From: Jack Saunders
To: S. A. Griffin
Subj: Contact

I looked up Michael Montfort in Google and got a hit on your interview with him.

Yesterday, I posted a reminiscence of Hunter S. Thompson at The Daily Bulletin in the morning and got email from a reader that night asking me if I was really the wino on the Muskie campaign train (no--I am an impostor).

From an online novel called DRAGGING UP: ART BREW GIVES HIMSELF AN LDA GRANT (LAST DITCH ATTEMPT).

Q: Dana Gioia, the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, said, "Los Angeles is perhaps the only great city in the world that has not yet produced a great poet...."

Q: Gioia is a business executive who sold sugar cereal to youngsters. The NEA wouldn't recognize a great poet if one up and slapped them side the head.

They are all MBAs. Careerists.

Q: Do you mean MFA?

A: MFA, MBA.... Veblen subtitled The Higher Learning in America, his book about academia, A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men.

Art Brew wrote A Memorandum on the Conduct of Literature by Business Men. And sent it to the businessmen.

Bukowski wrote, "Great poets die in pots of steaming shit." Perhaps he said "steaming pots of shit."

A fan says to Eddie Harris,
"I'm making you rich,
I'm buying your records,"
and Eddie Harris says,
"Is my name Eddie Atlantic?"
In Ray, when Ray Charles signed with
ABC-Paramount, Ahmet Ertegun
told him, "I'm proud of you," and Ray said,
"You guys always get the good ones,"
or "the talent," meaning they would be OK.
Ertegun understood. Business is business.
Of course, that's when Ray's life started to turn
to shit. He got what he wanted and lost what he had.
Keep it in the family, William S. Burroughs told Jesse Bernstein.
Stick with your friends.

I'm reading a biography of Willem de Kooning.

A close friend, Jack Neff, was a painter.

He died broke. I don't think he sold very many paintings in his lifetime. I don't know what happened to his . The last time I saw it it was in the basement of Laurel Cottage Cottage Industries.

I remember a sergeant saying to me once, "What do you want to do-- paint pictures?" As if that were the most impractical and self-destructive endeavor he could imagine.

(For Larry L. King it was writing a 10,000-page novel.)

But I think it's every person's dream. To get up in the morning, wear work-clothes, paint all day, solving problems in your work, advancing the discipline. Contributing to the community.

I wanted to do that writing, and I wanted to do it as a married man, with children.

In fact, I did do it, as a married man, with children. I did do it, writing.

That's rare.

I am almost completely unknown.

If I dropped dead tomorrow, no one would know.

No one in the world of belles-lettres gives a shit.

Larry and Hazel, the keeper of the archive, do, my publishers do, the Underground Literary Alliance do, and my coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult, do.

I do. If I didn't I would kill myself, because the struggle is too hard, if you lose belief.

Maybe Thompson just stopped believing.

I mean, he went a long time after he wrote this:

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark-the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.