An INTERRUPT at 3 am in the morning [full stop]

 

Here’s what I posted to the ‘Confidential’ site yesterday: Catching Up

Two points. The Overload is real and probably temporary. AND… Take a look at the span of a writing career that includes the three numbered items. I am an impossibility, and I am running on fumes, out of time.

You told me in one of our email exchanges that I should ‘command’ you. I woke about an hour ago at 3 am, a place Fitzgerald claimed was “where it’s always dark night of the soul.” So I’m in a mood to command you to review the entire Confidential website in order. (Beginning here…) A huge volume of work grown steadily over nine months of a pivotal year in my own personal history. This is the 35th year after publication of The Boomer Bible, which is the same time differential George Orwell chose for his span of prognostication in 1984. Whose prognostications are closer to what the world really looked like 35 years after the writing?

Orwell died almost simultaneously with the publication of 1984. How would the world of letters have treated him during those years if he had lived? If he hadn’t had the PR armor of being a dead prophet unavailable for plaudits or punishment?

Why did I choose Malashock to be the beneficiary of my Confidential website? Because he had been involved in my attempts to solicit assistance from Lisa Schiffren, who has a very nice career going as a conservative Op-Ed columnist for respected media outlets. She is friends with Malashock and they were both friendly with the publisher-connected Adam Bellow, son of Saul Bellow the famous novelist. I was seeking help in getting a publisher (print, electronic, whatever…) for the in-progress work called Death of the Republic, written in 2021. Malashock and Schiffren both acknowledged having shared an interest in my work, to what degree I could never be sure. Malashock plays all his cards very close to the vest. But they agreed to try.

After reviewing the website as it still exists, Lisa informed me they had reviewed it and it was Bellow’s opinion that “a blog is not a book.” (Never mind Shirer’s Berlin Diary, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the Diaries of Samuel Pepys and Anne Frank, Lardner’s You Know Me Al, and the first ever novel Pamela.) Where the DOTR project ended. I made one further effort with Lisa, suggesting she should consider that I am a story she could write a book about and take credit for. I am demonstrably an archetypal Baby Boomer in every possible respect and there can be no doubt that I have written the most compelling book about a history-changing generation anyone has attempted. She responded that she was the wrong person for the job. We still exchange birthday greetings, and my FB posts still get an occasional like or comment from her.

None of which changes the fact that mine is still an important story. A glaring hole in the contemporary literary firmament, a major writer who has been completely banished from any literary/academic consideration, media attention, or public recognition  of any kind whatever. My alma maters, Mercersburg, Harvard, and Cornell do not include me as notable alumni, although Mercersburg can claim no significant literary writers but Max Eastman, Cornell has Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Pearl Buck, and who….?  Harvard is a different story, but I might be one of very few alums of the last hundred years who was not a charter member of the left-tilting liberal fraternity. Significantly, Harvard can’t point to any outcasts in the 20th Century who went their own way and paid a huge price for it.

I’m pleased with the plan we have put together, but as had occasion to look back yesterday on 102 posts as ‘Confidential’ I realized its own work of literature, a product that demonstrates an entirely different kind and level of autobiography, inclusive of but beyond what Proust achieved in his Remembrance of Things Past. 

It is NOT a print book. What is it then? It’s a website people should pay to read, just as if it were a breakthrough work of writerly innovation. Alternatively, it is a query letter to bust through the voicemail dead letter box of a literary agent of the kind who realizes that American publishing must learn how to get beyond paper and ink. Which are as obsolete as the fraudulent NY Times Bestseller List.

What’s the hook? A bunch of big questions that deserve answers. How can this be? Why isn’t this guy famous? Famous at least as J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, who are celebrated for their reclusiveness as much as anything. How could a book as big and obviously innovative and serious in its intent as The Boomer Bible have been completely ignored by The New York Times when it was published? And whether you like this guy or not, anyone worth his salt knows that he is a story somebody could make a bunchmof money taking credit for discovering after no one else has bothered to notice millions of words, thousands of graphics, four giant diary blogs, and dozens of books. 

This does not mean they’re no good. I just paid half attention to a movie in which major film producers discussed the genius of H. P. Lovecraft, who died (like his idol Poe) without being recognized as a major talent but has since become a cottage industry in the movies. Never mind that Lovecraft is controversial on matters of race, religion, and sexuality in all kinds of ways. He’s a story because he left this mountain of stuff behind without caring that nobody asked him for it or gave him seven figure advances or invited him on TV talk shows to promote his latest brainchild. 

Where are the hidden Baby Boomers? The ones unexpectedly and spectacularly counter to the counter-culture the Boomer sheep in music, movies, politics, and art of all kinds made fortunes from. 

WHO THE FUCK IS R. F. LAIRD AND WHY HAVE WE NEVER HEARD OF HIM?

The Confidential site as written and hyperlinked reaches across the vast extent of my work and connects to a total mass of work significantly larger and more diverse than anything published by Marcel Proust. (Who was also born on July 10 btw). 

My wife tried on and off for several years trying to find a literary agent willing to discuss republication of The Boomer Bible, whose rights have reverted completely to me since it was finally eliminated from the Workman Publishing catalog. Its sales of over 100,000 in the combined U.S./U.K. market are ten times what the Great Gatsby had sold at the time of Fitzgerald’s death. She never succeeded in getting through to a living human voice. Now she can’t make those calls and I avoid the phone like the plague.

If you wish to withhold the teaser of my completed death event, you can maybe get through voicemail limbo with the hint that “He’s in his mid-Seventies now and not getting any younger. He’s still working, but he is truly reclusive, and anyone who actually gets through to him personally will have a huge scoop no one else is likely to get..”

There’s nothing to say we can’t have two big websites. The Confidential-based site could be an invitation to research by aspiring younger writers, the basis for developing their own literary styles and personae.

All of this boils down to my biggest command at 5 am, the hour of crashing back to fretful dozing again: “Tell me how ‘Confidential’ can be (re)packaged and disseminated by whatever means to make me some MONEY. As soon as humanly possible. I need to be able to do more for my wife and her current future security. I need more and better computer power. I need to be able to buy more appealing food for both of us, from whatever source. I need truly effective pain medication for my wife, new eyeglasses, state-of-art hearing aids, a walk-in tub, and one of those side-saddle stairway lifts to ride her up and down the two stories of our house. 

Overload. As I said. Temporary. But it’s sapping my stamina and confidence. Which is what I can least afford of all the other deficits.

Pretty sure I saw him on this tour at the Academy of Music in Philly