Fr. de Plüm stops by
with coffee and apple kringle.
Father Norm tells us he’s tackling, of all things, a political thriller, with novelist Mark Mitchell.
“I’m temperamentally unsuited to collaboration. I like things just so. And Mitchell is a terrible atheist. I agreed over a martini. But maybe this will be good for me, don’t you think?”
Coffee houses do not yet have tvs like all the bars do. We hope they do not start. We hope Starbucks is not testing this at sites. We hope the coffee house we saw at the airport with tvs at the four points of the compass is an aberration.
Coffee houses agreeably are places for not tv, but for reading, writing, or talking, things that are the opposite of tv. We will admit there is lots of staring at phones, but we like to think these people are reading novels.
We hope that coffee houses stay this way. We hope they do not go the way of hardcover books, to be completely replaced by e-books, which of course never happened. People still buy and put on their shelves hardcovers and nice-looking trade paperbacks exactly the way coffee houses don’t have tvs still like the bars do.
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It's February 2025, and we’re rebuilding the site. Also we thank you for your generous and mystifying support.
We’re probably at work on this right now, and if you refresh your browser you’ll likely see something entirely different. In mobile view, the site might look like you dropped your phone.
Out of the blue someone arranged to send us a quantity of Bitcoin. Our actual initial reaction was the look on a dog’s face when you make him a birthday cake, but we are duly grateful.
Love Snippet.
A duck walked past his bench carrying its invisible suitcases. The buildings south of the Park were a mountain range of which he could name only the tallest. He was glad he’d stopped smoking and could keep his hands in his coat pockets, warm.
He stood soon as as he saw her, in the white coat with the black saucer buttons, just emerging from the shadow of the Burns monument. Her face the sonsiest of faces. How to face a face such as that? Maybe she loved him for his complete loss of composure around her. “You said,” she called out when she was still fifty feet away, “you’d not be involved with someone newly divorced.”
Two women pushing strollers stopped to look at them both.
“I did,” he said.
“How newly?”
He looked at his watch.
Bry O’Shaughnessy’s Complete and Authoritative Periodic Table of the Elephants is now launched at 118els.com
Bry’s exhaustive large-scale tabular disinformation graphic gathers all the world’s elephants in a handy and easy-to-consult format is available in several sizes and formats.
Formerly, Bry’s Periodic Table joined his brother Nog O’Shaughnessy’s print, William Blake’s Amended Emended London Tube Map of Hell, on the site. But Google Analytics made the case that Nog's grim art was driving away nine out of the ten visitors who had come to visit the elephants, and so Nog pulled it.
a house brand
January 25 is Robert Burns’s birthday, which marks the beginning of the Snippets season.
Now we begin carrying everywhere (and keep bedside at night) a tiny cheap spiral notepad and nub of pencil. Others are known to go whole-hog, decking themselves out with a Field Notes Front Page Reporter’s Notebook and a Montblanc Meisterstück Le Petit Prince Solitaire LeGrand filled with purple ink. We sit in coffee shops, bars, libraries. We take the train. We walk in the woods.
This is the time of year you’ll see us break off from whatever we were doing to jot down whatever seed crystal of a story or snatch of melody comes to the inner ear. Or we seek out birds, trash bins, a woman waiting for a bus, and sketch them quick as we can.
We take all these home and tack them up, feathering the walls with what might just be a work in progress, we’ll have to see.
Another note
from Mrs. Goblington—
I myself must Watch this Edge. I tell myself,
I've no Time for my True Work this Morning.
O I say, instead I must go to my Job at the Mill,
And O this World is Cruel, and
O yet I have Virtue
Even as I Neglect my own Art.
Thus I cast myself as Victimized Artist,
The Martyr, and do not Do my Art!
The Lies I tell Myself!
As the Poet & Engraver said,
We want not Liberality,
We want Fair Price
& Proportionate Value & General Demand
for Art!
An Artist is a Worker with a Social Function,
A Producer of Goods for which there is
a steady Social Demand!
A Society where artists are socially Isolated
or live off the Charity of Patronage
Will do all the Damage it can
to the Genius that Appears!
[ We love you, Mrs. Goblington. ]
all mrs. goblington's submissions graciously
UNDERWRITTEN By
We're not so far apart, when you get right down to it.
You believe 75,017,613 Americans to be seriously delusional, while we put the number closer to 77,302,580.
“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.”
surname in quality
pleasant clubbiness
Now this news.
Nog writes us:
“Report in last month’s Journal of Applied Hysterics, that hahophysicists at Catskills National Laboratory claim to have discovered preliminary evidence for a sixth, and possibly seventh, Marx Brother.”
By the time Bearings Season begins, we’re good and ready.
Those who have struggled with New Year’s resolutions may like Bearings. We drink lots of water and experiment with adjustments to our exercise program, meditation practice, nutrition, sleep. We abstain from, or ratchet back on, drink and digital. We try out new styles of list-making. Seasonal colors are azure, silver, and white. Bearings runs until Robert Burns’s birthday on January 25, by which time we’ve had all the virtue a body can stand.
muddle in style
We here at Smallwhisky House observe Bern O’Shaughnessy’s seasonal calendar, which declares Muddle to begin December 26 and last through the first two to seven days of January. (We sort of have trouble pinning it down.)
(During Muddle Season we can have trouble just transitioning between paragraphs.)
Traditional Muddle is observed by staying home, eating leftovers, finishing opened bottles, wearing bathrobes or the same sweatpants, and not shaving.
Seasonal colors are brown, maroon, warm gray. In our house it is celebrated by getting lost for hours reading books we’ve probably read two or three times already. You may be thinking, That describes my whole year.
Orthodox Muddle calls for personal hygiene every third day.
(A brief rundown of some of Bern’s seasons may be found here.)
Some news about Bern O’Shaughnessy’s “The Quiet Underwoods."
Bern says, “Right now I'm working on a different novel. It’s in its second draft. It’s more topical. It asks the question, ‘What if an Elon Musk had a soul, and were cleverer?'
Sounds interesting. But what is Bern doing with “The Quiet Underwoods?” He must have spent five years on that book.
“Closer to ten. It ended up being another of my lighthearted meditations on death, with talking animals. It ran 210,000 words, almost three times the length of most debut novels. To a literary agent receiving this as a submission, it's like you’re running a busy sandwich shop and your food service vendor shows up hoping to unload a truckload of marrow bones on you. I queried 120+ agents. Two did ask for the full manuscript but, ultimately found it not quite for them. ‘The Raleigh Review’ published the first chapter as a short story, “Whipsnake,” in their Fall 2024 issue. So there’s that.”
Wow.
“Yeah. I’m shooting for 80,000 words with this one. That way if it’s rejected, I’ll know it was because it just wasn’t a very good book.”
fine madness
stole anchor
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