Matthew Simmons
Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle.
Matthew Simmons—
The two best things I read online today are this essay on mushrooms by Daniel Nester and this paper from Hypermedia Joyce Studies that examines the connections between Finnegan’s Wake and Electronic Voice Phenomena.
Comments Off on hearing voices
Matthew Simmons—
It really feels like summer. Here’s a video by the writer Juliet Escoria with blood and a bridge and . Feels like it’s going to be a great summer. A summer where we bleed out all that’s bad inside.
Present Tense and Mumbai New York Scranton by Tamara Shopsin
I guess I’m never going to be a doctor of anything. I mean, I’ve only ever tried to become a doctor of creative writing, so I only feel a small amount of regret about the fact that I’ll never be a doctor. A doctor of creative writing is a strange sort of doctor to be, anyway. It’s maybe better not to be one, really.
One of the reasons I’m not going to be a doctor of creative writing is, I guess, that the application I sent to places for consideration for their doctoring in creative writing programs included a story that included a section written in the present tense. And this seemed to bother at least one someone enough for them to mention to me that it stuck out to them as a good reason not to bring me into their school to teach me all the things one gets taught when one works at becoming a doctor of creative writing. (I’m certain there are other reasons I will not be a doctor. But that was a reason a person copped to as a reason I was rejected as a creative writing doctor candidate. But, yeah. Many other reasons, I’m sure. I fall short in all sorts of ways. All the time. Ask anybody.) And in response to a query about my ineligibility to become a doctor of creative writing, I was sent a link to this 1987 essay by William Gass which he expresses dismay about all the present tense going around. “Why won’t you be a doctor? Here, read this and find out. William Gass will tell you.” READ MORE >
Top Three Suicidal Gods
3. Mercury
Mercury, god of commerce and poetry, discovered that for most of the contemporary world, he was just the basis for a class of comic book superhero who ran fast everywhere and defeated terrible, terrible villains by running fast at them and away from them. Mercury, who like commerce and poetry, was of an erratic personality type, slumped into a despondency and decided it would be best to not be at all. Mercury decided to run himself to death, and so he found a long, flat place, and connected one end of it to the other, and made a twist in the center. It became a möbius strip. Mercury ran and ran and ran, waiting in motion for his legs to buckle and his heart to burst. For the knitted together sections of his heart to expand and contract faster and faster until they pulled themselves away from each other and splatter blood inside his chest. READ MORE >
Blaster Al Ackerman (19xx – 2013)
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 >
DIED: The Verbessem Brothers
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 >
DIED: Dave Brubeck
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.
Matthew Simmons—
“Laboratory testing for lethal intoxicating substances, stigmata of anaphylaxis, or metabolic derangements were negative.” He choked.
DIED: Keith Campbell
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 >
DIED: Edward Archbold
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 >