Q: In an interview, John Held, Jr. asks Blaster Al 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.
A: Brenda and I watched Elling last night. From Netflix.
Elling discovers his vocation.
He calls himself E, the Sauerkraut Poet.
He places his poems in sauerkraut boxes and puts them on the shelf, in supermarkets.
I used to leave my tlps in campground laundromats. I called myself Johnny Potsherd,
by analogy with Johnny Appleseed.
Johnny Potsherd went around the Southeast
sowing potsherds in Indian sites.
I called what I was writing my Potsherd-Tower,
by analogy with Kurt Schwitters' Schwitters-Column, the merzbau he constructed in
his flat in Hanover.
Every day he added to it, and everything he added changed
the relationship of existing elements to each other, and the whole.
He studied
this process.
Q: You called your stack your Potsherd-Tower?
A: Yes.
Q: And people would read one of your tlps and write to you?
A: Yes. Or stumble across the web site.
Get a hit on something
they were searching for in a search engine.
Q: Like what?
A: Like wanting to do a Hansel and Gretel stand-in but not wanting to go into
the gingerbread house and dick around with the witch.
That's a common ambivalence
in artists, the conflict between the need for attention and the need for solitude.
Who would want the world beating a path to his door? The world is seriously fucked-up.
You want to withdraw from the world. Go in your writing room and not come out.
Q: I see.
A: And yet, writing is about communication, not just self-expression. A writer needs to connect, to get through, to a reader, not himself. To an other, an audience.
Q: I see.
A: Now you see, I saw another Swiss-German film, about a child prodigy
who fakes mental illness, after a fall--I think he fakes the fall--and his grandfather,
who teaches him to fly, or gives him flying lessons.
Vitus. Bruno
Ganz played the grandfather.
The grandfather makes an offhand remark about
school, the military, and work, as being three spheres of life we go through, or
males go through, in European cultures, and I realized I write about those three
spheres--about manhood, or being a person, since a man is the person I am destined,
by biology, to be--and I suppose old age, senility, retirement, is a fourth stage.
Did you save enough? Did you provide for yourself? Will you depend on someone else,
at the end? Who? Your children? The state? Rank strangers?
Q: Mental defectives and children. You write about mental defectives and children.
A: And old people. An older person.
Q: Nobody listens to the old.
A: Nobody listens period.
So you might as well write about what
you want.
Q: An old man at the house, summing up.
A: Look at the botch he has made of his life. Who is he to give advice?
Q: You're not giving advice. You are sharing your experience, strength, and hope.
A: Exactly.
Plus, I would do it the same again.
I wouldn't
change anything.
I didn't learn anything.
Q: Being a redneck might have something to do with it.
A: Yes. A redneck is an outsider, in the culture, generally.
A
hick.
I am writing hick lit.
There's no such thing. It's a contradiction
in terms.
Q: Actually, that's who reads.
The untutored person.
The
person teaching himself. Or herself. By reading.
A: Yes.