202. Wild dogs & } furriers.

Jay Decay’s introduction to the Pluto in Furs reading was off-the-cuff-ish, a blend of his “An Abysmal Masochism” essay and other ideas and scolds. Highly entertaining. People arrived as he spoke. The mini-split unit whined. A shot of whiskey was passed my way. A skinhead with an anti-hate t-shirt sat down and looked at his phone throughout the event. A little girl alternately wore cat-ear headphones and listened. Jay summoned Clint Smith to read first—I laughed, poor Clint, sacrificial first reader, but he handled it with aplomb. He read from “Behemoth,” the long short story that closes the anthology— “The dogs were matted with a burgundy mucus, their glistening pelts catching the morning sunlight… the sound of their nails clacking on the asphalt as they scrambled away.” (A passage coincidentally reminiscent of a scene from “Wild Dogs” [in Supernatural Tales no. 30].) Jay offered comments, brought up Jeffrey Thomas whose story “The Tangible Universe” begins the anthology and reminds me of Brian Evenson’s preoccupation with amputation. Orrin Grey read. I was called up fourth. I moved a table, asked the audience what they knew about Thomas of Britain’s Tristan, from which I drew inspiration. Gemma Files read a tale of decomposition. She dreamed the title of her story. So heavy the dark burden of “Headsman’s Trust,” Richard Gavin had to sit while he read. (Many of the readers wore black. If I were to guess, I’d say Mr. Gavin wears black every day of his life. Gemma Files has a tattoo of two Egyptian hieroglyphs on her arm. I wore a purple shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of forest green sneakers.) At the reading’s end, I remained seated with Clint and the whiskey and people came down to say hi. Lisette from Canada told me she came just to hear me because she likes Worse Than Myself; I signed an autograph for a person who had, previous to that moment, wondered if I was real. I signed as “the other Adam.” (The back cover of Pluto in Furs is a subtle tribute to the opening shots of the 70s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The cover is pretty. It’s by Matthew Revert.) We drank all the whiskey. We thought we’d check out the marshmallows at the Tor reading, but they were on their way out, vying for spots on the elevator. From the rooftop terrace, where the reading had been, we listened to a concert in the park below, watched lights—purple & white.

Out on the street in front of City Hall, where I waited for Clint to return from an errand, a coyote loped past me with a snake in its mouth.

[ image: Pluto in Furs Gradebook, my tribute to Matthew Revert's Pluto in Furs cover. ]

201. Sick reasons } to attend Pluto in Furs.

Jay Decay prefers Don’t Go in the House (1979) to The Shining (1980). Why? Because he’s deeply perverse. Perverse as the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”: 

And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.

 What’s the black cat’s name? Oh, yes—it’s Pluto.

I don’t mean to slander Mr. Decay by calling to your attention his perverse nature. No, rather, I intend to present his perverseness as the foundation for my argument that if you attend this year’s Necronomicon in Providence and count yourself as a true aficionado of horror, you’ll want to attend the reading he’s hosting at 6pm on Sat., Aug. 24. That’s the Pluto in Furs book release reading.

When you receive your Necronomicon schedule, you’ll see several other events scheduled for that time. If your passion is for alchemy & magic, I can’t possibly persuade you to skip the Dust, Ash, & Iron panel—nor would I try: that’s mere phantasy, I don’t need to know you. If you want to explore “M. R. James as weird fiction,” skip the Under the Ash-Tree panel, attend the Pluto in Furs reading, and I’ll deliver a witty and concise overview of James the weird. Or just read the essay I wrote on James’ collected for The Smart Set.

Lastly, at the same time as Mr. Decay’s Pluto in Furs book release reading is the Tor Books Nightfire release party. This may seem like a difficult choice, but it’s only a difficult choice if your taste is mainstream. Go, if you want, get a drink at the bar. Eat the confections on offer. Hear the authors you’re already familiar with read from their latest. If, however, your taste gravitates toward the genuinely strange, the new, the perverse—then come hear stories from the Pluto in Furs anthology.

Aside from myself, readers will include Gemma Files, Jeffrey Thomas, Clint Smith, Orrin Grey, and Richard Gavin. Copies of the anthology will be available. Afterwards, we’ll be glad to lead you to a local wine cellar where we might drink together from a pipe of Amontillado.

200. Three stencils for } the Mountain series.

[ 1. stencil gold ]

[ 2. stencil black ]

[ 3. stencil orange ]

199. Notes for first M talk } &.

Four phrases rearranged from “Capitol” so I might hear them together:

Magic circle of horses + one mother’s voice,

magic little river + magic funicular.

A line—“heaps of stuff being sold”—ties these phrases. Read, “Magic circle of horses [caesura] + magic funicular. / heaps of stuff being sold” and “+ one mother’s voice, [caesura] magic little river. / heaps of stuff being sold.”

Mother’s voice = magic little river. A magic funicular [a mountain train or the cable that draws a mountain train up and down the mountain] is like a river.

The poem’s formal tone is broken in the line that follows the second “heaps of stuff being sold.” Read, “the ones who seemed like dicks” and, four lines later, “dogs chilling in their roundabouts.”

“Capitol,” by Hannah Brooks-Motl, appears in issue 17 of Tupelo Quarterly. I’m perplexed by Henk Rossouw’s conclusion re. the “critique and careful hope” in the “superb ending of this poem.” Read, “magic from the bunker / or what’s coming but magic / said she”—bunkers, I suppose, are hopeful. Are “cautiously” hopeful. I sure hope to survive. I sure hope when I pop my little head out above ground there’s stuff (“heaps of”). Maybe the hope is in the phrase “said she”; the omega woman emerges, the last woman = magic: she’ll fix all this shit.

(In issue 18 of Tupelo Quarterly, by the way, is a new poem by C. S. Carrier, a scruffy brother-friend of mine from the Hartford days. He writes about stuff being gone.)

My “Notes for first M Talk” (Word For/Word issue no. 33) is a close read of Hannah Brooks-Motl’s poem “Of Sadness” from her book M (The Song Cave, 2015).

And in Word For/Word issue no. 33, a selection of Matthew Klane’s cut-up circular works. “The Other Pothole” recalls Sol LeWitt, er, rather, the cover design of MIT presses’ Incomplete Open Cubes; I’d call Klane’s piece “R to the Ople.” What do you get when you add r + ople? Hang the letter “l.” These pieces from a “summer-constructed daily practice junk mail collage” series. See issue no. 3 of ctrl + v, issue no. 56 of Fugue, and fall 2018 issue of Gasher for more (the Gasher collage stuff is the best of it, for my money).

Rosaire Appel’s Page Speaks series, made with crayon and ink on slightly yellowed paper that feature some kind of printer’s guide marks, is my favorite work in Word For/Word 33. Built around / over texts cut or grayed out, the orange and blue crayon scribbles are striking, enhanced by the black ink lines and smudges. I see staves, thought-balloons, and a snail’s shell. It’s lively.

[ Image from Page Speaks by Rosaire Appel. ]

198. “...put into a museum } rock & roll is over.”

Amusing sequence in documentary Westwood: Punk. Icon. Activist. Vivienne Westwood is reluctant to talk about Sex Pistols.

Cut to: Ext. Day. Victoria & Albert Museum.

Cut to: Int. Victoria & Albert Museum (textiles archive).

[Classical-ish music in background.]

Archivists wheel a cart of clothes to “The Clothworkers’ Centre”; place clothes on tables. They wear white gloves. Carefully unfold “Destroy” muslin shirt.

Voice over, Clair Wilcox, senior curator: …it’s one of the most important pieces Westwood and McLaren created.

Cut to: Clair Wilcox, tenderly touching “Destroy” shirt.

Clair Wilcox: The sleeves are very long and they fold back and then this would clip onto here so making it, um, more wearable, but the notion of distortion, the sleeves reminds one a little bit of a straitjacket.

Cut to: photo of Johnny Rotten wearing “Destroy” shirt.

Clair Wilcox: But it’s really all about the imagery so here you’ve got a swastika, an inverted crucifix, the word “destroy,” and then lyrics from the Sex Pistols, “I am an antichrist.” And what Westwood and McLaren were doing with these punk garments was “confronting society.”

Cut to: photo of Westwood in “Destroy” t-shirt.

Vivienne says, “We invented punk” [that is, she and McLaren].

I love John Lydon, love post-Pistols P.I.L. (1978 – 86), but his antics did get stagnant—Westwood says, “…and he hasn’t changed, from being that phenomenon, unfortunately, he should have changed to something else by now.” Hard to be an iconoclast icon—what change it would require to smash that icon!

To her credit, Westwood later observes: “We wanted to undermine the establishment. The swastika, all these things, meant we don’t accept the values of this older generation. We hate it we want to destroy it don’t want it. We were youth against age, that’s what it was. But, it had affected fashion such a lot. The hairstyles, even, my spikey hair, was in Vogue one month later. And I realized that we weren’t really attacking the system at all. It was being marketed all the time. I just realized that the real marketing opportunity was that the English society could claim how democratic and how free they were that somehow kids could revolt as much as that. We weren’t attacking the establishment. We were part of the distraction.”

Kate Moss coda

Vivienne Westwood [while she works at a top with an assistant]: “I think it’s going to look great. I’m going to put it on Kate Moss. [Cut to: Kate Moss, smiling.] She’ll look lovely in it.

Kate Moss: Those shows, they were so outrageous. You know, champagne is flowing, and we’d go out naked with lollipops [Cut to: topless Kate Moss on runway, circa 1994, eating a popsicle] and [Cut to: Kate Moss, circa 2014, in a shop (her shop?)] you know, just outrageous, but, but really glamorous at the same time. They were the ones who were [gasps] my god, so exciting.

Kate Moss: She’s a rebel isn’t she though, which attracts me [Cut to: Kate Moss, circa 1994], coming from Croydon we wanted to get out and she was, like, our queen.

Kate Moss: I remember the shows but I can’t remember which one; we were backstage and she said, “Kate, you know I’ve never been into girls, I could’ve got into you and then like hugged me she was like, I could have been her only lesbian lover [Kate Moss fist pumps] ka-ching!