Thursday, January 13

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Brew remembered the old Saturday afternoon serials of his youth, a western, a mystery, or a science fiction short. At the end of one episode the stage would go over the cliff, and the hero would die.

At the beginning of the next installment, the stage would be shown going over the cliff from a different angle, and the hero would jump out in the nick of time.

Sometimes Brew would use the ending of one book to start the next book. There would be an overlap. Repetition.

He ought to put a warning at the beginning of BREW'S NEWS, for his coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult.

The first four days of BREW'S NEWS is excerpted from the last four days (misdated, as I was writing ahead) of JANUARY. The reader has permission to skip. But in the different context, the stories have a different meaning. I'd read them again, to refresh my memory.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Brew once had a job reading articles of interest to the governor for the clips. It was a fine practical education in journalism, and the news as manufactured product. How news stories had a shape, or form. Did you ever have the feeling you had read a news story before, even though the events described had just happened?

You had read it before. It was an old story, with the names and dates updated. There weren't that many new stories.

Someone said there were only two stories in literature, a man goes on a journey and a stranger rides into town.

But Jim Thompson said there was only one. Nothing is as it seems.

That was Brew's Johnny-One-Note story. Nothing is as it seems.

How to tell it without getting stale, resorting to formula, the old horse tricks, as William S. Burroughs said.

Brew's third book was called I REMEMBER YEARS.

From a quote from Ezra Pound, which he used as an epigraph.

I remember Yeats: I have spent my life trying to get rid of rhetoric, and all I have done is replace one kind of rhetoric with another.

Brew was not sure of the quote. After all, it was 250 books ago.

Brew had tried a lot of different literary forms in that time, like a fat woman trying on swim suits.

He thought it was taken from a book called The Rhetoric of Fiction.

To Brew, nonfiction was fiction.

I mean, look at his YU News Service columns.

What were they, if not criticism?