Buttons showing John Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad, to hand out at my recent talk about Dee.

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: