Sunday, Old Folks got up and wrote for
a couple of hours.
Well, he wrote until Brenda got up and started stirring
around.
She didn't secure the bait to the trigger in the raccoon trap. The
raccoon ate the bait without springing the trap.
So he didn't have to dispose
of a raccoon today.
* * *
Last night, he must have read Them between the movie and the fight,
because he was unable to watch all three fights.
He got sleepy and went to
bed.
He missed a good fight. Citron and Margarito.
Well, the first
two fights were good ones.
* * *
He printed out and read an article by Robert Parry about the lessons of Watergate
in consortiumnews.com, about how the left had been indifferent to the media,
the right had learned to make it an efficient machine to stonewall investigations
of wrongdoing, and the mainstream media had "shelved journalistic principles
in favor of a more immediate principle, career survival."
Old Folks
felt that the same thing had happened to letters, or literature.
Most writers
were careerists. Many successful writers were careerists.
And if you weren't
a careerist, if you insisted on speaking out, about letters, or literature, you'd
better be prepared to abjure the career as a writer as the price of doing it. The
careerists would see that you didn't have a career because you made them look like,
well, careerists.
Of course, this is what a sore loser would say.
* * *
Old Folks used to enjoy watching BookTV on Sunday, on C-SPAN, but
anymore, it seemed like a right-wing think tank was catapulting the propaganda. Even
C-SPAN and public broadcasting were creeping rightwards.
* * *
Pretty soon it was time to take a bath and get ready to go to The Red Bar,
to see Dread Clampitt play.
Old Folks really enjoyed being able to go to
hear Dread Clampitt once a week. See friends, former-hippies, or the children of
former hippies, now the grandchildren of former hippies.
Folk music. Roots
music. Americana music.
* * *
Folk art, American music, vernacular writing. Old Folks called himself a
vernacular writer
.
Vernacular means of native-born slaves.
A slave is an ambassador in bonds, who speaks boldly, as one ought to speak. To his
master.
* * *
This morning, there was a panel from BEA on BookTV, moderated by Bob Herbert.
The panelists were Umberto Eco, Barbara Ehrenreich, and John Irving.
Old
Folks taped the program, to watch later.
Eco was plugging The Mysterious
Flame of Queen Loana, Ehrenreich was plugging Bait and Switch : The (Futile)
Pursuit of the American Dream, and John Irving was plugging Until I Find You:
A Novel.
* * *
Old Folks's reaction was, as it often is, watching such events, "Why
them and not me?"
This didn't mean that he thought he was better than
they were. He didn't.
This didn't mean that he thought he was more authentic
than they were. He didn't.
He meant it personally, in the sense, "What
am I doing wrong?"
If he was as good as he thought he was, he'd be up
there on the stage, at events like that. He'd have a publisher that pushed his career.
Reviews would be respectful. Not no reply or a rejection slip.
Barbara Ehrenreich
seemed to be saying that if you do everything right, if you get a college degree,
learn marketable job skills, work at a job satisfactorily, you will still be sacked,
downsized, or outsourced, you will lose all the middle-class things you had acquired,
you will be unemployable for an extended period, until the leeches who coach and
counsel and consult unemployed professionals have picked you clean, and then you
will be rehired at a much lower pay rate as, in effect, a scab, or the cheap foreign
labor that got you outsourced, downsized, or sacked in the first place.
You'll
be exerting a downward pressure on wages.
The question Old Folks asked, and
he didn't know the answer because he was excluded from it, was, "Is the writing
profession like that, too?"
For him, it had been.
The second
question, then, is, "If so, what can I do about it."
Old Folks
wrote books about what he had done to write honest, hard-hitting books in an industry
that wanted...well, he didn't know what it was they wanted, except it was
not him.
They wanted bestsellers.
Blockbusters.
They wanted
to hear the cash registers sing.
Q: You should stop thinking like that.
You have a publisher.
You have a book coming out.
The ULA is going to try to make Philly Zine Fest
like that historic reading at The Six Gallery in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg
first read "Howl."
A: My publisher just lost his day job.
King Wenclas is asking me
for money, for fliers, to promote the reading.
I want to be invited to read,
but decline, like Jack Kerouac.
I want to be a bystander, an observer, the
guy who goes out for bottles of wine, and gets drunk.
Q: You can't. This is your chance.
You have to work with what you
got.
This is your chance to shine.
A: You're right. I'll be ready.
I'll rise to the occasion, like
Monk, when Count Basie looked at him.
Bukowski hated readings.
Q: But he did it. Until he didn't have to anymore.
To get to the
BEA, you have to start at Philly Zine Fest.
A: I've read to empty chairs before. It's no fun.
Q: This time will be different.
A: Maybe.
In Tales of Ordinary Madness, when the foundation head tells Charles
Serking he's going to see that he assume his rightful place in American letters,
Serking replies, "Maybe."