War!

 

My Dad’s. He painted in it to show how over the war he was. I still have it.

Just clips I remember for general and family reasons when the war stuff gets serious…

Once and Future War:

WWI (Ground War):

 

Letters from the Western Front sent by my Grandpa.

Available at Amazon books, paper and Kindle.

Click pic for link. 

WWII (The Air War):

Click on the pic for the link… (The 79th Fighter Group 

published this post as an entry for my Dad)

Vietnam (Bungled War):

I was in the last draft lottery when I was 19. Chosen in 

the top 300, got ready to report; then they called no one.

War Babies:

He was born in WWII. I was born in Korean War.

The Terror Wars:

Click on the pic for the website (wait for it to load).

Now I’m back to Newsmax for war coverage…

Time Out

 

No, not the Iranian Armageddon all the talking heads are sputtering about at the moment.

Just a personal circling back on a domestic rough spot that seems to recur when the real world breaks through my shell and threatens my creative progeny, past and future. The card problem I mentioned yesterday. Now my wife is mad at me again and I am becalmed and adrift for the moment.

At such times I have to remind myself that “this too shall pass.” My wife tends to be of the glass half-full or glass bone-dry persuasion, especially when it comes to disagreements between us. My plausible defenses are too ominous to say out loud if I can leave it there. 

Apart from the escalations caused by elapsed time, I’m back to the cycle I have to remind myself of at intervals, lately more often than in years past.

I get down. I have to reawaken myself, and recall that I’ve prevailed against long odds many times before. Sharing the sequence here, just by way of explanation. Just click on the graphics to see the posts they introduce…

The ‘Woe is Me’ Phase:

The ‘Start the Supercharger’ Phase:

The ‘Preparing for Takeoff’ Phase:

The fact I must remember is that I am subject to depression and I always go back to work. I’ve done an enormous amount of good work since I wrote the “Grate” piece, for example.

I’ll be back. It’s just there’s some music I have to listen to first.. give it a day or two…

Flash Report on the State of My iPad

 

The background graphic is Mont St. Michel. 

What the iPad is. My island in the shoals.

I mentioned at the outset that I am being squeezed. Increasing continually but from different directions at different rates. At times it gets ugly. 20+ years of intensive interactions on the Internet have created layers of legacy problems, including conflicts in passwords, email identities, and access to apps I’m still paying for but have restrictions on my access to because of changing ownerships and AI appropriation of all customer service, which is effectively reduced not just to zero but to occasional offensive assaults on my ability to preserve my work and even continue my writing. Where we are right now. A second entirely fallacious charge from Apple services not rendered that caused my bank to shut down the debit card (again), meaning a new endless and risky process of changing billing administration to a new card number.

My iPad is old, running current generation IOS software whose automatic updates I have been trying to hold off because every new point release adds more intrusive AI algorithms into Autocorrect that now result in spurious clandestine supposedly me-specific edits, unwanted Google-added hyperlinks, and a refusal to let me type an unfamiliar proper name without turning it into a more famous one, insistently.

I am literally hostage to this machine. I have a huge iCloud account, but I can’t trust it surviving a hardware change in a couple of vital areas. Last time my device died I lost all the Word files that had been bumped up to the cloud, and there’s no one to tell. Just gone.

The current device has 256GB of disk space, of which 115GB remain, with “miles to go before I sleep.” I have so much stored that it is increasingly difficult to search for things I know are there but not exactly when and where I stored them. 

Not complaining, just reporting. I chose the poverty that comes with freedom from being told what to write and who has the final word on text, format, and collateral content like photos, videos, and audio files, of which I have a great many that are only accessible through this machine or someone who knows in detail what is on this machine. More than 50 websites in various stages of work-in-process are products of Google’s blogger app, which is getting pushier all the time. My constant dread is of a decision by Google to charge a fee for every Blogger site, which would stop me dead in my tracks. They’ve already succeeded in pushing me out of my Safari browser into their Chrome browser, which is unreliable and tetchy but the only way I can insert images or videos into my blog sites anymore. I have big projects for which I have gathered abundant content material, but am deterred from pursuing flat out because they are so vulnerable to a casual rollover in bed by the vendor.

I can’t let the machine out of my hands to let strangers work on it. They might introduce some fatal new mistake. I can’t send it anywhere for cloning because there’s no insurance policy that could replace the contents if it got lost in transit. 

On and off for a few days, been trying to figure out how I can show you just how big this pile of my indispensable but mysteriously fragmentary stored material is.

I can give you some overview indications. I can also show you a representative but by no means complete slice of materials accessed by a single keyword. And I can show you some of the placeholders at Blogger that are receptacles awaiting content components presently stored as fragments on the iPad. I can do the first two of these here. The third will have to be done in a separate post of its own.

I have an app called Photo Ring. It can show me everything in date order, in a long series of huge increments. It begins by sorting all the image files for many minutes.

That’s 83 thousand image files of all kinds, about half my own work-in-process.

This results in a live animation display that can be used to pull up specific files.

There are 183 of these merrygo-rounds

Here’s a video I made, most of one month of a single year (2022) of the 8-10 years of Image files.

Click on the image to see the Rumble video rotogravure.

In a prior post, I described the unpredictability of knowing what I would be working on the next day during writing of The Boomer Bible. Same phenomenon at work here. The order of files is strictly a matter of their date of origin. The speed of change in my topics of interest and graphic construction can be seen here, baffling in retrospect even to me.

Now for the next step. Seeing what one important keyword can summon up. The search term is “Alice,” who has always been with me as a name/person of interest. She is embedded in all of my work. I’m not going to make any attempt to explain the significance of these files, though I will provide ID of their source context, as necessary. They are presented here in nothing like logical order. They’re here just as they came up in my iPad work. The search generated 149 results. This is nowhere near that many. Extrapolate if you can. [If you need more background, I have added a couple of items of interest Below the Fold. Cheat or wait, I don’t care.]

She was there. And so were the Walrus and the Carpenter.

First grade Day 1. Read the whole thing.

Alice Hate

TBB Preface, at the Razor Café

First glimpsed by Boz Baker at a swanky Tech Tycoon’s Party

Sentenced by St. Nuke to be her “dog” for trespass in Punk City.

Central to the history of Punk City and its coded art.

Murdered the same day as St. Nuke at the dedication of TBB.

One of its signatories in blood and forever 

preserved in her tomb on South Street

The Muse of Punk City and Johnny Dodge

Memorialized in the cryptic Vennich Manuscript.

Resurrected in the quantumscape of Shuteye Town 1999, 

Sought after at the very center of the Undernet.

One of the keys to the Coming of Age of ST99’s J. Doe, in the Book of 

Daniel memoir he will write, if he can find it. ‘Alice’ is the password.

Symbolically present in multiple incarnations inside Shuteye Town

Her charmed name always a signal of more going on, as in the 

frontispiece of the Autiobiography of the fictional Dr. Pangloss.

That’s enough for now. The Internet landscape in which Alice and her punks will live on will, as I said, be covered separately, but there are a few closing hints…

________________________

Below the Fold

A couple other associations of Punk City’s Alice:

A serendicitous find when I was the deepest in Punk City

I’d had to read a big chunk of Mallory’s Morte D’Arthur in college, which helped me understand Mark Twain’s skepticism. But the eternal mystery of whether Arthur was real or a composite kept me looking into the (mostly Penguin) historical stabs at an unanswerable question. This book turned out to be a delightful surprise. The author approached the subject via language not archaeology. She believed the truth was buried in the place names she had a PhD in. From her piecing together of mostly semiotic evidence she arrived at a unique version of the Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere triangle. As a fifth century Briton of Scottish descent, Guinevere was a warrior queen alongside the knights of ‘Camlac’ or wherever. Then she got abducted and murdered. She is still vaguely associated with an ancient ruin whose name suggests barbs or thorns, where she was, according to Goodrich, held until her death. But she could not be allowed to die by the Arthurian leadership. She was a prisoner in perpetuity. Thus was the tale of Sleeping Beauty and her confinement inside a wall of thorns begotten, only to be abandoned by the later romantics who covered the oddities of Guinevere’s separation from Arthur in the terms of the new fad called Romantic Love. 

Sleeping Beauty

I’d also had to read the Contes de Perrault in French at Mercersburg and deliver what our teacher called “literary translations,” so we’d appreciate the writing. It was stuck in there along with Malory and company, and it was a dark-tinged story, not a Disney cartoon. It also made perfect sense for my Alice character, who had two male intimates in her life too, with no announced choice between them at her death. The idea that Alice Hate was a punk parable of Shroedinger’s Box was perfect. Dead but not. Alive but not, and still somehow the object of desire by Johnny Dodge that kept him going after the massacre in Punk City. The two names of the fairytale roots were also complementary in my view:

Johnny Dodge was the possessor of the box that contained them both, death and dawn. In Pineville, where there was a kind of new incarnation who possessed the same kind of fire as both. 

Where another of my favorite old books dipped into the blue waters of Punk City. 

Monte Cristo was a necessary inspiration…

This, too, was a book I’d read half in English and half in French. My epic punk symbol named Doctor Dream was a metahuman figure just a step beyond the persona of the resurrected Edmond Dantes who became Monte Cristo. The one thing that still tied the Monte Cristo character to the mortal world was his love for the mysterious consort named Haidée.

In the accounts of Johnny’s Last Chance Garage, she is nicknamed Heidi, raised by her adoptive guardian Johnny, who leaves her behind on his mission to build New Punk City. So she follows him, with no idea where he’s gone. Her story still to be told, though many of its events are sitting in the content files at Images and in Word, on my iPad.

Not leaving you much to go on, am I?

State of the Union

Busy today on mere political matters. This is a perspective on related matters. It has two identities, one a lengthy video featuring my own far-ranging graphic creations with an AI-narrated soundtrack of the ideas that unify the seemingly random sequence of images.

It’s possible to watch that video without paying much attention to the dense, compressed content.

Found the soundtrack in its own file, which is a different experience. Kind of my personal SOTU in recent years…

See you anon…

How big is Big?

 

I know it’s easy to bridle at my contention that I am the most important living American writer and that there is no one who is qualified to critique my work knowledgeably because the scope of it is bigger than the purview of anyone who presumes to judge. I have been playing the long (looong) game from the time I completed the Boomer Bible manuscript. It’s documented in the book itself, in the Punk Testament’s Book of They.

Even the typesetters had to work overtime on the book; my copy editor 

made them repaginate to ensure that the last line of “They” really did 

require readers to physically turn the page.

The publisher bought the book over the transom because he started reading my large partial submission here and there, then took it home and put it on his nightstand because it was fun to read at bedtime. He never did understand how to categorize it, though he suspected it was important. He hired an outside consultant to be my copy editor. She had worked with William Faulkner when he was alive, and put her hands on her hips when we first met. “This is a first for me,” she said. “I’m supposed to copy edit a book I can’t change a word of because your Intercolumn Reference makes it impossible to make changes that would alter verse numbers.” When I looked bashful, she laughed out loud and asked, “you know when I knew for sure that you were a genius? When I read the Book of Ed and saw how you’d turned three Ed’s into one. And got away with it.” She found a way to make some changes and I acceded to them because how could I not, having handcuffed her so? She wanted to correct my eccentric misspellings of foreign  names, many of which were deliberately out of date. I only quibbled a couple of times about that. She also wanted me to change my original MS names for Captain Kirk and Rita Moreno. “James T. Jerk” became “James T. Quark,” because she thought Trekkies might find me mean. “Rita Morphino” became “Rita Moranmoro” after she suspected, correctly, that I didn’t know about her past problems with drugs. 

So far so good. Workman printed 88,000 copies, and there was a separate publication of a U.K. version (I turned down feelers about other European versions because translation was an impossibility), I was given a publicist who began setting up a book tour. Before that, I had defied my Book Editor’s prohibition about attending the annual Book Fair at the Javits Center (she feared I would be intimidated by being ignored in the industry mob scene). I’d arrived at the Workman booth, where I was informed I had an interview waiting for me with the Book Editor of the Wall Street Journal. That resulted in a feature page story about The Boomer Bible. We were expecting some great results for a first book by an unknown.

Then I got an incredulous call from my young publicist. The Book Editor at the New York Times had just informed her by phone that the paper would never review The Boomer Bible. Ditto the New York Review of Books. Before that big curtain came crashing down, we had deceived one glowing review from the San Francisco Chronicle (of all places), but the word went out from the Times and Publisher's Weekly gave it a yawn, followed by a “Metz a Metz” from the Philadelphia Inquirer (the book’s hometown for God’s sake) and I soon came to realize that my star had fallen past saving at Workman. 20,000 copies the first year and diminishing but continuing returns year after year after year after that. The book tour was nationwide and reached its early climax with a spot on New Year’s Eve at Entertainment Tonight. My 15 minutes of fame completed in about five or so.

Was I surprised by any of this? No. Only that I had managed to sell the book in the first place. The Boomer Bible was a middle finger in the face of the liberal intelligentsia in every possible way. By design. Obviously, many books have hopeful introductions followed by disappointment,  Workman turned down my next book project by postcard because that project was “The Naked Woman,” the first major satiric work about feminism and social science since the modern day women’s liberation movement began. I thought (hoped) it was about time they developed a sense of humor about their politically correct rants and rages, but it wasn’t to be tolerated. By then there were only two big bookstore chains left, and their head buyers were both women. No publisher wanted to run that gauntlet.  I know that because three different agents managed to get turndowns from every publisher in the nation and then lose a big chunk of the manuscript they had been kicking around at the exact fateful moment when my own computer had a disk failure that took my copy down with it.

Since then I have used the Internet as my publisher. And if I chafed at not having money for promotion after my retirement from consulting, I also found reasons to be content with living under the radar. As I moved more and more into the realm of multimedia I discovered that in copyright terms I was a flagrant criminal. When I saw photos or videos that struck me as promising material, I swiped them with screen grabs and made my own new creations out of them. Writers have always been thieves, from Vergil to Shakespeare to every romance novelist on the shelves of airport bookshops. But photography and the pop music and motion picture industries sneaked in under the tent because of the huge sums of money they earn from mass audiences. I took the view that there’s nothing wrong with rap sampling, just as there was nothing wrong with Rachmaninov swiping his “Theme of Paganini” by an innovative melodic reversal. And there’s nothing wrong with me incorporating/editing/reframing other people’s image work into multimedia projects of my own. As long as I stay under the radar, there’s no money to be gained by suing me or putting me in jail. 

Better yet, or best of all, I am free to create what I want as long as I am content to accept the economic restrictions on my toolset. I’m not governed by a publisher’s sales projections for the next year or by a publication’s editorial policy and customer demographics. What I do next doesn’t have to be anything like what I’ve done before. My ‘experimental phase’ never has to end. The fact that I have had to do all my tens of thousands of custom graphics with freeware and a stripped down set of industry standard WP, social network, and blogging apps is to me akin to the Marx Brothers having to live within the confines of the Hayes Act. They couldn’t use the extremely blue material that was the staple of Vaudeville humor, so they went with genius instead. 

I went through a period when I thought my best chance at literary recognition was dying young, but that’s what destitution taught me to ignore. When all I had was lemons, I made lemonade, with own unique twist. I got The Naked Woman from a painful, impoverishing divorce. I got Shuteye Town and Shuteye Nation from a kind of forcible isolation that ironically made it possible for me to focus as sharply and continuously on those projects as I had on the Boomer Bible. 

By now I have written multiple millions of words on almost every conceivable subject, personal, national, and global, derived from experience at all levels of income, in multiple industries that have been central to major economic and cultural developments in our time. My knowledge of pop music and network entertainment fare is as encyclopedic as my readings in the literary canon and the worlds of both fine arts and comic book pulp. I am an American in more senses of that name than most could comprehend. What is more, my leave-behinds can verify everything I’ve just said. 

Thankfully, my assertions about holography come into play here. Everything is in everything. Why the rest of this entry is concerned  only with The Boomer Bible. I have a question. How is it possible that a book obviously so different from anything else produced in the last century is more or less completely ignored by the elite gatekeepers whose avowed mission it is to present innovative talents to our attention, whether they approve of them or not? 

It’s possible you’ve read parts of TBB, but I’m pretty sure you have an idea of it that is, shall we say, incomplete. What follows is links to individual items in a vey large website that was originated not by me but by younger fans of my work. It had been going for at least a couple of years before I even knew it existed. When I found out about it I became a major contributor, though hardly the only one of those.

Investigating these links in some detail will demonstrate that this book, which has been dismissed as “empty-headed” and and “another reworking of familiar material” is incredibly complex and vast in its reach, methods, and depth. (Yes, I’m Henry Elders. Don’t let that deter you. He’s his own man.)

All of this stuff is in the Modern Archive (aka the Wayback Machine), which is beginning to put up obstacles to continuous free access. It functions by making multiple passes at the material through time, and different dates of capture have different levels of completeness and response time (some of the files linked below, like the ICR schematic, are very large). Some of these links will take longer to appear than Google queries. Try to be patient with them.

If, after a fair review, you don’t agree that there’s no way this book can be ignored and left out of the 20th Century canon, then I have nothing left to tell you. Otherwise, I’ll interpret your silence as agreement with my position and continue these posts as before.

Original Boomer Bible Website

Title Page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060710003924/http://www.boomerbible.com/

General:

 The Trick - There is something to be careful about while you are reading.

  Odd Facts - the longest poem written in the English language and more.

  Reviews I - by those who do not read circumspectly.

  Reviews II - by those who loved the book.

The Table of Harrier Days:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061118173451/http://www.boomerbible.com/CourtesyReview.php3?chp=TableHarrierDays.inc&ChT=Table%20of%20Harrier%20Days

ICR of “There is no God”:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061118181931/http://www.boomerbible.com/NoGod/

[The ICR is actually “Live” at another fan-generated site — with no contribution by me — at http://theboomerbible.com, which contains all three testaments but no front matter, prayer book, or hymnal. Clicking on the desired citation in the middle column will take you to the page on which the referenced text appears, in its original context.]

Books that help:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061118180849fw_/http://www.boomerbible.com/books.htm

TBB Numerology:

As mentioned, this web site has benefited from many contributors. One of these contributors, Henry Elders, has been a voluminous contributor. His insights into the numerological structures within The Boomer Bible have been posted here since Harry Day, 2002. You can find his essays, as follows:

    Initial letter from Harry Day, 2002

    Numerology and The Boomer Bible

    Harry's Toys - Miracles & Mysteries

    The Numerology of Harry

    Numerology of the Titles

    The Signs & Symbols of Harry

    The Harry Lands

    The Numerology of Punks

    The Numerology of Jesus Christ

TBB and 9/11:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061118182724fw_/http://www.boomerbible.com/CourtesyReview.php3?chp=EldersFeast.inc&ChT=Elder%27s%20Feast

https://web.archive.org/web/20061118173423fw_/http://www.boomerbible.com/BB911intro.htm

The link to the Original Instapunk:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060711032328/http://www.instapunk.com/

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boomer_Bible

Today: