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Dear Old Hag,
I don’t feel like I am going to cooperate with the New York literary establishment (such as it is) and go along with the fiction that I don’t exist.
That’s like New Yorkers saying about King Kong, “Let’s pretend he’s not there,” and King Kong just slouching quietly away. It goes against all the principles of physics.
To restate the story in a nutshell: the whole story of my birth is recounted in Saul Bellow’s groundbreaking novel “The Adventures of Augie March.” My mother is portrayed as the femme fatale Renée, and my father is Augie’s tough guy brother Simon. I am the product of her greed and his lust, and Bellow saw fit to use my birth as the tragic dénouement of the novel.
My birth represents the end of one epoch and the earthshattering birth of a new one. And that’s how the history and culture of this country will interpret it in the centuries to come.
I like to think that I have lived up the chaotic era that I was portrayed to portend. I have made a monkey of Bellow (who lived to regret ever writing about me), the American establishment and the Canadian establishment. I tore up all the rules and I have lived to write about it.
Compared to my well-documented record of artistic chaos, which I can comfortably compare to the explosive and reforming of celestial galaxies, all the literary lions of New York are as spoiled, docile lap dogs. And I intend to press my advantage.
Up to the present, I have crashed into a wall of establishment obstruction. Even James Atlas, who was forced to allude to my existence in order to justify the academic accuracy of his 2000 biography of my uncle, “Bellow,” declined to meet with me physically even though I lived only ten minutes away from him by taxi.
This united front has succeeded in preventing my emergence, but the wall is starting to crumble. I now have access to the same means of artistic expression as the rest of you, the internet, which means I can go straight to the public without running a gauntlet of agents, publishers, critics and half-baked writers.
I am already letting my story emerge in small doses, according to how much I feel people can handle. When I finally reach critical mass, the explosion will rock literary New York like an immense solar storm, atomizing the culture.
Then, from the chaos, I can reshape the firmament in my image. 200 motels
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Posted on 12/27/2005
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