http://themanwhocouldntblog.blogspot.com
Matthew Simmons is the author of a novella (A JELLO HORSE, Publishing Genius Press, 2009) and a chapbook (THE MOON TONIGHT FEELS MY REVENGE, Keyhole Press, 2010). He is a bookseller living in Seattle with his cat Emmett.
Blaster Al Ackerman passed away in mid-March. (Link there is to a very nice remembrance by our own Adam Robinson.) Some folks who knew him wrote some things about him. Michael Kimball and Rupert Wondolowski collected them for HTML Giant. Here—accompanied by some photos and some of Blaster’s mail art—they are.
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I met Blaster in the flesh only once. He was ludditical, sweet, grumpy, and eventually he put a bar of soap in his mouth. Soon after he moved to Austin, I picked up some shifts he had vacated at Normal’s Books & Records, and there his absence was a constant presence — notes from Blaster, paintings by Blaster, & stories of Blaster: goofing on telemarketers, giving fucked up directions to the Book Thing, &c. It got so I was seeing his influence all over Baltimore — particularly among that stripe of Baltimore artist that believes in the prank as a spiritual path and one’s life as a work of art.
– Bob O’Brien
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Dr Ackerman alias Blaster, who prepared himself at the age of 6 to outclass both Dante and Mark Twain, is one of the most enigmatic writers of the current literature of outcasts and damned poets. He is the author of such masterpieces as “The Fifteen Bath Towels” and “2976 Vienna Sausages,” not to mention “The Ecstasy of Macaroni.” In March/86, after being arrested for the millionth time for dancing naked, holding a flaming steam iron in his right hand and a half empty bottle of Whyte & Mackay scotch whiskey in the left, in front of a shopping center in San Antonio, Texas, he pointed out very clearly in a confessional letter (Confessions of an American Ling Master) he has sent from jail to the major of San Antonio that poetry is a social issue and not just a question of publishing and selling books.
-Istvan Kantor Monty Cantsin? Amen! Esmeralda Eldorado Sawang READ MORE >
Marc and Eddy were deaf and learned that soon they would both go blind. They were 45 and twins. Because they were Belgian, the option of assisted suicide was available to them. Believing they would no longer be able to live self-sufficiently, and to communicate with each other and family (they had developed their own sign language), they chose death by lethal injection. Before they died, they had coffee. READ MORE >
On May 9, 1961*, Iola Brubeck gave birth to a boy. He was given the name Charles Matthew.
The boy’s father, jazz pianist Dave Brubeck—who died today of heart failure on the way to a cardiology appointment and was a day shy of his 92nd birthday—wrote and recorded a song with his quartet called “Charles Matthew Hallelujah.”
Here’s the story I was told by a music teacher: Embedded in the song’s sections—there are two distinct sections—are, first, the words “Charles Matthew!” And then the follow-up “Hallelujah!” Follow Paul Desmond’s alto sax to hear them. Note that there seems to be an extra syllable in “Charles Matthew!” I always sing “Cha-earls Matthew!” when I sing along. The second section, a rolling sort of piano beginning at the 1:30 mark, has “I have a brand new baby boy, I have a brand new baby boy, I have a brand new baby boy, I have a brand new baby boy…” in it. The second and following “I have a brand new baby boy”s all start their “I”s on that stalled, heavy chord so the “I” takes a longer time to say. (Like Brubeck, the one who had the brand new baby boy is, in emphasizing the “I,” bragging a little. Or a lot.)
“Charles Matthew Hallelujah” is one of my favorite songs because it’s a hell of a birthday present. And a hell of a precise artistic statement about pure joy. It’s like the air in a balloon filled to capacity. The rubber skin is the constraint of time signature and the limitations of the instruments. But the air is stretching it as out as far as it will stretch.
Brubeck is nothing but all right in my book. RIP.
* A mystery: Wikipedia & IMDB say Charles Matthew was born on May 9, 1961. Wikipedia also says Time Further Out—the album “Charles Matthew Hallelujah” appears on—was “recorded” on May 3, 1961. So, six days before the birth of Charles Matthew. is Wikipedia referring to the first day of recording? Was it recorded all in one day, and Brubeck was anticipating the birth of a son? As the story was told to me, the song was recorded on the day of or the day after his birth.
“Laboratory testing for lethal intoxicating substances, stigmata of anaphylaxis, or metabolic derangements were negative.” He choked.
On October 5, Keith Campbell—one of the scientists who worked on Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell—died at the age of 58.
Adult cells have specialized jobs. They make one thing—skin, for example. Embryonic cells are not specialized. So, making an entire body from an embryonic cell is relatively easy. Making an entire body from a specialized cell is not. Campbell suggested trying to find a way to get adult cells to revert, to forget their specialization. Starving the adult cell did the trick. Dolly followed.
Some people call cloning “playing God.” Mostly, those people are talking about human cloning, not animal cloning.
But, still, Dolly caused a stir. And accusations of playing god. READ MORE >
On October 5, Edward Archbold, 32, won a live roach-eating contest at a pet store north of Miami, Florida. After his win, Mr. Archbold felt ill, began vomiting, and was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. Other participants in the contest did not fall ill and did not die, suggesting that his death might have been unrelated to the large number of live cockroaches he consumed. Or at least that, for the larger percentage of us, the consumption of a lot of cockroaches is not necessarily dangerous. READ MORE >
Griffith Edwards, Oxford-educated MD and addiction specialist, invented alcoholism. In 1976.
That is to say, he and a cowriter named Milton Gross first published a description of Alcohol Dependence Syndrome in the British Medical Journal in 1976, making the whole darn thing official.
Edwards spent his life considering, studying, talking about, writing about, and helping others with addictions.
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ALCOHOL in HISTORY: Edited Highlights READ MORE >
From Rick Strassman’s book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. This is the way a DMT test subject named “Willow” described her experience on the psychedelic. I’ve added emphasis to the sentence that struck me:
The other side is very, very different. There are no words, body, or sounds there to limit things. I first saw deep space, white with stars. Then there was this multidimensional experience starting. It was alive. It was the aliveness that I heard.
And here, a quote from Terence McKenna recently reTumbled by Tao Lin: READ MORE >
DIED Snippet: On September 14, chronic illness legal advocate Jennifer Jaff passed away. Her advocacy was a reaction to her own diagnosis with Crohn’s disease. Frankly, I don’t even know where to begin talking about the messy maze of health insurance and chronic illness or pre-existing conditions. But I thought this might be a fine place to link to Giant contributor Ken Baumann’s essay on his Crohn’s in Vice Magazine. (And to mention that they have his name spelled wrong in the byline.)(Also, this essay is not sexist.)
Gabriel Vahanian, author of the book The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era, died on Saturday, September 8. He was 85.
He was not an atheist. He was a theologian and critic of what he referred to as “Religiosity,” Christianity that appealed broadly to his contemporary culture, that embraced faith without doubt, that was literal in its interpretations of the Bible, that was “trivial.” Here he reveals the death of God in the names we give God: READ MORE >
Dr. Thomas Szasz was a professor of psychiatry who spent much of his intellectual life critiquing psychiatry. He believed much of psychiatry was unscientific and should not be used to justify coerced detention in mental institutions and that diagnoses should not be allowed in courts of law. He was popular with libertarians (because he believed in body and mind self-ownership over state control of our relative psychiatric [un]hingedness) and, because he called psychiatry a “pseudoscience,” he was embraced by the Church of Scientology.
Because he called psychiatry a “pseudoscience,” he was embraced by the Church of Scientology. READ MORE >
A young, Southern California rapper who maybe went by the names Inkyy or Jew’Elz died in a car accident. According to the obituary in the UK’s Daily Mail (Online edition), Ervin McKinness (Inkyy/Jew’elz’s government name) had, moments before the car he was a passenger in ran into a wall after running a red light, tweeted the following:
It is not believed that Inkyy was driving the car 120 miles an hour or drifting corners, but that he and his friends were—as he self-reports—”drunk as fuck” when they hit the wall. Five people died. It was 1:20am. Another report said they were at Creekside Drive and Haven Avenue: here. This article has video from the scene. There is an iron fence south of the LDS church on the southwest corner. I’m fairly certain that’s the one shown in the video.
#FuckIt?
A question one can ask about Existentialism—whether it is life affirming or life denying—can, I think, also be asked about #YOLO (You Only Live Once). It depends, it seems, on who is hashtagging. There are certainly those who have embraced #YOLO as life affirming. As of Friday, September 14, 1885 people have RTed Inkyy’s unintentionally final words. Those folks seem to have embraced #YOLO as life denying.
Where will you stand? #FuckIt. I stand with life affirming.
Have a good weekend, everyone. If you’re drunk af, stay off the streets. Inkyy’s video “Dreams” after the cut. READ MORE >
A McGuire sister passed away last Friday. As the New York Times obit points out, the McGuire Sisters sang simple, traditional pop songs in contrast to the low, burbling, grinding roil of early rock and roll music. When the McGuire Sisters made a hit out of the song “Sugartime,” history’s greatest rock and roll performer, Jerry Lee Lewis, was marrying his cousin and putting out “High School Confidential.” But they have their charms.
I’m going to just go ahead and admit that I find something particularly distressing about the death of the member of a ’50s close-harmony singing group made up of sisters. Those acts took such pains to eradicate all but the subtlest differences between them in their presentation, worked so hard to let the collective subsume the individuals. (All with nearly the same hairstyle, in nearly the same dress, bantering with Perry Como with nearly the same wit and tone, singing a song with nearly the same notes.) And, sure, they don’t perform anymore. They are in their 80s. But one imagines they sing at home sometimes. And one imagines they hear the other two when they sing at home sometimes. And one imagines they might hear a change in one of their phantom sister voices.
[matchup #51 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Patricia Lockwood is a poet. (A poet. A very good poet.) She also uses Twitter in interesting ways. Earlier this year, her series of SEXTS got attention from Rhizome, and then The Huffington Post & The New Yorker.
And I look at those tweets and I wonder, “How does someone do that?” Not get attention, though. I mean write those. How? So I asked.
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So, I was initially pretty dismissive of Twitter. And then, at some point, I noticed how funny it could be and found it to be a mostly worthwhile distraction. And then—probably while reading the fake Christopher Walken feed—I began to think there could be something kind of poetic about Twitter. That each little update could be a joke, a persona poem, a zen koan.
Did you sense the “poetic” potential in the Twitter post from the beginning or did your approach to Twitter change?
It took me about ten years to join Twitter because, like old men everywhere, I “did not get it.” What is the … where are your mentions … what is hashtag … who is a belieber? When I did join, I spent my first week livetweeting the movie Bambi, focusing specifically on the puberty of Bambi and Thumper, and was subsequently unfollowed with extreme prejudice by the few poets who had charitably followed me in the first place. (This still happens! A real writer will follow me and then four days later be like “what the freak is this” and it is goodbye. CAN’T believe you wrote a tweet about Jesus jelqing.)
OK, so scrolling back, I see that one of my earliest tweets was “I want to see the Beethoven movie where Beethoven finally manages to tear his way out of the dog’s body and play something good on the piano.” About two weeks later I sexted for the first time, like a teen. So it wasn’t so much that I saw the possibilities right away as that … Twitter is the perfect way to disseminate the kind of writing that comes most naturally to me.
READ MORE >
Do you think a blog without comments loses its readership a) quickly or b) slowly?
Stacey Levine on Ryan Boudinot: “This one whom some were following was calm and restrained. His work shows so much work. Thousands of bees in his brain. His work makes its own ceiling, then bursts the ceiling again and again. Those calm, compact manners and the close shave. But you sense at any moment the gentlemanly restraint could fall away. At the spelling bee he was the most polite of them all. He is not in love with the normal. But I think he dislikes the abnormal, because, after all, the normal and its trajectory is so much more complicated and interesting.”
