What Genre Is It?
Q: Didn’t you call a character Black McGoon?
A: Yes. Also Large Brown.
Also
He was writing a book called The Volcanoes of Wakulla County.
A lonely crabber’s wife might seduce him.
Q: I thought Heap kept his pecker in his pants.
A: He was a happily married man. But you need that possibility in romantic suspense novels.
Q: Is Double-Sawbuck (XX) in the genre romantic suspense?
A: Well, I have Heap rescue Miss Weekiwachee from the Creature.
Q: The Creature From the Black Lagoon?
A: Yes.
Q: What book was that in?
A: BLACK HARVEST.
Q: Right.
Not Blue Ball Blues?
A: No. Blue Ball Blues was a pamphlet about going to Creaturefest, at Wakulla Springs.
Also Vasocongestion Blues.
I look up Blue Ball Blues in a search engine and get a hit on PIE IN THE SKY, BYE AND BYE.
PIE IN THE SKY, BYE AND BYE. April 1 - April 15. 30,000 words. I pitch a session on The Use of Weblogs in Literature to BloggerCon 2004. I finish writing F-LOG: THE FIRST DRAFT OF LITERATURE, the YU News Service columns. Redacted Poems comes back from Bottle of Smoke Press. I combine "F-Log" and "Redacted Poems," and will add "A Casebook On Crank-Lettres Confidential: The Art Brew School Of Daily Typewriting Writing," when it is finished, to form WHAT GENRE IS YOUR PARACHUTE? A NOVELLA ABOUT BLOGGING, A CHAPBOOK OF REDACTED POEMS, A CASEBOOK ON A ROMAN-FEUILLETON, PERHAPS MY CHEF D'OOVRAY, a one-volume condensation of, and introduction to, Crank-Lettres Confidential: The Art Brew School Of Daily Typewriting Writing, like The Hobbit is a condensation of, and introduction to, Lord of the Rings. Out of the blue, I am laid off. Oh, shit. I decide to send out F-LOG by itself, and change the name to SACKED, OR, LADY DON'T LET YOUR BLOG BITE ME. My employer pays me ten days separation pay, in lieu of two weeks notice. I have time at the house to do my taxes and wrap my book up. I don't hear back on "The Use of Weblogs in Literature." I guess they aren't really literature, they are chatter. Nattering nabobs of negativism. Maybe Spiro wasn't so bad. Compared to Cheney. No, wait. Brew combines the poetry pamphlets Blue Ball Blues, Redacted Poems, Art Brew: The Spent Effluent Collection, Let's Get W*t, The Wardrobe Malfunction Program-Related Activities versus the Post-Rehearsal Decision to Have a Costume Reveal (compare The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster), and the nonfiction pamphlet Writing the Great American Novel on the Worldwide Web, to form the short book PAMPHLETEER, he changes the name of SACKED, OR, LADY DON'T LET YOUR BLOG BITE ME to BLOGGER, and combines "Pamphleteer" (26,000 words) and "Blogger" (32,000 words) to form SACKED, the one-volume introduction to Crank-Lettres Confidential: The Art Brew School of Daily Typewriting Writing, rather than WHAT GENRE IS YOUR PARACHUTE.
I guess what genre is it is a perennial question. Also, writing columns at work and being fired for blogging. Also telling BloggerCon what I am writing is literature and having BloggerCon ignore me.
Q: You might as well call romantic suspense literature.
A: Exactly.
Q: No wonder you have a chip on your shoulder.
A: The Cow Chip of Doom.
No wonder.
Q: And publishing a blizzard of self-published pamphlets.
A: The tacky little pamphlet (tlp).
John Held, Jr. interviewed Blaster Al. He asked him about the tlp.
A "tlp", and this is a term that Haddock came up with back in the '70s, to describe what it was that a lot of us were doing - "tlp" means "tacky little pamphlet." It's an interesting - I don't know if you could call it a genre, but it's an interesting format. And I've been doing a lot of those. Things like MOONHEAD NEWS, which is devoted to gibberish. A "tlp" like MOONHEAD NEWS will pass back and forth through the mail and there's also a fairly wide distribution, by hand, to unexpected places, like laundrymats, where they get mixed in with the WATCHTOWERS, and some of them wind up in the small press mags, and elsewhere - and what it is that these little pamphlets are actually showing you depends a lot on the context of where and how you happen to encounter them. Something that seems natural in a mail-art context can become very strange when you pick it up in a laundrymat, or in a psychiatrist's waiting room. There's a lot under the surface that's unaccounted for, particularly if you're somebody who's merely come in to wash some clothes, not really knowing the origin of the thing when you happen to pick it up and look at it. Currently, John E. Mumbles and I have been busy experimenting with a "Creative Theology" series, and, before that, I spent six months doing a series of tlp's that I call the WHEAT-FEET-PETE-GLEET-JEET-MEET-MEAT-BEETS-KEATS-SEAT series. A dozen or so of these tlp's in that series. They're hard to describe, which is what I like best about them. Ostensibly, you could pick one up and say, "well, this is about wheat - sort of." But it's also tied up with a lot of other stuff, not all of it rational, so that, for me, speaking metaphysically, it's a little bit like the problematic aspects engendered when you do a stand-in for Hansel and Gretel. I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but when you do a stand-in for Hansel and Gretel, there is like this constant play on the tension of not wanting to enter the gingerbread house, of not wanting to have to go through the whole business with the witch. But at the same time, the witch is built into the process. The witch is a traditional expectation that's hard to avoid. I'm not sure, but this impulse may be behind what I'm writing - that I'm trying to find ways, you know, like I'm agreeing to play the game and do this stand-in for Hansel and Gretel, but at the same time I'm trying to see if I can somehow avoid the enervating part, which, for me, is having to go in the gingerbread house and dick around with the witch. Like I say, this has been going on over a period of years and I have, in effect, faced the problem hundreds of times, and (laughing) there are times when I have to face the suspicion that what I've been doing may simply have left the rails. That would be funny - if, without realizing it, I'd gone the route taken by somebody like Vladimir Pyast. Valdimir Pyast was Poe's translator in Russia, and at a special poetry convocation, right in the middle of reciting Poe's "Ulalume," he went stark raving mad. I mean, who's to say, really? I think I'm sitting here talking to you, that we're doing this interview; but that's the thing, because if I've gone up my own pole far enough, in reality it could be that I'm sitting here playing a banjo and talking to a goose.