Tuesday, January 18 (cont'd)

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--If you look at a still photograph of William Lee's typewriter in the movie Naked Lunch, he begins his REPORT ON THE ASSASSINATION OF JOAN LEE BY UNKNOWN FORCES, "The present writer...."

I think he is using the Clark-Nova, not the Martinelli, or the Krupp Dominator.

Lee is a report writer for an intelligence agency. Or Dr. Benway. Or a cockroach with a mouth like a vulva, or an asshole.

Ornette Coleman is playing alto saxophone with the master musicians of Morocco.

The present writer has killed Joan Lee, his wife, back in the states, before arriving in InterZone, an Arab city.

Or either a Mugwump asks him to write a daily report on his experiences in the city.

Lee will kill Joan again, at the border, to prove to a border guard at Anexia, that he is a writer.

"It's time for our William Tell act," he will tell his wife.

"Welcome to Anexia," the border guard will tell Lee, after he has shot Joan, again.

Lee is not sure who has shot Joan. Unknown forces.

Art Brew is writing a book called Report on the Suppression of Art Brew's Work by Unknown Forces. He is not sure who has suppressed his work.

He might have sabotaged himself, by making it unpublishable.

Did Upton Sinclair submit The Jungle to the meatpackers?

Would anybody be that stupid, or crazy?

But Brew is sure someone has asked him to write a daily report on his experiences. Or is he?

What's the use? Who will ever see it? How will he distribute it?

Brew once wrote a series of books he called Potsherd-Tower, by analogy with Kurt Schwitters' Schwitters-column.

He named it after his hero, Johnny Potsherd, who went around the Southeastern United States sowing sherds in Indian sites. Brew and Brenda were trained as dirt archeologists.

Johnny Potsherd went around leaving vernacuilar writer business cards and self-published pamphlets in state park latrines and laundromats.

These mounted up.

Brew called them a Potsherd-tower because Potsherd's work stood in towering rebuke to the work of his contemporaries. Midgets and strainers. Hacks and apparatchiks.

Potsherd was a giant among them. A colossus. A typewriting colossus.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--When Melville wrote to Hawthorne that his book was going to be botched, Moby-Dick had not been published yet.

He knew it was going to ruin his reputation and kill his career as a writer of South Seas romances because it was too serious, too literary, for the consumers of adventure stories in the popular press. It was even going to antagonize critics. The effrontery. Who did Melville think he was? William Shakespeare?

Who did Shakespeare think he was.

Brew had taken a simple collection of newspaper columns making fun of the War on Totoism and turned it into a serious book, a literary book, like Gilbert Sorrentino did with Mulligan Stew.

He had botched his book.

Was he nuts?

A blivet is ten pounds of shit in a five-pound sack. Brew put too much in. He overfilled it.

How hard could it be to write a collection of satirical columns, that made the reader laugh, without asking it to think?

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--If Brew had botched BREW'S NEWS, what could he do about it but press on to March 19, to the Homegrown Pow Wow, then write something else.

That is, really botch it.

The pressure was off.

Brew didn't have to worry about getting a sponsor for it, or a publisher, he was his own publisher, his own sponsor. If he didn't send out query letters he would not get back rejection slips.

Just put in what he thought should go in and if the reader didn't like it, it could skip.

There were putters-in and takers-out.

Brew was a putter-in.

Had The Nation turned him down yet? Had Democratic Underground?

No, but his book had turned into something different than he proposed to them.

Even if he limited the book to satirical news releases, and left the appendixes out, the news releases were more about the fate of his manuscripts in the world than they were about foreign affairs, and domestic agendas, and who wants to read that?
Brew decided to take the headings out and just call the rest of the book BREW'S NEWS.

The reader would be able to figure out whether Brew was writing a column, a letter, an interview, a poem, or something else.

BREW'S NEWS. NEWS THAT STAYS NEW.

So what if the mainstream media doesn't print it.

It was published on the worldwide web.

At The Daily Bulletin.

That was enough.

It's more than Brew had before there was a worldwide web, and more than some underground writers had now, the ones who weren't technical.

A publisher used to be the only way to get your work out there. Now it was just the only way to make money getting your work out there.

If Brew didn't need to make money to do it--if he wanted to pay the reader to reader his work, as he had done now for years--then why keep banging his head against the brick stone wall of the world's indifference or hostility to his work?

What was he--a masochist?

A glutton for punishment?

If his aim was to be content, as an online writer, then be content at it.

Quit kicking at the traces.

BREW'S NEWS wasn't his breakthrough book, in which he crossed over to having a career as a mainstream writer.

It was Book 2 in the series Diary of a Contended Online Writer: An Experiment in Form.

Not only did online writers not make any money at it. An experiment in form didn't make money.

Mulligan Stew was an experiment on form. Moby-Dick was an experiment in form.

I got news for you, Brew.

This is it.

Rat cheer.

Right here.

Relax, and enjoy the ride.

When you cough up a lump, that's your asshole.

To signify Brew's change in outlook, he changed the title of his book from BREW'S NEWS: NEWS THAT ISN'T FIT FOR THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA TO PRINT, to BREW'S NEWS: NEWS THAT STAYS NEWS.

That is to say, BREW'S LITERATURE.