Diary

Thursday, March 3 (cont'd)

Q: Have you been following the flap at MobyLives about Foetry.com outing the fiction and poetry contests at Iowa and Georgia for judges picking their friends and colleagues for prizes?

A: For grants, writer-in-residence positions, publication by their presses.

When all that story's finished, what's the news, as Yeats says.

One year Janet Burroway gave a grant to a student of hers and when asked about it said she didn't see anything wrong with doing that because she didn't profit directly.

Q: No, she profited indirectly.

Take my class, win a grant. Don't take my class, don't win a grant.

A: Ask a barber what you need, he'll say, "A haircut."

And see nothing wrong with it, ethically.

How do you pick the panel that chooses the winner? Who picks the panel members? What pool of qualified people are you selecting from, and what are their standards?

If the whole thing is fishy, anybody who isn't fishy isn't chosen.

If everybody's sick and you're healthy, you're sick, relative to them. Or if everybody's insane and you're sane, you're insane.

Because they say so.

Q: What can you do about it?

A: I can tell you what I do about it.

Q: That's what I meant.

A: Assume they're on the up-and-up.

Assume that the judges are fair.

Pay the entry fee. Submit a sample.

They'll probably reject you, but you might cause them to argue among themselves.

You might cause a falling out among thieves.

I used to enter the Hemingway Days Festival Short Story Contest every year.

The Hemingway Days Festival had a short story contest and a Hemingway Look-Alike Contest.

I called it the Dog Days Festival. Designed to attract tourists to Key West during Dog Days, when the mockingbird don't sing and a cut won't heal.

I called it the Hemingway Write-Alike Contest.

I said, in my story, that the judges bought a keg of beer with the entry fees, gave the prize to one of their friends, got drunk and threw away the entries, picking one out of the trash pile every now and then to read it aloud and laugh.

Or they would fuck a contestant, like O. J. fucking a contestant in a sun tan oil beauty contest.

When I was nominated for the position of Poet Laureate of the State of Florida, I actively campaigned, making fun of the judges, and saying that whoever won unfit himself for the post by winning. I called myself the Poet Pretender, implying that I was the true poet and whoever won was a phony.

I'm not the phony, you're the phony, as Ed Harris said, in the movie Pollock.

I said Walt Whitman would never have won the Walt Whitman Award.

I compared myself to Walt Whitman. An outsider.

This did not endear me to the insiders.

I exposed myself to draw their fire.

I made them reveal their position.

They played into my hands.

Eat my dust.

Q: When the Delray Affair denied you a booth you held a counterfair in your front yard. The Dreyfus Affair - Banned Books.

A: That's correct. I put up a billboard that said FLORIDA'S SHAME.

Louisiana's shame was it wouldn't license chiropractors.

Florida's shame was it licensed writers and refused to license me.

Like beauty operators, or nail technicians. Funeral homes and real estate brokers. What license did Walt Whitman have? What certificate?

What license did Melville have?

A whaling ship.

Q: Faulkner had Yoknapatawpha County. You have Florida's Co-Opted Coasts.

It's your Florida, too.

You're a poet-out-of-the-schools.

Being unsuitable or inappropriate for junior colleges is a badge of honor.

I mean, Larry David is trying to cough up a pubic hair on HBO, like Granny Brown saying, "Husk!"

From eating pussy.

When the doctor told Meryl Streep she had syphilis, in Out of Africa, Granny Brown said, very loud, "Is she married?"

Q: That's right.

Outsider is my persona.

The outsider who battles the establishment and wins is a popular myth. A popular narrative structure. An epistemic paradigm.

Céline's doctoral dissertation was on Semmelweiss.

Tampopo was a western. A samurai flick.

Bukowski was bigger in Germany and France than he was in America.

A: Léon Blum had a career and a program. Céline had a life, and a work of art. Trotsky.

Q: So it's all coming together for you. Reaching critical mass.

A: Critical fudge, I call it.

When the molecules are spinning around deciding whether to become fudge or to glop up and be ruined.

It could go either way.