Philadelphia (cont'd)

There used to be a time
when I could reproduce
a 30-minute presentation verbatim,
from memory, or remember a conversation,
an interview, virtually word for word, afterwards.
I might try to do that with my workshop.
I don't think I'm capable of it anymore.
The problem is my imagination fills in the blanks,
supplies the missing information, and you think
it's memory. You think you have remembered what
you may in fact have imagined.

Four things have kept me going.

1. The joy of doing it.
2. The progress I saw myself making in the work.
3. Feedback from my coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult.
4. My sense of belonging to the tradition of outsiders.

William Carlos Williams said at the margins is in the main American stream and the mainstream is a sterile offshoot kept alive by money spent on marketing literature the way you market blockbuster films. The writer of literature is doing God's work.

Related to the items enumerated above.

1. If you can stop writing, you should. It's a vocation, not a hobby. Not everyone is called.
2. You have to keep stretching out, to keep yourself interested, both (a) in a form you develop yourself, like daily typewriting, and (b) through a medium no one else is exploiting yet, like publishing on the worldwide web in real time.
3. Value feedback as constructive criticism, praise as a positive result, and negative comments as a goad.
4. Read voraciously. Inform yourself on the history of your craft, and the continuity of movements like you belong to, over time. Membership in a noble tradition has unwritten rules. And you need to stay the course, to see the job through, to the bitter end. The underground is a subculture found in all big cities, college towns, and, now, with the Internet and satellite TV and public libraries, just about anywhere. Also, all literature is world literature, Goethe said. Genius round the world stands hand in hand and a shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

The book is a physical artifact. If you can't afford a book you can afford a pamphlet or a zine. A four-page sheet. Don't print more copies than you can afford to give away. The book, or booklet, is durable, you can exchange it with other writers, the reader can read it more than once, you can carry it around in a backpack, write notes in the margins, copy it, loan it to a friend. With print-on-demand you can publish books cheap, in small quantities, and print more, as you need them.

Keep up with the technology. You can serialize books on the web, daily, as you write them. Not only writing, but publishing, books, in real time. That is, publish not just pamphlets but books, series of related books, series of series.

Writing is a process. You can observe your own progress, over time, and learn from your mistakes. Lists are heuristic, and show you gaps. The paranoia-critical method, where you write, you send it out, you write about what happens to it, and how what happens makes you feel, is open-ended. For example after writing SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL, my 250th book, I wrote Bukowski Never Did This, about what you write after writing 250 books without selling one to New York. Then Bukowski Never Did This was published, and INSIDE UNDERGROUND WRITING is about reading from it at a book release party and selling it at Philly Zine Fest 2005. Plus, Forty was about doing that with Evil Genius and Open Book, and I can compare Forty and INSIDE UNDERGROUND WRITING, and see what I have learned in 17 years. The books are thus contingent and variable, like life, and follow what happens in the world, looking for associations and a pattern. Any one book both looks backward, at what you've done, and forward, to what you need to do next-to the next logical step in the process.

This is a both a damned fine thing to do with your life and probably something the world will not want to help you do. You are challenging the status quo, questioning the received tradition, disrespecting established pecking orders. Making waves.

I used to say that I had produced a body of work, my stack, and invented a form to present it in, daily typewriting, but I see now I also found a medium to get it out to the reader in, the worldwide web, and first started sounding the alarm about corporations co-opting the web like they did newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, because they must control what is said about them. And the Internet is fast, cheap, and out of control. They will price new players out of the market by (1) buying it up, and (2) regulating it. They not only don't want competition, they can't allow it, and, as Adam Smith said, whenever two businessmen meet they engage in a conspiracy against the public. Veblen wrote The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. It got him banned from higher education. But at least he could publish it. Who will publish The Belles-Lettres In America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Literature by Business Men? That's your mission, should you choose to accept it. After you finish writing INSIDE UNDERGROUND WRITING write UNDERGROUND WRITER: A LIFE OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM and JOURNAL OF A MEMOIR, simultaneously.

Writing and publishing are at odds with each other. Publishing is a branch of the entertainment industry. They want bestsellers by celebrities. Literature is about getting at, and witnessing to, the truth. Speaking truth to power. As a slave must speak boldly to his master. You will not have a conventional career, doing this. You must do it yourself. However you can. And be opposed, laughed at, starved-out, and wore-down. That's your subject. Vocation and career in conflict. You must write an Inside Baseball, or a Kitchen Confidential, about the front office, and their minions. Their hirelings. Go in beauty, William Eastlake says. Arise, take up thy bed, and walk. Be whole of thy plague.

Do it yourself. Tout le bataclan. The whole kit and kaboodle.