How’s this for the premise of an Umbrella Website available for a modest subscription fee?

As we work to do the labor-intensive job of compiling and finalizing new books on Kindle and Amazon, I find myself becoming convinced that the design of a large and continuously expanded web site is paramount. I know I’ve already mentioned a couple of ideas aimed at this purpose, but I have a new idea that’s a bit more aggressive and, hopefully, more fun and provocative.

The title is some variation on this:

The Largest Literary Hoax in History:

The R. F. Laird Conspiracy

The premise is a reversal of fictions. The punk writers of South Street and beyond are a real historical event meticulously covered up by smuggling their works into print and on the Internet by perpetuation of the myth they were created by a single author who does not exist.

Participants in the conspiracy number at least in the hundreds, and possibly thousands of lesser accomplices, in the United States and Western Europe. The secrecy has been maintained for almost 50 years by the sheer size of the endeavor. There is a nucleus of conspirators, of course, who have played complementary but seemingly antagonistic roles designed to further complicate perceptions of reality among a very diverse audience. 

The reason it is possible to begin uncovering the truth of a very long chain of events is that the world is finally coming to terms with the technology that made the utter reversal of fact and fiction possible, which is quantum computing in its most recent guise as Artificial Intelligence. There is now a language in which remarkable, supposedly impossible, alterations and even branchings of reality itself can be identified, analyzed, and understood by the larger audience which has been kept deliberately in the dark.

The beginnings of this saga of deception go all the way back to the 1960s, when a small skunkworks of renegade computer scientists started experimenting with the application of quantum mechanics to computer technology. The names and personal histories of the prime movers in this group are lost to history (facilitated by artful fictionalizations), but one or two of them almost emerged into the light of day because of their specific roles in creating a beta-test community of users in a murky artistic neighborhood located in the environs of Philadelphia’s historic South Street.

The two men we know about survive only as apocryphal names. Percy Gale and Tod Mercado, who between them endowed a handful of 1970s punk rockers to become literary writers virtually overnight. How can we be sure? A substantial quantity of their work survives in bits and pieces across the Internet and in used book stores. Their most famous work, a massive, community-written tome called The Boomer Bible was actually published by an eccentric American book publisher in one of the most unlikely over-the-transom sales in American history. 

This is where the persona of one R. F. Laird enters the picture. Due to another unbelievably well concealed event, it is presently impossible to prove that he ever existed at all. The Boomer Bible had two prefaces, both suggesting that Laird was the author only by the act of submitting the manuscript. 

For now, the details of The Boomer Bible’s publishing history are not as important as some standout anomalies in what purports to be the literary career of R. F. Laird.

What we are asked to believe is true:

The first major review of The Boomer Bible outside of New York City was in the San Francisco Chronicle, which called it, “the oddest, darkest, smartest, funniest, most innovative book to come along in years.” Yet the New York Times and the New York Review of Books have never reviewed it. Not then or ever. Best guess? They have no one competent to sit in judgment of a writer so adept in so many different genres and disciplines. Would you undertake to condescend to Ambrose Bierce or Evelyn Waugh or Samuel Johnson? Think about it. 

In the years since, works with an express or implied byline of R. F. Laird have included more than 20 self-published books of fiction, poetry, cultural and political commentary, and scathing satire; companion web publications called Shuteye Town 1999 and Shuteye Nation as large in scope and innovation, written and conceptual, as The Boomer Bible; the only known book-length satire of American feminism, The Naked Woman, including a detailed takedown of the fabled Turing Test; four major diary blogsites comprising more than 3500 posts averaging 600 to 1200 words apiece, for a conservatively guesstimated total of 3++ million words and well over 5,000 custom graphics; more than 400 video/audio files available in four different channels on YouTube and Rumble; and approximately 15,000 posts on Facebook under the name Robert Laird. His subject matter has included every conceivable topic from movies and popular music to theology, politics, race, gender, science (Evolution to IQ testing to Climate Change to Artificial Intelligence), and abundant humor and satire. Various writings also suggest that he also enjoyed a lengthy career as a management consultant with expertise in computer systems, Just in Time Manufacturing, corporate globalization and Continuous Improvement processes, in addition to a dashing earlier career as New Jersey motorhead with close call credentials far beyond Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” facade. It’s also claimed that he was the President a Harvard Final Club and graduated from that institution in three years at the age of 19.

Apologies for the length of all that, but it’s the biggest half of the R. F. Laird problem. It’s just too much and too diverse for one writer to have produced in a literary life, however defined. What’s the other half of the problem? In all those years, no one representing the so-called literary world has ever published an interview with R. F. Laird or even a failed attempt to do so. 

The sheer quantitative scale of his creative output is just too gigantic to ignore. And given that so much of it is so contrarian, it seems astonishing that self-appointed arbiters of cultural merit like The New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Vanity Fair magazines would not have featured him for the purpose of demolishing his hubris and presumption. Unless they are either 1) too intimidated by his under-the-radar confidence, or 2) complicit in the awareness that his impossibility as a person is a convenient cover for very secret entities with their own ambitious agendas. Moreover, it’s an easily verifiable fact that none of the educational institutions he attended have ever reported personal updates about him or mentioned him at all as one of their notable alumni, which is gross neglect of the author of The Boomer Bible. If he is that…

Why a small group of interested parties have decided to build this website and share what we find as we find it about the why’s and wherefore’s of the mysterious R. F. Laird. We have reason to believe, but still no proof, that the quantum computer technology mentioned above actually precipitated a split in conscious reality back in the Year 2,000, and that no information about living persons before that year can be verified as factual in any respect. Why we hypothesize that the R. F. Laird who cites biographical dates, locations, and events from the 1950s through the current year are, in our universe, pure fiction. This is bolstered by the demonstrable fact that he has not been seen in person by any reliable witness in more than a dozen years. He owns no property, belongs to no organizations, has no verifiable clients for his writing or other sources of income. 

How can this be? We intend to find out. We will collect what we can of his works, some of which are now archived in Internet vaults or otherwise hard to access. We’ll dole them out in dribs and drabs as they become topical again, which they seem regularly to do, and we will also attempt to model the consciousness of R. F. Laird (real, fictional, whatever) here, so that he can be spoken with, interviewed, debated, just plain interacted with as none of the literary luminaries of our time has ever had to balls to do.

Sound like fun? A reason to keep coming back? We think so.