last night I car Not knowing how to drive. Not owning a car. Adult from Minneapolis to Milwaukee Milwaukee to Minneapolis. Joven knockdown people. I love when a hundred and twenty miles to one town. I stopped at hedgeville. I slept in the back seat. I was excited about my new life. I don't see it as a Revival as much as a as in as an homage to a particular kind of startling imagery and energy that existed in the 1950s part of which I was involved with as of the one being one of the so-called Brown Bag beat boys. And those were the ones that would be around on street corners and we're too young to get in the jazz clubs in and hear the readings and would have a a bottle of Thunderbird wine and brown bag and be reading outside in the streets, which is really where the good reading was going on and a curious thing about that is if you think about it would have happened today and then you think of the fact that wouldn't happen today, but I don't think the reason is is that the not that there isn't Vitality in poetry today. I think the reason war is that the listeners out there and we've skip this entire generation of people who really bought that whole act about the the medium is the message in the media is the message and It doesn't make any difference. It's still the same message and that is images are what are important and not words and we went through a generation that believed and imagery being the most important thing in the end talking about visual images and there was a real mistrust for language. I know when I was at San Francisco State in the early sixties, and before the the real violence began in San Francisco state has a viable thriving institution of a so-called Higher Learning, but at that time there was a great debate going on with all of us in that was whether or not we should go into film as being the answer or whether or not we should go into novels with same perhaps at that time to be perhaps an Antiquated art form what has happened in the meantime. This generation did not read fairly much that turned its back on the written word. Suddenly. It comes out of the other end of the 1960s, which is the dawn of the 1980s and we see all of these The filmmakers who did have a head start in terms of going for in the 1960s and the best minds of Our Generation or making movies about outer space Hardware. And you have to really stand back and stay is this is what is this what it was all for and and what happened to the to the tremendous movement in terms of young filmmakers was where was that moment of absolute and pure corruption where they turn from making films of of some sort of social consequence into making films that would appeal of course to the lowest common denominator in this Society. I really can't buy the fact that there is some implicit Universal social matches that is going to better Mankind in Star Wars or Encounters of the Third Kind. I can't find that experimental filmmakers working throughout the country. There has been very much so and I think the probably young filmmakers today if I have seen I've had the benefit of another generation going before then that could have taken In any particular direction they wanted to win in the end took a bright on home to Hollywood. And I think that now they're definitely filmmakers that will not buy that particular Act. Particular act as well as as as Hemingway says in the end of that mean we're all the following a man with a stick. I can't I can't speak for other novelist. Clear league and the 1960s. I made my decision as I mentioned earlier, which was a political decision. I was at San Francisco State and started teaching there when I was 22, which if that doesn't a test of the corruption of the system of that particular time, I don't know what does but they were making every effort to fire qualified people and I are younger people who would be meaningful and who would have a particular kind of resourceful knowledge and they could communicate with the tumultuous times and the tumultuous events that were taking place. I recall a day in particular in in the got the second or third major ride at San Francisco State was 1969 and on the commons there were lines and lines of blue-coated SWAT team men and their their hard hats with their shields on from they look really like Redcoats coming marching across a common with with these large Riot sticks and they were clubbing people down on me and they were forcing him up towards a librarian people were running into the library and then the people in library panic and lock the doors and they locked about 500 people outside on the steps of library. Had up the steps with walking these men clubbing down the students and the blood began to trickle down the steps and then began to wash down the steps and it was it was it was a real Epiphany moment for me because I just looked inside what that Library represented and what was inside there and all of the words and all the language on all the books and here we were nevertheless. How many years after the Gutenberg Bible and how many words have been printed since then? I've been disseminated since they are we were still back to square one and it seemed at that moment that it was it was all for naught and it was a very despairing moment and I felt it and I had one of two choices which was to remain here in the United States where I probably end up behind a barricade waiting a smoking revolver it one of my uncles who would definitely be on the other side because it was clearly a generation get or I would Dedicate myself to my second novel which was which was rabbit pause which is metaphorically an anti-war novel. All the rapid bus is about the washer Indians of Northern California, which is a very A small tribe which is a group of people that we're almost totally wiped off the face of the Earth. And when I began that particular novel, I wanted to tell the story of the people that could have easily been destroyed because it was so many people that work at the great warriors of the Plains and we know that they many of them especially the Warriors have been utilized eulogize and great statues have been erected to them because of the fact that they fought I wanted to tell the story the people that would never have any statues erected to them. Then I told the story of California itself and the natural resources because it's the story really and we're all just we all just happen to be a natural resource, but it's a story of the people who were there in the Sierra Nevada than and witness the coming of the white man needs to be so big they wouldn't have speed on a party and the tragedy of the Donner Party and here was a so-called civilized man would come three thousand miles across the continental United States rolling on very sophisticated technological wheels, and it was a so-called primitive man who was witnessing cannibalism and yet he was well fed and well clothes. Thank you. So really that moment the pain that metaphoric mom explains the entire novel and it goes before Generations all the way through the Eisenhower years in the 1950s. What I was trying to give was a different perspective on our own Western Civilization call civilized society as seen from almost an objective View. Is that the main function of the novelist? Well, I think the as far as the main function of the novelist is concerned. We're all reporters of one kind or another. I mean will chase any siren will will run to any fire. And ultimately what we do report on is the condition of the human spirit and that is really I believe the major function of the novelist. I don't think it's simple report get into some of that idea of novelist his Visionary novelist is Seer. Well, I semi I clearly described to the to the idea that the novelist must have a Visionary imagination whether or not the novelist is a Seer is depends on the novel but there is something about that concept is also what we don't say And the novel so we can go back and read and they become very important because of the blindness of a particular point of view of the particular culture at a particular moment in history. So that's kind of a double-edged sword because you might be performing a function just by presenting your ma your ignorance in printed form for some future generation Yoona. Thomas Sanchez novel in a few years to decades and and and find that and then make that assessment the do I mean it it said I think that's true with every novelist that mean in in this country these days one is compared it one moment to Hemingway's Steinbeck the old days. I used to take that very seriously and they didn't give those away but I think I've been I've been compared to everyone but you know the Virgin Mary you really can't be worried about the critics or critical approaches to your work if you do you shouldn't be riding because You have to write with the with the with a firm belief that what you what you are spending your life on which for me is language when I was right? I would wake up in the morning and spit blood in the mirror which took place over seven years writing a novel and it was because if not, I would dream that. I had placed a, or semicolon in the wrong part of a particular piece of dialogue that might be spoken in 18-49. I'll buy a Native American and I was I would wake up in a cold sweat. I would wake up with blood in my mouth and I would have these nightmares that I have done that and I clearly had not done it in the novel. I mean the next morning I would take that I hadn't done it but I live with that fear because of the reality not only what I was writing about. The reality is I've how was being presented. So if if you have that kind of purpose, it's certainly not going to make any difference what your peers think of you or I mean in the long run I'm talkin about. My first novel was written. when I was in my early twenties, and I was trying to compete with Fitzgerald because I was still a college boy then and there was a guy wanted to have it done by the time I was 21 and it was a novel that was written about the Haight-Ashbury before anybody really knew what they had a Sprite was in terms of the world in terms of the United States in particular and and the rejection slips were getting was well the kid's a genius but where the hell is the Haight-Ashbury we have Greenwich Village the Virginia for what the hell is acid and we have marijuana and the Curious Thing about that was There was an example of being totally refused to being totally rejected and being told your Visionary imagination is incorrect. And looking back at it culturally. It's no wonder that that happened because New York didn't have any concept of what was taking place in the west coast, then when they thought they understood what they understood was not that there was a generation there that was dichotomize the Gen X generation that had two philosophies and one place. We was you were going to stop the war and you do everything you could in the streets to fight against the war in the other philosophy was the old Leary outage in a tune in turn on drop out and that's how you're going to stop the war by just completely turning your back on it which really meant to in turn on drop out really mean turn off tune out drop dead and they got in the long run but it was it was a generation that those who really felt the Psychedelic era was the way out that was trying to enough to size itself mean that's clearly what we can see today, but we couldn't see it then and then when New York felt that they understood the Haight-Ashbury what they did is they slapped on some covers on the Newsweek and Time Magazine with the with the pubescent blonde females. And flower dresses and Beads dangling around their necks and Reeves of flowers around their heads and they dubbed it. The Love Generation. They dub is the flower generation. But, you know, you couldn't if you wanted to come up with a better plot of how to dissuade people from the realities of the time then to Judd then to dub the generation of the 1960s The Love Generation. With the with the Wounded Knee material that you would prepared. I can do you foresee that you're always going to be in this time warp the Wounded Knee situation is it was was something that was very very complicated and misunderstood because of the media manipulation of the event there again, New York couldn't understand truly what was going on and I have been offered a very sizeable contract by very first date by two very prestigious publishes to do the definitive book on world to me and I turned the contract down number one not wanting to profit from the situation in that regard that they were trying to buy a headline book and they felt they had the person to write it who was there on then and had been involved in various levels? And I died. By turning that down. I didn't want to get go. I didn't want to write the book and then have the book turned in and then have someone say we're going to have to edit this and that it that net at that. So by virtue of trying to keep my Independence. I really lost a publisher by doing that because I thought it was very uppity to turn them down when they were offering money to write a book. And also I wanted to write a book that would be too many pages long. Will it take me to write and after two years I had 200 pages and it was clear that I throw another two hundred is going to be a 400-page book. And by the time that happened we put it out to New York and the comments were very very blunt in the comments were the American people don't care. the tired of being banged over they had by you no one ethnic group or another ethnic group and we're talking now about 1976 and the jingoistic fervor of the 1776 in the bicentennial and all of that and it was clearly a time of of of the flag waver Books on rabbit boss was tracing historical a certain historical. Time. There was a tremendous amount of Interest again and that particular subculture in the Zoot suiters of the 1940s. And also it peaked with a sudden interest again in in World War II and I began Zoot Suit Mart has now we're talkin about the uniform and a half years ago. If you had gone four and a half years ago and told somebody you were writing a novel was set in the Los Angeles area in the 1940s during World War II about some Zeus's I would have thought you were absolutely Stark raving mad. And now we say, they're all these Hollywood movies bad things about the World War II this nostalgic feeling and also they've been some films that have tried to come to terms with good many of the concepts that that suits with murders is involved with the history of of of the West is something that has been and I'm talking about Modern list of time by the west of the west coast of the United States in the western states not to the discovery of the United States was Christopher Columbus and we don't talk about the fact that the United States already had Western Europeans here and Spanish was the written and spoken language and how many generations before the pilgrim fathers ever sailed in to the Plymouth Harbor so they were really the planet stepfathers and the Spanish had been the written and spoken language here for 200 years. It was your lover when it's hard to get around to the dilemmas of writing a historical novel or even having something dub to historical novel. Well, I'm on very I'm very concerned with going back in and taking a very serious look at those apocalypse vents that have really shaped our lives and that was clearly what I was trying to do and suit suit Mart is the significance of the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 where you had United States Sailors truck in to downtown Los Angeles and disembarking and running amok through the streets and calling people down the significance of that event, which was not a try and significant in that it was wartime and we were using our own military personnel against our own citizens that was clearly such as such a racist attack and one that had been overlooked but I felt that by hooker by crook. I wanted to write a novel that would make people cognizant of that event and I was not trying to write history. I mean the book is it is a fiction. It has it has historical overcomes because of the suit Suit Riots and etcetera, but I was very careful to avoid particular incidence and events in the novel because I didn't want it to appear that the last thing I ever wanted. That was riding revisionist history and I'm writing fiction. I'm not running revisionist history. But if you want to take a look at how overlooked events of such that magnitude are ignored Overlook, you can pick up the Oxford companion to California, which was published last year and you can look on date by date and you can go to the year 1943 and you will see the United States Navy fighting citizens in downtown Los Angeles tipping over street cars breaking into into into the end of Breaking Through the Glass to get the people inside of bars inside the cafes in sides of the department store running in the theaters. Anybody was best in the suit, so that means keeping them taking him up on the stage and cutting their hair off clubbing pregnant women in the street. I mean, it was a very ugly incident and the only time that the entire city have been declared off-limits to the United States military personnel during during World War II because of violence of that sort. Okay, go to the Oxford companion to California and you will say sea in 1943 the Zoot Suit Riots or not mentioned at all at all. But when you realize that they didn't have time to mention them because it was a more important thing that happened in 1943 and they do mention that there and that was the year that Billie Jean King was born. How to make you cynical well, yes, it makes you cynical and that's one of the reasons why you ask me why why I was reading poetry from the 50s and I think that there was an eighth there was an exuberance and a Vitality with the Veep poetry and more importantly there was a whit there was there was The Cutting Edge of humor and their particular poetry and their statements and those times are very similar to these times when we still have all of this cold war Shuffle talk going on and we still have a very complacent electric electric perhaps that'll change recipe. but There's sometimes when one does want to escape behind are not Escape. That's that's an inappropriate word. But sometime one wants to to Donna a different armor, and I think that the armor of of humor and wet is probably the strongest of all.