Category - Writing

First Podcast Coverage:
The ‘Mysterious Universe’

The Mysterious Universe Podcast - featuring Townsend Brown

I’m not exactly sure how this came to pass, but I learned this week that The Man Who Mastered Gravity has been discussed at considerable length on the Mysterious Universe podcast.

You can find the podcast here.

Discussion of the Townsend Brown story begins about 38:20 in – after some discussion of something called “The Ghost Moose.’  I guess that’s one thing I can cross off the bucket list: playing second-fiddle to a ‘ghost moose.’

Mysterious Universe is a very popular and long-standing podcast, ranking #5 in Apple’s listings of social science podcasts.  From the listing:

Always interesting and often hilarious, join hosts Aaron Wright and Benjamin Grundy as they investigate the latest in futurology, weird science, consciousness research, alternative history, cryptozoology, UFOs, and new-age absurdity.

Just a quick scroll through the Mysterious Universe home page displays the depth and breadth of this podcast and its affiliated enterprises. These guys cover a lot of territory,  some of it within the wheelhouse of my work (i.e. ‘lost science’ outside the realm of orthodoxy) and some of it, let’s be charitable and just say, ummm…. not so much.

Most of the discussion that is freely available is a recap of the early chapters of the book.  There is a further discussion that gets into The Caroline Group and the rest of the story, but that’s behind a prescription paywall.

Gratitude

I have reached out to the producers of Mysterious Universe to see if I can get access to the subscriber-only edition. And (perish the thought!) offering myself up for an interview.

As I said, I don’t know how this came about, or how the book fell into their hands. I’m just glad that it did.

Yesterday, I listened to the episode in my – and had something of a moment.  I listen to dozens of podcasts.  I rarely listen to radio any more, just podcasts.  And too often I’m listening with a twinge of envy, like “hey, I’ve written books… I’m interesting… why doesn’t anybody want to talk to me?”

So yesterday… finally! Hearing my own name and work mentioned in a credible manner was the most ‘external validation’ I’ve had for about twenty years.  I know, we’re not supposed to rely on ‘external validation,’ we’re always just supposed to believe in our own work and purpose and just forge on in obscurity.

Well, fuck that.  It’s nice to know that somebody else finds merit in the work.

I think there is more to come.  Stay tuned.

We’re Number One !!

The Man Who Mastered Gravity has earned a #1 Listing on Amazon.com

I discovered last week that The Man Who Mastered Gravity is rocketing to the top of the charts on Amazon.com .

(…in the admittedly narrow category of “New Releases in Nuclear Weapons & Warfare History” but… who’s counting? A win is a win.  Take the win.)

If you are among the faithful who have purchased a copy of the book….

First, THANK YOU.

Second, if you find the material worthy, it would be great if you’d take a minute to rate or review the book on Amazon.

I thank you and Buster thanks you.

Buster thanks you for reading my book and posting a review on Amazon!

Buster thanks you for reading my book and posting a review on Amazon!

Anybody Wanna Buy A Book?

Townsend Brown - The Man Who Mastered Gravity - now 'live' on Amazon.com

(This is a cross-post of an item posted to ttbrown.com on March 18, 2023)

“Writing a book is adventure to begin with. It’s a toy and amusement; then it becomes a mistress and then it becomes a master and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.

– Winston Churchill

Ladies and Gentlemen:

The deed. Is. Done.

I can’t believe I’m saying this… it’s been such a long haul, and for a minute there it felt like the universe was putting up an impenetrable goal-line defense.

But the deed. Is DONE.

As of yesterday morning (Saturday March 18, 2023), all three versions of the The Man Who Mastered Gravity are available from Amazon. com. <– That’s the link.

That’s hardcover ($29.99), softcover ($19.99) and Kindle edition ($9.99).

What can I say other than, “I hope y’all will run right out (well, actually, sit right down) and buy a copy – and leave a glowing review on Amazon!”

Please note, the hardcover and softcover editions are print on demand (PoD), so delivery times are a tad longer than typical Amazon titles that are pre-printed and sitting in a warehouse somewhere.

I guess this is what the self-publishing gurus call a ‘soft launch.’  I don’t think of it so much as a ‘launch’ as just, well… like Churchill said, flinging it out to the public.

I am reasonably certain this edition is 98% perfect in terms of proofreading.  I just haven’t found the other 2% yet.  I was still finding typos etc. right up until I uploaded the files, so I am sure there are still some waiting to be detected.  If readers will point them out to me, I’ll round ’em up and fix as many as I can all once.

The title has also been established with IngramSpark, which will distribute the print editions to bookstores if there is any demand.

Demand.  Right.

Now comes the hard part.

In Case Anybody Has Been Wondering…

Cover mock up of Townsend Brown biography 'The Man Who Mastered Gravity'

….what I’ve been up to…?

Mostly this.

This long-ago-abandoned project resurfaced in the months after I got fired from Apple.  I suddenly found myself with all of my time on my hands.  I dunno, maybe that’s a dangerous thing – quite arguable in this case, since the project continues to be a bottomless rabbit hole in which there is quite possibly no rabbit.  Or maybe the rabbit is a squirrel. Still beats the fuck out of me.

Even though I set it aside – quite abruptly – back in 2009, this story always lurked in the back of my mind.  When I ‘published’ the first draft of the manuscript that I’d written between 2005 and 2008 (Q: What’s that book about? A: About 500 pages…) I did it under the masthead of ‘Embassy Books and Laundry.’ That was a callback to a front-business that Townsend Brown and his wife operated in the 1950s when he said he was ‘done with science.’  I wasn’t done with the book, either, but I didn’t think it would be thirteen years before I returned to it.

I worked on the manuscript all summer and into the fall.  I whittled 200,000 words down to about 100,000.  I don’t know if what’s left tells the story, but it tells a story.

In December I sent it to a volunteer from my fusion website for proofreading. I got the file back from him at the end of January, and then had to spend a couple of weeks sorting through the fixes, prepping the illustrations and fixing the endnotes.

Last Saturday (February 11 – Thomas Edison’s birthday), I sent the file to a layout/designer in Pakistan.  That was a bit of a monumental moment, representing nearly twenty years of thought and effort since I first went down the rabbit hole in 2003.   (Incidentally, I found the layout/designer in Pakistan, and the woman who created the cover from Bangladesh, on Fiverr.com).

In some ways, getting this book out there is the culmination of the primary theme of my life has been for almost fifty years. There is a thread through these two stories, and maybe a reason that they’re tied together.

I don’t know, really, what it all amounts to.

I just know I have to be careful, because I still don’t believe a lot of the things I think.

BTW, if anybody wants a copy when it’s finally ready, I’ll send you one if you’ll write a review on Amazon.  I’m imagining an April 1 publication date.  April Fools Day.

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People sometimes ask me if I cook for myself, and my usual weisenheimer answer is ‘well, I prepare meals, I don’t know if I’d call it ‘cooking’ exactly…

But last week I made chicken tikka masala from scratch and it turned out pretty well.  I have a mason jar of sauce in the fridge so it’ll last me awhile.  I don’t generally do photos of my food, but this is what the cooktop looked like before I started the cleanup:

messy stove top

I can make a mess with the best of ’em

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It’s either been a mild winter – or a late one.

Storms that have devastated other parts of the region just left a nice sheen in my neighborhood:

I dunno if I mentioned but I started reading Shakespeare last year.  First Saturday of each month I meet up with the good folks from the Nashville Shakespeare Festival to read one the plays.  Last month was “Much Ado About Nothing.”  This month is “As You Like It.” Some evenings I sit in the treehouse while the sun sets and read a scene or two:

These winter sunsets from the treehouse are pretty colorful.

In the meantime, life goes on out here in West Bumfuque.

And, yes, I leave the ‘Winter Lights’ up until Daylight Savings starts again.

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Oh, and, one other thing.  That pop-popping sound you hear?  Pickleball.  I’ve been playing a couple of hours nearly every day since last summer.  I am powerless over pickleball and my life has become unmanageable, but I impress myself with my septuagenarian ability to nimbly chase after the balls I just missed.

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Back to the new book, and it’s extension of the focus that started with the first book

I think a lot about what a weird destiny this has turned out to be, a life preoccupied with these two obscure, esoteric subjects.  I need to write more about that, and what ties these two stories together – if I can ever figure out what it is exactly I’m thinking. Or, more precisely, find the nerve to actually say it.

Which often reminds me of this:

**** Wisdom From A Typewriter No. 4 **** www.wisdomfromatypewriter.com 2016

Wisdom From A Typewriter No. 4, from  2016

Woodstock +50

Cut to the chase: click here.

As long as everybody else is reminiscing about Woodstock….

Was it really fifty years ago today?? Am I really that old??

Why, yes, I am. I will be 69 years old in November.

And I have survived – somehow, and despite my valiant efforts to the contrary.

The other good news is that my faculties are still (largely?) intact.

OK, I don’t exactly have photographic memory of everything that happened in 1969 – that is, after all, the year that the drugs kicked in, and I basically stayed stoned for the next two decades – but I made notes!

For almost all of 1969 and ’70, I kept a journal, and in that journal are the notes I recorded immediately after returning from Woodstock, which are compiled into three installments posted to Medium.com:

Whatever Happened to The Age of Aquarius?

There is also a somewhat abridged, 10-minute podcast edition of the story that you can listen to directly here:

… or download into the Podcast app on your gizmo here.

 

Trauma, Nostalgia and Closure

I went back to Rumson for a few hours last week….

Rumson is the town near the Jersey Shore where I was a kid.My family lived there from 1950 until 1962 – from age 0 to age 11. My childhood, pretty much.

Over the decades since, I’ve gone back there several times.In the fall of 1984 I went back for two whole weeks.I owned a house in Hawaii at the time, and could have arranged a ‘vacation home exchange’ anywhere in the world. I could have gone to England or France; I chose instead to spend two weeks in New Jersey.But even that was not enough to heal the psychic wounds inflicted by the way I’d left 22 years earlier.

Prior to this most recent visit, the last time I was there was in 2002, when my sister and my brother and his wife and a couple of their kids and I granted our mother’s final wish and spread her ashes around the town where she’d spent the happiest years of her life – before our father’s untimely demise in 1958.

Today I am publishing a pair of companion pieces that explore my departure from Rumson in 1962 – and why I keep going back:

The Summer of ’62 is about the move.It’s a piece that I wrote as part of a memoir writing class I took in March of this year.

Return to Brigadoon is about one of those return visits in the summer of 1969; it’s based on a poem I found when I re-opened the journals I kept during my last year of high school and first year in college.

I’m posting these now as part of an attempt to find meaningful closure around some of what my new therapist calls “early childhood trauma.”

For the past 8 months, I have been working with Lee Norton, a therapist in Nashville who specializes in the full spectrum of trauma, from assault-rifle-massacre-survival to the sort of catastrophic early losses like I suffered when Harvey died. I’ve been in-and-out of therapy since I was in the third grade but this feels like the most productive therapeutic work I’ve ever done. Please don’t ask me why it took so long.

I’m not sure what the outcome of this current course is supposed to be. My 67-year-old-self has been spending a lot of time with my 7-year-old self, who, it seems, went into hiding about the time his father died. The kid and I are still deliberating over who liberates who.

And while I’ve been doing that work, I’ve been spending some (but not nearly enough) time rummaging through my father’s writing and the correspondence he and my mother exchanged during World War II.There seems to be a connection.

I know what some of you are thinking: Why doesn’t he just get over it?His father died, the family moved, yada yada. It was 60 years ago.Move along…

I’ve even heard the word “indulgent” to describe these nostalgic disquisitions.

Yes, I am deeply conflicted about the whole proposition.On the one hand, it feels like necessary and unfinished work, despite the half-dozen decades between me and the events I keep returning to.On the other hand, at times the whole exercise seems like an excuse for not moving on to more constructive pursuits.

All of this came up in a session I had with Lee Norton shortly after this last visit to my point of origin. After wondering why am the only one of three siblings that continues to be affected by these long ago events, Lee offered:

One kid tends to get hit more than the others. Regardless of what the catastrophic loss was, the usual defense mechanisms are overwhelmed. It’s a very physiological process. The brain doesn’t have anywhere to put it, so it accumulates and sequesters in the right hemisphere which has no sense of time.

The brain always wants one linear, explicit storyline that it can then put away. Until you look into a catastrophic event and do something …. the brain does not recognize it as finished and when it’s not finished then all these unconscious processes kick in and we recapitulate. We’ll have relationship or job dilemmas; it’ll show up in lots of different ways – financially, self medication (umm…that would be me). The goal is you have to get it finished...

So I am, once again trying to get it finished.

For you, reading these things is optional.For me, apparently, writing them is not.

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A 180º panorama of Monmouth Avenue. It was a great neighborhood for kids and bicycles.
No helmets required.

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More From Harvey:
The 1956 Medical Trilogy, Part 1

I surmise that anybody who’s been following this revival of my father’s writing has learned by now that Harvey died of cancer in 1958 at the ripe young age of 37. Therein lies the tragedy and the origins of the personal trauma that I’m exploring now (while undergoing a fresh round of new personal trauma right here in 2018. But we’ll get to that later…).

We don’t really know a whole lot about his illness nor his death. It came, frankly, as a complete surprise to my siblings and me, although I was only 7 years old at the time and my sister only 4. My brother (also currently deceased) might have had more of a grasp of it, but even he was only 10 years old at the time.

Almost everything I ever knew about his illness (which is to say, nothing), was expressed in a poem I wrote a long time ago about the Little Green Boat our family owned while we still lived near the Shrewsbury River in Rumson, New Jersey.

What I do have in the archives that I’m rummaging through now are three short essays that Harvey wrote about his experiences in the world of mid-1950s medical care. Herewith, then, are those three essays, starting with:

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A Visit To The Mayo Clinic – December, 1956

It’s peculiar that when reading the travel and resort section of the Sunday papers that I have never noticed any ads for Rochester, Minnesota as the ideal winter vacation spot. Much is written about Miami, Palm Beach, Bermuda, and the West Indies. But who is singing the praises of this happy little village nestled peacefully in the Zumbro Valley? (named for its discoverer Sam Zumbro, who mistakenly thought he had found the Khyber Pass.) Read More

From Harvey, ca. 1940:
“The Parker Pen Letter”

Returning now too the subject of My Father and the things that he wrote during his relatively brief time on Earth:

One of the most “famous” of my father’s works (which is to say, famous within the family) is the letter that he wrote to the Parker Pen Company while a student at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1940.

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The letter was written in 1940, but I don’t have any photos from that era handy, so here’s one from the 1950’s.

December 6, 1940

The Parker pen company
Janesville, Wisconsin

Gentlemen:

As you can see I am writing a letter to the company that makes (by its own admission) the finest pens in the world – by using a typewriter.

I do this not because I do not have a pen., No, gentlemen right here in my left hand I have a pen. Said pen is called in one of your ads which I just happened to read, quote, a Jewel of Pendom, unquote. However, if I were to attempt to write this letter with this pen, the pages would be so smudged up with ink that it would be totally impossible for you to read it. But allow me to explain the case a little more fully.

About two years ago (or possibly a few months less) I wandered into a bookstore on our campus – that of the University of Illinois – and purchased a Parker pen. Since this memorable date, I have had nothing but trouble with the amazing instrument.

The trouble, to sum it up briefly, is that this pen leaks – leaks torrentially.

Read More