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boink by Richard Martin
A Lavender Ink Electronic Edition
10.25 x 8 inches, optimal for screen viewing, full color, clickable, 269 pages.
Richard Martin's indelible Boink probes the Obvious as it plumbs the Past of a creative mind adrift in this American popped kulture. This unclassifiable genre-buster is hilarious in places, poignant in others. Reading, experiencing, memorizing Boink is the only antidote for the Future. — Joel Dailey
Martin starts right in with the multidimensionality in Boink. "Chunks" of a novel, poems, and "wry comments" set in the 50th year of his life. And it is almost intuitively prophetic that the form is perfect for electronic and mainstream publication. There is the ongoing narrative, and the "Notes" which further fragment the day's inner process conjoining the entire process. His landscape is set in the practical and wanders off into the absurd, a nice trick. Stock full of philosophy street style, and classical references, ongoing comments on the poetic, and stand up comedy. Admit it, we've all been "boinked" a few times, so why not again? — Peter Kidd
From boink:
Day Twenty-Five
I got a little paranoid about the government and my body today. The government jitters struck first. When I say government, I’m talking about the Federal government, the one established by our Founding Fathers, which in my time has become so powerful and large that paranoia for a guy like me isn’t too much of a stretch. The thought that Uncle Sam could be watching us – you know, us American citizens – seems reasonable to me when I’m feeling a little paranoid. I wasn’t even working on my memoir when I felt this paranoia. I was on a break from it and comfortably sitting in a chair in my bedroom with my mind on holiday with the blackbirds in my backyard. Lots of stuff was popping in and out of mind. I thought of my new shoes – a pair of brown suede Ecco’s with their comfort fibre-system – and how truly comfortable they were. I felt like some popcorn and a verse from Steven’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” flittered through my noodle – I was of three minds, /Like a tree/In which there are three blackbirds. Then I wondered, if I had perhaps misspelled the word Pantex, which appears in Day Nineteen and plays a part in my unfinished novel, Mound. Of course I had. When I flipped back through Day Nineteen (after the break), I found that I had incorrectly spelled the word Pantex. According to my method of representing the sounds of language by literal symbols, I had written Pentex instead of Pantex. No big deal, a simple vowel off. Yet, because I knew so little about the Pantex Plant (I like to write about what I don’t know in unfinished novels), I felt the orthographic minimum in my memoir had to be to spell the damn word correctly. I went to the Net with orthodontist and orthopedics stuck like flies on flypaper to my orthographic inquiry. Once in cyberland, I typed my misspelling of Pantex into the search box. In an instant, I was cyberbounced into websites for werewolves and vampires. A vowel off and this is what I get! I thought. It was time to use my tiny brain and/or get downstairs and crank some Zevon. I choose the former and nanoed my synaptic playmates into recalling something about the lone star state. It has a panhandle for Christ sakes they cooed into my immediate awareness. It became obvious to me. Pentex had to be spelled Pantex because Pantex was a geographic word made from panhandle and Texas. Pan! I said, as in pan, Pan, panacea, Panama, panatela, pan-broil, pancake, panchax, Panchen Lama, panchromatic, panda, pandamus, Pandarus, Pandean pipes, pandect, pandemic, pandemonium, pander, Pandora, pandowdy, panegyric, panel, pan fish, pangenesis, Pan-Germanism, panhandle(1), panhandle(2). Trust the tiny brain. I was right. For as soon as I entered Pantex into the search box, the Net cybergramed me to the Pantex Plant site. Before I could say Jack Cyber, I learned that the Pantex Plant was located on the high plains of the Texas panhandle, 17 miles northeast of Amarillo and just north of US Highway 60 in Carson County. It is a big place, and as I mentioned in Note 190 for Day Nineteen, the Pantex Plant is the only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility in America. I cybercruised the site for a few minutes and saw that there were opportunities to learn more about radiation at the plant, storage of weapons, employment opportunites, and a host of other things. Without realizing exactly how I did it, I cyberscuttled into a section about the handling of pits. Pits are the most dangerous things in the world because they contain plutonium and are the terrifying kernels of nuclear bombs. Paranoia struck deep / into my heart it did seep when my eyes picked up three words in blue lettering at the bottom of the page on pits. The words were: notice to users. I cybershook my way down and clicked on it. Immediately a big fat warning cyberblinded my eyes. The warning said that visits to this site would/could be tracked and intercepted and that civil penalties and imprisonment etc. were possible for any individual cyberinterested in the site. The warning asked me to click onto it if I agreed with the potential risk and if I choose not to click on, I better get my ass out of there pronto. I cyberejected from this site (with my ass) like Snagglepuss exiting stage left. Man, I thought as I cyberstalled back on the AOL home page, the government still blows my mind. Though I’ve never had too much trouble with it, I’ve never felt warm and fuzzy towards it. Back in the seventies, I told an IRS agent to go to hell, which was not a great move on my part. But come on, I was living in a trailer with my first wife and my baby daughter and had managed to scrape together five or six grand from raking leaves and doing other odd jobs around Consesus Lake in Livonia, New York. The IRS agent was sitting in some federal building in Buffalo and told me over the phone that no one could live on that kind of dough. When I said: “I don’t call what I’m doing living.” He told me to watch my mouth and tone. I said, “Bite me,” and hung up the phone. Though IRS agents today are forced to go to user-friendly seminars, they didn’t have to back then. For kicks, the jerk must have flagged me as a potential tax-evader because I got audited a couple of times in the early eighties. The word on the street was that Reagan had ordered more agents to look into American citizens who were making 10 grand or less. I resided in that crowd and with three audits in 5 years or so; I gave some credence to that information. I cyperpanted over this memory while it dawned on me that I had possibly misspelled a word in Day Fourteen – The Doughnut Chronicles. The word was Intertrigo – the medical appellation for a sore ass. Before deciding on another cybervoyage, I quickly consulted my dictionary for the correct spelling but it did not appear. That’s when the Merck Manual leaped into mind. The Merck Manual of Diagnosis & Therapy has been published continuously for the last one hundred years, a claim no other medical textbook (in English) can make. It’s composed of 23 sections of various disorders of the human body: gastrointestinal, pulmonary, allergic, ear, nose and throat etc., along with sections on infectious diseases (bacterial, fungal, parasitic) and poisoning. I get the creeps just writing about it and the old Merck is not a recommended read for a recovering hypochondriac. But a misspelling is a misspelling and so as the Oz of my own misspellings, I typed the words Merck Manual into the search box, and cyperpresto, the contents page of the manual in all its glory appeared before my eyes. I knew what I wanted and cyperscooted to the Dermatological Disorders section and clicked it into view. Armed with its own search box, I typed in Intertrigo and before I could shout cyperBingo, a subsection on Nutritional Disorders cyberflashed onto the screen and I started to read about the symptoms and signs of Pellagra. It turns out that Intertrigo (Oz correct) is one of the symptoms and one of the four kinds of cutaneous lesions associated with the disease. According to the Merck, Intertrigo is characterized by redness, maceration, abrasion and secondary infection. I started to Merck-out, and when I read about that in advanced stages of the disease (Pellagra) mental aberrations were possible, I knew it was time to cyberfly from the site. I had a sore ass, not a vitamin deficiency. Back in real space, I wiped my sweaty palms off on my pants and said a little prayer for all the human bodies on the planet, about six billion of them. Man, I prayed, we don’t even know who we are or why we’re here, but we know how to spy on and destroy each other and record in detail all that ails us. So much of this had been part of my milieu and undoubtedly part of the mind’s milieu from the beginning of time. But it’s only the descent side of our selves. Then I thought of sunlight and kisses and waterfalls and spring flowers and all kinds of rocks and babies squealing and ice cream sundaes and hitting three-pointers in crucial games and poems and then kisses again and cuddling in bed with a lover and pretty wild socks and great meals and fine wines and flashing insights and hope and children and reading great books and being a father and then kisses again and really long sentences connected by conjunctions and short term and long term memories and ending my unfinished memoir this way (not just because my fifty days are up because they are, but because there is no summary or big bang of closure to a life still in process) and to continue like an anti-hero past parenthetical rhythmic intrusions because I know the last line of my memoir – one that no one will have to wait too long to read - will read: and so I began to feel better. And so I began to feel better. | |||
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