Tuesday, January 18

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Sunday night, Brew was violently ill, with a stomach virus.

He had projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea.

Luckily, he wrote a day ahead, so he had a column for Tuesday, and could take Monday off.

That is, today is tomorrow. Or tomorrow is yesterday.

This must be Monday. If I'm writing Tuesday's column.

At The Red Bar Sunday, Duke complained about all the entries at The Daily Bulletin for the last two days of JANUARY.

Wait until he sees the first day of BREW'S NEWS, with entries from January 10 to January 17.

But I'm caught up, now.

There was supposed to be a barbecue in McKenzie Park for Martin Luther King Day, but I don't want to get too far away from my commode.

I know they have Portolets, but there is a question of the noise.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--A Florida cracker was prima facie a racist.

Is that true?

Brew didn't believe he was a racist, he was sous rature, or under erasure.

Minorities and women, and the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and undecided community were trying to wash him away.

A straight white male, from the south, of a certain age, was an easy target.

At least Brew felt like a target. He felt like he had a bullseye on his back.

Not only was he excluded from the publishing contracts, the grants, and prizes, if he hazarded the opinion that he was a better writer than the minorities, women, and gay people who got them, he was accused or racism, sexism, and homophobia, and who wanted to be accused of that: no publisher, television station, book reviewer, or chain bookstore in the mall: they'd get boycotted, sued, and called neo-Nazis.

It was better to avoid the subject. Not write about it. Redact yourself.

Erase yourself.

It was only prudent.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--When Brew told someone he was a feuilletonist, they thought he said balloonist, and that made them think of sport balloonists, rich, mounting expeditions to cross the Alps, or fly around the world.

A feuilletonist worked in miniatures. Leaves. Brew wrote a book called Bay Leaves once, but the Bay County Junior League already had a cookbook out by that name.

The only way you could consider Brew a balloonist was sometimes when he went on book tours he would fill rubbers up with water and throw them out of hotel windows on pedestrians.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--When Brew got accused of being a Communist, because of his connection with the prestigious left-wing think-tank Point and Shoot Institute (PSI), he would say, "No, I am a columnist."

Brew was a columnist. A Schwitters columnist.

Here are three columns from a previous book. Three Schwitters columns.

Art Brew was the Schwitters columnist for The Daily Bulletin, a web site at which he posted series of related novels, daily, as he wrote them.

He had produced a body of work, his stack, and invented a form to present it in, daily typewriting, which he also called the PC method, enema vérité, and stark-nakedism.

PC stands for paranoia-critical, after Salvador Dali's Autobiography of a Genius.

Enema vérité is what you see on the end of the fork when you really look. To see what's on the fork, sometimes you have to eat with chopsticks.

Brew wasn't a genius. He was a word mechanic.

Not the engineer, the mechanic.

Not the scientist, the bricoleur.

He made art out of scrap.

The neoconservative economic philosopher and Mayberry Machiavelli Levi Strauss subtitled The Savage Mind (La pensée sauvage) The Science of the Concrete.

Kurt Schwitters' merzbau was an example of concretism. So was Brew's Schwitters column. An abstract idea in concrete terms.

Every day, there it was: another 1,000-word piece.

No closing hours, no holidays, no sick-outs, no work-stoppages.

We never close.

Brew never closed.

Art Brew was the Schwitters columnist for The Daily Bulletin. Unless he got a newspaper or magazine to sponsor him.

Bulletin from bulletino, the diminutive of bulla, as in papal bull. The bulla was a seal, and a papal bull had the Pope's ring pressed in hot lead. His chop.

Ever day Brew added to his web site, with items he found here and there, in his reading, the passive conversations he overheard, surfing the web, reading political blogs, watching television, or rented videos, especially art, or foreign films, and attending poetry slams, art exhibits, concerts, plays, seafood festivals, rattlesnake round-ups, gopher races, chili cook-offs, dwarf-tossings, female mud wrestlers, la boue, la boue.

The pirate's wardroom.

Or Fibber McGee's closet.

Sometimes he called himself the Madcap Titan of the Dustbin. Like Kurt Schwitters.

Sometimes he called himself the Salvage Archeologist of the Mall Builder Culture. Like Jack Saunders.

Sometimes he called himself the Swinette-Picker of American Letters.

I dream of playing the swinette on stage, at Americana music festivals, selling my books at the record table afterwards. A swinette, you stretch two horsehairs across a hog's ass and pick it with your teeth. Brew mounts the steps, walks across the stage with great dignity, takes a stuffed Miss Piggy doll out from under his robes, lifts her skirt, presses her butt to his face, and squeals like a stuck pig. Great cry and little wool, as the Devil said when he sheared the hogs.

If Kurt Schwitters' merzbau had not been destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943, art lovers from around the world, and concretists, would go to Hanover, and see it, but, except for censorship, and it hasn't been censored, yet, if you don't count suppression, anyone, anywhere in the world, can read my stack, as I write it, or reconstruct it, from the dated entries, like an archeologist.

I just want to make as much money writing it as a grant writer makes.

So I can do it better.

The way to get good is to do it full-time, like Dread Clampitt.

Art Brew's rate was Schwitters Columnist III. The next higher grade was Staff Schwitters Columnist, but Brew was a Lifetime Senior Associate (LSA), and would never make Staff.

The grades went Schwitters Columnist (I), Associate Schwitters Columnist (II), Senior Associate Schwitters Columnist (III), Staff Schwitters Columnist (IV), then Schwitters Columnist Manager (V) and so forth, through three levels of management.

The manager ranks were like commissioned officers and the Staff Schwitters Columnist rank was like an NCO. A Senior Associate Schwitters Columnist was like a buck sergeant.

Brew was the buck sergeant of Schwitters columnists.

He walked the streets of his native town and wrote about what he found.

Well, he walked the streets of Point and Shoot. But previously he walked the streets of Delray Beach. Jerry Steinfeld's parents have a condo there.

In Brew's case, he walked the aisles of the behavioral health care center where he worked, and surrounding DeFuniak Springs.

And of course he drove through North Walton County to get there.

One recent book, THE SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST OF FLORIDA'S CO-OPTED COASTS: A MEMOIR OF 38 YEARS OF GRACIOUS CRACKER LIVING, compared North and South Walton County.

Sometimes he wrote about books he had written.