Yalie thinks I’m just like all other modern writers he despises. (Click to see bigger.)

You know. If you’re Philip Roth or William Styron or Kurt Vonnegut or who else, you wouldn’t dream of inventing an entire literary movement that actually hates you. Or all the other people they hate.

But here’s the thing. My work was not Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Sinclair, Camus, Kafka, Lewis, Woolf, James, Mann, Beckett, Grass, Cather, Lawrence, Solzhenitsyn, Maugham, Steinbeck, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Capote, Bellow, Heller, Updike, Cheever, Pynchon, Capote, Kerouac, Orwell, Marquez, Nabokov, or Waugh.

It was, completely, my own. I had more writers than all of them. And here they are.

The signatures of all the bands of South Street on the day they dedicated the Boomer Bible, the first written protest against the utter nonsense of modern writing.

You see. There is this document. Signed by all the punk writers of South Street.

And their whole purpose in life was to overthrow the illustrious list above. They didn’t believe in believing in no meaning. They didn’t believe that a story was a single line penned by a narcissist from beginning to end. They didn’t believe that a story ever had an ending. They didn’t believe that the beginning of a story began with the first sentence and couldn’t be questioned afterwards. They thought the story was always, perpetually, up in the air, and that you had to plot your own course through it, somehow, some way, to arrive at a meaning that made sense to more than a few elect individuals.

And they thought, unlike all the geniuses they were rebelling against, that the sense to be made of things might be divine.

I lost track of the Epistle Dedicatory during a tough period in my life. But I found it again and paid $10,000 to get it back. I have it now. What do you have in writing you’d pay $10,000 for?

This little guy, with nothing to say, steered an entire generation to ruin. No wonder he’s a recluse.