Q: You might as well call your
book Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist.
An underground writer
is an outsider, and an outsider is anathema to New York.
He's someone who
won't fit into the corporate mold. Sing the corporate fight song. Wear the camo fan
club watchband, rah rah.
A: Boola boola.
I went to college. I graduated magna cum laude.
I made Phi Beta Kappa.
I am an outsider by choice.
It's a principled
choice. There is a place in American culture for the outsider--indeed, a place in
American letters. An honored place.
I have had agents tell me, "If you
were Thoreau Returned it wouldn't matter."
Or, "If I can't sell
it that's all that matters."
But what that really means is that it is
unlikely you're Thoreau. If you were Thoreau I could sell it in a New York minute.
But how do we know you're Thoreau when you are here, and living and writing, among
us, an humble sacked technical writer, with a quite dismal track record of rejection.
Q: That proves it. Of course he'd be rejected. If no one will even read
it, to see if it's any good.
William James said the only sure bar to knowledge
is contempt prior to investigation.
And nowhere is that contempt better illustrated--it's
like the primary tenet--than in New York publishing: if you were any good we would
have already discovered you.
A: Who's talking here?
I forgot I was reading and thought I was
talking to myself.