Coincidences, Red Herrings, & Being: A Conversation with Richard Polt

It’s beyond redundant at this point to say that reality feels off, isn’t it? Isn’t it? It’s beyond redundant to say that it feels like we are all teetertottering between Plato’s cave with its illuminating notion that there’s more to the world than it seems and Descartes’s demon with its sly notion that the world is absolutely false. Been there done that, haven’t we? What about a tangled web? Can we talk about webwork? There seems to be a neverending web of random players coming and going and zipping in and out of and setting up and throwing off coincidences and red herrings and mysteries to be solved and left behind. In Harry Stephen Keeler’s The Mysterious Mr. I, my favorite of this sublime and nutty genius’s prolific oeuvre, the titular character drifts across Chicago, carries around a skull, assumes 50 identities including a philosophy professor and a race car driver, has odd encounters with strangers, and solves two tangentially related mysteries involving an escaped lunatic and a convent’s mother superior. That’s what it all feels like, this brave new world we have been tossed into. At times, we may feel like that mysterious Mr. I wandering the territory and investigating two cherry picked coincidentally related mysteries, like two causes to get behind of course because getting behind all five billion causes would make our brains explode, and let’s just forget about how getting behind these two random causes might contradict some other causes that are in our cause-wheelhouse/concerns. And at other times, we may feel like one of the strangers that Mr. I has encounters with and we might ask ourselves, “Why is this man carrying around a skull? And how could the world be in such a way as to put me in this situation with the skull-man? Why a skull? Does this skull and this man have a deeper connection to me and my place in this world? Has the world been switched on, plugged in, contorted and transduced into some grand delusion of reference machine? If this were true, would it have anything to do with us all for the past 20 odd years voluntarily plugging our nervous systems into narcissism media machines like facebook and instagram and the rest?” Probably not. That’s probably a bunch of bullshit, but it certainly is an intriguing thing, isn’t it? One can see how conspiracy thinking has grown so rampant over the past 20 years. Wait. Is that the big grand conspiracy? It is, isn’t it? I mean in all seriousness, the direct cause of this mess is social media, but maybe instantly reacting to this conspiracy and ranting and raving about it is all a part of the plan. They want us to rant and rave. That’s the next layer of the grand narrative. And what does Dr. AI have to do with all this? I know he’s up to something. I know, because I just now received and read this special document that reveals the truth about Dr. AI. Oh that dastardly Dr. AI!

My god, we do live in a Harry Stephen Keeler novel, don’t we?!

The other day, I decided it was finally time for me to enlist the help of a real life Tuddleton Trotter (HSK’s Sherlock), Richard Polt. Richard, just like Trotter, is a polymath. He’s a PhD holding professor of philosophy at Xavier University, a Heidegger expert, a typewriter connoisseur, and a Harry Stephen Keeler superfan / society founder / sleuth.

Over the course of our weeklong email exchange, Richard was nice enough to improv with me and sew quite the web (a webwork the master weaver himself would be proud of). And as with all of my plasmate interview dives, I learned quite a lot about myself and my place in this webwork world.

And, let me please say why dontcha, I believe there are many navigational skills to be gained from reading and studying Harry Stephen Keeler, a writer who in my opinion was as daring and inventive as Joyce and as understanding of the fluidity and subjectivity of the human experience as Borges. Keeler, a writer who was a hundred years ahead of his time and somehow foresaw the postpostpostmodern entanglement storm on the horizon, deserves to be revisited and reevaluated and seen not as the greatest bad writer but as the greatest ontonaut, a sailer of layered, post-ironic, post-truth ontologies. That’s what we need, I think, in this brave new world; navigation. We will be especially grateful for these skills gained once Dr. AI really starts worming deep into the things and maps.

So forget the territory. At least to a certain degree. It is the map that we should be paying close attention to. For this world and these lives we live are filled with twists and turns, coincidences galore and oddities abundant, and nodule points and spider traps. And there are red herrings all over the goddamn place. And if we navigate properly, we let the smelly herrings swim down stream, and keep on keeping on our insane life-maps, just like with the resolution of a Keeler novel, we will find many of our mysteries solved and knots untied. And those answers will definitely be improbable and absurd, just like Being itself.

So, just accept it damnit. Oh god. That fnord. My arch nemesis, The Curious and Contagious Mr. Grief Esquire, is back it!

Grief!!! Imagine I am shaking my fist at the sky!!!

So, without further ado and with our wits still intact and with our psyches not yet ravaged by whatever that is on the horizon, let’s get into this conversation.

Chase:

Do you own an Oliver 5? I love this model for the simple reason that my hero Kafka owned it. What do you know about Kafka’s use of this model? And, to immediately take this interview to my signature gonzo plane, do you think Kafka when he was writing Metamorphosis was inspired by this typewriter that very much looks like a bug? Maybe it was a subconscious thing? Or maybe he kind of improvised? “Hmm, I know I want Gregor to have turned into something. But what? Hey, wow, my typewriter looks like a beetle.”

Richard:

I do own an Oliver 5! Mine is a nickel-plated version sold in Mexico. (Did nickel resist the tropical climate better than the usual olive paint, or did Mexicans just love shiny machines?) I don’t know any details about how Kafka used the Oliver. It’s a design that looks very weird to us now, with its arched typebars that hover over the sides of the paper, but it sold well for decades. I can tell you that David Cronenberg made Kafkaesque use of an Oliver in his film version of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. (Burroughs himself favored other models, such as an ultraportable Antares.)

Chase:

There’s a Keelerian novel for ya, The Triumphant Case of the Nickel-Plated Mexican Oliver 5!!! I might have to write that one. Spitball with me. The main character should be a cobbler moonlighting as a PI. He has 20 adopted carny babies. Maybe he adopted the babies because he’s trying to impress a jazz singer who is super into carnival stuff. The moonlighting PI gig is to help pay for the carny baby expenses, including a Mexican governess. Your turn. And go! Speaking of connections, coincidences, and the grand webwork we are all entangled within (in a tiny voice help me! help me!), I have always wondered if Burroughs was a Keeler fan. Is there anything the HSKS has come across over the years that might hint at this? And, so as to not leave this question in yes-or-no land, I agree with Matt Levinthal in his extraordinary Keeler News essay “From a Rich Rare Lunatic to a Mild Sheep” that HSK was definitely doing his magnificent thing on purpose, tongue in cheeky, playing around with language, doing the modernist thing a lot of people were doing in the first half of the 20th century. Do you know how aware HSK was of modernism, or was it maybe something in the air that he got a whiff of, something that made him want to mess with style and form?

Richard:

I haven’t run across any evidence that Burroughs read Keeler. I think Pynchon is a more Keelerian writer, with his intricate plots, goofy names, and minimal characterization. You can read my open letter to Pynchon in Keeler News no. 61. Of course, he never replied.

You’ve asked the $1 question, with 1000 years of compound interest: Did Keeler know what he was doing? I would say yes, but not in the context of what we consider literary modernism. For instance, you can notice a few parallels between Keeler and Joyce, but I’m not aware of evidence that Keeler ever read Joyce. (See Fred Cleaver’s review of David Earle’s Re-covering Modernism in Keeler News no. 74.) Keeler did read some contemporary literary fiction, but mostly by authors who are now obscure, such as his friend T. S. Stribling (Keeler News no. 20). To judge from HSK’s newsletter, The Keyhole, he preferred nonfiction, from physics to theology to history.

So what was the source of his own literary experiments? I would say a sheer love of trickery. He liked to hurl bright red herrings at readers and then blow their minds with unpredictable surprise endings. He himself enjoyed tricky puzzles, and so did his fans. You could say this about all mystery writers—but HSK took it to extremes. Eventually, his own tastes in trickery deviated too far from those of the public, and he appealed to a smaller and smaller audience.

Chase:

Those are my favorite kinds of artists, the ones who are maybe mold-adjacent, but really don’t actually fit the mold. And these are people who certainly didn’t go looking for the mold. Ahh mold! It’s crawling this way! Run!!! It seems to me that some people were just thrown into the world and their presence just shines through ineffably. I’m a comedy nerd, so I love to use people like Chris Farley, Andy Kaufman, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Madeline Kahn, etc as examples of this. People like them, and well anyone who resonates with some kind of an audience, seem to be nodule points in the grand webwork collage. I feel like this is all starting to sound Heideggerian. Is it? I dig Heidegger’s stuff a lot and feel like before I knew about his writings I was sorta swimming with him, but I only have a shallow end understanding of his concepts. Could Heidegger’s thoughts on throwness and being-in-the-world be compared to collage art and nodule points and people-who-exude? And, as a footnote, my wife recently informed me that in taoism this sort of presence (an embodiment of the tao) is called te (de). God, I’m in full-on Keelerian tangent mode. I need a bop on the head. Bop!!! Okay, there we go. Is there a connection for you between your work on Heidegger and your love of Keeler? And if so, what’s the what of the thing?

Richard:

Well, it’s a bit of a stretch. Heidegger was an imposingly serious thinker who tried to recover the ancient question of Being, while Keeler was a whimsical entertainer (of himself and, sometimes, others). However, I did use the Keelerian word “webwork” recently to describe the Heideggerian concept of worldhood, and I’ve cited Keeler’s notion of the “Psycho-Erg” for its efficient summation of the modern concept of value. Plus, check out these biographical parallels:

1889 Heidegger born in Messkirch, Germany

1890 (or, according to one document, 1889) Keeler born in Chicago

1917 Heidegger marries Elfride Petri

1919 Keeler marries Hazel Goodwin

1925-28 Heidegger has an affair with his student Hannah Arendt

1927 Keeler is infatuated with his secretary Thelma Rinaldo

1927 Heidegger’s first major work, Being and Time

1927 Keeler’s first novel with Dutton, Find the Clock

1933 Heidegger joins the National Socialist party, with its promise of a thousand-year Reich

1933 Keeler includes “How Socialism Finally Arrived in the World!” by “Socialisticus” in The Face of the Man from Saturn—the story of a thousand years of compound interest

1936-38 Heidegger speculates on “time-space” in eccentric magnum opus Contributions to Philosophy

1936 Keeler speculates on spatiotemporal detection in eccentric magnum opus The Marceau Case / X. Jones of Scotland Yard

1946 Heidegger refers to “Hitler’s criminal madness” in his journal

1942 Keeler writes that Hitler’s brain molecules are inside out in The Bottle with the Green Wax Seal

1946 Heidegger banned from teaching

1942, 1948 Keeler dumped by his publishers, Dutton and Phoenix

1952 Heidegger meets Hannah Arendt again; there is speculation that they resumed an affair

1960 Keeler meets Thelma Rinaldo again after his wife’s death, marries her in 1963

1976 Heidegger buried in Messkirch

1967 Keeler buried in Chicago

2025 Collected works of Heidegger exceed 100 volumes

2025 Collected works of Keeler exceed 90 volumes

Chase:

There’s another fun book! A buddy cop novel!! The Curious Worldhood of H & K PI Inc.

These concepts of worldhood and psycho-erg are so fascinating. Will you lay these out for me and my readers?

Richard:

By “world” Heidegger means a holistic webwork of meanings, purposes, and possibilities: for instance, the world of mystery fiction, or the world of Costa Rica. Worldhood, or the structure of all worlds, involves using things for proximate and ultimate goals, so that we may be able to exist in this or that way (e.g. as a novelist, or a Costa Rican politician).

He thinks that in the modern age, we’ve made it difficult to appreciate our immersion in worldhood because of the dominant subject-object split. In my book Heidegger: An Introduction, I quote Keeler’s “John Jones’s Dollar” to illustrate this idea:

At this day, when the Psycho-Erg, a combination of the Psych, the unit of esthetic satisfaction, and the Erg, the unit of mechanical energy, is recognized as the true unit of value, it seems difficult to believe that in the twentieth century and for more than ten centuries thereafter, the dollar, a metallic circular disk, was being passed from hand to hand in exchange for the essentials of life.

I comment:

… the division between subject and object, which finds its classic expression in Cartesianism, is linked to a technological understanding of our existence. From this point of view, nonhuman beings are objects that can be represented accurately and effectively by the mathematical means of modern natural science. Human beings, in contrast, are conscious, willing subjects. Through science, we can become the “masters and possessors of nature”: we can harness natural forces and use beings as resources in the service of our will. Things have value, then, only insofar as they supply energy for our technological projects or satisfy our subjective desires. We may continue to use dollars for some time, but one could argue that the Psycho-Erg has been our true unit of value ever since Descartes.

Chase:

When I think about Heidegger’s worldhood, I can’t help but imagine how Buber’s I-Thou could rescue it from the subject–object split, and then because I am ridiculous I think about the off-the-cuff timing and rhythm of improv comedy and how Del Close’s (a modern shaman?) techniques might help the world out of this mess. The world’s ‘content’ right now (geopolitics, ideology, the dickheads in charge) is a mess, but maybe the real story is the glitchy pulsation underneath. That glitch feels almost Keelian (on top of being super Keelerian) like the super spectrum peeking through. And maybe that’s why I started with Metapsychosis to go looking for modern shamans like you Mr. Polt who can zip the improv comedy interruption into the pulse. So, what is your take on all this? And is there something to be done about it?

Richard:

Hmm … you’ll have to explain “Keelian.”

Chase:

In these crazy times, which feel like a combination of a Philip K Dick novel with all of the constant edge of the construct strangeness, a Robert Anton Wilson novel with all of the constant chapel perilous excursions, and a Harry Stephen Keeler novel with all of the constant coincidences and batshiterry, a lot of us folk feel like John Keel investigating and speculating the big what-the-hell. In Keel’s follow-up to Mothman Prophecies, the weird fiction classic The 8th Tower, he proposes that some super ancient civilization before it annihilated itself left an extremely advanced technology, he called the super spectrum, which causes all of our religious experiences and all of our glitchy anomalous what-have-you’s as well. Now, I don’t necessarily believe in a literal super spectrum (or wouldn’t admit to believing in it lol), but maybe being itself is a nice metaphor for a super spectrum technology.

Richard:

Yes, and …

There’s a line by HSK that I’ve been printing in the masthead of Keeler News for many a year now: “It is this artificial relationship, this purely fictional web-work plot, this bit of life twisted into a pattern mathematically and geometrically true, that fills in the gaps in one’s spirit which rebels at the looseness of life as it apparently is.” Secret plots and hidden patterns satisfy a deep dimension of our minds, but our sanity depends on preserving the suspicion that reality is actually a web of chance, and that usually a coincidence is just a coincidence.

Chase:

And for my last question…

And thank you so very much for doing this interview with me Mr. Polt.

And I must thank another Keeler for introducing me to HSK and then the HSKS way back in the early aughts, Ken Keeler (who I have been told is not related to Harry {little does Ken know, a will revealing him to be a nephew of Harry’s is heading his way at this very moment!}). Whenever people ask me where I went to writing school, I tell them I went to Futurama and Simpsons DVD commentaries (these are accredited institutions, people!). Speaking of institutions, Keeler News in my opinion is a cornerstone, a touchstone, a monolith of the internet. The web just wouldn’t be the web with KN. And Keeler would not be anywhere as known and appreciated without you!!! Can you tell me a bit about what coincidences brought you to Keeler and then what pulsations compelled you to start the Society and the newsletter?

Anything else you want to add or announce?

Richard:

Thanks for the compliment.

Ken has been a great evangelist for Keelerdom, and he’s also the author of the ultimate HSK imitation, “The Mind With the Alternate Skull Mystery” (in Keeler News no. 69). It’s a must-read.

My own discovery of Keeler began with a search for “typewriters” on the still-young World Wide Web in 1996. This led me, by chance, to William Poundstone’s Harry Stephen Keeler Home Page. (It still exists today at http://home.williampoundstone.net/Keeler/Home.html) It immediately gave me a thrill that has never disappeared. I felt like I’d suddenly discovered an alternate version of American fiction, a weird and forgotten universe… and I had! Once I’d read a few novels by Keeler, including The Riddle of the Traveling Skull and X. Jones of Scotland Yard, I got the idea of starting a club that would combine fun with research, and draw together the few people I had discovered who were aware of HSK. The newsletter was originally photocopied and sent through postal mail once a month. That was a lot of work. Now, as you know, it’s a more-or-less annual PDF. But I’m very glad to have kept it up for nearly 30 years.

Sometimes a coincidence is not just a coincidence, but destiny.

Issue 100 of Keeler News will come out sometime in 2026, and I encourage all the Keeler-mad and Keeler-curious to contribute a letter, an article, a book review, or some other special scrap of strangeness.