My name is Anthony Philip Glass. Many years ago I was the unwitting participant in a cruel hoax, perpetrated by my father Edward Glass.
Perhaps my name is familiar with you, over the years it has been appropriated for many tall tales, fantastic stories and outright lies but in this journal I intend to set the record straight and do what I can to regain my good reputation.
But let me start at the beginning. My father was always a terribly ambitious man, and was possessed of a keen intellect and no small amount of charisma. However, he always seemed to fall short of his own high expectations. In fact, if it weren’t for a large inheritance that included our family house, I doubt whether he could have kept a roof over our heads at all. It’s not that he was workshy, or without skills, but I always got the impression that he felt “work” in itself was beneath him, something that other people did while he contemplated the best way to leave his mark on the world.
I think I must have been about 10 years old when he decided that I would be his legacy, his “gift to the world” so to speak. My father had always been fascinated with what came to be known as Science Fiction and would read all the pulp magazines of the day voraciously, in much the same way as most other fathers would devour the Times, my father ploughed through piles of histrionic nonsense like Weird Tales and The Argosy.
And so it transpired, my father set about formulating a scheme that would guarantee his infamy, with me as the key player. He devised meticulous plans for a machine that he claimed would transmit music and other forms of art through time to some future recipient – the purpose of which was never really explained. Over the course of three years I was regularly administered a weak tincture of what I now assume to be laudanum which kept me in a permanently bewildered state. Every night I was dragged from my bed and taken to my father’s library where work would continue on building the vast orange-brown behemoth.
I must confess, the sheer scale of my father’s deception was impressive. By the time we were undertaking the first “tests” the machine filled almost every corner of my father’s large basement library. It huffed and puffed, glowed and groaned in a most impressive manner, and some of it’s malfunctions were terrible and magnificent to behold. By the time I was sent away to live with Aunt Sophie at age 14, the machine seemed as much a part of the house as a heart is to the human body.
I will write further tomorrow.