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.
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 She wanted to correct my eccentric misspellings of foreign names, many of which were deliberately out of date.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:
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 Jesus Christ
TBB and 9/11:
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:
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