Q: You call yourself Old Folks,
MVW.
What does MVW mean?
A: Master of Vernacular Writing.
Sometimes I call it Motor Vehicle
Wreck.
Q: What's a Doctor of Vernacular Writing?
A: A train wreck.
Q: Laughs.
A: For a Florida cracker to write about race is suicidal, career-wise.
But if you don't have a career, what are you putting at risk?
Not having
a career is liberating. And it's exciting reading, too.
Q: In "Setting Free the Buk," Review of Contemporary Fiction, volume 5, number 3, Fall 1985, Gerald Locklin writes.
Bukowski has never had to heed taboos, whereas nearly everyone else, even in our supposedly permissive age, has had to take a limit or two into consideration. University magazines and slicks alike depend for their continuation upon the good offices of administrators, donors, readers, and the post office. Some of the more proper outlets impose their own proprieties, while few editors anywhere will run the risk of being accused of "racism" or "sexism" or proscribed forms of written violence. It may soon be an unwritten, if not indeed a written law, that no character be allowed to smoke or drink or swear in the pages of the liberal quarterlies, let alone push a grapefruit in a woman's face. Or maybe warnings from the surgeon general will appear beneath offending titles.
Bukowski, on the other hand, began his career writing a story a week for money from the now defunct L.A. underground papers such as Open City and the Free Press. He was not only permitted to let it all hang out, he was encouraged in his explicitness, vulgarity, antiacademicism, fearlessness, and abuse of all orthodoxies, the liberal not excluded. With the demise of the underground press, his stories now seldom appear in periodicals before book publication anymore. He has a steady income from his Black Sparrow and City Lights and overseas books, and some of the ancillary income that accrues to a famous author. Since it would obviously be self-defeating of his publishers to demand that he be less Bukowskian, he still enjoys an extraordinary degree of freedom. He is, in fact, giving the most unrestrained range to his imagination that he ever has: see the stories in Hot Water Music for confirmation. Why should he pull his punches now? As Joe Garagiola says (about once an inning), "What got you there is what is gonna keep you there." Sixty-five in 1985, Bukowski has no illusions of invitations to the White House. His books do not even appear among the finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Thus, with plenty of money and permanently alienated from the literary establishment, Bukowski has no reason to compromise what may be the greatest freedom enjoyed by any published writer in American literary history.
A: By remaining unpublished, or underpublished, Old Folks enjoys more
freedom than Bukowski.
Old Folks buys his freedom by writing for the L.
A. (Lower Alabama) Free Press. As he sometimes calls The Daily Bulletin.
Q: You're 65 in 2005, and have more freedom than Bukowski. And yet, you
haven't made one brass farthing writing.
Do you expect that to change?
A: It might and it might not.
But I know two things.
(1)
Old Folks is too old and ornery and set in his ways to change now.
(2) Anything
is possible. Stranger things have happened. There's no accounting for taste.
Q: Also, there's a third thing.
A: What's that?
Q: You don't have to earn a living writing to write and publish your own
books.
For 34 years you have worked full-time, or been the houseperson in
the home, between jobs. And written 264 books. 265 in progress.
If you can
do that for 34 years you can do it for 6 more years.
A: You're right.
That's my goal.
To complete my stack,
40-Year Run.
Not to sell this book or that one.
Q: Do you think your last book will sell? OLD FOLKS AT HOME?
A: I don't think anyone will publish it.
Q: Did you think no one would publish it when you wrote it?
A: Yes.
Q: Why write a book you think you cannot sell?
A: There were a few things to be said.
There are two sides to every
story, and my side wasn't being told.
Q: What got you?
A: Market censorship.
I am the poster boy for market censorship.
Q: Who says your book won't sell?
A: The people in marketing.
Q: They ought to know. They're the experts.
A: Yes. They ought to know.
They have the badges.