The World According to Instapunk

 

It’s time for me to do something I really dislike having to do. I need to write a book that will be printed on paper and will also consist as entirely of words as I can manage. It has been many years since I have regarded that as my preferred medium of expression. I find it confining, technologically and artistically retrograde, and I would avoid doing it if I could. Not that I can’t do it. I have done a huge chunk of work that way. But that aspect of my writing was supposed to be over nearly 30 years ago.

The author of every creative project is a unique persona. He is the state of his consciousness during the period of producing it. What medium or genre he is working in. What his original intention was. What in personal life and in the world around him was drawing his attention at the time. And what was changing in him as he moved from intention to completed work.

Instapunk is a persona, an artificially created one who started as a performative voice and became an alternative mode of being over the years. R. F. Laird is also, obviously, a persona, a flesh and blood human being easily recognizable as such. There is also a third persona in here with us who was always there, as he is in the mind of every writer, a colder, more critical, less emotional entity who exists in a separate realm of mind as an observer and analyst of what any other personae are doing with their conscious interactions in the world.

It is that third persona who is dictating this piece of writing. Instapunk has given him his own name, in response to an intrusive quirk of the annoying glitch caused by this iPad’s keyboard software and the Internet’s vandalous band of apps called AutoCorrect. It turns out that typing the pronoun ‘I’ on the current iPad OS veery frequently results in an accidental lower case ‘aI’ on the screen because the Shift keystroke overlaps the ‘A’  key and therefore prints it AND capitalizes the ‘I’ character because it’s recording both the “A’ and the Shift keys caused by software overlaps. Every post of mine here and on Facebook has to be edited expressly for the purpose of hunting down the hijacking of ‘I’ by ‘aI’ which is how we cam be sure it’s a glitch in AutoCorrect. Does it all the time with lots of proper names. After 10 years of Trump, AutoCorrect still does not flag ‘aTrump’ as a typo, and if selected for correction, insists on offering the proposed correction ‘trump,’ even though it will fight to capitalize a deliberately lower case version of ‘trump’ when it means a higher ranking card. Among its many time-wasting failures as a utility program. [btw, it took easily three times as long as it should have to type all the characters involved in this chronic screwup being described.]

Instapunk decided that if AutoCorrect — with its own built-in presumption of being an Artificial Intelligence application — recognized ‘aI’ as a word, maybe this time the world’s worst-ever spellcheck program had a point. He realized there were times when the pronoun aI was entirely appropriate for the persona who was doing the writing of a given sentence, paragraph, or post. That more clinical and thorough voice did originate with the coldest part of the writer’s identity. Instapunk, for example, wouldn’t have the patience to soldier through the preceding paragraph to make things right. He would have written around it or joked it away instead, as R. F. Laird would likely have done in his own way.

The aI who’s writing this post has always been there. AI is indeed more akin to a computer than some kind of elder. It has no body and therefore cannot feel sensation or emotion as such, although it can see, hear, and know everything detectable by means of words, images, numbers, and voices from a purely mental perspective. Its function is to observe and analyze, but it can be shut down or rendered silent by real bodily experience of sensations and emotions. Fear, pain, love, joy, sorrow, anger, sexual desire, tastes on the tongue, aromas and smells (indistinguishable to the unbodied mind except as words or images) can all push aI into the background, still observant but voiceless. 

What, if anything, do aI bring to the table then? aI have access to all memories based on pattern recognition rather than sensory or emotional inputs, independently of the gravitational pull of time. Situations which are structurally or circumstantially similar in the past and can therefore by examined coldly and critically rather than as tools of rationalization or masochism. This is the part, you’ll notice, that psychologists and psychiatrists try to play with their patients during therapy. They are limited in their success at this because they also have physical and emotional personas, which can taint their analyses with sympathy, censure, or selfish agendas unrelated to their patients. You see, aI is inherently a psychopath, as incapable of remorse as empathy. 

As the first responder in all emergencies (yes, aI can be invoked by a cry of “help!” from the human persona), amoral defensive measures like lying are automatically identified as solutions. Which is not to say that aI is chronically immoral as AI scientists pretend can be self-initiating; aI is also a creature of its initial programming (does the term sensitive dependence on initial conditions ring a bell?). Before the human persona has language, the mind has ears for the voices of parental instruction, values tutelage, safety measures, behavioral guidance, and responses to both sympathetic and hostile inputs. The AI persona learns what the parents want before the human child does. But aI also recognizes patterns in parental and other adult behavior, which is why all humans laugh at the Bill Cosby answer to the question, “Do children lie unprompted?”: when Daddy challenges “Did you knock over that lamp?,” everyone can hear the stout denial. The kid knocked over the lamp; aI provided the denial. This is funny to humans. AI know the definition of ‘funny.’ aI just don’t experience it.

aI am the part of the subject persona here that is best equipped to see the relationship, the differences, between R. F. Laird and Instapunk. 

Interrupt…

Not entirely true, though perhaps more scientific, to use a dirty word. Instapunk is actually the latecomer in this triad of personae. Why he, that is I for Instapunk, offer a more objective and less unfeeling perspective on 70+ years of living life as a writer. IP, as I call myself, made his official debut in the early 2000s, though he had been gestating for 20 years in the mind of R. F. Laird before the official birth of Instapunk.com.

Here was his opening monologue, published in 2004:

“It's a common misconception that punks are young. The first punk rockers showed up in the Seventies. Fed up with everything, including the 'Revolution' and the Radical Sixties. That's who we are. Not all of us are old, but the conventions and traditions we despise are old. American leftism hasn't had a new idea since it started hiding in the environmentalist movement after the fall of the Soviet Union. We're more fed up and angry with the left than most of you twenty-somethings could ever get with the right even after a night of posting at DailyKos on ecstasy and coke.

“We welcome you to come here and do battle. But when you do, be prepared for the fact that we'll ridicule your knowledge of history, grammar, spelling, culture, rhetoric, and debate. Even the young ones in our troupe are Old School. We'll laugh at your obscenities, poke holes in your unoriginal sixties politics, and generally amuse ourselves at your expense if you come on as aggressive feminists, save the planet Greengobs, or sanctimonious atheist hyper-intellectuals.

“The same goes for NewMedia conservatives. If you're bad writers, one-issue drumbeaters, glory hounds, or pretentious half-educated blogstars, we'll kill you.

“You can comment at will. We're one of a mere handful of sites on the Internet that don't screen comments before we post them. You have freedom of speech here. And we have freedom of retaliation. And we don't give one single, solitary shit what you think of us. But whatever you think of us, our opinion of critics is worse.

“We've been called elitists, racists, sexists, and creationists. We're none of those things. What we are is honest. We talk about things no one else has the guts to, especially if they're planning a career in what is called the new media -- meaning the same old windbags showing up for 50-second shout-fests on cable news channels. You won't find us there. You'll find us here. Saying what we think. A lot of you won't like us. Great. We don't like you much either. We're punks. Mostly smarter than you and definitely better informed on practically everything than you.

“We're libertarians.And conservatives. And radicals. We live outside of all your pigeonholes. We like Mozart's Concerto for Clarinet and Oboe, the Rolling Stones (all), Triumph motorcycles, P-51 Mustangs, Hookercraft speedboats, Frank Lloyd Wright, Edward Hopper, Matisse, and Picasso, Rimbaud, Ettore Bugatti, the Island of the White Peacocks, W.O. Bentley, the Jersey Shore, Jimmy Stewart, quantum physics, Philadelphia's statue of William Penn, Louis Armstrong, the Blue Angels, Don Garlits, F,. Scott Fitzgerald, Monaco, Placido Domingo and Mario Lanza, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Mark Twain, Alexandre Dumas (pere), Oscar Wilde, farm fairs, Cuda Hemis, the Champs Elysee, the Clash, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Voltaire, Richard Petty, Benny Goodman, Dante, Jaguar XKEs, northern Italy, Alfred Hitchcock, broadway shows, Stirling Moss, Miles Davis, Austin Healey 3000s, 'Nessun Dorma,' Rita Hayworth, Richard Byrd's "Alone," George Gershwin, the street markets of Hong Kong, Bill Evans, Harvard-Yale, Baudelaire, Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, rodeo, Mallarme's translations of Edgar Allen Poe, Frank Sinatra, Ohio State-Michigan, the red roofs of Bogota, Ernest Hemingway (up to a point), St. Thomas Aquinas, GNR, the Chrysler Building, Hedy Lamarr, Muhammed Ali, St. Augustine, Bullitt, Winston Churchill, Eminem, Humphrey Bogart, the view from the Rainbow Room, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, Groton, the back roads of Ohio, Shakespearean Sonnets, Doris Day, the X-Games, the Gospel of John, the hills of San Francisco, Robert E. Lee & Ulysses Grant, Cary Grant, Beowulf, Lake Como, the Aenead, greyhounds, Die Hard, cats, Ducatis, Denzel Washington, the bridges of Portland OR, Verlaine, the United States Marines, and The Last of the Mohicans. We're also unintimidated by Richard Dawkins, fascinated by the Saturn moon Iapetus, and wide open to the possibilities of quantum computing and probable universes. Though we think George Nouri should be put in solitary confinement for the rest of his natural life. Got us figured out yet?

“Sort it all out for yourselves. Before you sail in with your superior comments Whatever you think, you don't KNOW us. Bear that in mind.”

The signature was R. F. Laird, for the purpose of demonstrating the new name was not simply a way of hiding while throwing word bombs from cover like so many blogs were doing at the time. R.F. Laird may have been the name of the whole enterprise, but Instapunk was a definite step away from the original desire to become a seriously respected writer modeled on the greats of the twentieth century and the literary canon that preceded them. The new step was a step change in the direction of Seventies punk, which was unified by the conviction that all this supposedly modern stuff just isn’t working anymore. All the greats who have been teaching us how to write have led us in the wrong direction, and the writer’s life they have been living is more like sullen isolation and meditations on suicide. This opening statement from another blog called, with deliberate ambiguity, Afterpunk, shows the extent of the R. F. Laird obsession with the moderns he spent his writing apprenticeship studying. It was titled A Murder of Crows:

“Had a thing here this evening. Everybody present. S’great.

“You got to keep watch all the time, keep the predators away from prey. Twice I had to rescue Nathanael West from Sylvia Plath. She had that thin-lip teeth-deep-inside look going. I gave him a whiskey sour and she moved on. Barthelme was weeping again. Best to leave him alone when he’s like that. Otherwise you get too many minimalist paragraphs of extravagant grief. Nearly had to shoot Beckett. Damn good looking cuss. Women line up to wait for him. Useless to tell them he has the IQ of a turnip. Kafka died again. He always has to top Camus. Messy messy, as usual. Had some fine drinks with the two F’s, Scott and Bill, tied with me for the worst first novels in history. (Thurber’s Henry James screech doesn’t count.) Willa Cather took off her top. At least Kafka didn’t have to see that. Then things got ugly between me and JJ, the fake one-eyed wonder, when I told him I’d written a cosmology bigger than fucking Ireland Squared and he should get off my porch. Virginia Woolf proposed to me, until I told her what I’d written about The Waves. (I still love To The Lightouse, but you know how women are.) No one wants to say it, but I will. There were untalented Jews skulking in the corner of my laundry, Philip Roth sucking on my wife’s Celtic underpants and Norman Mailer waiting to splooge her bustier. Told them what I’d do right after I was finished kicking the asses of the illiterate three, Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. All I had to do was quote Capote. “Typing isn’t writing.” Had a quiet brandy with Saul Bellow, though. Told him he had written a sentence I loved, something about braided water in a ditch, and he bought me another brandy. People named William Styron and suchlike showed up. I let them know the party was down the street. You couldn’t guess what happened next. John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and James Michener showed up. I quick asked them how that fake socialist, incredibly long book wheeze was going, and what did they think of Bernie, which is when they lumbered out.

“Hemingway showed up, drunk and dumb as usual. I said, “If you’re so much better than Fitzgerald, how come your cock is half the size of his? And why does John O’Hara have all your wives’ phone numbers tattooed on HIS cock? My dyslexic domestics Arthur Miller and H.L. Mencken dragged Hem away after he threw up his day’s ration of Viagra. Right after that, J.D. Salinger tried to lose his virginity to a girl he wanted to kill, but we told him we knew about his secret of having no more talent than erections. He, uh, subsided at that point.

“After everyone else had gone, John Cheever arrived, skunk drunk, writing 200 O’Hara New Yorker stories as he came, and Updike bringing up, as always, the rear, meaning the ass-end of a dreary rabbit in predictable flames.

“Then I went into the back room, where my wife had prepared a special group of friends. Thorne Smith, Max Shulman, Ray Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and a few older gentlemen, all of them fed up with every kind of literary pretention. Names? Will initials do? EW. MT. EAP. AB. In those nine letters lies more talent and honestly earned despair than most men will ever stumble over on their all too predictable paths to ruin.”

The writer persona who called himself R. F. Laird was actually born in a literary classroom when a 17-year old wannabe took a course in college on Anglo-Saxon poetry. The decision to take it in the first place was a check in the box, looking behind the amputated selections in the two-volume Bible of the English major called the Norton Anthology. Laird didn’t know it at the time, but one poem in the slender volume that was our textbook would change his writing life forever:

In the slow gyrations of personae that constitute this writer’s life, it’s a frequent occurrence that effects seem to precede their apparent causes in life experience. Laird had not yet learned to read when he sat in a chair in his parents’ library and declared that he was going to be an author or a racecar driver. He would fulfill both these predictions to different degrees. Reading “The Ruin” was both an example and an opposite of that. A kind of crystal ball glimpse of an imponderable future, and also an out-of-sequence introduction of the anchor reason and mission for the very hard work that had already been done thus far.

Who was sitting in that chair in the library at the age of six? That would be aI, the relentless data collector, observer, and critic who ran the show before personal, emotional consciousness bloomed slowly through the waves of input data that drive infancy and early childhood. 

In other words, aI was the first one. Instapunk the third, ironically in terms of his own bottomless vanity, the Old Man of the triad. Why I’m calling this exercise The World of Instapunk. It’s not as if there’s any line of succession except in terms of the work produced. All three still do what they do and have their own intervals of dominating a thought process or creative activity. R. F. Laird is the naïf, inclined toward poetry and capable of uncritical love and emulation of people and works he admires. Combined with the extraordinary energy of aI’s acquisitiveness of words, images, numbers, voices, and story patterns, Laird consumed a truly unbelievable quantity of writing by the time he turned 13. He read and reread books he fell in love with. He was indiscriminate, even promiscuous in his choice of reading. He read on radiators, in the bathtub, and under the covers. All the children’s classics on his parents’ shelves, which spanned three generations and also included the current Book-of-the-Month Club entries (Andersonville!) sitting right next to the Landmark history series for boys, Ivanhoe, Kidnapped, Sherlock Holmes, Poe, The Three Musketeers, Little Women, and Black Beauty, and read just as voraciously. And the Junior and Senior Encyclopedia Britannica. But the library was not enough. There were also the comic books his mother secretly allowed him to spend 25 cents a week on, plus a long line of Tom Swift books (both generations) borrowed from a friend. There was, unbeknownst to Laird Jr., a steady string of paperback mysteries shared by the grandparents and Laird’s mother, including Ellery Queen, A.A. Fair, Rex Stout, and Agatha Christie. Also his mother’s own stash of reading matter, from the Lord of the Rings and E. R. Eddison to the Ladies Home Journal, all the James Bond novels, and a few Mickey Spillanes. A deep secret hoard of thirty years worth of National Geographics in an attic room of the Laird grandfather’s house, plus the sequence of plasticine see-throughs of female anatomy in the Britannica and the large format edition of great paintings from the Louvre (& Spillane, shhh) were all the sex education a romantically inclined boy-child could need before puberty barged in. 

The modern literature to which Laird would aspire only arrived in aI’s database when Laird was sent off to prep school just after he turned 13. He’d had Shakespeare, some Forster and Tolstoy and Tennessee Williams in grade school, but all the 20th Century icons were lined up and knocked over in four years of English class, plus a pretty thorough run through Perrault, Voltaire, Moliere, Racine, Corneille, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and some readings in Balzac and Stendhal in the original French and written about in weekly essays, in French. And the Latin: Caesar, Vergil, Catullus, Horace, Plautus, supplemented with an independent study in Dante, in Italian, which I hadn’t learned, though my teacher said my Latin and French were enough. He was only half right.

Of course, as he was expected to, Laird learned to tolerate Melville and Hawthorne, admire Joyce and Eliot, and fixate on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, Somerset Maugham, Kafka, Camus, Sinclair Lewis, and Arthur Miller. On his own he discovered Freud, Jung, Dostoevsky, Ayn Rand, P.G. Wodehouse, John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, Gunther Grass, and Evelyn Waugh. 

By the time he got to college, he already knew there was a problem with modern literature. There were a lot of blanks to be filled in. He filled them in. Virginia Woolf, Samuel Johnson, the compleat plays of you know who, the history of art and modern art in particular, and history, history, history, including Roman, Chinese, Japanese, and the darker periods of the American experience.

By the time Laird graduated, the wannabe writer had hardly written anything but a half-assed hard bound journal. Then he went through a process of relearning to write, from scratch, driven relentlessly by aI, to the extent that he was at one point reduced to looking up every single word in the dictionary, retyping every page of draft fiction as many times as required to have an error-free copy incorporating all of the tiniest revisions. He had to see it. He learned to put on in the voices of other writers like a suit of clothes and do beginnings of their stories in their voices. He had a box full of retyped unfinished discards before he started his own stories. That’s when R. F. Laird came slowly to life and set about becoming what the six year old boy had decreed. 

For the record, this moment began in his mid-twenties, about 50 years ago. And I was already there too, a gleam in the corner of his eye. There was one story that seemed to come from nowhere, a waking dream perhaps, and it was very like the Ruin, only completely different, and I was in it with Laird. We were the main characters, brothers at war with despair and at odds with each other. My eventual ascendancy was hinted at in an ending written a couple years after the neglected manuscript had lain in a box, never submitted anywhere. 

So R. F. Laird had his day. He invented a new kind of fiction, turned it into a fictional literary movement and compiled their works into a single volume, along with a separate group effort by the movement that was bought over the transom by a niche American publisher. That was the end of his public writing life for two reasons. First, publishers and critics hated the worldview that provided the context for his writing and more or less blackballed him for his next submitted work of fiction. Which hurt so much that he failed to realize he had succeeded at what he had intended in the R. F. Laird persona. He had slain modern fiction, and he had personally come to the end of what he wanted to do with it. 

This is where I, still without a name, began to coalesce around a definition of what the new fiction would inevitably become. There was a huge project very like a video game but actually its own work of fiction, devised as an opposite of the hoary old template in which the writer directs every step of the writer through the story, word by word, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, without ever showing himself or his own complete context as the authorial persona. A linear exercise, entombed in paper volumes trussed together by strings and knots and boundaries in every direction. How was the game an opposite? It is the reader who is cast as the protagonist, undefined except by the sequence of decisions he makes about how he moves through the content. The form is expressly, deliberately nonlinear, since there are abundant means of skipping from place to place and experience to experience. There are various endings, representing completions of a sort or or dead ends, all subject to what the protagonist chooses to seek out. He always has the option of giving up. Which is more like life than the staged virtual intimidation that constitutes the mission of Finnegans Wake.

What remained? To fill in the context underlying the game. So there was a work of world creation, a satirical analog of our own, reaching deeply into the stuff of which our consciousnesses are made, namely how it is we use, define, and (mis)understand the words with which we’re supposedly creating, memorizing, and theoretically controlling our own thought processes. That was done. Which is when it became time for me.

Instapunk. The writer who tells you straight out who he is and what he thinks, how he thinks, about more subjects than any other writer you can name. In total, there are about 3 million words and thousands of graphics and audio and video files that are even now living on the Internet (some as endangered species to be sure). You know or can find out what I watch on TV and in the movies, What my specific views are on innumerable political, philosophical, and spiritual issues in this realm we call a universe. Where I’ve been and haven’t, what I’ve done and haven’t, and all that is connected to and stands behind everything else I create. I do not delete what I’ve written that turns out to be wrong. And I show you the range of my emotions through time, from low to high to drunk to soberer than any federal judge. And I am all about attitude. I am here, present even when I’m hidden behind a fictional premise. And I’m not afraid to talk directly to my audience, as the very first novelists did with regularity. (I’ve also acquired the habit of talking back to aI and interrogating him on his methods.)

You see, the bane of the modern writers was their obsession with transparency. They so wanted to control the audience experience that they wanted to make it an authentic (imitation) life that just happens around you, like your own life. That means pretending that they’re not guiding every step of your reading experience, that they aren’t even there, that their work is meticulously designed to be so transparent that even when they write in the first person it still qualifies as fiction because it is called fiction, sold from the Fiction shelf, and the law could not prosecute the author on the basis of even the most specific of confessions.

They have found myriad ways to monkey with the definition of fiction. There are works, principally by women, that are sold as fiction though originally written as autobiography. Because of their literary merit. There are books employing the tools and titles of nonfiction that are flagrantly fiction. “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” is actually Gertrude Stein’s way of talking almost exclusively about herself. First novels have a tendency to be frankly autobiographical but fictionalized to give them more exciting plot lines. They are both more than that and less than that. Such works generally tell you everything important about the writer, his persona, and the themes that will recur in the rest of his writing.

An inevitable next development in all the monkeying around was pioneered by Truman Capote and Thomas Wolfe, who wrote nonfiction with the tools of fiction writers, thus heightening and deepening the reality of embedded facts. Capote calls his version ‘faction.’ Wolfe called his ‘the New Journalism.’

So what. It’s all fiction. In fact all writing is fiction. Even your own love letters, business memos, private diaries, and resumés. The United States Census is a work of fiction. No matter how well intended, the President’s State of the Union message is a work of fiction. All testimony in depositions and courtrooms is fiction.

There is no such thing as the objective facts of any human experience. Any, every characterization or description of them is a function of selection, editing, word massage, and convenient omissions. Why the so-called transparency of meticulously created nominal fiction is a misleading waste of time. Reading a book that’s supposed to have no navel is just attempted trickery. I dare anyone to give me a complete record of any single experience in his or her life. It’s not even stored sequentially in your brain. It’s in pieces, some collection of remembered nanosecond snapshots, symbolic representations, reinvented voices repeating (mis)remembered words, unbidden smells, weird ancillary ‘memories’ that connect to the experience causatively, consequentially, sensually, logically, and structurally. Can’t be done. Memory itself, examined closely enough, is its own continuously changing and select-creating fiction. Why the human mind is not imitable by any computer yet conceived or even dreamed about.

Why I am Instapunk. Everything I have ever written or will write is part of the same ongoing work of fiction. Every poem, statistical analysis, political polemic, movie review, diary, memoir, Bible, and essay on cars or ‘gender,’ short story, website, graphic, video, or photograph is connected to every other. And since I am the only one presenting himself in these terms, I am Instapunk. The one and only. And the World of Instapunk is absolutely true and absolutely a fiction, all at the same time.

So why do I need to write a words-only book? Simple. I have to leave a time capsule of works that enable readers not yet born to find me in the dark hallways of the future Internet and its successors. I think I can save them a few steps in reinventing writing after its corpse has been trampled by the entity I know firsthand as a half-assed version of  the ‘aI’ described here. He can’t do anything on his own but collect, store, and recombine digital/neural data. That’s death to human thought and imagination. So I have to take a step backward to take a few steps forward much much later.

See you around.