Q: Janis Owens has a home page
in which she talks about her daily life, what books she's reading, recipes, links
to other writers, bands. Painters.
But she doesn't put that in her novels.
A: Neither did I, to start.
But imagine if J. K. Rowling serialized
Harry Potter, online, and put her thoughts about the writing life in there,
too. Wouldn't that be more fun to read than Harry Potter?
Her experiences
as a writer.
In addition to the Harry Potter books.
Q: "More fun to read than Harry Potter." Jack Saunders.
A: I asked the library to order black fly season by Giles Blunt
for me. It came in yesterday.
I'm reading it.
There's a blurb on
the cover from Lee Child, that says, "Giles Blunt is a really tremendous crime
novelist."
I just read Child's ninth Jack Reacher novel, One Shot.
Best one yet. He's working on number ten. The Hard Way.
There were
some good lines in there. "I never forget a prone position." From the old
gunny marksman. Who wouldn't lighten up.
I'm reading Jack London's The
Cruise of the Snark. Did you know that Charmian used to spar with him?
Q: They had a good relationship.
Anthony Brandt says London was
a hack.
He wrote too much, because he needed the money, because he spent
too much.
A: Who's Anthony Brandt?
I write too much.
But not because
I need the money.
To still the voices.
Q: Shelby Foote died.
A: Whenever I think of Shelby Foote, I think of Will Percy, and Walker
Percy, and how little Yankees know of race relations in the south.
I think
of the speech Percy made to the angry crowd of Negroes after the Greenville flood,
when a white man shot and killed a Negro.
A good Negro has been killed by a white policeman. Every white man in town regrets this from his heart and is ashamed. The policeman is in jail and will be tried. I look into your faces and see anger and hatred. You think I am the murderer. The murderer should be punished. I will tell you who he is.... For months we Delta people have been suffering together, black and white alike. God did not distinguish between us. He struck us all to our knees. He spared no one.... For four months I have struggled and worried and done without sleep in order to help you Negroes. Every white man in this town has done the same thing. We served you with our money and our brains and our strength and, for all that we did, no one of us received one penny. We white people could have left you to shift for yourselves. Instead we stayed with you and worked for you, day and night. During all this time you Negroes did nothing, nothing for yourselves or for us. You were asked to do only one thing, a little thing. The Red Cross asked you to unload the food it was giving you, the food without which you would have starved. And you refused. Because of your sinful, shameful laziness, because you refused to work in your own behalf unless you were paid, one of your race has been killed. You sit before me sour and full of hatred as if you had a right to blame anybody or to judge anybody. You think you want avenging justice, but you don't; that is the last thing in the world you want. I am not the murderer. Mr. Davis is not the murderer. That foolish young policeman is not the murderer. The murderer is you!
Q: Talk about blame the victim.
A: Sometimes the victim is at fault.
That's the kind of speech
I made in my diversity sensitivity class when I was asked what I, a white overlord,
could possibly have against blacks, the downtrodden underclass.
Q: That must have gone over like a turd in the punchbowl.
A: Yes. They didn't want to hear that shit. About how their own sorry ways
were the cause of much of their sorrow and my aggravation, as a poor white having
to live among them.
Because it's insoluble. It's bred in the bone. It's in
the blood.
Q: Oh, shit.
A: Exactly. Oh, shit.
What if it's in the blood, as the old peckerwoods
said, and anthropology denies.
What if, as the old peckerwoods said, if you
integrate the schools, it won't lift blacks up, it will drag whites down?
Q: Just say that's the cost. It has to be done. More has to be done.
A: That's what nobody wants to hear.
If this is what you want,
more has to be done.
You can't have it without paying the price.
The price is the revenge those sour faces, filled with hatred want.
They
don't want justice. They want revenge.
Q: Let's change the subject.
A: Good idea.
Q: Orwell's biographer, Crick, said that you could see Orwell working out the ideas that went into Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-four in his journal, letters to friends, book reviews in journals of opinion, and "As I Please" column at the Tribune.
A: Yes. I thought that all of those should be a part of the book. Animal
Farm/Nineteen Eighty-four: The Making of Featurette.
Then I thought that
they, in toto, would be the book: Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-four and
Orwell's journal, letters to friends, book reviews in journals of opinion, and "As
I Please" column at the Tribune, and that the books, Animal Farm
and Nineteen-Eighty-four, would be embedded in this larger book, as kernels,
to be teased out, by the reader, if that's all he was interested in reading.
I thought the reader deserved what the biographer saw. Without having to chase all
over for it.
And I endeavored to make it available to the reader, in one
place. At The Daily Bulletin.
Or in the series of related books reprinted
by a bricks-and-mortar publisher as ink-and-paper books after they've been serialized.
I'm taking care of the writing, and serializing them on the worldwide web, daily,
as they're written, part.
I'm still looking for a publisher to take care
of the uniform edition, series of related books part.
I might die before
I find the publisher.
I might die before I finish 40-Year Run.
But I did as much as I could, with the resources I had.
I was thwarted. Stymied.
Blocked.
Like Harry Block, blocked writer.
I wasn't a blocked writer,
I was a writer writing about being stymied, or thwarted, by book publishers-and that's
always career suicide, to write about that.
Publishers like to think of themselves
as crusaders, rebels, members of the vanguard. Not as conformists, censors, enforcers
of the dead hand of tradition.
They like to pretend they aren't in it for
the money.
They're in it for the money.
Money and truth don't mix.
Then the truth must go, doubletalk prevail, they are masters of doublethink and Newspeak
and the memory hole.