Q: Why do you write about graduate school under Work, instead of School.

A: Jeff Schmidt wrote a book called Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives.

Sometimes I quote from it.

The prospect of failing the qualifying test frightens the student, even the student who is best at answering the kind of questions used on the test. The student is frightened because his desired future as a professional in his field of interest is at stake. But he is also frightened because society does not guarantee his material security (except at a life-shortening subsistence level). It seems possible for the individual, if suddenly of no value to employers, to go overnight from a job to walking the streets, from being somebody to being nobody, from living in the suburbs to living on skid row, left to struggle for survival among the desperate at the bottom of society. It doesn't matter that such individual downfall is very unlikely; by simply featuring the possibility, the system announces the fundamental insecurity of the individual. This insecurity unrelentingly haunts the student studying for the qualifying test. The student sees professional training as his chance for a secure future, with status and nonalienating work, his life free from the threat of a nightmarish trip to the bottom of the heap. An important part of his past is also riding on the qualifying test, because no matter how many years he has vested in preparation, coming close to passing is worth nothing in terms of attaining professional status. The years of preparation go down the drain along with the hoped-for career.

Graduate school is vocational training, for a career.

Even an undergraduate degree, you go on to get advanced training, and teach the subject in school. In college.

Even writing, now.

All careers have been professionalized. It's a way of keeping the troops in line. Making sure you don't get any troublemakers, people who are going to rock the boat, upset the applecart.

Q: Thorstein Veblen wrote a book called The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities By Business Men.

A: I write Belles-Lettres in America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Literature By Business Men.

I say that business men have done to literature what business men have done to higher learning. Corrupted it. Debased it. Monetized it. Made it fungible.

Q: Oh, my.

A: Yes.

Q: This is the sort of thing only an outsider can say.

A: Someone who has been inside and opted out. Someone who has seen it from the inside. From inside the belly of the whale.

I went and saw for myself, reported back what I found.

Q: Now, they want you to be Hemingway before they'll publish you.

A: By The Dangerous Summer, he was ill. He couldn't finish it. He couldn't edit himself. He just kept adding to it.

There's a picture in Ernest Hemingway and His World, by Anthony Burgess, of Hemingway in Spain, in 1959, with no shirt on, and he has a big fat belly and no muscle tone left in his arms.

Q: And they keep pushing you as Hemingway after you aren't Hemingway anymore.

A: The Dangerous Summer was a sign.

A Moveable Feast turned out okay. But Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and True at First Light, you can see why he didn't publish them when he was alive.

Q: And you could see why Mary would.

A: There was money to be made.

Q: She owned the vault.

A: Maybe she figured she had it coming, after all the shit she ate.

Q: That was mean, blowing his head off, so she would have to come down and clean it up.

A: She got her revenge.

These were not nice people.

They felt like the world owed them a living. A substantial living.

Q: Like Virginia Woolf thought she should have been treated like a male heir. Supported like a male. She didn't see that that was wrong for him or her.

A: I did all right.

I've no complaint.

Nobody told me to be a writer.

I made that decision on my own.

Knowing what was involved. After the first ten years or so.

Q: You didn't publish a book for ten years. And then it was with a small press.

A: John Bennett, Vagabond Press. Screed. 1981.

He did a good job.

It wasn't his fault it didn't sell.

It burns his nanny when I say I am unpublished, or underpublished.

Q: O, how sharper than a serpent's tooth is an ungrateful child.

A: Writers are ungrateful.

They are a black suckhole of need.

Nothing is enough for them.

Help! Help!

They're like children. Crying for their mother.

Q: Have you outgrown that?

A: I had help.

My mother helped me, my grandparents helped me, Brenda and the boys helped me, Larry and Hazel helped.

The Buzzard Cult.

I had white privilege. That helped. The education I got, the secure home life, with art and music and books in the home.

Don't want to take the help I had for granted.

It's easy to take what you had for granted.

Q: To feel like you had it harder than someone else.

A: It's hard. People have it easier than you do.

A career in the arts, some of the people are much better off than you are.

Gerald and Sara Murphy had it easier than Hemingway.

Rich people in general had it easier.

Hemingway resented the rich.

He blamed his break-up with Hadley on the rich.

"The Pilot Fish and the Rich" is scornful of the rich and the artists who suck up to them, like John Dos Passos.

Q: Hemingway said the more money he got the more right-wing he got.

A: He had less money when he was left-wing. Everybody did. Being poor was your badge of honor. You were proud of being poor.