I gave READFEST 2006 a subtitle. BY JACK SAUNDERS, VERNACULAR WRITER.

I think that's what the story is about. How I became a vernacular writer instead of, or by trying to be a mainstream writer, but not going about it in the conventional way, or the right way.

Who says what the right way is? New York?

Or me, in Parker, Florida, writing a newsletter on the state of the culture, or, how to write world literature from Parker, Florida.

New York isn't interested in world literature. They're interested in maximizing profit. World literature, or a newsletter from Parker, Florida, isn't going to do it.

It's about how that worked, for me. What it meant. For me, for my family, for American letters.

Stanley Crouch said if Bobby Bradford had moved to New York it would have changed the course of jazz trumpet playing.

Maybe. Maybe not.

The Buddha said if you go in a cave and think one true thought you can change the world.

Maybe a cave is the place to do it. Rather than New York.

I look at New York and I don't see world literature coming out. I see potboilers coming out. I see dead writing coming out. Writing manufactured in a university writing program, to guideline and checklist.

Here's what David Robinson saw when he looked at the influence of Wall Street on the motion picture industry in the thirties.

The bureaucrats and accountants, eager to overcome the unpredictable and intractable element in the creation of films, began to codify certain principles of commercial production that still prevail in the industry: the attempt to exploit proven success with formula pictures and cycles of any particular genre which temporarily sells, at the expense of other and perhaps unorthodox product; the quest for predictable sales values-star names, best-selling success titles, costly and showy production values-which have little to do with art.

That's what I see.

Here's what I wrote in my pamphlet Root Doctor, by Jack Saunders, WM,(1) DIY(2) Historian of Americana Music Band Dread Clampitt.

Root Doctor sold 750 copies, a personal best.

Here's what I said about Dodo Marmarosa.

Dodo Marmarosa kept practicing.
He was knocked comatose by a bunch of sailors,
at the beginning of a promising career in music
(won an Esquire magazine New Star award),
his wife left him, and took the children, he got drafted,
labeled crazy, given electric shock, he went home to live,
to Pittsburgh, his parents, first-generation Italians, thought
there was a stigma attached to mental illness, and wouldn't let him
seek help, get treatment, he kept his chops up, practiced, people would
call him, he'd sit in with pick-up groups, had a regular gig at a bar,
off and on, the Midway Lounge, went to Chicago, but not the coast,
or New York, for any period, not on the road, Leonard Feather described
his slow slide into "obscurity as spelled P-I-T-T-S-B-U-R-G-H,"
and called him "one of the great Might Have Beens." To the end,
he thought of himself as a musician, and practiced.
He called himself Michael. Others called him Dodo,
or Moose. As in "Moose the Mooch."
Might have been what, Leonard? A critic?
People who can't do it write about it.
What might I have been, and who says so?
What did they accomplish, that's greater than
producing a body of work and inventing a form to present it in?
I lived where I lived because I had kids to raise, and didn't want to do it
in a slum in some big northern rat-race I did not know how to navigate,
which is all I could have afforded to live in, working at a makeshift job and
writing in the apartment after work, the occasional poetry reading in a distant city.
The occasional self-published pamphlet and now web site on the Internet.
I'm where, and who, I am. Just now developing into what you read right here.

Or, as I wrote about Notes From Underground, a pamphlet I read at the Legends of the Underground readings,

It would be about the press conference, my trip to New York, the Battery's up and the Bowery's down, Cannonball Adderly coming into the Café Bohemia, hayseeds hanging all off of him, and playing "Cherokee" at a blistering pace, you could hear the instrument cases clicking shut all over town.

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(1) Word Mechanic
(2) Do-it-yourself