This on its own would be seen as radical and revolutionary in the 20th century. How on earth do people believe Melville is real? It’s a historical fraud. I’m glad so many people dig my work, though! Having an obscene page limit to reach led to dumping historical research on whales and ships into the book as a joke. The entire thing is very modern and sounds like it was written a decade ago, but it’s hard for people to realize this when they’ve barely even read the book and admit it frequently, much less read anything from the same time period. What a neat trick.

We created modernity. We don’t all know each other — I’ve only met some through working with them. Some of this work was done at schools and observatories. As a sidenote, as a musician at heart, human beings are the only animals that can appreciate and play music. But very few can write songs or musical works, it turns out. Even if they can credibly play a few chords or an instrument, they rarely can string together a whole song, much less in concert with other musicians (there is usually a band leader and director, also, who is typically the composer or writer, meaning there was only one person writing the song itself, but with the aid of trained musicians to play it). Writing or creating music (and I assume any form of art or philosophy or science or cogent political ideas) is quite difficult and out of most people’s reach.

Yes. Read about Richard Feynman’s (really, Caltech & SFSU & University of Alaska) quantum communications project; it is legally a protected medium for communicating or sending information, a la radio, television or the internet. You may be seeing something now! Ta-da!

It is a historical forgery attributed to a man who did not exist. So are some of Shakespeare’s plays, Emily Bronte, a good deal of the Romantics including Willian Blake and Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickens, Twain, Thomas Mann, Poe, Dostoevsky, at least one Oscar Wilde novel (he DID write poetry), Zola, Gogol, Lewis Carroll, Conrad, Joyce, Kafka, Marx and Tolstoy and more 20th century writers, poets, philosophers and painters, sculptors and other artists (never mind musicians) than you could imagine. This is why it sounds “modern”. It turns out no one could write or write anything that wasn’t lurid, vulgar or stupid, and so we have a history of artistic frauds to bring up the general tenor of public discussion and culture. This was also done for the works of people far off in the past — look up ‘pseudo-Aristotle’. There is a pseudo-Galen and pseudo-a lot of other great minds.

‘Moby Dick’ was actually written in the first decade of this century by an English and history grad student at Bard College. It was sent back in time to a certain point and introduced suddenly to the public by a small, knowing (you can guess who they’re associated with) group of people (the book actually showed up in perhaps in the ‘20s or ‘30s and was treated as a lost work of literature and presented with grand public announcements and PR spectacles). This seems like some kind of joke, but it isn’t. People are putridly stupid, but thanks to this program, society isn’t as dumb as they were going to be. And it’s STILL stupid (see, for the most extreme examples: incels and white supremacist groups, everyone on TikTok for a less glaring example).