“The Finest, Fullest Flowering” is now live at Nightmare Magazine, having slipped out from behind the paywall. There is also an audio version. Keep in mind that you can buy the full issue as an ebook or support Nightmare with a subscription.

 

In the first season of The Sopranos, Tony’s mother Livia enters nursing care, and is sitting up in bed reading when Artie comes to visit. This is her point of view shot: She’s reading the obituaries. HD now allows us a glorious glimpse of the pasted-up paper she’s reading, visible for a fraction of a second…unless you pause it on your iPad and take a screenshot. At first glance, one sees evidence of actual, old school cut-and-paste. But a closer read shows the two columns on the left had some actual work put into them. I’ve done my best to transcribe them below:

Julie Ross

[S]aturday. Chase Township. Julie

[R]oss, one half of the acrobatic

[t]eam of Ross and Toss, was found

[de]ad in a Queen’s NY mental

[ins]titution, apparently as an effect

…her attempting to juggle too

[ma]ny items at once. Ross and Toss

…e famous in the European

…s venues for their

…mplished act. In their most

…s feat, Ms. Ross would

[balan]ce an entire film crew on her

[shoul]ders while Toss would shout

[r]andom schedule changes to

[torme]nt the hapless crewmembers.

…survived by her acrobatic

…of 16 years. Toss, a full

…Cherokee Indian whose

…was knife throwing

…it was rumored for many

…at Ross and Toss were

…r. Toss denied that today,

…Ugh. Me-um and squaw

…just act for show. No

…kyum.” “But, he added,

…otice Me squaw Ross

…heap nice rack.

Services will be

…at the Juggler’s chapel.

 

Sunday. Brigantyne. Dr. Mitchell Burgess, the notorious “Shore Points Diet doc” was found dead of an apparent exploded stomach after chowing down to an “all you can eat” lobsterfest at a local Brigantyne bar. Burgess, whose controversial diet method, “Eat This Book” made the NY Times best seller list for seven straight years, preached that the fiber content of ordinary wood pulp as found in paperback books was more than enough nutrition for the average American. By eating his books, Dr. Burgess’ readers not only shed pounds, but kept buying more and more copies whenever they wanted a little snack. “He seems to have stumbled on the ultimate selling technique,” opined his Publisher, Robin Green of Random Thoughts Books. “By convincing his readers to eat the books, he kept on the best seller list for all those years.” On Sunday, Burgess, who practiced what he preached and demonstrated a voracious appetite for fine literature by once eating the collected works of [?] was innocently walking down the street [?] munching on a TV Guide…

Since I am no longer actively sharing every single thing I read on Facebook, I thought I’d make an effort to compile and occasionally post interesting links I’d encountered. Recurrent themes may emerge.

The state of our shorelines:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-rio-superbacteria-exclusive-idUSKCN0YW2E8

 

http://www.hokulea.com/island-heart-tangier/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Worldwide+Voyage%3A+Weekly+Update&utm_campaign=20160604_m131926833_Newsletter+feed+weekly&utm_term=Read+More

All of Proust in your pocket.

Just arrived in the June issue of Nightmare Magazine, “The Finest, Fullest Flowering.” It lurks behind a paywall until June 15th, which is not coincidentally the day I will be reading at the KGB Bar. Prior to that time, you can pay a pittance to read the entire issue, or, for a slightly larger pittance, subscribe for a year. I will post again when it goes live. Hopefully that opening paragraph proves so tantalizing you can’t resist supporting the Nightmare Empire with some inexpensive clicking.

I have fleshed out the Interviews page with links to a number of interviews I have given over the years. (Which reminds me I also need to find a place to put interviews I have done with other people, such as this one with Misha Nogha.)

I also posted my old article “The Egos at id,” the feature I wrote for Wired Magazine about id Software and the making of Quake.

 

 

“For God’s sake, turn around and–IT’S TOO LATE!”

When David Garnett was putting together New Worlds 2, he asked the authors to provide photographs of themselves to go with their contributions. For my story of ominous darkroom procedures, “Great Breakthroughs in Darkness,” I descended into my own ominous darkroom and put together this image by printing a negative through several layers of transparent collages while also moving physical objects through the beam to cast photograms. I’m still no good with Photoshop however.