I'm sorry but
the volume of rejection slips I receive
does not permit an individual reply to your
snotty, disdainful missive. You are not right
for me. I lack enthusiasm for your hidebound mindset
in this difficult publishing environment. Perhaps another writer
will feel differently. There's the honor rolls and the beauty pageants.
Sorority girls going down for a fraternity pin. Fraternity boys
getting married for a piece of ass. Careerists. Nelson Algren said
no one should be a literary agent just because she wants to be one.
Many are called but few are chosen. Keep trying.
Even a blind pig finds an acorn
once in a while.
Just follow
the pack.

One time Potter wrote a short story
for Tyrone's Hogtown Hooter regional magazine
(Pretty Michelle was the brains behind that outfit),
the punch line of which was, "Ha ha, there is no
third mate on a head boat I'm a deckhand."
We killed the grouper and red snapper that day.

He's on the left, I'm on the right.
A garbo asked Potter for a life jacket, and he said,
"What for--all they do is make your titties sore."

A garbo is a native of L. A.
(Lower Alabama) who comes down
to the Redneck Riviera, rents a room,
and fishes for a week. He buys a plastic
GI can at K Mart and fills it full of mingo snapper
and motel ice. From vermilion. Called beeliners,
in Panama City. On the way home, he throws
the lot in a side ditch, pink water, rotten fish,
and all. The opposite of a conservationist.

Should holiday travelers be concerned with terrorist attacks
this Thanksgiving weekend? Yes. And gas prices, Disneyworld,
especially the commercials. Strontium-90 in the atmosphere
from the Americans and the Russians blowing off atomic bombs.
Bush had decided to withdraw from Iraq a month before he was assassinated.
Don't want to put those two words together on the Internet, the software will come
looking for you like an earwig crawling in your ear or a carneira swimming up
your urethra when you piss in the Amazon River. Who knows what evil lurks
in the hearts of men? Sad days are these in Passaic. The Shadow don't.
The Shadow is Victor Jory, for Christ's sake.

Percy Dovetonsils, where are you now that we need you?
Fuck this "Springtime for Hitler" shit. The situation is serious.
Do you feel safer, now that Monkey Boy is in? Space Balls, the movie.
Permanent waves, a boutonniere, cuff links, a string of pearls.
The host, adjusting the knob for his guests. Mixing the martinis.
Did I miss something? The Military-Industrial Complex
is alive and well in academia. Look like one of those
Dip Wars parties, where faculty wives made dueling guacamoles
while faculty men talked business, were chatted up by flirting coeds,
that's how the patronage was handed out, Nuala O'Faolain says.
Jesus H. Statistical Christ, Kathleen.

Patient denies having rage
about his lack of literary recognition,
claims his outlook is "always merry
and bright." Says he has nothing against
Haitians, even though he calls their religious
practices "ululating," and "jabbering in
their heathen tongue." Ought to send them back
to Africa. No, that's the indigenous blacks.
Is he xenophobic towards the Century Village
New York Jews, who view a Florida cracker as
an ignorant hick? Of course not. Your deli man
in Brooklyn was also mine. My prune is yours.
Philip Larkin was a racist, maybe, but he didn't get laid
until he was 41 years old, in the annus mirabilis between
the lifting of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles' first lp.
Madonna on Oprah talking about authorship.

Once Brenda becomes adept at transcribing medical records
she can telecommute. Work from home. Every day will be
Casual Friday, dress-code-wise. No race or battle-of-the-sexes
jokes at the water cooler, no office politics, no jockeying for position,
wondering if you hockied in your own nest with that one, Jack, having to
network and form alliances, exchange theory in the work of Marcel Mauss,
an earlier edition of French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, is she
a Freudian, a Marxist, a cultural evolutionist à la Leslie A. White
at Michigan, a bureaucratic hydraulic despotic elitist (rice paddies
in the Orient, cf. Wittfogel). I distance-teach, sailing my philippics,
jeremiads, and pasquinades out into the howling void of cyberspace.
Joe Mac called the HRAF at Yale (Human Relations Area Files)
the Human Relationships Area Code, and he got a masters degree
in anthropology from FSU. Few are called but many are chosen.
If you truly have a call, you're screwed, Camerado.
The ones who don't are sharpening the knives for you.
Teachers, learners, incense-burners.
I'm still here, John Hartford says,
about the California earthquakes.
Dancing on a platform of my own construction.
¾" marine plywood, salvaged from the county dump.
A knacker in an abattoir, put together out of scrap.

I wasn't really ABD
(all-but-dissertation),
although I had completed
my course work and passed
the comps in every area except
my specialty, North American Archeology
(not just the Southeastern United States).
Once you get the union card you specialize.
Dale McCall knew a man who was an expert on
uterine scars in shrews. Do you know how big
a shrew's uterus is? Picture Pee Wee Herman
holding his fingers close together and saying, "Tiny."
The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

Why do you write redacted on certain headings
in your online journal (OLJ)? First of all,
it is the great long continuous book
of my life, 40-Year Run, a novel.
Journal entries are just a part of it.
Ezra Pound made Laughlin put
the black lines of the censor in
his Cantos. Hemingway wrote unprintable,
in places where he could not use the word
he wanted to. He drew attention to
the absurdity of such restrictions.
Expletive deleted sums it up.
One can guess the exact term
from the context, so who is fooled,
whom protected, from what? Dirty words?
Thoughts? A feeble attempt at mind control?
A sense of modesty, decorum, punctilio?
Manners? Advice to the lovelorn?
Brew wrote a column once called "Ask Doktor Dork,"
for the newsletter KorporateKulture.Kom (KKK).
From what the old NCOs called an early Quality Control
program, Zero Defects. Zelda Dork. We put the K
in kwality. Around the time that Lucent stock
went from $84 a share down to so low they were almost
delisted from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Good morning, may we Marfak your car?
This is my brother-in-law's car, Marfak you.
Have you had it in an olive, the oral polio vaccine?
The good news is you don't have polio. The bad news is
you have SIV. Simian immunovirus. You pays your money
and you makes your choice. Syphilis or yaws.