Baffling Combustions

Following our jag of listener-instigated topics, which we fuse and defuse in as spontaneous a manner as we may fashion, this week we were given "Kaczynski," or (in the interests of disambiguation) the man the FBI termed the "Unabomber." Having found enough here to spread across two sessions - albeit fronting a storm of computer challenges (appropriate for cat who advocates the overthrow of technological society) - we track his traumatic story, philosophy and place in our collective, including touching on how Ted's today pacing out his life sentence in the super-max in Florence, Colorado. Special thanks to Paul Sigismundi for these sessions!

In a Baffling Combustions' first we invited one of our fans to propose our topic: Freud, with particular attention to his contemporary relevance, which we managed to find while mulling how little practically his ideas seem to have found register in contemporary mental health therapies. Also, in this session we reveal Freud's actual very last words - never before revealed! Our thanks to Charles Paikart!

Here we toss more salt into the gap opened in our first SALT session, boldly proposing, modestly withdrawing and sideways implying this crystalline structure is not just essential to our collective human anatomical - the destroyer and preserver of organic creation itself - but also our soulistic integrity.

We turn here to "salt," touching in this first of two podcasts on not only its crystal constitution but also (mostly) its esoteric sense as a metaphor that we all need to keep it together. This podcast carves a particular jag through Maurice Nicoll's THE MARK in which he explores the concept "sin" as manifest in the Gospels, a most salty text.

Enjoy the conclusion of our our session on novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1936 essay "The Crack-Up," in which he writes with aching candor on his psychological collapse and fragmentary, absent spirit, psychic reconstitution. Here's a link to Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up":

https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/the-crack-up/

What better could follow on HEALTH (our two-part treatment) than CRACK-UP 1 (also in two parts), our session on novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1936 essay "The Crack-Up" in which he writes with aching candor on his psychological collapse and fragmentary, absent spirit, psychic reconstitution? To note: This session includes reference to the Cave Canem Foundation, dedicated to African-American poetry and poetics. Fitzgerald concludes his essay with reference to that Latin phrase (trans., "Beware of dog"). The Foundation's name came from a sign the poet Toi Derricotte spotted while visiting the House of the Tragic Poet in the volcanic ash-covered city of Pompeii. Here's a link to Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up":

https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/the-crack-up/

In HEALTH 2, we continue where we didn't leave off and manage as ever to leave other leavings left off, which might be one face of health - to know what to forget. This session includes a semi-mini-biography of Sparrow's exemplary father, who will turn 102 in February.

In this first of a two-part session, we examine the nature of health and what exactly (and otherwise) it might be - including the mystery of the relative absence of its definition within western psychological science. This is a broad-ranging - and we hope far-fetched - discussion that concludes, temporarily, that, like love, there may be an infinite range of health states.

In this session (the second of two) we tackle Andre Breton's Second Manifesto of Surrealism, publishing in 1929—to find ourselves not unexpectedly floored, though we manage to stand again, chastened. BE AWARE: This session ends with the Frankfurt School and the Orgone Box. Here’s a link to Breton's manifesto:

http://theoria.art-zoo.com/second-manifesto-of-surrealism-andre-breton/

In this session (the first of two) we go in and out, through and around Andre Breton's First Surrealist Manifesto (Le Manifeste du Surralisme), publishing in 1924. (To note, this session ties in with our discussion of Gertrude Stein's "Composition as Explanation" in Steintime 1 and 2. Below is a link to a translation of Breton's text.

https://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/F98/SurrealistManifesto.htm