I took a job with IBM writing instruction booklets for programs
that ran on the IBM PC. I used a small, desktop computer to write.
I said that PC didn’t stand for Personal Computer, it stood for the muscle
women contract when they squeeze their pussies shut, pubococcygeus.
I called the computer they made Big Red, the Snapping Pussy of Doom.
Did you hear the one about the woman who went drift-fishing with 27 guys?
All she got was a red snapper. I called the books underware, by analogy with
the hardware and the software. Books that sought to get at the infrastructure,
or underlying form of what the computer was going to mean in everybody’s life.
President Bush called the War on Terrorism the War on Totoism. Run, Toto, run.
The small, desktop computer is not your friend. It is Big Brother. It is a tool for
modern times, and I don’t mean the cuddly Charlie Chaplin figure. I mean
the apparatchiks in the Soviet Writer’s
and the East German writers who informed on each other to the secret police
to keep their dachas and their chit books at the nomenclature store.
Their passports. They were knowledge workers.
But they lacked transparency.
They didn’t have closure.
I said the small computer was
a trap we built and caught our own leg in.
Surely I jest, you say. You wouldn’t do this.
When all is said and did and done I did it.
I was a fart in a whirlwind.
Read Common Sense,
Full Plate,
Blue Darter, and Lost Writings.
I showed it to them and asked them
to let me write books like it for my job.
They didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
They told me to stop. They told me not to do it.
Desist, they said. Cease.