Too Prolific

Saturday, July 31

Brew wrote more than New York were accustomed to handle.

Several books a year.

More than a book a month, during productive periods.

Charles Willeford said his most productive years were between ages 50 and 55.

The years between 60 and 65 were Brew's most productive. So far.

In the writing year September 1, 2003 to August 31, 2004 Brew will have written 18 books, if he finishes REPORT ON THE SUPPRESSION OF ART BREW'S WORK BY UNKNOWN FORCES by August 31.

No publisher will publish 18 books by a single author in a year.

If you called it a series of three books, in ten, four, and four parts, respectively, New York wouldn't publish that.

Brew called what he wrote last year a series of three books, in ten, four, and four parts, respectively, and asked New York to publish it.

Why not? The worldwide web was capable of publishing a series of three books, in ten, four, and four parts, respectively, in a year.

Brew's readers were capable of reading a series of three books, in ten, four, and four parts, respectively, in a year.

New York would just have to keep up, to catch up, to come into the 21st Century.

New York was a 19th Century technology in a 21st Century world.

All New York learned to do in the 20th Century was water books down. Debase the product. Make books a product advertised on television.

The way New York sold books affected the contents of the books, and the style. Thus of our literature--our very way of knowing who we are.

Advertisers would tell us who we were, and what products--including which books--we needed to buy to define ourselves.

You are what you buy.

Not what you read. What you display.

The average college graduate reads five books after college.

Brew wrote five books in three months.

I have whiskers on one of my front tires,
the wire of the steel-belted radials is showing through,
I can either trade the car in on a new one, buy a new set
of tires, or replace the bad one with a retread for $30.
The car, which has 158,165 miles on it, may need CV joints
and front end alignment, plus it's running hot, and needs
a thermostat. A new one may cost more than I can afford.
What would Uncle Potter do? I guess I'll go with
the blem two-ply. Like the African-American before me.

My computer kept locking up.
I ran scandisk and defrag,
but that didn't help. Brenda thought
I'd have to format my hard drive
and resinstall Windows. Finally,
I got a message saying Windows did not
recognize my mouse. I unplugged it,
and reseated the plug. That seems to have
fixed the problem. Maybe the cord got pulled
aloose. What a relief. I got a new used tire
put on the car. $30, balanced. I always run
blem two-plies, and buy reconditioned batteries
that cost $39, with a trade-in. A poor man's like
a gopher in a tub. He gets up on his hind legs
and crawls around, crawls around, and ends up
right back where he started. A poor man will get by
on grits and grunts, make do. A bricoleur,
or knacker in an abattoir. Put together
out of scrap.

Brew woke up writing in his head.

He dreamed of writing mezzotints, collecting them into folios, and selling them out of a musette bag at The Red Bar, or the Dread Clampett tape table at the Bayou Americana Music Festival.

He wrote a folio, set it in two columns, and printed it out on his inkjet printer.

A single sheet. He was a sheet writer. Shee-it!

Folio means foil, or leaf. Compare feuille.

He was an old man, and he lived alone, although he had a wife. He was a writer.

A sheet writer. Shee-it! He wrote poems, or prose vignettes, he called mezzotints, because he often had a color picture in them, and ran them off on matte picture paper, or card stock, in his inkjet printer.

He would package them in groups of ten which he called folios, and sell them at crafts shows and street fairs, bluegrass festivals, goat ropings, for $10 a set, about the price of a CD, or self-published pamphlet. Serialized books.

Think of Alfred Huffstickler at the Ruta Maya coffee shop in Austin, a pensioner and poet, with young people for fans, sending poems off to little magazines that paid in copies and went tango uniform (tits-up) after several issues.

Art "Home" Brew, compare art brut. The birthday boy. In the picture above, taken at The Red Bar on August 31, 2001, his birthday, he had just turned 62, and gone on reduced benefit social security, and was fixing up Brenda's old home place in Parker, Florida, which she would move into when she got laid off from her job in an IT Help Center in Atlanta the next January and move in with him and raise heritage seed Seminole Indian pumpkins.

They'd both find work, eventually, both at behavioral health care centers, as it happened, she as an administrative assistant to the Single Point of Access (or accountability) person, he as a grant writer and community relations specialist.

Swiss Family Paranoia-Critical, or Team Wuppie (for willfully under-employed professional.)

Here they are, cleaning out the Augean Stables, one of the Seven Labors of Hercules.

Brew called his sheets feuilletons, or leaves. He even had a web site he called roman-feuilleton.com, now defunct, or morphed into The Daily Bulletin, where you could read the whole bolus, as he wrote it.

Sheet 1. To be continued.