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 She replied a few minutes later by dismissing the book as “outdated rageism,” which makes her the fastest reader in human history.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.

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* Unless this is where he resides these days…