About This Book

Of course it begins with a selfie

My recommendation would be to buy this book at Kindle, copy it to disk so that it will survive even its discontinuation at Kindle or the death of Kindle. And then don’t read it until I’m dead.

Why? Because a lot of you will find this an off-putting work. It’s about my work, how and why I made it, and therefore about my mind, which is in my not so humble opinion truly extraordinary. I have carried the definition of what writing is and can be into new territory, which is why it can be hard to see from ruling conventional perspectives.

There’s an affliction in this book I can’t overcome. It’s the word “I.” But the book is absolutely a function of my perspectives, which are not focused only on me but are dependent on my history, my knowledge, my processes of thinking and working. These can’t be described or explained without that deadly word “I.” So let’s lay it out on the table now and get it out of our systems.

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I. 

Circumlocutions, substitutions, the third-person “talking about myself like a prizefighter” pose would be not only time-consuming and complicating but also confusing and downright counterproductive. I have written under many names, each of which has a distinctive personality of its own. I will be discussing this aspect of my writing, but only I can do that.

Why is any of this necessary? Isn’t it the job of critics to provide readers with educated assessments of a writer’s work? Isn’t it presumptuous of the writer to shoehorn himself into that discussion when his work is supposed to have done that for him already? 

Yes and no. Yes to the first question. It is their job. But they are not competent to assess my work. They haven’t seen most of it and they’re not equipped to understand it anyway. Because the answer to the second question is No. this book is also part of my work, its own imaginative creation, as much dreamed and spun automatically out of the ether of my consciousness as any “novel” written by any “serious writer” is. It’s absolutely the case that my canvas is far larger than theirs and therefore far larger than that of any critics who presume to attempt it. My perspective on my works is also part of my work, perhaps not necessary to the right sort of curious and multi-literate mind, but probably indispensable to most in our current cultural environment.

I find it necessary to be my own Cliff Notes if you will. What is the work? Why is it important? What does it mean? What are the essential elements you should address in your book report or the review under your not so humble byline?

Here’s the sit-rep as we stand right now. Convention has it that age range of masterpieces in literature is 35 to 55, according to the academic orthodoxy (elaboration to come, just not yet). I have several of those, but I am way past the limit at the age of 70 even if I am still working on the biggest one of all in my career, of which this book is one small part. Still, the fifteen years I have on the clock after the accepted range of greatness entitles me to look back with my own kind of objectivity, which is still teaching me what I have done in those earlier works I am still learning about now. Point being, I am qualified to be a critic of my own work, up to a point. Chuckles permitted. The real critic, of course, is the reader. Which is not a platitude in my case. My work has always been unified by my sense that the writer’s job is to provide enough material for the reader to choose his own storyline through it, which will be different from everyone else’s. My commitment to that idea underlies all my major works. 

I want to say up front, it’s not necessary for you to like me in any personal way. I know I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. Even my best friends can’t stand me, as curmudgeonly wags have boasted throughout history. I’ve been called many things in my many lives over the decades. On the plus side I’ve been called a genius, a polymath, a seer, an innovator (in multiple arenas), and a fearless champion (of this, that, and the other thing). On the negative side I’ve been called an arrogant prick, a snob, a worthless drunk, a failed writer, a horrible person, a narcissist, a gadfly, a fascist, a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a user, and a cold-hearted sonofabitch.

Like most arrogant pricks, I reject the nasty epithets across the board. That said, the best way to approach this book is to accept that I am in various ways unique, a freak to be looked at for its differences and possible similarities to your own experience of life. You will, as I indicated above, navigate your own way through the material and plot your own storyline if you care to. And if you don’t care to, all it will have cost you was the price of this book, which is guaranteed to be unlike any you have ever encountered before.

Why unlike? Order for one. Obviously I am presenting the chapters in the order I’m writing them, and like my other books it certainly can be read in that order. But it’s not necessary. Also like my other books, the order in which you read is your own choice and violates none of my intent. I have created labels for different categories of chapters, designed to be searched for as title prefixes simply by scanning the Table of Contents, so that you can read everything about Education or Books or Numbers or Technology or Graphics or Personal History or Unfinished as these categories attract your interest. If you don’t like or understand a chapter, skip it. Depending on how you choose, you can read this book as an autobiography, a philosophical discourse on writing, a cultural critique, or a utilitarian operating manual providing instruction on how to find other works you might like in a variety of media.

Also Scope. The territory being covered here is vast. Why the critics are useless on the subject of me. Nobody alive can take my measure. My stuff is a plethora of multiples, scattered across the Internet dating back more than 30 years and never more than at present. Multiple media, multiple genres and styles of writing in multiple voices, multiple topics of close attention, with multiple meanings from multiple levels and angles of perspective. Over the years I’ve written seriously and satirically about a staggering (even to me) variety of topics, including movies, music, sports, other writers, theology, language, education, evolution, toys, the sexes, the law, technology, statistical analysis, abortion, climate change, race, politics and politicians, celebrities, fashion, travel, automobiles, country stores, particle and cosmological physics, astrology, UFOs, the paranormal and esoteric, artificial intelligence, the nitty gritty news of the day, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, and my own life. I have made up my own worlds, past, present, and future, as well as my own science and historical fictions. I have written four Bibles. Because the territory is so large, a guidebook of sorts makes sense. Consider this that.

Most importantly, Time. It’s not what people think it is. It’s not a river, always carrying you inevitably, helplessly along. It’s a series of locations from very large to very small. Locations that can be visited, relived, reinterpreted. When things happen is part of their identity and meaning, and yours. My work is profoundly concerned with the nature and uses of time, and this book may be the easiest way to see how and why that’s true. It’s a clock with many more hands than the ones for hours and seconds. They are all in constant motion, but they can all be frozen and walked around, peered into, relished or rearranged or repudiated or redeemed.

I have had the opportunity to live many lives and vicissitudes of fortune, always in the right order somehow but far from the usual order. Particularly in my youth, I had many close calls with death, which is a clarifying experience. I have been a country boy living within a mile of millionaires and the near destitute of five different races and ethnicities, the him from which I viewed the moon landing and the live televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. I have been a prep school student in an all-boy world unified by the desire to get into the best possible college, a world suddenly up-ended by the drugs, politics, and music of Woodstock Nation. I have been a Harvard snob, youngest president ever of a snooty institution called a Final Club (where I began drinking in earnest) while the radical era of the Weathermen transformed leftist politics into bombs and Harvard into a sea of treasonous mimeographs blowing across their world-famous Square. I was a paralegal for a Harvard lawyer, summers and for a year after graduation, until I went to graduate business school at Cornell, where I fell in love with probability theory, learned computer programming on IBM punch cards, and dropped out with a semester to go because I realized I was destined to become a Certified Public Accountant if I stayed. I was 22 years old.

Since the age of 15, the writing diminished only briefly during my three years in college and my year and a half in business school. After that it resumed and became the core of my identity. The output by any measure is a huge pile of stuff. I ceased seeking renown as a writer during my book tour for The Boomer Bible. My last public appearance as an ‘author’ was on Entertainment Tonight, broadcast on New Year’s Eve, December 31st, 1991, as if from the brink of a new, more public life. But by then I could see how writers wind up writing essentially the same book again and again, and selling it in similar words to a revolving cast of newspaper, radio, and TV arbiters of the public taste and its reading appetites. I didn’t want that. Didn’t want to fail either. But writing what I wanted to became increasingly important as I observed the nosedive of our culture into a drab abyss of meaningless repetitions that become their own traps and prisons.

I may yet end my days in prison, but it won’t be because I forgot what motivated me in the first place. What still motivates me. To leave a record for those who will come after, seeking meanings powerful enough to keep living, keep procreating, and keep believing that the future can be better than the present slough of despond I see everywhere I look.

Leaving a record should be easier in an age of high technology. It isn’t. Electronically stored information doesn't have to be stolen at gunpoint and burned in a bonfire to go away. It can be done in with a keystroke, in the blink of an eye that knows exactly which key to strike. The only defense is encouraging people to find and make their own copies of what’s held hostage in all those servers out there in unlifeland.

That’s what this book is about. My best shot at showing you where and how to find the creations I’ve given my life to. There’s nothing I can do with money, except use it to preserve what I’ve made in forms that can survive my death and likely penniless estate. Still, if this book can generate more book sales and more hits on older websites that improve their chances of living on in the archive, my mission of leaving a record behind is enhanced. The rest of the book will show you everything else you need to know about assisting this mission.

What’s in it for you? For one thing, REACH. I think I’ve found a way to link you to helpful excerpts and sources beyond these pages, which are themselves a kind of map of a life’s work. All my life I’ve been haunted by this graphic, James Joyce’s attempt to provide a picture of what he was doing in Finnegan’s Wake. It’s completely worthless except as a demonstration of the limitations of the two dimensions in which writers have labored for many generations.

This is more middle finger than map.

I can do better. And you won’t need a PhD. in me to follow my mind into its most intricate alleys, byways, and cul de sacs. You’ll just need the operating manual this book represents and a good head on your shoulders.

Closing this with a teaser from the Vennich Manuscript Project. It says a lot more than it seems to:

Personal History. A Life in Brief

I have had the opportunity to live many lives and vicissitudes of fortune, always in the right order somehow but far from the usual order. Particularly in my youth, I had many close calls with death, which is a clarifying experience. I have been a country boy living within a mile of millionaires and the near destitute of five different races and ethnicities, the home from which I viewed the moon landing and the live televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. I have been a prep school student in an all-boy world unified by the desire to get into the best possible college, a world suddenly up-ended by the drugs, politics, and music of Woodstock Nation. I have been a Harvard snob, youngest president ever of a snooty institution called a Final Club (where I began drinking in earnest) while the radical era of the Weathermen transformed leftist politics into bombs and Harvard into a sea of treasonous mimeographs blowing across the famous Square. summers and for a year after graduation, I was a paralegal for a Harvard lawyer, until I went to graduate Business School at Cornell, where I fell in love with probability theory, learned computer programming on IBM punch cards, and dropped out with a semester to go because I realized I was about to become a Certified Public Accountant. I was 22 years old.

It took me three more years to leave a hometown I hadn’t been more than a visitor in since the age of 13. During that time I wrote most of a first novel, served as editor and sole staff member of an historical magazine in support of the county’s Bicentennial celebration, and after chickening out on sending my novel manuscript to an agent my father had known in college, sat down at an old Underwood Standard typewriter in a plywood office next to the Today’s Sunbeam printing press, and learned how to write, frequently retyping whole pages to make two word changes in text.

I quit to take a job as a staff editor for a construction bid newsletter in Philadelphia, got fired for insubordination, took a position as proofreader for a nuclear engineering firm in the time immediately after Three Mile Island, quit under threat of being fired for editing instead of correcting typos in nuclear specifications, got a job as a technical editor with a McGraw-Hill subsidiary called Datapro Research Corporation, where I received a crash course in microprocessor and communications technology, and then thanks to a headhunter went to work as a competitive analyst in Dayton, Ohio, for one of the Big 8 computer companies experiencing rapid decline because of the meteoric rise of the Personal Computer as a game changing technology. I resigned after 18 months to go freelance as a business and technical writer. I was 32 years old.

Never again had a salary or a boss. Instead, one boss became many and my largest client, a General Motors division in Dayton, enabled me to move from video scripts and training manual copy about Just in Time Manufacturing into executive speechwriting and, eventually, major communication projects overseas. I had my own consulting firm with ten partners by this time, and acquired the UAW as a client along the way. I dissolved the firm when the partner who had initiated contact with the union decided to delegate vital early project tasks to a writer he’d signed as a partner against my wishes because he was careless and not a good writer or thinker. That’s when I resumed work full full time on the manuscript of The Boomer Bible, which I sold over the transom about halfway complete in early 1990. I was 36 years old.

Finishing the manuscript and a book tour took well over a year, and I was in no mood for business. But a friend called and wanted me to talk to a communication VP at Whirlpool Corp in Benton Harbor, Michigan. His company was going global, and he needed help with internal communication and training at headquarters and in Europe, where many of the facilities were newly acquired existing companies. I quoted him a ridiculous hourly rate and he accepted at a slightly reduced rate. That accounted for the next four years. After an interval in Hightstown NJ, I moved back to Salem, into my father’s house (and his father’s before him), resigned the Whirlpool account when the one man I trusted left to get his PhD in communications theories we had noodled out together, and then, oh, right, I got divorced, l went completely to pieces, and lost the family home to the bank. I was just past 40 years old.

The rest has been writing. And reacquaintance with a real life not spent on airliners or in conference rooms surrounded by drones in blue and gray suits. I was a clerk at a Borders bookstore, a business telemarketer, and a house-husband with a step-step-daughter during her teenage years. Subsequently, I renewed acquaintance with the woman who had been my boss at the nuclear engineering firm, and we got married shortly after I turned 50. Since then there has been another home in the country, plenty of dogs and cats, and a new set of relationships with her children and grandchildren, all of whom are fully grown with lives of their own. Along the way, there have also been multiple blogs and books and other media and genres of writing. At present my increasing lack of mobility has left me mostly housebound, a de facto recluse with only wife and pets as daily companions. I am 70 years old as I type this on my well worn couch.

Technology. It takes away… but it also gives generously…

 

A fraction of the links from one verse of The Boomer Bible

In my approach to writing, linearity is the enemy. The photo is a screenshot from a dense section of a vast network of links from of a single verse in the Book of Willy, the first gospel of the imitation messiah named Harry. The graphic map was produced on his own hook by a devotee of the book with no help from me. In other words, it’s not only a demonstration of TBB’s complexity but also a demonstration that the deep complexities of the book are discoverable by readers who are looking in the right way. He was using advanced project management mapping software to follow his hunch that he would find something amazing, and he did. 

Was this effect an accident? No. It was an essential part of my vision from the very beginning of the book. When I sat down to write the first book of my bible I was working on an Underwood Standard typewriter I’d purchased from the Salem Sunbeam newspaper years before. I didn’t own a computer (Apple II’s the rage in those days), but my job put me in the vicinity of terminals connected to an IBM mainframe, and I knew that the technology was not capable of what I had in mind, but I did have it in mind nonetheless. 

Not the original but exactly like it.

The first page I typed had a laboriously constructed mock-up of the Intercolumn Reference format I was copying from the King James Bible. Two columns of text separated by a skinny column of chapter-and verse notations bracketed by vertical lines the length of the page. I wrote the opening text longhand, enough to spill over into a second column. I typed the left hand column far enough to know where the break to the second column would be, and then started retyping, this time adding the vertical lines for the first line then with a fake link in between, then the first line of second column text. I added a second, third, and fourth line of second column text (and another fake link or two) the same way, then added in the rest of column one. Because I couldn’t wait to see. I had to see it. The format would work. All I had to do was write the book and count on typesetter technology to do what a computer still wouldn’t be able to do.

I knew about the physical composition of printed pages. As editor of my prep school newspaper I’d witnessed the steampunk intricacies of linotype page makeup and printing. I’d sat next to the print shop for the Sunbeam for more than a year, and at the Philadelphia Construction News we’d a computerized print setting workstation, whose output I more than once driven across the Ben Franklin Bridge to the printer in a dingy part of Newark. Books and newspapers were very physical things to me. I could imagine the finished Bible. Which for nontechnical reasons was still ten years away. 

The final manuscript still had to be manually created in part because the consumer-level text processing software of the day could not give me the column configuration I needed. The Inter-column Reference had to be printed out separately, cut to fit, and applied page by page with wax adhesive. The stack of paper I mailed to the publisher was more than a foot tall. They sent me a framed photograph of it sitting next to the first proof copy from the bindery. My first Scottish deerhound smashed the frame and chewed up the photograph. He was just a puppy.

Reliance on technology in the writing business always involves loss. Computers die suddenly more often than not, and if you’re poor or in transition, necessary backup copies may not have been made. I’ve lost a lot work in process that way over the years, most recently a few months ago when my iPad suddenly phlooeyed to a screenful of buzzing static.. The same fate routinely befalls files during the writing. Swearing helps but ultimately you have to man up and accept that what’s gone really is lost for good unless you write it again from memory, which sometimes turns out better.

I once lost 100Mb of a graphics-intensive sequel to a major Internet work of mine. I don’t think about it much anymore. When I do, it’s just a pang of sadness that has to be put away like other unrecoverable losses. I feel the same kind of pang about a lovely little Fiat 124 Spyder I had to abandon when I lost my house to foreclosure in the mid-1990s. But I can still feel the sensation of driving it with the top down, reveling in all the Italian eccentricities that make it seem clumsy and almost undriveable until you fall in love and become one with it.

Writing is different from cars though. You can lose the paper and the electronic files but the creative inspirations behind them live on. They join the vast phantom population in your head of the “Unfinished.” Sometimes you can return and resurrect, reconfigure them with different tools and new infusions of more mature creativity. I’ll have more to say about the Unfinished as we go, but the counterpoint to the stories of loss due to technology is the hope and promise it continually offers you. Someday, there will be an application, a tool, a breakthrough that will enable you to re-dream an old idea and make it better.

On that day when I created the page format of The Boomer Bible hyperlinks did not yet exist. I already needed them but did not know it. When they appeared fortuitously during my in-depth apprenticeship in the computer industry, I was able to seize on their power immediately and in the process transform everything about how I viewed writing forever.

One of many surprises I have had about writers and writing over the years is how little use they make of this technology. Old habits die hard. Unfortunately, writing itself is dying of it, or at least not taking the necessary next step to the next dimensions of writing people like Joyce, Nabokov, Hemingway, Woolf, and Stein were groping for in their individual experimentations with form and style. Publishers are even worse in this respect, chaining their writers to obsolete templates of writing product in the belief that linearity is the sine qua non of pure art in fiction, and clear communication in nonfiction. 

This is not unusual. I can think of three major examples in the world of science where a similar kind of hidebound myopia has delayed progress for long periods of time. 

The translation of Mayan writing was held up, academically prevented in fact, for a quarter century by a single authoritarian scholar who declared that Mayan steles were written in mostly untranslatable pictographs. He was wrong. The hieroglyphs denote pronounceable syllables not mythological symbols. He was ultimately overthrown by a younger generation of scholars who learned how to translate the ancient scripts by listening to the speech of the living descendants in the region. Mayan hieroglyphs can be read, just as Egyptian hieroglyphs can, a feat also accomplished by an outsider to the insular archaeological fraternity.

The delayed progress in the field of quantum physics continues, and it has now lasted more than a hundred years.

The delay in rehabilitation of Evolutionary theory is now approaching 150 years and shows few signs of being reformable from within the inner sanctum of academia.