Many overcoats of clay in the instance of Callion Hamblin's
friends and family who have argued volubly, lovingly, and vehemently with Death
since their brother, son, husband, and friend was taken from them almost five months
ago in a hissy fit of police state violence. They argue with his senseless and
unjustifiable Death, shouting down the absurd surreality of his ashes and
dust, dust that should never have been kicked up over a bondsman's bounty.
Here are some select words remembering when they were
together, holding fast to their connection, refusing its brokenness, counting
and recounting their monstrous loss in a Facebook community--RIP Callion "Smoke/Kinloch" Hamblin--of which
I am a member. Daily I hear their inspiring words as arias to as of yet
unwritten operas; lyrics to art songs, soaring or hushed; song cycles of
Spirit, unadulterated and pure; anthems, fanfares and dirges of loyalty, love,
and a righteous nonacceptance of what is, after all, totally unacceptable.
You see, Spirit is winning this argument with Death; Spirit
is celebrating the time when he was here, as he should be still; Spirit is
embracing him, holding him dear always. To have friends like these, just might
be worth dying for.
sup
brah, first tme since u passd i had a dream about u. a vivid dream.. it
wuz too real. not of past shit weve done ths dream consisted of today. .. i love u kinloch. i wish to god i cud rewind tha hands of
tme fam.. give me closure brah not completely jus let me kno dat ima b
aight down here.
Me
and Miss saw a guy that reminded us of you yesterday, I had to walk up
close just to get a better look, he looked at me very strange
EVN IN DEATH WE LIVE FOREVR. WE GONE RIDE TIL THA WHEELS FALL OFF MY NIGGA.
Smoke
I didn't want to get on this page and speak bout you knowing you not
here but that laugh you had, I think I was the only only one that could
make you laugh so hard you start snorkeling like a baby pig
All i ask Smokey is u plz
watch over me sweetie....cause i dnt kno if im comin or goin anymore...n
i gtta do my best ta hold myself tagether cause my beautiful baby girlz
need me!!
I always call him Callion, it
is how he introduced himself to me the first time we met, he went out
and bought new shoes and shirt, dressin to impress...we had Lasagna.
Being a "more mature" person I remember telling him he looked
Spiffy..hahahha....bet he never got called Spiffy before. lmao. I
should have told him he was stylin or at least fly!
Was
going thru my phone and saw your name had the notion to just text you
and say ” hey big head you iight” n u would always say something smart
back but this time no...then I thought about the time I told u I won on
that lottery ticket you said I owe you half lol I told you u ain't put
in on it so you ain't getting it lol...but you said you put in half a
thought so that counts lol u was serious too...
Miss
you so much, think about you everyday. Keep thinking u will call and
ask me to bring you a pack of Newports, *sigh* man i miss the little
things. I miss our talks and me givin you shit about all the young girls
u dated. You were my best friend for real. Funny how we had an amazing
relationship.....after we were divorced! LoL X is finished with
basketball and started baseball, he changed his number to #32 in honor
of you.
I have to say X did get something from you...........I mean
besides that nose and that peanut head, lol he got ur quickness, that
boy is fast! Coach says he is one of the fastest on the team and they
are counting on him to steal bases.
I
found all the letters I've been missing of yours! Sitting here reading
them lol if I ever need a good laugh I just read them when I'm down!!
Yal hear dat thunder...dats big brah up thr partyin already....
Smokey!!
I am sooooooooooo pissed right now! I feel like my head is gonna
shoot off like a fucking rocket! These mother fuckers won't even let us
mourne in peace! Every single person in this group needs to get them a
bracelet or maybe 2!!! Wear them everywhere you go! Show your love
for Smoke! They can't stop me from doing that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BIG
BRAH, HERE WE R ANOTHER DAY. STILL UNBELIEVABLE.. SHIT DONT ADD
UP...BUT I LOVE U AND MISS U.... TOLD U IMA KEEP YO NAME ALIVE... GOT
IT TATTD ON MY RITE WRIST... A BRACELET ON THA LEFT THANKS TO CHERYL AND
YO NAME ON A DOG TAG AROUND MY NECK..... WATCH ME MY NIG... SAVE A
PLACE 4 ME UP THR...PUT DAT WRD IN 4 ME YA DIG....AND TELL EM BOUT ME UP
THR AIGHT. LOVE U FAM
Well said. I miss ya too smoke! But we won't let no one forget what they did to you! Promise!!!!
FIND IT HARD TO BELIEVE: HOW THA FUCK AM I TO GRIEVE, WHN A NIGGA DAT I
LOVE WUZ KILLED BY THA POLICE. MORE THN JUS A FRIEND TO ME U TORE APART
A FAMILY, BUT IMA KEEP HIS NAME ALIVE CAUSE HE' LL DO THA SAME FOR ME.
WONT B THA SAME WIT OUT MY NIGGA THS INVOLVED MUST REMEMBER, U REAP WUT U
SOW WUT WUZ DONE WONT B FORGIVN........TO B CONTINUED
he was with me at mcDonald's
tonight, me and Missie were eating a burger and the light above our
table kept flicking on and off, the only one in the whole place doing
that...I was telling her about how I took him with me on my road trip
today, told her he sat on the steering wheel, she laughed and laughed
and that light kept going on and off. hahhaha.
i
had a dream about smoke last nite and i got up went in the living room
where i keep his flowers and they are blooming like crazy
I
miss him like crazy, he was a true friend. You may not agree with
everything he done but one thing is for sure he was a likeable
guy......could always make you laugh. Cal was a true friend he would
give you the shirt off his back or his last dollar iff you asked. His
boys idolized him.........
Rip
my nigg,,, wish it could of been different... We all love ya and you
will be truly missed,,, x and dre be strong yo unks gotcha,,, I'll see
you in the after life smoke but not yet
you
may not me our thug Smokey here but your now our thug angel.. you
might of made your mistakes but we all have made our own lil
mistakes....There's not a single person datz perfect!!!!
man i miss his ass so much can't stop thinking about him the storm last nite i was like smoke raising hell already
Wuts gud my nig.....we miss u down here brah.
smoke
happy fourth of july 4z sup ^ I will never forget the fourth of july on
donelson street in park hills at mama Diean house you fliped that
mountain bike you was hot as hell but got up and walked it off like a g
but redeemed yourself later in the night by hitting ole boi well
there's fire works you know who I'm talking about the whole hood was
shooting fireworks that night thanks to you bruh
Happy fathers day smoke
Happy fathers day
Happy fathrs day brah.
Happy Fathers Day Cal!!
Happy fathers day smoke, love and miss you like crazy!!
Happy Fathers Day Cal! U are heavy on our minds today. X and I miss u bunches :) This is ur day RIP, love you.
Happy
Birthday Cal ! June 10, 1979 Would have been 33 today. This day is
difficult, miss u so much everyday, today I will miss buying u a gift,
telling u ur getting old, goin bald, etc......I so badly wish u were
here with us to celabrate. Going to spend a little time with ur girl Pac
and reminisce about good times.
Smok£ I'm not feeling diz Izh But evry time I get like dizzying I feel you like your standing right behind me thank you bruh
Hi ya Callion...having a Grand daughter tonight...super excited. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sittn
here tryna see tha world thru yo eyes now..thnkn bout wut u may have
saw and tha expression u may have had as u walkd entered home...i wish i
cud jus talk to u one more tme..for closure and peace.
I'm Cal's ex-wife, however we
remained very close he was my best friend.....Cal was a best friend to
many. He made an impact on many peoples lives. ...It
seems like such a senseless tragedy that they murdered him. The police
portrayed him as a dangerous criminal to justify the shooting. We as
friends and family never got ANY answers just what the police say. I
myself heard the gun shots from my house and let me just say,"It was NOT
the sound of gun fire EXCHANGE, it was the sound of OPEN FIRE" the
coroner told me he was hit "multiple" times two that were fatel..... Its
hard to find peace when so many questions left unanswered .
Who says there's nothing sweet for young people to do in Farmington, MO on a Monday night? At 10 pm a crew of Farmington High's finest set out on a treasure hunt for five hidden copies of my novel Cooperative Village placed around the historic downtown district. I thought they would be challenged but these kids are so bright that I may have to amp up the difficulty level if we do it again. One of the boys guessed the first location before he even left the convenience store attached to the gas station where I connect to the internet! Can you? We'll see how long it takes them to get back.Feel free to play along!
Cake from my publication party in May 2007, made by Ron and Ira of Rainbo Cakes in the Essex Market, LES, NYC
This in from Steve Hull while we wait for the kids to get back:
They're back for some hints! They got 3 out of 5 in under an hour. These kids are so amazing! And here they are:
Gordon Chamberlain, Erin Roberts, Catherine Gracie Minnis, Sydney Rodgers and Christian Wooddell (and Baron Gogol in the background whose great-great grandfather was Russian literature heavyweight Nikolai Gogol!)
They're back out to retrieve the last two! Didn't take long at all. And now for the answers.
Atop the ice machine at 214 Liquor
Location #2
The weird staircase to nowhere at Jefferson and Second.
Location #3
Behind the columns at the Farmington Post Office
Location #4
Behind the lions at Botaniques
Location #5
Behind Music Makers
Yay Gracie, Erin, Christian, Sydney and Gordon! Christian's off to Norway, but the rest of the crew will be back for more Farmingtonian hijinks very soon.
A couple of years ago I popped into a panel at the CUNY Graduate Center and heard Professor Aronowitz talking about the best use of one's time while waiting for the political moment in which change, real and widespread change, might be possible. He said that we should start newspapers--not blogs, not websites, not journals, but newspapers!
It took a while but I've done the next best thing; I've helped to revitalize a defunct one. I can hardly believe it, but I am the proud publisher of The Madison County Crier, a free alternative community newspaper published semi-monthly here in Southeast Missouri, where I've lived for the last year and a half.
Please download the PDF of the paper here and please, please pardon our numerous typos. We'll sharpen our pencil on that score in the July 11th issue. We have a Facebook page too, here, which you could "Like" if you really and truly do. And please come see us in Fredericktown or Marquand or Junction City or Cherokee Pass real soon.
What's with the black stars on this American flag? Has the U.S. flag flying in Rep. JoAnn Emerson's Columbia Street office window been--egads!-- desecrated!? (Say it isn't so, Jo-Jo!)
Election season brings its litter of lawn signs enriching
sign makers and impoverishing the rest of us. Tempting as it might be to
suggest the enactment of legislation to abolish lawns themselves as a way of
eliminating the eyesores, one has to assume the pols would find another way to
do their electioneering; and since elected officials or their wannabes are not
required to take a blanket oath (like doctors, for example) to do no harm,
their tactics might include even greater destructive acts such as pounding
nails into trees to hang their red, white and blue come-ons, or by further
polluting the already imperiled night sky with LEDs.
So unless one has cultivated the kind of selective vision
that elides the offending signs from the landscape, it's just another of the
crass indignities to be borne in modern daily life. We're forced to look at their banal slogans while driving to the local food pantry to contribute canned goods to
our jobless, hungry neighbors (last year in this rural hamlet alone our local
food pantry distributed hundreds of thousands of pounds of food); or
while heading over to yet another fund
raising benefit for someone gravely ill fighting the good fight without
adequate health “insurance;” or on the way to one of the frequent senseless and tragic funerals
for a person in their prime slaughtered on the blood-and-guts-soaked killing fields
that are our local highways by yet another drunk because let's face it, there's
no public transportation and a very limited and expensive taxi service, and if
a tipsy party-goer needs to get from point Alpha to point Omega it's likely
going to be behind the wheel of an automobile. I do
the best I can to block out the annoying placards from my view and resist
allowing them to penetrate my consciousness.
But there is one on the horizon that has somehow darted
in under the radar, and try as I might, I can't shake it off. Offered up by career U.S. Congresswoman
and professional people person (and golfer?), JoAnn Emerson's campaign sign says: Putting People Before Politics. Now maybe this is where
the rubber of my New York cynicism meets the road of my Missouri skepticism,
but putting people...? What grip on which club would she even use for that? Is putting people even possible in any meaningful sense? Would they roll and fall into the hole, or just sort of
pathetically flop over and convulsively twitch in place?
In theory I understand why she'd want to putt
people before politics; and not only because “politics” is how she earns her
daily bread ($165,200 per annum) and benefits you and I can only dream of, so the incentive to risk injuring “politics” with her
putting iron really isn't there. But
still, I'm not liking this idea of putting people., even small dimpled white roundish ones. Furthermore, I'm not quite buying that she does it successfully, as her
message implicitly suggests.
I can hear the naysayers out there shouting me down, because, technically, she never claims that she sinks the putts in the
hole, just that she makes the attempt. I concede the point, but I find it, if
not exactly disingenuous, kind of weak on her part to announce all over her
own district, to the very people who
hold the power (or so we're told) to vote her back for more of the same ole,
same ole that she's flailing around on
the putting green; simply going
through the motions. Has staff not informed her that even the perception that
she may be engaged in false advertising could be extremely harmful to her
re-election bid? Have they not advised her to add a clarifying modifier,
perhaps something like: Putting (But Not in All Cases Sinking) People Before...etc.?
By now, some of you out there may be thinking that I'm
pulling your leg, that I'm making some kind of “statement” about the false,
one might say subpar, "choices" routinely presented by the electeds, or how they never really mean precisely
what they say or say precisely what they mean, or both. To which I, doffing my plaid
golf cap and bowing low from the waist of my pink and lime Lily Pulitzer golf
togs, might retort: Play through!
When they go so far as to place the white elephant right there in the window for everyone to see, maybe we should take a freaking clue...? What good is transparency, if no one bothers to look? Or if when they do, they can't see what's staring them in the face?
“Stop yelling. Hope said it was okay, we
have it in
writing!” And I ran to get the note from
Mr. Plotsky, but
the visual of Mr. Plotsky’s
helter-skelter craziness made
things worse.
“Frances, what have you involved us in?”
“She said we have a biological
imperative! She said
we have to clear the decks!”
“What’s coming in for a landing? A UFO?”
--From Chap. 4 of Cooperative Village,
“A Dunking A Day Keeps the Torturer Away”
In
my novel Cooperative Village, I created a fictional character to
represent the part of me who lags behind, who gleefully dances for perverts,
who openly weeps at beauty and loss; the slowest bubble to the surface, I
called her “the lovely retarded woman.” In one of my favorite scenes (one that anticipates the configuration aspect of Bogost's Tiny Ontology concept) the protagonist,
Frances, rewards the lovely retarded woman for her help with a tedious project
creating vocabulary flashcards for her husband's elementary school students.
She presents her with an expansive gift removed from a curio cabinet of
treasures—a kaleidoscope.
I showed her how to aim it a light
source, look through the hole and manipulate the wheels, both in the same
direction, in opposite directions, fast, slow, and spinning with abandon.
“Beautiful,” she said. “Beautiful.
BEAUTIFUL. For me?”
“For you.”
She put her arms up in a “v” for victory.
The
lovely retarded woman leaves her encounter with Frances refreshed, enriched, with victory in hand. (You'll have to read the book to see the
curious effect their session together has on Frances.)
I
don't have a kaleidoscope for philosopher, game designer, professor of
Digital Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and author ofAlien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost; anyway, it
would be too rudimentary a tool for the operation at hand. There are certain things I sensed in reading and rereading this newest addition to OOO theory that his own book wishes to tell him, certain contradictions currently withdrawn from his perception that it wishes him to resolve in favor of freedom and greater ontological dignity. In the book's epigraph, Bogost posed a series of questions to his book.
Particle man, particle man Doing the things a particle can What's he like? It's not important Particle man
Is he a dot, or is he a speck? When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead? Nobody knows, Particle man
--They Might Be Giants, Particle Man
His book has answered him, but I don't think he's listening. The book didn't know he was being merely clever, and his book wants his attention. So as improbable as this all seems, it called out to me here in St. Francois County over Memorial Day weekend. For days now I've been worrying how to intervene, how to help? (Lives are at stake.) What medium would best deliver his book's message, most impress him with his book's urgent warnings?
So even though it was painstaking and time consuming (and way more than he would ever do for me if the tables were turned) I made him an ontograph, or the beginnings of one (I ran
out of Time and didn't get to finish in the “dense meanwhile,” so it's a WIP; besides it's better if he finishes it himself). I mean it to be an amalgam of a Latour litany and a Shore picture. As Bogost
writes, “The Latour litany gathers disparate things together like a strong
gravitational field. But the Shore ontograph takes things already gathered and
explodes then into their tiny, separate, but contiguous universes.”
My
ontograph is in the form of an index, a creative supplement (some new
categories, some new entries to existing ones) to the one already created for Alien
Phenomenology, offered with two hopes: 1) that it fulfills itself
definitionally, index as that which “leads an observer to surmise a particular
fact or draw a particular conclusion.” (From Webster's Third New International
Dictionary); and 2) that as John Barth told
us in Chimera: “The key to the treasure is the treasure.”Tittle and all!
Here
are the index categories:
New Unit!
addiction: alcohol-caused
liver disease, 20; when I don't tweet, I might lose face, 76;
New Unit!
Christianity: wounds of
the mountain-Christ, 3; rapturous disappearance of humanity, 8; a great
cathedral, 21; Carpentry, 85-111; Wonder, 113-134.
New Unit! Empire (hyperobject): U.S. Armed Forces,
1; Trinity Site, 1: 1862 Battle of Glorieta Pass, 1; Roswell Army Air Field, 1;
Very Large Array antenna, 2; African elephant, 9; Harry Potter, keynote
speeches, single malt-scotch, 12; volcano's network, 21; the palace of being,
21; Winnie the Pooh, 22; Slurpee, 23; who does the counting?, 27; pragmatic
speculative realism, 29; the Voyager, 32; Offra of Mercia, 35; the Prussian
empire, the Zionists, 39; the relationship of accumulation, 40; Coke Is It!,
44; Disney Concert Hall, 46; the latest gadgets, 48; subjects are subordinate,
48; Hostess Twinkie, 62; USSR, 66;
games:
Being human the players can try to outwit one another in order to fool the
interlocutor through deception, 14; the cancer that beats others at its own
game, 39;
perception:
of things, 27; ordering like an imperative, 27; bracketing our natural
assumptions about, 32; arrested before, 50; as clear subject for
phenomenological inquiry, 61; as ideative categorical intuition, 80; subjective
universe of one object's, 83;
New Unit!
prison: of your own
devising, 3; dank halls of the mind's, 5; tragically blind to the distinction
between doing and saying, 15; making things tidy, 15; of representation, 40; of
human experience, 65; the pace of Twitter, 76;
I
thought it might be further illuminating and fun to practice a little
mereology. First, consider each these six
categories individually, then as a whole, and then insert each entry into its
proper place in the preexisting index and consider the larger whole. For
instance, addiction would be inserted between Adams, Ansel and Adventure;
Christianity between children: career goals for and Coke Is It (slogan); Empire
(hyperobject) between Eames, Charles and Ray: Powers of Ten and
entities, alliances among; and prison would nestle between preservation of
units and process philosophy.
Then
just sit back with a kick-ass cocktail and let the index perform the
philosophical work. It's powerful!
I think if Ian Bogost will do this and spend more time listening to his book (and maybe literally reading it aloud will help him), one of the things he will discern (and by no means is it the most important contradiction, but it's the one that jumped out at me, and showed itself as a symptom of a broader tendency) is a fundamental contradiction between calling literature out, as he does on page farty, for having "a preference for traditional narrative" [of precisely the sort insisted upon by James
Wood] because it "acts as a correlationist amplifier,” and reifying Wood's self-serving status as arbiter of the "good" and "aesthetically successful." Even the lovely retarded woman wasn't that self-defeating.
Meanwhile, although we haven't used the term "correlationist amplifier," to describe James Wood, or Adam Kirsch, or Lev Grossman, or Laura Miller, or any of the other middlebrow gatekeepers, we in the litblogosphere, and most especially Edmond Caldwell at Contra James Wood and The Chagall Position and in his phenomenal new novel Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant, have been saying exactly that for years.
