Q: So WORKINGMAN'S BLUES NO. 2 is a book about going to a writer's conference.

A: Yes. And writing a training course.

We're keeping Rowan this weekend.

So it's about grandchildren, too. And backyard chickens.

I went to hear Slim Fatz, but I didn't go to Marianna to hear Owen and Balder play.

Q: That's next weekend. You aren't going?

A: I don't trust my car to get over there and back.

Plus, the air conditioner doesn't always work and the windows won't go down.

Q: Do you think anything will come of They, or dem?

A: What would come of it?

I wrote it. I handed it out at the writers conference.

I mailed copies to the Buzzard Cult.

That's what comes of it.

I mailed a copy to Dan Simon, Seven Stories Press.

It's in the book.

If WORKINGMAN'S BLUES NO. 2 is published, They, or dem is in the book.

Q: Does anybody plan to publish WORKINGMAN'S BLUES NO. 2?

A: That's my point. No.

That's why a workingman has the blues.

It's hopeless.

Q: That's funny.

A: You have to see the humor of it.

Q: Marshall McLuhan used to lecture from a deck of index cards.

One time he dropped the deck and the order was randomly rearranged.

He picked them up and lectured from them.

The new juxtaposition showed him things he hadn't seen before. New associations.

A: Who's Marshall McLuhan?

Tom Wolfe wrote an article about him called "What If He Is Right?"

Q: Who's Tom Wolfe? Didn't he invent the New Journalism?

A: No, that was Terry Southern. But he was an early practitioner of it.

I invented the new novel. The nouveau roman.

Q: No, that was Stewart Home.

A: Stewart Home wrote, in 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess,

They were an attempt to collapse the entire output of a pulp author--you know, a massive output, the entire oeuvre, however many books, twenty, thirty, a hundred whatever it was, into one book. When I went and read through the entire output of one of these pulp writers I found they'd repeat sentences, paragraphs, basic plot ideas through each book and to me that was interesting. On the one hand they were operating under this constraint of time, because the only way of making money with pulp is to write fast, and on the other hand when I read all of them together and treated them as one novel I was basically seeing the same thing from different perspectives which very much reminded me Claude Simon and Alain Robbe-Grillet. So I was working with the concept of pulp being the same as the nouveau roman, and I was trying to make that repetition that occurs through successive pulp novels readily apparent, by collapsing it into one novel. However, because of the simulacrum element in my earlier novels which entailed using narrative, people seemed to think I was trying to write pulp. A lot of critics thought this. It's hard to judge the non-critics--you end up sounding like Hegel making distinction between the critic and the more general reader--but then, I have the critic's opinions in black and white before me, so that's easier to deal with. A lot of people seemed to miss what I was doing, and also there's this bizarre thing within the English trade. If you write in a stripped down journalistic style it is considered to be an unliterary style and people think you can't write. They don't think you've actually spent a long time perfecting this very pared down style. They don't have this problem in America where they have this hard-boiled tradition. I prefer Jim Thompson to Raymond Chandler but people can recognise that stripped down writing is writing you have to work at, regardless of whether they go for Thompson or Chandler, or even Hemingway.

I'm thinking of writing a pulp novel next.

Q: WORK.

A: That's correct.