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.
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:
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