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.

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