Three cords and a (broad) band : PUNK journalism

Once upon a time, long ago and far away, there was an orphan feller from way out in the country ; a yokel with a Gibson J-200, a boom box dreadnought with only three frets ,way up at the cowboy end of the stick.

Real dumb I know (!!!!!!) , but this musically-challenged rustic claimed that was all he needed to be a real big songwriter.

 Just three chords and the truth.

why me and not some academic writing up Henry Dawson's discoveries ?

Good question : one I get asked many times.

One answer is that if an academic is ever going to do a thesis on Henry Dawson, I want it done before I am dead,  so I can read it too.

I mean the man made the significant breakthrough in DNA almost 85 years ago, the significant breakthrough in penicillin almost 75 years ago - so why aren't thesis supervisors beating at his family's door, looking for personal and professional papers ?

I think I know why.

I am a longtime DIYer and I instantly recognized a kindred "go it alone" spirit in Dawson's tiny little makeshift penicillin project, something I was sure that "Big Academia's collegiality won't be able to fathom.

the fragments of a dialectic enlightenment :Adorno & Horkheimer as PUNK DIYers ...

If one of your dear, dear friends gave you as a christmas present, late in December, over 300 pages of turgid prose, written in fragmentary style, and mimeographed to ensure ultra low quality readability and then stuck it all between two dull brown covers, you might be forgiven if you waited until January before you began a token,polite, skim through it.

That would be January....... 1945.

1945 ! : post-hegemony's annus mirabilis.