Transcripts

SPEAKER: Because you see, we will be able to filter through the male establishment for all sorts of the wrong mistaken reasons they'll publish it because they'll think it's sexy.

Sexual politics, I think, got accepted because three sleepy editors, in addition to my editor, read the first chapter, didn't notice the quotation marks, and thought it was hot stuff.

[LAUGHTER]

But better yet, we should publish ourselves. And I really believe in the autonomy of women to do their own thing. That's really a room of one's own, oppressive one's own, because there is a terrible amount of censorship in publishing.

A lot of it's commercial censorship, but a lot of it is artistic and social as well. Those creeps don't publish anybody who writes differently from their idea of good writing, which is that of a not very bright C student in freshman English, in my opinion, maybe senior English, the better.

But if you're an editor, you're not a writer, right? So you are trying to imagine all the editors that Faulkner had to go through to get those sentences published. My God. Freshman English teachers wouldn't accept those sentences.

So there you are. You're up against an enormous opposition to any kind of new artistic form and certainly to new ideas. And it is wonderful that so many things do get published which shake things up because I think the system is weighted against it. And we would be much better off, all of us outsiders, to have our own presses.

And that's of course, the whole point of a counterculture, to have one's own magazines, one's own books, one's own records, all the rest of it, and not to depend on fat cat capitalism. So I'd be for that all the way. And I'd love to see it set up. I'd love to help anybody who wanted to set up such a press.