Remember when Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus came to town and wanted to talk Willeford? Talk Willeford we did, and Ethan recorded it, had the thing transcribed by Cullen Gallagher of Pulp Serenade, and he just put the chatter up on his blog — if interested, check it out.
To make it a show, Ethan also roped in a Willeford-centric interview with Ray Banks, and did a survey of Willeford’s works with lots of long quotes — not the sort of thing you can do in a book, but on the web pretty standard practise, and they’ll give you the sense whether or not you may enjoy Willeford.
Charles Willeford is one of the all-time greats, one of the deepest pleasures of late twentieth century absurd literature, but he’s not for everybody. Which is covered in Ethan’s symposium.
Me, I wrote an entire book about Willeford, and while some may think they are bigger Willeford fans, no, they’re not.
(One thing I am wondering about, though — where the hell are the dustjackets on Ethan’s copies of Willeford items? Does he throw them away? Does he file them in folders or something? I’m a modern lit guy, I know first editions, and I like dustjackets — the dustjacket for Willeford was especially nice, I thought. Man, keep the dustjackets!)
