Q: We’re looking for writers who don’t want to eat shit and lie.
A: Advertising.
Television.
The corporate maw.
Help, I have been trapped by the corporate maw.
Q: Help Underserved Arts Communities (HUAC)—or I’ll kill you. No, that’s Support Mental Health.
A: Did you see the jowls on that son of a bitch?
Q: Nixon and the pumpkin tapes.
A: I have a lady in the balcony, doctor.
Q: That would be the easy, the popular thing to do.
A: I remember when the Division of Cultural
affairs held a workshop in
I thought I was an arts organization, as a small press, Mixed Breed.
It turns out I wasn’t.
I had to be (1) associated with a university writing program, or (2) a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation with a board of directors. I couldn’t be a seat-of-the-pants, one-man shop. Couldn’t be for-profit, although my chances of earning a profit were nil.
Q: Mixed Breed.
Your motto was, “In desktop publishing before the IBM PC.”
A: Yes. I was in desktop publishing from 1976, when Larry published Playing Hurt.
When I wrote READFEST ’76.
Q: Larry also published Raw Energy: A Cookbook for Action Painters in 1976.
A: Yes.
Q: You don’t list Playing Hurt and Raw Energy in the catalogue raisonné of your stack, Great Wall of Books.
A: No. I list them in Pamphlets, Chapbooks, Fliers, and Four-Page Sheets.
Q: How many pamphlets, chapbooks, fliers, and four-page sheets have you published?
A: Hardhat Snood was 298.
Q: And Playing Hurt was the first one?
A: Yes. In 1976.
Q: Hardhat Snood was published in 2012?
A: Yes.
Q: And you can’t apply for a grant as an arts organization because you are not not-for-profit.
A: Yes.
Q: Can you apply as an individual artist.
A: Yes. But you see there my problem is you have to apply in one of three categories, Fiction, Nonfiction, or Poetry, and I combine all three, in the same book.
Also, because of blind judging, you can’t submit work that identifies who you are.
But that would disqualify Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, or Ernest Hemingway, who were characters in their own books.
Think of Death in the Afternoon, In Cold Blood, or The Executioner’s Song.
Q: Or any gonzo journalism.
A: Tom Wolfe considered Terry Southern a founder of the New Journalism.
Remember “Twirling at Ole Miss.”
Q: I do. A student wrote nigger-lover in the margin of one of Faulkner’s books in the university library.
A: Southern wrote the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove. Along with Jim Thompson.
Q: Those old pulp writers got around.
A: Thompson’s biographer said he left his wife a coffeecan full of unpaid bills.
Q: Who was that? Roderick Thorpe? He wrote an introduction to a collection of Thompson’s work.
A: Right. He wasn’t a proper biographer.
He wrote an introduction to a compilation of three short novels.
Q: Was Barry Gifford a biographer of Jim Thompson?
A: He was Thompson’s publisher. But he wrote introductions to the noir novels he reprinted as Black Lizard books.
Gifford also reprinted Charles Willeford’s out-of-print noir novels as Black Lizard books.
