Wednesday, December 1 (cont'd)

Q: What's an underground writer procedural novel?

A: A stand-alone crime novel is a crime novel. A series of crime novels with a recurring cast is a police procedural.

I am writing a series of related underground writer novels, with a recurring cast.

How Brew gets along with his co-workers. His bossman. His wife and kids.

Q: A recurring theme in Miami Blues and New Hope for the Dead was where to find affordable housing.

A: Yes, themes can recur, too.

My theme, stated in five words or less, is vocation and career in conflict.

In Dade County, all novels are about real estate.

For a working stiff, in Bay County, they are about transportation.

How will I get to work if my car doesn't start? How will my wife get to work if her car doesn't start?

Margie Summerfield says cars that might or might not start are one of the fun parts of poverty.

My car is becoming unreliable.

The door handle on the inside driver's side quit working.

I have to lower the power window and open the door from the outside.

This morning, the power window quit operating.

Later, it started working again. But it could fail at any time.

I'm going to have to buy a new used car.

That's one more payment I'll have to make.

I am another payment book away from being able to stay at the house and ride a bicycle to the post office and the library.

Q: And on side trips.

A: You're right, I'll need a car for side-trips.

I can't make any more side trips until I am a writer, and can rent a car, and deduct it as a business expense.

Q: Which you won't do writing underground writer procedural novels.

A: I write the kind of books I like to read.

Reading one of my books is like surfing the Internet, or reading several library books--and magazines and newspapers--at the same time.

Q: Thorstein Veblen's subtitle for The Higher Learning in America was A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities by Business Men.

It strikes me that one of your themes is A Memorandum On the Conduct of Literature by Business Men.

A: It's more a reflection on what happens when a writer writes a book like Carl Hiaasen's Team Rodent, and then has to submit it to Disney, who are more than amusement park operators and owners of cartoon characters as intellectual property--they are book publishers, TV networks, and movie studios.

All the book publishers are TV networks and movie studios.

It's like Upton Sinclair having to submit The Jungle to the meatpackers.

All Veblen did with The Higher Learning in America was get himself blacklisted as an academic.

But he was onto something.

Business men are the problem.

In every profession. From medicine to philanthropy.

How does society gain from buy cheap, sell dear?

From maximize profit regardless of the social costs.

Social costs don't get factored in. The balance sheet leaves them off.

Brew tries to put back in more than he takes out. He tries to consider quality-of-life. That's hard to do in a society that wants to go back to Social Darwinism.

We not only should teach evolution in the schools, we should teach social studies. Civics. In a way that shows that laissez-faire capitalism is destructive. It benefits a few and harms everyone else. And the few are not nice people. They are ruthless.

Q: Nick Tosches said he started out as a writer for a certain reason, and he looked around, and it's "Gee, I work for Enron."

You are just a digit in some computerized accounting system. It's not even Bob Kratchit, it's some computer that you can't kick.

A: Doctors can't practice medicine, researchers can't research, writers cannot write.

That is, they can write but not get published. Write any fool thing they want, as long as they don't expect to see it in print.

Chester Himes said if you want to destroy a man, don't value what he does.

The only thing the Mall Builder culture values is money, and anybody worth his salt puts whatever his trade is above money, and so he is at odds with the people who can make or break his career, and the system rewards the pricks and asskissers and punishes the idealists and the principled.

With Bush in power we are seeing what corporatism, which translates fascism, in Italian, really entails.

Q: Ike warned about the military-industrial-academic complex.

A: Yes. Most academics don't like to talk about their dependence on federal grants.

Who pays the piper calls the tune.

No more George Washington Carver studying the peanut in an historically black chemistry lab.

Q: Publish it yourself, or find a small press to publish it.

A: Good idea.

Q: Nick Tosches attacked publishing in his last novel.

He said they wouldn't accept many classics, now.

They only want the next Stephen King. Oprah Sex Tips.

A literary editor can't work for them. They are driven out by the relentless emphasis on bottom line.

Literary writing is as doomed as madrigal singing.

A: Good. Then I don't have to say it.

I'm suspect. As a rejected writer. I just sound disgruntled.

He's a distinguished writer. He sounds critical, in the best sense.

Of course, a writer criticizing publishing is like a cow criticizing McDonald's.

Q: Or Charlie the Tuna criticizing Star-Kist.

We want tunas that taste good, Charlie-not tunas with good taste.

A: Like I said, the 10% that didn't get the word.

Q: Jeff Potter's mother-in-law cooked a 51 lb turkey because she'd always wanted to.

It took 13 hours to cook and was still steaming five hours later when she brought it to Jeff and Martha's house.

A: I always wanted to write a 51 lb book.

Q: Take what you want--then pay for it.

A: That's always been my favorite Spanish proverb.