Novel

Thursday, March 3

When Brew lived in Atlanta, and Brenda lived in Wewa, he used to drive down to see her, on holiday weekends.

Or he would drive somewhere in Georgia to see Owen play at a bluegrass festival, with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver.

He never picked up any women because too many people knew him as Owen's father, and Brenda's husband, and Potter's brother-in-law, and Balder's father, on the bluegrass circuit. In loco parentis.

He wrote screenplays about going to hear Owen, or visiting Brenda, and he sent a couple of them to Victor Nunez, but Nunez liked to write his own screenplays, just as Brew liked to write, design, publish, and review his own books.

His next book, for example, POSTCARDS FROM POINT AND SHOOT: AN IMMOBILIZED HERO NOVEL, he was going to use the fiddler crab he painted for a cover.

It tied in with the movie Sideways, don't you see.

So Brew didn't mind being rejected by Victor Nunez.

He didn't even mind being left out of The Book Lover's Guide To Florida.

How would the English professor, Kevin McCarthy, know about Brew? He wasn't exactly a household name.

It did bother Brew that the Florida Artist Directory left him out.

It rankled.

The Florida Artist Directory was a list of writers and artists educators picked writers and artists to be writers and artists in the schools, K-12 through junior college, from.

The Division of Cultural affairs informed Brew that his work was unsuitable or inappropriate.

Why not? Maybe that was why Contemporary Authors left Brew out, or the directory published by Poets & Writers included him when Screed was published, but expunged him from the database, later on, like the out-of-favor commissar who was airbrushed out of the photograph in Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

When they forget to include you, all you can do is laugh.

Nobody wants to read about, "It rankled."

Brew used to read Al Burt's column in the Miami Herald's Tropic magazine on Sunday, "Al Burt's Florida."

University Press of Florida published a collection of his columns called Al Burt's Florida.

I guess the columns were literary or scholarly.

At least, they were suitable and appropriate.

Maybe that's why the University Press of Florida rejected Brew, not because he wasn't scholarly or literary enough, but because he wasn't suitable or appropriate enough.

To paraphrase Christine Todd Whitman, it's Brew's Florida too.

Oh yea, sometimes Brew wore Birkenstock sandals,
instead of white leather walking shoes, and went hatless,
and had an orange Velcro skindiver watchband, and a deep,
beachcomber tan. Picture him getting out of a dinghy
with a case of Haig & Haig Pinch on his shoulder, on a deserted island,
like Walter Anderson on a sketching expedition, to draw fiddler crabs,
and paint water colors of birds, reptiles, mollusks, and amphibians.
Who's interested in that? I am.

History Repeats Itself is the best series of three books
since Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable,
possibly since Castle to Castle, Rigadoon, and North.
I can't go on , I'll go on. Charles Willeford going on
for 40 minutes in a course on the 20th Century European Novel
about Samuel Beckett going on about hats, or Céline, a medical doctor,
becoming the flea-counter at Ellis Island, in Journey to the End of the Night.
Picture Jennifer Jason Leigh writing a haiku for her class in English Composition
at Miami Dade Community College. Shit happens when you party naked.
I never met a man who didn't like my pie.