We're honored that Gordon Meyer (of Smart Home Hacks fame and a creator of haunted bells and genie bottles) likens our Hexopedia to what Harry Potter might have been had that series been carefully considered:

Hexopedia: A review

 It popped into our head that the celebrated poet Gary Barwin can write both of his names in one go, if he employs the bee-gee and the double-y.  The top half of the letters read "gary" and the bottom half read "barwin."

If it's true that a lack of specificity in characterization creates the stereotypes that evoke the intuitive knowledge upon which a work relies for its emotional effect and thematic meaning (as per Erich Segal: A Critical Companion), then these stills from Kamen Rider Kuuga speak for themselves.

Or, to quote from the Gervase Fen mystery we're currently reading, "Characterisation seems to me a very over-rated element in fiction.  I can never see why one should be obliged to have any of it at all, if one doesn't want to.  It limits the form so." —Buried for Pleasure by Edmund Crispin

We're honored that acclaimed poet Gary Barwin has offered a foreword to our new guide to The Care and Feeding of a Spirit Board.

On the basis of two bits of evidence (but please send us more examples), we've determined that British humo[u]r can move any mountain (to the tune of The Shamen's "Move Any Mountain" or not).  Exhibit A: In Maurice Dolbier's Nowhere Near Everest: An Ascent to the Height of the Ridiculous, we find a character who boldly "contrived the removal of Mount Everest and the substitution of a smaller peak, in an attempt to create an international incident."  Exhibit B: In the series one, episode two of Absolutely Fabulous, a character is sued by British Heritage for shifting some ancient standing stones out of the way:

Eddie: Sued?  Why are being sued, darling?
Bubble: Well, that last fashion shoot you organised.  Apparently, someone moved a couple of rocks, or something.
Patsy: Moved a couple of old rocks?  My God!
Eddie: Stonehenge, Pats.  Anyway...
Patsy: So?  They should be glad of the publicity.

Britain's effortless ability to move any mountain through humo[u]r is unmistakable.

 

"Every evening at seven I ask myself: what are we to do?"
—Ernst Kreuder, The Attic Pretenders

See our piece on "Prometheus Found" (as well as a bonus anagram involving a learned owl) in the premier issue of Fiddler's Green, a magazine of "art and magic for tea-drinking anarchists, convivial conjurors, and closeted optimists."

Can one judge a book by its first page?  (Spoiler: we do.)  We bought Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant after reading John Pistelli's piece about it, and we'll probably try to get through it, but page one sure did leave us cold.  (That's not counting Ishiguro's blatantly misused semicolon in the second line.)  We're initially astonished over the banquet of praise the book has received.  In fairness, one can't help but to draw comparisons to John Cowper Powys' astonishing Porius, which similarly explores ancient Wales and its mythology (only Powys, under the spell of Merlin, writes sublime sentences from the get-go).  Almost more so, we're still staggering from the utter brilliance of The Attic Pretenders, which presents itself as an actual artifact of the Otherworld (and may be the only one of its kind: the phrase "artifact of the Otherworld" delivers zero Google results).  (And thanks to Writers No One Reads for putting us onto The Attic Pretenders.)  Compared to the visceral Otherworld that Attic Pretenders captures, the first page of The Buried Giant feels like a child's chalk drawing.  While we'd love for page two of The Buried Giant not to disappoint, we have entire color-coded bookshelves of vastly better-written prose.

On the edge of understanding
Below, above our reason's sway
Is a ghostly world extending
Into cool infinity.
Hosts invisible protect
The path beyond the intellect.
—Theodor Däubler, "The Sleep-Walker," quoted in Ernst Kreuder's The Attic Pretenders

On being bogged down in the superstition of our so-called scientific age:

"'Does anyone know how to tell fortunes?' asked Waldemar.  Nobody did.  'Or read a horoscope?  No?  How extremely backward.  How deeply we're all bogged in the superstition of enlightenment.'" —Ernst Kreuder, The Attic Pretenders (and thanks to Writers No One Reads for directing us toward this delightful book!)

(This is our submission to Writers No One Reads, which is where we first learned about our very beloved The Secret Service by Wendy Walker.)

No one reads fine artist Rhea Sanders' guidebook to the fictional Fire Gardens of Maylandia or Sweetwilliam's Folly (The Tradd Street Press, Charleston, SC, 1980).  The author respectfully dedicates this wryly humorous, meticulously envisioned oddity to "the virus which gave me the fever which gave me the hallucination which gave me the idea for this book."  The reader of the deadpan guidebook is presumed to be a tourist to the state of Maylandia, in possession of a working knowledge of local attractions, so the mysterious nature of the fantastical fire gardens is revealed in subtle tidbits as the site's colorful and often controversial history is explored.  We learn that the gardens were conceived in 1720 by the first royal governor, Ferdinand Mayland, "during one of his annual bouts with a local fever."  The author dryly recounts how the governor persuaded the indigenous Changapod tribe to relinquish their sacred plains of flaming shale at the foot of the mountain they called "He Who Waits": "Since all objected, all were done away with.  This is indeed a sad episode, but it is well to remember that the Changapods had owned this territory for centuries, and had done nothing with it, whereas Governor Mayland imagined a work of art.  There were in any case only 370 Changapods."  As the history progresses, we become privy to intimations of "fireworkers" in possession of "the knowledge" -- carefully guarded secrets of controlling the shape, movement, and color of fireballs, handed down from father to son over generations.  We learn of figures with oddly Francophilic inclinations, such as the Governor's London-born wife Marguerite, who "spoke only in French, for reasons which have not come down to us."  We learn of the possibly addictive tea leaves that grow near the fire gardens and seem to treat the blue skin condition resulting from exposure to the natural gasses.  ("And why should everyone be either black, white, red, or yellow?")  We learn of several possible murders along the way, all unsolved, including one in 1927 -- the winner of a contest to name a new garden to express the spirit of the age.  A certain Billy Jackson's entry, "Jazz Baby," earned him a $5,000 check, though he was shot and killed on his way home and the check stolen.  "We in Maylandia often point to Mr. Jackson's Jazz Baby Garden when outsiders ask us about the minorities in our midst.  For what could be a more beautiful testimonial to our treatment of minorities than this Garden?"  We learn of tea plantation heiress Angela Longleaf MacDowell, who stood six feet tall and boasted, "No man on earth or beneath the sod has ever kissed the lips of Angela Longleaf MacDowell."  It was she who envisioned, in a dream, the memorial fire garden for famed local poet Cassius Augustus Robertson ("the story of Robertson's mysterious death at the age of 99 is too well known to be recounted here").  Profusely illustrated by the author, The Fire Gardens of Maylandia is a charming, deeply funny, and thought-provoking relic from an alternate reality just a little bit more smoldering than ours.  (Profuse thanks to Hilary Caws-Elwitt for recommending this book.)

There's a longstanding rumor that Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" hails Satan when played backwards.  What could be more natural?  A fall from heaven is the equal and opposite reaction to an ascent to heaven, as we see in this card from a magic deck that the eminent mentalist Kenton Knepper commissioned of us.

"Greeks enjoying themselves."  And if the boat begins to sink, would they need to be bailed out?  (Ooh!  Topical!)  From Around the World on a Bicycle by Thomas Stevens, 1887.

When I learned that Andy died, I knew I'd quite literally lost a part of my heart.  It was at a grand bonfire in the Nevada desert that a magus once arranged Andy, me, and three others (whose identities I'm not at liberty to divulge) into a pentacle, intertwining our arms in a special way so that when we squeezed hands a heartbeat pulsed around and around the circle.  For some timeless moments, we five were a single beating heart.  (There's a Sufi doctrine that the heart has five faces, each pointed, in turn, toward the divine, the world of pure spirits, formal exemplars, the visible world, and the synthesis of the inwardly hidden and outwardly manifest.)  Even before that ritual, Andy had been hanging around me a bit, shyly or perhaps covertly seeking to get a grasp on what exactly was going on with me.  I know I let down some masks, but he never let on whether I revealed my true self.  He was a witch masking as a magician, and he knew I was something, at the very least a fellow outsider hovering at the edge of a gathering of eccentrics in the middle of the desert.  We briefly commiserated on our respective dark nights of the soul, but only later, secondhand, did I learn that Andy had recently been exiled from his coven.  Andy had a maxim for how not to drown in an overwhelming flood of language: "Don't trip over the fall of letters."  My own Muse took that and twisted "fall" into "Autumn": https://www.oneletterwords.com/weblog/?id=6274.  And so, my heart skipped a beat when I learned that Andy died.  I didn't really know him, or didn't allow myself to.  As the ancient Egyptian proverb goes, "He who knows his own heart, the fate knows him."

We're honored that the renowned philosopher of magic Robert E. Neale (author of The Sense of Wonder) thinks we've stumbled upon the secret to world peace with our Seance Parlor Feng Shui project: 

Prof. Oddfellow has carried the logical approach to nonsense to even greater heights than before. The logic of two absurd systems logically joined into a masterpiece of faith for fools that could stop us from killing each other. My delight lies in making up meaning, but his talent in this is unsurpassed. This treatise will lurk about on our coffee table waiting to preside over a promising guest. In the meantime, I might play with feng shui myself.

Woohoo!

We're pleased to offer an Internet first, having painstakingly transcribed a subtitle track for the brilliant absurdist comedy stage show Birdstrike (2000) by the incomparable Harry Hill.  The show is not currently available on DVD (only VHS), and the YouTube upload does not feature accurate subtitles (only very garbled captioning).  If you download the file, play it on your computer via VLC or Plex and put the .srt file in the same folder with the same name as the video file.

Download SRT subtitles for Harry Hill's Birdstrike (2000) »

If it's true that "it is not we who guide the unfolding of the game of experience; it is experience that leads us; our task is that of corresponding to such continuous opening of truth" (Between Nihilism and Politics, 2010), then we humbly suggest the only way to meet that task is to employ a continuous doorway (as seen in The Southern Planter, 1882).

The Paper St. Journal reviews our imaginary Kafka parables, Franzlations.  "Sometimes maudlin, but always wise, Conley, Barwin, and Thomas induce you into a willing hypnosis as you ponder over the pithy blocked letters, scattered scraps of sentences, and gothic illustrations."  The reviewer, James Puntillo, credits us with constructing within the book "a firewall to protect against readers who won't delight so easily" in aphorisms*, and if it's indeed true that we did that then we'll figure out how to reverse-engineer our previous works, too.  Whew—it'll be a relief!

The internet is a haven for misattributed quotations, but all quotations attributed to Buddha are, due to a technicality, accurate.

We know you've speculated, so here's what might be.  From A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain.