NoMoPo (cont'd)

61. Interior. Classroom. PYLE and MAN IN HUSQVARNA HAT.

I'm writing a book about writing called WRITING.

That's short for writing, work, and family.

My hero is called Heap.

Irascible `Razz' Heap, compare Incredible Hulk.

Heap is a senior fellow at the prestigious left-wing think-tank in Point and Shoot, Florida, the Point and Shoot Institute (PSI).

He writes white papers.

A white paper is a short essay on economics, politics, the arts.

I know what a white paper is.

Good.

Businesses write commercial white papers. That's a white paper that presents only the good side and glosses over the bad side.

I know what a commercial white paper is.

Good.

I write about my conditions of production.

I think a book should be about a writer's conditions of production.

Where did the writer get the money to live on while he wrote his book, and how did he know who to send it to, when he was done?

It's not that to get an agent you have to have a track record, and to get published you have to have an agent.

It's worse than that.

It's that if you were anybody they would have heard of you and if they haven't heard of you, you aren't anybody. So fuck you. You're nobody.

Now, if you write about that, you sound negative and pessimistic. That's a turn-off. Nobody wants to hear about that. Even if it's true. It's too dark

So I started calling what I wrote, or what my hero wrote, black papers.

Wouldn't you like to know what John Kennedy Toole thought of book publishers?

Of course, his suicide speaks eloquently to that. He was in despair. Because of the way publishers treated him.

Or Barbara Pym.

To me, the way publishers treated Barbara Pym killed her just as surely as the bottle killed Jack Kerouac.

And publishers killed Jack Kerouac. The bottle was only the efficient cause. Not the reason.

The reason was publishers.

Nods.

When my first book, Screed, was published, my publisher, John Bennett, Vagabond Press, flew me out to Ellensburg, Washington, for a book tour.

I read at the college where his wife taught art.

We went to a rock concert at a warehouse in Seattle. Seattle is where grunge music came up. The punk ethos was you don't have to know how to do it, you just have to sincerely want to do it. Get up and do it. You'll get better at it as you learn.

Jesse Bernstein was part of the Seattle art scene.

The rock concert was the idea of Dick Elliott, Dick and Jane's Spot. He threw a rock at a TV set.

The rock bounced off.

We all had a good laugh about that. The TV set was impervious to a rock.

I hear back from readers things like, "I thought I was talking to myself," or "It's so true. I keep watching the TV, and thinking, Do they really think we fall for this shit?"

Now, we went to Seattle, Portland, and Eugene, Oregon, and stayed with friends of John, and I had the thought that he and I belonged to a subculture, of people who bought books, listened to classical music or jazz on the public radio station, watched art films, bought paintings, drank imported beer and local wines, made drip coffee, instead of drinking instant, wore natural fibers, cotton, linen, silk, and wool, rather than nylon, rayon, or polyester, went to plays, and poetry readings, did things out of doors, with their kids, in the woods, or at the shore, and that we lived all across America in big city neighborhoods, and college towns in small, or rural communities, and that was my audience, my readership, and they were worldwide, all literature is world literature, Goethe said, and the worst place to be a writer who wrote for such an audience was America, because American publishers did not publish books for such an audience, but we were such a rich country I could work at a menial job, make my art on my own, after work, and get it out to my readers by hook or by crook, and so far I have done that, for over 30 years.

Almost 40 years.

And what also struck me was that my readers, this audience, was, were, slightly alienated from the mainstream, from the people who watch television and listen to Top-40 radio, and go to action-adventure movies in the mall and eat junk food and text each other and play video games and read hobbyist magazines, or don't read at all--they feel, not estranged, that's too strong, but different, odd, outnumbered, and something that brings them together, makes them aware of the kindred spirit in the adjoining town, gives them a sense of belonging, a shared, ah, brotherhood, or neighborliness, or citizenship they don't always feel with the citizens, the neighbors, of their own town-that something is literature.

That's one of the uses of literature. To show people that.

"You are not alone. They think I'm crazy here, too."