The ‘ARIFLIP Junkyard

  It’s a Google map. I found it buried in his 70,000+ image files, but I can’t find where he used it. I know I’ve seen him quote the nostrum, “If you would be universal, first be local.” This map shows where he’s from in southern New Jersey and implies a broader reach than that. Northwest of the outline profile is the City of Philadelphia, a kind of headquarters of his fiction. The face suggested by the profile is indeed pointed westward toward the rest of the country. Strangely enough, this is the image file I had to keep returning to get the “bug picture” of his youth and upbringing. There’s a problem with ARIFLIP you don’t have with most writers. The thing about those 70,000 image files is that although there’s a ton of stuff in them that relates directly to his experience of life, what’s most notable is what’s missing. Missing from his writing as well as his inventory of image artifacts. Unlike the American notables of his time and before, there is no autobiographical early nov...

Antonio Gaudi’s Cathedral in Barcelona as it looked in 1926 You’re reading this post either after reading a lot of others or hardly any. Doesn’t matter. As with everything I say here, I could be wrong. But I’ve been at it long enough now to think I’m not wrong. ARIFLIP (my name for him) was building his own cathedral, with spires and chapels and grand spaces and secret chambers underground and sacristies, and balconies, and gargoyles and doorways and tombs and choirs and altars. He wasn’t working in stone. He was working in words and images and voices and numbers. The numbers four and five were particularly meaningful in his creative endeavors. The five stood for the unifying medium, which he believed was consciousness.  He never finished it because he ran out of time. Unless he always knew that would be the case. In all his work he was extending an invitation to readers and other writers and artists and architects to participate in completing the whole.  He sent me all of thi...

  One of his innumerable selfies.  Despite generating literally thousands of custom graphics for his Internet works, ARIFLIP is like a broken record on the subject of his artistic talent and how he rates it. “I see myself as the James Thurber of artists on the web,” he says repeatedly in posts. At one of his more personal sites, he explains, “My father could paint on canvas with oils and watercolors. I can’t. My only paintbrush is a keyboard, and my artistic motto is “WYSIWIG.” That’s true for himself as much as for his audience in my opinion. He has a different relationship to the visual arts than to the language arts, where his confidence is conspicuous. His limitations are few when it comes to words. He has a vast arsenal in terms of vocabulary, grammar, syntax, figures of speech, and genres of rhetoric. Images and video projects are a different matter. Working strictly on his own, he is constrained by two severe limitations. He can’t afford to buy software so he has to mak...