The Architectural Design and Writing

 

Free at Kindle if you’re a member

The fictional concept of a punk writing movement was a deliberate assault on the modern writing establishment. The Boomer Bible — so often dismissed by conventional critics as “simple-minded” because of its colloquial, oral diction — was a prolonged horselaugh at the precious princes of contemporary literature. Some few knew what it was and what it meant. The New York Times book editor told my naïve publicist that the Times would never review the book, even though it had already been featured as the standout event at that year’s book fair in the Javits Center, New York, NY. My publisher had told me to stay away from that annual gala because it’s so crushing for first time writers to see how many books there are and how cruel the book business is. So I went anyway and got interviewed by a Wall Street Journal reporter who had recognized at once the seditious nature of The Boomer Bible. Then I was a feature story in a major New York newspaper, a paper “of record” as they like to label themselves. Why my publisher printed 88,000 he hadn’t the slightest how to promote and sell. It took 30 years, but they sold them all.

This book is not about that or my fifteen minutes of fame, the book tour, the TV and radio interviews from Philly to San Francisco. No. It’s about the incredible ambition and complexity of The Boomer Bible’s design. Yeah. Kind of a term paper a serious English major would write. Guilty as charged. I wanted it on the record that the book was designed from the outset as a ‘whole,’ not as a stream of consciousness episode of verbal diarrhea, which is what fiction became in the 20th century.

The Boomer Bible is definably, quantitatively a whole in five quite independent schemes. It’s an incarnation of a King James Bible, it’s a complete Tarot Deck, it’s an homage to Dante’s divine mathematics, it’s a five-layered fractal with holographic properties, and it’s a history of western civilization from its birth to its end, compleat.

This book about The Boomer Bible is not complete. About half of it got lost to my first total Apple disk crash. Here is what remains, 72 pages that fortunately do include my personal critique of modern lit. It’s dense but also funny.