Matthew T Grant

There are many reasons why my academic career didn’t pan out, but among them is undoubtedly the fact that I didn’t publish very much. For example, I never turned my dissertation on the Baader-Meinhof Gang into a book (though part of my research did end up in an obscure, Canadian journal called, Border/Lines).

When I did publish, it was essays like this one on the politics of gangsta rap.

Now, of course, I “publish” pretty much every day!

Life is so strange.

Reading two NYT articles today reminded me of how much fun with similes writers over there can have.

First, in “The Great Unalignment,” writer Matt Bai says that, in the aftermath of Scott Brown’s Senate victory here in Masschusetts, Democratic talk of “a great liberal realignment seems as retro as Friendster.”

While I don’t exactly consider Friendster retro – it’s hardly Pong – I’ve always said, “Retro is the new cutting edge.”

Second, in a review of Charles Pellegrino’s The Last Train from Hiroshima, Dwight Garner writes, “Mr. Pellegrino follows his survivors as they trudge through wastelands that make ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy read like ‘Goodnight, Moon.’”

Of course, that just got me thinking about how well “The Road” would go over as a bedtime story: “Goodnight corpse. Goodnight air. Goodnight cannibals everywhere.”

I launched the incredibly successful Twitternet phenomenon, #onewordwednesday, in May 2009, at least by my reckoning.

The fact that on every subsequent Wednesday (and sometimes earlier) the hashtag has seen action, and not just due to my own fervid zealotry, I consider one of the few real achievements of my adult life.

Nevertheless, I fear that I have been lax to the point of wishi-washiness on what constitutes proper observance of #onewordwednesday. Among other things, my wavering spirit has led some to attempt a #onewordwednesday takeover, albeit it in the interest of your eternal salvation.

Today, however, I’m drawing a line in the sand and stating clearly and definitively, that true, devout observance of #onewordwednesday calls for limiting all Tweets that day to ONE WORD.

“But Matthew T. Grant, what about retweets or the sharing of links?”

Gosh darn it! OK. Fine. As Buffy Saint-Marie once sang, “I was an oak, now I’m a willow, now I can bend.”

• You may retweet other contributions to the #onewordwednesday experience until the 140 character limit has been achieved.
• You may also share links if and only if the Tweet consists of nothing more than one word and a shortened URL.

Look, I’m not asking that everyone across the Twitterverse adhere to this standard of observance. I simply want to provide those interested in truth, purity, and righteousness a guiding light and a clear sign that they may better find their way on the path to (#)one(wordwednesday)ness.

Peace.

The fact that I was grooving on Andrew Hill, coupled with the fact that I decided to check out  his Andrew!!! (literally, I got the cd at the library) because I saw that John Gilmore, longtime collaborator of Sun Ra, played on it, makes me a “jazzhole.”

Likewise, the fact that I would say, “Everyone knows Point of Departure cuz Dolphy was on it, but I prefer the stuff Hill did with Sam Rivers,” makes me a “jazzhole.”

Nevertheless, if digging the esoteric masters of the art is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Image Courtesy of Max Sparber.

I was once in an alt-rockin’ trio called “Spanking Machine.”  The fellow who played bass, Kurt, was the son of a brain surgeon. My father, it just so happened, was an orthopedic surgeon.

One day, Kurt said that we should form a band with this other dude, Dave, whose dad was a cardiac surgeon.

“We could,” he suggested, “call ourselves, ‘Sons of Surgeons.’”

It only recently occurred to me that our fathers regularly cut people with surgical blades. My father sawed and drilled bones while replacing joints with hi-tech titanium replicas.

Kurt’s father sutured brains.

I’m sure that our conscious or unconscious awareness of the work our fathers did had no influence whatsoever on our life choices.

Image Courtesy of daveparker.

I’m off to MarketingProfs’ Digital Mixer in Chicago this morning and I’m practically giddy.

Look, I’m a people person and if there is one thing that conferences like this have, it’s people. The bonus is that in this case, I’ve actually met some of them before and am very much looking forward to reconnecting with Paul Chaney, Amber Naslund, Beth Harte, Jason Baer, Mack Collier, as well as all the great folks from MarketingProfs proper.

The super-bonus is that there’s gonna be folks there whom I haven’t yet met but, having met them, will find my life utterly transformed and the world full of bright, ever-expanding horizons. Or at least I’ll get their business card.

I must admit, however, that, aside from meeting people, “deepening relationships,” and “participating in the conversation,” I have another goal in attending the MarketingProfs Digital Mixer: atonement.

You see, at a MarketingProfs event last June, I moderated a panel on content strategy. At the beginning of the session, I asked people to put away their laptops and refrain from Tweeting unless prior to doing so they could honestly and earnestly say to themselves, “The world must know!” It was not surprising that, for doing so, I was called, by Greg Verdino among other people, a “douche.”

I don’t know if the mustache I’m growing will really help me live down my reputation as “douchey,” but, heck, I’m gonna do my darnedest to make up for this egregious social media faux pas and show everybody that I’ve drunk the Kool Aid, that I’ve gotten with the program, and that I can play well with others.

And much like my conscious decision to grow a mustache, in spite of its many perils, that last sentence was written in the complete absence of any inner sense of irony or sarcasm. See ya there!

Chaos is our mother.

∞

The entire history of the universe unwinds in the transition of diverse high energy state into a single low energy state. When the universal stuff has achieved a uniform temperature, it will be completely and chaotically disordered. When the energy gradient has disappeared entirely, there will be no identifiable things. “No thing-ness” awaits the universe at and as its end.

∞

The amount of time we spend consciously dwelling on the Earth is vanishingly brief compared to the time it will take for all the energy generated (released?) at the time of the Big Bang to dissipate entropically and, for all intents and purposes, vanish. For this reason, I say that we always find ourselves in the middle of time.

∞

“You can’t miss what you can’t measure.” For something to exist the way that things exist, you must be able to measure it. Does it make sense to speak of a thing that does not exist?

∞

If the existence of something cannot be proven logically or demonstrated scientifically it is irrational to insist that it exists. In other words, it may exist, but only irrationally.

∞

Dynamic referentiality. Our language does not refer to some central lexicon to be used or understood. Instead, it refers to the multidimensional history of its own usage. Read the rest of this entry »

As some of you may recall, and many of you will not, Frances Fukuyama published a book in 1992 entitled, The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama’s thesis therein was that, with the ascendancy of societies combining a free market economy with democratic political institutions, history, understood quasi-dialectically as a series of increasingly dominant and effective social forms, had, as the title suggests, ended.

Fukuyama’s thesis was and is plausible because, like the scientific rationality which forms the third angle of modernity’s powerful triumvirate, the free market and democracy share a distinct formalism. Just as “science” offers not a set of beliefs about the world so much as a method for exploring and solving its many mysteries, “democracy” merely offers a way of formulating laws and maintaining a system of government, without stipulating their specific content, while the “free market” provides general guidelines for the organization of commerce and trade, indifferent to the existence of a particular enterprise or commodity.

This formal abstraction lends to science, the free market, and democracy, a kind of universal timelessness and along with it an aura of finality. At the same time, this formal emptiness, while appealing to the reformer, appalls the revolutionary; the reformer sees in this open-endedness the possibility of continuous improvement; the revolutionary sees it as a failure to instantiate the absolute.

Read the rest of this entry »

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About three months ago, I wanted to see if I could launch a trending hashtag and the hashtag I hit on was #onewordwednesday. My first tweet containing that hashtag read, “meme #onewordwednesday.”

I quickly discovered that I was not the first person to use this expression. That honor goes @markdudlik, who was about a month ahead of me. By the way, he’s a scientist. Of awesome.

The basic rule for #onewordwednesday is: Post at least one tweet containing a single word of your choosing along with the hashtag, #onewordwednesday. I guess I could have gotten more complicated by insisting that all your tweets for the duration of #onewordwednesday be one word in length, or that you should only tweet one word for the entire day, but I wanted to keep it simple, for good or ill.

So far, about 38 individuals have contributed to the #onewordwednesday effort with @cristinagordet, @motoole1, and @rsheffield deserving special recognition for their unflagging and enthusiastic support of this quixotic endeavor. I would also like to point out that #onewordwednesday would have been strangled in the cradle had @devinusmaximus not reached out and inspired me to keep hope alive in the early days of our movement. Devin, you are the wind beneath my wings.

The future is unwritten, as the Clash used to say, and I do not know whither #onewordwednesday is bound. I like that a kind of game is developing in which people retweet a #onewordwednesday word and add a related word. That sort of thing can only go so far given Twitter’s character limit, but it emerged spontaneously, which I find promising. Who knows what the day after tomorrow might bring?

The other idea I had was to choose a word, like “focus,” and see how many people we can get to tweet, “Focus #onewordwednesday.” In addition, we could retweet any random tweet containing the word “focus,” adding the hallowed hashtag as well. Are you game? Let’s do this.