Q: That clears up the confusion.

But if he uses a different cover, you'll have to write a different back cover.

A: Or someone else will have to.

Anyhow, I'll use it as a flier.

Q: You have to establish the brand. An identity.

You have to establish an identity and then ride for the brand.

A: I went by Woodie Long's studio the other day.

Dot showed me a wire rack with Woodie cards, and envelopes, in it. Different Woodie paintings reduced to greeting card size.

You can put the rack up beside the cash register in a gift shop, a bookstore, a music store, a head shop, a surfer shop.

It's anti-niche marketing.

The idea is Woodie can't be put in a niche.

What niche do you put him in? Kite-fliers, school buses, taxicabs among the skyscrapers, pickaninnies jumping on the bed. Black and white cotton-pickers and angels?

He's like Howard Finster.

Woodie is his own niche.

A writer has a voice.

Once a reader discovers a writer it likes, it buys everything by and about him it can find, regardless of genre. Or title.

What was Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam? about? Big game hunting in Alaska.

Q: Are you proud to be an underground writer?

A: Yes.

My goal has always been to cross over from the underground to the mainstream, but that's a hard row to hoe.

Only two writers have done it, in their lifetime.

Richard Brautigan and Charles Bukowski.

Q: What about Hunter S. Thompson.

A: He was always a mainstream writer.

He was just a weird mainstream writer.

An extreme, or intense mainstream writer.

You can't call the guy Rolling Stone sends to cover the Pulitzer divorce trial an outsider.

Mind you, I'm saddened by his suicide, just as he was saddened by Hemingway's suicide.

But he lived a full life.

Q: You lived a full life.

A: I wonder what Tom Wolfe has to say about Thompson.

Tom Wolfe was kind of a right-wing Hunter S. Thompson. A PhD in American Studies instead of a drop-out. Went straight to the Herald-Tribune magazine, instead of slogging away in the trenches in Puerto Rico.

Compare Electric Kool Aid Acid Test to Hell's Angels, or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

As Whitman said, "I am the man, I suffered, I was there."

Thompson was the man. Tom Wolfe was Jackie Kennedy with a Press Graflex camera, working as a reporter.

Did your daddy buy you that?

Hunting quail with buckshot.

That's like hunting deer with birdshot. You can't roller skate in a herd of buffalo.

Q: I'd say R. Crumb is an underground writer who crossed over to the mainstream.

A: Me too.

Ray Charles said he liked country music because the songs told good stories.

Crumb told good stories.

And the drawings added something straight text does not have.

Q: Crumb sold a suitcase full of drawings and moved to France.

He just couldn't take America anymore.

A: Michael Montfort sold his Bukowski archive and moved to Prague.

America is a hideous country.

It's like McCarthyism, all over again.

Criminals running everything.

Q: Will you ever go to Europe, or the Caribbean, to live? Cuba? Costa Rica?

A: That's like a black jazz musician moving to Copenhagen.

Somebody has to stay here and fight.

Besides, I'm not in a position to go anywhere, financially.

My options are constrained by my financial circumstances.

Limited.

Q: Success corrupts, but failure limits, or narrows.

A: I don't call it failure.

I call it doing the best you can with what you have.

If I ever have more, I'll do more.

If I don't, that's just the way the ball bounced.

At the end, Bukowski was proud of his accomplishment.

As well he should have been.

Read the last chapter of Pulp.

Q: Do you have the sense that you are on the verge of a big change in your status?

A: I am in a big change. My LDA fellowship. Which Brenda and I did ourselves.

I think it will just peter out. I'll have to find a job that grinds my guts to glass when this is over.

Q: You don't think you'll be discovered?

A: I don't see why I would be.
If it hasn't happened in 33½ years, why would it happen now?

Q: This doesn't make you sad, or piss you off?

A: I accept my fate. Love your fate. That's what I've learned. Love your fate.