Summer 2022

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 …

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

“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…

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…

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…