Thursday, January 4

Q: How did you like the New Year's weekend book coverage on C-SPAN2?

A: I liked it.

My only complaint is it's all nonfiction.

To me, a book like Nineteen Eighty-four, or Catch-22--or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas--is as important as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

Q: Any favorites?

A: The New York Times Book Review. How books are chosen. The editing process. What books are not chosen. What writers and not asked to write for them.

Q: What books are not chosen? What writers are not asked?

A: Self-published books, or books published by small presses, even if not vanity presses.

Writers who don't write polished prose. Writers who write too fast, or too much. Internet writers.

Q: That's you. That's your books.

That must have been eerie, watching that.

A: It was like a cross between watching the movie The Devil Wears Prada and a nightmare flashback to the Head of the Anthropology Department at Tulane writing me a letter saying I didn't fail my comprehensive exams, but I didn't pass them, either. They would like me to take them again, and show improvement.

Q: How much improvement, in what areas?

A: You can't quantify the PhD mystique. They'd know it when they saw it.

Q: That's bullshit.

A: Yes. And completely true.

They won't quantify the PhD mystique. It's their rice bowl. Knowing it when they see it. Holding that over your head.

It made me realize how fortunate I am.

Like Job, I only myself alone am escaped to tell.

Q: That's sour grapes.

A: No, I mean it.

I used to feel excluded.

Now I feel like I have cachet.

Cézanne called the finish the Academy sought "finish of fools." He held a Salon of the Rejected.

I used to envy writers who had what I thought I needed, to make it, because they had it, and I didn't. They were making it and I wasn't. If I wanted to make it, I needed what they had. Or I wouldn't make it.

Q: That's a self-perpetuating cop-out.

A: It is.

I don't need to have what they have to do what I want to do.

If I had what they had I'd have to do what they do, once they get it. Who pays the piper calls the tune. Support comes with strings attached. They have to play what they are told to play. They have to follow the guidelines. Their work needs to have a certain je ne sais quoi.

I don't want to make it, I want to get at, and witness to, the truth.

I can do that with what I have.

I can only do that with what I have. Not what I'm in thrall to someone for.

I have the freedom to go where the writing takes me and report back what I learn.

That may be of interest to other people. It may not. It will not be of interest to some people, because it contradicts what they know, or exposes their hustle. They may want to silence me, to shut me up.

The truth can't be faked. And it will not be denied.

Q: You sound, not just resigned to this, but at peace with it. Content.

A: I'm re-reading Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

There's a passage in there I often quote, about coming out in the open, erect, and fully exposed.

But re-reading the book, I note the paragraph before that one.

To know peace man has to experience conflict. He has to go through the heroic stage before he can act as a sage. He has to be a victim of his passions before he can rise above them. To arouse man's passionate nature, to hand him over to the devil and put him to the supreme test, there has to be a conflict involving something more than country, political principles, ideologies, etc. Man in revolt against his own cloying nature--that is real war. And that is a bloodless war which goes on forever, under the peaceful name of evolution, In this war, man ranges himself once and for all on the side of the angels. Though he may, as individual, be defeated, he can be certain of the outcome--because the whole universe is with him.

Q: You can't get there until you get there.

You have to go through what you go through to get there.

To coin a phrase.

A: Yes. I'm not the man I was the first time I read The Air-Conditioned Nightmare because of what I went through between then and now.

I learned something about myself, and nature, and struggle.

I've been beating myself up because it feels so good when I stop.

I don't need to do that anymore.

It's not that I know the answer to why I haven't made it. It's that I found out the answer doesn't matter. It's the wrong question.

The question isn't will I make it.

The question is will I get it right.

It doesn't matter if you made it but you ratified a lie.

Not making it is better than that.

But getting it right trumps making it. It's a different scale you're measuring yourself by.

Q: Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain's widow, is a cultural icon around the New York Times Book Review. I heard the editor say so.

A: Better to be an iconoclast than somebody else's--anybody else's--idea of an icon. They're in the icon-making business. I'm in the icon-smashing business.

A bunch of toadies, praising insiders, keeping outsiders out.

I feel more comfortable out.

If I were in, I'd wonder where I pulled my punches. Where I failed.