To free speech.

Derek Armstrong
Kunati Inc. Book Publishers: New Voices. Great Books
2600 Skymark Avenue, Bld 12, Ste 103
Mississauga, ON L4W 5B2 Canada

Dear Derek Armstrong:

I saw your listing at Publishers Marketplace.

When LitVision Press in California published Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family I cashed in the annuity I rolled my retirement over into when Lucent Technologies laid me off and gave myself a grant to drive around the Redneck Riviera selling the book out of the back of my car and write about doing that. I was the roving correspondent (some would say raving correspondent) for the L. A. (Lower Alabama) Free Press.

I am just finishing a series of four books called Underground Writer Makes Good: The Last Six Months of My LDA Grant.

LDA stands for last ditch attempt.

I enclose a description of the series.

I plan to finish writing it by the end of April.

Would you like to see the first book of the series, BLUE-COLLAR REDNECK: WHY WON'T NOBODY HIRE ME TO BE A WRITER?

I enclose the pamphlets Yawp and No Oprah, as examples of my work.

Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404

You know David, when I was in NY and walked into some book-shops one afternoon I really thought they were branches of Delicatessen, incredible what a poverty, not one single book of serious literature, colorful covers covering nothing or fake literature (if you're lucky). If I would search for this rare unknown American author, where would I find him first? In NY, in LA, in SF or maybe in London, in Amsterdam in...well of course NY is big enough and maybe as a naive European I probably missed the right book-shop, somebody will sell it in NY I know just get a good directory. The point is Jack Saunders is probably too European for an American and too American for a European. That means his books could sell very well in Iceland, not America not Europe, but just in between. Arthur Berkhoff

Richard Kostelanetz
PO Box 444 Prince St.
NY, New York 10012-0008

Dear Richard Kostelanetz:

Here are two pamphlets I wrote to hand out at the Miller Theater reading April 17. Yawp and No Oprah.

I once contributed some index cards to Assembling, at David Cole's invitation.

He and I met in Atlanta, after corresponding for years. His sons called me when he died. I was sorry about it for a long time, and often think of him.

Maybe I'll see you there.

Those guys at Columbia really have a tin ear. Ginsberg is laughing somewhere.

Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404

April. Projected. The ULA plan to picket the 50th anniversary of Howl reading at Columbia University featuring Mark Doty, Ann Douglas, Margo Jefferson, Philip Lopate, Rick Moody, and Jason Shinder, and invite me to attend. I write Yawp and No Oprah for the event, to hand out. I thought that FLORIDA WRITER would take two months to write, but I finish it in March and have April to write I ACCUSE. That will make four books in six months, but the last two books are short. Man, these guys are playing into my hands. I'll be like Jesus throwing the moneychangers out of the temple. Woe unto you hypocrites, lawyers. Strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

Q: John Dullaghan had maybe seven hours of film. That's an estimate. Film of Bukowski, shots of still photographs, interviews with friends, editors, critics, girlfriends, feminist hecklers, wife.

He edited it down to a feature film. Say two hours.

A: I'd rather watch a seven-hour movie, shot in sequence, and edited in the camera.

Than a two-hour film and five hours of outtakes. Or a two-hour film and no outtakes.

Q: Who will publish it?

A: I publish it. At The Daily Bulletin.

Members of the Buzzard Cult download it, print it out, and read it. As it's taking shape.

Q: Who will publish it as a book, and sell it in bookstores?

A: A conventional publisher.

Q: How's that working?

A: Slower than I thought.

Mission statement.

Business plan.

Strategies for implementing measurable objectives.

Q: Do you know why?

A: Civilization is based on literacy. Reading and writing.

We live in a postliterate, or postcivilized society, where people get their information from the television, the radio, small talk, at work, and conversation with their significant other, at home.

Newspapers, consumer magazines.

Four of those--television, radio, slick magazines, and mass-circulation newspapers--contain ads.

Drinking buddies if they go out and drink. Phone conversations with girlfriends.

But they are talking about a zeitgeist that is defined by political propaganda and commercial advertisements. The zeitgeist is shaped. Before it gets to them. Their raw material is massaged. Pre-chewn. It isn't raw, it's processed.

The business of business is culture. Manipulating the culture. Shaping it.

Modern industrial societies are set up so a man must work at a job he finds onerous, boring, and morally reprehensible, to provide for his wife and family. Or a woman has to. Company men are better at it, and better rewarded. Company women.

The artist does not want to do this. He tries to find a way to be independent, to work for himself. To heed his conscience. He urges other people to consider what he's doing and think about doing something similar themselves.

This makes him a threat to the established order. To discipline. He must be silenced. The people who control the means for disseminating his art suppress it. Dissident voices are not heard. They're not given a platform.

But people are in crisis, spiritually. They look to art for a better way. A different answer.

They seek alternate visions out. They find them in the underground.

Sometimes, if he has passion, and perseverance, an underground writer will cross over to the mainstream. He will have the career that was denied him for decades, sometimes.

This doesn't happen to all underground writers. But it happens to some.

It happened to Charles Bukowski.

He made enough money writing to quit his job and write full-time.

That's all a serious writer wants.

Or all I want.

Q: I thought you were in it for the lugwah. The glory.

A: I want to make a salvage archeologist's income writing enema vérité. But I want to make it writing enema vérité, not working as a salvage archeologist and writing before and after work.

Q: One ought to be able to do that.

A: James Michener said you can make a fortune writing but not a living.

To make a working stiff's income, writing, is arrogantly modest. You are demonstrating hubris. Tempting fate.

Q: Why?

A: Our world is overwhelmingly commercial.

The worth of something is how much money it makes. Not how good it is, intrinsically.

If you are anticommercial--and I am anticommercial, not noncommercial--you don't fit. There's no place for you. You are an affront to the rule everyone is bending himself to serve.

Mainstream writers included.

Academics included.

Popular writers, or writers who are the darlings of the academy, are not anticommercial. That's the kiss of death, commercially. They out-Herod Herod, commercially.

J-Franz wouldn't come out and make fun of Oprah.

He couldn't bring himself to say the words.

He was mealy-mouthed.

He said he was polite. It was rude to criticize people like Oprah. It was bad manners, and he had too much class to criticize Oprah.

Q: He wanted to have his cake and eat it.

A: He just looked disingenuous.

He looked like a politician caught with his pants down.

Q: What market is there for what you do?

A: Any time something like I write sneaks past the gatekeeper it creates a succès fou, or runaway success.

America has a passion for the inédit. The undiscovered, the fresh, the new.

The genuine, the real, the authentic.

Folk art is about authenticity. Credibility. Not polish. Not falseness.

It can't be faked and it will not be denied.

There's always a demand for that.