Saturday, July 31 (cont'd)

Q: You can't really say your work has been suppressed, if you publish it on the worldwide web and sell folios out of a musette bag at The Red Bar.

A: If a guy played baseball in his back yard, and tried out for the majors, and they banned him from baseball because they didn't like his politics, would you say he hadn't been banned from baseball because you could go and see him play in his back yard? By himself?

Of if a scholar couldn't get a job teaching in a university, or get published in scientific journals, or by university presses, because they didn't like his politics, would you say he had not been blacklisted because he published pamphlets himself and called the studio in his house the Art Brew School of Daily Typewriting Writing? Pamphlets you couldn't buy anywhere except directly from him?

Q: I'd call him blacklisted. Banned.

A: That's Brew's schtick. Banned Books.

Why can't you buy any of his books at a chain bookstore in the mall?

Brew's persona is underground writer. But he's not an underground writer by choice. He was forced underground, held down, by people who don't like what he has to say, about them.

That's a romantic, appealing figure. The outlaw, or outcast. Refused admission to the guild on grounds of merit. The guild members who exclude him say his work doesn't measure up. Like the apparatchiks in the Soviet Writer's Union who voted to expel Solzhenitsyn to keep their dachas and their chit books at the nomenklatura store.

Art Brew is to the War Heads in American publishing as Solzhenitsyn was to the Russian state, and commercial censorship is just as total and devastating to an individual artist, and a culture, as official censorship by the government is.

Q: War Heads being the unholy alliance between, or among, book publishers, literary agents, book reviewers in the media of mass communication, arts bureaucrats in arts agencies and foundations, and university writing instructors and literary critics.

A: Yes. The underground writer is at odds with the people who make a career in art possible. They do their best to stamp him out. Grind him into dust.

Q: Stomp a bog in his ass and walk through it.

A: They drive through it in 4 x 4s. Big off-road SUVs. Humvees.

Betsy Amster
Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises
P. O. Box 27788
Los Angeles, CA 90027-0788

Dear Betsy Amster:

I am writing a series of three books called American Original: An Underground Writer Saga.

The first book, CRANK-LETTRES CONFIDENTIAL: THE ART BREW SCHOOL OF DAILY TYPEWRITING WRITING, is complete. It ran 300,000 words.

The second book, A MIXED BAG: A MEMOIR, SOME POEMS, AND TWO SHORT, TWO-FISTED NOVELS, is in progress. It should run 250,000 words. I expect to finish it August 31, 2004.

The third book, DEM: A PARANOIC VISITS HIS OBSESSIONS, is projected. It should run 200,000 pages. I plan to finish it December 31, 2004.

I enclose a synopsis and catalogue raisonné of the series and the first three pages of "Out of the Blue," from the first book.

Would you like to see the manuscript?

Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404

Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida
19 East 4th St. (Old Jail-across Harrison Avenue from Martin Theater)
Panama City, FL
Living Waters: Aquatic Preserves of Florida
M, W, F: 10-4; T, Th: 10-8 p. m.; Saturday: 1-5
Admission - free. 10% off purchases to VAC members

In the movie Adaptation, when Chris Cooper took Meryl Streep out into Fackahatchee Strand, to look for orchids, Brenda said to me, "I've been there."

She meant literally, when she surveyed Big Cypress Swamp for the National Park Service, in Vietnam jungle boots, waist-deep in water, heaving a machete, and navigating by Brunton compass, packing out bone and shell from hammocks to see, back in the lab, what the Indians were eating.

I dug in a Suwannee limestone swamp myself, up a tidal creek from the Aucilla River, on the Jefferson County side, taking a mandible and a greenstone/chert celt (hand-axe) out of an Archaic midden. When it came up under the trowel it looked like a piece of jade.

And taking it out of the ground put the curse of the Pharaohs on me. I should have left it where it was. It isn't respectful to dig up dead people. Even heathen savages. Who's to say he wasn't as spiritual as the Spanish Conquistadors, or the old Indian slayer Andrew Jackson?

About the only way to see a swamp this way, if you aren't an archeologist, is to get ahold of a Clyde Bucher coffeetable book, or, while the show is on, go to see large prints of Bucher's photographs at the Panama City Visual Arts Center.

I recommend the Visual Arts Center. There's something about being able to stand in front of a large photograph and walk towards it and back that's better than a book.

At the Visual Arts Center, there's even a multimedia effect, as a television set in an alcove is playing a documentary about Florida's aquatic preserves out into the empty room like The Stepford Wives, and there's an evocative soundtrack by Tallahassee composer and performer Sammy Tedder. You can buy a Bucher poster for $30, a DVD or VHS tape of the documentary for $20, and a CD of the music for $10 in the lobby, after the show.

Looking at the video, at home, I realized how much Florida's state parks had been a part of our lives, as Brenda and I raised Owen and Balder, and we camped, fished, cooked, walked the nature trails, or canoed the lakes, rivers, streams, and springs of the state.

I have Tedder's CD, with nature sounds, playing as I write this. As lagniappe, his web site (www.sammytedder.com), tells you how to make your own river cane flute.

I wish I had a mess of scallops from St. Joe Bay.

If you have to have tourism, ecotourism is best. There's still a lot of Florida left. Did you know you could take a canoe from Everglades City to Flamingo, through the Ten Thousand Islands, and catch snook, redfish, and trout to eat, en route?

The documentary was made by Elam Stoltzfus, of Blountstown.

Wait a minute, was Brew a hospitality industry report writer and folk art critic or an ecotourism specialist?

He was a defrocked ecotourism specialist, fired for blogging.

Stay home. Go back where you came from. We don't need you.

No wonder he wasn't on the Florida Artist Wall of Fame, like Clyde Bucher.

He was a crank.