After getting sacked from my technical
writing job, in Panama City, Florida, I got hired by a community behavioral health
care center in DeFuniak Springs, as a grant writer/community relations coordinator.
The drive was a long commute. I compared The Golf Courses of Red Bay, Florida:
Sandy Pines Home Sites and RV Park to The Covered Pedestrian Bridges of South
Walton County (Seaside). Robert Kincaid takes photographs for National Geographic,
I can't even place my photographs at the National Lampoon.
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So I wrote a book called THE SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST OF FLORIDA'S CO-OPTED
COASTS: A MEMOIR OF 38 YEARS OF GRACIOUS CRACKER LIVING. 60,000 words. This is
like Carl Hiaasen writing Team Rodent and then asking Disney to publish it.
Disney isn't just an amusement park and spin-off cartoon-logo figures for Michael
Jordan to appear in television commercials with. Disney is a publishing company,
a TV network, and a movie studio.
Was I nuts? No, I was real. That is,
fictional.
Robert Kincaid was an Avalon romance. Robert Kincaid was Fabio.
I was Art "Home" Brew, compare art brut. An outsider artist.
America's greatest living unpublished, or underpublished writer, perhaps the greatest
unpublished, or underpublished American writer ever.
I wrote DECLARING VICTORY:
THE UNDERGROUND WRITER (ART BREW) WHO CHANGED THE ART OF NOVEL-WRITING , POSTING
HIS DAILY TYPEWRITING ONLINE, DAILY, FOR YEARS. 68,000 words. DECLARING VICTORY
is about how Brew wrote 249 books without selling a word to New York or Hollywood,
winning a grant or a literary prize, a writer-in-residence position or a stay at
a writers' colony. Although he was a headliner at the Underground Literary Alliance's
Legends of the Underground reading off-off-Broadway.
Brew realizes that SALVAGE
ARCHEOLOGIST and DECLARING VICTORY are not a series of two books, 248-249,
as he'd thought, they are a book in two parts: LUGWAH: ALONE IN HIS PRIVATE GLORY.
A glossary and index complete the book. The glossary is 10,000 words. An alphabetical
list of terms cross-reference each other, and show how what I am doing is (1) sui
generis, and (2) the shape of literature to come. Like Ornette Coleman was The
Shape of Jazz To Come. The index will be useful to readers who study the book,
to biographers, and to literary critics.
We see LUGWAH (138,000 words) in
the process of development, as it discovers its form in the data, rather than having
some off-the-shelf form imposed on it, in advance.
The Celebrated Jumping
Mullet of Bay County, Florida. Actually, Parker Bayou, Florida. Jump, mullet, jump.
Owen and Balder open The Saunders Brothers: The Doghouse Sessions with "Jump,
Mullet, Jump." This is a book about combining writing, work, and family. I
held a marriage together, raised two fine sons, created a body of work, my stack,
and invented a form to present it in, daily typewriting. We get the flavor of what
it was like to do that. The glossary defines stack and daily typewriting.
I went for la gloire. I hit the big door prize, as John Prine says. In spite
of myself.