Friday, July 30 (cont'd)

If you're going to live somewhere besides New York or Hollywood, at least live in the same place long enough to be identified with it. Like Faulkner or Thoreau.

When I think of Los Angeles, I think of Bukowski, and vice versa.

The same with Charles Willeford and Miami.

Brew moved from New Orleans to Penland, to Winston-Salem, to Fort Walton Beach, to Tallahassee, to Delray Beach, to Panama City.

To Atlanta, Wewahitchka, Parker.

Always in search of work, or a cheap place to stay.

He might as well have stayed in New Orleans

He'd have been someone in New Orleans by now, if he had stayed.

But he left thinking it would help his career as a writer, children followed, and he and Brenda lived in out of the way places. I think it hurt his career

On the other hand, although he could discern no purpose behind the accidental path he had followed, no guiding hand that had brought him here, Brew was in exactly the right place, to be doing what he was doing. Which he might not have been able to do as well some other place, and which he didn't know of anybody else doing, in any place. Especially New York or Hollywood. Or some university town.

Brew had everything he needed where he was.

He had a public library, the post office, cable TV, a video store, and the Internet.

He had two bicycles, a mountain bike and a ten-speed with a 25" frame, and two clapped-out Key West cars, your father's Oldsmobile and a Japanese pickup truck with 120,000 miles on it.

Brenda worked, and did her share of the chores, around the house.

The only thing he lacked was an income from writing, and he had chosen to make his living some other way, because the only way you could make a living writing--namely write potboilers and then act as a shill for them on television and/or on book tours--interfered with writing more than working full time as a grant writer or technical writer did.

You had to have a place to write about, and Brew had a place. Parker, Florida. From which he commuted to Florida's Emerald, and Florida's Forgotten Coasts. East to Panacea and west to DeFuniak Springs.

He had readers he saw face-to-face, weekly, at The Red Bar, in Grayton Beach, and readers he had corresponded with for decades, who had read large sections of the oeuvre. One couple, Larry and Hazel, had seen it all. All 245 volumes, 246 in progress, now, and rocking steady like the cap on a pressure cooker.

What did New Orleans have that Parker didn't have? Night life.

Brew's night life was he went to bed early so he could get up before work, the writing roaring in his head, and write before work. Brew's night life was the monastic desk.

He didn't have to go to parties. The only parties he went to, his boys played music.

He remembered the faculty parties at Tulane, insincerity and hypocrisy so thick you could spread it with a butter knife, the long knives out for rivals, danger, danger, who is fucking whom?

From Parker he could remember other places he had lived, and write books about them, books like A1A STORIES, A POSTCARD FROM SEASIDE: MY TRIP AROUND FLORIDA'S EMERALD, AND FLORIDA'S FORGOTTEN COASTS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES, FLORIDA BOY, FLORIDA WRITER, GULF COAST BLUES, HIGHWAY 30A STORIES, HOMESTEAD, OUT OF THE SOUTH COMES THE WHIRLWIND, PARKER BAYOU, SCHOOL OF THE SOUTH, SOUTHERN GOTHIC, THE EMPTY NEST, OR, LIFE IN THE SUBURBS: AN OFFLINE JOURNAL, THE OTHER FLORIDA, TRAVEL LOG: A MONTH IN THE LIFE OF AN UNDERGROUND WRITER, TRAVEL WRITER, UP AND DOWN IN DELRAY BEACH AND PANAMA CITY, VISIONS OF FLORIDA.

Time to break this off and go to work.

In a foreword to Archaeology of the Northwest Florida Gulf Coast (Willey 1949), Gordon Willey thanks the Rosenwald Foundation for a grant to write the book, and tells about how frustrating it is to try to write a book in your spare time, unable to devote the dedicated time, the concentration to the effort, a book demands.

But as Brenda says, "Well, Jack, you don't have a grant. Write it when you can."

Q: Didn't you write a book called A WINE TOUR OF PARKER, FLORIDA?

A: Yes. When I moved to Parker and started up roman-feuilleton.com I called myself a hospitality industry report writer and folk art critic.

I went to beer joints and wrote about how bad the cigarette smoke was and how likely you were to get in a fistfight.

Another name for Parker is Point and Shoot, Florida. From the camera. But by analogy with Cut and Shoot, Texas.

Q: Dim lights, thick smoke, and loud, loud music.

A: I flew out to Redmond, Washington, to visit my mother, and reviewed the in-flight movie.

I went to the Red Hook Brewery and Chateau Ste. Michelle, in Redmond.

Two of the bars I rated in Parker went broke.

That's unheard of.

The economy is bad when a beer joint goes out of business.

Q: What was folk art critic about?

A: I took visitors from out of town on a gallery tour, of Woody Long's gallery in Santa Rosa Beach and Justin and Billie Gaffrey's gallery, in Blue Mountain Beach.

Big Chief Visions had a booth at Springfest. When I walked up to his booth, he said, "Oh, no-a folk art critic."

He recognized my picture from the web page.

Folk art critic is a contradiction in terms. Folk artists are self-taught. The vocabulary of fine art criticism does not apply to them.

Q: Like the vocabulary of belles-lettres criticism does not apply to a Vernacular Writer.

A: Right. I call what I'm doing crank-lettres.

"Hey, man, I dig your stuff."

Q: A Guide Micheline to Parker, Florida beer joints. Who'd buy that? The people who drink in them know where they are and nobody else cares.

A: I was making fun of rock criticism. Almost Famous. A high school kid makes a cover of Rolling Stone.

Shitty music lovers know who's in what band. Who's fucking whom. Whose career is hot, whose career is cold.

Q: Didn't you write a column for the Delray Beach News-Journal called "Pahokee Is for Lovers."

A: Pahokee is the birthplace of Mel Tillis. They don't get many tourists. It would be like taking vacation in Liberty City, a black neighborhood of Miami where they had riots after police killed a black motorcyclist.

Do you remember the television documentary Harvest of Shame?

Q: Yes, but younger readers won't.

A: That's Pahokee. Migrant sugar cane workers. Poverty.

Q: So "Pahokee Is for Lovers" was meant ironically. It was satire.

A: I'm a humorist like Mark Twain.

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of North Walton County.

Nothing in North Walton County but meth labs. Exploding house trailers.

Spun. Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts, together again. Remember The Pope of Greenwich Village?

Q: Bedbug Eddie's Neapolitan Mastiff.

A: "Cop shit his pants."