Diary

Wednesday, March 9 (cont'd)

I introduced myself when you first got to the book fair, but I didn't think my name registered with you.

I left fairly early Friday afternoon, to get home before dark.

Locke's two-story garage fell in, and his library and 78 rpm opera recordings (and car, downstairs) were buried in the rubble. The city condemned the property, which he had lived in for 50 years, and he had to move out.

An old person, living alone, in a bad neighborhood, is not safe.

Anyhow, he's in an old folks home in Lakeland, writing away, and painting.

Your son will have better luck for snook if he goes south, to Chockoloskee Bay, and the Ten Thousand Islands, down around Randy Wayne White's territory.

I'll be more insistent about who I am, next time I see you. I didn't recognize you either, but I heard Rick Campbell call your name, and I was expecting to see you. I kind of snuck up on you.

I wrote a story about snook at yesterday's The Daily Bulletin. There's also a picture of me there. Rescuing Miss Weekiwachee from the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

It's a Manichaean struggle, the forces of darkness and the forces of light.

The lone writer, writing alone, versus principalities and powers. Spiritual wickedness in high places.

Think of Hunter S. Thompson in the atrium of a Marriott hotel, quoting Revelations, or, in my case, Ephesians.

He gave me his Press pass for the Superbowl, and I gave it to a black guy. In Where the Buffalo Roam. They cut the part about the transfer from me to the black guy out.

He used to write wrestling promotion for the Playground Daily News, in Fort Walton Beach. Under a nom de guerre, like several wrestlers wrestling at different times under the name Gorgeous George (there was once one retired in Boca Raton and one retired in Delray Beach and one retired in Boynton at the same time).

So you're The Barracuda. So you're The Barracuda. So you're The Barracuda.

In Biloxi, at a strip-tease joint, was a sign in the window saying VIOLET APPEARING NIGHTLY.

There were three violets in the nine months I was there.

Mama-san owned the name.

Biloxi hosted an Air Force Technical Training Center. The mnemonic for the color code on a resistor was, "Biloxi Boys Rape Our Young Girls, But Violet Gives Willingly" (black, blue, red, orange yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white).

Thompson went to electronics tech school at Scott AFB, Illinois.

He was supposed to go to Thule, Greenland to maintain DEW Line radar, but refused to accept his Secret clearance on the grounds he considered himself a security risk.

For punishment, they sent him to Eglin and made his Sports Editor of the base newspaper.

That'll teach him.

Q: Do academics look down on you?

A: I don't know. I feel like they do, sometimes, but I could have a chip on my shoulder. Be quick to take offense. Where none was intended.

I could look down on myself.

Not getting a PhD in anthropology at Tulane was traumatizing.

However I rationalized it, I sounded like an Alibi Ike, to myself.

I bought into the whole myth, of virtue being rewarded, hard work being rewarded, and the system being fair, and just.

Anybody who didn't make it couldn't hack it. It was their own fault. Not the system's.

Q: Then when you dropped out, to become a writer, you believed that that system was fair, and just. That hard work and virtue were rewarded there, too. In writing.

A: Yes. I thought in writing ability was all that mattered. Not who your daddy was, or where you went to school.

Q: Do you still think that?

A: Yes. However, I now think who your daddy was, and where you went to school, matter. How pretty you are.

I think the game is rigged.

But they are obstacles everyone must overcome, and, in the long run, merit is recognized, quality does rise to the top, like cream.

I just underestimated how long the long run can take.

Q: You're just a slow starter, then.

A: A dark horse. A longshot. I could not make it. I could go from unknown to forgotten without ever having been discovered in the first place. Just go straight to passé.

The career could pass me by. I missed the parade. Sitting at home, typing.

Q: Sitting at home, typing, is where a writer should be.

A: That's where I am.

All's right with the world.

I have everything I need.

Dead man, typing.

That's the theme of An Immobilized Hero Novel. Dead man, typing.

Q: Brenda says Janice teaches a class in government, at Gulf Coast Community College, and the textbook is provided, and a CD with test questions, and answers on it, and a curriculum outline, and they have a right-wing slant, a bias, and she has to use it, and she can't challenge it, question it, even have the wrong kind of class discussion of it, if she wants to keep her job.

A: I don't think the Big University is that bad.

But you can't talk, or write, freely about race, sex, or gender, if you want to keep your job.

If you are labeled a racist, a sexist, or a homophobe, no one will come to your defense, because they don't want to be considered one themselves.

Q: Veblen wrote A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, and got himself blacklisted, as a teacher, in universities.

A: I write A Memorandum on the Conduct of Literature by Business Men, send it to book publishers, book reviewers in the media of mass communication, foundations that give out grants, arts agencies, and the writing instructors and literary critics in universities--the War Heads, I call them--and get turned down for grants, writer-in-residence positions, teaching jobs, and book contracts. My entire oeuvre has been suppressed, by New York and regional, fine arts presses.

This is not theory. It's fact.

I am the man, I suffered, I was there.

Some guy who ties a string around his own balls has no right to look askance at me. He ought to look at himself. What compromises did he make to get, and keep, what he has?

Teachers enable bad behavior, in universities, with their acquiescence.

A writer should not enable bad behavior, in publishing, by holding his tongue.

Stand, and in the evil day, withstand.

Clad only in the breastplate of righteousness.

Ike warned of the military-industrial-academic complex, where a government research grant replaces free and open inquiry. A government grant to subsidize the publication of capital-L literature replaces do-it-yourself small presses and homemade web sites on the Internet. I'm like George Washington Carver in an historically black university chemistry lab, studying peanuts, to get away from King Cotton, the agribusiness king. With its plantations, and slaves, and cruel overseers like Simon Legree. I'm like Harriet Beecher Stowe.

No, I'm like her neighbor, Mark Twain.

The Celebrated Jumping Mullet of Bay County, Florida.

You can fake a lot of things, but you can't fake craft.