Brief Notes on Nicholas Brooks, Rotten Teeth
In August 2008, three young white men plotted to assassinate Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado. Tharin Gartrell, 28, was arrested driving a rented pickup truck in an erratic manner. Inside the truck were two high powered, scoped rifles, wigs, walkie-talkies, camouflage clothing, a bulletproof vest, a spotting scope, licenses in the names of other people and 44 grams of methamphetamine. In the process of being apprehended, one of the men jumped out of a sixth floor window in an attempt to escape; he broke his ankle in the fall and was caught. Federal officials treated the arrests lightly, referring to the men as “knuckleheads.”
Mallarmé published his last major poem, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A roll of the dice will never abolish chance) in 1897. With its spatial composition, formal playfulness, and hypertextual references to sounds and the physical page upon which it is printed, the poem is a radical and beautiful composition of free form poetics and subtle imagination. Mallarmé is referred to extensively in Joris-Karl Huysman’s Á rebours (Against the Grain), a book widely considered the defining novel of the 20th century Decadence movement. Decadence was widely reviled in its various forms by official academic circles, mainstream culture, and state authorities throughout Europe. Decadence embraced the rotting perversity (flesh) of life and the decay of the moral human spirit in the civilized world. In their pursuit of sexual and spiritual enlightenment through excess, the Decadents were some of the first to open their doors to the spiritual effects of hard drugs.
Homemade napalm was used by the Cantonsville Nine on May 19, 1968 to burn 378 draft cards.