopped being an idol for Koosman and started to become somewhat of a lesson to be learned from. He cut back on his drinking and finished a manageable draft of the college book, but it left him badly burnt out, as did the food service journalism. He was also homesick, so he returned to his native New York and rented an apartment in Astoria, Queens, where he supported himself by freelance writing. It was here where he met Anja, a native of Iceland whom he would marry in September 2001, a little more than a week before 9/11. After the attacks, the couple was badly shaken and moved to the small village of Djúpivogur in Iceland, where they lived happily for several years. This was Koosman's most productive fiction writing period, and the work he did here is still in the vault, which is where all of his writing wound up because he had grown weary of being rejected first by the establishment, then by the literary hipster generation being led by Dave Eggers (Koosman on A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: I feel bad for the guy because of what happened with his parents, and he is a fine human being for taking care of his brother, but I'm sorry, this book sucked. After I finally got to the end, I was dismayed that there was more, and that the text was upside down). At the time he had discovered the work of David Foster Wallace and was both inspired by the genius of Infinite Jest, but also deflated knowing that he could never come close to Wallace's level of genius. He was further deflated by constantly being told that no one would want to read a novel about college, even if his tale was one that many would appreciate. He felt his book would finally succeed where successful writers had failed, writing the great American college novel set in one of the most legendary college towns this country had ever known. After reading Neal Stephenson's The Big U, Koosman wrote: Stephenson is a highly intelligent man and a brilliant writer, but my college book is better than his college book. Koosman also had particular disdain for Bret Easton Ellis, a successful writer from a previous generation: Less Than Zero is one of the rare examples of a movie being better than the book. It is perhaps my greatest fear that my work should ever be compared to that of Bret Easton Ellis. While Koosman was honing his craft, Anja wanted to start a family. But Koosman was growing restless. The fire within him had began kindling again, and he felt that his fiction writing was not meaningful enough and that now that he felt like he knew what he was doing, he needed to have some more significant experiences to write about (which apparently did not include being a father). The same restlessness that had driven him on Long Island, in Oneonta, in Vancouver, and in London had resurfaced in Iceland, only now there was a biting urgency to it. He felt that he had to defeat this chronic longing once and for all before it defeated him, and he was willing to roam the world to finally find whatever it was his soul was looking for. He would write a new novel as he experienced this quest, and the working title was Killing the Beat, which he didn't care for, but that was the general idea he would start with, to succeed where Kerouac had failed after writing On the Road, a similar sentiment he had with the college novel. After divorcing Anja, Koosman set out for Brussels, where Chidlington had set up his own publishing business. Chidlington offered him a job, but a job in Brussels was not what Koosman was seeking. He knew that he had to go further than ever to find this thing that was haunting him, and that he had to go far beyond the borders of his comfort zone to a place of which he was completely unfamiliar. It was around this time where something changed. He had set out to write a meaningful book, but it soon became a quest to find meaning in his life—which seemed the perfect premise for a book, one that didn't even have to be a novel—but the writing all but stopped. He headed east from Brussels and didn't stop until he had arrived in Lhasa, Tibet. This period is a little cloudy, perhaps because he had become very ill during his journey and nearly died, and in retrospect part of him probably did. There are no significant writings from this leg of the journey or his time in Tibet, and it is unclear what he did or where he stayed while he was there. He also declined to talk about it years later, saying only that it was the most beautiful place he had ever been. He would eventually leave Lhasa and follow the Friendship Highway to Kathmandu and from there travel to Dharamsala, India. This portion of his journey is also something he would not discuss in detail afterwards, but, putting two and two together, he may have been seeking audience with the Dalai Lama himself. While in Dharamsala, he began writing again, but it was more reflective and distant, and he hardly mentioned his present circumstance. He remained there until August 2009 before heading to Australia, where he enlisted in a campaign led by a famous activist hell-bent on stopping whalers from a large island nation from killing whales in the Southern Ocean, a mission that had become a popular television program. (If you're wondering, he was seen in the background of this program a couple of times, but he had no lines that ever made it on the air). He would later reveal that he did this because he had grown so sick of the people in the world that he figured he would try to help these gentle giant creatures of the sea, but even that turned out to be campaign fueled by people, egos, television ratings, and money. He soon left this organization and journeyed by boat up to Ushuaia, Tierra Del Fuego, which he said he liked because the people there were "very kind to a broken soul, and they do not have big egos". He also said he liked the idea of being in the "southernmost city in the world", as if he had finally reached the bottom of the barrel—a barrel that had apparently already been empty since his departure from Iceland. Unable to recapture his muse, he decided to "retire" from writing and head west once more to Bora Bora, where we would spend the rest of his life haphazardly trying to organize and make sense of his work. But he never really accomplished this, and the task would eventually land on the desk of his old friend Chidlington. The details of Koosman's death remain murky. Classified by authorities as a boating accident, some have speculated that members of a whaling crew from that large island nation encountered him and exacted revenge at sea. Others have suggested that he took his own life. He had previously mentioned hearing that drowning was the most peaceful way to die once you get past the struggle of trying to survive. Perhaps he realized that his soul would only find peace if it ceased longing to be elsewhere. This is all speculation, however, and the truth may only now exist in clues he left behind in his writings. Oneonta: The Novel is the first in what is expected to be a series of posthumous publications. The success of this first publication has spawned two new editions of the book with alternate cover artwork, one of which includes a previously unpublished journal entry he wrote while in Oneonta calling for the end of marijuana prohibition.