My own little political polling corner

Old Business: Fixed the missing link in the Comparative Reading post. You can now go directly to the IPR post “TDS Not a Monolith but a Coalition.”

There are dozens of Robert Lairds on FB. Part of my under the 

censorship radar strategy. I’m the one who uses this profile icon.

Pardon me if I’m not assuming that you visit my Facebook page directly. My wife continually misses about half my posts because she still responds to notifications instead of looking me up directly. I’m mentioning this now because I’ve spent a fair amount of time lately whipping up little “reels” as Facebook has renamed videos. (Method in their madness: there used to be a collection of videos on your FB page, including vids longer than a minute or two. No more.) I’m using “reels” as a test platform for low-grade freebie AI apps that turn pics into spoken word videos matched to canned responses by celebs. My reels feature graphics made by me, matched with canned responses that are frequently replaced by my own audio clip.

I’ve observed a couple of benefits so far that partially offset the loss of the FP page list of videos. First, there are traffic numbers shown for each reel; i.e., number of visits and comments. Since I’ve never been able to derive traffic info about my own FB pages, the visitor numbers are a help. Second, the visitor numbers are a rough measure of which people and issue categories matter to casual readers. The numbers show big differentials that amount to a rule-of-thumb polling mechanism to see who is interesting at the moment and who isn’t.

Why I’m suggesting you make periodic visits to my FB page for the purpose of checking out the reels section. Here’s how you get there. Search for my page from yours. Click on the ‘Robert Laird’ with the avatar shown above. Then find reels in the page header display:

The choice here is helpfully underlined. It takes you to the following…

Click to see individual reels. Scroll to see more reels. By now now there are dozens.

My biggest draw so far was a Tim Walz reel that drew 39,000 visitors. It hit both important factors: 1) it was genuinely funny even on first appearance, and 2) he’s a guy people are really fired up about. That second criterion is actually the more important of the two, but when it comes to reels I’m in the funny business first, the political horse race second. If 1) and 2) are both on the money, people will share and the numbers will skyrocket quickly. Who knew that Jane Fonda is still in the “Never to Be Forgiven”category?

Trends I’ve noticed. People still track celebrities, no matter how much they hate them or claim to pay no attention. (Certain ones, too much in the news, fade quickly in their appeal.) Crooked judges, even quite anonymous ones, are a surprisingly good draw. The people who go reels shopping are keeping an eye on the latest anti-Trump, anti-American rulings by district judges from ritzy suburbs. Older Dem leadership like Pelosi, Schumer, Carville, Warren, and Sanders are almost fishwrap at this point, no matter how funny the punchline. The younger leadership tracks more with the noisiest celebrities, popular for sharing at first, then diminishing returns as the insanities pile up. 

If you cruise through the reels I’ve posted, you can spot your own trends about who’s a hot topic and who isn’t. That’s not how I make my choices; I’m the old satire warhorse who’s mostly looking for a good punchline in the fancies and AI tricks at my disposal, preferring to trust my own instincts about my target audience. Just like I’ve made no effort over the ears to build a huge total of Facebook friends. [gotta break in and tell you this; just typed ‘warhorse’ and AutoCorrect edited it to ‘Warhol pres’ as I was writing the next line (hit a ‘p’ by accident, did I?). That’s AI super-intelligence for you…]

And now that it’s come up, AI is something that’s important here too. Facebook is using AI to create more sophisticated algorithms intended to reduce audiences rather than flat-out censor posted material. I know there are shadow bans (plural) on me, in terms of both posts and reels, and they are subtle enough not to be too blanketing. Some reels take off like gangbusters as soon as I post them. Others, featuring faces and topics that are sizzling hot, barely draw for 8 to 10 hours before trending toward modestly healthy numbers. Treatment of posts is just as suspect, but even more subtle. I have loyal readers who seem to take days to see or comment on any post, while others are putting in their ‘Likes’ from the moment I hit ‘Save’ it seems. FB also does not like to show teaser graphics for posts linking my page to Instapunk Returns, my long format blog, which can make posts with short intros almost disappear from the scanning eye of a reader. Some posts, often the more provocative ones in terms of subject matter, go for days with no Likes or comments at all. Not included in notification strings? I can only guess.

Reels is confirming some of my observations to date about AI algorithms. As sophisticated as it seems, the technological capacity to make lips move as if pronouncing specific words does not include the actual ability to “see.” The algorithm is designed to sample very small segments of an image that are ‘facelike’ or  ‘mouthlike’ and put in them in a work-in-process buffer. What the algorithms are not doing is “looking” at the whole image and inferring the existence of faces. They don’t know what a ‘face’ is. They know that some combinations of shade-gradients and intensities within backgrounds represent buffer candidates, but they cannot even rank them for likelihood as primary candidates for work. Why the apps that will make a face speak specific words prompt you for choices between faces even when some are so small and/or partial they are highly unlikely choices for a starring role in the vid. When there are clearly two and only two buffer candidates, they offer you a choice between them with the default starred. The default is the image on the righthand side the screen, because the code writer knows that interviewers mostly sit on the left, and interviewees mostly sit on the right. When there is only one buffer candidate but its internal relationships between variables are poorly aligned or placed, you will be prompted to verify that it is in fact a face by moving and sizing a face outline onto the correct part of the image. If there is no buffer candidate, the app will stall, even if there are visual elements that would be blatantly facelike to a viewer with human pareidolia. I discovered this by trying to get an app to recognize a twerking butt as a face, which it would not do. I therefore inserted a very small human face into the image somewhere above the butt, and when I was prompted to show the exact size and location of the face, I moved it straight to the butt, which said the words I’d picked for the twerking babe in the photo.

When you have chosen the ‘face’ you want, it goes away and builds a new WIP of mouth and lips, which are processed at some length to generate a succession of image files showing a range of lip configurations corresponding to mouths speaking consonants or vowels. The app has no idea what a mouth, a lip, or a word is. It’s just crunching data at very high speed to imitate what it takes a human brain a nanosecond to do.

All AI is assembled this way, from algorithms that sample huge volumes of data for target combinations of attributes that can be manipulated like children’s building blocks. More sophisticated programs have more layers of processing than the two I’ve described for the ‘still photo speaking’ app. The only intelligence involved is the programmer’s, and he has no more knowledge of the meaning of the desired programming outcome than the computer does. He’s formstting from ‘A’ to be manipulable by ‘B’ so it can be processed and output as ‘C’. Then it’s time for a beer.

You don’t hear about this kind of grunt-level programming reality from the AI “experts” who gleefully inform us that all white collar jobs will be devoured by Artificial Intelligence. If they are, that’s instant Worldwide Great Depression.

Can you see why I’m thinking there might be some value in looking at my reels? Whether you do or not, I’ve learned quite a bit by trying to use them for my own purposes.

As you were…

Dragonfly Mode

It strikes me now and again. Can’t help it. Just try to control it…

I’ve only done one thing:

That’s all. I swear.

Guess I succumbed more than I thought I would. But only a little…

The Sounds of Silence

 

I’ve heard a lot them in my life, sounds of silence. People don’t tend to ask me many questions, and they don’t challenge contrarian ideas I put forward. My wife says I don’t get many comments because I don’t leave much for them to say. My take on it is that they don’t ask questions because they’re afraid I might answer. When I was a consultant, both my partners and my clients never asked me about how I did so much work in so little time. I don’t think they really wanted to know. It was standard practice for my partners to drop their output on my desk and say, ‘I’ve got it 80 percent there, and it’s time for you to do what you always do to finish it. So I took the 50 percent they’d done and finished it without complaint. Clients generally expressed their approval by changing almost nothing I turned in to them. Here and there word changes or name inserts were about the only edits they made. And they also shared a tendency to keep me a secret. I never really sold down the hall; I got spotted by my immediate client’s boss, who appropriated me for his own use. I’ve told you already, I think, that the copy editor of TBB, hired especially for that assignment, told me on first acquaintance I had pulled off the impossible: written a giant book that couldn’t be edited because any change could have unknown repercussions elsewhere. I was delighted she understood the importance of the Intercolumn Reference without explanations.

My way of motivating myself in the silence is that it doesn’t matter if people never actually try to talk with me about my work. Like my old partners, they really don’t want to know how or why I do what I do. A problem arises when I have a good idea that I can’t implement all by myself. That’s where I am now. My sense is that most people are comfortable in their boxes. They can furnish them with comfort items and ignore distractions that might rock some personal boat or other. I’m in a box too, just not one bounded by limits of imagination, mental weariness, or patience, but defined by tight and tightening constraints on my own physical resources. I’ve done as much as anybody can with free and bootlegged software, reconditioned hardware, and, uh, what’s the right term? — budget constraints. Now I’m also dealing with the human fact of time running out on my lifeclock and an invasion of bullshit AI algorithms that are increasingly capable of preventing me from writing altogether. Here’s a snap of some doodling I was doing yesterday in the Apple Notes utility. The fucking AutoCorrect junkware refused repeatedly to accept my edits to their presumptively superior version of what I was writing:

For awhile there, I thought getting the text I wanted wasn’t even going to be possible. Worse than the phony modesty of the SW is the brand new AI insistence on interpreting every unexpected letter combination as an attempt to insert a Proper Name they’ve decided I’m trying to type.

When I tell other FB’ers about this, they say, “I know how you feel. I’ve noticed it too.” They don’t know how I feel. Nobody out there, nobody, is writing as much as I am every single day.

Here’s what I do know. The American book publishing business is dying. People don’t read because the books suck, and publishers have zero interest in not making exactly the same mistakes that have slain the Hollywood movie business. Reliance on series franchises, celebrity names, and boardroom level contracts that guarantee cash flow now that turns into huge losses later. (Another Hillary book warehoused as a courtesy to deep-pocketed political operatives.)

If there is to be an American book publishing industry for another generation, publishers must radically alter their definition of what a book is. No one wants to read or write the morosely derivative crap that’s been reigning in critics’ twisted judgment since Erica Jong and Joseph Heller put a gun to the head of originality and growth in terms of artistic vision.

Books are going to have to be multimedia productions consisting of much more than print and paper or print-pixels on a mute screen. Those who are intended consumers of fiction must begin participating in the creation process by having the means to navigate their way through a dimensionally expansive world, not a tedious string of one page after one paragraph after one sentence at a time. People are done with that shit. Why there are no great writers coming along.

It’s not that I’m out of step with the literary world. The literary Deep State is out of step with me. And I’m running out of time and resources to win more than a Pyrrhic victory at this point.

I have a huge multimedia work on the drawing boards. I’m linking a miniature prototype of it here. For everything you see there is an abundance of additional material in every kind of media to deepen and widen its scope. Most of that material has been assembled for just this purpose but postponed because of my concerns about how not to lose it by putting it under the wrong TekLord’s physical control. I can’t build it without their products, but where am I if they suddenly charge me a fortune to work on 50 websites?

The artistic goal is to create an extensive enough presence across the electronic landscape that people simply will not remember whether or not there was a culture changing literary movement called Punk Writing that began in the late 1970s. I have the evidence and the arguments on both sides. Plenty of it. Plus a verifiable record of Internet censorship and banning of decades’s duration. 

One tiny example. If the first king of Punk City was not assassinated and burned in a boat Viking-style off the coast of Cape May Point on Easter night 1981, how do you explain this?

The proof of the entire story is provided by a context that includes all my works, even the ones that aren’t about punks. For now, I don’t care if anyone believes it or not. I just want them to play a much much larger Game with me. If you don’t encounter some material in there that will make your hair curl, you haven’t tried hard enough…

I don’t need people to understand what I am doing. It’s over their heads. But if there is no place for me (or people like me) to do what I do, the literary arts cannot survive to resurrect themselves in a new incarnation.

.

Comparative Reading Exercise

One of my graphic portraits of Harry, First Babe of the Boom, still living high in Rio.*

A non-sequitur post this one. Just had a pre-dawn go-round with a humorless Trump hater (she had ‘reporter’ embedded in her Threads alias) turning his off-the-cuff jokes into proof of his pedophilia and contempt for his “stupid” followers. “Smart people don’t like me.” You know the drill. Put me back in Harry mode for a bit. She accused me of pedophilia for defending Trump and accused me of ad hominem rhetoric because I suggested she was part of a death cult who wanted the President dead, defended alien criminals against U.S. citizens, and condemned motherhood as a patriarchal prison while celebrating abortion as a woke sacrament. I gave her a link to the online Boomer Bible to give her a hint that talking down to me was a wrong turn. She replied a few minutes later by dismissing the book as “outdated rageism,” which makes her the fastest reader in human history.

So I sent her one more link and signed off. 

Which got me to thinking. People who only know me from Instapunk Returns often mistake the style of my more analytical posts as constituting my “voice” as a writer. What they don’t have the patience to read in the Facebook era they see as proof of my limitations. It never seems to occur to them that I might be writing over their heads to an audience that is qualified to comprehend the duality of complexity and simplicity and accept their ultimate unity. 

I have many voices. Depending on the topic and the context, I write to persuade a particular kind of reader or to document ideas that should be examined more rigorously than an Op-Ed column.

Decided to post this not because I’m addressing any deficiency of yours, just to put a reading experiment on the record. I know you’re busy. Come back to this some day when you have the time for some comparative analysis. Two pieces about the same subject, approached in quite different voices. Do they work together in some way? Or is there some fundamental difference between them?

First, there’s this, the last link I gave the Threads chick:

The whole book of Centralians is here. It spans eleven pages, and the ‘Next’ button at the upper right of the screen will take you through it. Like all the epistles of TBB, this one has a specific Philadelphia connection, the venerable Central High School, which was once the premiere secondary school in the city and perhaps the nation. My grandfather Laird went there and received a Bachelor of Arts degree (including courses in Greek he could still quote in his eighties) before going to Penn for a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry. The diploma I found in the attic was from Central, not Penn. it was the biggest diploma I have ever seen (24x18 inches?), penned on genuine sheepskin and beautifully framed. Only the best students went there. Like everything else in academia, it has declined in prestige and caliber since then. Be aware that the Intercolumn reference in this online version of TBB is live, meaning if you click on a reference indicated in text, the column link will take you to the page where the linked text can be found. On the first page here, the references to the ‘Ext’ book (Exploits if the Ultraharriers) ) will give you more information about ‘Fred’ and why he is a ‘martyr.’

There are two routes through Centralians. I’d recommend starting the first pass by accepting that the strikethrough text is to be ignored. The remaining text flows continuously without it. The second time through involves rejecting the strike-outs and reading the whole continuously. 

Next up is an Instapunk Returns post from 35 years later. Still focused on the question, “Can you recognize the box?”

That link is here. It’s a little under twice as long as Centralians but far more specific and discriminating in its content. There is no ICR, though there are relevant links for the curious. Yet it does still close, finally, on the confining nature of the boxes people wind up living in.  It absolutely shares with Centralians the idea that individual consciousness is not really an all-seeing free fire zone bounded only by IQ as the intellectual elites prefer to believe. Even the most gifted occupy boxes that limit and obscure the view from inside the containment zone.

That’s it. Reading both pieces is the exercise. As a writer I prefer Centralians of course. But as a citizen in a time of grave national peril, I regard the IPR piece as its own kind of epistle to the generation of saviors still waiting to be born. I think living readers might learn from it, but I suspect they are not thirsty enough to drink of this particular draft and draw sustenance from it.

Sorry to interrupt. As I suggested, consider this one a layaway item you may or may not look back in on at a later date.

____________________

* Unless this is where he resides these days…

When life gives you lemonade…

Got quite a jug full of the yellow stuff yesterday. For the first time in at least a dozen years I do not have online access to my multimedia work Shuteye Town 1999. Checking on something I was going to reference at Instapunk, I ran into this where ST99 should have been:

Note that the graphic provides no contact information. The”happy to help” is a lie.

My wife had received an expiration notice she didn’t tell me about, thinking she had updated our bank card information with those who bill us monthly and are supposed to be automatically paid by the bank. This was the second time we had had to replace the card because of a phony charge that had in fact been paid by the bank without notifying us of a suspect circumstance. The first time we agreed mutually to cancel the card and get a new one. This time, they hadn’t even informed us before shutting down the card, requiring an ex-post-facto flurry of vendor contacts to give them a new card number. She thought that the two Wordpress sites we’d been paying for on a monthly basis over 10 years time would be paid automatically by a bank who had reason to know there might be a billing issue. She thought wrong.

Result? I spent 6 hours in the middle of the night from when I discovered the ‘suspension” taking stock of what all was involved and how I might proceed from here. The suspension shut down two sites, rflaird.com and ip.rflaird.com, which together contain well over a thousand posts and the files of both Shuteye Town 1999 and Shuteye Nation. That’s about 15 years of work and an indispensable chunk of my total writing and graphic output. Latest instance of the squeezing phenomenon I’ve been talking about.

What I’ve done since and why. Took an inventory of what content from rflaird.com and ip.rflaird.com are still at least partially preserved on the Wayback Machine. This was modestly successful. So far it appears that Shuteye Nation, more writing in many fewer files, seems accessible thus far, as do many of the actual posts at both sites, with varying degrees of format collapse caused by some Wordpress glitch a couple years ago. (I have not been able to log in to revise or add to either site since some point release was not backward-compatible in its administrative code ‘enhancements’.) These Wayback researches have been seriously compromised by policy changes in the last year or so to save costs by pressuring frequent users to have monthly ‘donation’ subscriptions. I had a subscription but apparently lost it during the first hacked bank card cancellation, and I have gotten nowhere in my attempts to renew. Just as with Wordpress and their new owner Blue Host, there’s no one to tell it to. The Modern Archive has its own stick to use: informing you that you have made too many inquiries “in a given period of time” and denial of service (i.e., suspension) for some indeterminate number of days/wks. I have never been able to speak to a human being at Wordpress, Blue Host, or the Modern Archive/Wayback Machine. 

My next step was to inventory my wife’s computer, which contains the only surviving versions in our possession of the original Word97 version of ST99 and the HTML version that was protected for years inside its own box within the rflaird.com site. I have stayed away from that computer since my wife essentially resigned from manuscriot formatting for Kindle and moved her banking transactions to a used, very stripped down iPad she hates. I stayed away because like my online works her Dell laptop is more than 10 years old, unsupported by either Dell or Microsoft, and is living on a prayer at this point.

Within the last year, I took several steps to prepare for a transition I knew would be high risk. I bought a Read-Write DVD drive that should be switchable between her PC and my iPad. I found an original copy of Word97, which is the only software that can read the original ST99 graphic files. I conducted an operation on my wife’s PC to find one file without which even the Word97 SW wouldn’t give me complete access to the original: a list of the passwords to the 200+ protected files I had created when I still thought I was building a videogame, not a multimedia experience. I couldn’t get her computer to open my Google email and ship a file across the room to my iPad, so I photographed the pages of the file on the display screen.

That’s where things stood yesterday when what I’d dreaded became inevitable. I had to rescue ST99 from the dying PC before it gave up the ghost. I connected the DVD drive and successfully completed one file transfer from her machine to an old blank CD/ROM I still had. That meant that if I could find a cheap PC laptop clone, I could copy ST99, hopefully both the original and HTML versions, to a limited use computer that would protect the work for a few years longer.

Then I ordered a refurbished Chinese laptop clone for $67 and priced direct PC-PC Ethernet FILE-transfer cable from Amazon; that and a box of three 7GB DVD/ROMs are available for about $30 or so.

I also created a new Blogger site on my wife’s iPad, so that I and designated others can still access Shuteye Nation at the Wayback Machine without experiencing the “too many inquiries” blockage of my own device. Here’s the link: Shuteye Entry Pages.

Contacting Blue Host and sorting out things with them is also on the list, but not with much hope.

Next? Started working on the mixing of “lemonade” this morning. The traumatic history of Shuteye Town 1999 is actually a coincidental (serendipitous) component of a larger work I’ve alluded to here and elsewhere in the past. There have been four Shuteye Town websites since Y2000, two of them full-featured dedicated sites and two others transitional holding areas. Both the dedicated sites were done in by vendors who turned “free” into “paid” with about two weeks notice. The Blogger version just blown away by the Blue Host suspension was a placeholder, as was the ST99 linkage in the original Boomer Bible website. 

The backstory of the punk writer movement has always included the explicit possibility that what was presented as fiction might be a cover narrative for events that really did occur. Why there are two prefaces of The Boomer Bible. And why, back in 2018, I wrote a two-part user manual for Shuteye Town that quietly surfaces the possibility that punk writings were written by real punk writers who lived secretly on South Street for seven years before disappearing in a single night. The first and principal part of the manual was authored by an also-ran video game developer named Victor Dragoman whose final verdict on Shuteye Town was a thumbs down because, given its timeline and troubled technological history, it was obviously a rush job by a man who had lost everything and was just sounding off about everything. 

The second part was a response to the draft Dragoman published, taking issue with his narrative and his research. The authors of the”Response” called themselves the ‘South Street Irregulars,’ a mysterious gang of fugitives who had appeared in a previous terminated website called “The South Street Mystery,” which did in fact exist side by side with “JDoe99.com” until the vendor named Simplesite was acquired and subsequently canceled five other major websites with which R, F. Laird was affiliated.

Here are the authors of the “Response”:

Here was the cover for their “Reboot” of Shuteye Town:

[On a personal note, I must tell you the most intoxicating thing about Sherlock Holmes was that he began as a fiction and became so real that his lodgings on Baker Street now exist in fact, and my guess is there are a lot of young people (at least) who do believe he was a real detective, the one who discovered fingerprints and sinister messages written in code. Why this frame of an unpublished autobiographical vid I made to amuse my wife highlights reading matter that was inspirational in my earliest years: 

The cat, also real, was named Jade. She lived to be 21.]

The Response manuscript was not so fortunate. When the iPad I wrote it on died a sudden death, my files were not lost for the most part. Except for Word documents that had been stored in ICloud. They never returned and “Reboot’ joined a very long list of lost writings. 

As a result I did not proceed to publication of the Victor Dragoman manuscript. I wasn’t in the mood to restart what I thought was done, and I hated giving up on my original conception for a unique print book design. It was to have two front covers. You picked the one you wanted to start with. Read page by page until you ran into print that was upside down and backwards. Close it up, flip the book over and oriented with type from left to right and start reading the real book.

So I never did the technical cleanup stuff at the end of Dragoman MS. Since I also hadn’t restored enough of the missing texts from Moon Books and elsewhere in Shuteye Town to satisfy me, I went back to work on those without resolving in print how readers would locate them.

Which brings us to this morning. I hauled out the Dragoman guide, made a few minor copy edits, and produced a linkable PDF version You can read here.

Click here to learn about the history of a work that has at least briefly passed away from life on the Internet. The Shuteye Town 1999 User’s Guide

All the lemons I can squeeze in a little over 24 hours. Last hint I’ll give you. Punk City vanished on the night of the MOVE Bombing in Philadelphia. I have photographic and documentary proof of that buried criminal action by agents of a shadow federal government who wanted the technology only the punk writers of South Street possessed. That’s been the deepest element of the narrative all along…

The Pop Culture Iceberg

 

One thing that’s hard to get a handle on, even in my own assessments of my work, is the extent to which I have made use of pop culture as both a tool and an inspiration. My best ideas aren’t all derived from Cynewulf, Voltaire, and William Blake. When I look at my image files in particular I find that popular entertainment artifacts are threaded through my photos and graphics at a level that’s overwhelming because they can’t be broken out separately and distinctly from the rest of it.

I’ve read a lot of great literature and used it in my own work. I’ve also read a lot of airport bestsellers, including complete series titles by Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, John D. McDonald, Ross McDonald, Ellery Queen, Sue Grafton, Patricia Cornwell, and even a few Erle Stanley Gardners (Bertha Cool is cool!) Yes, I’ve also read Gone With the Wind (only once) and seen the movie more times than that (women you know..). I’ve seen a truly staggering number of movies and TV shows too. (Recently took a sidebar test on my knowledge of vintage network TV series and answered 50 questions with a perfect score.) Comic books and grownup magazines were another guilty pleasure when they still existed. Even my grandmother’s unread copies of Redbook and Cosmopolitan (she’d have perished in mortification if she ever found out what was in there). 

This kind of indiscriminate taste was a fixed component of my behavior from earliest childhood. I had a crush on Sally Starr, Philly’s most successful children’s entertainment host. Popeye cartoons, the Three Stooges (never liked them) and Sally herself, “My Gal Sal” with her colorful cowgirl livery and ever-present hat. My Dad didn’t approve of the show and I had to turn it off when he got home, but my mother took me to see her in person at the Bridgeton High School when all the other kids were caravaning to a new Disney movie called “Old Yeller.” They all came home crying, whereas I had seen my first ever celebritee…

Sally Starr (1923-2013)

There’s a lot of this pedestrian stuff that I run into when I’m looking for other more important book covers, serious art, and other weighty influences on my youth. It’s not that I’m contemptuous of these influences. I’m not. The problem is, when I’m looking for something I need for an essay I keep coming across these distractions whose impact on my work can’t really be summarized or smoothly integrated into my grander notions of literature, art, and imagination. But they still captivate me and I wind up wasting time trying to figure out what I was using them for in my other work. Why I called it an iceberg in the post title. They’re there. They matter. But mostly as proof that I have not spent my life in a monastery.

Except for all the exceptions, of course. I’ve probably learned as much about lean narrative writing from Rex Stout as I did from Ernest Hemingway. Which amounts to a distraction. A couple years ago, I wasted a few days writing a sample chapter and a book outline for a Nero Wolfe mystery called “Too Many Victims,” in which one famous literary detective after another shows up at Wolfe’s  brownstone, only to be murdered within hours. I was never going to finish that book. It gave me a couple days off, but once I knew where it was headed, the actual writing was a slog I had no stomach for. Just one more instance of me trying on another writer’s voice to see what it feels like from their side of the keyboard.

At the top of the post I inserted a picture of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. My mother wouldn’t let me read them till I turned 13 in July 1966. By the time I left for boarding school in September I had read all of them. Ironically, I had made the acquaintance of Ian’s brother Peter Fleming some years before, in a hilarious book called Brazilian Adventure about a real expedition to the Amazon to locate the missing Percy Fawcett. His voice in writing it was charming, a self-conscious parody of previous Fawcett books loaded with self-deprecating humor and some very real dangers.

James Bond has become iconic beyond his literary merit, though, by the sheer enormity of his enduring presence in the movies, finally laid to ignominious rest by Daniel Craig’s leaden performance, Judy Dench as a schoolmarmish “M,” and a heretical cameo by the legendary DB5 Aston Martin. An essay I haven’t written is how the succession of actors miscast as Bond after Connery (with an Honorable Mention to Timothy Dalton) illustrates the parallel decline of our view of men, manhood, and desirable women. Bond was already in intensive care when Pierce Brosnan took the reins, and Craig just completed the death with a frantic fossil replacing attraction with action. Maybe I’ll write it on some slow future day. 

BUT… I have used my James Bond memories in other ways. The reason for this post is my rediscovery just the other day, looking for something else, of an Instapunk post I wrote and illustrated in 2009, shortly after Obama’s first inauguration in January 2009. I used the comparison to smuggle in my own predictions about what the un-macho Obama would be spending time on in the White House. I still like it.

It’s called “Agent 009”. See what you think of it.

Not the only time I’ve ventured into this kind of territory. There was a similar opportunity to weigh the attributes of my favorite comic book hero Spiderman, this time because Frank Rich of the NYT had tried to use the comparison for his own purposes. 

That one’s called “Spider-Man for President”. Couldn’t, wouldn’t have done it without my own experience following the coming of age complications of Peter Parker.

[That’s interesting. Just got a death threat on Substack. I get these notifications from Substack and Threads, where I go to take the temperature of the functional sociopaths in the TDS silo. While I was working on this I got a notification that someone was demanding his followers go after the dumb shit MAGAt who needed to be put in his place. I took the link and told him there was no chance he could prove me a dumb shit and promised him that I could clean his clock on any subject. I informed me there was nothing he could say that would hurt me and the best he could hope for was laughter. About half an hour later I got another notification telling me all MAGAt’s were cowardly pussies and inviting me out to California, where he would kill me. So I took the link and got a 404 screen, telling me there was nothing at the link. Guessing they shut him down. My standard reply to the death threats is, “Go ahead. I’m old. You kill me and I become a martyr. My existing books will immediately become bestsellers, and my estate and heirs will/thank you.”]

Is that interruption of this post ironic or just funny? Maybe both. 

Where was I?  Oh. I was about to tell you that in my midlife crisis after my divorce in ‘92-‘93, I went through a second wave of pop culture entertainments that did indeed make a significant contribution to my serious work. I was alone in a big house at the time and installed a state of the art media system with high end stereo, VHS and laser disk players, and a Genesis video game console. It took no time at all for me to become hooked on video games. A friend gave me a version of Doom with all the cheats included, which enabled the pure fun of shooting up the bad guys as much and as long as I wanted. When I tired of that, I went shopping for my own self. I bought Evander Holyfield Boxing and eventually won all the way through it, twice. I also played with Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Streets of Fire. Fun but more trick than treasure.

My favorite was a motorcycle game called Road Rash.

It takes practice, practice, practice…

By then I’d had a Honda 360, a Norton 850 Commando, and a Harley Sportster. But riding a bike with a game controller is its own learning experience. I had always had amazing reflexes (able to catch a cup falling off a table before I knew it was falling…), and that had been useful to me in my motorhead days years back as well.

As I learned more about video games, evolving quickly as I tried to keep track, I came across a novel game(?) called “Myst,” which would prove a turning point in my writing life.

Myst wasn’t a game as much as a place you had to earn your way through challenges and feats of coordination to explore. The desire was not to score points or save up powers and lives but to see the whole damn place as far as it went.

The experience of Myst immediately made me think of another pop culture hit of the day, a graphic novel-cum-Internet app called “Maus.”

There was nothing unserious about Art Spiegelman. He was trying to use abilities he had to cover an experience most would regard as inappropriate for cartoons. I loved it. 

Myst and Maus stewed in my creative crockpot until divorce and subsequent personal floundering had cost me everything, including my family home, all my cash and possessions, and even my one bedroom apartment in Delaware, from which I was evicted without a driver’s license to carry me to some haven of renewal. Instead I got rescued by a spectacular blonde woman who had once been my next door neighbor and was now struggling with a protracted divorce proceeding of her own. She had a house in my old home village of Greenwich and she took me in, with multiple trips of my stuff in her Cadillac in a single exhausting night. The next seven years are a story in their own right for another time, but when I settled in at the desk containing my old computer, I started working on a single graphic to see how the drawing app in Microsoft Word97 worked.

It worked fine but slowly. I could make one change on that drawing and wait five minutes for the screen to repaint itself. My last friend from my business life came to visit, watched aghast at what I was working with, and returned two days later with his own computer to replace mine.

When refresh speed entered the picture, Myst and Maus converged in my imagination and became a new place, a serious place that would have to transcend my limited and entirely computer based drawing skills. The place was Shuteye Town 1999, which I began serious development work on in late 1997 and finished just before New Year’s 2000, when I had reason to believe, the computer world we’d known would come to an end. I wanted to leave a record of what our culture had become after decades of decline and technological addiction.

My focus was as intense as it had been with The Boomer Bible. I worked on it seven days a week, including even the day of my Dad’s funeral. Finishing it before 2000 was a race I refused to lose.

That work has had its own complicated history and is still in a state of  peril not unlike what I was dreading when I started it. But it’s as big and ambitious in its own way as TBB. As with TBB, ST99 had its own unbelievable instances of serendipity. Most notably an accident that incapacitated my right hand for a few weeks as stitches healed. I continued nonetheless, drawing with my left hand, which took me in an inspired direction of variation and completion on the Wonderland theme that underpinned the whole project. Like TBB, it also had an equally ambitious companion work, this time a sequel not a prequel. TBB had Punk City. Shuteye Town had Shuteye Nation. That , too, is a story for another day. 

That’s all I’ll cover here. My point in starting this was to explain the distractions that frequently send me in different directions from what I set out to today. Story of my life as it turns out.

I hope that’s not too annoying a trait.

Obvious, perhaps, but not irrelevant

Here’s the Internet link.

This book has received no promotion since its initial release and the end of my 1991 book tour on Entertainment Tonight, and it is still alive. The New York Times told my publicist the paper would never review the book. They knew what it was and wanted to bury it. It has sold 80,000+ copies (no figures on the U.K. version). I own the rights.

I have been reading about a resurgence in Christianity among college-age young people in the United States. Reports say many of them are actually reading the Holy Bible several days a week. The Boomer Bible was written for precisely this audience.

From one of the final books of TBB’s Punk Testament. This was, is, 

and will always be my mission. To be a resource for the ones 

who will have to rebuild western civilization. 

A couple days ago, I went to the Turning Point USA and asked them to contact me. I told them a bare minimum of info about me and The Boomer Bible. Have heard nothing yet. Months ago I sent a pristine copy of both TBB and the companion book Punk City to Skyhorse Publishing, which claims to be interested in conservative books. I received no acknowledgment or communication of any kind from them. All self-promoting agents are unreachable by phone and do not respond to voicemails. My wife made many such contact attempts before her present disabilities began, and she never succeeded in speaking with anyone.

I’m telling you this because I have to tell someone. I am not trying to get rich. I am trying to provide a valuable resource to a beleaguered generation of young people who need it. TBB is a Judeo-Christian testament of faith, an exposé of the Sixties generation that poisoned the end of the 20 century and the first quarter of the 21st. It tells the history of the world as the Baby Boomers learned it in school, college, and adult life. It satirizes the delusional interpretations of modern culture while providing a way to see the more enlightened sources beneath the slick dismissals.

The book is, in fact, a biography of the mind of Harry, a true ‘Anti Christ’ persona who uses reverse psychology to create a dark but complete mirror of Christianity called the Pontifical Harrier Parish. He has his own Trinity of Desire, Certainty, and Blame, and his communion sacrament is called Consolation, the white powder that gave him an impregnable empire in Rio de Janeiro, the heaven to which he escapes after walking out of a life sentence in prison. 

The premise is that TBB was written by the dispossessed, a community of punk rockers turned writers who worked in bands aided by artificial intelligence software that blended individual contributions into stories. Their biggest problem was having nothing to write about. All they had was hatred of the Yuppies who visited their rowdy nightspots on nights and weekends. They decided to find out what these Boomers knew and write it down so they would know what the hell was wrong in their own lives. They interviewed the Yuppies and took notes, then they gathered en masse at a computer center in an abandoned ice cream factory in Headhouse Square to write their Bible. The content they captured included the cynical essentials of education at a liberal arts college, of which Philadelphia has plenty. Popular culture was also part of the mix, including movies and TV shows described in enough detail to enable the book’s Intercolumn Reference to cast every major figure in history as some famous Hollywood star. 

The Present Testament’s epistles are aimed at the demographics of Philadelphia, taking in all walks of life and levels of income and education in the City of Brotherly Love, including a slide presentation about the Way of Harry in the Book of Wharts. 

You see, the book is educational, irreverent, and predictive of everything that went wrong when the Baby Boomers were finally in charge of it all.

Who needs such a book? The kind of young people who are turning away from atheistic Marxism and are seeking a meaning in life that just might be traceable to a divine creator who gave Mankind the gift of law and consideration for the rights and well being of others.

You may have gathered my time is pretty full up with writing and trying to salvage imperiled existing works. I need ideas about how to engage with the new movement toward a purpose in life beyond a BMW in the garage.

Maybe it’s still too soon. Just thought I’d be clear about my own intentions in the matter.

I know that some person of discernment knows it’s important. The TBB entry at the Modern archive is a photographic copy of every page in the book. I know this because there’s bleed-through on some pages from the text on the other side. That means someone had the job of carefully photocopying all 822 pages, one page at a time. The book can be borrowed in discrete chunks for specific periods of time, for free of course.

They’re also giving me a hard time about accessing other large works of mine at the Modern Archive. Tightening their belts, it seems. Just this past year they started cutting me off for “Too Many Inquiries.” I know they want money on a subscription, which I’m doing at a level I can afford, but it doesn’t seem to be enough.

I’ll wait to see if Turning Point can find someone with enough spare time to correspond with me. Pretty sure they have the money to republish The Boomer Bible. They just don’t know they want to yet.

Heads up on St. Patrick’s Day

 

One of my Time Machines revisited

I suspect, rightly or wrongly, that you rarely take my Facebook links to Instapunk Returns. Today would be a good day to do that. The post explains more of what’s included in Shuteye Nation than I usually do, and, vitally, the very real nature of the slenderness of the remaining Internet connection to one of my most significant works. Here’s the link to St. Patrick’s Day! (Plus Premonitions of AI media, the Epstein Files, and “wardrobe malfunctions”)

Circling but getting there…

Yes, I know it looks like I’m in a holding pattern, but I’m not sitting on my hands. I don’t feel any rush, because you are now officially in the “Dear Diary” category of phantom correspondents, which means I’m free to pursue multiple spin-off tasks inspired in large part by what I’ve already written here. That means multiple balls in the air at the same time. The biggest of these will wind up here when it’s done, my first ever account of how I created the book Punk City, father of The Boomer Bible and much much more.

After you wrote your excellent takedown of Tucker Carlson, I was going to send you this drawing of mine from Shuteye Town of a character I’ve always had a kinship with:

No, it’s not clip art. I drew it. Me and Don Quixote go way back…

But I didn’t send it or post it here either. It reminded me of a slew of windmills I’ve tilted at, some successfully, many not. A self-contained example of this is the blogsite I did back in 2021, when I finally had to sever my already troubled relations with the Mercersburg Academy, where I began my lifelong quest to be part of saving western civilization from my sorry generation. Here’s the story. It tells itself.

Here’s the link to the whole website.

It’s a dead site now. Still sitting there waiting to be discovered after the self-eating hysteria concerning sex and gender and the invincible legal/moral superiority of women has been stuffed back into the X-Files where it belongs.

Hardly the only windmill I’ve aimed a lance at that got me threatened, banned, slandered, and otherwise punished by the arbiters of good and bad in our declining nation. I’ve got a troublemaker rap sheet dating all the way back to my own days at Mercersburg, but the proofs of it are part of the record already if and when somebody goes looking for it.

So I left my Don Quixote pic in the Images file of my iPad and resumed work on multiple other, still incomplete posts.

A messy but funny Instapunk piece with the working title “How Posts Fall Apart,” about the difficulty of choosing a worst New England state. An abundance of collected/created materials with built-in punchlines but no cohesive narrative to get beyond the default answer of “all of them”.

A hole I discovered in my 10-year series of  “End of Year” posts that could easily be a Kindle book if my iPad and I can survive the dreary complications of electronic manuscript formatting. I located the missing Year, 2019, in a series of late December Facebook posts. The censors were after me big-time in the buildup to the 2020 Presidential campaign. I have all the bits and pieces stored and available for use (you’re favorably mentioned there btw), but it will be another sorry looking mess with formatting issues galore. Still working on it, a little bit at a time, like the New England piece.

I don’t know if you even know how to get to my Facebook page, but if you did and took the link to all my ‘Reels,’ you’d see I’m also working at learning the algorithmic patterns of the low-grade, freebie AI apps available for playing with video, audio, and animation miniatures. My observation is that most of the so-called experts on AI technology haven’t done this kind of grunt-level research, which discloses how fundamental the obstacles are to large scale implantations assembled from the same kinds of piecemeal junkware. They pontificate from on high without ever getting their own hands dirty. My own hands are filthy with it.

Three more ambitious projects designed to leverage freebie junkware into longer video projects have consumed a lot of my time so far and have made decent progress, but can only be worked on until my eyes and fingers and short-term file-link memory hold up on a given day. One is a movie I’ve already posted a trailer for. It’s called The Trial of Zoltan Mandamme. 

Finishing the actual movie is a hill I’m still climbing.

Of the other two, the simpler one is a multimedia excavation of James Joyce’s famous map of the intricate genius of Finnegans Wake. I’d call it 90 percent complete at this point, which means half the work is still to be done. One teaser graphic:

And, yes, there will be animation, narration, music, and voiceover narration. The redlined stuff is what I have also covered myself as a punk writer, more provably than does the one-page middle finger thrust at critics by the most famous One-Eyed Jack in English literature.

Other stuff too. Including future entries here, still in partial drafts. I’m working on something an average of 10-12 hours out of every 24. It will all come to something I like, or it won’t. 

Sound like a chaotic mish-mash? It is and it isn’t, Dear Diary.

All for now.