Damn skippy, that!

Honorarium nomination.

Appreciate the input. I'm sticking with the Ayers' style being fairly difficult to emulate.

Ayers' style isn't just literary. It's a lifelong attitude that he translates into prose.

For example, Ayers hates anything traditionally American. He particularly hates the white middleclass.

Otoh he pretty much worships disenfranchised radical black youths. His opportunity to write Dreams allowed him to vicariously become the individual he admires most.

I will never concede that all of Bill Ayers' particular fetishes coming together in one book could be replicated. Even a good ghostwriter would fall on his face trying.

Just one more post on the subject.

Here's the opener for Dreams, emphasis mine.

A FEW MONTHS AFTER MY twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news. I was living in New York at the time, on Ninety-fourth between Second and First, part of that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan.  It was an uninviting block, treeless and barren, lined with soot-colored walk-ups that cast heavy shadows for most of the day. The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn't work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.

None of this concerned me much, for I didn't get many visitors. I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions. It wasn't that I didn't appreciate company exactly. I enjoyed exchanging Spanish pleasantries with my mostly Puerto Rican neighbors, and on my way back from classes I'd usually stop to talk to the boys who hung out on the stoop all summer long about the Knicks or the gunshots they'd heard the night before. When the weather was good, my roommate and I might sit out on the fire escape to smoke cigarettes and study the dusk washing blue over the city, or watch white people from the better neighborhoods walk their dogs down our block to let the animals shit on our curbs -- "Scoop the poop, you bastards!" my roommate would shout with impressive rage, and we'd laugh at the faces of both master and beast, grim and unapologetic as they hunkered down to do the deed.

I enjoyed such moments -- but only in brief. If the talk began to wander, or cross the border into familiarity, I would soon find reason to excuse myself. I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew. ....

Notice how subtly the hatred of the white bourgeoisie is handled. The bastards had it coming for using the POC neighborhood as a lavatory for their dogs. Leftists loved it because it reinforced all their stereotypes. And whether or not readers were aware of it, the disenfranchised 'us,' of the young POCs vs the 'them,' of middleclass whites is a defining theme of the book.

You can't tell a ghostwriter to replicate that. It wouldn't play, coming from a former POTUS. But without it the key ingredient of Dreams is lost.