Q: So you're at the house, writing GULF COAST STORIES.
What did
you just finish writing?
A: A book called ON ASSIGNMENT: FOUR MONTHS OF DAILY TYPEWRITING.
ON ASSIGNMENT: FOUR MONTHS OF DAILY TYPEWRITING is about combining writing, work, and family. For 38 years. Raising children, now enjoying the grandchildren. Being a presenter at a writers conference. Speaking on publishing as a business and self-publishing as an alternative. Combining fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and a movie script in the same book. Posting it online, daily, as I write it (the second half anyway-for the first half I had security issues with the defense contractor, at work). I think back to the old mail art correspondence novel David Zack was doing with his dog Bleeto out of the Immortality Centre, in Tepoztlan, Mexico. Copier art. All literature is world literature, Goethe said. What's it like to be a writer like Herman Melville in a culture that wants the books it sees on Oprah Winfrey or in a large pile at Wally World, big-box-discounted. Melville worked for the Customs Service. When he retired, they gave him a gold watch, and wished him luck. "I'd prefer not to," he said. A Story of Wall Street. Wall Street is too big to fail. I failed. I botched my book. It is a final hash. From hacher, to chop small. To mince. I don't mince words. That's why I have to work as a technical writer, from time to time. I'm 70. ON ASSIGNEMENT, my temporary assignment ended and I was reverted to my permanent rank: househusband.
ON ASSIGNMENT was in two parts. "Held-in-Abeyance (HIA): Talking to
Myself" and "Househusband: A Correspondence Novel."
Q: So you just end ON ASSIGNMENT and start GULF COAST STORIES?
A: Yes.
Q: Don't you try to sell ON ASSIGNMENT?
A: Sell it to whom?
Q: A publisher. Through an agent.
A: I sent the first two parts of HOUSEHUSBAND to Melville House Publishing.
That was before HOUSEHUSBAND became twice as long, or combined with HELD-IN-ABEYANCE
(HIA) to form ON ASSIGNMENT.
I am waiting to hear from them.
Q: Do you identify with Melville?
A: Not really.
Just in the sense that the hero in modern fiction
is immobilized. I identify with Kafka.
Q: Captain Ahab wasn't immobilized. He was a man of action.
A: I was thinking of Bartleby the Scrivener.
Q: In the beginning of his biography of Melville, Andrew Delbanco quotes the Sopranos saying that Billy Budd is a gay novel.
A: Melville has made it into the culture. In a way I haven't, and probably will not, before I die. I'm 70. I had to look up Delbanco's first name in Google.
Q: Was Billy Budd a gay novel.
A: Leslie Fiedler thought so.
Q: Who was Leslie Fiedler?
A: Somebody Nuala O'Faolain fucked because "that is how the patronage
was handed out."
That is how you got a job with a magazine, a book contract,
a teaching position, a grant.
That is how you won a prize.
You fucked
the judge.
Q: That's appalling. No wonder Melville quit writing after Moby-Dick.
A: He wrote Bartleby the Scrivener.
I think he left Billy
Budd in a tin box.
I used to say I left my stack in a tin shed. A rental
storage shed.
My life's-work is moldering in a rental storage shed.
I finish ON ASSIGNMENT, I put it in the shed, and start GULF COAST STORIES.
Q: Enough about that.
A: Just so. A little of that goes a long way.