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.
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