Our eighth event, “Remembering Keel,” took place on a sunny Sunday afternoon.  We had somewhat of a small crowd, thanks to the World Cup (which we certainly didn’t anticipate when we reserved the space months ago).
Doug opened the ceremonial ullage: for this occasion, we chose John’s favorite drink, a diabetic protein shake. 
Lisa read a piece John wrote for […]

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I’m happy to inform you that you can now savor that notorious lipogrammatical curiosity, Gadsby, simply by following this link.  Gadsby has long had an almost mythological status among linguistic buffs (and Oulipo fans); most of its original printing was lost long ago, but luckily a microfilm proof copy still sits in a public library (in California, I […]

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I recently obtained a copy of Joscelyn Godwin’s book Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World (Inner Traditions, 2009).  I mention it here so that I can plug it: it’s a wonderful overview of the 17th century savant, studded with 400 examples of his charts, maps, inventions, and other illustrations.  There’s been somewhat of a Kircher […]

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On Sunday, May 16th, hardcore fans of the suggestive braved suspended subway service and a glorious sunny afternoon to take in some harmless smut at the Ullage Group’s “Not Dirty, Just Spicy” event at Jalopy.
Doug Skinner started things off by reviewing the rhetoric of extended double-entendre. To drive the point home, he performed the Cliff […]

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Bobby Edwards (seen here in a self-portrait from 1917) gave his own history of the “Greenwich Village Epic” in that quintessential Village journal, The Quill, in the November 1917 issue:
“Down in dear old Greenwich Village,” or, as the Bard sings, “Way Down South in Greenwich Village,” originated in Polly’s about four years ago.  Lucy Huffaker, […]

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“The Greenwich Village Epic,” aka “Way Down South in Greenwich Village,” or “Down in Dear Old Greenwich Village” is often quoted in books on the Village.
It’s usually credited to a famous Village character of the ’20s, Bobby Edwards, “the troubadour of Greenwich Village.”  (I’ve been assembling material on him, by the way; I hope to post it here soon.)  […]

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The art of book illustration seems to have evaporated up into the ullage.  It lives on, of course, in the lively fields of children’s books and graphic novels.  But few novelists nowadays turn over a few pages to an artist to draw pictures of their stories.
Which provides an excuse to post here one of the […]

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Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) was many things: renegade monk, heretic, revolutionary, sorceror, proto-scientist.  He suffered exceptionally brutal torture after a failed revolution against the Spanish authorities in Naples, and spent 28 years in prison.  There, he wrote most of his works, including the classic utopian fantasy, The City of the Sun. 
He was also a poet, whose intense, […]

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[As a postscript to “Pandora’s Music Box,” let me add this lovely imaginary instrument from Boris Vian.  It appears in his novel L’écume des jours (The Scum of the Days).  A number of artists have built plausible models of the Pianocktail; documentation can be found, here and there, on YouTube.  But let me translate the […]

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[As a postscript to our event about hoaxes, I’ll post this account of a memorable literary hoax that may be unfamiliar to American readers.  It’s taken from my article “Boris Vian for Anglophones,” on the life and work of that French writer/musician, in Strange Attractor Journal Two.] 
The war had ended, Paris was free, and nightlife was […]

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