This would probably be Heap’s last writers conference,
or Heap’s last pamphlet. Last year, one person attended
his lecture, and when he asked Heap, “How do I get an agent?”
or, “How do I get published?” Heap said, “That’s the wrong question.”
What’s the right question? I don’t know. The writing took over.
“You want to write? Very well, then—write. Write!”
“Vous-voulez
écrire? Eh bien, écrivez donc. Écrivez!”
Who said that? Trotsky? Léon Blum had a career, and a program.
Céline had a life, and a work of art. Is that correct? I need
a fact-checker. I wanted to have a life, and a work of art.
Sometimes I call 40-Year Run my stack. A stack is
an unpublished, or underpublished shelf. That is,
an oeuvre. A complete works. Blaster Al talked about
my great wall of books. In “Jack Saunders Revisited,”
the afterword to Forty. Reprinted in BLASTER:
The Blaster Al
Ackerman Anthology.
Reports have it he moved back to
There it was (as he saw it in his mind):
a vision of four or five hundred volumes
stretching away to the horizon—each volume shining
in its own unearthly greenish light….
WE’RE NO. 2! will be my 403rd book.
Although some of them were short.
Would you have predicted that from Forty?
If 40-Year Run: A Celebration is 12 books
I’ll end up at 415.
Without selling one to
I am what you call self-motivated. The books are written
out of their own inner necessity to be written. Their passion.
It’s a labor of love. It’s art for art’s sake. It’s an explosion in
a charnel house. The Volcanoes of
Had an affair with a lonely crabber’s wife, whose husband
was off doing beach clean-up for BP. The oil spill in the Gulf
a dark presence, a leitmotif, a signature lick, a black labyrinth
in whose recesses a monster waits to devour us. Who will lead us out?
Where is Ariadne’s thread? Pinto beans and scotch bonnet peppers.
The small press movement, mail art, and the worldwide web.