This, I think, will be the first page of my upcoming comic book Shorten the Classics. I may as well start by aborting the Trojan War. Good riddance!

The 23rd issue of Black Scat Review is now available! It’s devoted to “wordplay,” and includes several pages of Doug Skinner: my translations of two poems by Raymond Queneau (depicted on the cover) and four pages of my upcoming comic book Shorten the Classics. Also on board are the stellar crew of Mark Axelrod, Tom Barrett, Kevin Brown, Norman Conquest, Brian Coughlan, John Crouse, S. C. Delaney, Paul Forrestal, Ryan Forsythe, Eckhard Gerdes, Penelope Gerdes, Joseph Harms, Amy Kurman, Opal Louis Nations, Angelo Pastormerlo, Steve Patterson, Derek Pell, Agnès Potier, Paul Rosheim, Gerard Sarnat, Carla M. Wilson, and D. Harlan Wilson. You can find it on Amazon. When you find it, buy a copy!

To celebrate the release of the movie The Mothman Prophecies, based on the book by John Keel, Fortean Times published a special Mothman issue (#156, April 2002). I contributed an interview with John, aided by George Kuchar and Mamie Caton, as well as a Keelian bio and bibliography. I also wrote a short article about Woodrow Derenberger, one of the contactees John wrote about in the book. John was amused by the title, since he had once written a proposal for a movie called Nudists from Outer Space, which I hadn’t known about. (It turned up after John’s death, and is posted here.)

In another shortened classic, Chicken Little doesn’t think the sky is falling. What a relief!

A setting of part of Il Vendemmiatore, by Luigi Tansillo, which I encountered quoted by Giordano Bruno in his dialogue La Cena de le ceneri. The part I set is:

Lasciate l’ombre, ed abbracciate il vero;
Non cangiate il presente col futuro.
Io d’aver di miglior già non dispero;
Ma per viver più lieto e più sicuro,
Godo il presente e del futuro spero:
Cosi doppia dolcezza mi procuro.

Leave the shadows, and embrace the truth;
Do not exchange the present for the future.
I do not despair of having something better;
But by living more gladly and more calmly,
I enjoy the present and hope for the future:
And so I obtain double sweetness.

It was based on randomized four-pitch diatonic chords, like the “Nine Settings.”

The syllabic constraint of haiku calls for the additional constraint of rhyme. Here are seven examples:

Look at all the salt
Sprinkled on my frosted malt
It’s the waiter’s fault

You thought it great sport
To commit a grievous tort
I’ll see you in court

What is this I found
Just lying here on the ground
It must weigh a pound

Consider the mole
It spends its life in a hole
That’s its only goal

In the afternoon
You will seldom see the moon
Because it’s too soon

This is just a hunch
That was not a wholesome crunch
In my bite of lunch

Everybody dies
Then we get our ears and eyes
Full of baby flies

A song about the miracle of human reproduction. Here’s how it begins:

I’ve drawn a few pages under the rubric “Shorten the Classics.” Each is four panels, and abbreviates a famous work of literature, usually by nipping it in the bud. Tragedies are averted, murders prevented, adulteries blocked. Derek Pell of Black Scat Books urged me to draw a book of them, so that’s what I’m doing now, redrawing the old pages and drawing new ones. Here, for example, is that classic book for horse buffs, Black Beauty.