Q: What does sneaking past the gatekeeper mean?
Is an agent going to accept you as a client and sell POTLICKER JORUNAL to a publisher?
A: Why wouldn’t that happen to me?
It happened to Jack Kerouac.
It happened to Ken Kesey.
It happened to William S. Burroughs.
It happened to Hubert Selby, Jr.
It happened to Hunter S. Thompson.
Q: I think it will happen to you.
Of course, you may be dead before it happens.
It hasn’t happened in 40 years. Why would it happen in Year 41?
A: That’s putting my fate in the hands of other people.
Principalities and powers. The forces of darkness.
Q: Spiritual wickedness in high places.
A: I enjoy the buffet at Popeyes.
I like staying in a chain motel. Eating in chain restaurants. Applebee’s. TGI Friday’s.
Well, Outback. Carrabba’s.
Reading USA Today to find out what’s on the cable TV that night.
Driving on the interstate.
It’s the best of all possible worlds. I am living the American dream.
Disney World.
Blue Highways is precious.
Give me the interstate. It’s faster. Cleaner. More efficient.
If
they’d had an interstate when Henry Miller wrote The Air-Conditioned Nightmare he would have gotten to
Q: The Tropics and Black Spring were only banned for 28 years,
At some point being unpublished, or underpublished, will work for you, instead of against you.
A: I used to think that it would. Now, I’m not so sure.
Q: So what does sneaking past the gatekeeper mean?
A: I’m already sneaking past the gatekeeper.
It isn’t something I am going to do, or hope to do, someday.
It is something I am doing.
I’m posting my books, online, daily, as I write them, at The Daily Bulletin.
What do I need an agent or a publisher for?
If they think you’re needy you are fucked.
Q: Money? Recognition?
Don’t you want your accomplishment to be recognized?
A: The Buzzard Cult know who I am.
They know what I’m doing.
They write to me.
Thank you for the latest I enjoyed it.
Thank you for 2011. Keep up the good work.
Sneak, snuck, snookered.
I snookered the bastards.
I am snookering them.
Q: You have everything you need.
A: I have everything I want.
Did I need a publisher and an agent to write POTLICKER JOURNAL?
Q: No.
A: I don’t need an agent and a publisher to write SNEAKING PAST THE GATEKEEPER.
They are guarding first-class on the Titanic.
If the Buzzard Cult went away—if They, dem, shut down The Daily Bulletin for nudity, sex, or exretion—how big a help were the Buzzard Cult? When you get right down to it.
I appreciate them.
They make me feel needed.
But I’m like Frankenstien’s monster. Push come to shove they won’t come to my rescue.
Aiee, The Phantom. I’m The Phantom.
I’d write if I didn’t have a cult.
I wrote for 30 years before I started publishing books on the web in real time.
I can always go back to pamphlets and xeroxed manuscripts.
Myself, I prefer a writer who would do it even if he didn’t get paid.
It’s purer somehow.
He did it out of an inner passion to do it.
The sans-culottes are not going to storm the castle for me.
They’re going to watch me burn. For entertainment. For spectacle.
America kills its writers.
Why should I help them speed that process along? Why should I die to entertain television viewers?
Q: You are living the American dream.
Go to school, get a job, find a wife, settle down.
You created a body of work, invented a form to present it in, and found a means to get it out to your readers through.
A: Why would I stick my own leg in the trap? Trap myself in the corporate maw?
Where are they outsourcing our literature to?
Literature is local, like genius.
Idiosyncratic.
Individual.
It’s a sport or freak of nature.
Bogger Red calls himself Sporting Life.
He’s like Mickey Rourke making a movie about rugby.
Q: Mickey Rourke played Henry Chinaski in Barfly.
A: A great performance.
Are you Henry Chinaksi?
No, I’m Leon Spinks.
