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Get abducted by alien music.

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Not a Kindle owner? Win a paperback and a conductive bookmark via Goodreads here:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Joe4

by Salem

Giveaway ends September 23, 2015.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

In October my exclusive deal with Amazon will expire and the iBook, interactive version will become available. More soon!

Zoonomia: A Manual for a Hyperconscious Homo sapiens

The concept of evolution is recent but its catch-phrases dominate how my generation perceives its place in the universe and the pecking order of species.  Much as the Batman phenomenon is a pop culture trend floating on the top of the oil slick of consumerism, the language stemming from Charles Darwin's theory percolates to the surface of our current worldview in bumperstickisms: survival of the fittest and natural selection being the two most succinct phrases we use daily to boil down the how and why, not just of our genetics, but of the very rationale for our existence.

This document is a step toward giving evolution some new language. If you watch the most recent Cosmos series with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, you'll find the producers scripted his narration by relying on bumperstickerism. This is how he explains why polar bears are white like snow: gene mutates white, nature selects white fur that blends in with snow because it protects the species. End of story.

Really? How does consciousness fit in to evolution?

We have reached a place in our history where we can transcend self-consciousness and gain a mastery of our neurophysiology. Consciousness, a condition of advanced life, is becoming more conscious. It was a mere 140 years ago that the cataloguing of physical trends led to the theory of evolution and only in the last 100 or so that psychology rose up from the ashes of astrology to generate more "scientific" language for describing mental qualities and conditions and providing a newish basis for dream interpretation.


With technology bringing brainwave analysis to the consumer, we have reached a fold in the evolution of consciousness, a self-retiterative fractal cove where the mirror-like nature of consciousness can take a look at itself from a new perspective. Technology is the harbinger of this perspective, and I propose that first and foremost the concept of what is technology and, subsequently synthetic, be re-examined. We can start by returning to earlier senses of the word "plastic," a word Darwin utilized to describe the malleability of life forms.

Revolutionize your world by revolutionizing the language you utilize every day. If you dumb your life down through bumperstickerisms borrowed from Darwinism or from any other dilution of pop culture science, you may not be able to seize the grandeur of your existence and capitalize on your consciousness. Let's revolutionize language and make a manual for proactive evolution.

In my novel-in-progress, titled Zoonomia, the main character becomes a new species by insisting to those around him he is not a Homo sapiens but a plastic monster. In what some might call my field research, I have thoroughly enjoyed taking the subway trains in New York City and looking at people as nothing other than plastic monsters.

This novel is really an exploration, even a work of philosophy, regarding how we acclimate ourselves to "reality" through language and ultimately explain our lives away. This is a problem of the current paradigm, in which monetizing and data mining is paramount to exploring and even exalting in being alive and conscious.

Language, however, is extremely plastic, just like consciousness.

In our new paradigm of future now, where someone like me can fabricate my own EEG equipment with a 3D printer and simple microcontroller--and explore deeply, for example, the narrative light phenomenon known much more simply as the dream, I think we will have the opportunity to reintroduce plasticity to the language of evolution. Not as something cheap and recyclable but eternally malleable.

Go look at yourself in the mirror. Are you not a plastic animation? Perhaps even a plastic monster?

More about my work is here: www.metapulp.com

Paperback Hack

My fiction is filled with conductive ink and its quantum prowess. While only in imagination am I able to summon the passion of dead writers such as William Shakespeare, the pop culture trends of the maker movement have at the very least introduced affordable conductive ink to the marketplace. I do like to believe, and quantum physics does allow it, that the essence of an author's motive is sustained in their actual writings. Most pencils and pens, inks especially, are prone to conductivity.

As an author, paper and ink are my main media. I have no qualms about investigating the carbon basis of my media, and I especially enjoy investigating the other side of written language, namely the oral tradition from which it descends. This side of my art leads me into sound, the bio-acoustics of our languages. Cool stuff indeed.

When I first saw the Bare Conductive Touchboard, I knew I was fated to own one. This is a simple Arduino based micro controller that incorporates mp3 player sensibility, so basically anything that can send an electrical impulse to it, from tomatoes to their own Bare Ink, can be used as a sound generator.

I decided to incorporate this into a novella I wrote, in which essentially the protagonist gets abducted by alien music. Yup. I also decided to insert a keyboard into the paperback. This blog entry is basically a how to for hacking a paperback.

1: Get a paperback, for example Joe4 by me.

2: Add conductive buttons or sensors or even a keyboard to it, like this:

3: Connect to a micro controller which houses mp3 audio data and hit the buttons like this:

I employed a Kickstarter campaign to fund my fledgling audio studios, and this enhanced paperback/conductive ink/audio book package was the maker package most backers selected. I somehow knew in advance it would be difficult making a nice conductive ink screen print on the paper that comes with these print-on-demand books. And I was correct, so I had indicated I would make a "bookmark" midi-synthesizer on wood veneer to go along with the package. After stumbling my way through learning screen printing and playing around with techniques to get nice quality conductive ink prints, I was able to make a clean screen print and the bookmark as pictured here:

In addition I recorded each chapter and produced my first audiobook. An initial reviewer laments my voice as a kind of bad impersonation of William Shatner. Since I've frequently gotten comparisons to Tom Waits, I say this is a good thing. Voices are unique bio imprints for most certain!

I had promised my backers that I would also include alien music with this keyboard, so I did go ahead and generate some tunes via Ableton, the audio program I use for all recording and for midi work. I don't expect these to be the greatest alien hits of the universe any time soon, but feel free to listen to them on my Soundcloud channel:

And if you're in the mood for some bad William Shatner, please feel free to listen to the evolving Black Hole Butterfly mega-novel on Soundcloud or even pay good hard-earned money to listen to my to-be-abducted-by-aliens-voice via Audible. Have a great night!

Hiroshima My August Apology by The Atom

Recently I watched a documentary about Hiroshima, not in preparation for the 70th anniversary of the World War II bombing but because I like documentaries and as an amateur chemist and physicist, I have a keen interest in nuclear fission. I am especially fascinated by the phenomenal energy inherent in our universe, inherent in the fabric of space-time, inherent essentially as a kind of cosmic and very deadly fire.

I don't know who could watch this BBC documentary and not be touched by the devastation. This morning as I read the news online I came across this thread in the New York Times, where people can submit their own theory as to whether the bombs needed to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I certainly am no military buff and could not, in the 200 words allotted by the Times, persuade as to why the bombings were not necessary. But I had already, after watching the BBC documentary and then a trailer for Hiroshima Mon Amour, decided to write a short story from the perspective of the underlying power inherent in the atom. Why not ask it how it feels about what it did, I thought.

This story comes in the way of an apology as told by the atom that did the dirty work at Hiroshima. It is written down by an interpreter, an entity- let's call it an alien sentience -who is charged with writing a history of planet Earth for its people. The only information this intelligent being has about our world is a radio transmission of the trailer Hiroshima Mon Amour.

I have watched the trailer and not the movie, and I thought it would be interesting to posit someone trying to understand Homo sapiens through this fragment of our culture. One key thing this being would share with us is the elemental universe, meaning the periodic table of elements. And since quantum physics in many ways posits the underlying, and rather intelligent union, of the subatomic, I thought why not have this alien talk to the atom itself that first split inside Little Boy through the movie trailer? In fact, why not talk to the atom through a bouquet of bottle caps as imaged in the trailer?

And so, I titled my short story 

A Bouquet of Bottlecaps

It starts like this:

My name is Uranium. Also pitchblende. Darkly lustrous, daggery in gemstone, I inherit the virile awakening of energy. I am the blackberry-like, electrical tongue of the swallowing serpent binding what makes us all and destroys into a nothingness that cannot go away. I am the atom, the dark mother, and I apologize. I apologize for the ecstatic topology inherent in my nucleus, and I apologize for the T-shaped bridge, which made it so easy to find you. I apologize for the bouquet of bottle caps. Hiroshima, I am the black rain you drank, and this is my August Apology.

Meriot reviewed the journal entry he had just written on behalf of the atom speaking to him. He was the historian assigned to the planet Earth, with which he was only familiar through radio signals that had been netted by his world’s radio vacuum system. These had been designed to enfold the radioactive waves that undulated through his solar system from the angry black flares of his native sun. But they had begun picking up informed transmissions in the past years, and he was one of many who took it upon themselves to catalog the information and make sense of it.

Meriot was, in the terrestrial human language, an animist, as was common in his culture. His people had cracked the code of nature’s language some epochs prior and discerned that the fabric of space and time, like a conscious chiffon, was speaking to them in static whispers, hushing consonance and even in the lukewarm froth of pop culture's voices. Earth’s transmissions were collected and collated like leaves wrapped around a woody stem, except in this case the leaves were melted, metallic bottle caps. In this fashion he carried with him a “book” about Hiroshima. And this book, he understood, wanted to apologize.

Hiroshima, I am the soda pop you did not drink from the bottles that were never capped, and this is my August Apology.

Thanks for stopping by Salemwire. Find out more about my writings at www.metapulp.com.

Romance Novel Covers De- and Re-constructed

Romance novels are not exactly on my radar in general but recently I've taken an interest. A Nuyorican friend of mine tells me his mother's Harlem apartment is filled with Harlequin paperbacks. My own mother was a devotee of The Days of our Lives soap opera, and my early years recall the voiceover artist recounting how our lives are like sand in the hourglass. For better or worse I go to my grave with this audio artifact from pop culture engraved into my memory and a deep sense of the futility of time's passage.

When I received a lunch invite from Random House's newish digital-only romance imprints (not sure how I got on their radar), I threw it into my digital trash. But later I thought, doesn't Metapulp, my publishing company, have a romance novel in the line-up? So, I retrieved the invite and signed up. After all, I only had to leave my front door, take the uptown A train to Columbus Circle and walk a few blocks to the New York City headquarters of Random House to pull this off. Any hopes I had that the other romance novel lunchers might prove to be old spry men or other stereotype shattering folk who banged out romance novels under pen names, was dashed against the floor like china in a, well, in a soap opera. The ladies in attendance looked like they wrote romance novels. Bright green eyeshadow and matching skirt. Check!

I feasted on my quinoa salad while the Random House editorial staff introduced themselves and basically sold the imprint to the writers. I started googling on my phone the moment they said they also had a scifi imprint named Hydra. Really? That had not been on my radar either. Right away a flurry of negative posts came up regarding the disemboweling tactics of the imprints. (Basically, these imprints are trying to snag the potential breakout indies before they go viral and the contracts pretty much steal off with the copyrights. That's if you believe what you read in blogs anyway.)

Back to my believable blog! I returned my attention to the editors in front of me. A cover "artist" was discussing how she dug through stock photo images of muscly men and nearly naked women to composite the covers, and how even the author got to play a role in choosing the final cover. Want to wrap your stud in green plaid or red? You choose! Nevermind that no one seems to be collecting these covers that all look the same.

Well, let me get on with the deconstruction part of this blog. Aren't all stories just variations on a theme anyway? The romance novel cover is the same freaking cover over and over and over again but so are our stories, no matter what the language. There's a lot of sex and bananas, if you know what I mean, in Gravity's Rainbow.


It's all a signal to a potential reader that a hot dude and chick or some combo is waiting between the pages, waiting to be discovered by you. It seems a little bit of a hellish job, placing an abdomen on a book cover format day after day, though the Random House artist seemed to relish it. Here's some from me:

Horny yet? Let's get down into the deconstruction, which is a bit like adding a halftone dot effect to a stock abdominal image in order to boil it down to its dots, which we will now connect.

If the romance novel really is a latter day roman a clef, then escaping into sexual fantasy is the foundation of the modern desire to read and to write. And what is the sexual fantasy based upon but a hormonal urge to procreate? And why the hell does life want to go on living anyway? Let me use these all important questions to segue to Metapulp's new romantic title, to the titular point.





And here is our cover, sans abdomen:

Yes, I've cowritten a romantic novel with my buddy X.Y. Zero, who has a sense of humor whereas I do not (but I'm willing to hammer out the words as he dictates). It's about the hottest woman in the world who just got lucky. Yep! Metapulp had insisted on an abdominal cover, but we settled for Puerto Rican flag colors instead, striking an agreement between the heavy drinking parties. I ended up pitching the concept to Loveswept and Flirt, Random House's imprint, and their acquisitions editor Shauna said they could brand around me, (I mean us X.Y.), that they did indeed have flexibility that print does not have. I popped a bonbon into my mouth and took a pleasant walk along Central Park West, dreaming of the cover of my latest roman a clef. Why do we write? We write so that people who aren't getting laid can pretend they are, halftone dots and all.

Thanks for stopping by, yours, salem and X.Y. Zero. More at www.metapulp.com.

And by the way Random House and everyone else, everything here is copyrighted by me, salem.  So hands off!

Realism ain't Real

I've never wanted to write a Great American Novel. Such an undertaking presupposes, let's call it, a micronostalgia for a very compressed period of human time. If our species truly has evolved over millions of years, then the Great American Novel author is a bit of a dead fly in the ointment of time. And a desire to pontificate with purpled prose, for example, the doldrums of a dustbowl wheat farmer, just seems a little silly to me. That book too will turn to dust.

Novel writing has not been around that long either. And the realism comprising the voice of the Great American Novel - or any other so-called literary novel - is a fantasy, a cultural collusion.

The deft turning of phrases is our human birdsong at its best.

It is on my mind quite a lot these days as I spend many hours editing storytelling and getting a little too close to the sound, not just of my own voice, but that weird intersection between the sounds and their meaning.

These sounds comprise the uniquely haunting, human ability to generate storytelling. Once the sounds and shapes of written language are pared down to the stick of realism, however, this lathed language becomes mistaken for the thing that it is trying to describe. And yet, this stick language is what commands the big literary prizes. I don't want to go Plato's cave on you all, but a realistic novel is a bit like a shadow on the wall, and a realistic novel prize is another shadow applauding the shadow play.

Right now Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman is on my to be read list not because I'm a fan of realism, but because the book is essentially an archeological artifact, written by someone probably keenly or obtusely ignorant of quantum physics. And probably ignorant of the chemical composition of paper upon which a realistic narrative floats like sticks on a sea.

Carbon Web

I wrote the previous paragraphs last night. This morning I read that E. L. Doctorow has passed, and I read further from The New York Times,

“Someone said to me once that my books can be arranged in rough chronological order to indicate one man’s sense of 120 years of American life,” Mr. Doctorow said on the publication of “City of God.”

A reference to an early, fantastical work also crops up:

His second book, “Big as Life” (1966), was also drawn from genre fiction. A peculiar fantasy — science fiction, sort of — the novel is about New Yorkers who are thrown together one morning when, without explanation, two human giants are found standing, seemingly immobile, in the lower Hudson River. An unsuccessful book — “Unquestionably it’s the worst I’ve done,” Mr. Doctorow said in 1980, and would have no reason to change his mind later — it remains his only novel no longer in print.

And from his canon, that is the book I would like to read. Realism ignores how fantastical reality is. We are, last I checked, inexplicably spinning around in a mobius strip of space-time, made of what we call carbon, eating carbon, writing with carbon on carbon.

Literary realism strips awe from existence.

Genre, on the other hand, incites awe. That's nothing to be embarrassed about. Sharknado 3 debuts tonight on the Syfy channel, but I won't be able to watch it because I'll be out on the Hudson, where no doubt giants from some other space-time continuum will be bathing near the Statue of Liberty.

We live in a universe ebullient with imagination, and one where literary realism ain't real.

salemwire's home: www.metapulp.com

Time is Concentric

This morning I looked at images of Pluto sent back by the New Horizons NASA spacecraft. This afternoon, as I was narrating my novel Black Hole Butterfly, I read the line:

"The men of Gasland did not know time was not - and in fact never had been - linear. It was concentric, like the rings of a tree, organically evolving around its once seeded core." 

I could also have written it is like a planetary system, circling around the center of its origin.

The question I have for you today: what is time to you?

NPR just measured the time it took for New Horizons to make it to Pluto, using as its stick the complete Harry Potter audio books, which one would have to listen to over and over and over again to span a decade. No thanks!

Well, without our lives being that repetitious, that is what we do. We impose a seven day week on ourselves and pretend that the cycle is a straight line marked by our own aging.

The great thing about science fiction as opposed to science fact is that I can use the language fueled by imagination to alter my perception of time. Think about it. We aren't going anywhere. Ever. The best we can do is go in circles. Time is not, and in fact, never has been linear. It's concentric.

Put that in your Pluto, and crank it.