- Registrado
- 10 de Ago, 2019
FIRST PREFACE
For a dedicated scholar of American literature, there can be no more difficult task than that of introducing an obviously inferior piece of writing to the reading public. When the situation is further complicated by the fact that the content and tone of the proffered work seem premeditatedly designed to offend almost every ethnic, religious, and gender constituency in the population at large, one is hard-put to know quite how and where to begin. Nevertheless, extraordinary circumstances have resulted in publication of the contemptible document that presumes to call itself the Boomer Bible, and it would be unforgivable to release it to an unwary public without some explanation. It has therefore fallen to me to write this preface, which I undertake with a sense of commingled trepidation and outrage that are unique in my literary experience.
I have determined to begin my unwelcome task with the strongest possible warning to those readers whose sensitivities are less impervious to injury than stainless steel. Make no mistake: it is well nigh impossible to think of a racist (or otherwise ethnocentrist), religious, or sexist slur that is not enshrined in what passes for the scriptural language of the Boomer Bible. Nor is this the only offensive element of this work. For it would seem that the author(s) of the Boomer Bible were resolved from the start to libel everything they touched, with special malice reserved for all subjects pertaining to the twentieth century. Indeed, it is quite literally impossible for any contemporary reader to work his/her way through this assemblage of bile without encountering multiple instances of insults that seem deliberately calculated to offend his/her race, his/her religion, his/her profession, his/her taste in literature and art and music, and/or his/her preferred lifestyle.
The very fact that such a warning is needed leads inevitably to the question of what purpose is served by publishing the Boomer Bible at all. The answer to this question is not an easy one to summarize in simple terms, however, because it relates to the circumstances under which the Boomer Bible was purportedly written, as well as the circumstances surrounding its “discovery.” We shall discuss both of these in turn, beginning with an explanation of what is presently known about the work.
In all probability, the manuscript that gave rise to this volume is almost exactly ten years old. The original date of publication is given in the epistle dedicatory as April 19, 1981, and thus far at least, no compelling reason for disputing this date has been uncovered. Scientific analysis of the paper and ink also seems to confirm that the manuscript is at least eight to ten years old. That said, however, there is little else about the Boomer Bible that is not suspect in one way or another, including the identity or identities of its author(s), the means by which it was allegedly written, and even the authenticity of the manuscript that has given rise to this volume.
Those who claim to know the truth about this work have declared it the product of a renegade literary community that was entirely contained in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, between the years 1979 and 1985. And to be sure, there is a certain amount of evidence to support this contention. It is known, for example, that the historic but economically depressed South Street section of Philadelphia may have served as the base of operations for a particularly virulent offshoot from the punk music fad of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Further, there exists some documentation indicating that these alleged South Street punks considered themselves writers and carried out a form of vanity publishing to disseminate various works of “punk fiction” among themselves during the years in question. And perhaps most strikingly, fragmentary records of this so-called punk writing movement do repeatedly refer to a Boomer Bible written by the collected efforts of the entire South Street community.
Given this basic context, it is hardly surprising that amateur literati would regard any manuscript bearing this title as, ipso facto, the work of South Street’s punk writers. Unfortunately for those who would ascribe authorship of the Boomer Bible to this community, however, punk records make so many extravagant claims as to shed doubt on everything they contain. For example, a variety of punk documents acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of the South Street community (which, in their hubris, they renamed “Punk City”) could barely read and write in the early months of 1980. This deficit was supposedly overcome through what is described as an “orgy of learning” led by a punk king named St. Nuke, who ruled his subjects with an almost unbelievably primitive legal code. Called the NukeLaw, the code featured such barbaric anachronisms as duels to settle civil disputes, trial by combat, public whippings, banishment, and even sentences of death, although these were allegedly reserved for outsiders.
Spokespersons for the Philadelphia Police Department deny out of hand any possibility that such a deviant separate society existed, or ever could have existed, within the city limits of Philadelphia, and such declarations are convincingly confirmed by police files, which contain no record of punk arrests inside “Punk City” for the full four-year period in which they supposedly held sway on South Street. Although there is record of a gang war on South Street during the winter of 1979-80, there is no evidence whatever that punks were involved. Roland Belasco, an acknowledged expert on Philadelphia gangs, scoffs at the idea that South Street’s punk rockers could have waged a war against any gang in the area: “Not even an army of punks could stand up to a Philly gang for more than about ten minutes,” he declared in a recent interview, laughing out loud at the thought. “The gangs I know would make a punk ‘king’ eat his crown and then cut his throat while he was choking on it.”
As if all this were not sufficient to cast doubt on the veracity of their self history, punk records make the further claim that their writing activities were carried out with the aid of powerful computers that enabled four or five members of a “punk writer band” to write together on hand-held input instruments. The central computer that received this input was allegedly powerful enough to correct and collate their work into coherent pieces of writing, and during the effort to write the Boomer Bible, one computer is reported to have corrected, collated, and edited the work of two thousand writers into a finished work that punk proponents believe to be reduplicated in this book.
On the face of it, all of this is absurd. Despite its grievous flaws, the manuscript that appears in this book could not have been written by semiliterate children, no matter how many computers they had. There is no official record (outside of the delusionary self-histories referenced above) that such a community ever existed in the first place. There is no official confirmation that punk “stars” mentioned in the Boomer Bible manuscript—including St. Nuke, Alice Hate, and Johnny Dodge—ever lived in Philadelphia or anywhere else. Indeed, the only possible connection between Punk City and official records concerns the band known as the Shuteye Train, although the discrepancies between police files and punk documents simply could not be any greater than they are on this point.
For example, the punks claim that the Shuteye Train consisted of four individuals named Loco Dantes, Reedy Weeks, Pig Millions, and Joe Kay. These four were said to be quite literally immortal: they were believed to represent “the invincible heart of Punk City,” although even punk documents concede that they never lived on South Street and visited only rarely.
Police files depict the Shuteye Train in wholly different terms: as a syndicate consisting of four loosely connected criminal organizations that heisted huge quantities of both drugs and cash from drug dealers throughout the Middle Atlantic states. Over a five-year period in the early 1980s, numerous arrests were made of alleged Shuteye Train functionaries, although no confessions of such tie-ins were ever upheld in court. Ultimately, according to anonymous but reputable police sources, federal drug enforcement organizations designed a sting operation that apparently put the Shuteye Train organization out of business for good in 1984.
And where does all this leave us? There is, to put it simply, no proof of any kind that a community of “punk writers” occupied South Street in the sense, or on the scale, we are asked to believe. Consequently, the mere mention of a “Boomer Bible” in otherwise suspect records cannot be accepted as evidence that punks wrote the manuscript reproduced in this book.
Thus we are presented with a distasteful piece of bad writing that has no confirmed historical existence. And it is being published. Why?
I can only speak for my own involvement in this affair. It is true that an esteemed colleague (who understandably prefers not to have his name used in connection with this project) recently asked me to review a small trove of documents and artifacts that were found buried in the general vicinity of South Street. It is true that such of these documents as have been safely restored from the considerable weather damage they sustained suggest that a “punk writing movement” was documented, regardless of whether or not it ever existed in reality. Further, it is true that I have examined individual “punk” documents as they have been restored in order to determine whether or not they contained anything of literary value or interest.
To date, I must declare that nothing of literary value or interest has been evident in the materials submitted to my attention. If there is a Boomer Bible manuscript in the trove, I have not yet seen it or heard of it. Moreover, I am not yet satisfied in any respect that the whole business, including this book and the trove itself, is not simply some clever fraud that is being perpetrated by practical jokers of immense arrogance.
As I understand it, the manuscript that is supposed to be the Boomer Bible was mysteriously conveyed by parties unknown to a free-lance tabloid journalist whose greatest previous claim to fame was a book predicting a UFO invasion of the planet Earth. This “journalist” now asserts that some deliberate effort is being made by the “academic-intellectual establishment” to suppress all knowledge of South Street’s punk writers, due (if I understand properly) to some attribute of the Boomer Bible manuscript that people like myself are deemed to consider threatening in some way.
Despite this rather odd sponsorship, Workman Publishing has decided to proceed with publication of the so-called Boomer Bible manuscript. As it has been explained to me, Workman takes no position on the authenticity of the manuscript and is publishing the work because the “idea” of a defunct, phantom literary movement is “intriguing.” While I cannot share this viewpoint, I have agreed to write this preface so that the reading public may hear firsthand that there is no conspiracy to suppress so-called punk writings. The text here included should lay to bed all suspicion that any writing of value is being withheld—deliberately or otherwise—from the American audience.
I will also state that if and when a new literary movement does emerge in American literature, I am quite confident that it will come from some source other than a tribe of uneducated street children who duel with sharpened screwdrivers and write bibles on subjects of which they are profoundly ignorant.
Still, in consenting to write this preface, I have also bowed to the publisher’s request that I provide the reading public with some basis for an informed response to this work. My own recommendation is no response. As to the work itself, it has no merit of any kind: it is an imitation of a farce of a parody.
The book consists of a Past Testament, a Present Testament, a Book of Harrier Brayer [sic], and a Punk Testament. All three “testaments” are written in a meandering chapter-and-verse format that is hard to dignify with any such term as style.
The Past Testament purports to cover the entire history of the world, from the creation through c. 1964, although the near total absence of dates, as well as numerous chronological inconsistencies, require that this be characterized as an educated guess. The Past Testament also contains a number of books that appear to be an incompetent attempt to mimic the Old Testament books of wisdom and the books of the prophets. Most notable in the Past Testament are its nine books of the “Chosen Nations,” which may well be the most pointlessly venomous pastiches of modern history yet recorded in any form.
The Present Testament represents an inexplicably perverse plagiarism of the New Testament of the Bible, complete with four gospels of a substitute messiah named Harry, who is clearly an outright fiction devised by the author(s). The Present Testament also includes its own epistles, written to various neighborhoods and institutions in Philadelphia, for the purpose of instructing its targets in the ways of the Present Testament’s demented, drug-dealing messiah. Overall, it is difficult to find any part of the Present Testament that merits serious critical analysis or comment, for the simple reason that it never rises, even momentarily, above the level of invective, name calling, and race/class/gender prejudice that represent the only unifying feature of the Boomer Bible. As for the attached Book of Harrier Brayer, I found it altogether unreadable and can offer no elucidating comments of any kind.
The Punk Testament is clearly intended as some kind of vindication for the excesses of the prior testaments, but it does far more to reveal the benighted lives and ways of the legendary (real or fictional) “punks” than it does to explain the purpose of the book as a whole. For example, two of the twelve books in this testament amount to nothing more than lists of alleged combats in Punk City, including blow-by-blow descriptions of numerous contests in arms. The testament concludes with five books of pathetic doggerel intended to define the philosophy (for want of a better term) of the author(s).
Finally, there is a running intercolumn reference which makes connections, in astonishingly tedious quantity, between verse fragments throughout the three testaments. Personally, I found this aspect of the book unusable and utterly pointless; I can only assume that its inclusion was intended to enhance the scriptural appearance of the text by providing a visual distraction from the incompetent versification and meager vocabulary that deface every page of the work.
I expect that the publisher will be disappointed in this preface, but I cannot in good conscience endorse a book of such dubious origins, particularly in the absence of any redeeming qualities in the writing or content. If the trove materials eventually disclose a Boomer Bible manuscript and evidence that the punk writer community did in fact exist, I will be only too happy at that time to revisit my current historical characterizations and amend them in light of new information. But if the trove yields another copy of this same work, I must forewarn one and all that the only retraction I will feel obliged to make concerns my remarks about its authenticity. And mere authenticity cannot bestow quality where none existed before.
For a dedicated scholar of American literature, there can be no more difficult task than that of introducing an obviously inferior piece of writing to the reading public. When the situation is further complicated by the fact that the content and tone of the proffered work seem premeditatedly designed to offend almost every ethnic, religious, and gender constituency in the population at large, one is hard-put to know quite how and where to begin. Nevertheless, extraordinary circumstances have resulted in publication of the contemptible document that presumes to call itself the Boomer Bible, and it would be unforgivable to release it to an unwary public without some explanation. It has therefore fallen to me to write this preface, which I undertake with a sense of commingled trepidation and outrage that are unique in my literary experience.
I have determined to begin my unwelcome task with the strongest possible warning to those readers whose sensitivities are less impervious to injury than stainless steel. Make no mistake: it is well nigh impossible to think of a racist (or otherwise ethnocentrist), religious, or sexist slur that is not enshrined in what passes for the scriptural language of the Boomer Bible. Nor is this the only offensive element of this work. For it would seem that the author(s) of the Boomer Bible were resolved from the start to libel everything they touched, with special malice reserved for all subjects pertaining to the twentieth century. Indeed, it is quite literally impossible for any contemporary reader to work his/her way through this assemblage of bile without encountering multiple instances of insults that seem deliberately calculated to offend his/her race, his/her religion, his/her profession, his/her taste in literature and art and music, and/or his/her preferred lifestyle.
The very fact that such a warning is needed leads inevitably to the question of what purpose is served by publishing the Boomer Bible at all. The answer to this question is not an easy one to summarize in simple terms, however, because it relates to the circumstances under which the Boomer Bible was purportedly written, as well as the circumstances surrounding its “discovery.” We shall discuss both of these in turn, beginning with an explanation of what is presently known about the work.
In all probability, the manuscript that gave rise to this volume is almost exactly ten years old. The original date of publication is given in the epistle dedicatory as April 19, 1981, and thus far at least, no compelling reason for disputing this date has been uncovered. Scientific analysis of the paper and ink also seems to confirm that the manuscript is at least eight to ten years old. That said, however, there is little else about the Boomer Bible that is not suspect in one way or another, including the identity or identities of its author(s), the means by which it was allegedly written, and even the authenticity of the manuscript that has given rise to this volume.
Those who claim to know the truth about this work have declared it the product of a renegade literary community that was entirely contained in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, between the years 1979 and 1985. And to be sure, there is a certain amount of evidence to support this contention. It is known, for example, that the historic but economically depressed South Street section of Philadelphia may have served as the base of operations for a particularly virulent offshoot from the punk music fad of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Further, there exists some documentation indicating that these alleged South Street punks considered themselves writers and carried out a form of vanity publishing to disseminate various works of “punk fiction” among themselves during the years in question. And perhaps most strikingly, fragmentary records of this so-called punk writing movement do repeatedly refer to a Boomer Bible written by the collected efforts of the entire South Street community.
Given this basic context, it is hardly surprising that amateur literati would regard any manuscript bearing this title as, ipso facto, the work of South Street’s punk writers. Unfortunately for those who would ascribe authorship of the Boomer Bible to this community, however, punk records make so many extravagant claims as to shed doubt on everything they contain. For example, a variety of punk documents acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of the South Street community (which, in their hubris, they renamed “Punk City”) could barely read and write in the early months of 1980. This deficit was supposedly overcome through what is described as an “orgy of learning” led by a punk king named St. Nuke, who ruled his subjects with an almost unbelievably primitive legal code. Called the NukeLaw, the code featured such barbaric anachronisms as duels to settle civil disputes, trial by combat, public whippings, banishment, and even sentences of death, although these were allegedly reserved for outsiders.
Spokespersons for the Philadelphia Police Department deny out of hand any possibility that such a deviant separate society existed, or ever could have existed, within the city limits of Philadelphia, and such declarations are convincingly confirmed by police files, which contain no record of punk arrests inside “Punk City” for the full four-year period in which they supposedly held sway on South Street. Although there is record of a gang war on South Street during the winter of 1979-80, there is no evidence whatever that punks were involved. Roland Belasco, an acknowledged expert on Philadelphia gangs, scoffs at the idea that South Street’s punk rockers could have waged a war against any gang in the area: “Not even an army of punks could stand up to a Philly gang for more than about ten minutes,” he declared in a recent interview, laughing out loud at the thought. “The gangs I know would make a punk ‘king’ eat his crown and then cut his throat while he was choking on it.”
As if all this were not sufficient to cast doubt on the veracity of their self history, punk records make the further claim that their writing activities were carried out with the aid of powerful computers that enabled four or five members of a “punk writer band” to write together on hand-held input instruments. The central computer that received this input was allegedly powerful enough to correct and collate their work into coherent pieces of writing, and during the effort to write the Boomer Bible, one computer is reported to have corrected, collated, and edited the work of two thousand writers into a finished work that punk proponents believe to be reduplicated in this book.
On the face of it, all of this is absurd. Despite its grievous flaws, the manuscript that appears in this book could not have been written by semiliterate children, no matter how many computers they had. There is no official record (outside of the delusionary self-histories referenced above) that such a community ever existed in the first place. There is no official confirmation that punk “stars” mentioned in the Boomer Bible manuscript—including St. Nuke, Alice Hate, and Johnny Dodge—ever lived in Philadelphia or anywhere else. Indeed, the only possible connection between Punk City and official records concerns the band known as the Shuteye Train, although the discrepancies between police files and punk documents simply could not be any greater than they are on this point.
For example, the punks claim that the Shuteye Train consisted of four individuals named Loco Dantes, Reedy Weeks, Pig Millions, and Joe Kay. These four were said to be quite literally immortal: they were believed to represent “the invincible heart of Punk City,” although even punk documents concede that they never lived on South Street and visited only rarely.
Police files depict the Shuteye Train in wholly different terms: as a syndicate consisting of four loosely connected criminal organizations that heisted huge quantities of both drugs and cash from drug dealers throughout the Middle Atlantic states. Over a five-year period in the early 1980s, numerous arrests were made of alleged Shuteye Train functionaries, although no confessions of such tie-ins were ever upheld in court. Ultimately, according to anonymous but reputable police sources, federal drug enforcement organizations designed a sting operation that apparently put the Shuteye Train organization out of business for good in 1984.
And where does all this leave us? There is, to put it simply, no proof of any kind that a community of “punk writers” occupied South Street in the sense, or on the scale, we are asked to believe. Consequently, the mere mention of a “Boomer Bible” in otherwise suspect records cannot be accepted as evidence that punks wrote the manuscript reproduced in this book.
Thus we are presented with a distasteful piece of bad writing that has no confirmed historical existence. And it is being published. Why?
I can only speak for my own involvement in this affair. It is true that an esteemed colleague (who understandably prefers not to have his name used in connection with this project) recently asked me to review a small trove of documents and artifacts that were found buried in the general vicinity of South Street. It is true that such of these documents as have been safely restored from the considerable weather damage they sustained suggest that a “punk writing movement” was documented, regardless of whether or not it ever existed in reality. Further, it is true that I have examined individual “punk” documents as they have been restored in order to determine whether or not they contained anything of literary value or interest.
To date, I must declare that nothing of literary value or interest has been evident in the materials submitted to my attention. If there is a Boomer Bible manuscript in the trove, I have not yet seen it or heard of it. Moreover, I am not yet satisfied in any respect that the whole business, including this book and the trove itself, is not simply some clever fraud that is being perpetrated by practical jokers of immense arrogance.
As I understand it, the manuscript that is supposed to be the Boomer Bible was mysteriously conveyed by parties unknown to a free-lance tabloid journalist whose greatest previous claim to fame was a book predicting a UFO invasion of the planet Earth. This “journalist” now asserts that some deliberate effort is being made by the “academic-intellectual establishment” to suppress all knowledge of South Street’s punk writers, due (if I understand properly) to some attribute of the Boomer Bible manuscript that people like myself are deemed to consider threatening in some way.
Despite this rather odd sponsorship, Workman Publishing has decided to proceed with publication of the so-called Boomer Bible manuscript. As it has been explained to me, Workman takes no position on the authenticity of the manuscript and is publishing the work because the “idea” of a defunct, phantom literary movement is “intriguing.” While I cannot share this viewpoint, I have agreed to write this preface so that the reading public may hear firsthand that there is no conspiracy to suppress so-called punk writings. The text here included should lay to bed all suspicion that any writing of value is being withheld—deliberately or otherwise—from the American audience.
I will also state that if and when a new literary movement does emerge in American literature, I am quite confident that it will come from some source other than a tribe of uneducated street children who duel with sharpened screwdrivers and write bibles on subjects of which they are profoundly ignorant.
Still, in consenting to write this preface, I have also bowed to the publisher’s request that I provide the reading public with some basis for an informed response to this work. My own recommendation is no response. As to the work itself, it has no merit of any kind: it is an imitation of a farce of a parody.
The book consists of a Past Testament, a Present Testament, a Book of Harrier Brayer [sic], and a Punk Testament. All three “testaments” are written in a meandering chapter-and-verse format that is hard to dignify with any such term as style.
The Past Testament purports to cover the entire history of the world, from the creation through c. 1964, although the near total absence of dates, as well as numerous chronological inconsistencies, require that this be characterized as an educated guess. The Past Testament also contains a number of books that appear to be an incompetent attempt to mimic the Old Testament books of wisdom and the books of the prophets. Most notable in the Past Testament are its nine books of the “Chosen Nations,” which may well be the most pointlessly venomous pastiches of modern history yet recorded in any form.
The Present Testament represents an inexplicably perverse plagiarism of the New Testament of the Bible, complete with four gospels of a substitute messiah named Harry, who is clearly an outright fiction devised by the author(s). The Present Testament also includes its own epistles, written to various neighborhoods and institutions in Philadelphia, for the purpose of instructing its targets in the ways of the Present Testament’s demented, drug-dealing messiah. Overall, it is difficult to find any part of the Present Testament that merits serious critical analysis or comment, for the simple reason that it never rises, even momentarily, above the level of invective, name calling, and race/class/gender prejudice that represent the only unifying feature of the Boomer Bible. As for the attached Book of Harrier Brayer, I found it altogether unreadable and can offer no elucidating comments of any kind.
The Punk Testament is clearly intended as some kind of vindication for the excesses of the prior testaments, but it does far more to reveal the benighted lives and ways of the legendary (real or fictional) “punks” than it does to explain the purpose of the book as a whole. For example, two of the twelve books in this testament amount to nothing more than lists of alleged combats in Punk City, including blow-by-blow descriptions of numerous contests in arms. The testament concludes with five books of pathetic doggerel intended to define the philosophy (for want of a better term) of the author(s).
Finally, there is a running intercolumn reference which makes connections, in astonishingly tedious quantity, between verse fragments throughout the three testaments. Personally, I found this aspect of the book unusable and utterly pointless; I can only assume that its inclusion was intended to enhance the scriptural appearance of the text by providing a visual distraction from the incompetent versification and meager vocabulary that deface every page of the work.
I expect that the publisher will be disappointed in this preface, but I cannot in good conscience endorse a book of such dubious origins, particularly in the absence of any redeeming qualities in the writing or content. If the trove materials eventually disclose a Boomer Bible manuscript and evidence that the punk writer community did in fact exist, I will be only too happy at that time to revisit my current historical characterizations and amend them in light of new information. But if the trove yields another copy of this same work, I must forewarn one and all that the only retraction I will feel obliged to make concerns my remarks about its authenticity. And mere authenticity cannot bestow quality where none existed before.
- Elliot Naughton
Cambridge, MA
March 1991
Cambridge, MA
March 1991
