"Fear of the sack keeps modern, Western man in line," George Orwell wrote.

The sack and the blacklist.

I was fired for blogging at my last four jobs, and I didn't have a computer at two of them.

I thought about the writing in my head at work.

Then I typed up what I wrote in my head at work when I got home, and posted it at my web site.

I wrote about dem.

All they had to do was look up my name in a search engine and there I was, committing vocational hara-kiri.

My last job I was a handyman at the L. A. (Lower Alabama) Folk Life Center. I called myself the Anthropologist-in-Residence (AIR). I wrote a piece called the Anthropologist-in-Residence (AIR) Creed.

I advised people to study their jobs like an anthropologist studies an unknown tribe, then spill the goods on the company. Air dirty linen. Out the managers.

I think the bossman read that and thought I meant to do that, there.

I did mean to do it.

I was laid off.

Since I hadn't done anything wrong, I was able to to go on unemployment.

I drew unemployment for a year.

It was like winning a fellowship. I was an AIR Fellow.

Isaac Bashevis Singer called himself a luftmensch. An impractical person, who lived on air, or with his head in the clouds.

I won a luftmensch grant. I was a luftmensch.

Paranoia is characterized by persecution mania and delusions of grandeur.

I call myself the poster boy for marketplace censorship.

I say I am to the Mall Builder culture as Solzhenitsyn was to the Russian state.

That ain't been proved yet, as Faulkner says.

Still, could none of my books have been good enough to publish? Or is something else working, here?

Nelson Algren said it used to be if a writer went Hollywood he had sold out, but now, if you write what New York wants you have sold out. New York is Hollywood.

New York is Hollywood, books are television, the writer is a movie star, or a rock star. The bookstore in the mall is the Gap and the Internet is the bookstore in the mall.

Who's Nelson Algren?

Nelson Algren sold two books to Hollywood. A Walk on the Wild Side and The Man with the Golden Arm.

He felt like Hollywood (1) screwed him on the money, and (2) made a botch of the movie, by departing from the book.

He vowed never again to sell a book to Hollywood unless he (1) got a fair shake on the money, and (2) retained artistic control of the book.

He said Hollywood wouldn't buy a book on those terms, and if Hollywood wouldn't buy it, New York wouldn't publish it, because Hollywood was where the money was.

He said he lost heart, lost his innocence. He couldn't bring himself to write a book he knew would not be published.

He was a National Book Award winner who had written two bestsellers.

How could this happen to him?

If it could happen to him, could it happen to you?

If you tried to write like he did would it happen to you?

One of my favorite books is Conversations with Nelson Algren, by H. E. F. Donohue.

If you want to be a writer, Conversations with Nelson Algren is a book you should read.

I write about the sack and the blacklist.

I write about feeling paranoid.

Losing heart.

Losing my innocence.

I have kept my innocence. It is an acquired innocence, not a simple, naïve innocence. It was tested in the annealing flame of experience. Of 38 years of rejection by New York.

I test it every time out.

Can I do this?

Can I keep from being depressed, cynical, or pessimistic?

Can I stay positive, focused, and not distracted by side shit, don't give me none of that side shit.

If you're sane, and everybody else is crazy, you're crazy, relative to them.

Sanity is a normative concept.

The censor was the magistrate who took the census.

What was right and wrong depended on what was popular and unpopular.

Ostracism tantamount to death, in primitive societies.

From the Greek word for potsherd. Used in the balloting.

Job scraped his boils with a potsherd.

The Buzzard Cult is named after the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a revitalization movement that swept the Lower Mississippi Valley just before and after European contact.

I was trained as a dirt archeologist. A Southeastern archeologist.

In The Southeastern Indians, Charles M. Hudson writes,

It has often been observed that something of the frontier still hangs on in the culture of the South. Partly this came about because of the isolation of the South during the Civil War, and partly it is because of the bitter poverty in the South for many decades afterwards. Southerners continued their frontier ways after such ways were abandoned elsewhere because they could not afford any other. Is it stretching things too far to see a hint of the Southeastern Indian in some of this frontier heritage? Is there something of it in the Southerner's love of hunting and fishing? And is there something of it in the Southerner's admiration of wild and reckless bravery?

I'm just a good old boy. A hick.

I call what I write Hick Lit. By analogy with Chick Lit.

I call Chick Lit Chick Lite.

I send it to New York.

I write another book. A new book.

Everything else is side shit. Keep on writing.

On the Necessity of Vocational Disobedience.

If you're a writer, that's who you disobey.

Dem.