Do-It-Yourself (DIY)
Q: You saw you weren’t going to get the PhD. You signed up for Thesis, to draw your stipend, stayed at home, and wrote. You taught yourself to write.
A: Yes. I stole the last year of my fellowship to become a writer. I saw my chance and took it. I seized the moment.
Carpe donut. Seize the donut.
I seized a beignet. And Café du Monde coffee. In a yellow enamel French-drip pot.
Q: Did you learn how to write?
A: I learned how to write, how to cook, and how to combine writing and work.
I worked on a dig
at
Q: What cookbooks did you use?
A: The Times-Picayune’s Creole Cookbook, Marion Brown’s Southern Cook Book, and The Kitchen, by Nicolas Freeling. “Run it through the hurdy-gurdy and call it Bounty of the Sea.”
Brenda bought me the Freeling book because she knew I liked his mysteries.
Now, I might add Gulf Coast Cooking: Seafood from the Florida Keys to the Yucatan Peninsula, by Virginia T. Elverson.
Where else are you going to get a recipe for snook in ancho chile sauce (Robalo Abodabo).
Q: What books did you use to learn how to write?
A: The Rhetoric of Fiction, by Wayne C. Booth, Carlos Baker’s biography of Ernest Hemingway, and John D. MacDonald’s paperback original mysteries. Plus Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
Q: What books taught you how to combine writing and work?
A: Post Office. Bukowski’s poems and short stories in the NOLA Express. The small press movement.
The small press movement was alive and well in 1971.
Q: And you and Brenda were happy. Not a care in the world. Living in a great city,
A: Yes. It was a great year.
Everyone should have a year like that.
Teachers, learners, incense-burners.
Rock and roll had killed jazz but underground writing was still alive.
Q: You weren’t trying to be an underground writer, though. You were trying to be a mainstream writer.
A: Yes. But underground writer is the larval stage of mainstream writer. That’s where you learn the ropes. Develop your chops.
I was developing my chops.
Q: A trumpet player can lose his lip in an eight-bar rest.
A: Ain’t it the truth.
The underground separates the men from the boys.
In the
neighborhoods of Houston, Lightnin’
Q: Leon Russell.
A: Mad Dogs and Englishmen.
I tear up when Willie Nelson sings “Song for You” in Honeysuckle Rose.
Q: Jazz was dead but there was still Lightnin’
There was Leon Russell.
There was Willie Nelson.
A: Dread Clampitt played “Whiskey River” Sunday.
There’s Dread Clampitt.
Time marches on.
A reggae-bluegrass fusion band playing Pink Floyd.