For my friend at Substack
I started a flame war with a self-declared genius named Daniel last night.
He’s 50 or so. I’m 70. The word obscured by the serendipitous downward arrow in the graphic is ‘convoluted.’ He thinks I’m that. He also said (paraphrasing), I’m Faulkner to his Hemingway.
Which is funny. I am but not in the way he thinks. I could help him, but by the time you’re 50, generally, you’re set.
Thought he needed a lance to penetrate his shell, so he could find the next gear before he reached the terminus of the genius years, usually pegged at 35 to 55.
Overdid it probably. Or did I misinterpret the “insignificant worm” reference? I actually don’t expend private communication bursts on insignificants.
He has talent. He thinks if he says it well enough, people will swoon. Every writer’s trap. We all know how to write the poetic description of a mood, a place, an emotional conviction. But is this convoluted?
The thing buried deepest at Feelmalez Station in Shuteye Town 1999. No accompanying lecture.
Oh yeah. Context. You want the words? Or the numbers?
Takes a while to get here though. Got to keep clicking through all the feminist cant….
Granted. Not a substack post. Daniel finds me in my final phase, documentation. Trying to provide helpful explanations for those who will follow after all of us are dead.
Not writing for him, except as a senior writes for an apprentice. I sink the lance only to make him explore my work, which should give him new tools for the genius window he still has open to him. There’s a much larger world of writing open to him than description. Of his own life, his feelings, his conclusions. That’s old fashioned stuff.
The challenge for writers of the future, after the dead ones are dead, is to escape the prison of Hemingway’s ‘one true sentence’ and the primacy of personal experience as an historical truth akin to Hemingway’s gored bullfighter and the “lean clean whiteness of the bone” as reality. That’s not reality. That’s just one person’s observation of sensory experience, plus biased phrasing.
The challenge is to escape all that. Try on other great voices. See what you learn. In my science fiction tome called Punk City I chronicled (ahem, how presciently?) a complete literary movement spawned by Artificial Intelligence computer technology which enabled illiterate street punks to write together in bands and work their way through imitations of the entire canon of western literature.
Yes, I wrote a system description of their technology.
In the process of assembling their story from what remained of them after they mysteriously disappeared into the maybe realm of their quantum computers I tried it all on. I began with my old fiction attempts and discovered I was working my way backwards. Their late and decadent phase consisted of my early attempts at writing in the modern style (which to this day my wife still prefers in the punk opus). Their early efforts were rock and roll reimagined, then a dalliance with scripture and romance and the beginnings of self-doubt, etc. I tried all the voices on. What’s the best way to acquire a new perspective on the astonishing genius of William Blake? Try to write like him.
The punks of South Street, propped up by AI, tried on a lot of voices, including everyone from Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot. Jesus too. I had been struck early on in my own self-apprenticeship as a writer by a theologian who declared that the only proof we needed of the reality of Jesus Christ was the distinctiveness of his voice. I read the red words in my Episcopalian Christian Bible, tried on that Voice, and realized he was right. Where The Boomer Bible came from. He’s just out of place, out of time, the first truly unique voice in recorded history, amazingly consistent across all the gospels. Why it had to be a compleat Bible that overshadowed the work which gave rise to it. It had to be like Christ himself, about everything, everywhere, all the time, simultaneously. Why TBB’s Intercolumn Reference, like but more than the KJB’s ICR, was typed in a two column template on an Underwood Standard as a promise not to be fulfilled before the September 1991 publication date. Which it was.
From the original TBB website: “There have been a number of charts created to trace
the connections established in The Boomer Bible. One such chart traces the ICR from
a single verse - "There isn't any God," from Wil.25.5. The results have startled us all.”
Click on the graphic above to see the whole thing. Wait for it to load. It’s a huge file, in
the Modern Internet Archive, originated on professional product management software.
But before I finished that massive gift from somewhere way beyond me I kept trying on the voices of the punk writers and their chroniclers. I left Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s alone, but there was Mailer, Tom Wolfe, John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, Gunther Grass, Swinburne, Waugh, and, well, others I caught up with later on, like Updike, Dawkins, Michener, P.D. James, Sue Grafton, et al. I did the same with art.
The main character and Yuppie victim of the first ever punk story, called ‘Shammadamma’.
He was murdered by his authors, a band called The Shuteye Train. “We write with guns.”
How I began drawing a huge unclassifiable work called Shuteye Town. And a sequel called Shuteye Nation, where I gave Ambrose Bierce an AI tool he didn’t have in his day, the hyperlink.
How I discovered my own voice, which had always been there, from earliest days, struggling under the weight of nihilist, claustrophobic self-obsession. How I learned to love even my first throwaway punk stories and their naive precursors. By the time I was pushing old enough to buy my first midlife crisis Harley, I was mostly done with fiction as such. Because I had discovered that all writing is fiction. A lesson much facilitated by my nonfiction professional life. In graduate business school I was exposed to the Harvard Business School pedagogy of case studies. The deliberate withholding of narrative. Just exhibits in the form of documents, financial statements and such, from which the student is required to assemble his own narrative and defend it. By the time I was organizing Punk City, this was my model. The ultimate rebellion against the Hemingway model.
I don’t lead you from word to word, line to line, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter. I give you a bunch of stuff, replete with blatant contradictions, prejudiced opinions, persuasive but not necessarily accurate voices, both real and made-up facts, and you find your own way through it, your own narrative, your own most personally appealing story. Which is what all writing has always been about. The story. Our story, the Story of Mankind and what that story means even as it changes, volcanically, through time. Learned that in business school, but also from J. R. R. Tolkien, who even made up the languages he needed to believe in his own creation, as I did with my own Punk Lexicon, which created the new verbal idea of mutual transitiveness, such as verbs that act on both objects and subjects, which was the heart of punk writer experience. Also, completing a thought, William Faulkner, whose novel As I Lay Dying, a medley of different voices, gave me the idea for my first novel, which unlike his should have, wound up in the trash but didn’t give up the ghost entirely.
Their movement dies of this inability to get past their struggle to remember the first days of consciousness. Just like us. They fell into the modern art trap. They could never get past their own beginnings. Even in their abundant works of art.
They tried on artists too. South Street’s version of Guernica,
about their Winter War, when St. Nuke killed the Duke, and
punk writers were freed to start writing. Unless it all was not
quite like that somehow. Where’s Johnny Dodge that day?
They obsessed on telling their own narrative of themselves rather than exploring the much richer and wider world of reality. They became modern. Their creativity died. They died. Unless maybeee they didn’t but were rescued by their mythic unkillable hero… Nah.
The epicenter of the punk writer world on South Street in Philly. A ruin now. That still shimmers.
Why I knew very early on that AI was a deadly path. Led me to prove that the fabled Turing Test was a joke. Having received computer programming instruction in business school, I was able to make it an elaborately plausible joke. I wrote the schematics, just above the actual code, of a computer program that could absolutely defeat the Turing Test, as all subsequent supposed conquests have imitated.
Technologists are all also writing fiction. As I did in The Naked Woman.
Since then I have been, as Daniel suggests, increasingly “convoluted.” If all writing is fiction, then all my writing is also fiction. My obligation is to tell the truth as I see it from every possible perspective. I write about the same subjects, again and again, sometimes as a satirist, sometimes as an advocate, often as a joker, and increasingly as I age, as a man who has had a foot in many worlds, both real and imagined, including even Fortune 100 executive conference rooms. I am not afraid of math or other people’s “data.” I am not afraid of death or poverty or intimidation. I have had the best education of anyone in my time, and I can prove it. If you want to know what I really think, you can find it in all the contradictory complexity (i.e., convolutions) in my leavings. Which is the one thing other writers don’t do. Don’t want to do. They think their talent can control how you perceive them. That’s their mission in life. Leading you down their carefully constructed, smotheringly linear, line by line path to Hemingway/Mailer heavyweight championship.
Impossible. The championship is already mine. Has been and will be for the foreseeable future.
From the Vennich Manuscript, still writing me as we sit here…
He lives in a small house at Homez Station, one of 42 stations on the subway lines. We can find/see his room, click on the books and videos that have shaped his perceptions, and he should be fine. But he isn’t. He is struggling with Time. He is trying to write a diary, but he doesn’t know the names of months. I think he starts on some gloomy day in Pretober. He is discovering he has no real sense of the chronology of anything in his own life. He is fighting to poke his head above the mist of unconsciousness. It will be his destiny to undertake the brutal odyssey of J. Doe in the very last minute of 1999. It’s a brief piece, one of many fragments that make up the cartoon stained glass picture of Shuteye Town.
Obviously this Daniel, the recipient of this post, is far above that Daniel. It’s just a resonant touchstone for me. And the basis for what could be read as either a friendly apology or a less formal Facebook-to-Substack relationship of the strictly verbal kind.
Up to the both of us, I guess. But any next step is his. This is the step I took.
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