John Dee, Part I: John Dee Through His Dreams

An Illustrated Lecture with Doug Skinner

Date: Tuesday, November 18
Time: 8pm
Admission: $12
Place: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, Brooklyn.
This lecture is presented by Shannon Taggart, Programmer in Residence of the Morbid Anatomy Museum.

In the first of this two evening series, Doug Skinner discusses the life and work of the extraordinary Elizabethan polymath John Dee: sorcerer, astronomer, astrologer, alchemist, mathematician, antiquarian, imperial apologist, bibliophile, historian, and adviser to the queen. Such a life defies chronology, so his many interconnected activities are approached through the dreams that he noted in his household diary. Each glimpse into Dee’s psyche reveals another facet of his unique career.

Part 2: Thursday, November 20: Sex and Spirits: The Dee / Kelley Plural Marriage – An Illustrated Presentation with Don Jolly.

More info at Morbid Anatomy.

Horoscrapes is now available!  Here is the publisher’s blurb:

Part Oulipian exercise, these meticulous scrapings reveal the future in all its sublime absurdity. The author approached the horoscope in his morning newspaper as if it were a puzzle, like the crossword or sudoku. By scraping out the middle part, and joining the beginning and end, he received a hidden message.

Reading outside the lines here one discovers an alternative fate more interesting than the fluff dispensed by run-of-the-mill soothsayers. Indeed, these predictions are pithy, profound, and astonishingly accurate.

In HOROSCRAPES, Doug Skinner offers up 366 clever twists of fate—something for every sign—guaranteed to alter forever how we view the universe.

Who knows what the future holds?

Doug Skinner knows.

Available from Black Scat Books.

At a recent reading/slideshow of selections from The Unknown Adjective, I performed a musical version of the last page.  Ralph Hamperian played the tuba.

I had forgotten about these two short pieces for flute, ‘cello, and piano, written for my composition class at Oberlin Conservatory, back in 1972.  They seemed lively enough to keep, so I made a legible copy from the penciled antique.

The book blog “Wuthering Expectations” has posted a nice review of the Selected Plays of Alphonse Allais.  You can read it here.

The book in question is available from Amazon.

Norman Conquest, of Black Scat Books, has sent these photos of happy readers:

A little song about guns: in the first verse, Fred’s son shoots himself; in the second, Fred shoots his wife; and in the third, the singer suggests that Fred shoot himself, so we’ll be rid of him. The son of a bitch.

This melancholy little piece features the Tremoloa, a curious instrument once made by the Manufacturers Advertising Company, which has a single slack string played with a steel bar. On its first performance, I was joined by David Gold on viola, Ralph Hamperian on tuba, and Doug Roesch on guitar.

Richard Toronto has written the definitive work on the artwork of Richard Shaver, in two volumes, with over 300 illustrations. I wrote the introduction for the second volume, linking Shaver’s preoccupation with stones and pareidolia to the long tradition of scrying and lithomancy. It’s from Shavertron Press, and you can find it on Amazon. Here’s Toronto’s description:

In 1960, science fiction writer Richard Sharpe Shaver discovered “rock books” on his Wisconsin farm. He concluded they were not just rocks, but intelligently designed documents, the recorded history of an ancient, pre-deluge civilization. For 15 years he decoded the rock book texts and images he found embedded in stone, and soon began painting and photographing what he found. It was an alien world that few other than Shaver could see. Shaver also wrote essays to complement his paintings. He wrote of the people and customs of Earth’s pre-history—the half human, half fish Mermen and women—documenting their daily lives in intimate detail. He left behind a body of work that has languished in obscurity for decades. Richard Toronto has gathered together the largest collection of Shaver’s art ever to see print. Presented in two volumes, with more than 300 illustrations, Rokfogo: The Mysterious Pre-Deluge Art of Richard S. Shaver presents the paintings, photographs, and essays that made up Richard Shaver’s ante-diluvian cosmology. Now considered an Outsider artist, Shaver was a pulp fiction writer during Amazing Stories’ golden era. Shunned by mainstream science fiction fans for his radical ideas, Shaver died in obscurity in 1975, leaving behind his legacy of the “sensual art of the ancients.”