Not loafing. Just grappling with myriad tech issues. And digging…

Trying to back away from the politics and spend my time finding all the bits and pieces I’ve got stored for use in putting the big things back together. But even I doing that I find myself being pulled to things I’ve done, and forgotten I’ve fine, that annoy me because people are damn reluctant to engage in anything but the latest rumors and gossip. 

Making progress on the more important job, but I get sidetracked as always. I have a funny story to tell you about that part of the work routine, but before that there’s this…

Went looking for stuff that’s been buried for a long time in my “middle child” Instapunk blog, Intapunk Rules. Came across one of my end of year summaries that was more analytical than reflective, as they’ve mostly been since the war for 2020 votes began. I did actually gather the three parts together in an IPR post back in 2020. It ended with this mental model of the Progressive mind in 2018 (which Michael Smith seems to be reinventing in his post this morning:

Smith is trying to use something like this model to explain the Marxist takeover underway in a number of states this election cycle. So I was moved to create a new mental model that more accurately reflects the present consciousness, or what remains of it, in the enemies wielding power within our borders. It took awhile. Time I begrudge, but it felt like it had to be done…

I’m leaving it there for now. Keying in posts at FB and Instapunk Returns has reached the point of being both painful and rage-making (a little less here for some reason, but not much). Maybe later. If you want you can noodle it out from what I’ve already posted above.

Now…as to the funny story. I’ve told you, and others, about my portmanteau word ‘Serendicity,” which is a wedding of serendipity and Carl Jung’s term synchronicity. His anecdote illustrating the phenomenon occurred during a debate between him and Freud about the nature of the realms below the conscious mind. Just as they were reaching an impasse, a book suddenly fell off a shelf in Freud’s office. The title of the book was directly relevant to the debate and enabled Jung to steer it in a new direction. He believed the even was the universe in communication with him by means at its disposal we know not of. I’ve had similar experiences myself, each uniquely configured in a way that fit the topic.

Cut to the night before last. I use the television to provide background voices, music, etc, to serve as a prompt back to consciousness if I have a troubling anxiety dream of some kind. This time I had picked some B-List horror movie that I watched just enough of to assure myself there would probably be no screaming. And so to bed. It couldn’t have been more than half an hour later that I and the two cats and the dog were awakened by an enormous crash. I was groggy. Looked around the room in the pitch darkness to see if parts of the ceiling had come down or a desk had collapsed and hurled its contents across the floor, but no. I resigned myself to leaving it for morning and resettled myself for sleep when I realized the room was so very dark because the TV had turned itself off. This happens when the dog tramples on a surge strip, which he sometimes does. The easy way to determine that’s the case is by hitting the on/off button on the remote a couple times. I did that. Nothing changed. Must be the surge strip. I moved to stand up and suddenly saw a stripe of colored light at the right hand side of the HDTV screen. WTH.

The TV was on. It just wasn’t sitting on its little platform. I switched on a light at last and saw that the 40-inch flatscreen monitor was standing on its right side on the floor, aimed not at me but the door. Wow. Never happens. Some cat crazies kind of seizure must have to grief and dumped the whole shebang on the floor. Crashing noise explained.

I’m fully awake now. I right the TV reposition it on its stand, and reboot the streaming service I’d been using. It automatically rejoined the movie in progress. A couple of men were having a serious disagreement about something. I couldn’t remember the title of the movie. I usually can’t with these late night random choices. Hit the pause no putt on the remote. The action froze, the title displayed itself: “The House of Fallen.”

Fallen? Like a TV set in the middle of the night? Ha ha. I had to watch a few minutes of this thing and see what it was about. I recognized Corbin Bernsen, much older than I remembered, although I did recall he’s been making faith-based movies fairly regularly in his old age. Hmmm. The disagreement was about some entity called “The Watchers” and who was and wasn’t one. Bernsen was denying he was ine, even though he knew who they all were because he had been given the task I of keeping their history. Angels were mentioned. And then Bernsen said a name I knew, “The Book of Enoch.” Holy shit. Was Carl Jung giving me a prod from the beyond? And laughing up his sleeve as he did so?

The movie was about the internal politics of the first rebellion against God, before the Lucifer fiasco. My knowledge of the Book of Enoch comes, ironically, almost entirely from the movies. I’m a huge Christopher Walken and he played the meanest scariest fallen Angel I’ve ever heard tell of in “The Prophecy.”

Never took the Enoch material seriously enough to read it because there were a bunch of mostly fun movies aboutit, all of which seemed to be making up their own fake scripture as they went along, one always different from the last.

But I was awake now. Sort of anyway. Kind of like Keith Richards when he woke in the middle of night with the deathless riff of “Satisfaction” in his head and had to write it down before he passed into dreamless slumber and came to the next morning with a No. 1 hit on his hands.

I had to look up the Book of Enoch at Wikipedia. Scanned it briefly. A lot older than I’d have guessed., more than all but a handful of books in the Old Testament. It was part of the Apocrypha in some but not all religions. I copied the link into my Apple Notes App and proceeded to look up “Apocrypha.” I knew that would be longer and heavier duty than what they had for Enoch, because I’ve played with the notion of an “Apunkrypha” before in the past. Wrote two books for it, one OT-ish, one NT-ish. Had other ideas, notions about it, but here I was in the middle of the night, jotting down the thiughts and recollections that came to me. Then, like Keith, I turned off the light and went back to sleep till morning, or as close to morning as I ever get.

That’s it. Funny story. House of Fallen.  Don’t know how to take that. I stored my notes in a PDF. Doubt if they’re as significant as “Satisfaction,” but we all measure that state in our own way.

Here’s the PDQ file:

The Book of eNuke.

Sorry for this interruption of what must be more worthwhile pursuits…

The Examined Life takes in a lot of territory

Inevitably, another major commitment of my time called Instapunk Returns will occasionally stick its nose into the doings here. Working on both, I’m sometimes forced to ask myself how I got from Point A to Point XXX as I seem to have done yesterday at IPR. Specifically, how did I manage to get from here…

Yes, I did ‘Shapes’ at graduation, but we all learned our ABCs too.

…to here?

The concluding flourish of my latest IPR screed, Thoughts on Foul Language

I put the Little Red Hen Nursery School in the same context with the song abcdefu because we all have an important personal timeline with respect to the alphabet. My parents sent me to nursery school for two years when I was three. Which means when I turn 73 in about three weeks it will be 70 years since I began my formal education. Yes, we had playtime indoors and outdoors at the Red Hen, but we also had classes taught by Mr. and Mrs. Cholerton, and I was already amassing Sunday School perfect attendance points at St. Andrew’s Church (where I was married to Pat 50 years later) in the class of, I kid you not, Miss Toothacre. Graduating from nursery school was a serious affair; there was a ceremony with caps and gowns and presentations to parents by individual students. For years I was relieved that the graduation photo my mother kept was in black and white, which made the pink gowns look white instead. I remember that day, the faces of the Cholertons, and my own performance at the feltboard. 

If I can’t specifically remember the class sessions at the Red Hen, I do remember being read to at bedtime every night by my mother, which is why over the years I have hunted down the titles that have stayed with me unforgettably. One of these was a beautiful little hard bound book by Tasha Tudor.

“A is for Annabelle”

Just a few years later, ‘A’ would also be for ‘Alice’, in the first book I ever read, out loud to my parents on the first day of first grade at St. John’s Day School. 

I hunted them down because I had a history with the name Alice.

So ‘A’ was for Annabelle, and for Alice, but most importantly ‘A’ was for Alphabet. That string of letters that opened the doors to the glorious, fantastically wide world of Reading, which is its own universe without end. Why my most challenging Dr. Seuss book was this work of genius.

Can’t let this stand alone without mentioning my all-time favorite Seuss character, 

Mr. Sneelock. (AI/AutoCorrupt is determined to correct this to ‘Sherlock’. Not today.) 

If OBZ is the beginning of a bold intellectual quest, Mr. Sneelock is the beginning of 

Everyman’s Walter Mitty quest for unflappable ineffable heroism: If I Ran the Circus.

My personal writing relationship with the Alphabet is even more extensive than my history with ‘Alice,’ or at least more diverse. The most expensive of my Amazon paperbacks is, not surprisingly, the least popular in terms of sales. That’s okay. I did it for purposes of defensive documentation, against the very real possibility that some of my Internet works would become inaccessible as the TekLords moved under the covers of their beds in careless slumber.

Even my own hard copy is only a proof, nearly a hundred pages 

short of the final published version. 40 bucks for a rare book?

Not in my budget since that annoying bankruptcy ordeal…

Poe put me onto puzzles of all kinds — with assists from Lewis Carroll, James Thurber, Bierce, et al — so that I have my own bag of tricks. I do labyrinths (ST99, the Undernet, the DarkNet, et al), jigsaw puzzles, secret codes, cryptic dictionaries & glossaries, and bibles of obscure origin.

There have even been numeric/alphabetic puzzles that defy categorization:

80 is a big deal. You have to rise to the occasion.

And I do alphabetic bestiaries of multiple kinds.

These are serious business for me, no matter how funny they can be. I still know, word for word, every line of The Gashlycrumb Tinies, for example.

There’s a complete alphabet book within a book in The Boomer Bible that serves as a summary of all western history and culture. ST99 has a subway station that shows us what letters of the English alphabet no longer stand for.

Click on the graphic to get to the live ST99 file. (Blow thru the two 

warning screens, which are a Wordpress glitch, not a security risk.)

If I’m so desperate to save Shuteye Nation, why don’t I ante up the $40 for my own copy? Because it’s a demonstration of the dimensional difference between what linear writing is and what I do. The way to navigate The Glossary and the gazetteers to see how poison spreads in words, thoughts, and images is via the hyperlinks. Which cannot be reproduced by ink on paper. Why American book publishing as it conceives of its role in promoting literary artistry is as dead as Griswold’s obituary of Edgar Allan Poe, which can be accessed at the Authors’ Hall of Attention in Philadelphia…

Click the graphic for Griswold’s magnum opus, the only thing he is remembered for.

There will be a lot of other dead stuff at the Author’s Hall when I finally get around to assembling all the floating pieces of it waiting in my files. But as you know, there are several priorities that take up most of my time these days. Excavating and restoring lost stuff ground up in the TekLord Machine is no small part of it. It took me a few hours yesterday just to reassemble what may be the grandest of my bestiaries, even though it took me just an hour and twenty minutes to write it. (Times noted in the linked pdf file below.) The original belonged to a simplesite called Laird Ink which was my most successful effort yet to link a representative variety of my writings in one place for people to browse through. Gone now. Cancelled with two weeks notice by free-to-paid extortion. In 2022. Here’s what I extracted piecemeal on the last day:

My Own Personal Bestiary4

How and why did I get so mad at IPR the other day? Because language and insightful conversation have been destroyed by the foul mouths of deliberately uneducated children. For the present I am completely obsolete. But I am trying to remember that George Orwell published 1984 in 1949, to share his perspective on what the world would be like in 35 years. Last I checked, we’re still working on it and poor George died in 1950, without even a glimpse of how right he would be proven to be. 

Pardon me for noting that I typed the first page of The Boomer Bible, including the middle column markers for the Intercolumn Reference on an Underwood Standard typewriter. 

The manuscript I sent to the publisher was made of laser printouts that had the middle ICR column strips pasted on with wax. Only now, 35 years later, with the current work-in-progress called The Boomer Bible Online, has the technology finally caught up with my conception. Far less progress has been made by littachure [stet] experts in understanding what I do and how I do it. 

Let me be clear. I’m content with not being recognized till after I’m dead. It’s the ugliness of the end times we’re going through with our half-dead youth that makes me furious. Having to watch. With no one to talk to who gets just how bad it is and how much better it could be…

That’s what really sucks.

Feels darker now than it did back in ‘23 when I doodled this…

Happy first day of summer…

Oh. My. God.

 

I didn’t do this. Some complete stranger(s) did. I just received an email from an old friend who might be working with me again on some new/old projects. We were touching base after the school year at Pomfret School where he is a Department head and has been understandably busy for many months. In his response to my email, he wrote me this:

“Hi, Robert, I was just thinking of you... I was checking my non-Pomfret gmail, an address I have relegated to torrents of spam, basically ignored, and I found a new email from Reiji Kitsuoka, signed Elphkun. Do you know about this? They linked to their project here: https://theboomerbible.online/

I had no idea! I haven't had a lot of time in the last couple of days, but it seems that they cracked the ICR following functionality, where you can click through and then just follow the links all the way down the line. Wow! They also said they updated the Table of Harrier Dates to work now and far in the future. 

I guess I should ask: is this you? Are they in touch with you? If not, should they be?”

It is unbelievable. A masterpiece of coding and the product of a ton of meticulous work. It breaks the code on the Intercolumn Reference. You can now toggle to the exact lines of verse referenced in the ICR, as well as the context in which it appears. (It can’t do this yet, but that’s for some future PhD. dissertation)  It is also the complete book, including what TheBoomerBible.com did not, including the both prefaces, the epistle Dedicatory, the Book of Brayer, and The Hymnal.

I’m too blown away to say much more at the moment. It needs a front end and it could also provide useful links to other works, but this is my path to posterity. Cannot put into words how big a deal this is. Total strangers. How many books get recreated in meticulous detail by hands other than the author’s in his own lifetime? (I also owe whoever was posting it for how he posted the original book in the Modern Archive. That was done with a handmade photocopy of each page, easily proven by the bleedthrough from backing pages. No OCR app in batch mode. Hands holding pages over the platen of a large format scanner.) 

Just this morning I was having expensive dreams about the Kamund. Had a technological breakthrough of sorts in the Acrobat app. God, how I was lusting for a new computer when I got this email. I had just been trying to bank the fires of my TechLust…

Now I’m just simmering, like a pot of stew on the stove…

Darker thoughts than usual

 

I could stop right where I am. My wife is right. It’s all written already. My poor agèd computer devices are failing at a rapid rate, and the newest releases of AI-infected text processing software are getting too burdensome and time-consuming to deal with. It’s becoming painful to write when lame algorithms keep trying to type the next word for me. They don’t know what that word is and never will.

My wife is attending her granddaughter’s high school graduation today. My last extended-family success. I may have worked just hard enough behind the scenes to keep her from attending the family school they all attended, Rutgers. But Rutgers is still committed to the policy of no vax, nor matriculation. Her name is Anna and she will be going to Montclair State. Highly ranked, good at what she wants to study, a few miles enough away from home, but not so far as to get lost. She’s a member of the National Honor Society and has a scholarship.

Don’t know if the pills are working yet, but I’ve convinced myself I’m seeing some improvements on the margin.

If it weren’t for my desire (vanity? hubris?) to save my work for the future, so that it survives my death without completely disappearing, I guess there’s no particular need to keep adding to Instapunk and Facebook. People can infer what all I have been right about over the years without my nailing stone tablets to the wall that would just depress everyone. 

No one else has to confront the list I’m going to write down here.

What I’ve Been Right About

Atheism is the newest, worst, most spectacularly failed human philosophy ever formulated. It was a necessary detour in the interest of trying out all ideas, but it has succeeded too well in an environment that wanted it as an escape from the complexities of life. How new is it to be so dominant and so wrong? Atheism was born in the 19th a century and came to power in the 20th. Costliest resumé in human history. How quickly we have managed to forget that the Ten Commandments was the greatest moral and intellectual breakthrough in history.

Too Big (Not) to Fail is not just a prescription for corporate fatalities. It is also a prescription for organizations and systems of all kinds that outgrow our ability to constrain their power over individuals. There is such a thing as Organizational Consciousness. The Government of the United States is the largest, most powerful organization in the world history we know of. It is too big not to fail. It has become the unseen enemy of human morality and individuality.

Trump cannot save America. The Deep State is too deep, and the nation no longer possesses the moral goodness the founders knew was the requisite for its survival. Trump has been a brave, valiant, and inspiring final attempt at halting a hundred year decline in the nation the founders designed. I have fought for him as hard as I can because I have always been a fighter, even in lost causes. The material prosperity is the last thing to go, as Rome discovered about 1,500 years ago. I suspect he will be assassinated or be forced to declare a state of martial law, either of which would speedily bring about a national collapse into totalitarian rule, whether left or right, is anyone’s guess, though I’m betting left. Ironically, he has probably hastened the onset of the coming Dark Age by forcing the liars and totalitarians out into the open. Why the seemingly irrational hatred of him is so ferocious and bloodthirsty. Unfortunately, the opportunity for people to “get” how sinister the totalitarians are will not be taken advantage of. The elites, having been unmasked as the amoral vandals they are, will simply speed up their takeover with more blatant legislative and judicial attacks on the constitution and more physically violent attacks on their more courageous opponents in culture and politics. The Dark Age is coming, as I predicted in Death of the Republic.

Feminism is the most spectacular failed social experiment in recorded history. I have documented its professional, political, and cultural failures in dozens of ways, including facts and figures no one wants to look at. It’s newer than its prerequisite, atheism, but it’s old enough that it has run out of excuses for non-performance. It has not been an equalizing influence in societal contentment; it has transmogrified into a destroyer of families, a dilution of the talent pool needed to build and run things, and an invitation to the worse alternative of Islam as a way to control the mothers of the next generation, who are needed for that purpose more than any other. The other vital role of the female sex is providing the necessary and easily distracted focus of men on the physical rather than metaphysical propensities of men, which are abundantly creative but are also dangerous if they come to value competitive successes over survival. The Deep State loves women as units of its own perpetuation. The DEI crisis is both the proof of feminism’s failure and the last stage in the deterioration of big government’s ability to carry out any of its vital functions effectively. California — and its cities in particular — is all the proof we need of just how direly broken our institutions are. Golden State voters are prepared to re-elect the most disastrously incompetent big city mayor in American history, because they no longer connect campaign rhetoric to reality. They’ll buy anyone and anything wearing the right words and unctuous posses in the DEI media. The same state, just to prove the rule, is perfectly willing to fund the presidential aspirations of the worst governor in the history of the United States, a (long acknowledged) dyslexic who is pretty enough to be a woman, with even better hair than the current style for the blonder sex. My piece, The Ultimate Conspiracy, is not a fantasy but a report from the future, because I am right about women. They are not just slightly different. They are not evil, but they are also (80-20 Rule in effect) not suited to command the vast physical and institutional structures they are inherently incapable of building. I did not want this to be so, but I have never met a woman who could contend with me intellectually. They just don’t. In college I very much wanted one of the Cliffies to come at me hammer and tongs on the politics of feminism. They knew that instinctively and did not have that discussion with me ever. My sister has tried, but it’s like the scene at the end of The Matrix when Neo can handle Mr. Smith in seeming slow motion. Why she resents me so to this day. I learned from Camille Paglia obviously, but she is a feminist who proved the folly of politically oriented feminism without realizing she had done so. She thought her own creative brilliance as a thinker would prove women belonged in the metaphysical company of great men. They do, as does she, but they need male approval too much to be Plato, William Blake, or Leonardo da Vinci.

Artificial Intelligence will, one way or another, provide the most immediate economic collapse event. It will not be the sole cause. But all the other aspects of culture that have been trending downward will be accelerated by the scarcities and privations of economic depression. Amazing how often it is the case that the things which are most obviously dead wrong are the ones that are most fanatically believed and subsidized by greedy opportunity. Marxism was always dead wrong, because if nobody is allowed to excel economically above his fellows, then no one will excel, and scarcity will become a permanent prison. Evolution was always dead wrong. If the prevailing directional law of physics in the universe is entropy, it’s impossible to get from parameciums to peacocks by means of an endless falling apart. Global Warming was always dead wrong as anything more than an alarming theory based on incomplete data whose collection methods have changed continuously over the span of a few decades. (I first blew the whistle on it in 1997 for GIGO data.)  Science was always dead wrong that it knew more about running civilization than the humanities. Science puts scientists in charge. The Humanities put Mankind in charge. Feminism was always dead wrong. Women cannot be equal in the realm of physical infrastructure construction and maintenance, protecting the weak, or taking irrational risks for the benefit of others. To run something competently you have to have gotten the calluses and scars that are earned by the physical labor and courage involved in the things you’re running. The expertise of women is indispensable in the building and maintenance of good families. We are dying as a culture because we let everyone forget that just to avoid an argument at the dinner table. Artificial Intelligence has always been dead wrong as a description of technological progress because it is a contradiction in terms. Artificial means simulated. Period. It’s the Segway of the 2020s. But it will ferry us into very troubled streets and highways.

Other people’s predictions aren’t as good as mine.

Consciousness, or the loss of it, is the single greatest civilizational challenge in human history. I am right that it is not a constant but a variable that is in the process of vanishing from individual lives at every level of income. This problem area is implicated in every one of the crises listed above. We are living through an era in which Impaired Consciousness is the Invisible Plague infecting almost everyone you know.

As for the writing itself, not my call. I can have my own opinion about it. Why I’d like a better educated future generation to have a look at it too.

Never mind all that. Dismiss it as ventilating. What dragonflies do when their flight in every direction is being hindered or pursued…

Just because I’m alarmed about AI doesn’t mean I ignore it; I’m investigating 

its uses. Don’t turn your back on it if you know what’s good for you.

The Trickiest Part of My Process

I could have cropped out JRR’s window, but I think his window is important.

What do these two have to do with each other? I’ve been noodling the next installment of the ‘Reality Divide’ discussion. Unbidden, I found myself tempted to introduce Poe into the mix, even though I started by laying it all at the feet of Conan Doyle and Tolkien. I went for Poe early, and it’s possible I read the Dupin mysteries before I discovered Holmes. There’s your first consulting detective. Not strictly germane to the establishment of Sherlock Holmes straddling the worlds of fiction and reality in the minds of fans and casual readers. Why I didn’t mention the Purloined Letter as the seminal work of all detective fiction.

You see, in many ways, Poe is my Main Man of American letters. He’s his own topic all by himself in my writing life. Trying to keep the reality subject clean, I left him out of the Reality posts here. But as I was figuring out how to describe the powerful attraction I had to Tolkien, I kept running into Poe connections, not point to point in most instances but thematically overwhelming. It was Poe who led me ultimately to the mysteries of archaeology and the study of dead languages as a code to be broken that made me so receptive and, well, sucked into, the semi-reality of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Impossible as it was, I wanted some way of at least half-believing that it existed somewhere in the aeons of prehistory we simply haven’t yet dug deep enough to find. Where it starts to touch on the concept of languages as a holographic tool for creating reality from a keyboard, which is what Tolkien did. By creating quotable excerpts of the language of the Elves, for example, he is giving us a hologram that looks like a few lines of poetry but inferentially must contain a much vaster whole. There’s an ancient, complex world behind the one-line artifact of “Elbereth, Gilthoniel, silivren penna miriel…” (No, I didn’t have to look that up. Still in there, along with the complete ring poem, word for word.)

I didn’t need Poe for the nuts and bolts part of the Tolkien reality question. Why I wasn’t going to get into the Poe part of the equation despite the temptation. Keep it clean. But the title talks about my tricky process.

For a completely different reason, Poe popped his head into one of the topics I’m preparing a post on for Instapunk Returns. 

[Deep breath]

The political violence fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome is escalating very rapidly. It’s time to make an issue of the very real mental illness that is likely to result in a catastrophic Presidential assassination within the next two years. My post-in-progress is about the gravity of what I’m calling ‘Monomaniacal Mass Hysteria’ (MMH). Both monomania and mass hysteria are considered superseded terms by the psychology profession, though not because they are phony ailments. Both are still symptoms of potentially psychotic episodes described and treated under different labels. Typical. When I was collecting background and historical material for my post, I encountered this odd pop-up at one of the Google AI summaries, from the “More…” section of the Monomania overview:

There he is, the Main Man. Still considered more insightful about it than today’s pill merchants.

Take a look.

“Something Monomaniacal” — Obsession and the Unity of Affect”

The article argues that Poe understood monomania was not simply a ‘partial insanity’ but a more profound and pervasive illness in which specific fixations infect the entire personality and its thought processes.

Helpfully, Poe wrote at least three stories showing us what the full-blown mental affect looks like:

The Telltale Heart

The Black Cat

Ligeia

No, I’m not trying to drag you into that discussion. I’m showing you a typical process issue for me. What do I do first? The slog of the mental illness post at Instapunk Returns or the next part of the Reality Divide? The MMH post might get Poe out of my system so I can do the ‘clean’ version of Tolkien’s pedagogy about reality creation. Or it might further reinforce his centrality to the larger question of why I care about turning fiction into something much closer to what we like to call reality.

I run into dilemmas like this all the time, and I’m handling it the way I always do. See what app I open and start typing into. Trust the process. That is the tricky part.

Here’s what I’m going to do. A limited detour into the Poe-code-archaeology fixation, followed by a description of what I learned about method from Tolkien, given my interest in Middle Earth as an an alternate/parallel/antediluvian reality.

As it happens, I have an old YouTube video specifically about Poe and codes.

This led me to read, then reread and become obsessed with the archaeological quest for decoding the mysterious writings and art and architecture of the past. The book had been a boyhood gift from my godfather ‘Uncle Herb,’ a character in his own right, and I didn’t dip into it right away, only when Poe made the back cover blurb seductive.

Yep. Climbed to the top of the Pyramid at Chichen Itza in person and 

stared into the murky waters of the Well (i.e., sinkhole) of Souls.

I have even performed my own homage of transliterating Egyptian hieroglyphs for use in pages of the Vennich Manuscript…

There is actually a schema for a system of codes used in Vennich. 

Unfortunately, it has to be reconstructed every time I want to use it.

Vennich, of course, is a play on the Voynich MS and its elaborate text 

and image codes, never yet broken, though there’s always a pet theory.

Just one more quick footnote on motivation for Tolkien obsession. These books I got very young and reread often. My first literary crush was Ivanhoe’s Rebecca.

 

These are the actual editions I imprinted in. The Door in the Wall 

was the subject of my first book report in 3rd grade. I was 7.

I inherited The Hobbit from my mother’s stack of paperbacks. It was written for children and seemed like it. I had a strong negative reaction about his use of the word ‘goblins’ as something that just felt wrong to me. Too cartoon somehow. When my mother passed along The Fellowship of the Ring, I told her I wasn’t interested. She said “It’s better than The Hobbit. You’ll like it.” I was 11. The goblins were gone. Now they were Orcs. I fell in love with the Queen of Loth Lorien. I was hooked. Very intense experience of reading. All three books. Wanted it to be true.

So did J. R. R. Tolkien. Why he made himself document so much of the history and language artifacts in appendixes to bolster the reader’s sense of documentation rather than fiction. Fictional proofs one could suspend one’s disbelief in. The ‘goblin’ misstep was all the evidence needed to demonstrate that he was learning as he went, becoming more obsessed with his created fiction of a world. The Silmarillion proved it. No one needed that book as much as Tolkien did. 

Conan Doyle did not deliberately set out to make Sherlock Holmes real. The audience did that. Tolkien was different. He was systematic in what he did. He was letting his imagination run away with him and putting it in harness as it ran. How I built Punk City in my head.

Thank you, Professor…

Why Punk City is organized more like a case study than an anthology. All the content is selected for its utility as evidence. The editors are not inclined to assign value to punk writing except as a dysfunctional sociological phenomenon. It’s up to readers to reject the easy dismissal and believe that something important and very secret was happening on South Street for the seven years from 1978 to 1985. Everything is data of one kind or another. Here is the gang slang they used. Here is the computer equipment and the software they used. Here are their weapons. Here are their stories. Here is the Tarot-based religion they used to find a way of believing in meaning, even though their lives were hard and short. 

Because the editors won’t stoop to taking the writing seriously, the tacit challenge is to the reader. Why do they dwell so much on their own origins, and why do they seem to have a hard time remembering what happened? Why do their versions of what happened contain so many contradictions? 

Where I went Tolkien one better. He had to be the narrator, the Homer of his epic prose poem. Despite my byline (wink wink), I removed myself as the presiding narrator of Punk City.  The punks don’t remember well what happened at the beginning because none of us does. All of everything sought out by human curiosity is part of the quest to know who and what we are and why we’re here at all. It’s the ultimate philosophical and literary question, and the punk version of it is very specific, very local, very complicated. Perhaps all the accounts are true and Punk City is a blur because multiple timelines are spinning “out of the blue” simultaneously, overlaying and intertwining with one another. Perhaps none of the accounts is true and all of them boil down to the last punk piece published within the community, Tabula Rasa by The New Yorkers (formerly, the Epissiles); it is a blank page inside a frame, fiction finally emptied of the pretense of meaning perpetrated by the use of words.

When you create your own world, you have to abide by your own rules, which means knowing what those rules are. The first big challenge of my premise was figuring out what a bunch of barely conscious, wholly ignorant “punk writers” would have to write about. Which led to three major lines of development: 1) They could focus on targets of opportunity, like the Yuppies who went slumming for drugs and sex on South Street; 2) They could explore the mystery of their own origins referenced above; and 3) They could develop some mechanism for learning what they’d been missing all their lives. 

They did all three. Their software was powerful, enabling them to call on databases that would provide ‘voices’ for them to write in. Why I had to provide a case study exhibit on the software documentation for the Prose Upgrade and Narrative Collation application. Why I had to show what some of the hardware might look like:

Surviving Plot Synthesizer

I’ve said that the book Punk City is a case study. More precisely, it is a first report by explorers resembling Hiram Bingham, III, ‘discoverer’ of Macchu Picchu in Peru. Natives of the region told him it was there and led him there. He did not have anything like all the answers when he first published his findings. There are gaping holes in the punk writer story. That was deliberate-um-necessary because I did not know how to take the next technological step in the excavation of what they’d left behind. Just as Bingham had his expeditionary team and native bearers, there was already an actual archaeological dig underway in the South Street area at the time the book was released. But who’s been in charge of it? Who can be trusted to tell the truth and show the real evidence? We don’t know. Yet. Mysteries abound.

There is also a verifiable record of suppressed attempts to publish more than is currently available. Some odd, debatable pics of underground memorials to punk writers past. 

So, much of the later history of Punk City is still in question. This can, of course, be filled in by participants who desire to work like the original punk writers. Conjuring their own version of events in the reigns of Kobra Jones and Cadillac Mope as their interactions with their own digital devices produce mystery solutions that suit them. Who knows what stories, videos, AI reenactment movies, and other works will arrive to bring the truth out into the open at last.

More is known about the end days of Punk City than has been permitted to remain the public eye by the powers that be. This is where the rubber hits the road in the Reality Divide. Which will, of course, have be dealt with in the next installment of this saga.

 

Thin Edge of the Wedge

 

Antique technology, low fuel, low idle, valve tap too?

Oh well. Maybe it’s just the ‘Gloomy Sunday’ Syndrome…

They said people committed suicide to this song when it was playing on the radio.

Or it could be the time-elapse effect of places I’ve been where more dignified MAGA folks don’t want to go.

The Cryptkeeper (12/25)

The Roots of TDS in the Dem Rank and File (9/25)

No sign yet of improvement from Bill Gates’s pills. He said it would take a week or more for first effects to be felt by the person being treated.

Sorry for being a grump. At least the XKE graphic is funny. Haven’t driven one of those in nearly 50 years. Who am I kidding?

The Reality Divide, Part 2

Going to have to work at this topic more slowly and judiciously than I’d planned. My own computer infrastructure is teetering on the brink of a stall as even input of new material gets harder to do by the day. An interesting irony with respect to the age issue. All my digital tools are agèd and limping and short term in memory while on a good day my mind feels as if it’s operating at a peak performance level of some kind. 

Where was I when I wandered off the Reservation on “The Reality Divide”? I had just brought Sherlock and Middle Earth into the discussion.

I was going to talk about the fact that by the time I discovered him, Sherlock Holmes had already become as real as a fictional character can get. Conveniently dead, he still had a flat at 221B Baker Street you could visit and see how he left it. He had also become his own cottage industry of sorts for other detective novelists, some of whom had achieved great prominence by starting out from the Sherlock template and simply reworking the profile. Rex Stout was admirably aboveboard about his own debt. He was an open member of the Baker Street Irregulars, and if anyone had earned the right to make a negative photocopy of Holmes he had. London becomes New York, Watson becomes Archie Goodwin, Mrs. Hudson becomes Fritz the Chef, Gregson becomes Inspector Cramer, Lestrade becomes Lieutenant Rowan (corr. Rowcliff, just remembered), and the faceless gang of Holmesian undercover accomplices becomes Saul Panzer, Fred Durbin, and Orrie Cather. Nero Wolfe himself is a classic concatenation of opposites. Thin becomes fat (‘an eighth of a ton’), tobacco and cocaine become beer, the violin becomes orchids (Wolfe hates music… gilding the lily?), motley attire becomes impeccable suitings, and the two real character standouts in the stories — Moriarty and Irene Adler — become Arnold Zeck and Phoebe Gunther (“The Woman” who died solving the mystery for Wolfe in the best of all the novels, The Silent Speaker.) Check, check, check, check, check… 

Am I showing off? Maybe. I did not to have to look up any name on that list but Phoebe Gunther (spondee, trochee) because we barely got to see her in person and she was the ‘silent speaker’ of the title. 

[That’s not where my memory is changing its mode of operation. I recall an enormous number of names from my life and my readings and my entertainment watching. The names that drop out are, surprisingly, ones that are easily recovered by clever searches on the Internet (e.g., historical or show biz related) usually resulting in additional information about even people I admired with knowing basic facts about them. It seems that when I develop a memory block about someone I have good reason to remember, it’s an indication I haven’t looked far enough beneath the surface of my experience with them as a student or fan. Christopher Walken and John Malkovich are both exemplary in this respect. They happen to be two of the four actors I marvel at because they are so often making a different movie than the director and the others in the cast. Why there was more to learn about the two on the list who weren’t Marlon Brando or Nicholas Cage.]

You’re always allowed to skip the square bracket asides if they seem distracting. Sometimes they just put themselves in.

Rex Stout isn’t the only one. Agatha Christie, bless her brilliant soul, took on the Sherlock challenge herself in a big way. Just to show she could do it, I expect. For a decidedly British detective novelist, she went Belgian with Hercule Poirot, whose sidekick was a Watson-esque Hastings and whose appraisal of his own powers was every bit as lofty as Holmes’s (or Wolfe’s). Like Stout, she turned away from the obsession with deduction to a more intuitive species of genius represented by Poirot as “little gray cells” doing their own thing, not dissimilarly to Wolfe’s lips puckering in, out, in out, while he seemed buried in a near coma. 

What all three writers captured to a delightful degree was the joy of watching the phenom at work. Which somehow doesn’t get as tiresome as the serendipitous romantic involvements of a Travis McGee or the sighing ennui of Inspector Dalgleish as roundabout approaches to cracking the murderer’s code. Distant third places go to the breakneck pace crowd, who think they are living up to the standard set by Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Mike Hammer, all of whom are one-offs for the quality of the writing and other style points of outstanding writers. We never needed the first-person go-gettems of Lew Archer, Kinsey Milhone, or Dr. Fay Scarpetta. Although to be fair, I owe a debt to P. D. James, Sue Grafton, and Patricia Cornwell because I spoofed their detectives at Moon Books in Shuteye Town.

I have at least admitted my debt and made use of aspects of the Holmes crossing of the Reality Divide by endowing the post-1985 punk writers with their own set of “Irregulars” in the now forcibly terminated Max Lute website…

The existence of the Irregulars is confirmed at the one remaining page (of 15) at the murdered punk Simplesite, “The Gallery of Gypsy.” The South Street Irregulars were not the only surviving source of information about the past and present activities of punk writers, as covered by a Max Lute site investigating what became of the movement after the massacre in May1985. This graphic has also been separately retained from the loss.

In fact, the Irregulars and these other sources are still working behind the scenes, just not as readily accessible on the Internet. What does remain of their third-person confirmation of punk writer reality, with a credibility enhanced by the fact that their communication vehicle suffered from censorship while it was active and was subsequently done in by sinister external maneuverings, is now reduced to this remnant of the Simplesite “The South Street Mystery.” (1 of 15 pages).

Another one-page screencap from before the site went down but was under pressure…

The site was removed shortly thereafter.

I’ve previously mentioned and linked other punk-related sites and what you’d have to call “hunters,” because they are starting from farther behind than sources like this and this. The Mark Frelinger experiment in literary archaeology continues, in dribs and drabs so far, but always with an eye toward provocative skepticism about matters considered settled.

One of my FB friends, The Rifleman, just received a Messenger post from Mark Frelinger about some scrap he’s uncovered in his dad Frank’s papers. The graphic is supposedly taken from a YT video posted half a dozen years ago by Johnny Dodge…

The Max Lute reference is disingenuous. I don’t trust Mark Frelinger.

Even more bizarre is the reason I decided to write this next chunk of the Reality Divide (yeah, starting to look like a series) this morning. I’d been looking for some photos about the history of MOVE in Philadelphia I’d gathered over the years to recount the events of May 1985, when Punk City disappeared from view. I’d reached the point of looking where it wasn’t likely to be among my 60,000+ photos and videos. (Videos are notoriously harder to search in the Apple universe.) I came across one that had a blank screen instead of an opening image.

Surprise surprise. Turned out to be another external placement by Apple on my iPad disk. At intervals, they invade my image files and use some kind of AI selection mechanism to create a video showing off the superior functional features of their video apps. Usually, they give themselves away with non-sequitur inclusions, work-in-process frames with blank spaces to be filled in during further editing, and pointless repetitions of the same shot. This was better than most. Best of all, it somehow contained a lot of my misplaced historical MOVE photography. 

Yes, there was a MOVE bombing. And that was the very night black ops commandos invaded South Street to kill the punks and steal their AI technology. Recovered for me by unrequested AI assistance. Do I have friends I don’t know about?

Guess I’ll stop there for now. Next up (probably), the improbable importance of J.R.R.Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in my grapplings with Reality Divide. Particularly the least read parts of his legacy, the Appendixes and the Silmarillion. Indispensable.

That’s right. It’s D-Day. No wonder I’m thinking about military invasions…