A Word About Intentions

You can be guessing about what this is while I race through an intro sorts.

I know I’m still on the hook for Part 2 of ‘The Reality Divide’ still gathering some of the necessary materials. Problem with project is it forces me to look harder for source content I’ve squirreled away somewhere without ID’ing it properly for keyword searches. An Apple thing. Also a me thing. Always relied on my memory, and now it’s catching up with me. But the looking, the searching, is a good thing, however temporarily distracting and frustrating it is. As I post here about things that are an important part of the sum, the list of what I have to put up here keeps growing. I’ve identified big chunks of my creative history that still have to be documented, sometimes the ‘what’ but often the ‘how’ I used to stay zealously mum about because I thought that was a job for readers. I have no confidence in the readers of today. They can’t begin to understand what I have done, what I do, because no one else’s scope of material is nearly as wide as mine or as continuously interconnected. I’m a one-off. The more I post here, the more I realize that in specific terms.

That’s not vanity. It’s just facts. I’m not trying to convince you of anything here. I’m relying on this site as a necessary discipline. Even subtle deadlines are enough to overcome the temptation to find something (generally an inspirational graphic of some kind) by accident, add an ID note to it, and promise to come back later for the tedious part of assembling related pieces into a shape that will be useful longer term.

Why I thought it was necessary to explain something about intentions. An explanation that will be helpful when I post Part 2 of ‘The Reality Divide’. 

The oldest and most inflexible part of my mission as a writer is to leave a record of what I’ve done and what I didn’t finish because time caught up with me. I’m doing this for the ones who will have to rediscover language and the classics and the eternal indispensable theme of literary writing, which to explore and share the meaning of life as a source of energy and endurance.

I criticize them, but I have learned a great deal from the masters of the 19th and 20th centuries. Before he festooned it with self promoting pronouncements, Hemingway laid down the dictum, Write the truth of what you’ve seen and experienced as accurately as you can. He used thot dictum to write what may have been the best novel yet written, The Sun Also Rises. What’s so great about it? He shows you just how much you can leave out and still be on target with your theme. Fitzgerald said, There are two different kinds of writers, ‘putter inners’ and ‘taker outers.’ He was the latter. I’m the former. Why it’s impossible to parody Fitzgerald. To make it convincing, you have to write in exactly his beautiful voice. Any satirical embellishment blows up the whole enterprise. Early Hemingway is the same. Great for learning from by copying, but not for the sake of humor. Strangled laconicism is just nonsense. It was only Max Shulman, father of Dobey Gillis(?), who realized when Papa had made himself a target. His short novel ‘The Featherbedders,’ is the best Hemingway takedown ever. No point in even trying to compete with it.

I have previously shared my frustrations with the legacy of James Joyce, for whose early works I feel genuine admiration, affection, and gratitude. The Dubliners is extraordinary and deathless, dark as it gets to be. Why I got pissed off when I ran into the wall with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. My take on them was that they represented a prolooonged middle finger at literary fiction as a genre. Here was his message the way I read it: “Where I am going you cannot follow. I can dive so deeply into the ephemeral passages of consciousness that they are automatically behind the reach of those who will, dog-with-a-bone-like, pretend they can decode them for less learned and scholarly readers. They will get PhDs focused solely on learning how to read my books and their innumerable local/universal references.”

Here was his coup de grâce.

I already showed you the opening round of my rebuttal:

I can defend my use of the ideas represented in the lefthand column. I don’t believe Joyce could. The graphic up top is a sample of manuscript changes the author was making on a daily basis as Ulysses was being typeset for printing. That’s not the work of a writer fleshing out the depths of a multilayered and meticulously realized scheme of themes. It’s an exposé of a writer now writing and rewriting off the top of his head and getting taken in by his own opaqueness. (I’ll elaborate on my graphic at a later date.)

I don’t have anything in my writing history that resembles the graphic up top. But I do have correlative experience that also bears on the question of intentions. My work with graphics over the years is a lot more like what we see in the Joyce galley proof above. Look this over while I explain below.

I snapped the photo because for once they were all there, the processing steps, 

in neat rows and columns for a change. Hardly the biggest one 

I’ve ever done but fresh on my mind.

For much of my life I felt deprived by the fact that I hadn’t inherited my Dad’s talent for drawing. (I know that should be in the draft MS of the previous post, but I already have a list more of ‘Views’ that need to be put in. Yesterday, I just stopped because I knew it was enough for now. How it’s always been with the writing. When the next sentence isn’t waiting in my head I stop and resume only when I know what that sentence is. Why I have continually scorned writers who cling like babies to the bottle when anyone suggests typewriters are passé and an impediment. On the typewriter I used to retype whole pages to change one word. Computers set me free. With the text processing tools they provided I could revise continuously, back and forth in real time, until the last sentence I typed finished a completed work. When I got to NCR, I received a workstation so advanced it could literally recover an entire accidentally deleted document one keystroke at a time. One day I needed thwt ability on a long strategy piece I’d been writing. I sat there and watched myself write it onscreen. Character by character, it proceeded relentlessly, stopping at abrupt intervals to scroll up to an earlier paragraph in need of revision for consistency with what would follow. When it got to the end of recovery, the document was done, all in one go.

How the writing’s always been. Computers save me the retyping 400 words to change one word delay. Graphics have been another matter altogether. Where I learned the bruising process of the medium pushing back hard at your own talent limits. Things I just couldn’t do because I couldn’t draw well enough or the software wasn’t powerful enough or I didn’t know how to use what it could do without feeling like an amateur. But computer software was a necessary crutch given my conviction that images have an indispensable role to play in breaking through the walls that Joyce others crashed into on their quest for the “next dimension” in writing.

But since the visuals and the sounds and the mixing of media are part of the wall set that has to be broken through, I came belatedly to realize that being William Blake was never in the cards for me. If I could draw like that I wouldn’t have gotten my hands as dirty and my fingers as banged up doing the wrench work on my picture graphics and videos. And that’s a very good thing. The intrinsic constraints of the tools I have to use force me to use my imagination in ways that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to me.

The pushback and imaginative workarounds also bleed back into the writing required to finish off whatever the project is. Nowadays, I spend far more time on computer graphics than on the writing. That’s my give, the one thing I know for sure how to do in service to my intentions.

Back to the jumble of graphics shown above. They were all used to create this Facebook reel yesterday.

GP: “RINO Brian Fitzpatrick Defends His Push with Democrats to Stop 

Trump’s Weaponization Fund – Says He’s Not Afraid of Trump, Admits 

He’s Pandering to Liberal Voters.” Always was a sad sack lockstep lefty. 

Ran as Republican to win House seat in rich red suburb of Philly. 

Creep? Yup yup yup.

 

It’s gotten 159 views since I put it up yesterday evening. I’m not that pleased with it, but this is the hurly burly of social network jousting over politics. This one was personal to me because I’ve been painfully aware what a glib, condescending political whore he is since I used to hear him as a regular guest in the Dom Giordano talk radio show in Philly. He was a Republican member of Congress from a red suburban district and he defended every bonehead move made by Democrats in Philly and on Capitol Hill. He didn’t care people knew he was RINO. He knew how to win elections and make political deals of advantage to himself. Dom got mad every time and debated him extensively in absentia after every appearance, but he kept right on appearing. WPHT.  One time home of the despicable Uriah Heep calling himself Michael Smerconish. Only good thing they had was Rush. Who knew better than to interview jerks and liars.

So I saw the picture Gateway used, and I knew I had to smack him. Lots of ways to play with an image. I don’t actually care if the viewers get what I’m doing visually. If they don’t recognize a substitution, I’ve already  made one tiny dent in his facial recognition quotient. This time I did what I often do. Ask myself who he looks like, who he reminds me of. First thought was Sad Sack, the cartoon soldier. Not usable but the soldier idea.. I thought of McHake’s Navy and his band of incompetents. Then thought of Gomer Pyle, feckless tool of his noncom in the unit, obviously dumb as a post, but something similar in the facial features. Scrolled through hundreds of Gomer pics, only a few of which were in color. Then I spotted a B&W still from the TV show that might be serviceable. Now the work begins. 

It took a total of five freeby graphics SW apps to complete the job. One to colorize Gomer, one to clip him from his background, multiple iterations of that to trim the face just above the eyebrows so it could be plated over most of Fitzpatrick’s. When it fit, roughly, multiple iterations of two other apps to match the Gomer face to the shade and contrast and saturation of the target pic. Then another trip to the cutting app to smooth the edges of the implant. Next, choice of an advanced filter that does the most to conceal any visual facial discrepancies. More processing to set up the file to be used by the AI animation/sound file app. Then the Revive transaction, without headline so as to evade their new NSFW protection of lefty loudmouths, and a result which can be clipped for use as a FB Reel but not here. Blogger won’t run it without the Revive logo.

There’s no point in writing the FB intro for the feel until it’s ready for posting. That’s about 30 seconds worth of composing and a little more for persuading AutoCorrect to display the characters I typed. TA DA.

Why so much time and effort for an admittedly indifferent jibe at another carbon copy corruptocrat? Because along the way I learn more about my target for future reference. Also because there’s no longer any point in refuting the dumb shit they say in interviews on CNN/MsNOW or transcribed by 5th Columnist Pam Key. (My Moby Dickless obsession at Breitbart). Making fun of them, crudely, often, and with utter disregard for the truthfulness of any accusations I make up along the way is what the Democrats deserve. Actually taking some talking point seriously enough to refute it logically and factually is just playing their game. They don’t bother with facts or logic. Why should we be the only ones in what has become the runaway atmosphere of a down-at-the-heels circus on fire, with wild animals running amok everywhere?

The long term intention survives, redoubled. Those who find the ruins of our era later may find both the serious and the slapstick remains of a cultural nervous breakdown and learn the invaluable lesson that humor is always a weapon against lies, cruelty, violence, and the tyranny of small men (and women) in high places.

Latterly, a reminder that my MS about Dad could also benefit from a “putting in” of the endearing fact that after denouncing both shows sight unseen from their promos, he was forced to watch full episodes “Hogan’s Heroes” and “Get Smart” because I insisted on my ZTV rights as a kid. He laughed uproariously at both sows all the way through and became a devoted fan as long as they lasted on-air.

Humor is wonderful thing. He had that. I got mine from him, and I need to say so.

Documentation. A hard thing but a good thing…