Black Papers: The Presentation

* Wrote The Last Picture Show. Made into a movie.
* Wrote Lonesome Dove. Made into a TV mini-series.
* Won an Oscar for screenplay of Brokeback Mountain.

* Won National Book Award for Dog Soldiers.
* Won PEN/Faulkner Award for A Flag for Sunrise.
* Wrote memoir of the 60s, talking about Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. Talked about drug use.

* Wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Made into an Oscar-winning movie.
* Was the subject of Tom Wolfe's book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
* Was a character in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.
* Visited Kerouac in the Merry Prankster bus.

* If you are as old as Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, and Ken Kesey, and have worked at writing as long, and as hard, as they did, you're probably as good as they are, your career just took a different hop.
* Ken Kesey said, "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie." Just right to be Ken Kesey. Midway between.

* Irascible "Razz" Heap, compare Incredible Hulk, was a senior fellow at the prestigious left-wing think-tank in Point and Shoot, Florida, the Point and Shoot Institute (PSI).
* He wrote white papers on a variety of topics. Politics, the economy. Local color.
* Humor. Black comedy. Black papers.

* Heap posted what he wrote, online, daily, at his web site on the worldwide web, The Daily Bulletin. A Newsletter On the State of the Culture, or, How To Write World Literature From Point and Shoot, Florida.
* He pitched individual books to New York editors and literary agents.
* He heard back no reply or a form letter rejection slip.

* Heap had written what he called a stack.
* A stack is an unpublished, or underpublished shelf.
* Heap called his stack 40-Year Run.
* Each book of Heap's stack was connected to the book before it and the book after it.
* The great long continuous book of Heap's life, after Thoreau. Imagine if Thoreau had had a small, desktop computer.

* And a day job.
* Heap worked at a job. When he had a job.
* At his last job, he learned to use PowerPoint.
* He wrote training courses for unemployed people. It was economic-stimulus-package trickle-down money.
* Some money trickled down to him.

* But Heap had security clearance issues at work.
* He took links to his books down at The Daily Bulletin.
* He stopped posting his books online.
* He felt like he was letting his coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult, down.
* Heap had a cult following. Small, but loyal. High one-, low-two-figures.

* Heap was trained as a dirt archeologist. His name was derived from Shell Heap Archaic, an early archeological period. Before pottery. Before agriculture.
* Heap big heap writer. Sometimes Heap called his stack a heap.
* The Buzzard Cult was from a later archeological period, the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a revitalization movement that swept the Lower Mississippi Valley just before and after European contact.

* The first thing a literary agent wants to know is, "What genre is it?"
* Heap wrote a pamphlet once called Areas Not Interested in Agenting: Poetry, Autobiographical Fiction, Anecdotes and Ravings.
* Heap combined all those in a new genre. Sometimes he wrote all three. In the same book.
* He went back and forth, from the past tense to the present tense, the first person to the third. From memoir to fiction to poetry to bulleted lists. He called what he was doing enema vérité.

* Enema vérité is what you see on the end of the fork when you really look.
* Sometimes, to see what's on the fork we have to eat with chopsticks.
* Nixon gave his enemies a sword. Heap gave the Mall Builder culture an enema.
* Sometimes he called enema vérité stark-nakedism, or the paranoia-critical method.