Thursday, January 13

Art Brew is Miami Bureau Chief of YU News Service, a parody news and disinformation syndicate. He lives in Point and Shoot, Florida, with his wife Brenda and works as a grant writer in DeFuniak Springs, the Winter Home of the Chautauqua.
Brew writes a daily column making fun of President Bush's War on Totemism and the Homeland über alles Security Czar. Bush calls it the War on Totoism, but we know what he means. Run, Toto, run.

He can run but he can't hide.

President Bush has accumulated capital and he intends to spend it. His second administration will do for America what his first administration did for Iraq. Make Giuliani and Bernie Kerik rich. Well, Kerik is out. He couldn't keep his maid's immigration status straight. The old Nannygate got him.

Brew didn't have a nanny. He and Brenda worked as nannies. BREW'S NEWS was laissez-faire capitalism from a working stiff's point of view.

Ezra Pound said literature is news that stays news.

BREW'S NEWS wasn't journalism it was literature.

Think globally, write locally. Brew belonged to the prestigious left-wing think-tank Point and Shoot Institute (PSI), where he was a senior fellow.

Brew's book was about trying to work full-time and write a daily column both, while trying to hold a household together on shit wages.

Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. Brew augured in. He had nothing left to fear. What was New York going to do? Reject his book? He'd just post it at his web site, The Daily Bulletin, a regular Dead Letter Office of daily typewriting.

BREW'S NEWS was Book 2 of a series called Diary of a Contented Online Writer: An Experiment in Form.

Brew was content. He had found his form.

The creative nonfiction bylined column novel.

One time I had a job reading seven newspapers from around the state and marking articles of interest to the governor for the clips. I would mark them and our secretary would cut them out, paste them up, xerox them, and send them to the mailroom, for hand-distribution to the governor, the Secretary of Commerce, and his department heads: Unemployment Compensation, Employment Security, Economic Development, and Tourism.

Literature is a form of tourism promotion. After I did the clips, I wrote on my novel.

I lost that job for blogging at work. This was before there were blogs, of course.

But it cured me of being a news addict. I saw how a story was born, senesced, and died, to be revived again, in the same narrative template, with only the names and dates changed. I got to where I could predict what different newspapers would do with a story. One would put it on the front page, one would bury it inside, and one would not run it at all. It was a fine practical education in journalism, in news as manufactured product.

I watched broadcast news, on the networks, become replaced by cable television channels, with the crawl, talking heads, shouting matches, pro wrestling.

I watched the development of the Internet.

I got a web site and posted my books on it, online, daily, as I wrote them. I linked to other sites. I answered reader comment in my books, the day after I received it, which was the day I wrote it. My books were thus both written, and published, in real time, and interactive, playing off spam, crank mail, wingnuts. Flame wars. My books were immediate. Timely.

But did they exceed their sell-by date? Did they canker, like yesterday's tabloid, blowing down the street?

John Dos Passos described Thorstein Veblen's lecturing style as "reiterative. Like the Eddas."

I have recurring leitmotifs, or themes. A recurring cast of characters. It's lodged in a sense of place and held together by a distinctive voice.

When Monk quit playing he sounded like he did in 1939. But it wasn't stale because he wasn't playing licks, he was stretching out. It was fresh, and new, it just had his signature on it. He played the same songs over and over again--a repertoire--but he never played a song the same way twice. He innovated, he improvised, he used what life served up: different sidemen, different venues, a different audience each night.

Imagine if you followed him around and tape-recorded it, the rehearsals, the jam sessions, the recording sessions in the studio, the concerts, at home alone, composing. You'd have a record of it and be able to hear it the way Monk, and only Monk, heard it.

It would be almost like being Monk

BREW'S NEWS is almost like being me. Nobody but me could write it.

Every time I hear Diz play, I think: "He was just now developing into what you heard tonight."

Dizzy said the trumpet was just laying in the case, waiting to fuck him up.

"The music is on the horn," said Monk. "Play it or throw it away."

JANUARY. December 30 - January 19. 41,000 words. I ask The New Republic, The Nation, and The Atlantic Monthly to serialize the 12 books of Diary of a Contented Online Writer: An Experiment in Form, online, daily, as I write them, like Washington Monthly hiring Kevin Drum, Calpundit, to write "Political Animal." The Atlantic Monthly declines. Then I decide to collect Art Brew columns into BREW'S NEWS, and ask Democratic Underground to serialize them, like a kind of Art Brew's Daily, by analogy with I.F. Stone's Weekly. Only Stone was a reporter, who dug up facts. Brew's a bloviator, with more opinions than caution. Who needs more commentary? The air is full of commentary. Well, BREW'S NEWS isn't journalism, it's literature. It contains recipes. And they work. Brew is swamped at work. The family song is, "If I Make It Through January and February." One way or another Brew will make it through.

BREW'S NEWS: NEWS THAT ISN'T FIT FOR THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA TO PRINT. January 10 - March 19. In progress. Brew has found his form, the creative nonfiction bylined column novel. Ezra Pound said literature is news that stays news. On errands of life, Brew's columns end up in the Dead Letter Office. They are not fit to print. Oh, well. Brew publishes them at The Daily Bulletin. He is a contented online writer.