Summer 2022
The Demon
from Part One I The somber Demon, banished from the heights, Soared aimlessly above the sinful earth, And memories of better days gone by Kept crowding countlessly before his eyes …
Historical Surrealism: Some Paintings from 2003-20016
Right around 2000, I became frustrated with the artificial division between text and image in Western art and I experimented with combining them. Emerging out of my sketchbooks were characters…
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Sphincter and Sphinx
The new client was a hugely fat, fez-wearing mystery gink from the incest-and-incense-redolent East. He had beautiful hands, ripe with purple finger jewels. He seemed a little too happy to…
Music of the Russian Alphabet: Interview with David Witten
96 Before we begin I must avow my ignorance on a key point. How do you pronounce Tcherepnin? Where is the accent? DW The proper Russian accent is on the…
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Cold Days in Hell
The cops kicked Urfirer’s ass—and it wasn’t a pretty ass. Scales, stray hairs an inch thick, and a bleary blind eye on the left cheek. The thing that was pretty,…
Poetry at Gunpoint: Interview with Mark Pettus, translator of Lermontov
96 So, tell me about Lermontov. MP In some ways there’s not a whole lot to tell—he had a short life. He only lived to be twenty-six. He was born…
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The Spectre of St. John’s Churchyard
Vacant heart and hand and eye,Easy live and quiet die. —Sir Walter Scott I. Providence, Rhode Island, 1848: The Hotel Bar The bar in Edgar Allan Poe’s hotel is a…
Fenrir
Do you want to know when the killing started? Of course you do. It didn’t start right away. On last week of May, the students in my old neighborhood would…
The Tower
As a child she had miraculous hair, of a thickness and lustre remarkable to behold. As she grew older, imagine their surprise when her seven captors discovered that, whenever the…
Peeky Eyes
Anya sat bolt upright in bed and sucked in air through clenched teeth. Her nightshirt clung to her skin and her hair was smeared wetly against her cheek. She gasped…
Messiah in America: Act 2
Act II Scene One A Golden Calf is brought on stage. A song is sung by an assortment of bourgeois folk. The sun shines on high and the swallow flies…
Frog Prince
“Phylum Chordata!” said Harry and splashed into the water. The term had eluded him for days. To celebrate, he swam to the bottom of the pond and back to the…
Reviews: Tcherepnin, Lermontov, Derek Owens
Three Generations, Chamber Music by Ivan, Alexander and Nikolai Tcherepnin, David Witten, piano; Quan Yuan, violin; Sue-Ellen Hershman-Tcherepnin, flute; Donald Berman, piano. Nikolai Tcherepnin, Piano Music; David Witten, piano. Toccata…
Du Fu: Chinese Mythscape
Chinese mythology was never conveniently collected. Hesiod, with a Greek’s passion for systematizing, and Ovid, with a Roman’s passion for history, synthesized their peoples’ visionary explorations into linear narratives. Few…