A Reclamation Project Begun
As you work your way through the links here, don’t be shy. Get ‘Click Happy.’ Even on pics.
How bad has it gotten? I uploaded this video from the old Instapunk at YouTube
an hour ago. It has already been removed for violating YT Community Standards.
There’s a pdf version, just published, of the post from Instapunk.com the video above was created for. Nobody censored it 15 years ago. Back then, it was unquestioningly covered as freedom of expression.
Here’s my pdf file of ‘The Goosestep Enigma’.
This was by no means the most controversial post or graphic included in Instapunk’s 2,000+++ posts over the years. Now I’m going back in time to make pdf versions of the key parts of that website, meaning the most comical, controversial, reflective, insightful, and graphically provocative. But why reinvent the wheel. It’s all still there, isn’t it?
You can get a good idea about the kinds of posts Instapunk generated over the years right here at Instapunk Returns. Links here and here will give you access to a selection of IP posts from individual days and sometimes weeks. This was an effort on my part to demonstrate that for an old site, Instapunk remains frequently funny, insightful, and relevant even as an artifact. My illusory hope was that new readers would develop an interest in the old place and start browsing at the main link available through my Facebook profile (ambiguous link to ‘Web Archive’) and now here at Instapunk Returns.
The list does not have to be intimidating. Think of dates. Think of dates
that matter to you (birthdays, anniverasaries?) or were significant at
the time to everyone. We’re right against an election. What were people
thinking about in previous Octobers and early Novembers. Echoes here?
That’s just a couple of years worth shown. Each of these links is to a full week and contains on average between 3 and 7+ posts, depending on my mood at the time. That’s the equivalent of a 100,000+ word book every year for 10 years. With rare, mostly identified exceptions, all of this is my writing and a great many of my own graphic creations (in many cases better than what I can do with today’s supply of free SW). My skills improve, but… moving along…
I’m not asking you to do anything about this state of affairs. I’m just reporting on my own intentions. I’m facing a ticking clock of my own. Optimistically, I have a few years left to save my work from total oblivion. When I die, all the paid platforms (Deerhound Diary and brother site Instapunk Rules at Wordpress, Shuteye Town 1999 and Shuteye Nation, plus boomerbible.com) will go away for nonpayment of fees. In time, my 50+ websites at Blogger will also disappear, either because — like Simplesite — they will stop being free or retire the sites through fading attendance.
Completely wiped out but for some screen
shots of content and two indispensable sites.
The books presently available at Amazon could also disappear, either because of belated Woke censorship or lack of demand with me out of the picture. My 200+ video and audio files at YouTube are similarly endangered (today’s YT incident is only one of several such removals; I’m on a short leash with them as well.)
The Johnny Dodge Theme
My YT stuff is overwhelmingly non-bellicose.
The Channel belongs to my man Johnny Dodge.
Thought maybe some calming music might help.
Facebook, of course, is a constant threat of total banning, just as they peremptorily banned rflaird.com (née Deerhound Diary) and Instapunk Rules for violating their mysterious Community Standards, which seem obsessively offended by female breasts to a degree utterly blown off by all the streaming services and, well, everyone else too but the U.S. broadcast networks and TV advertisers. You can’t search Facebook effectively anyway, at least not without a complicated duel between searcher and Facebook’s college freshman-level SW.
No, not the world’s smallest violin, but in a sense what I do is
play the violin and I don’t like it shrinking away in my hands.
Am I sorry for having put all my eggs in the electronic basket of the Internet? Have I made some huge mistake I will regret to the end of my days? No. I took a big risk, but it was a necessary one whose benefits have been extremely worthwhile to me personally and as a writer.
Life changed for me with the publication of The Boomer Bible and the simultaneous writing of the integrated anthology now a print book titled ‘Punk City.’ It was an incredibly lucky over-the-transom shot to a firm that prided itself on publishing not quite the usual stuff, though they made their living with well produced paperback cookbooks. My partial manuscript landed by accident on the boss’s desk, no doubt under a post-it featuring a big question mark. He read away at it, here and there, like most making their first acquaintance of the work. Then he took it home and put it on his nightstand, where he kept reading. And laughing. From the first he regarded it as a sprawling work of humor and, yes, satire, but he was a New Yorker who still believed in pushing boundaries. He bought it on our first meeting in his office, gave me an impossible deadline for finishing it, and approved the decision to bring in an elderly lady as copy editor who had worked with, among others, William Faulkner. When she first got her hands on it, the manuscript was finished, enormous, and shackled tight with a massive Intercolumn Reference. She laughed when she told me, “I’ve been doing copy editing for [deleted] years and this is the first time I can’t change a word of what’s been written. Your ICR won’t let me.” She loved the book and we very much enjoyed working together. I submitted to a compromise strictly as a consolation prize for her. I allowed to her to correct the names of famous historical (not literary or filmic) names, and I also gave in on two movie star names she thought went too far, one for a reason I’d known nothing of but happened to be too much on the mark by accident.
The publisher began book production. I had to proofread the galleys and needed help from a close friend to get that done in time for well over 800 pages. They sent me a galley proof of the whole book to make last minute changes on. Shortly after that, I broke my supervising editor’s prohibition on attending the New York Book Fair, where all the new works were being trotted out to buyers and the press. “You don’t want to go there,” she said. “New writers find it depressing. You feel like your heart’s blood is evaporating into a publishing universe that will never notice you.” So I went anyway. There was a small booth with a galley proof on display. There was also a writer from The Wall Street Journal, waiting for me. She did a lead article in the Book or Lifestyle section, whichever it was, and the publisher ordered the printing of nearly a hundred thousand copies. They assigned me a publicist, an eager young woman. Thanks to her connections, I received an early rave review from The San Francisco Chronicle. A book tour was arranged. I went to a bunch of states across the country, appeared on a bunch of radio show in-studio interviews, a couple of brief TV gigs, and on December 31st, 1991, I was featured in a segment of Entertainment Tonight. I was going to be a star!
Actually, that was about the last good thing that happened for quite a while. Reviews were mixed. Some were enthusiastic and full of praise, but many were dismissive, scathing, even angry. I had touched a nerve in the literary press. My publicist informed me, shaking her head in puzzlement, that she had been told flatly, by phone, that The New York Times would never review The Boomer Bible. I got a one-liner, positive, from Harvard Magazine, but only after I sent them a copy. I was summoned for a meeting with the publisher’s marketing people. The bookstores, meaning the gazillion units of Barnes & Noble and Borders who were the last survivors in the big-bookseller business, had claimed they had no idea where to shelve the book. Humor? Religion? History? Nonfiction Commentary? Surely not Fiction (they said of a book presented to them as precisely that). The publisher’s sales manager also reported in-person visits to individual book stores found the book in different categories, if anywhere, and nowhere was it featured in store displays. Moreover, they got the idea that a lot of young clerks responsible for shelving choices didn’t want to shelve it at all.
The good news?Every copy got sold.
The
publisher kept it in his catalogue
for 30 years, which is how long it took.
And it’s having a whole other life online.
The first full year of publication sold about 20,000 copies, not enough to earn back my advance. Then things got worse. Sales declined for a couple years while I returned to my management consulting business. Then I went through a divorce and began writing a new book in the same obsessive way I had composed The Boomer Bible. It was called The Naked Woman. It was a multi-directional satire, targeting modern feminism, social science, academia, stupid male vanity, and monolithic perspectives on all sides. I submitted a nearly completed manuscript to my supervising editor, who sent it back almost by return mail and explained her decision in a postcard that said, “Good luck with this.” Three agents and dozens of publisher rejections later, with only one close call ultimately vetoed by the publisher’s delegation of the decision to two 20-something editors. Not Politically Correct. Unpublishable. Amid the chaos of its troubled life, the Naked Woman manuscript got fragmented, with some parts lost. I kept the still book-length MS for refashioning/reconstructing later on as a pet project of my own (now an Amazon paperback, very expensive because of the color graphics and well worth the price). American publishing was done with me, and I was done with them.
Is it odd, or contradictory, or something anyway, that the terms
‘Not Politically Correct’ and ‘Non-Playing Characters’ share
the abbreviation ‘NPC’? Well, give it a think. I’m too tired to.
So I turned to my computer and started working on graphics experiments. That’s how Shuteye Town 1999 was born, a self-published work on CD/ROM. That’s how I came to discover, five years on, that there were people, mostly 20-something’s themselves, who were looking for R. F. Laird. They had shared their talents to create a “Boomer Bible website” and a Discussion Forum in which they were debating the meaning of The Boomer Bible, trying to learn more about it, how it had been put together, what other books they could read to understand it better, and what significance this book should play in their own lives. They seized on Shuteye Town 1999 with a passion and had a great time disagreeing with one another (and me) about what the hell this bolt from the blue could possibly mean. My next project was Shuteye Nation, a follow-on and companion work to Shuteye Town. Along the way, these two multimedia works have given rise to six spinoff books, self-published in paperback and/or on Kindle. The venerable TBB had two big spin-off books of its own. At the time they came out, though, my only feedback was the membership of the Boomer Bible Forum.
That’s when I began participating with them. I contributed content of my own, some of it large and unexpected even to me. Then came 9/11, the War on Terror, and I became a blogger. First there was a site called Gloves Off (now a book), then Instapunk.com (three books and counting), Deerhound Diary (one book) Instapunk Rules (one on-line book), Facebook (that throwaway on the side), Instapunk Returns (one in-line book thus far with others in the pipeline), and well over a dozen sites active and still being added to at Blogger, most of them multimedia, valuing words, graphics, audio/video cuts, and hyperlink connections equally. There are other books of mine at Amazon that have nothing to do with these other works, books of poetry, fiction, history, movies, commentary, advice, and (nostalgically) CIS-normal erotica. Some of these appear under different bylines.
Content spanning 50+ years of writing
There’s a point to all this history. And to the nominal subject of this post. I don’t expect you to read all this, especially those of you who are already not reading this. Your possible indifference doesn’t bother me. The history here is a part of the record I’ve never spelled out just this way, in just one place. It’s here for those who might be interested, and because it is part of my career-long mission as a writer: To leave a record for those who will come later.
You can find the text and Live ICR for all three testaments of TBB at
TheBoomerBible.com project - like the Boomer Bible website - not
generated by me but by the books’ talented & hardworking adherents.
That’s why I’m not mad but grateful about the sequence of events described above. If I had been an early literary success, much of my best work would never have been created. I’d have become a property, like a player in Major League Baseball, well compensated and treated as long as I contributed to the result the owners wanted. Getting cut by the sport of American Publishing has been a blessing, recognized as such early on. One of the big winners of the year TBB got published was American Psycho, a shocking and shockingly lucrative horror thriller. Since then there has been a movie with an A-List cast, more thrillers, and more media interest in the author’s private life than most writers are comfortable with, if we’re being honest. But he’s still writing in much the same vein.
At least the talented Christian Bale was having fun anyway.
To think that when he was a kid, I could identify with him.
Celebrity-style exposure is, I’m convinced, not as oppressive as the institutional pressure to keep writing inside the lines; that is, giving us (publishers) more books that we can sell to a known audience under your brand name. Did John Updike really want to write all those Rabbit books? Have any of our greats been compromised by fame and expectations (and too much money) in visible ways? I’m reminded of the story about Howard Hawks telling Ernest Hemingway he could make a successful hit movie out his worst book. “What’s my worst book?” huffed Hemingway. “To Have and Have Not.” Hemingway famously blushed and replied, “I wrote it for the money.” But I’m sure he cashed the check he got for the now classic movie starring Bogart and Bacall.
Oscar and Nobel winner. For the worst book he wrote. Liked it.
The artists of all kinds who get the public attention, critical praise, money, and the mixed influences of a Jet-set lifestyle are ultimately the property of some one or ones other than their personal Muse. It’s said Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls to prove he could write stream of consciousness prose. It shows. Phrases like “Guapa, my little rabbit” and “I unprint myself of you” have become embedded in the idiom in what seems like a mocking tone. The very best literary parody I’ve ever read wasn’t even billed as such but sneaked into the screwball comedy novel called The Featherbedders by the not nearly respected enough writer Max Shulman. But Shulman was definitely in the business of breaking the rules, even about fame-seeking. In his wildly innovative post-war (WWII) twin books lampooning his own generation, Barefoot Boy with Cheek and The Zebra Derby, he deftly satirized the Marxist pretensions of college students at the University of Minnesota, which he described in a foreword as an entirely fictional institution located in a state for which he gave an etymology of gorgeously preposterous fakery. Shulman had an unconcealed trick he used repeatedly, in which his lead character would meet a stranger while enroute somewhere and become hostage to a seemingly endless and absurd autobiography reproduced by the author, in full, and never referenced again because those characters never appeared again. Another brilliant miniature by this certifiable Mad Max was an essay “for young authors” on ‘How to Write.’
This gem is still available somehow somewhere, and it’s worth getting. One of his best bits about writing was how to use flashbacks to reveal character and motives. He gives us categories of them: the flashback, the double flashback, the telescoping flashback, the double-telescoping flashback, and more variations of these, all described in simple mechanical terms. The telescoping flashback consists of a character remembering an incident in his past wherein a character from that memory remembers an incident from his past.. and so on.
Today Max Shulman is mostly remembered, if he is remembered, by the show’s fans, as the creator of Dobie Gillis and his beatnik friend Maynard G. Krebs.
Isn’t that “Little Buddy” from Gilligan’s Island?
Surprisingly, even as unlikely a candidate as William Faulkner got dragged into institutional serfdom. He famously rebelled against the cubicle life of the “the writers’ room” in the Hollywood studio that hired him by secretly decamping back to his home in a Oxford, Mississippi. But that didn’t stop him from being sleighted as one of the writers who couldn’t make any sense out of the shooting script for The Big Sleep. “Even William Faulkner couldn’t figure it out,” Hollywood honchos laughed. In fact, Faulkner may have recognized the serious flaw in Raymond Chandler’s book, that running way late on a publisher deadline (drinker, you know) he had pasted the manuscript together from at least two and maybe three other incomplete failed novels. That’s pretty hard to fix, and Faulkner was a drinker himself who probably knew when to throw in the towel.
There are a lot of ‘writer as victim’ stories illustrating the pitfalls of being a famous author. Capote. Mailer. Nathanael West. John O’Hara. William Burroughs. Ken Kesey. Arthur Miller. Tennessee Williams. People don’t like to talk about the maybe exceptions, the ones who had an early success and ran for the hills into Garbo-like solitude. J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. Both have published since. Like many, I haven’t done more than read at their subsequent works, but I don’t detect, or haven’t heard, that they were characterized by the youthful breakthroughs that produced their initial success. It’s very possible that fiction is suffering from more than the bane of publishers and movie moguls.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, chiefly a victim of himself and famous friends like Hemingway, called out the truth of the matter well before most of his brethren (and sistren). In the late 1920s and early 1930s he suggested that the novel was done for, running out of new imaginative talents and soon to be replaced by the more accessible and charismatic movie industry in Hollywood. The movies were better at telling stories, and written fiction had subcontracted the story business to mystery and romance writers while “serious” writers preferred gazing deeply and logorrheically into their own navels and the lint in the navels of their lovers and family. Fitzgerald took his own turn as a screenwriter/gofer, failed, and returned to his writing desk, where he was at work on The Next Gatsby (called The Last Tycoon) when he died at the age of 44. The main character of Tycoon was a Monroe Stahr, a fictionalized version of Irving Thalberg, considered in his brief lifetime the greatest producer genius in Hollywood. Fitzgerald survived Thalberg by only four years and didn’t live to finish what many still consider a truncated great novel-in-progress.
I escaped the money and acclaim and famous acquaintances. A cute way of saying I got thrown out of the game by parties unnamed and unknown. Water under the bridge. Watching the water rush by has been incredibly freeing to me. I can put a boat of my own making into that water and drift or row or sail or motor in whatever direction I want, whenever I want. I can also fly above it or swim in and underneath it. No one owns it or my access to this realm.. And I am living in a different realm than most of my peers. The Boomer Bible was an Internet creation before there really was an Internet. The first page I tapped out on my old Underwood Standard typewriter was formatted for the Intercolumn Reference to come. I was that sure. I deliberately designed and wrote the whole work just so I could link verses and ideas and events together by the process of referencing them in a structure that had a meaning greater than any of the individual lines or paragraphs of writing it encompassed and used.
Where my Internet (cf. ‘Undernet’) was born.
The structure of the book is driven by four suits of my own personal Tarot deck: words, images, numbers, and voices. I won’t explain the intricacies of that set of suits, but they have continued to push me toward a multimedia definition of the writing profession.
I can no longer go back to the world of pure words, which traditional wordsmiths seem to regard as at their best when they exclude pictures, sounds, music, math, and the geometry of constructs with more dimensions than a sheet of paper. Dimensions that can only be imitated or alluded to or inferred from lines of sentences that must be read, in the order the author has prescribed, preferably on consecutive identical sheets of paper bound together by cardboard, cloth, stitching and glue. In short, a kind of physical prison in which we of the ‘pen persuasion’ are expected to serve an honorable term of servitude while the rest of the world spins away inside its gonfallon bubble of electronica, digital and chemical hallucination, and the dead artifacts of what used to be art collapsed into a zombie hall of mirrors in which everyone is unable to detect structure, meaning, purpose, aspiration, or divinity. All the pieces that used to be constituent or allied and in communication are now siloes of isolationists who regard themselves as ‘experts.’
Science is for scientists. The soft sciences — psychology, social work, economics, climate and evolutionary theory (both still are too theoretical to be successfully quantified), and political science — are the hidey hole for those who actually know their expertise is a crock and therefore the more to be hysterically defended. Computer science is a science when it comes to hardware, a chaotic and often destructive art when it comes to software, and “whenever the twain shall meet” they shall create havoc under cover of Tekhead arrogance. Math is for fools who think they’re smarter than the extinct species of English and Classics majors. Medicine is for making money while preferably killing as few people as you can be prosecuted for, and don’t you dare question the degree, the diagnosis, the medicine, or the surgical/pharmaceutical outcome. Business is for people who mistake accounting for math and money for entitlement to power. Law is for know-it-alls who learned in law school that words mean nothing, and the meaninglessness of words proves the absolute absence of any kind of meaning but conquest and vengeance. Religion is for idiots. Writing is for people who mistakenly believe people still know how to read and do so if the NYT bestseller list tells them to. News is for the idiots who didn’t realize it was a waste of time to major in political science, gender studies, psychology, or broadcast journalism. Fiction is for the elite who occupy the pages of The New York Review of Books. Poetry is for idiots who didn’t get into law school but aren’t dumb enough to believe in God. Images are the bailiwick of specialist categories of movie making, video games, paparazzi, photojournalist newsies, graphic novelists, and cartoonists. Voices are for the lost among us who believe ranting about their grievances and enemies and sexual obsessions and personal disappointments will make the world sit up and take notice. Of them.
What can traditional forms of linear sentence-after-sentence writing, and consequent sentence-after-sentence reading from the writer’s arbitrary beginning to his arbitrary ending do to illuminate the darkness in the cemetery of guarded siloes our culture has become? Illumination is not possible except to similarly limited, siloed intellects. What’s missing is connectedness, the unexpected clash of sententious language with related but brutally hostile language and images and music and competing recorded voices. Just knowing that the link is there is a threat or promise of conflict, superior and/or inferior perspectives, sensory overload. Reading an essay about the realities of fetal dismemberment is not the same as close-up photographs of babies torn to pieces and thrown on the floor (or sand) or the soul-piercing wail of a mother seeing the mutilated body of a child, anybody’s child, or the background music of a Mozart Requiem intercut with a rapper doggerelizing about ‘fucking ho’s’ and ‘crack-baby toes.’
One small example from the Punk Writers. This is a painting that reimagines Picasso’s ‘Guernica.’
You can’t see the painting except in transparency here, only the invisible links embedded in it that
lead to different perspectives on “The Winter War” in which Punk City was born. The painting is at
once itself and all the other forms and voices it leads to. New fiction in a nutshell. Click DEEPLY.
No, the interconnectedness of multimedia does not have to be forced on an audience unless it’s a necessary part of the story. It works quite well just by being there, as all those bracketed number references in Wiki entries (not ever hyperlinked btw) remind the reader that there may be some source for the written data or some dispute or some additional context. Words have become only part of the whole of the truth we pursue now that technology has made it possible for the readers or listeners to escape strict linearity, as well as the Alpha mode of reading ‘consciousness’ writers deem necessary for ”focus” on their work.
My kind of writing is the future of writing. Pursuing it has enabled me to discover and bathe in a diversity of tools, techniques, topics, and topologies of the creative act. I would not trade this or any of my life experiences for the sorry ghosts I see in the public eye.
Since hardly anyone is doing what I do, I feel the weight of time on the years (or months, days?) I have remaining to me. I want to save as much as possible of what I’ve done, the record of how I got here, and what I did with the freedom of never being told or persuaded what to write, the freedom of never having my creative work “corrected” by an editor since school days, the freedom of choosing for myself brand new forms to play with, brand new vocabularies of communication and thought, brand new perspectives on old ideas, the ignorant prevailing perspectives on those ideas I’ve now lived long enough to view as antique, obsolete, and unworthy of the respect they cling to. There’s life left in a lot of old ideas now misunderstood into the grave where we try to bury the inconvenient past.
I’m not working to save things for you, I’m sorry to report, though you’re welcome to discover and react to them on your own. (It would warm the cockles of my cold heart.) I’m making the record I intend not even for your children principally, but their children, who will be starting life in a place we can properly worry will be full of fear, darkness, and an absolute requirement for knowledge, faith, courage, curiosity, determination, and the ability to think and communicate in multiple dimensions. I want to be there for them when they start looking.
One big part of the long-term rescue effort is pdf files for topics heavy (see above) and light (click on the file page to lose the sidebar). I’m working on all that as fast as I can.
That’s all for now.
P.S. Quick Qiz. One question — Did you find something here titled “Simple Steel Helmets”? Interesting.
UPDATE. My appeal of the YouTube “Strike” I received has been denied. The dangerously hateful 16-year old video has been permanently removed.
One can only guess at who these people are and how dreary.
I got suspended for a week, but more importantly I received “Strike 2.” I was told ominously how rare and ungood (for want of a better word) ‘Strikes’ are. Chilling effect? I have more than 200 audio and video files in my “Johnny Dodge Channel” at Youtube. Can’t download them back to my computer and nowhere else to send them to. The power of monopoly. Three Strikes might be an extremely bad situation. The only good news is that they think I’m Johnny Dodge (whoever he is), whose channel is getting a couple hundred hits a month and about that many subscribers. I just won’t be posting much more stuff there, if any. Enjoy it while you can.
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