Who Needs Help Now:

The small magazines: Argot — Freed — Frontiers. Each with a personal vision, each extending the realm of literary consciousness, each in the main tribal centres.

Mark Young — escaping a past of promise and the creditors that a man of letters collects;

Dave Mitchell — a delicate fear of publication yet with 3 volumes to shame the Elders unprinted;

Ian Wedde — high for a week in Northern Spain, then strange messages from Jordan, an individual muse of gentle construction, patronised by Landfall;

Russell Haley — scientific-fictive from Leeds gracing us now with his knowledge of the literary grabbag;

Richard Brooke — savage proseur and recently total dramatist exploring the sexual mythos of the insular mind;

Norm Bilbrough — the fear of the individual, also recordist of his masters in subtle portraits;

Sam Hunt — searching for a subject more necessary than himself along the estuaries of boozeheaved brain.

Over these names the bureaucrats sit stupidly unaware that this is where a literature is taking place and not in the fraudulent promulgations of the past. These people need cash to survive and not simply as a token for the services of buffoon or swiver of the Elders' daughters. They are beyond your command yet political patronage controls the pursestrings, be not afraid to cross their palms with silver! They may hang their mad heads in the pines at a later date but they will give you a motherfucking literature in the process. You burned out the brain of Brother Jim Baxter and, although each be a bastard to the muse, you will screw these to death in Thanatos unless you make over the profits of your system to their minds. And there are the other names to plough their deviant ways into your pockets around the comer from these. Largess now and not simply in the erection of shitcreek monuments.

"We have, however, entered quite another time — apocalyptic, anti-rational, blatantly romantic and sentimental ; an age dedicated to joyous misology and prophetic irresponsibility; one distrustful of self-protective irony and too-great self-awareness." Leslie Fiedler, Playboy, December 1969.