Mother Jones magazine calls itself MoJo. A great old muckraking journal.

Michael Moore used to write for Mother Jones. Barbara Ehrenreich was a regular contributor.

The editor of The Nation, Carey McWilliams, commissioned Hunter S. Thompson to write an article about outlaw motorcycle gangs. It became the book Hell's Angels.

That book broke Thompson out. Next he wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

You meet the nicest people on a Honda. You meet Hunter S. Thompson on a Vincent Black Shadow.

He isn't nice. He is your worst nightmare.

He called his story about the Pulitzer divorce trail, in Rolling Stone, "A Dog Took My Place."

Meanest dog in Alabam'. Get 'em, Dan.

Michael Vick is sorry that he raised pit bull dogs to fight, and fought them, and bet on them, and killed the ones who wouldn't fight, to purify the breed.

No dogs were harmed in the writing of this story. It's a story.

Pyle thought he'd write a "Letter From Point and Shoot," like Janet Flanner used to write, from Paris, for The New Yorker, but The New Yorker wasn't interested.

Mother Jones wasn't interested, The Nation wasn't interested. Rolling Stone wasn't interested.

Thomas McGrath published a long poem called Letter To an Imaginary Friend. Copper Canyon Press finally brought all the parts of the book out together.

I try to make my books read like a letter from an imaginary friend. But I write a book like that a month.

Who will publish something like that?

I will.

Anything you have to do, you have to go on and do yourself, Rahsaan Roland Kirk said.

Do-it-yourself is a strategery.

Don't look at it as a means to an end, look at it as the end itself.

It's not a stepping stone to something higher. It's a terminal destination.

The better you are at it, the less the mainstream media want to have to do with you.

You are a loose can on the deck. You wouldn't fit in their operation.

You're too quirky, too independent, too unpredictable, too volatile. You're unstable.

You might spontaneously combust. Melt down. It's unprofessional, brother.

What do you think this is--Amateur Night?