One, I am the only writer to expose the fact that a major publisher, Simon & Schuster, was out to totallly discredit a major writer of indelible veracity--Henry Miller--by handing $80, 000 to a feminist to attack his reputation from every fashionable angle.
Two, I am the only writer to expose the world's largest publisher, Random House, for publishing a biography of a writer (Bukowski) whose work they had consistently rejected during his lifetime. The object of Random House---make money and do it without the least ethical concern.
Three, In the last 50 years, I am the only writer whose writing (poem---In This World of Terror and Pig-Headed Conmen) made a university (Univ. of Utah) publicly ban a world-prominent scholarly magazine.-- Western Humanities Review. Public record--- Winter, 1975, Salt Lake City Tribune, Univ. of Utah student newspaper.
Four, I am the only writer to expose Harper's Magazine, the leading intellectual journal in the U.S., and its editor Lewis Lapham for conciously burying evidence of the corruption and total breakdown of the U.S. literary industry.
In none of the 4 above exposes did I get a single letter of support from any of the one million professional writers in the U.S.
Five, I am the only writer in the last 50 years to criticize the New York Times Book Reviewing system. (American Book Review, 1983). My reward: The Times Sunday Book Review in March, 1990, hired a recently defrocked Jesuit priest to review my scatalogical novel, First Born of an Ass. In a tape-recorded interview, this reviewer told me that he had said to the Times that he didn't want to review First Born and couldn't they please find someone else. He claimed he was told by The Times that if he wanted future reviewing assignments to hurry up with the review of my novel. The ex-Jesuit priest wrote that First Born of an Ass had no redeeming qualities and never should have been printed. The Sunday NYTimes Book Review is the leading book-review outlet in the world. It is the major guide that bookstore managers and librarians use to fill their shelves.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote me, "The Times should not have published that review."
Twenty-eight other leading U.S. novelists had the novel and the Times' review and did not respond.
6. Repercussions: In April, 2013, Robert Loomis, head of Random House from 1965 to 2012, walked into RH with the manuscript of my latest novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pyromaniac. He handed it to his successor, Andrew Ward. Loomis had written me in 1994, "Believe me, I wish I had had the sense, or perception, or instinct, to publish First Born of an Ass when it was submitted here (1983)." Ward wrote me a month later, saying that he had enjoyed my manuscript but gave no reason for rejecting it.
7. The only writer ever fired by an arts council (Pennsylvania) for reading an objectionable poem (In This World of Terror) to a group of fellow poets in the program, 1977. Public record: the files of Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat, Texas, who challenged the PA Council on the Arts as well as the National Endowment for the Arts and says neither organization would answer his phone calls.
8. The only writer who exposed corruption within the system of literary agenting. Pages l47--162, MBE, 2nd edition.
9. The only writer since the McCarthy era to have his work confiscated by the FBI. Previous allies of mine--typesetters, printers, employers--were threatened by FBI agents who visited them.
10. The only writer to expose chronic corruption within states' arts councils and literary prize systems, essays l978 to 1990.
11. Only writer to challenge the poetry hierarchy led by Stanley Kunitz which controlled major prizes in poetry. essays 1983 to 1990.
12. Only U.S. writer to establish connection between U.S. foreign policy and its literary apologists. Several foreign writers had done it, among them Luis Buñel and Eduardo Galeano. In shor, the arts in the U.S. exists only to prop up an evil and vicious empire which has trashed 90% of the planet.
All this may seem petty given the suffering in the world but for 20 centuries stories and poems were the mediums through which humans learned what was appropriate and what wasn't. Now nobody acts appropriately.
13. The key in all this is a single poem, So You Still Want to Talk. Written in 1987, it simply says that language has been trashed. It no longer functions. But if you read closely Giono's essays or Rimbaud's poetry, language may have been dead long before. Except in a few islands words are dead things. There is no point in talking, in writing. That's why Miller wrote his most important book, Time of the Assassins-----the butchers have taken over because words have failed. Best to cheer them on and hope that some day they enter the sacred confines of Random House. Humans are better off dead.
14. I am the only writer in the world who had fun.
