Q: How do you define a Florida writer?
A: Every year the newspapers have a round-up on What is the Florida novel?
Who is the Florida writer? Once, they had a conference at Key West.
I am
left out.
I define the Florida writer as the one left out of the year-end round-ups.
And the Florida novel as a book about what that feels like.
What it means
for Florida. For the culture. To deny this writer and include that one.
A
Florida writer, to me, has a sense of exclusion. Alienation.
He's always
saying, "Huh?" "Am I not a writer?"
They're trying to
define him away.
Q: A book called FLORIDA WRITER, you'd probably include it, if it were published.
A: You'd probably not publish it, if you read it. It has a chip on its
shoulder.
A book called OLD FOLKS AT HOME: A FLORIDA CRACKER'S SUNSET CRUISE.
Florida cracker is bad.
Q: Didn't you go to college to broaden your horizons? To transcend your ethnocentrism? To enlarge your perspective?
A: Yes.
Q: What happened--it didn't take?
A: Some of it took. Some of it didn't.
Some of it was science.
Some of it was philosophy masquerading as science.
I did an anthropology
of anthropology.
I turned their own tools on them, used their own techniques
against them.
Q: You hoist them on their own petard.
A: A petard is an explosion. I was an explosion in a charnel house. I was
sewer gases, exploding. I was a lit fart. A flame thrower. Scorched earth.
A Professor of Cracker Studies, without portfolio.
I still think OLD FOLKS
AT HOME: A FLORIDA CRACKER'S SUNSET CRUISE was a good book.
A book investigating
the notion of home. Memory, nostalgia, myth. The difficulty of getting the tone just
right.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. But neither is history. Science.
Belles-lettres.
I said there was a literary dimension to science,
a narrative form, a rhetoric.
You had to look at the sociology of knowledge
of it.
Who saw what, and who determined who got to see it and who didn't?
I went and saw for myself, reported back what I found. Inventing a language where
necessary.
Q: John Clellon Holmes warned Kerouac not to get crabby and hung-up about rejection.
A: About seven years of rejection.
I'm coming up on 34 years.
Q: But that's changing. Bukowski Never Did This is coming out.
You're having your homage. Your fête.
A: Maybe.
Q: Dorothy Allison said you're used to leaning into the wind, and if the wind changes direction, and you don't, you fall flat on your face.
A: Makes sense to me.
Q: Be patient. Enjoy your weekend.
A: I'm scared.
What if I show my ass?
What if nobody comes?
Q: Then you can write about it. With humor and grace.
Brenda liked
that story about President Bush you called "Bartleby the Aviator."
A: That was a good one.
Bartleby the Aviator
When President Bush was in the Texas Air National Guard, he had to take a
physical, as pilots do.
He skipped it.
When asked why, he might have
said, "I'd prefer not to."
Missing a physical is a serious offense,
for a pilot. You are immediately taken off flying status.
All you have to
do to get back on flying status is pass the physical, but for some reason President
Bush preferred not to.
When a pilot misses a flying status physical, he has
to explain why, and he is disciplined, whatever the reason. There would be some record
of the disciplinary action taken placed in the officer's permanent military record.
Somehow, this unflattering paperwork was expunged from Bush's record.
He
may have preferred not to leave it in there, as it cast him in a bad light.
We won't talk about going AWOL, or deserting. Dereliction of duty, or malingering,
might apply. Shirking.
President Shirk.
I guess we'll never know.
Why would a gold brick tell on himself? It ain't in his nature.
Just stonewall
it. Offer a modified, limited hang-out. Maybe it will all go away.
Bartleby
the Scrivener languished away, in jail, the poorhouse, or the mental hospital.
Bartleby the Aviator became Commander in Chief, landed on an aircraft carrier, announced,
"Mission accomplished."
500 other servicemen's deaths ago.
The whole country headed for jail, the poorhouse, or the mental hospital.
President Smirk.
It is good to be the president.