Bill Beaver
Tucson, AZ
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Bill Beaver lives in Tucson, AZ w/two dogs amid the ruins of a 100 year-old house. His biggest ambition in life is NOT to become a bag lady
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• What do you do for a living?
This question always stuns me into silence. Mouth open, sometimes I drool. Supposedly this means I have what the Church of the Sub- Genius calls 'slack.' A good thing? I am unemployable. Thus I am that strange entity called a consultant. I also teach. I guess you could call me a digital imagist. In the course of which I have pursued computer programming videography, photography, animation & interactive design. Am I making any sense? No.
• Who are your favorite artists?
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats, Walt Whitman, Appolinaire, Blaise Cendars, Alfred Jarry, Celine, the Russian Futurists of any medium who did the whole modernist experiment in 20 years what took the rest of the world a whole century, all the Jazz & Blues greats, rock & roll, Henry Miller/Anis Nin, the Beats especially Kerouac, Burroughs & da levy, Thomas Pynchon, Nabokov, Don Delillo, Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, Man Ray, Annie Proulx, Gunter Grass, Ishmael Reed, Borges, Carver, Bukowski, Todd Moore, Androla, Greg Benson, any & all science fiction writers, etc.
• What influences you to write about/how you do?
The human condition is so absurd there is enough material for a hundred lives. I write because I have to, if I don't write I'm not happy although sometimes writing is like performing surgery on myself w/a can opener.
• Where do you see the underground writing scene in 25 years?
As long as there is civilization there will be an underground. If the world is truly now a global civilization I expect a global underground. The problem of translation will become more & more acute. In this country the underground has suffered from too much freedom, neglect, being ignored. If anything important happens it quickly becomes co-opted into our consumer society. In the future I see a Cait Collins 'interactive' doll, sock extra, a Ron Androla mini series, guided tours of Mesquite St., Jazz's gun collection in a museum. Jay Minor - The Game? What we need is a good decade of repression - hangings, people denouncing their work - to weed out all but the strongest. Maybe there is hope.
• from cait - you must have been teased along the years about your last name being beaver. by now, what comment do you despise the most; do you consider yerself related to ‘the beave’ by now and do you think beaver cleaver is circumcised …o, the hell with the beaver…are you circumcised? (just wondering)
As my 'ol granpappy used to say: “Call me anything you want jus don't call me late for dinner!” That's before they put him away - forever. When I was in elementary school I was too big to mess with, my duty in recess rumbles was to fight the other big kid one grade above me. Later I worked the perimeter keeping kids from the Catholic school off 'our' playground. In junior high & high I spent a great deal of time out of sight, underground. I was looking for that mythical tunnel leading to a vent into the girl's locker room. My first failure. About then people started calling me Beaver, a name that stuck for almost thirty years. Lately it has devolved into bill but I'm still called Beaver by aging burnouts (friends &; ex wives.) In the last few years has come a new irritant, people think I look like Jerry Garcia. Usually slavering drunks (friends &ex wives.) I am not a dead guy's ghost. This never fails to send me into a rage.
Maniacal laughter over the phone when I give someone my name. Especially from women. I always tell them “It's spelled the same as 'the animal.' (ya cunt!)
Hell, my father's name is Wally! THAT has caused enough disturbing nightmares. I feel that 'the beave' is an unborn twin lodged deep in some cavity within me. Late at night I can hear him, bitching about royalties.
Scholars have long debated the rumor that beaver cleaver was circumcised some 30 times, each time his foreskin miraculously regrowing. Current thinking is that he was circumcised 'a lot' his sessions under the knife a source of many lost episodes & those mysterious 'reruns' that happened every summer. Jerry Mather's foreskin, on the other hand, lies suspended in liquid helium in a secret vault under Temple Beth Israel in Los Angeles. Cloning will occur. Look for 'the beave' to return around 2020.
Aside from when they removed the tail & those pesky nodules, a knife has never touched this pristine shrine I call my body. On the other hand my foreskin cannot & never has been used as a blanket.
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