Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Brew threw a point-and-shoot camera, a red linen field book, some Uni-Ball gel pens, and a trowel in his musette bag, threw the musette bag in the cab of his old pickup truck, like Clint Eastwood in The Bridges of Madison County, and went off to write a travel piece on his search for the Wakulla Volcano. With pictures. A photo-essay. Like you might see in National Geographic, or Outside magazine.

Art "Home" Brew, compare art brut, was the salvage archeologist of Florida's Co-Opted Coasts. He once worked with a man who called a trowel a troll. To live is to war with trolls, the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen said.

On Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, there was a character called Henry Gibson.

John D. MacDonald wrote Dan Rowan, "Everyone is interested in the mechanics of a craft. Remember The Violent World of Sam Huff?"

Brew wrote about the mechanics of the writing craft. A query letter, a proposal, for a book called THE VOLCANOES OF WAKULLA COUNTY. A reply to a form letter rejection slip.

Then he put these in his book. THE VOLCANOES OF WAKULLA COUNTY.

Sometimes Brew called himself The Wakulla Volcano. The book was thus eponymous, or named after its principal character. Or place. Or thing.

Brew was an explosion in a charnel house.

In The Bridges of Madison County, or the movie of the book, Clint Eastwood had an affair with a lonely farmer's wife, played by Meryl Streep, whose husband was away. After the woman died, her children discovered some love letters, or a diary, in a trunk, and realized that she had had a secret life, a life unknown to them.

Brew was careful not to have affairs with lonely fishermen, crabber, or oystermen's wives, because if he did, he'd have to write about it, as his life was an open book, and his wife would read about it, while he was still alive, and married, and it wouldn't be like throwing water-filled rubbers out hotel windows on his 64th Birthday Tour, he would be in deep kimchee. She would rip off his head, defecate down his neck, and call him a name you couldn't print in a family newspaper, but it rhymes with Old Birdhead.

Usually, he'd just eat out in a seafood restaurant, think his thoughts, and come back home. Write up his thoughts.

Sometimes he interviewed other novelists, songwriters, and 12-string Dobro players, like interviewing Jack Rudloe and Slim McElderry, on a recent trip to Panacea, and put his interviews in his books, but the interviews never turned out to be anything he could sell, and, half the time, he made fun of bookstore owners and newspaper editors in his books, as well, so they would not run other writers' reviews of his books or invite him to sign books at their store, even if he got a book published, which is one reason publishers didn't want to publish them.

Who did Brew think he was? The barefoot boy with cheek?

Temerity, or hubris, translates cheek. Laöcoön and his sons were devoured by a sea serpent because he had the temerity to tell the Greeks that taking the Trojan horse into the walls of the city was not a good idea. He interfered with fate.

You couldn't even interfere with your own fate. Without being devoured by serpents.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Art Brew is not embedded in, or in bed with, a military unit involved in Operation Bully of the Town. He is a free-lance writer, unbought and unbossed. This denied him access to some information, but kept him free from dependence on official sources which had been sanitized, or vetted, by military censors and psychological warfare operations (psyops) personnel.

He was an analyst. What Georg Groddeck, The Book of the It, called a wild analyst. Wild in the sense untutored, untrained. Self taught.

Art brut, a homonym of Brew's name, translated naïve, or primitive art. Raw, unrefined, coarse. Vulgar.

Brew called himself a vernacular writer. Another name for folk art is vernacular art.

In The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth called Native American Indians naked salvages, or savages. Sometimes Brew called himself the salvage archeologist of the Mall Builder culture. He studied the classic texts, rather than the press releases of propaganda ministers. He walked the ground. Went and saw for himself, reported back what he found.

YU News Service was a parody news and disinformation syndicate. As Miami Bureau Chief, Brew wrote satire. He considered himself a humorist.

Gregory Stephenson writes, about Richard Brautigan,

In a larger sense, Brautigan takes his place in a line of American humorists, a tradition with which he identified himself, according to his friend, Ed Dorn. In Brautigan's surrealistic leaps of language and imagery there are echoes of the tall-tale of the American frontier, and of the extravagances of the 19th Century American humorists Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby. Brautigan also has similarities with Mark Twain in the use of natural colloquial speech, humor based on exaggeration and understatement, the employment of an innocent/naïve persona/narrator, and a sense of the ludicrous and absurd that is ultimately founded upon malaise; upon a vision of violence and terror (though, unlike Twain, Brautigan is never biting or bitter).

Incongruous as it may at first seem, Brautigan's closest affinity, both stylistically and thematically, is with Ernest Hemingway. The simple declarative sentences strung together with the conjunction "and," the flat tone, the plain language, and the laconic dialogue that characterize Brautigan's prose derive unmistakably from the Hemingway style. Brautigan's ingenious innovation consists of using this dry, terse, matter-of-fact style as a vehicle to depict strange, amazing, and wondrous events; and linking it to elaborate and surreal similes. This curious duality or incongruity, this inherent-tension in Brautigan's style reflects his central preoccupation.

Stephenson defines this preoccupation as "confrontation with and resistance to the void."

Hemingway called himself "Ernie Hemorrhoid, the poor man's Pyle." Ernie Pyle was a war correspondent killed on Ie Shima, off Okinawa, in the final days of World War II. Pyle lived with the troops, ate C rations with them, slept on the ground. The GIs loved him. He told their story. Having walked in their shoes.

Hemingway liberated the Ritz Bar in Paris and hung out with officers. He ate in four-star restaurants and drank grand cru wine. He had groupies before there was a word for them, beautiful female war correspondents. He married two of them, although not at the same time.

Before the war, Pyle drove around the Southwest visiting small towns, talking to people, and filing six 1,000-word stories a week for the Scripps-Howard chain. That's a lot of copy, when you consider the time he spent driving around, and talking to people.

He was married, and his wife traveled with him, at first, but then stayed at home. She had problems with depression and substance abuse, and twice tried to kill herself.

Pyle was an alcoholic, who was burned-out, and stale, when the war rescued him. At the peak of his fame as a war correspondent, 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers carried his column.

That's one way to fill the void.

Brew wrote six 1,000-word stories a day, with what he estimated was a readership in the high-one, or low-two figures. It was filling the void that counted, not hearing back from the crowd. Not being in the limelight.

If he didn't hear back at all, Brew was crazy. But if he heard back from eight or ten people, he wasn't crazy, he was just outnumbered.

Not everybody had the sense of the absurd required to appreciate Brew. To some readers, though, Brew's surrealism was magical realism, or even straight mimetic realism.

Those readers knew that we are all sous rature, or under erasure, the void crumbling beneath our feet like an ant-hill, eroding, when you stand on it, or the erosion of the metal blade of the nutmeg-grater under the constant attrition of the nutmeg, or wood.