Notes on The Mystery of Bitter Root Manor

In 2014, a quite remarkable work of over 30,000 words in pentameter verse was slipped over the transom anonymously to our sister station, TexEditing.com, the copywriting resource for people in the arts
community. The format of the work bears examination, since it is consistent with ideas I've written about in the past, especially in "Why I'm Not On Facebook Any More." To tell the truth, pretty much everything in these blog pages is consistent with the attitude expressed in The Mystery of Bitter Root Manor. What a relief! I thought I would have to finish my days without the understanding of my peers.

The work is in rhyming verse–over 50 chapters and three acts of it*–describing the adventures of a behavioral psychologist slash biologist and his sexually expressive children and grandkids. In almost every instance, access between different locations in the story requires knowing a password taken from three categories of trivia: the guest villains on the 1966 Batman television series, performers of various theme songs for the James Bond franchise, and questions regarding the names of songs and album titles by The Beatles.

The trivia answers are difficult enough, one supposes, to be daunting to the casual reader, although close attention to the words in the poem usually gives more than ample clues. Could Anonymous have imagined, as I did when I read the beginning of his or her poem, stacks of readers hung up in The Great Hall, trying to remember that Anne Baxter played Olga the Cossack Queen on Batman? The point of the tough trivia exercise is likely not to quickly disqualify every potential visitor to Bitter Root Manor but to insist on active reading of the work instead of passive "barking at print." Expressing a fatalism about reader participation, Manor’s anonymous poet writes, "The secrets hidden a reader could find/ Blah, blah, blah, and if he-she had the time/ Well anyway, in these rooms they are writ/ With treasure to win if you give a shit."

For a work that can only exist in a hypertext environment (its pages linked together, not bound, and every one illustrated with photos and animations), the story of the dynastic Archers acknowledges that it must be primarily read, not watched or scrolled. Anonymous drops off a magnum opus on a thumb drive, leaving it on the doorstep of an illiterate culture, content to have its crucial morning brief leaked drip-by-drip through corporate-sponsored filters, Fox News, and Americans for Prosperity. Requiring the reader to engage with the text by passing through frequent checks of its content has the whiff of boomer nostalgia for erudition, a common culture, and a time when it was the duty of every citizen to be well informed and able to discriminate between legitimate sources of information and propaganda.

The Mystery of Bitter Root Manor depends on the reader’s knowledge of pop culture trivia to move from room to room of the text. Given the unlikelihood of any visitor to these pages knowing names like Glynis Johns (Batman’s Lady Penelope Peasoup) or Matt Monro (he sang the theme for Bond’s From Russia with Love), Anonymous apparently values simple Internet scholarship so much as having a memory suited to play Jeopardy! We are invited to refer to extraneous sources that referee matters of an empirical nature. Go ahead: google the answer; read the marvelous tables on Wikipedia covering who played the villain in every iteration of the BM franchise and every theme song that played while some naked ingenue was projected onto Commander Bond’s gun. A simple, scholarly gesture signals adherence to a whole system of facts, causes, and effects.

Besides connecting itself to the great, pop culture library in the sky, a recurring theme in Bitter Root Manor is the postmodern assumption that whatever we need to know as a race is readily available somewhere, but we walked right past it or lost it in our files. (Is the library at Alexandria still on fire? Has it ever not been?) Modern life is an overwhelming deluge of facts, figures, and bat-shit crazy interpretations of them. Behind every trivia question is the lowly Jeopardy! writer who editorially organizes names and places into a Venn-diagram circle-within-a-circle representing “things a sentient person is likely to know.” The rest of life's dross is so hopelessly obscure it will become a mere footnote someday, like the entire Justin Bieber catalog. Which among the barrage of facts we receive is an actual cultural touchstone, and what might we thankfully forget with time, when our Doctor Oz and Marcel Ozuna wounds have healed?

The lively and often ribald poet evidently is a product of the 60s and speaks directly to other members of his or her cohort, the core of the Baby Boomer generation.

Consider these while here and there you go
As we assess the crusts of what you know,
Leftover from the appetite you sate,
For heaps of flesh and blood upon a plate,
A bit of quid pro quo to spice a game
Of which of Batman's villains can you name
Some trivia we'll get to soon enough
That unlocks locks and panels when it's rough.

While, on the one hand, Bitter Root Manor rewards readers for remembering names from a palette of pop culture highlights, at the same time, the very nature of a password is that it has to be written down somewhere, even if it temporarily drops out of immediately accessible, human memory. Indeed, Bitter Root Manor’s secret passkeys are compiled in a single convenient html document and shoved in a hidey-hole. The maze of the story, leading from room to room in a jumble of events and perspectives, has a secret map with embedded links that catapult the user to any location instantly.

I never played those bloodbathy first-person shooter, video games, but I was vaguely aware of my teenage son playing them, and how he acquired special codes that gave his avatar unlimited “lives” and gnarly superpowers. He could only be accused of not winning those video games "fair and square" by someone who was unaware of the real playing field of the contest, which clearly included sellers of secrets and the largesse of the highest of the high.

One is excused from “not knowing,” because, after all, ignorance is only temporary, the easiest of all cognitive deficits to remedy. All the traveler has to do is spot the likely niche in which the secret key is hid (you don’t need a password to access it!) or, better still, find a more accurate reader who will share what they know. Let me tell you something about meritocracy in America. I teach the SAT, which started as a game-leveler in the "competition" for college admission. Its mission, today, is the same as it ever was: success on the SAT is available equally to anyone who can afford me as their tutor.

What should we make of a story that permits the reader to dispense with following a particular sequence of plot events by supplying the technology to skip from location to location and the various pressure points in the story each setting represents? A primary characteristic of postmodern fiction is acknowledging the falseness of all plots. In fact, time and space, even cause and effect, are an illusion. You could look it up. Additionally, Anonymous recycles themes and imagery from their own work and pop culture at-large (superhero comics, 60s sitcom TV, an obscure animation Chuck Jones did for Bell Laboratories) to expand beyond any single file or folder the world in which the web-based story exists, intertextuality being the hallmark of the most important works of fiction created since the 60s.

The first act of BRM's comical rhyming couplets is devoted to Batman trivia. The choice seems auspicious, and not only because the show is so fondly remembered. Adam West was a notoriously stiff performer, which helped to make the series the campy gem it was. Creator Lorenzo Semples, Jr., who passed away in March 2014, a month before Anonymous sent out his or her Batman love letter, intentionally built his show to read ironically; for instance, he originated the idea of giving ordinary objects a Bat-prefix.

Camp is an essential aspect of the postmodern sensibility, and we can date it aesthetically to Susan Sontag's 1964 essay for The Review that determined its 58 separate features, chief among them artifice and exaggeration. Like the "Pow!" and "Boff!" caption cards that narrated Batman battling Penguin in a dimension outside their sitcom space, the carefully constructed "extra-textual" notes and disclaimers surrounding The Mystery of Bitter Root Manor highlight its artificiality, and its spy movie/comic book trappings include it in a discussion of Terry Southern's work for Candy (1968) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) with a lovely dovetail to the Beatles, swinging London, James Bond and Casino Royale (1966). Or, would you believe Get Smart? Anonymous remains self-effacing, self-referential, and multi-textual, so much it will make you plotz.

The writer of The Mystery of Bitter Root Manor and its fifty or so html pages has chosen a form that is adapted to the Internet (although the rhythm and rhyme suggest Homeric epics or something equally dusty). The first-person video game presentation of the story divulges its essentials randomly, the reader encountering events associated with a particular place--not a particular sequence-- as they move from room to room in the titular mansion. It can be said that the medium of the work is html code and the basic feature of its format is a browser window. The Internet, after all, is the crucial technological development conditioning us to view the world through a tiny peephole. which like a periscope fails to encompass the vastness of human experience or history. Irony supplants knowledge. We are each a laser-beaming Observo, whose superpower is attention to present styles and perspectives. Who’s even trying to generate a narrative that ties all those different portal views together?

As Art Linklater used to say on the box cover of The Game of Life, I heartily endorse the game-like structure of this sprawling and profane adventure. Consider The Mystery of Bitter Root Manor three acts in search of a reader; don't go by me, but Pirandello over to TexEditing.com as soon as you can to see for yourself.

*Since this article was posted, The Mystery of Bitter Root Manor has grown a fourth act and about 70 html pages.