Chicago’s Horsegirl makes me excited about music again. Not that music doesn’t excite me anymore—but, honestly, not as often as it used to. Let’s face it: popular music is, for the most part, a three- or four-part variable equation. Vocals. Drums. Bass. Guitar. In 2026, finding something genuinely new to do with those four things ain’t quite as easy as it might have been in, say, 1966. Or even 1986. Not that it was ever easy. But Horsegirl sure makes it sound easy. Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein and Gigi Reece understand noise, space, repetition and restraint in a way that feels instinctive rather than studied. (But since they covered The Minutemen, they did study…and study well, I might add.) Their latest record, Phonetics On and On (what a great title, huh…as is their debut), somehow sounds both familiar and completely fresh. They know the history without being trapped by it. And here’s the part that really gets me: they’re barely into their twenties. There’s something wonderfully wise-beyond-their-years about Horsegirl, but without any of the self-consciousness that phrase usually implies. I get the feeling they’re not trying to show me how smart or hip or cool they are. They just play.
I really loved The Defeated, the series set in the absolute chaos of Berlin immediately after World War II. And 1946 Berlin fascinates me: a city physically destroyed, its institutions shattered, millions of people displaced and four victorious powers trying to figure out what comes next. It’s basically a breakdown-of-society movie…sans the zombies. (That’s why I love zombie films so much.) This also continues what I’ve come to recognize as the seemingly inevitable Middle-Aged Dude Obsession with All Things World War II. Guilty. But lately I’m less interested in the war itself than in what happened five minutes after it ended. Everybody knows Hitler dies, Germany surrenders and the Allies win. Roll credits. Except nobody actually got to roll the credits. Berlin became a free-for-all for its citizens, the occupation armies, the refugees, black markets, hunger, prostitution…crime and murder and revenge and people simply trying to stay alive. And then there were the Soviets. I’ll go out on a limb here: what makes the Russians such evil fucks? Although history makes it abundantly clear that The Evil Fuck Business has never belonged exclusively to anybody. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times—each time with as much sarcasm as I can muster (especially after watching the evening news): Ain’t we a terrific species?
I seemed to have pretty much grown out of my poetry phase. It started when I was an undergrad English Lit major at Arizona State and really took off when I stumbled onto Bukowski and the Beats, sometime around 1988. For the next twenty years or so, I read a lot of poetry. And then I was just kinda over it. Oh, sure, I’d read a poem every now and then. More then than now. Which isn’t to say I don’t still love poetry. Which is a double negative and probably not the best way to say what I’m trying to say. What I’m trying to say is that I recently walked into a bookstore and saw Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things sitting face-out on a shelf. Smart bookseller. The black cover, Siken’s name and that title in a kind of Basquiat-esque scrawl got me to pick it up. Then I read the first poem, “Real Estate,” which took my breath away. And the rest of the book is just as good. It reminds me a little of Horsegirl. Just when you start thinking maybe you’ve heard it all—or read it all—and you’re getting a little bored with the whole show, something comes along and reminds you why you loved the thing in the first place.
I’ve hit the point when aging stops being theoretical. Cancers & strokes & heart attacks, oh my! Now what? I was diagnosed with non-diabetic neuropathy, the diagnosis coming after a series of electric shocks through my legs, beginning at my heels and working their way up behind my knees. Each one was a little worse than the last. About 1/2 way to my knee I asked The Doctor’s Helper, “Are people OK with this?” “Do you want to quit? Because we can quit if you’d like.” “People quit?” “Oh yes. All the time.” Which got me wondering. “Do they cry?” “Some do.” This will be interesting. Then the cold sweats kicked in as I waited for the next blast. Each one more extreme as she made her way to the back of my knee. Which is when I asked, “Can I make noises?” She was fine with that. So I did. Because the back of the knee shock was, by far, the biggest one. And lying there making noises as she started electrocuting the other leg brought me back to the summer of 1986, which I spent in Guanajuato, Mexico, learning the language and history. At a picnic one afternoon, some kids stood in a circle holding hands while an electric current passed through them until somebody couldn’t take it anymore and broke the circle. Forty years later, lying on a doctor’s table in Arizona, I finally understood their game. And I didn’t break the circle.
I’m increasingly convinced that the things I like best are the things I wasn’t looking for. I didn’t walk into a bookstore looking for Richard Siken. His book was sitting face-out on a shelf, I liked the cover, picked it up and read a poem that blew me away. That’s discovery. The algorithm is something else. The algorithm knows I like Bukowski, so here’s more Bukowski. You watched a World War II documentary? Congratulations, you now apparently want to spend the rest of your life watching Nazis on YouTube. Listen to one band and Spotify will happily introduce you to fourteen other bands you’ve never heard that sound vaguely like them. It’s useful. It’s also kinda boring. Ever get the feeling we’ve gotten really good at eliminating chance? We search instead of browse. We order instead of wander. We ask for recommendations based on things we already know we like. Which I get. And which is probably why I still love flea markets and record stores and used-book shops. You have to wander. Most of what you encounter won’t interest you. And then something does. Something you didn’t search for. Or were you? Something nobody recommended. Or did they? But it’s something the algorithm didn’t know you wanted.
We talk a lot about Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip—the photographs, the accordion-fold construction, the concept, and its place among the great artist’s books of the twentieth century.
What we don’t talk about much is the silver slipcase it came in. My book remains remarkably clean. My slipcase is a mess. The adhesive has failed, the silver-wrapped construction is coming apart, and apparently I’m not alone. It’s simply one of those peculiar realities of owning a nearly sixty-year-old book—and something you rarely see in the beautiful photographs of it.
Yesterday I shared Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Here’s another Los Angeles book that seems like a natural follow-up: Edgar Arceneaux’s 107th Street Watts. Arceneaux revisits Ruscha’s idea from an entirely different Los Angeles—photographing the buildings along 107th Street in Watts.
Every once in a while I’m going to pull something off the shelves and show it off here. No real agenda, and not necessarily anything for sale—just books, photographs and ephemera I like having around.
This time it’s my copy of Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, published in 1966.
Maybe fifteen years ago, at a Southern California flea market, I found a yellow Kodak box of color slides with “Raymound”—yes, with a U—written across it.
I pulled out the first slide and held it toward the California sun.
Bettie Page.
And a photograph of Bettie I’d never seen before.
Sold.
When I got home, I went through the rest and discovered another Bettie among a couple dozen wonderfully tame, slightly mysterious “girlie” photographs. Then I did what collectors do: I put the box away.
For about a decade.
Recently, I rediscovered Raymound’s slides, scanned them, and decided it might make a terrific little Thing. So I started laying my idea out.
Once I had a proof, I sent it to my friend Eric Kroll. Eric knows more about the history of erotic photography than just about anyone, and he sent back a terrific piece of writing.
Problem was, the book was already designed.
So Eric’s contribution became an addendum. I letterpress-printed 100 copies, then drove down to Tucson, where Eric and I had lunch and he signed (and I numbered) every one.
Eric had titled his piece Early Girlie!
So, sure. Kroll landed the title.
The “Restricted to Adults” belly band came next, inspired partly by the famous WARNING band on the first edition of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and partly by those wonderfully ominous warnings early publishers of adult material used in an effort to keep themselves out of trouble.
The funny thing is that these photographs are incredibly tame by today’s standards. That’s part of their charm.
Finally, I needed something sturdy to house the finished book. I found heavy cardboard mailers originally intended for shipping a single DVD. Early Girlie! fit perfectly.
But I couldn’t leave them blank.
So I went back to the era of the slides—to Titter, Wink, Beauty Parade and the other men’s magazines where photographs like these were advertised. I found an original mail-order advertisement for “Color Slides – Studies in Beauty,” scanned it, turned it into a PDF, and had a rubber stamp made from it.
Then I hand-stamped all 100 envelopes.
A forgotten yellow Kodak box marked “Raymound,” and destined for the trash before a picker got it; one unexpected glimpse of Bettie Page in the Southern California sun, ten years on a shelf, twenty-four photographs, a road trip to Tucson, a Vandercook SP-15, Eric Kroll, Henry Miller, an old men’s magazine advertisement and 100 rubber-stamped envelopes later…
Edition of 100 numbered copies. Square format (4.75 × 4.75 inches / 12.1 × 12.1 cm). Ten pages reproducing twenty-four anonymous vintage “girlie” color slides discovered in an original mail-order slide collection. Cover reproduces a Bettie Page photograph from the series.
Issued in a custom heavy kraft envelope printed with a reproduction of a mail-order advertisement for the “Color Slides – Studies in Beauty” series from which the photographs possibly originated. Each copy includes a letterpress-printed addendum by Eric Kroll, hand numbered and signed by the author. The addendum was printed by Jim Camp from a polymer plate on a Vandercook SP-15 press and is laid into each copy beneath a printed belly band reading “Restricted to Adults.”
Designed, printed, and published by Jim Camp at the synaesthesia press.
Notes: The photographs reproduced in the edition are anonymous and date from approximately the mid-1950s. The project originated after finding the original box of slides at a flea market. The edition was conceived by Camp as both a contemporary artist’s book and an homage to mid-century mail-order photography.
I hate overgeneralizing, but here I go: everybody knows the Sex Pistols. Everybody knows the Ramones. Everybody knows Black Flag.
If you’re collecting punk ephemera, here’s another thing almost everybody knows—the records are just the beginning of the story.
Before our vast social media platforms, flyers got you to there. The heartbeat of a local scene was printed on paper, run off at Kinko’s (or even a mom-and-pop copy shop), then stapled to telephone poles, dropped off at most record stores and some book stores and maybe a coffee shop or two. They weren’t designed to survive forty years. Most were torn down, thrown away, or stuffed into someone’s back pocket and used as directions to find their way to the show.
That’s exactly why they’re rare. And now, very cool. I mean they were always very cool. At least I thought so. Enough to scoop up a handful at my local record store a long time ago.
Here are six original flyers that capture a little piece of the American / Phoenix underground before anyone thought to preserve it.
Not really a “concert flyer” at all—which is exactly why I love it.
This is Black Flag functioning as its own newsletter: upcoming shows, SST releases, amazing Pettibon artwork (that would wind up on two of Black Flag’s record covers), mailing address, and the unmistakable feeling that if you wanted to know what was happening in the summer of ’84 — when SST was at its absolute peak (Meat Puppets II, Double Nickels on the Dime, and Zen Arcade), this single sheet of paper was all you needed. (Fun aside: when I showed this to the band’s archivist (I won’t drop names), he showed me the original paste up).
Phoenix, Arizona — Madison Square Gardens — May 8–9, 1983.
You don’t often see Arizona punk history get much attention. Since Phoenix sits between LA and everything east of LA via I-10, a lot of bands made their way through the desert.
This flyer captures one of the most important touring bands in hardcore sharing a bill with the Meat Puppets before they became alternative-rock legends.
The “Coming Saturday May 7 Black Flag” tells another story entirely. Somebody was promoting next week’s show using this week’s flyer. That’s punk economics. And of course minors were welcome.
This one feels handmade because…it was. They all were.
Cut-and-paste typography.
Photocopied graphics.
No designer.
No marketing department.
Best of all? No social media director. Just enough information to get you to the right warehouse on Friday night. And trust me, you’d wanna make 100% sure where you were going anywhere near Alameda and Olympic BLVD in 1984. Especially on a Friday night.
Phoenix —Madison Square Garden — October 28, 1983.
This is the sort of lineup that, forty years later, almost doesn’t seem real. Well. Maybe a bit of an exaggeration. Before “alternative rock” became big business, these bands were still driving themselves from town to town, sleeping on floors, and playing all-ages rooms for six bucks a ticket. And at the time, it was just another Friday night. And the story I always got (I didn’t make this show) was the power went out and Hüsker Dü played across the street at the Laundromat. Anyone confirm this?
Phoenix —Madison Square Garden — November 28, 1983.
British punk collides with one of the strangest / greatest / worst (depending on who you ask) bands Texas (maybe even America) ever produced. The designer somehow made room for Albert Anastasia, a mob execution photo, and the Butthole Surfers on one piece of paper. Completely ridiculous. Completely perfect. Commercial marketing at its finest.
An SST showcase! How about that?! Four of the labels foundational bands with a wonderfully perfect Raymond Pettibon illustration that could only have come from early SST. Nobody was worrying about branding. That’s for sure. They were worrying about making enough copies before the copy shop closed.
Around 1997, while I was in graduate school, I struck up a brief correspondence with Chris Offutt after he responded to a newsletter I mailed to collectors—a simple list of fifty or so modern first editions I was trying to sell to help pay the bills. Fifty or so books mailed out to about the same number of people. Over my time in grad school, I think I got a half dozen or so mailed out. Chris was a collector!
We traded emails, a few phone calls, and eventually I worked up the courage and asked if he’d consider letting synaesthesia publish one of his stories? He generously sent two! As a small-press dude, I felt like I’d won the lottery. I chose 211 All Around, but a simple mistake in my next newsletter—accidentally giving his new book (The Good Brother) the wrong title (The Good Son)—ended whatever friendship I’d managed to build. What a terrific brain fart! I apologized, but the damage was done. Never heard a word back from Chris again. He had accepted some books in lieu of cash payment for the story, and while I debated what to do, another small press published 211…. This left me with the other manuscript, A Dog & His Boy. And, honestly, a little butt hurt.
That chapbook eventually found its way into print, though not without a few more bumps along the road. Looking back some twenty-five years later, I can see that we probably both overreacted a little? I know I did. But that’s the nature of small presses. They’re built on passion more than profit, and sometimes feelings get bruised more easily than they should. It certainly wasn’t about making money—I was lucky if I earned minimum wage after paying for materials, all the hours of hand-setting type, printing, binding, and marketing was completed—but I wouldn’t trade that time for anything. And while looking at A Dog & His Boy today makes me want to change all sorts of things about it, I stand by that book.
Every one of synaesthesia’s books has a story behind it. This one just happened to have a few more twists than most.
The Musical Instrument Museum sits on a stretch of North Phoenix that, in my mind at least, will always be desert. Fifty years ago I was riding dirt bikes out there. Literally. In MIM’s exact spot. Now that desert is home to one of the most remarkable museums I’ve ever visited. Leave it to an old dude to get sentimental about a patch of dirt mixed with dry washes, Saguaros, and Palo Verde trees. If you’re visiting Phoenix, MIM is worth at least half a day. If you’re an instrument junkie, it borders on being a destination all by itself. I had no idea so many instruments existed, let alone that someone had managed to gather them under one roof. You can wander from Swedish nyckelharpas to giant Belgian orchestrions to Roy Orbison’s Gibson ES-335 “Dot” he played during his stint as a Wilbury. Pictured here is an instrument I picked up in middle school, mastered by college, and have abandoned since: the Air Guitar. Its placard identifies as being made of “Nitrogen, Oxygen, Argon, Carbon Dioxide, and dreams.” Which is exactly why I played it: “Whole Lotta Love,” “Free Bird,” and just about everything on Van Halen’s first record were my early influences. Oh! Surprise bonus—the Chicken Posole soup. I came for the instruments, got sidetracked by an Air Guitar and left thinking about lunch. All in all, a pretty great day.
Right now I’m finishing up a bibliography of the synaesthesia press. “Checklist”? Feels like a better word? “Bibliography”? Maybe a little too formal, a little too academic? I dunno. What I’m really trying to do is document what I’ve published over the last thirty years before I forget everything. I’ve been surprised by my reaction to the project. Part of me is genuinely proud. Proud of the books. Proud of the authors. Proud of the broadsides, chapbooks, oddball Voltas, and all the strange little things I’ve published. Looking back, I can see threads running through the whole thing: Bukowski, Brautigan, Wallace Berman, Billy Childish, small presses, found photographs, letterpress printing. The other part of me wonders: is the whole exercise self-congratulatory? And if any of this really mattered, wouldn’t somebody else be writing it down? Probably not. The truth is that every publication has a story attached to it, and stories disappear faster than books. So for now, I’m trying to save the stories while I still remember them all. Now if I could just find find my copy of Harold Norse’s Sniffing Keyholes.
I watched Narvik and thought it was terrific. Not terrific “for a foreign film.” Or because it’s a foreign film. It’s terrific, period. Before watching it, I knew almost nothing about the Battle of Narvik. Somehow this chapter slipped through my WWII cracks. Which got me thinking: why do many middle-aged and older men—particularly white dudes—pop a boner over World War II? Patton Oswalt said something funny about that, but I forget it now. But that’s not what stayed with me about Narvik. Beneath the battle scenes and military history is a brutal moral question: would you save your own child if doing so meant betraying an Allied position to the Nazis? Not a spoiler alert, BTW. If you have Netflix, check it out.
One of the (many) books on my nightstand right now is Elizabeth Winder’s Marilyn in Manhattan: Her Year of Joy. Like everyone, when I think about Marilyn, I think of sadness, addiction, loneliness, and the way her story ultimately ends. The idea that there was a year in which she was genuinely happy was enough to make me pull the book from the shelf. Here’s a Marilyn who is finally beginning to discover her own strength, independence, and sense of self. A woman trying to stand on her own two feet. Of course, she had to find her way to Manhattan to do that. Where else does a person go to reinvent themselves? (OK, shout out to San Francisco). My favorite scene so far comes before Marilyn even leaves Hollywood. Her roommate, Shelley Winters, invites a Welsh poet named Dylan Thomas over for dinner. Thomas proceeds to drink everything in sight before deciding he needs to get to Charlie Chaplin’s place in Calabasas, where The Party is underway. So Dylan goes. And Shelley goes. But Marilyn taps out. There’s your one-act play.
THING 5. Early Girlie!
In addition to Scot Sothern’s Sweet Adeline, I’ve been working on Early Girlie! and, if all goes according to plan, it will be available in July in an edition of 100 copies. The project grew out of a small box of anonymous color slides from the 1950’s I found years ago on one of my many flea market adventures. Most are “cheesecake” pictures—ordinary women posing in an era when even mildly risqué pictures could get you into some serious legal trouble. For example, all the pictures in Early Girlie! are pube-free. What always interests me isn’t the photographs—but the people and circumstances behind them. These were clearly commercial images, probably produced by a single photographer working with professional models. My guess is he started out in a camera club and either found a producer willing to back the work, or he (she?!) had enough money of their own to pay the models and recover the investment by retailing the finished sets. Bettie Page’s name is one of the few that survived the era. Most didn’t. I’ve always been fascinated by the small details that history leaves behind. Give me a name and I can spend an afternoon chasing it. There’s almost always a terrific story behind an unknown name. Unfortunately, in many cases the photographs survived while the names of the women who posed for them and the photogs who made them did not. Early Girlie! is a small square format featuring selections from the slides along with what I’m calling an “addendum” written by Eric Kroll laid-in to the book. Like many of the projects I enjoy most, it sits somewhere between photography, found imagery, vernacular history, collecting, and bookmaking. It’s also a reminder that sometimes the best publishing projects begin at a flea market and not with a manuscript.
Jeff Weddle is the Alabama Beat Poet Laureate (2024–2026). He won the 2007 Eudora Welty Prize for Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press and his work has been nominated for a Pushcart. Several of his books have won medals in national contests, such as the Florida Authors and Publishers Association President’s Book Awards, the Feathered Quill Book Awards, and the Next Generation Independent Book Awards. He has two collections of selected poems published in Kosovo in Albanian translation and a smattering of his poems have been published in Spanish translation. Jeff has been a faculty member in the University of Alabama’s School of Library and Information Studies since 2004.
Jim Camp: Jeff, before we talk about Bohemian New Orleans, I want to talk about Bukowski. Buk got his hooks into me with Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame. For you, it was Mockingbird Wish Me Luck. What was it about that book that grabbed you and made you want to keep reading?
Jeff Weddle: Bukowski came to me at the perfect time, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky. This was probably 1980 or ’81. I was a small-town kid, pretty much a straight arrow, before I moved to Lexington and fell in with a bunch of wonderful drunks. We all lived in a great old building called the Minor-Dixon Apartments. I started drinking a lot and barely did enough schoolwork to keep from getting kicked out of the university. It was a glorious time. One day my downstairs neighbor, a guy named John Patterson, knocked on my door, handed me two books, and said I needed to read them. One was Patchen’s novel Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and the other was Bukowski’s Mockingbird Wish Me Luck. I’m pretty sure I read the Patchen first, and it was really great, but when I read Bukowski it was like the scales fell from my eyes. I had always liked poetry, but until I read that book I had no idea how immediate and pure a poem could be. I couldn’t get enough after that. There was a very cool alternative bookstore in Lexington called SQecial Media, and they carried all of his books. I read every poetry collection, then the short stories, the novels—all of it. When there was nothing more to buy at SQecial, I turned to the UK library to see what they had. That’s where I fell into the world of little magazines. Wormwood Review was the best of the best that I found there, and it was in a memorial issue dedicated to Jon Edgar Webb that I first learned about Loujon Press.
JC: One thing that jumped out at me in your answer is that the path wasn’t really Bukowski straight to Loujon Press. It was Bukowski, then the little magazines, then Jon Edgar Webb, and only then Loujon. At what point did you realize you were no longer just reading Bukowski, but becoming interested in the ecosystem that made Bukowski possible?
JW: That actually took quite a long time. You have to remember that I was very young, maybe 19 or 20 when this started, and I was following a blinding light. I was always on the lookout for anything I could find about Bukowski and it was almost incidental what it was. I was also incredibly obnoxious in my obsession. One of my friends described me as being a Bukowski fan in the same way other people are Southern Baptists. So, I was not only consuming all of this, I was preaching it to anyone who would listen, whether they wanted me to or not. I’ll call it the arrogance of youth, but it lasted until I was 40 or so. Don’t get me wrong, I have never stopped loving Bukowski, but I did finally settle down some. I guess I started consciously putting what I knew and loved about Bukowski into the context of the small press and little magazines when I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Tennessee. Bohemian New Orleans, by the way, is a revision of that dissertation. It was the first time I considered his career — not just his writing — in a systematic way. That said, I had been personally pulled into the small press world years earlier, probably in the late 1980s, when I started sending poems to the littles. A few years after that, a buddy and I started our own little magazine, which we called misnomer. It ran for four issues and each one had a section dedicated to a featured poet. The final issue featured Bukowski, but he unfortunately never saw it because he died before it was published. I treasure the items of correspondence that I have from him.
JC: You mentioned discovering Loujon Press through a memorial issue of Wormwood Review. Do you remember your first direct encounter with Loujon? Was it one of the books? Or an issue of the Outsider?
JW: My first encounter with Loujon was actually a telephone conversation with Louise Webb. I knew a little bit about the Webbs and their press through things I’d read here and there, primarily Neeli Cherkovski’s biography — Hank — but had never actually held or seen any Loujon publications. Neeli’s book didn’t have a lot of material on the Webbs, but it was enough to really get me excited about learning more about them. When it came time to pick a dissertation topic, I asked one of my professors if he thought a history of Loujon Press would work. He said that it sounded good and agreed to direct the dissertation on one condition: I would eventually publish the dissertation as a book. The Internet was still relatively new in those days, but I went online to see what I could find. A quick search turned up an online interview with Lou and that led me to getting in touch with the woman who had conducted the interview. She gave me Lou’s phone number and I gave Lou a call. I’ve got to tell you, I was very nervous when I made that call. Lou lived with her sister in Slidell, Louisiana, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, and the sister was very controlling. She always answered the phone. Never Lou. I remember I was sweating pretty hard, because what little I knew of Lou made me believe that she and Jon were highly consequential to the evolution of American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. So, I was very nervous when Lou came to the phone. I introduced myself and told her about about the dissertation and that I’d like to interview her sometime. She thought I meant I wanted to come over to her house right away and told me that I couldn’t do that because the bus was waiting to take her to the Senior Center where she spent most of her days. Of course, since I was several hundred miles away, in Knoxville, a visit that day was never my intention. Lou was very sweet, but also wary. She told me that she might be willing to help me, but first I would have to pass muster with her stepson, Jon Edgar Webb, Jr. She gave me his contact information and that got everything rolling.
JC: You just described Jon and Lou Webb as “highly consequential to the evolution of American literature in the second half of the twentieth century.” That’s a remarkable statement because outside of collectors, small-press publishers, and literary historians, most people have never heard of them. What made you feel that strongly about the Webbs before you had even met Lou, and what did you learn afterward that either confirmed or challenged that belief?
JW: Before I address that question, I need to backtrack just a bit. All of this that we’re talking about took place over a good many years and sometimes I can be forgetful. It had completely slipped my mind that, a few years earlier, when I was living in Oxford, MS, I met a guy who had a copy of the second issue of the Outsider, which he sold me for ten bucks, and which I later ended up losing in a move. Also, around this time, my folks found a copy of the final issue of the Outsider somewhere and bought it for me. I still have that one. Bukowski had such an impact. The common narrative on Bukowski’s career explosion is traced through the lens of John Martin and Black Sparrow Press, which makes sense, but you’ve got to remember that Martin didn’t show interest in Bukowski until the Webbs had already launched him via their “Outsider of the Year” award in the third issue of the magazine, an award which not only gave him his first, full-blown, major notice in the little magazine world, but also came with a book deal. In truth, the award was mostly conceived of as a marketing tool to push the book Jon Webb already wanted to publish, but that’s neither here nor there. It worked. When It Catches My Heart in Its Hands came out in 1963, in an edition of 777 handmade copies, it caused quite a stir. Jon made sure of that. Not only did he nominate the book for a Pulitzer Prize, but he hustled through his extensive network of contacts and made sure it was reviewed in major publications such as the Village Voice and the New York Times Book Review. The Times review was written by Kenneth Rexroth and, other than taking a swipe at Loujon for promoting Bukowski so hard, it was a beautifully nuanced and highly positive piece. It took Bukowski seriously on the national stage. This was huge. It’s possible that John Martin may have been slightly aware of Bukowski before the Webbs brought him his first great success, but it was the Loujon connection that made Bukowski’s star shine bright enough for Martin to really take notice. I don’t think I have to make the case that Bukowski’s impact on American and world poetry has been, and continues to be, profound. There is no question that his rise to prominence is directly rooted in Loujon’s efforts.
JC: Who was Jon Webb as a person? Beyond the mythology that has grown up around Loujon Press, what qualities allowed him to recognize Bukowski’s importance before most of the literary world had caught on?
JW: Those are big questions, and for full answers I would refer readers to Bohemian New Orleans. Jon was a remarkable man, at least as interesting a person as was Bukowski. He was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. During the Great Depression, he married an alcoholic by the name of Opal, with who he had several children. He also became a newspaperman who committed a daring armed robbery for which he served three years in the Mansfield State Reformatory, where he began writing and publishing short stories. When he was released, he found the love of his life in Louise, who became his second wife. Jon wanted to be a great writer, along the lines of Sherwood Anderson or Ernest Hemingway, both of whom he eventually became acquainted with, but came to realize that while he was a good writer, it was unlikely he would achieve the greatness he craved. He chose instead to become a great editor and, to my mind, he succeeded. As to how he came to find and understand what he had in Bukowski, the answer to that is that Bukowski was pretty much brought to him by California poet Jory Sherman. Sherman was acting as the Outsider’s west coast editor and he was well acquainted with Bukowski’s talents. He showed Jon some of Bukowski’s work and Jon recognized the power of the poems. He also felt a kinship in the very real outsider status both men shared. Bukowski’s style was fresh, raw and unlike anything others were doing in those days, or at least he was certainly doing it better than anyone else. Jon solicited poems for the first issue of the magazine and they were a hit with readers. He solicited more poems for the second issue and Bukowski was actually a little hesitant to comply, because he thought it might be overkill. Jon was insistent, though, and Bukowski sent the poems. They were likewise well received. Jon knew he was working with a rare talent and saw that both he and Bukowski could profit greatly from a continued collaboration. Jon had already decided that he wanted to pivot from being only a magazine editor and publisher to being a book publisher and came up with the idea to promote Bukowski as “Outsider of the Year” in the third Outsider and use that as a way to launch a collection of his poems. It Catches My Heart in Its Hands was certainly a big achievement for Bukowski, but it was likewise a big achievement for Jon.
JC: Do you think Jon’s own ambitions and disappointments as a writer made him a better editor?
JW: That’s hard to say with certainty, but I wouldn’t be surprised if if that were true. I mean, as a writer he created a network of associates in the literary world and that alone helped him be a better editor. When you have good people to work with, it’s easier to get good results. And knowing the possibilities and challenges inherent to the business probably made him more discerning, and perhaps more forgiving in some instances, of writers who might not be living up to their potential. I don’t have any evidence to back any of this up, but it would make sense if it were true. A couple of things I forgot to mention earlier were that, in addition to being a short story writer, he also published a successful novel with Dial Press. It was called Four Steps to the Wall and was based on his prison experiences. That book almost became a movie starring well-known character actor Dan Duryea. Also, while he was incarcerated, he edited the prison newspaper, The New Day. I suspect his work with The New Day had a significant impact on his editorial approach later on with the Outsider. It’s my understanding that he not only published work by inmates, but also the work of established writers on the outside who used prison numbers as pseudonyms. Oh, and by the way, the prison where he did his time was used extensively in filming The Shawshank Redemption. That’s kind of cool.
JC: Maybe there’s a direct line between the prison newspaper and The Outsider? In other words, was Jon already becoming Jon Webb The Editor and Champion of “The Outsider” long before Loujon existed?
JW: I think that’s a great observation and a reasonable hypothesis. I’m sad to say that I’ve never seen a copy of The New Day and, as far as I know, none still exist. I’m not entirely sure that Jon’s editorial stance was as cut and dry as being a champion of outsiders and outsider literature, though. Still, that wouldn’t negate your point about the through line between the two publications. Jon was shrewd and also believed in the power of good writing, no matter where it was from, either by way of tradition or author. He said as much in some of his promotional materials. As an example in support of him putting this into action, one of the regional editors he used in the early days of the Outsider was Marvin Bell. I believe Bell was already an MFA student at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, and you can’t be much less of an outsider than that. Bell became a regular correspondent with Jon and one of his staunchest supporters. He later had a long and distinguished career teaching at Iowa and other universities. In one of his letters to Jon, he mentions that the first piece of his that Jon accepted for publication was a sonnet. Of course, Jon also made a point to say that he was tired of old ways of writing that didn’t take chances. The man was complicated. In some ways, the bottom line with him was the bottom line. That is, while he was both determined to publish great work in a spectacular format, he was just as interested in selling as many copies of his publications as he could. He definitely wanted to make money. When I was first looking into doing research on the Outsider, I compared the contributors list for issue one with the poets represented in Donald Allen’s landmark, and immensely popular, 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry, which was mostly made up of work from the Beats and the Black Mountain poets. There were many of the same people in both publications. Part of this was due to Jon being guided early on by his friend, the leftist poet Walter Lowenfels, who had his finger on the pulse of what was important and popular at the time. Lowenfels helped guide him to many of the high quality literary outlaws he published. In Wayne Ewing’s excellent documentary, The Outsiders of New Orleans: Loujon Press, Louise Webb says that Jon picked a title for the magazine that described the two of them. I think that’s probably closer to the truth than the notion that he was a passionate champion of outsiders in general. One more example in support of this comes to mind. After building Bukowski up and publishing not one, but two books of his, he dropped Bukowski in the middle of a project Bukowski didn’t want to do, but was doing anyway out of a sense of obligation. It was a record that was to be called Bukowski Speaks. He tape recorded a good deal of material and sent it to Jon, but Jon unceremoniously abandoned the project when an opportunity to publish a book of Henry Miller’s work arose. Say what you will about Miller’s status within the literary community in the mid-sixties, he was selling a lot of books and was by no means an outsider in the same way Bukowski was. Jon thought he could make more money working with Miller than he could with Bukowski, period. It turned out to be a miscalculation on Jon’s part.
JC: Tell me more about Bukowski Speaks. I’m assuming he was reading the work Jon had already published? Or newer poems? Do you know if any of that work showed up later on the Black Sparrow Press reel-to-reel?
JW: There’s not much to say about it beyond the fact that Bukowski didn’t want to do it, but did it anyway out of loyalty to Jon. He was suffering horribly with hemorrhoids and it was miserable for him to sit there and do the recording, but apparently that’s the kind of man he was, regardless of the persona he crafted around himself. From what I gather, he could be a very standup guy. The idea behind the record was for Bukowski to talk about whatever he wanted to. I suppose that could have included him reading poems and stories, but generally speaking, it was going to be him talking off the cuff. I don’t know what became of the tapes, but the record that Jon had in mind never happened. By this time, Jon had already published a second Bukowski collection, Crucifix in a Deathhand. Some of Henry Miller’s correspondence with Lowenfels had already appeared in the Outsider and he and Jon were acquainted in that way. Miller loved the beautiful work Jon did with his magazine and the Bukowski books, so he queried Jon about publishing a manuscript called Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel. For all the praise the Bukowski books and the Outsider elicited, Loujon wasn’t bringing in much money. I think Jon wanted both the prestige and the profits publishing Miller might bring, so he dropped Bukowski like a hot rock in favor of the much more famous Miller. Order and Chaos was a gorgeous book, but it didn’t sell nearly as well as Jon had assumed it would. This left Jon without his true star and with an association with a disgruntled Miller who had helped bankroll his book and now felt at the very least underwhelmed with the turn of events and maybe a little cheated. Near the end of his life, Jon did another ambitious book project with Miller, but Jon didn’t live long enough to see any results at all from that project. In the time between the Miller books, Jon did his best to get a book project with Kenneth Patchen off the ground, but it didn’t pan out.
JC: If a reader came to the story knowing only that Loujon published just the two Bukowski books, what would you want them to understand about what Jon and Louise actually accomplished?
JW: I guess, since I can be annoying about that sort of thing, I would first let them know about the two Miller books, the Outsider, and the Patchen book that might have been. I would tell them about the stir Loujon caused back in the day, which has mostly been forgotten. I mean, at one point a complete stranger, out of the blue, got together a group of people to buy the Webbs a very expensive Heidelberg press, just because he was so impressed with the quality of Loujon’s publications and the drama of their struggle. Jon and Lou were never household names, but those who knew, knew. More than the things they published, though—and the impact these publications would have on our literature—I would tell them that they would never hear a more amazing and wonderful story of than that of Jon and Louise Web. It’s an incredibly American story, but one that resonates with anyone, anywhere, who measures success in the sincere and dogged pursuit of uncommon dreams. Jon and Lou never got rich, but they never stopped believing in Jon’s vision or working past exhaustion to make it real. More important than this, they were deeply in love and completely devoted to one another. Lou told me once that she and Jon were soulmates. If there is such a thing, and even if there has only ever been one pair, it’s them. We’ve barely scratched the surface of the Webbs’ story here. I invite people to read my book, Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press, and to watch Wayne Ewing’s remarkable documentary, The Outsiders of New Orleans: Loujon Press, if they want to learn the rest of it.
JC: As I mentioned at the start of our conversation, it was Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame for me and Mockingbird Wish Me Luck for you. If someone reading this interview decides to follow one trail we’ve discussed—one “primary source”—where would you point them first, and why?
JW: That’s a very difficult question to answer. When it comes to Bukowski, as a writer, I would need to know if they preferred poetry or prose. For prose, hands down I would recommend his novel of childhood, Ham on Rye. Not only is it a great read, but it provides context for everything that came after in his life and career. For poetry, it would be a toss-up between Mockingbird and Burning in Water…, and I would probably throw The Roominghouse Madrigals into the mix for good measure. I’m sorry that I can’t be more decisive, but for me, those three collections are each indispensable in their own way. Mockingbird has poems like, “If We Take,” which is simply magnificent, along with “The Mockingbird,” “More or Less for Julie,” and “Consummation of Grief” and others which are essential. The Roominghouse Madgrigals includes stunning pieces such as “Brave Bull,” “Old Man Dead in a Room,” and the amazing “Layover” among the highlights. If we are looking at a single book that takes into consideration both Bukowski and Loujon, however, it has to be Burning in Water…, since that’s a collection of new and selected poetry, with the selected work coming from Bukowski’s two Loujon books. Burning in Water… has some magnificent pieces, including “The Tragedy of the Leaves,” “The Twins,” and what I think is Bukowski’s greatest poem, “Something for the Touts, the Nuns, the Grocery Clerks and You.” You can’t go wrong with this book. I will always, personally, go with Mockingbird as my favorite.
