My advice is to get a good agent and a good tax accountant if you ever make any money, and remember, you can’t eat fame. And you can’t write unless you want to write, and you can’t want to unless you feel like it.– William S. Burroughs
Have rarely felt like it.
I am a late bloomer. Still waiting. Didn’t fully mature until, I don’t know, probably seventy. That’s late, too.
Probably best known as The World’s Slowest Professional Runner. Probably because that’s what I may be most proud of. It’s a title with some panache, if not a little merde.
Used to imagine myself a rich and famous writer. And so for many many years of my youth, up to and including this morning, I have been waiting to be discovered.
Nobody was looking for me.
There’s a slim chance I might have gone about it all wrong. Being rich and famous. But turns out I found something better. Healthy and happy. The rest is just pretend.
After I was awarded my home-schooled MFA (Master of Feral Artistry), I determined to investigate the writers I most admire.
Somebody asked me recently about my affection for Hunter Stockton Thompson. I read him as righteous satire. Hari Kunzru wrote that “the true voice of Thompson is revealed to be that of American moralist – one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.”
Of course, Ralph Steadman’s gonzo illustrations make all the difference.
Raymond Carver would be an influence if I was ever energized enough to write a short story. https://www.jackdogwelch.com/?p=1807
When I was 27, back in 1966, I found I was having trouble concentrating my attention on long narrative fiction. For a time I experienced difficulty in trying to read it as well as in attempting to write it. My attention span had gone out on me; I no longer had the patience to try to write novels. It’s an involved story, too tedious to talk about here. But I know it has much to do now with why I write poems and short stories. Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on. It could be that I lost any great ambitions at about the same time, in my late 20’s. If I did, I think it was good it happened. Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent.
Raymond Carver
Talent and production. You got to give them something that gets their attention. You have to do the work.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/6-of-the-most-prolific-authors/
Bukowski, of course. Think I learned most of all it’s fuckin’ okay just to say it.
It’s true, you know it’s true, so does she, so do they, just say it. Buk was a mess.
But I appreciate his product, I admire his arc.
I moved my research to artists because I realized it’s all the same thing, man.
Basquiat died of an overdose. Is that a suicide?
In early 1968, Mark Rothko was diagnosed with a mild aortic aneurysm. Ignoring doctor’s orders, Rothko continued to drink and smoke heavily, avoided exercise, and maintained an unhealthy diet. “Highly nervous, thin, restless,” his friend Dore Ashton described Rothko at this time. However, he did follow the medical advice given, not to paint pictures larger than a yard in height, and turned his attention to smaller, less physically strenuous formats, including acrylics on paper.
Rothko killed himself.
Rothko’s marriage had become increasingly troubled, and his poor health and impotence resulting from the aneurysm compounded his feeling of estrangement in the relationship. Rothko and his wife Mell (1944–1970) separated on New Year’s Day 1969, and he moved into his studio.
On February 25, 1970, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko’s assistant, found the artist lying dead on the kitchen floor in front of the sink, covered in blood. He had overdosed on barbiturates and cut an artery in his right arm with a razor blade. There was no suicide note. He was 66. The Seagram Murals arrived in London for display at the Tate Gallery on the day of his suicide
Jackson Pollack also killed himself, with a bottle of gin and a green 1950 Oldsmobile convertible.
Rothko became rich and famous painting a precise square with one calm color. Pollock completely opposite but the same, wild splashes of a frenetic rainbow. Rich and famous, killed themselves.
Me, you are gonna have to take me kicking and screaming. Which I have already started doing.
Something to think about. All it really takes is one good effort. Think Gone With The Wind and To Kill A Mockingbird. Written, by women, please note, for those who believe me a literary misogynist.
Sylvia Plath killed herself.
Based on my research to date, only example of somebody who got it done right was Leonard Cohen. A rock star who lost a multi-million dollar fortune and spent six years as a Buddhist monk, him, he had his shit together in the end.
Hunter, not so much. Killed himself. Like Hemingway. Like David Foster Wallace.
If I had to put two influences together – and I had to – I’d go with Thompson and Cohen.
The energy and outrage with music and a calm voice.
Turns out getting your shit together is helluva lot of work.
If you can make it, old age is just like before, only without the obvious crazy.
Zen Gonzo, I call it.
My last best hope of fame is a posthumous PBS documentary.
So you should save all our correspondence.
