NoMoPo (cont'd)

61 (cont'd).

Crazy.

My hero, Heap, takes his name from Shell Heap Archaic, an early archeological period.

Before pottery, before agriculture.

I was trained as a dirt archeologist.

Sometimes I call my coterie of steadfast readers the Buzzard Cult, after the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a revitalization movement that swept the Lower Mississippi Valley just before and after European contact.

Sometimes I call my cult following Benthos, or Bottom Feeders.

Heap Big Heap Writer. Sometimes I call Heap's stack a heap.

A stack is an unpublished, or underpublished shelf.

My stack now stands at 362 volumes, 363 roaring in my veins like a camphor injection.

Sometimes I call my stack 40-Year Run.

I started writing it September 1, 1971.

I expect to complete it August 31, 2011. Large Pyle Day.

That's not as far away as it sounds.

After 70, time goes by in a grunt.

I might very well finish 40-Year Run without selling a word to New York or Hollywood.

Without selling a word.

I call myself a vernacular writer.

Vernacular translate of native-born slaves.

A slave is an ambassador in bonds, who speaks boldly, as one ought to speak. To his master.

Woodie Guthrie wrote a song that contains the line, "I ain't gonna be treated thisaway."

"Hard Travelin."

I tell the cotheads to kiss my natural white ass.

I call them by their name.

"Dem."

"The MFWICs." Motherfuckers-what's-in-charge.

They're the cause of it all.

Sometimes I call myself the Swinette Picker of American Letters.

PYLE stands, and acts like he is reading from a pamphlet.

I dream of playing the swinette on stage, at Americana music festivals, selling my books at the record table afterwards. A swinette, you stretch two horsehairs across a hog's ass and pick it with your teeth. Brew mounts the steps, walks across the stage with great dignity, takes a stuffed Miss Piggy doll out from under his robes, lifts her skirt, presses her butt to his face, and squeals like a stuck pig. Great cry and little wool, as the Devil said when he sheared the hogs.

I'm not a vernacular writer, I'm a funicular writer. All funiculus means is cord.

Play it like a zoo-zoo.

That's what I'm doing here.

I read from my work at a writers conference and then sell books at the book table afterwards.

The zoo-zoo is just to draw a crowd.

I'm just a song-and-dance man.

Pyle starts dancing the old soft shoe. And doing his hands together and apart, like playing a zoo-zoo.

Puttin' on the Ritz.

Um, um, um, um.

Does his hands together and apart, like Pyle. Then he stands straight up, shoots his arm out in a Sieg Heil salute, and says,

Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!