There will be a show of my artwork at the Mothership, the multi-purpose space in Woodstock run by Paul McMahon. It will be small but lively: cartoons, illustrations, travel sketches, scores, index card assemblages, rubber stamp stereoscopy, broadsides, and other works on paper. And it will be up for only a few days: the opening is Thursday, May 17, 6-8; and the closing is Tuesday, May 22, 6-8. Come feast your eyes!

The Mothership is at 6 Hillcrest Avenue; there’s more info on Paul’s site.

My horror story, “The Werechurch,” will appear in the next issue of Dagger Magazine. It tells the terrifying tale of a man who turns into a church, and then meets a gruesome end. To make it more gothic, it’s told in sonnets. Here’s the first one:

The night was dark, although the sky was starry,
As Di and Dave strolled homeward after dining.
They’d stuffed themselves on wine and calamari,
And now were looking forward to reclining.
The gibbous moon above was just a sliver,
The wind that whistled past them, keen and lashing;
The road they took led downward, by a river,
Where they were startled by the sound of splashing.
A church heaved onto shore, alive and dripping,
A church with steeple, portals, sanctuary,
And stained-glass windows caulked with weather stripping.
The building seemed so sinister, so scary,
And when it shook itself, so diabolical,
Their hair stood up on end, down to the follicle.

Here’s another excerpt from my collection The Snowman Three Doors Down. In this story, the eagles discover that Prometheus is open for business. (For the rest, please buy a copy of the book.)

LUNCH ON MOUNT KAZBEK

Zeus looked on with satisfaction as Kratos, Bia, and Hephaestus chained Prometheus to the face of Mount Kazbek. Prometheus protested that the punishment was unjust, but Zeus was inexorable. Zeus reminded him that he’d stolen fire from the gods, and given it to vile mortals. Prometheus reminded Zeus that the burnt offerings so prized on Olympus needed fire to be burnt. That only made Zeus angrier, since Prometheus had tricked him out of the best offerings, back in Mecone.

Prometheus adamantly refused to show his pain, even as Hephaestus drove in the iron stake that fixed him to the rock. Then, Zeus and the others flew back to Olympus, leaving Prometheus to his torment.

For the first few days, Prometheus lay alone on the barren peak, scorched by the sun by day and chilled by winds at night. He never slept, because Titans never do, and could see nothing but the blank sky and the bleak expanse of the Caucasus stretching to the horizon. He suffered atrociously.

One day, he spotted two specks high above him. Gradually, they grew larger, and he saw that they were golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos). They fluttered down beside him, and perched on an outcropping, furling their wings.

“Good morning,” said one. “I’m Saba, and this is my wife Tamar.”

“Good morning,” said Tamar.

“We hear there’s some mighty good eating around here,” said Saba.

“We’re told the liver can’t be beat,” said Tamar.

Prometheus said nothing, since he didn’t speak Georgian.

“Must be shy,” said Saba.

“I guess we just dig in,” said Tamar.

“Bon appétit!” said Saba. “Or, in our good native tongue, gaamot!”

“Gaamot!” echoed Tamar.

Le Scat Noir, the online journal published by Black Scat Books, has suspended publication. With it, so has my regular page of musical instruments. This is the last one I drew, the 18th. That means I’ve come up with 162 instruments, which is quite an orchestra. Well, I’ll keep drawing them, and try to make a book of them…

(You can, of course, enlarge it by clicking on it.)

The Snowman Three Doors Down is now available from Black Scat Books! It has 24 stories! It’s 246 pages! Hapless characters slog through tangled plots and formal constraints in this bracing collection. Will the Chromatologist find the shade of green that identifies the adulterous cosplayer? Will a group of tipsy scholars discover the secret to Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe’s suppressed play? Will Gumball Gaffigan make it safely to Georgeville? And will Chicky and Chalky finish that snowman? Laughs and bewilderment await you! It can be found on Amazon, or from Black Scat Books.

Here’s a keyboard reduction of the 8th string quartet (see last post). Oh, those spheres!

Athanasius Kircher gave a brief realization of the music of the spheres in Musurgia Universalis (1650). Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars correspond to the soprano; the sun to the alto; Venus, Mercury, and the moon to the tenor; and the earth to the bass. I expanded his four measures to a hundred. He suggested that the planets orbit through the modes; I added key changes and ornamentation.

This is inevitably ambient. I suspect a concert audience would not be entertained. If you like, you can make it longer by repeating the first 96 measures a few times, and then closing with the last four.

Black Scat Books has released a free Peek-A-Book of “An Interview with Horace Ballantine,” from my upcoming collection The Snowman Three Doors Down. The veteran cartoonist has to contend with an interviewer who never heard of comic strips, and it’s not easy for either of them. You can download your PDF here.

My less-than-first string quartet collects a few pieces from my teens that I thought worth saving. Here, for example, is a rollicking polytonal number I wrote when I was 16 (recopied for legibility).