4.4.18

Hello All --

(The painting is "Melancholic Cannibal" by Ljubomir Popovic).

UNLANGUAGE is available now, published by Eraserhead Press.

The French translation of ANIMAL MONEY will be published later this year, with more to come.

A collection seems to be in the cards as well ...

I continue to labor on my new novel, and my monograph on weird fiction.

Here is an excerpt from UNLANGUAGE, available nowhere else:

          The wandering student of the work book abandoned the life the wandering student had made. Decay is the door to new life. The matter of life conjugates and declines. With steely passivity the student watched as everything that had been life disintegrated, not lifting a finger to prevent the disappearance of a career, a home, the dispersal of carefully collected and preserved property, the evaporation of love and fellowship. It was a little like standing on a prominence looking back on the rubble of a home town reduced to smoking ruins and blanketed in corpses that can't be told apart, then turning to enter a new day of isolation, poverty, want, exile, shame that's inescapable because it has nothing to do with the faltering of any merit, a fatal and maybe impregnable language barrier has risen. All the same, the student allows it all to die, making not even a fruitless effort. He will wander homeless through the world and suffer, but he will at least be spared the humiliation of confinement to a psychiatric hospital, which never befalls him.

          The First Person, the teacher, is brought in by four students carrying him in a litter, which is a swivelling desk chair supported on a couple of wooden posts actually, and the teacher himself is a corpse. The students convey him to one corner of the spacious, windowless classroom with walls of bare cinderblock and tip him onto the floor by a bunch of cardboard boxes. The teacher's corpse falls in a seated position, sprawling against the boxes, head a little lolled back, one hand resting on the floor. The legs are bent and sideways. His lips have shrivelled away to nothing and his open mouth is a black sharpness in his face, clean-cut as a hole punched in a paper cone. The whole body has a slack, deflated look; the flesh sags and seems to be hardening into soap.

          The bell on the wall rings shrilly, on and on.