Novel

Friday, February 25

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Art Brew was a Professor of Cracker Studies, without portfolio, sometimes even the dean of Florida's Co-Opted Coasts writers, and even sometimes a Florida's Co-Opted Coasts writer emeritus. He gave himself these titles, he might as well lay it on thick. Salvage Archeologist of Florida's Co-Opted Coasts.

For example he gave himself a Disappearing, or Retreating Writer award, by analogy with Emerging Writer. The prize was the glass stopper off a Worcestershire sauce bottle. You stuck it in the end of your penis to keep the carneira from swimming up your urethra when you pissed in the Amazon River, or either the Panama Canal, Brew couldn't remember. The tanga is a ceramic pubic covering worn to prevent female carneira infestation. Also a skimpy thong bathing suit worn by Cariocas, or natives of Rio.

One reader called Brew Dean. Until he read about Brew calling himself Florida Slim. Now he called him Slim. Brew called himself Florida Slim after Slim McElderry, who was known as Slim, Mac, or Em. Confusion to the enemy, Ed Ball used to say.

Ed Ball ran the St. Joe Paper Company. Had thousands of acres of pulpwood trees in Northwest Florida. St. Joe Paper Company is now St. Joe Company, and they are a real estate developer, exploiting their land holdings by turning them into new communities in Florida's Great Northwest, Inc. They hired a man from Disney to help them accomplish this.

Remember what Orlando used to look like, before Disney? That's what Florida's Emerald, and Florida's Forgotten Coasts looked like before Florida's Great Northwest, Inc.

Brew called Florida's Great Northwest, Inc. Florida's Co-Opted Coasts, but what did he know, he didn't have any land holdings. Economic development would be good for the area, it would bring good, high-paying jobs, and a few low-paying jobs, in the banking, insurance, and real estate sector, the service sectors, the hospitality industry sector, lawn maintenance, tennis court and golf course maintenance, you could watch the runoff of fertilizer turn the water green from eutrophication, fish gasping for air, who needs fish, who needs families that make a living fishing, and have for generations, the net ban will take care of them. The Florida cracker is deader than a lobe-finned fish.

Brazil. In the movie Brazil, the terrorists, who were tortured, had to pay for their own interrogation. One terrorist, Buttle, was actually a man named Tuttle (or vice versa), whose name was printed out by mistake when a fly dropped into the mechanism.

Anti-terrorism isn't an exact science, it's an art. A black art. If you're against development, you hate progress, hate America, hate freedom. There's a black hole out in space with your name on it, waiting to suck you in, and not disgorge you. Woodie Guthrie sang "Vigilante Blues." Leadbelly sang "Bourgeois Blues" and "Fare Thee Well, Titanic," about Jack Johnson not getting a seat in First Class on the Titanic because he was a Negro. In his CD The Black Hole, Slim McElderry sings "Faretheewell Democratic," and "Bushwa Blues," about voting machine irregularities in Florida, especially among African-American voters, rigged, and stolen, elections, monkeyshines in broad daylight. Bessie Smith sang "Gimme a pigfoot, and a bottle of beer." Wrong.

Bessie Smith died because of race. The Florida cracker died because of class.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Art Brew called himself a hospitality industry report writer and folk art critic. What did he know about art?

He called himself a forensic philologist, too. He knew words.

Art Brew was an eponymous name. At least, Art Brew was a homonym of art brut, or outsider art.

Raw, intuitive, naïve. Coarse, or vulgar. Wild.

Georg Groddeck, The Book of the It, called himself a wild analyst. Wild in the sense untutored, untrained. Self-taught.

Savage. One translation of The Savage Mind (La pensée sauvage), by Claude Lévi-Strauss, is wild pansies. As pansy is a sobriquet for homosexual, wild pansies is an oxymoron.

Sometimes Brew called himself a naked savage, or salvage, after the Indians in The Sot-Weed Factor, and sometimes he called himself the salvage archeologist of the Mall Builder culture.

A salvage archeologist was a wild analyst. That's what Brew knew about art. He knew it when he saw it. He knew what he liked. What is good and what is not good, Phaedrus--need we anyone to tell us?

Brew had a dog named Phaedrus that was run over by a car chasing a cat. Phaedrus was chasing the cat, not the car. They both ran in front of the car. The cat got away. Phaedrus didn't.

Phaedrus was a Roman writer who translated Aesop's fables from Greek into Latin. Phaedrus was also a character in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And a dialogue of Plato.

Why can't Hulk think? This is more than the reader needs to know about Art Brew.

He pictured a car going up over the curb in hot pursuit of a cat.

Don Batten crashed in a ditch and broke his neck.

People are wondering, did he go into the ditch trying to hit an armadillo, or a deer, with his car?

One time he hit a refrigerator carton, in the road, to watch it fly up in the air. There was a refrigerator in it.

Would you hit a woman with a baby, no, I'd hit her with a brick, e. e. cummings says, in i: six nonlectures.

Brew published his little screeds at his web site, roman-feuilleton.com, but now it was time to brick-and-mortar publish them, he thought. To publish a collection of them. In a book.

The book was where it was at. The physical artifact.

Artifacts survived.

They could be studied. Analyzed and interpreted. Reconsidered.

Brew read Screed, every few years, to see if it held up.

It held up.

Forty held up. His 40th book.

How many books ago was that? 182?

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Take my wife. Please.

Compare art brut. To what?

Compare art brut to Art "Home" Brew, report writer. Report on the Suppression of Art Brew's Work by Unknown Forces. William Lee was a report writer in Naked Lunch. He wrote a report on the assassination of his wife, Joan, by unknown forces. He, of course, shot Joan in the forehead while they were performing their William Tell act.

"Raw peeled winds of hate and mischance blew the shot."

"I'm exactly the same as a madman," Salvador Dali said, "except I'm not mad."

Brew wrote ink-and-paper books. Not ebooks, or self-published pamphlets. If you hit his refrigerator carton, there was a refrigerator in it. They had weight. Gravity.

Gravitas. Brew had gravitas. Dragging his stack behind him like a sea anchor.

A stack is an unpublished, or underpublished shelf. What book was Brew working on now? He didn't remember.

But he could look it up.

You didn't need to remember, if you could look it up.

It isn't bragging if you can do it, or did it.

Howard Finster said,

As far as I'm concerned, ther ain't no outsiders of anything. If you're an artist, you're an artist. If you're a mechanic, you're a mechanic. If you're a farmer, you're a farmer. Ain't no outsider farmers, ain't no outsider mechanics. That's just something that someone's got up to class things. I ignore it.

That's the way Brew felt. He wasn't an outsider, he was top-dead-center (TDC) in the mainstream. The mainstream was marginal. It was backwards, topsy-turvy, ipso-facto.

TDC didn't stand for Tourism Development Council, it stood for top-dead-center.

Tourists, stay home. Retirees, go somewhere else. Real estate investors, buy all the condominiums you want. Anywhere but here.

Jack Rudloe said if there was one thing he was disappointed by, it was how little fight the natives put up in defense of their own way of life. They didn't seem to see that once what it was based on was gone, it was gone. It couldn't coexist peacefully with progress, development, the exploitation of natural resources, rather than working in harmony with them, learning to understand the intricate relationships among the seemingly disparate parts: environment, economy, sociopolitical superstructure. Not to mention commercial advertisements and political propaganda spewing out of radio, teevee, slick magazines, and newspapers, books, what did you consider the mainstream of American literature, Harold Robbins or Henry David Thoreau? Jacqueline Susann or Walt Whitman?

Brew was in that tradition.

Under the Volcano, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Brew was under the Wakulla Volcano.

He just wrote The Volcanoes of Wakulla County, sent it out, got back form letter rejection slips.