An Experiment I lost track of

 

If you’re the sort who likes to cut to the chase, you can skip “The Prelude” and scroll down to “The Point… Finally.” Obviously, I think the prelude part is an important part of the story, but I have no objections if you read in reverse order. Pretend you’ll come back read what you skipped, then don’t. I’m okay with that too.

THE PRELUDE

You have to understand that everything I do or create is done on the cheap. It’s not just my Scottish blood, it’s authentic penury. I pay for Word and two websites I can’t afford to let go. The rest of my software is free, or has been, for 20-some years now. I do my video work on a GIF app, a voice recorder, and a free movie app. I do my most of my graphic ‘artwork’ in Word, with enhancements from a phalanx of free image processing apps that are no longer updatable without running afoul of the dreaded ‘in app purchases’ warning at the Apple App downloading site. All my hardware is old or out of  commission (I haven’t had a working printer in years…) The original Word 97 and HTML files for Shuteye Train 1999 are still being held hostage on my wife’s ancient Windows PC, which is no longer supported or protected by real security SW. My iPad is a reconditioned unit, perhaps four years old, also no longer supported, and my iPhone is, or has been until a few weeks ago, even older than the iPad, long since tapped out on storage and incapable of accepting the new versions of the operating system Apple keeps scheduling and then declaring ‘failed to load.’ 

Of late, age-related failures of unknown cause or fix have been creeping in. My iPad microphone is no longer capable of recording sound. The iPad touch keyboard is getting sloppier about what it displays when I hit certain keys. (My anger is usually vented with more ‘F-bombs’ than aI used to use in a year…) My iPad movie app is getting eccentric when it comes to making movies from a sequence of still images. The iPhone doesn’t have the memory to take up the slack. The delays in getting down to work in the old free apps are getting longer and trickier, since I have to keep fooling them that I’m still trying out the product before purchasing the PRO version that contains all the cool stuff you want to do.

With the exception of the keying nightmare, I have been pretty stoic about all this. This way, I know that I’m the intelligence quarterbacking my work, not some AI-based software suite on steroids that takes over after you hit the magic button. It makes me a kind of buccaneer, albeit a couch-bound one, who works like the early rappers did, grabbing samples out of the airwaves because in the old days nobody cared or knew how to stop them. What they were making was something new out of something old, which when the fine artists in museums do it is called collage and was practiced by masters like Matisse when he got too old to update the software in his brush fingers. Like the rappers, I take the position that when I use an image originated by someone else and materially change it by sampling it, editing it, and placing it in a new context, it becomes part of my work and may be illegal under our benighted copyright law but isn’t sinful. I’ve never objected to others copying my graphics, reworking them, and posting the result widely. I wish they’d do more of it. This is the kind of creative contagion we need if we are are to accomplish a long delayed leap forward over the corpse of modern and post-modern art and literature. Linking is the equivalent of the lever of Archimedes; if the lever is long enough, it can lift the world.

A little more info here about the Vennich Quest. Note the date of the post(!). A related MS here.

Even stoics can have a bad day. Or a bad year. 2024 was a bad year for me. The upcoming Presidential Election was not just politically consuming but personally traumatic. I had first become engaged in the culture vs. counterculture war at the age of 15 and had battled American decline in one arena (or theater of operations, if you will) after another ever since, always as a writer. In every costume from the poet’s bathrobe to the corporate consultant’s Brooks Brothers uniform and back again to blogger sweats and laptop, I had been writing in pursuit of the same basic mission for 55 years. Poems, short stories, novel manuscripts, technical documentation in multiple industries, marketing and advertising copy, training manuals for all education levels, videos, executive speech scripts, ghosted articles and white papers for Fortune 10-500 corporations, consulting proposals and international projects, stand-up training programs in the U.S. and Europe, an 880-page Bible, 20-some other books in print and online, multiple multi-year blogs, text and graphic satire, multimedia websites and standalone projects., and even late in the day, still some poetry. The role was always that of teacher, assisting in the job of enabling my various audiences to understand the challenges and the stakes better, to think more capably than their schooling had taught them, and taking one more step, wherever I was at the time, to hold the line against the entropy that fells all organizations if they are not renewed and reformed at key decision points. I quit the corporate world when I realized my efforts had made no real difference, all changes for the better lost in short order. When I traded the gray suit for the impoverished garb of the unwelcome curmudgeon. I was personally more content, but my country was dying.

Where aI was languishing at a crisis level in 2024. If there was a Biden re-election (or fourth Obama term as I thought of it, the country I had been born into and fought for all my life would cease to exist. So would the under-the-Radar existence that had protected my heretical writings for so many years. With MAGA slain, my little fish in a big pond status wouldn’t last. Just as the Biden FBI was arresting suspected conservatives who had just been in DC on Jan 6 and arresting, convicting, and imprisoning old ladies who had committed the crime of praying outside abortion clinics, there would no longer be anyone too small to pursue and hunts down and punish. Already accidentally/deliberately impoverished as the ne’er-do-well subversive of the UniParty, I — and more importantly, my wife — would likely become fixed-income fatalities of the next round of Bidenomics or targets of the black SUVs in our driveway at three in the morning one day in the near future. 

I kept writing, as I have always done, but worse than the thought of death or imprisonment for an old man is the prospect of knowing that your whole life’s mission has been in vain. My hardware and software were dying faster than I was. In a new censorship-obsessed totalitarian regime, my works would disappear, and my oft-repeated assertion that I was writing for those who would come after were toast. And whatever I was writing to fend off the disaster of a BidenKamala/Obama (Kamalama?) victory, I did not believe that Trump would (be allowed to) win the election, especially after two assassination attempts.

Then two things happened in swift succession. Trump won. My wife woke at 2:30 am on Election Day to tell me the impossible comeback had succeeded. In one night, not weeks of vote wrangling and media lying.

It took days for it to sink in. Then, just as I was feeling alive again and hopeful, my iPhone stopped working. If unplugged for a moment, it immediately defaulted to claiming it had less than 2 percent of a charge. Then, after being plugged in again, it admitted it was 100 percent charged and then changed its mind when you tried to do anything with it. In other words it was dead and not provably a battery problem. Something else. Something mysterious.

The next day my wife took the phone (over my self-pitying defeatism) to the nearest tech center of our Wi-Fi vendor to see what could be done. She returned home several hours later with a brand new iPhone containing (almost) all my software and files. It had ten times the disk capacity of the old one, a bigger chassis and screen, and enough heft to feel like a miniature iPad. 

Who knew? This new machine is the most powerful computer I have ever owned or worked on. I wrote my first computer program at the age of 21 on an IBM 360-Series mainframe. You had to go to the computer to use it, sit down inside the huge climate-controlled room it lived in, enter the code on punchcards, and wait for them to be fed into the card reader before receiving an 18” by 12” printout in blocky computer type. My new iPhone is ???-times the power and capability of that multimillion dollar mainframe. It’s taken me a while to figure out what all it can do. My old phone had been missing years of IOS updates, just as my iPad is starting to now, so the new gear is an adventure for both the devices I use together on certain kinds of projects, as well as for the old man at the wheel.

THE POINT… FINALLY

Actually, I’m still learning what both hardware and software have been up to in my recent “wilderness years.” For example, the reason for this post is an ebook I thought had been an experimental failure withdrawn shortly after I realized the experiment had produced an unusable disaster. 

I’ve been poking around on the new iPhone and I discovered an app icon I hadn’t clicked on in practically forever. It showed me a few examples of multiple ebooks and documents listed under my name. Some were files I did not know had ever been successfully rendered in PDF format. I’d tried and failed to do my own PDF versions of these files myself. What were they doing here at this link?

Then I saw a link to a book cover I remembered, the failed experiment called “The Glossary.” As part of a larger project called Shuteye Nation, The Glossary was a component unit heavily hyperlinked within itself and to other components of the larger work. The experiment was to determine if the ebook software could execute hyperlinks and what it would do if the linked item(s) were not present. What it did was go haywire. The internal links worked fine, but the whole file spazzed when it couldn’t find a link outside the Glossary. Well, okay then. I thought my invaluable ebook formatter and I had agreed to pull The Glossary from the product line. 

When I clicked the link on my new phone, there it was, beautifully formatted, with all links highlighted. And amazingly enough, all the links seemed to work. In other words, all of the project called Shuteye Nation was available on a link-to-link basis, the way it worked originally online before that vendor shut it down along with the entire brand of websites it owned and no longer wanted to support.

I’d been thinking I had to rebuild the website containing all these documents from scratch in an altogether different web creation environment. Which I’ve begun but am still a long way from completing. So, to demonstrate that what aI said about sharing my work is the truth, I’m giving you the entrée to a functioning hyperlinked world called Shuteye Nation right here.

Missing context of an organized, unified website is hinted at in the promotional video that led off the old site. It’s a minute long in a trailer format:

And here’s the ebook to play with. Generally speaking, you’ll discover units outside The Glossary by clicking on hyperlinks, which will take you to a dozen or more different files with different kinds of content, including op-ed columns, national magazines, an assortment of Who’s Who files, two illustrated gazetteers with voluminous collateral materials of their own, and even a few locations where these documents can be accessed under their own names. Yes, it’s kind of a backhanded, inside-out approach to experiencing a work of writing, but it demonstrates better than any other format how links form trains of thought and refine themselves by association; for example, the other components of Shuteye Nation link to back to The Glossary, defining words in their own text by connecting to the Glossary’s definition via a ‘degree’ sign (i.e., tiny little circle generally used to indicate temperature). You can click to the Glossary, read the definition and backspace to where you were. Easy lookup.

In fact, that’s how you have to navigate here. The ebook provider thinks it’s only providing you with a couple sample pages. The whole rest of the Glossary and the other SN units is here though, a functioning demonstration of my conviction that all writing by any writer is holographic in nature. The whole opus is always present, even in the shortest of works. Specifically, precisely, it is all present here. You can only move by finding a useful link on the page you’re on. Ironically, the Glossary links are the most useful means of not getting stranded anywhere inside one document. When not in The Glossary, find a word with the ‘degree’ superscript, click it, and presto, you’re back in the Y2000 lexicon. Conversely, to escape the Glossary, find a hyperlinked proper name and click your way to some Who’s Who. (The best proper noun you’ll find in the sample is “Jang Zemang,” dictator of China (haha). His link will actually include a list of clickable file titles (TA DA… Freedom!) I don’t know when or how this SW update by the vendor turned a sample into a whole book, but it did. Play with it at your leisure. You’ll discover a lot of things that were knowable in Y2000, though few did know those things, such as the existence of the UniParty; click on ‘Democratics’ and ‘Republians” for proof. Click all over the place and have fun.

You’ll find you can use the orientation of your device to see two pages at once or just one. Devices differ, so play with it until you discover how moving around works best for you. Here’s your jumping-off place:

I’m feeling better these days. More hopeful and energetic. Time for another lap around the course.

BACKUP LINK, JUST IN CASE, IF YOU WANT TO COPY AND SHARE IT (FOR FREE ONLY):

The Glossary Online.