Talking about Liz Phair's first album, Exile in Guyville, the Raincoats' Gina Birch recently gushed:

All those bloody records I'd listened to for years and years with the boys -- The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street and Bob Dylan's 'Lay Lady Lay' -- I was having a good time, but I always wondered where I fitted into it as a woman. Suddenly, four or five tracks into Exile in Guyville, I knew Liz Phair's songs were on my side, that they were twisted to my viewpoint, my advantage. Lots of women have written like that, but to me it had the edge.

1993's Exile in Guyville is a song-by-song response to the Stones' 1972 album and a wry take on the world of boy rock. With lyrics like 'I wanna fuck you like a dog... I wanna be your blow job queen' (on 'Flower') and track titles ranging from 'Fuck and Run' to 'Girls! Girls! Girls!', Liz presented herself as a sassy songwriter going some way to challange and subvert women's traditionally submissive sexual roles in music. The album, filled with bold folk melodies, won widespread critical acclaim in the US -- although it sold only 20,000 copies on indie label Matador in the US, it was voted album of the year by Village Voice and Spin, while Rolling Stone named Phair best, new female artist.

Because of her sexually uncompromising lyrics and don't-fuck-with-me attitude, Liz has been called the 'indie Madonna' by more than one American journalist. The label doesn't irritate so much as it bemuses her and although she's been quoted as saying 'I hope I can handle myself better than she does', Liz told Details that 'Madonna kicked a huge rough- hewn patch through the jungle and we're all tiptoeing behind her saying: "Look at all the pretty flowers." Madonna made it possible for me to be interpreted properly.' In Ms. Ciccone's wake, Liz talks ruthlessly about wanting to exploit herself better than anyone else could and is not afraid to admit that she has 'just bought a manager'.

She has been slammed for such an approach -- taking on an aggressive male persona -- and for her direct sexuality. A white female folk-rock singer writing sexually overt lyrics has elicted responses similar to Madonna's dalliance with the virgin/whore imagery -- including a sex- kitten sell-out' and 'whorish ball-buster pyschobitch'. American feminist rock critic Ann Powers takes a more positve view:

There's something more unprecedented about what women like Liz Phair or Polly Harvey are doing. In the early 70s, even with singers like Joni Mitchell, it was more about having a romantic vision that was saying 'I want to be independent' but not necessarily 'I am oppressed'. It's hard to imagine a song like 'Fuck and Run', with its blatant message, appearing at any earlier time and being accepted.

Liz is hardly 'oppressed' -- she was born in Cincinnati, moved with her parents and brother to an affluent Chicago suburb in 1976, and later majored in visual art at the liberal Oberlin college -- but she rails against role-playing and sexism. At the start of 1991 a friend convinced her to record some of the songs she had been secretly writing. Under the moniker Girly Sound she made a tape using her voice and electric guitar, made a few copies and discovered that East Coast musicians and critics were duplicating the songs for each other. In spring 1992 Matador signed her and Guyville appeared the following year.

The likes of Chrissie Hynde and Winona Ryder declared themselves fans and Liz was (star) struck by paranoia. She could hardly bring herself to do live shows: a winter '93 London gig was chaotic and no testament to Guyville. Six months on and she was so bolshie on stage in New York that it was hard to believe she was ever self-conscious. When it came to making album number two though, the paranoia returned until exile in recording studios in the Bahamas stoked up her creativity. Between swimming and rum-drinking sessions, Whip-Smart came together. The themes are familiar -- sex, love, relationships, emancipation and rock -- and is also stronger, funkier and altogether more accessible album. 'Chopsticks is slow and sultry compared to the tough pop rock of 'Super Nova', the title track addresses an imaginary son and boldly steals the chorus to Malcolm McLaren's 'Double Dutch' while 'Jealousy' wonders at her lover's past: 'I can't believe you had a life before me.'

Liz Phair is all about balancing the tension between freedom (to fuck and run) with her own take on feminism and her flirtations with image control -- she considered but turned down Playboy, 'because there's no way to be subversive about it, even if I take the pictures'. As Liz Phair herself said in an interview in the September 1994 issue of Harper's Bazaar: 'When people were exclaiming over my album [Guyville], I thought, you've got to be kidding. If this was the greatest thing that ever happened to a female, where is everybody? It's like showing up at a party and wondering where everyone is who said they'd be there.'

I was always into rock, even when I was very little. I really liked the beat and the speed, the toughness. I picked up my first guitar in seventh grade -- I'd been playing the piano for a long time. I was in various musical classes and there were always instruments around. I felt like people were trying to expose me to lots of different creative outlets -- so it wasn't weird to pick up a guitar. I don't think it really snapped into place and I hated reading music, but I could imitate my teacher because I had a great ear. My teachers would always let me get away with playing from memory instead of actually reading music.

I remember growing up and listening to a lot of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Peter and the Wolf, Jesus Christ Superstar. My parents were into a lot of different music, but this was just the stuff that I would actually waddle out and pay attention to. I was definitely excited by music at an early age. My mother used to sing me to sleep every night when I was very young; there was always a ritual where we'd be in bed and she'd sing cultural things like 'Down the Valley'. That must have clearly gotten into my subconscious. I'd sing along with her and I learned all these pretty classica structures, the 'little ditty'. I sung around when I went to camp and I was in a choir for a while.

When we were on car trips, we'd always be singing. It sounds like we were the Von Trapp family! We weren't... I am just scrunching it all together. I always felt like there was room for me in music; that was definitely where I felt at home. But you know what? I never really had that great 'I discovered this kind of music'. It was always there. My babysitters in Cincinnati used to give me all their old singles. I was listening to the Kinks when I was about five. My brother -- who's two years older than me -- had a huge collection of singles. He would get them all 'cause he had the record table. You know what's odd? I just realised that in junior high I would leave the radio on to get to sleep.

It was hard to go to shows from where we lived; it was too suburban. I never felt I was missing out, I didn't really care. It wasn't until I got to college that music was even something I wanted to do, and then I think it was more of a social direction. It was more like I wanted to be in that scene. I went from an extremely preppy conservative high school to a relatively radical, middle-class liberal, but very defiant, school. I became a rebel, but not in a really colourful way. I enjoyed being messy and obnoxious and sexual -- at least superficially -- because I guess my social life was split off from the rest of my friends from high school. Suddenly I found this new, more dramatic, more exciting social scene which was more connected to music.

My first gig was just terrifying. I didn't throw up at all; I'm not a vomiter. For a week beforehand I went through every scenario in my mind. I could picture everything. I could picture humiliation and people talking about me afterwards. I could picture the whole audience just standing there judging... You know, when I watch a performance which is awkward, I cringe. I remember being little and going skating at the Ice-capades and someone would fall over. I'd be like: 'Oh God!' It would kill me. I projected this on to everyone watching my show. I imagined an audience to be so much more attentive than clearly they would ever be. They're wondering about the girl standing next to them, they're about to go get another beer, whatever. They may be watching, but it isn't that severe. Of course I was convinced otherwise. During my first gig I felt really awkward and my voice cracked a bunch of times, but I got through it. It was fine. It really wasn't the kind of thing where I thought: 'No way, never again. What a dumb idea!' Clearly, the ball got rolling.

Now I've had lots of practice. Doing it again and again and a-fucking-gain. And I don't even tour that much. I figured that I wouldn't be lousy at it if I could just get through the fright. You know what it is? I grew up being the manipulator. Being the person behind the camera. I grew an academic; I was never, ever, a performer. I never did recitals, never acted in plays, even though everyone always said I should. I really hated the idea of having that kind of attention without being able to control it. To me, you're really naked on stage. Now that I've got some tools in my vocabulary to get me through, I can finally get into places that have space -- mental space, where I can get above myself, my appearance and everyone's judgement of me. And simply be in the music. But I waited a good fucking year and a half for that. There was no watershed that broke me through. It was literally step by little step. I imagine it'll continue like that 'cause it isn't something that came naturally to me. It was real interesting to watch myself do it.

It's still weird seeing images of myself. I can see myself and I think it's kinda cute. 'Aw, there she is, all scared.' I've seen so many photos nowadays I don't get that upset, I don't read into them so much. I see the pound of make-up and the clothes, I see the shot that they took and I see what they were trying to show me as. You know, why they took it from that angle. I still am so much behind the camera; my brain is still back there with the photographer and stylist. I'm not letting myself be totally in front, which is good, I guess, because a lot of people end up winging out into the world of cheese if they get too into being the one in front. The funny thing is, if I were styling myself, I would make myself just as sexy. I would exploit myself, only I think I'd do it better. What I find is most detrimental is the fact that they're trying to mould me into something but it's never what would have been the best mould for me. They're not looking at how I dress normally and trying to enhance or dramatise that, they're almost trying to shove me -- to take a circle and shove it into a square. You can see where it's not fitting. I almost always see that in photographs.

I usually tend to analyse myself in terms of socio-econonic and cultural upbringing. The kind of people that I may have tried to style myself after were never celebritites, it was always the beautiful prep. I just saw Wolf and the way Michelle Pfeiffer was styled was great. Or Audrey Hepburn. That sort of stylish chic. Yet... worldly. I thought about it every once in a while -- every month or so. 'Damn, I got to get some rock 'n' roll clothes. I gotta get something like... silver!' But I don't have a face that looks prettier for having exotic clothes on. I tend to look better in something that's traditional and, at best, elegant. So it's funny, 'cause you have my music -- which is kind of tough girl with the soft side -- and it doesn't really mesh with my appearance. There's a resonant disparity between what I look like, where I come from and how I choose to express myself. I can't really change it.

There's tons I wouldn't do to sell my product. There's a shitload I wouldn't do to sell a record. I was recently talking about what the bad or awkward words are now. Which are a mark of where feminism is at. Lately, I came up with 'slut'. Who would you call a slut? Trying to get women to say that about other women is really hard just now. I was thinking about this 'cause I ws in a hotel room in LA and I turned on the porno channel. I got really upset about this one woman's performance and I was calling her a 'slut, mumble, mumble'. And I was thinking: "What does that mean? Why am I thinking that? What is it about her?' And I kept trying to explain it -- my boyfriend and I got into long discussions.

It isn't really that I wouldn't use sex to sell a record, 'cause I would. My songs have sex in them so I would definitely include sex in the visuals. It's subtle and possibly a funny distinction to the mainstream, but I think I how your sexuality is used is really important. It can be worlds apart within one category. There's a certain type of portrayal using my sexuality which I would never, ever do. I toyed with the idea of doing Playboy because everyone does. I thought: 'Can I really be subversive in the ultimate men's magazine?' And you really can't. It's that desire to show that you vote for sex and yet against sexism. How do you get away with this kind of thing?

I had a whole bunch of times with Whip-Smart where I was trying to keep control. 'Cause I didn't really want to share my emotions any more. Every time I tried to write a song, I found the discipline was no longer my outlet; it was a product that I knew was going to end up being used in some way and it really fucked up my songwriting for a while. I kept coming up with catchy chord progressions which I didn't really want to share. It's so ironic. I call my mom every once in a while, and she'll be like: 'Honey, you're a private person.' That is what's going wrong here. As much as I feel like an exhibitionist -- I like to make a bold statement when I make one -- I only like to make it when I want to, under controlled circumstances. All of a sudden I didn't have the time to be monitoring that and I didn't have the leisure to mull over what I did want to say.

I haven't listened to Exile in Guyville in eighteen months. I don't tend to go back and analyse too hard. But I do think I set up a paradigm, I set up a structure around myself that I found really hard to work within once it had been set up. I found myself working within limitations. It's tough for anyone who goes from anonymity to being watched. The songs' expressions were so intimate, it was almost ironic to go public. In my case, the private/public is so extreme -- as was the difference between the kind of intimacy I foster on Guyville and the kind of publicity it generated. I was totally surprised at the response. Wasn't everybody? This has become my little soundbite, but I thought about 1,300 people would listen to it and I'd sell about 1,300 copies -- which was exciting, 'cause in the indie market that gives them a reason to re-press. And I needed it to be heard by people that were within a mile radius of my apartment. That was what I was picturing. I freaked out when I found out that people like Chrissie Hynde liked it.

Writing the followup to Guyville took longer as a result. I fell in love when Guyville was coming out and I've been with the same person, living with him for a year now, and we have a very close relationship. So all that longing and lonliness has changed, 'cause I've never been in love like this before. It's like what I hoped and pictured and yet, it's never exactly like what you picture. It's better. It's just so funny, it's really weird... This next album [Whip-Smart], you know what? I really like it now. I can honestly say: I think it rules. It went through a lot of stages of: 'Well, I don't think it's there...' Then we'd add a different song, change it a little bit; it took for ever to get the order 'cause the sequence wasn't right. I just went through it last night again, and it sounds great.

There's probably not the same intimacy as on Guyville, but there's just as much me. It's really, truly me. Instead of reaching out and longing, as I was on Guyville, I'm sharing -- in a weird way. It's still very opinionated and there's a bunch of songs that are pretty poignant and personal. But at the same time, it's almost like I sound a little cured. I hope not at the expense of being mainstream. I don't think it is, because when I play it to people, they say, 'You know when you hear a Liz song.' To me, the difference between the two albums may be really huge, but to other people it's probably going to seem like a logical extension. I think I got the sophomoric slump or something, but we'll see.

I guess the lyrics are just as dissatisfied, but in a different way. But they're not so much: 'I'm needy!' They're more like: 'This is how I see it.' I'm standing up for myself on this one. I'm calling it as I see it. And I'm still musing back and forth; there's all that contradiction stuff that there was before, that's just my personality. I think there's a certain amount of strength and, I wouldn't say it's happy, but it's definitely more kinda... If Guyville felt like there was a big hole somebody needed to fill, then this one sounds like the hole got filled. Only I'm still complaining! That's the art of the songwriter: you always write about what isn't fixed in your day-to-day life. That's the forum for those parts of you that feel like: 'Hey, wait a minute...'

I wrote songs that are better than I could have written before, and I didn't use a ton of them. I found that I wrote a billion songs about me and the industry. Like: 'Oh it's so hard for me/Oh it's so tough...' No one wants to hear that sort of shit. That made it dfficult, it made it gruelling to find enough songs. I think that the toughest thing about the sophomore album is to come up with fourteen more songs that are going to last over time.

In some of my new songs, I swapped a bunch of gender roles. In a bunch of gender roles. In a weird way, I'm refuting the traditional love object. My lyrics tend to be putting myself back and forth from female to male shoes. In 'Whip-Smart', the song begins: 'I'm going to lock my son up in a tower till I write my life story on the back of his big, brown eyes.' And in the second verse: 'I'm going to lock my son up in a tower till he learns to let his hair down far enough to climb outside.' There you've got a locked-in Rapunzel and it's all over jealousy. I take on the man's role, see it through his eyes: 'I can't believe you had a life before me, I can't believe they let you run around free, just putting you body wherever it seemed like a good idea.' In 'X-Ray Man', I'm calling the man a girl: 'As far as I know, baby/As far as I know, funky lady.' And literally, in the last song, I call him 'May Queen' and I treat him like he's an attention-grabbing, sexually manipulating woman. It's all over the place and I don't know what it is, but it's almost like it transcends gender roles.

When Juliana Hatfield says women aren't biologically equipped to play the guitar, I understand what she's saying and I think she's wrong. I'm the kind of person that tends to bring out things like that. I wouldn't say that, but I have said things like: 'There are biological differences between men and women which determine some behaviour.' I'm always willing to say something that sounds too overarching, too generalised to possibly be true. Just like I was talking about 'what is a slut?' because it's very telling. That's my college education coming out there, the provocative statement which we all have to acknowledge the truth of it -- but at the same time you know it can't be true. I think it's really neat Juliana Hatfield said that because she's gonna get pounded for it -- she should get pounded for it -- but clearly she can take it if she said it.

In a certain way, why don't women do guitar solos? I know everyone wanted me to do a solo on Whip-Smart and I didn't do one. It was going to be this big thing: 'And this will be here first solo!' I said: 'Nah...' 'cause it isn't in my stomach to do a solo. But then again you've got Louise Post in Veruca Salt who's pulling a solo every single song. So it can be done, clearly. I have just always been attracted to the sing-song melody because, like I said, we grew up with camp songs. With mom songs and Girl Scout songs and car trip songs, fire songs... And think about all the women that are on the radio, what are they doing? Ballads.

I totally agree with the idea that women don't have to be guitar peformers. I think we're all exploring our gender differences 'cause suddenly they're thrown up in front of us in a way they never really were before. I think it's really cool. I got really upset about a movie we were watching the other night and then I got even more upset because my boyfriend didn't invalidate it and his 15-year-old son is sitting there. It was some dumb fucking sci-fi thing -- this life force suddenly sucking the life out of them. And I'm like: 'Aagh!' These idiotic things like whether girls can play guitar solos or not. I much prefer to get everyone's hair raised by talking about what women can and can't do in terms of what they are actually doing. I feel that now I've got a lot more room to be doing things that people can then analyse -- instead of having things done to us that we have to analyse.

Being a female musician gets easier year to year and then it falls back for a while. I think everything in life is like that -- your health is like that, weather is like that and I think it shouldn't ever be taken for granted. I know every woman in the world has those days where they just sit and shudder because they know power can be taken away. If it can be taken away from a country, it can be taken away from a gender, and I think it's really important never to take it for granted. Never to get numb to it, never to get blasé and think: 'Well, hell -- we've got money..." There's so many things left to be done and America's so far ahead of so many countries. In a weird way it's really creepy.

I get frustated with the way male journalists treat me... not daily, but weekly. I don't spend so much time now trying to find out whether it's because I'm a woman or it's because I'm a person with certain strengths and weaknessess. Or because I'm a commodity to their business. I am always aware of power and the interplay between those that have it and those that have less. As a woman, people still get away with stuff on me that I don't even know they are getting away with -- they wouldn't treat a male band this way. But I wouldn't really know; I've never been a guy in rock 'n' roll. I do know when I smell condescension and that's what pisses me off.

I tend to surround myself with a better world than the average, just by whom I associate with. Whether it's my record label, my band mates, my booking agent, or my new manager -- I try to pick people that I just sense will treat me with a certain amount of respect and equality. I pick people to be friends with, people who can greet me as who I am as a person rather than as a woman. It doesn't always work, but that's what I try to do. So I don't think in any way, shape or form, I'm living in the average slice of America any more. I think one of the biggest privileges of being singled out like this has given me the ability to do that -- to isolate myself in a type of human environment. Reading badly put together interviews drives me crazy. Drives me utterly crazy. It's such a drag to be manipulated into this personality that comes across on the page. It's retarded: it's guy-retarded. And it's so clearly people who are unwilling to allow my overactive will to cohabit with my feminine, almost girlish, demeanour. They just see one or the other -- they either want the doe or they want the lion. Not even a lion... let's say the rhino. That pisses me off, I really hate when my personality's so tightly boxed.

To me, feminism means that I believe in women, in their potential, their words and their value. And I am disgusted by people that don't share my opinion. In that sense, feminism is, to me, the 'of course' clause. 'Should we be paid the same amount?' 'Of course.' 'Should we have control over our bodies?' 'Of course.' To me, it's shockingly logical. Last year, I was asking people whether they think women could be geniuses which, to me is, 'Of course!' I have met them many times! And you would be so surprised how many men who run inthe indie music circle, who run around with women who are clearly in control of their lives, literally do not believe that women can be geniuses. They think it's the province of men. They think it's literally a type of brain that men possess. Maybe, one in a million women comes along who actually has these capabilities, but clearly is very male-like.

Sometimes, I get a shuddering... Sometimes I get downright frightened by the fact that I'm walking around taking it all for granted -- 'Yes, I can do this. Yes, I can do that' -- when there's so little precedent to say that I can. I think that people who break ground don't think about it, they just go do it. It's like the warrior mentality,which we still need to possess. Isn't that funny? The results of some study showed that most women who achieve on par finacially and in corporate status with men were tomboys. That women would have to be, still today, half-male to be able to achieve. It's so telling. It's so grotesque.

I think this fear of feminists comes from the fact that a lot of women are in love with the image of women, and to some extent, that is created by traditional views. Delicacy or guile, whatever... I figure that the more women are up and out there, the more it will naturally diversify. Right now, the main aim is to get women everywhere in relatively equal percentages. Certainly I believe -- 'cause I believe biology matters -- that areas will equate to one gender or another. Men may prefer one thing because of their inclinations and women may prefer another. But if we can see, as a culture, that these things shift and flux and that men and women can participate in the world equally -- then GNP [gross national product] would be a product of both genders.

I think we're at a very early stage of women's liberation -- we're talking maybe a century of some kind of enlightenment. Women will naturally gravitate towards certain things and become relied upon in society for things other than domestic. Because life is cyclical, the struggle is, in a weird way, ongoing. The best thing you can do is to literally do something. Be visible doing something. And if you have to be a tomboy at this point, maybe in fifty years' time you won't. I don't think we're going to get it like we want it for a long time. It's the worst fucking feeling when you think everything's going OK and suddenly you realise it's not. Nothnig makes me burst spontaneously into tears like that sudden feeling that I'm a woman and this is a man's world. That scares the living shit outta me.

Sometimes there are drunken guys at my shows -- what do they think they're doing there? That's the thing I said about isolating myself. They're such an anomaly to me. I occasionally run into them in a bar and I think: 'What fucking stone did you crawl out of?' The arrogance to fucking take up my stage time with their bullshit. I remember once in Manchester -- that was the grossest. Totally being harassed backstage by the band that played before me -- really evil, ugly stuff. Like, do I pay my band mates with sex? There were about thirty-five of them sitting backstage, all of them hostile as shit -- trying to see if they could make me cry, run, whatever. I don't know if they're just dumb, and they think that this is how bands behave at shows -- maybe they go to lots of other kinds of rock shows where the dudes are all drunk and that's what you do. It's really hard to know what the hell that is.

I usually try and hear a couple of them out -- in the same way you respond to men on the street. You try and field one comment to see if you can quiet them by acknowledging them. 'Cause sometimes, if you don't say anything and clearly they know you can hear them, they get way louder. They start shrieking and they get a little more hostile -- it's almost like terrorism defusion, trying to defuse the situation before it gets really bad. I try and hear a couple of things and maybe I can snap back at them in a witty manner. Then they just start yelling again, so I really ignore them and try and do my job. My big fear is having things thrown at me on stage -- when it starts getting physical. I've seen that a couple of times and heard about it a bunch. That's a nightmare. In some ways, by behaving in that aggressive manner they're getting what they want -- they're getting my attention and they're making me uneasy. That, I resent. Strongly.

I'm sort of misanthropic and I believe that crowds turn violent and ugly and bring out the worst in people. I do not like being on stage in front of a huge amount of people. I'm always aware of the potential for things to get out of hand. I think it is a guy-to-girl thing. They don't throw that bullshit at men. I think partially they feel uncomfortable standing in front of their little 'schoolteacher'. If there's a female teacher, they want to see if they can make her cry. I feel that these are the guys who only know about a few words from a song -- 'I wanna be your blow-job queen' -- because it was mentioned in some article they saw. I don't think they have the album, any of those guys. But they paid to get in, ha ha!

I'm a wife and mother in my daily life. I live with my boyfriend and his 15-year-old son. I've probably nver been more girlie. Yet at the same time here in my music I'm writing these lyrics. It kind of amused me, it was really neat that there was this bizarre theme. My boyfriend doesn't listen to lyrics that much, although he fixed part of the order. He's a musician too. He really likes Whip-Smart, but we don't talk about each other's work. In a weird way, we leave it separate. Some of the songs are older than our relationship, some of them are just about people -- I can write retroactively or just imaginatively. Some of them are about him, but he doesn't tend to analyse my lyrics simply because he realises it wouldn't be a wise idea. And I don't analyse his work, although it's not the same thing. Our relationship's separate; the rock thing doesn't really encroach. When he goes to a show, he's always just shocked and weirded out.

Do I have groupies? Not those who want after-show sex. They don't do that! They blush and they shake and they say, 'Your album's just the most amazing thing! Thank you Liz, for making it.' They freak out. You just want to remind them that you could have been in Social Studies with them! This could be you! You could be up here! And I could be there. Most of the time I think I get relatively respectful groupies.

There's a boy/girl balance, honest to God. People always ask me this, but I'm not lying. The girls tend to freak out while the boys are a little more sheepish and they're not all dweebs -- some of them are very good- looking, thank you. I'm pretty happy with my audience as it stands right now. That's something that I'd have to worry about -- if you look at the audience and you don't like the people you see, there's something wrong. This record could totally blow that theory to hell but thus far, people have been pretty cool. They're recognisable to me as people I could hang out with. Younger, but they seem really nice -- all excited and freaked out -- but they don't do anything. Occasionally, there's a real fucked-up guy, drunk or something, who's a little scary, but that doesn't happen to often.

I get tons of letters, but they usually go to Matador [the record company] or my parents' house -- they keep bringing me balefuls and I just put 'em in a closet. I don't even write my grandmother. That's my failing. There's many people close to me that are waiting for me to become a decent correspondent. Generally speaking my fans are really cool. There's nothing weird about my career. And anyway, I told Matador to watch out for repeat writers that might be psychotic.