Thursday, January 13 (cont'd)

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--One time Ernie Pyle used to drive around the Southwest, talk to people, and write six 1,000-word pieces a week for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain.

If you don't know, that's a lot of copy.

When Brew was on sabbatical, he wrote six 1,000-word YU News Service press releases a day for The Daily Bulletin.

Art Brew's Daily. Art Brew's daily what?

He could do that because he didn't have to work. He had his name written on his shirt.

Art Brew. Hospitality Industry Report Writer and Folk Art Critic.

Later he would call himself an Ecotourism Specialist, and later still an Adventure Travel Correspondent, but really, he just sat in his studio, Lazaretto, and made it all up.

Sometimes he would go to MagnoliaFest, or Homegrown Pow Wow.

Now, he had to work, and had a long drive, back and forth.

He wished he was on sabbatical again.

A goat wants horns, but it dies buttheaded.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Brenda bought an Ocean Alphabet book for Ella, and had Brew change the entry for M from M is for Minnow to M is for Mullet, the Fish That Leaps.

He had a rubber stamp of a mullet, and, by stamping it at the proper leaping angle, could make it look like the mullet was leaping.

This gave Brew the idea to write an alphabet himself, with pictures.

He wrote Florida Cracker: A Bestiary, and sent it out as a pamphlet, with a color picture of Billie Gaffrey's Funky Flipper from Dolphin Splash! on the cover.

People liked it.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Flipper is a dolphin, or, more accurately, a porpoise. The dolphin is a marine game (food) fish, genus Coryphaena, often called mahi mahi, or fish-of-the-day. The fish-of-the-day may be mahi mahi, it may be barracuda. If you don't get ciguatera poisoning, it was mahi mahi.

Flipper is the mascot of the professional Miami football team, and a popular performer at Sea World, Gulfarium, Marineland, and so forth. In Panama City, you can go on a dolphin cruise and pet the dolphins, and at several water parks you can swim with them. The mermaid was thought to derive from the dolphin. Or was it the manatee, or sea cow?

Dolphins talk to each other in a secret code that humans cannot understand, or they would strap bombs to their backs and use them to sink enemy ships. The male dolphin has a penis that looks just like the penis of a human male. Or is it the male alligator?

Panama City had a public art project called Dolphin Splash! I thought I would drive around visiting the plastic casts of dolphins, painted by local artists, in situ, and write about what the sponsors of individual dolphins said customers had to say about the art, but when I finished my piece, I couldn't think of a newspaper of slick magazine to send the article to, and called it a short story. I couldn't think of a little magazine to send it to, so I published it as a pamphlet, myself, and posted it at my web site on the worldwide web, roman-feuilleton.com.

I am like Herman Melville. I can't be bothered to write anything that will sell, and what I write is unpublishable. So the result is a final hash, and all my books are botches.

In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my "Whale" while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now, -- I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose, -- that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me, -- I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, -- it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.

Better a botched book than no book. If the book is Moby-Dick, or Billy Budd, or even "Bartleby, the Scrivener."

Bartleby ended up let go by the Dead Letter Office, owing to a change in the administration. Like me.

"On errands of life, these letters speed to death." Like my stories.

My little vignettes and feuilletons.