Book cover

Filmed by Andrew Glenn Shenker. Reading from "Krall Krall" begins at 50:00.

Illustrations by the author for Cars Are Real book release and gallery show at Current Space, Baltimore, October 2013. This event featured works by Alejandro Ventura, Laura Warman, R.M. O'Brien, Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez, Josef Kaplan, and myself.

See article at: http://thisrecording.com/today/2012/2/16/in-which-the-dalkon-shield-has-a-paralyzing-effect.html "Hugh Davis was obsessed with inventing things. By the time he landed a job at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he had already created thirty pioneering laparoscopic instruments (used to operate inside the body through a single small incision), establishing the type of minimally-invasive surgery that patients expect today. He had worked with the best doctors and surgeons in the world. They reported that he was a real whiz-kid with an ego of troubling proportions."

See article at: http://thisrecording.com/today/2012/1/13/in-which-we-explore-these-feminine-products.html "Contraception was a private female problem before it was a big business."

See article at: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-to-live-forever-by-being-mostly-dead

See articles here: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/in-which-big-game-and-eugenics-go-to-washington-or-environmentalism-is-born And here: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/it-s-dark-in-those-woods-tracing-environmentalism-to-eugenics-part-two

See article at: http://thisrecording.com/today/2013/7/26/in-which-we-stand-between-the-awe-and-wonder.html

See article at: http://thisrecording.com/today/2015/7/31/in-which-we-accept-margery-kempe-as-a-holy-person.html

See article at: http://thisrecording.com/today/2012/5/11/in-which-it-hurts-in-isolation-or-with-others.html

See article at: http://thisrecording.com/today/2012/3/1/in-which-we-entertain-the-opinion-of-the-inventor.html

See article at: http://thisrecording.com/today/2012/6/26/in-which-they-stand-at-the-vanishing-point.html

See article at: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-manmade-marvel-of-the-baltimore-sewers

Essay for Issue 2 of Schematic Quarterly, produced by Ingrid Burrington, Baltimore. This was a nonfiction piece about magnetism, models, metaphors, and the crafting of alternate worlds in the context of the 17th-century "scientific revolution". A performance and slideshow accompanied the magazine release.

"Instead, amateur participation appears, in the archive, as excessive and unruly, overflowing the forms designed to contain it and producing an “inchoate accumulation” rather than a system of scientific facts." See article at: http://forbiddenhistories.com/2014/06/27/amateurs-empiricism-and-the-tedium-of-psychical-research-guest-post-by-alicia-puglionesi/

"Among the many novelties unleashed upon the world by Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, perhaps the most striking is the spectacle of dignified nineteenth-century physicians carefully imbibing graduated amounts of cannabis and attempting to record its effects upon their mental and physical states. Just as you wouldn’t feed dinner guests a dish that you hadn’t sampled, Hahnemann argued, doctors had no right to prescribe their patients remedies that they had not themselves tried." See article at: http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/09/04/proving-it-the-american-provers-union-documents-certain-ill-effects/

To her neighbors in 19th century Baltimore, the mycologist Mary Banning was a witch-like “toadstool lady”, known for boarding trolley cars with her arms full of slimy, putrid-smelling specimens. Many Americans once regarded mushrooms as unsightly and uniformly poisonous. Mycology—the study of fungi—was no pastime for a woman. http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-lost-mushroom-masterpiece-unearthed-in-a-dusty-drawer

Harry Houdini, testifying before a subcommittee of the United States Congress in 1926, brandished a sealed telegram and demanded that someone in the audience tell him the contents of the message inside. The chamber was packed with spiritualist mediums, psychics, and astrologers who had turned out to fight against Houdini’s bill, House Resolution 8989, which would ban the practice of “fortune telling” in the District of Columbia. If the mediums couldn’t read the telegram, Houdini argued, they belonged in jail for hawking fraudulent psychic powers. http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/in-1926-houdini-spent-4-days-shaming-congress-for-being-in-thrall-to-fortunetellers

Although metro-riding beavers, militarized dolphins, and their canny ilk seem to pop up almost weekly now, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that psychologists and the general public began seriously considering whether animals had consciousness, emotions, and intelligence. This was due in part to the fin de siècle fad for “wonder animals,” domesticated critters that solved math problems, answered riddles, and discoursed on philosophy, often using a code to communicate with their handlers. The catalyst for this wonder animal fad was Clever Hans, a mathematically-inclined German horse who gained notoriety in the early 1900s. He could apparently solve math problems–he even did square roots–and carry on simple conversations by tapping his hooves. When Hans started performing for an amazed German public, he amplified a growing interest in animal intelligence that had the potential to transform science and society. Perhaps animals, long regarded as mindless automata, actually had the capacity for reason and language–which meant they might even possess consciousness and something like a soul. Full article at: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-counting-horses-and-reading-dogs-convinced-us-animals-could-think

A cave is a perfect mystery: dark, dangerous, and filled with pristine evidence. The caves underneath western Virginia attest to million-year geological transformations, but they also harbor intrigue on a human scale. The discovery of these subterranean wonders in the 1800s spawned a genre of local lore and popular fiction–call it “the romance of the cave”–in which crystal caverns became theaters for passion and politics. Many cave romances were European fantasies of ancient North America, featuring stereotyped Indians as well as mythical races like Phoenicians and lost tribes of Israel. Caves became gateways to an imagined past for a country with a very short recorded history. Meanwhile, centuries of tourism and amateur exploration have destroyed archaeological evidence that could have revealed a more realistic story of early Native American cultures. Full article at: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/show-caves-arent-telling

It’s abundantly clear from their 1962 newsletter that the employees of the Mallinckrodt Chemical Company’s Uranium Division were proud of their work. On the division’s 20th anniversary, they produced a cheerful tribute to “growth and progress in research, in management, in human relations–and in the total reputation of the organization.” The newsletter circulated through office mailboxes and break-rooms in a bustling, cutting-edge facility on the suburban fringes of St. Louis, Missouri. Today the spot is covered by a 45-acre, 75 foot-high waste-disposal cell, entombed under layers of clay, sand, and gravel. Full article at: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-midwestern-potato-farm-became-the-worlds-first-nuclear-waste-site

Frederick Bligh Bond resorted to psychic archeology because he didn’t have permission to dig up the ruins of England’s legendary Glastonbury Abbey. At least this was his explanation for why, on a November day in 1907, he made contact with the spirit of a medieval monk named Johannes. Over the course of nearly 70 seances, Bond sketched detailed plans of the Abbey, relayed by Johannes, that turned out to be largely accurate. Archaeologists were not pleased with Bond’s methods, but psychic mediums, amateur ghost hunters, and the “dark tourism” industry have capitalized on them ever since. Full article at: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/psychic-archeology-or-how-to-dig-up-the-dead-with-their-own-advice