Q: You call what you write a stack.

A: A stack is an unpublished, or underpublished shelf.

Sometimes I call it a heap, after Shell Heap Archaic. Call myself a heap big heap writer.

Q: Another name for your stack is 40-Year Run.

A: Clement Greenberg said Jackson Pollock had some ten-year run.

I called a series of books Ten-Year Run.

The series after The First Nine Novels and My Chronicle.

Then I called it The Great American 20,000-Page Novel.

Larry L. King said that writing a 10,000-page novel was the stupidest thing he could imagine. I had written a 10,000-page novel when I read that. So I called the next 10,000-page series, plus the first one, The Great American 20,000-Page Novel.

Then I called it 40-Year Run. After Ezra Pound's Cantos.

Q: And you're 35 years into it?

A: This is my 35th year. Yes.

Q: How many books is it now?

A: UNTITLED will be 275. If I live to write it.

Q: Why wouldn't you live to write it?

A: Chance. Fate. We can't take the time we have for granted.

I don't have any reason to think I won't.

But I could die tomorrow.

Q: So, if you live to write it, 40-Year Run will probably top 300 volumes.

A: Yes. I have already written three times the 90 novels or novellas Balzac wrote in his Comédie humaine.

Q: Balzac's Comédie humaine was like a soap opera. A long soap opera.

A: Sometimes I call my stack The Human Soap Opera.

It's farce. Farce related to forcemeats.

"Art Brew went out to the charcuterie for forcemeats. On his bicycle."

That's funny. Walking to the Publix and Neal's Farms Market and back carrying a net bag, like a hausfrau. Making a cassoulet the day after Thanksgiving with leftover turkey and lamb and smoked sausage and dried white beans. Man, was that cassoulet good.

Q: Bernard-Henri Lévy, author of American Vertigo, was the guest on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart last week. He said France's political landscape was caviar vs. cassoulet.

A: Well, I'm caviar and cassoulet. The mullet culture and the corporate-cubical dot-com culture. Roadkill chili and haute cuisine.

Liberty's a glorious feast. A fig for those by law protected. Bobby Burns said.

That's what Screed was about. I was about to write Screed. A book 30 years ahead of its time. A book older than gully dirt.

Q: Hellzapoppin.

A: It just goes on and on. Until I drop dead in my tracks.

Q: And you may drop dead without selling a book to New York.

A: They want caviar or cassoulet.