Q: The year between booksALIVE 2006! and booksALIVE 2007! was an exciting year for you. It must have seemed full of possibility.

A: Yes, it was.

I got a lot of good work done.

Reached more and more people.

Mike Lister asked me to edit an anthology on underground writing and asked to read my Charles Willeford book.

Q: How did that turn out?

A: He'd like to publish the Willeford book, but can't afford to. If I can afford to, he'll do it cooperatively, with me. I can't afford to.

Q: That must have been disappointing.

A: It was.

Q: Where does the anthology stand?

A: I offered to buy $750 worth of books at a 40% discount.

That way the book will be published a few weeks from now. Rather than a few months from now.

He has cash flow problems with bookstores not paying their bills promptly.

Q: But it's going ahead.

A: Yes.

It won't be ready in time for booksALIVE 2007!

But it's going ahead.

Q: And you sent GULF COAST BLUES to River City Publishing?

A: Yes.

Q: And you're going to send SQUIBS to LSU Press?

A: If they ask to see it.

If not, I'll try the University Press of Mississippi.

Q: Why would they be any more receptive than the University Press of Florida?

A: I haven't insulted them?

They won't be.

A press is a press.

Q: So you'll show up for booksALIVE 2007! with Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family.

A: Yes. Plus two tlps, Text and Plagiarism.

Q: tlp?

A: Tacky little pamphlet.

Now most of the pieces I write originate in the context of mail art, partake of this context in various ways, and, not that this is always discernible, because when something appears in a magazine the mail-art connection will often disappear, but these last few years I've been very interested in works where you have trouble figuring out what the intention of the piece is supposed to be-as with the "tlp's." A "tlp", and this is a term that Haddock came up with back in the '70s, to describe what it was that a lot of us were doing--"tlp" means "tacky little pamphlet." It's an interesting--I don't know if you could call it a genre, but it's an interesting format. And I've been doing a lot of those. Things like MOONHEAD NEWS, which is devoted to gibberish. A "tlp" like MOONHEAD NEWS will pass back and forth through the mail and there's also a fairly wide distribution, by hand, to unexpected places, like laundrymats, where they get mixed in with the WATCHTOWERS, and some of them wind up in the small press mags, and elsewhere--and what it is that these little pamphlets are actually showing you depends a lot on the context of where and how you happen to encounter them. Something that seems natural in a mail-art context can become very strange when you pick it up in a laundrymat, or in a psychiatrist's waiting room. There's a lot under the surface that's unaccounted for, particularly if you're somebody who's merely come in to wash some clothes, not really knowing the origin of the thing when you happen to pick it up and look at it. Currently, John E. Mumbles and I have been busy experimenting with a "Creative Theology" series, and , before that, I spent six months doing a series of tlp's that I call the WHEAT-FEET-PETE-GLEET-JEET-MEET-MEAT-BEETS-KEATS-SEAT series. A dozen or so of these tlp's in that series. They're hard to describe, which is what I like best about them. Ostensibly, you could pick one up and say, "well, this is about wheat--sort of." But it's also tied up with a lot of other stuff, not all of it rational, so that, for me, speaking metaphysically, it's a little bit like the problematic aspects engendered when you do a stand-in for Hansel and Gretel. I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but when you do a stand-in for Hansel and Gretel, there is like this constant play on the tension of not wanting to enter the gingerbread house, of not wanting to have to go through the whole business with the witch. But at the same time, the witch is built into the process. The witch is a traditional expectation that's hard to avoid. I'm not sure, but this impulse may be behind what I'm writing-that I'm trying to find ways, you know, like I'm agreeing to play the game and do this stand-in for Hansel and Gretel, but at the same time I'm trying to see if I can somehow avoid the enervating part, which, for me, is having to go in the gingerbread house and dick around with the witch. Like I say, this has been going on over a period of years and I have, in effect, faced the problem hundreds of times, and (laughing) there are times when I have to face the suspicion that what I've been doing may simply have left the rails. That would be funny-if, without realizing it, I'd gone the route taken by somebody like Vladimir Pyast. Valdimir Pyast was Poe's translator in Russia, and at a special poetry convocation, right in the middle of reciting Poe's "Ulalume," he went stark raving mad. I mean, who's to say, really? I think I'm sitting here talking to you, that we're doing this interview; but that's the thing, because if I've gone up my own pole far enough, in reality it could be that I'm sitting here playing a banjo and talking to a goose (http://www.geocities.com/johnheldjr/AlAckermanInterview.html).