Meet V. Vale

We recently connected with V. Vale and have shared our conversation below.

Hi V., thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

Japanese cultural upbringing: you try to keep your word. I was expected to be “smart” so I tried to live up to that expectation. I earned my own money from earliest years.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I publish “zines” in various formats based on interviews I recorded. I’ve had a lot of William Burroughs conversation cassettes I was too lazy to transcribe, but lately, I’ve had help and so the. next xine will include these excerpted conversations. My most recent zine contained conversations with Philip Lamantia, a Surrealist poet identified with the early Beat Generation and its aesthetic which pushed investigating avant-garde jazz of the time (generally ignored by large white audiences, who controlled the mass media).

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1. Listen hard. 2. Say as little as possible. 3. Transcribe. super-accurately, then edit (every word must earn its keep). Don’t misspell. Be very careful to preserve the “voice” of the speaker but eschew redundancies and inessential divergences.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

The Story of Philosophy by Will & Ariel Durant. The JOB by William S. Burroughs. Great Dialogues of Plato, a paperback.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.researchpubs.com
• Instagram: vale_research
• Facebook: val vale
• Youtube: researchpubs
• Other: Bandcamp: researchpubs.bandcamp.com