I found a musical cipher on a tearsheet from an old encyclopedia, so I wrote a quatrain to try it out. This is what it sounds like.

Translating verse is difficult enough; it’s harder to try to retain the rhyme and meter.  Some paraphrase is always required, but it often comes closer to the original poem than a more literal rendition.  It is, at any rate, a challenging writing exercise.  Here’s my version of a verse by Jean de la Fontaine, from his first collection of tales in verse, 1665.

A round on one of life’s eternal truths.

Walter and Benny reason from false principles again, in this six page story.

I delivered this brief talk at the “Congress of Curious Peoples,” at the Coney Island Museum, May 1, 2014.  It concerned the attempts by fans of the pulp writer Richard Shaver to build the machines he described in his stories.  Here’s the first page…

Fooling around in the sketchbook.

A round on a bit of verse by Ambrose Bierce.