Marty Halpern's Blog, page 6

50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing on July 20, 1969

8 of the surviving Apollo astronauts got together for the
50th anniversary of the moon landing: From left to right: Charlie Duke (Apollo 16), Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11), Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7), Al Worden (Apollo 15), Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9), Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17), Michael Collins (Apollo 11), and Fred Haise (Apollo 13). [Photo by Felix Kunze/The Explorers Club]
Read the full article on Business Insider .

And ya gotta love Buzz Aldrin's formal attire!

Now Reading: Bob Dylan by Anthony Scaduto

"Highway 61 Revisited was at that time—and may be still today—one of the most brilliant pop albums ever made. As rock, it cut through to the core of the music—a hard, driving beat without frills, without self-consciousness. 'Like A Rolling Stone,' 'Tombstone Blues,' among the finest rock ever recorded. As living poetry the album demonstrated that Dylan's talent had matured to the point that it seemed capable of expressing in word-rhythms the depth of his visions. Despite what the literary keepers of the esoteric flame may say, no matter how much they sneer, Dylan's works are poetry: 'Desolation Row,' for just one example, amply demonstrates that. It is a decent into a modern Inferno, an eleven-minute freak show that portrays a world of alienation ruled by madmen, a world in which humanity has been estranged from its own possibilities, a world in which man's once free mind has been so totally suffocated by the one-dimensional society that it accepts lies as truth and beauty, permits creativity and naturalness and Eros to be perverted by the social 'reality.' Not since Rimbaud has a poet used the language of the streets to expose all the horrors of the streets, to describe a state of the union that is ugly and absurd."
– Anthony Scaduto

[ENDED] Humble Bundle Science Fiction eBooks

Start Publishing has put together 20 science fiction ebooks -- novels and anthologies (including my Alien Contact!) -- in tiered options: you pay what you want, donate money to charity (Doctors Without Borders) and/or donate money to the authors and editors of the books you've purchased.
This "Humble Bundle" has been going on for approximately three and a half days already. But don't hesitate if this interests you as there are only nine-plus days remaining before this offer goes away.
As of this writing, there have been 3,035 bundles purchased, which is not too shabby indeed.
So, click on the "Purchase" button below and check out the titles being offered. And the great thing about ebooks is that you can read them just about anywhere and on nearly any device.
But time is counting down....

Humble Bundle Science Fiction eBooks

Start Publishing has put together 20 science fiction ebooks -- novels and anthologies (including my Alien Contact!) -- in tiered options: you pay what you want, donate money to charity (Doctors Without Borders) and/or donate money to the authors and editors of the books you've purchased.
This "Humble Bundle" has been going on for approximately three and a half days already. But don't hesitate if this interests you as there are only nine-plus days remaining before this offer goes away.
As of this writing, there have been 3,035 bundles purchased, which is not too shabby indeed.
So, click on the "Purchase" button below and check out the titles being offered. And the great thing about ebooks is that you can read them just about anywhere and on nearly any device.
But time is counting down....

Editing: Unlikely Friends: James Merrill and Judith Moffett: A Memoir

I know, I know... Where have I been these past nearly two months? (Sometimes a guy just needs to veg for a while....) Anyhow, here I am! But let me also add a teaser: I've been busy reading a new manuscript from Charles Stross for the next volume in his Laundry Files series!
In this post, the book that I want to introduce you to is by Judith Moffett. Now if you've read this blog regularly over these past years you will recognize her name, as I have written about her on numerous occasions. In fact, if you scroll down just a bit, in the sidebar on the right you will see the cover for her Hugo and Nebula award-nominated story "Tiny Tango," along with a link to the four-part series on how we turned this story into an ebook. And one of my earliest blog posts on Ms. Moffett's work was back in February 2010 entitled "Aliens Have Entered Mainstream's Orbit." Feel free to search this blog (see Search field on the right) for "Judith Moffett" for a list of all the entries.
In 1988, Moffett won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in the field of science fiction and fantasy. But what you may not know is that, long before writing sf, Moffett was (and still is!) a poet -- and a helluva poet at that. Here are just a few of her awards and honors: (1971) First prize, Graduate Division, in the Academy of American Poets Contest at the University of Pennsylvania; (1976) First Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant in poetry; (1984) National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship Grant; and, even after launching a successful science fiction writing career: (1998) Presenter at the Nobel Symposium on Translation of Poetry and Poetic Prose. But enough of the kudos...you can read the complete list of "Awards, honors, and recognitions" in her Wikipedia entry.
Merrill & Moffett, 1993, International
Poetry Festival, Malmö, SwedenI bring up poetry because that is the focus of her most recent publication, Unlikely Friends, a memoir of her near thirty-year friendship and correspondence with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill. I had the honor of line editing and copy editing the manuscript: more than 200,000 words of diligently maintained journal entries from throughout that friendship, carefully transcribed correspondence, photographs -- and above all, the personal insight gleaned by the author upon looking back upon those decades.

For those readers in the book/publishing biz, you most likely know that a Kirkus review is difficult to come by: the publication is fairly stingy with its reviews. That being said, imagine how difficult it is to not only get reviewed by Kirkus, but to snag a starred review as well. And that's exactly what Unlikely Friends did: it garnered a starred review -- and, to top it all off, the memoir is self-published! Here's an excerpt from that review:

"Her Merrill scholarship is exhaustive, as she spent years writing a book about his work while finding success with her own poetry. She and Merrill were rarely in the same place, but she lovingly describes a 1973 trip to Greece and moments at his New York City apartment. Both eventually struggled with serious health problems, but they remained close due to their obvious reliance on each other's intellect and their lifelong dedication to their crafts. Moffett's painstaking memoir is epic in length but remains consistently engrossing. Particularly noteworthy is her desire to get to the root of her own fascination with Merrill, and she reaches some surprising conclusions about herself. She tells her own life story of struggle and success with undying fervor, and Merrill's letters show him to be urbane, witty, a bit fussy, and generous when it mattered. The two were different in many ways, but Moffett's account of what they shared is authentic and impressive.

An absorbing, indispensable portrait of poets."
–Kirkus starred review, January 23, 2019

If you have access to Facebook, Moffett has been publishing lengthy excerpts and photographs from the book on her FB page.
And as I was writing this, I remembered that in 2016 I had noted in a blog post the receipt of her most recent poetry book (at that time), Tarzan in Kentucky: about life on her farm, grief (the loss of her husband), and other poems of a more personal nature.
Both Unlikely Friends [image error] (print and ebook) and Tarzan in Kentucky (print only) are available from your bookstore of choice; the links here will take you to Amazon.com.

"By culling a trove of letters and journals, Moffett has written an account of her friendship with Merrill that somewhat suggests the vivid quality of a novel. In every chapter the events of particular years are given the importance they had when they happened—they are not simply bridges to some later, more important time, but events in their own immediacy. The dense braid of writing by the various Judys of those years, and the Judy now reflecting and summing up, gives her narrative the four-dimensional effect of deep time. It's a love story—love of literature, of friends, of idealized figures who were also real people. It will send you back to Merrill's poems, and Moffett's too."
–Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Mars Trilogy andNew York 2140

The Land Of The Free by The Killers (via Jimmy Kimmel Live!)

Dream Crazier

This post promotes the contents of the video, not specifically the brand name Nike.

A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan H. Walsh

The title of this blog post is actually the subtitle of this book. The actual title, Astral Weeks, probably wouldn't have intrigued you, snagged your attention, unless you were a huge fan of musician Van Morrison's early work.
Published just this past year in hardcover (357 pages) by Penguin Press, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 [image error] may be one of the most mind-boggling, and weird, books I've read in quite some time.
All the events of note take place in 1968 in and around the city of Boston. I spent some time back in the day in Boston and its surrounds: used to hang out in Harvard Square; ate regularly at a grinder shop in Kenmore Square, while watching all the addicts (in the shop!) nod off; when I couldn't snag a bed at the only youth hostel in town, I would kill time all night in a Dunkin' Donuts, buzzing out on coffee after coffee, until the city came awake in the early morn. Made many a hike from Beacon Street across the Mass Ave Bridge -- and back again -- just because....
Some of the "characters" in this book include Jim Kweskin, of the Jug Band fame, who gave up the band for a place in Mel Lyman's Fort Hill Community (aka commune) in Roxbury. Did you know that Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, though from New York, played the Boston Tea Party (music venue) a total of 43 times between 1967 and 1970? The VU cited the Tea Party as their favorite place to play in the whole country! Others in the book include Jonathan Richman (of the Modern Lovers fame) and, of course, Van Morrison, who, at the time, was living in Boston to avoid certain Mafia connections to his music label in New York!
In fact, it was the Velvet Underground who taught Jonathan Richman to play guitar, as detailed in this excerpt:

"Jonathan, can you make this curve with your ring finger? VU guitarist Sterling Morrison asked Jonathan Richman.     Richman had brought his bingo-prize guitar to the Tea Party and lingered in a corner of the dressing room until members of the band offered him something in the way of lessons. "They physically taught me how to play," he recounted. "That's where I got everything."     The band eventually took to their sixteen-year-old mascot. "Occasionally, I drove them around in my father's car," Richman recalled. "I would go to some of the parties they'd go to. I was part of this crew."

Then there was T. Mitchell Hastings, a 1933 Harvard grad, who, in 1954, invented a transistor radio to work in an automobile. Hastings loved classical music, and set up a string of radio stations for classical music; eventually, all the stations failed, except one: WBCN in Boston. Hastings, who kept the station open only during business hours, was talked into renting out the graveyard hours (midnight to 6am) to Ray Riepen, who planned to broadcast free-form rock music during those hours. The very first song played was by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Within two months, Riepen took over programming of the entire station -- and thus FM rock radio was born.
And interwoven throughout the book, and throughout these many events, is the story of musician Van Morrison and the writing and recording of his classic record album Astral Weeks [image error]



On April 5, 1968, one day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., cities across the country were like powder kegs, just waiting for the fuse to be lit. In Boston, city officials were brainstorming ideas to keep people off the streets that evening. Singer James Brown was in New York that morning filming a TV special, and he was to perform at the Boston Garden later that evening. Someone proposed:

What if the Brown concert was broadcast live on television? It was an audacious, nick-of-time proposal. Each home viewer would be another person not on the street. WGBH was the obvious choise....
Boston's Mayor White agreed to cover Brown's lost earnings from concert tickets (more money than the city even had in its coffers!), and the show went on.
As rioting in DC came a few blocks from the White House, James Brown took the stage in front of approximately 1,500 souls and launched into "If I Ruled the World," a vision of a better life for everyone.
....
Reports started rolling in from police officers all around the city: Boston was a ghost town. "The city was quieter than it would've been on an ordinary Friday night."

All in all, 1968 -- in Boston, at least -- was a very good year.

(Whipped) Cream of the Crop

Photo of Pop's Resale, Lexington, KY, courtesy of virgil_caine31

Keith Richards Quote

"Life's a funny thing, you know... Nobody wants to get old, but they don't want to die young, either. You just gotta follow this thing down the path...."–Keith Richards,Under the Influence,
a Netflix documentary, 2015