Evan Dorkin recently published an omnibus edition of Beasts of Burden — the Eisner award winning comic he wrote about a ragtag band of pets investigating the supernatural — and a decades-spanning collection of Milk & Cheese, Dork, and The Eltingville Club under the title Nerd Inferno: The Essential Evan Dorkin. All of this comes on the heels of younger fans on TikTok rediscovering the Eltingville pilot from Adult Swim and creating animations, memes, and original characters. The fandom grew worldwide in short order, and I began to notice the original comics selling out or rising in price. Now the Nerd Inferno omnibus has sold out and is going to a second printing, and Evan is doing signings and convention appearances for the first time in years. No one in comics deserves success more. In light of his recent wins and these two incredible collections, the biggest omission for me is a series that I wish he could return to, Hectic Planet, known for most of it's stop-start history as Pirate Corp$. It's incredibly unlikely, but a boy can dream. And given the spotlight on him now, it'd be understandable if new fans wanted to try digging into this series as well. But this series may be a little difficult to get into for a few reasons: 1. There are two series with overlapping numbers. 2. The name changes at the end of the second series. 3. Not only does the tone shift, but the cast of characters expands, minor or new characters take on greater prominence, and some early characters all but disappear. There's a real sense of growth throughout, both in Evan's art and storytelling and in the world he's created. You come away with a sense that there's a universe of stories to be told, if only he had the time and luxury to tell them. There are laughs, excitement, and emotional gut punches along the way, and I absolutely adore it. It has been collected, but not for some time and not completely, and the publication history also adds to the confusion for anyone trying to find and to read through the comics. What follows is intended to help folks figure out where the various single issues and collections overlap and run in sequence. You may read the story through single issues, through collections, or through combinations of each, but the notes below will help ensure you're not seeking out duplicates and are instead able to piece together the series in the correct order. This is not comprehensive, and in fact it says less than half of what I wanted to say, but it's long enough and accomplishes the main task, which is to make a little sense of the publication history. * * * ## TL;DR Your best bet is to find the three collected trade paperback volumes (Hectic Planet, Volumes One, Two and Three) and the single issue short story collection The Bummer Trilogy. * * * _Note:_ It is highly recommended that you start with “Postcard from Mr. Blue (An Introduction for You New Folks),” (see below, under Volume Two), which is the best introduction to the series. It helps to contextualize the earlier work, and does so in a way that's much more satisfying than the brief two-page introduction in Volume One, where Halby almost apologizes for the original Eternity series. ## Volume One: Dim Future ### Original Issues The first series was published by Eternity from July 1987 to February 1988. * Pirate Corp$ #1 (Eternity, July, 1987) * Pirate Corp$ #2 (Eternity, October, 1987) * Pirate Corp$ #3 (Eternity, December, 1987) * Pirate Corp$ #4 (Eternity, February, 1988) ### Collected In 1993, Slave Labor Graphics (SLG) collected issues 1 and 2 as Pirate Corp$: The Blunder Years #1 and issues 3 and 4 as Pirate Corp$: The Blunder Years #2. In August 1998, SLG collected all four issues as a trade paperback (TPB) under the title Hectic Planet Volume One: Dim Future. (On the spine, it's Hectic Planet: Dim Future and the cover says Hectic Planet Book One: Dim Future, but the copyright page has the official title.) * * * ## Volume Two: Checkered Past The second series was published by Slave Labor Graphics from 1989 to 1992, beginning with a "special" and followed by a planned bi-monthly "money-losing" series. The schedule wasn't quite that regular. * Pirate Corp$ Special! #1 (SLG, April 1989) * Pirate Corp$ #1 (SLG, June 1989) * Pirate Corp$ #2 (SLG, September 1989) * Pirate Corp$ #3 (SLG, October 1989) * This space intentionally left blank. * Pirate Corp$ #4 (SLG, April 1992) Now, just hold on a minute! What's with this space intentionally left blank between Pirate Corp$ #3 and #4? If you can find it, you can squeeze in this little gem: * "Alcoholics Anonymous" from Munden's Bar Annual #2. This story has not been collected or reprinted due to questions around the financial collapse of First Publishing and Evan's fear of raising any potential legal issues for himself or his publisher. This fun story sees Blue, Hal and Fibby running into Milk & Cheese at Munden's Bar, which exists at the cross-section of all dimensions in John Ostrander's Grimjack. ### Collected SLG also collected these issues as a TPB in August 1998, this one under the title Hectic Planet Volume Two: Checkered Past. (On the spine, it's Hectic Planet: Checkered Past, and on the cover it's Hectic Planet Book Two: Checkered Past, but the copyright page has the official title.) * * * ## Volume Three: The Young and the Reckless The final issue in the series was printed with two titles. Pirate Corp$ 5 and Hectic Planet 5 are the same comic. * Pirate Corp$ #5 (SLG, December 1992; later reprinted as Hectic Planet #5, September 1993) * Vroom Socko: Paid in Full (SLG, November 1993) * Hectic Planet #6 (SLG, November 1993) Vroom Socko is modified and partly redrawn from a story that originally ran in Deadline [U.K.] #44 (September 1992), #46 (November 1992), #48 (February 1993) and #51 (May 1993). The Vroom Socko issue is branded with a Pirate Corp$ in the upper left corner, while the Hectic Planet issues have a new logo of sorts, which may be more like a tag line: 24 Hours a Day (as in there's no let up: it's a hectic planet, 24 hours a day). One can only assume that Vroom Socko fit more with the original tone of Pirate Corp$, while the main title shifted enough to the personal and internal lives of the main crew and no longer on their status as a crew of space pirates. ### Collected SLG collected these issues as a TPB in May 2001 under the title Hectic Planet Volume Three: The Young and the Reckless. (On the spine, it's Hectic Planet: The Young and the Reckless, and on the cover it's Hectic Planet Book Three: The Young and the Reckless, but the copyright page has the official title.) * * * ## The Bummer Trilogy And that brings us to the final installment of the story so far. This was originally a series of short stories about love in three successive issues of the anthology Dark Horse Presents. In the anthologies, they're titled "Hectic Planet, part 1 of 3," etc., but the first two are titled on the page. * Dark Horse Presents #118, pp. 1–8 (Dark Horse Comics, February 1997) * Dark Horse Presents #119, pp. 9–16 (Dark Horse Comics, March 1997) * Dark Horse Presents #120, pp. 19–26 (Dark Horse Comics, April 1997) These stories were collected as a single issue comic called The Bummer Trilogy: three Hectic Planet love stories (SLG, April, 2001). In the Hectic Planet collection, they're given titles: * "5 Years and Counting" * "Shot on Goal" * "Love You Madly, Elsie; or, Scumbag of Oz" You are guaranteed to cry by the end, and that's not something you would have said in 1987. * * * It's been 20 years since Evan hinted on his LiveJournal (How Not to Make Comics, pt.1, May 22, 2006) that there was an unprinted issue #7: > For now, it joins Milk and Cheese #8, Hectic Planet #7, and Biff Bam Pow #1 as unprinted fever dreams. "Fever dreams" might suggest it was only planned, but Biff Bam Pow #1 came out a year later, and the story these issues were said to be joining appeared in The Eltingville Club #1 (Dark Horse Comics, April 2014). Granted, Milk & Cheese #8 has been referenced in Evan's Patreon via sketches and notes for unfinished stories, so Hectic Planet could be in the same boat, but something must exist, even if it's an outline. Introductory notes in The Bummer Trilogy had this to say: > For the continuity-minded, the events in The Bummer Trilogy take place several months after those portrayed in Hectic Planet #6, or for followers of the collected volumes, Hectic Planet Volume 3: The Young and the Reckless. New Hectic Planet stories are planned for 2002. * * * Even if he never revisits the series, the characters are still with me like memories of old friends. I think of them fondly and hope they're doing well.

I had been using Aaron Parecki's indieauth dot com as my IndieAuth server, but hadn't been doing much of anything with it. When I recently tried to sign in to An IndieWeb Webring, I received an error indicating some cryptic problem with the issuer. I reached out to Marty McGuire on the IndieWeb chat, and he pointed me in the right direction, correctly surmising that it was a disconnect related to the evolving spec. It seemed best to seek out a new IndieAuth server, and I first tried Benji Encalada Mora's serverless-indieuth project. It worked well enough, but I wasn't a fan of the interface and realized I had a pretty good solution staring me in the face. Or staring daggers at me in the rearview mirror, since I hadn't noticed it in the backseat for a really, really long time. The IndieAuth plugin for WordPress (WP) doesn't seem like the right solution for a static site built with Eleventy and deployed to Netlify, but I ran a popular blog many years ago in my former life as a classicist. You know, talking about ancient languages, analyzing poetry, making niche jokes about philosophers and mythological figures, gushing over your favorite dead scholars and how mean they could be about each other's work. Good times. I continue to pay for hosting as an ode to another time. What? No, not antiquity. My own past. An ode to my younger self. I'm not that old. Stop giggling. The IndieAuth plugin for WP is dead simple, with very little in the way of settings. This is kind of great, because there's nothing to mess up, no code to customize, no Netlify functions to deploy and break, etc. But it raises an important question: How do you use it to authenticate yourself on a _different_ site? The plugin works by treating your WP author page as your personal page, and thus your canonical identity. After installing the plugin, you place three links in the head of your personal site, where example dot com is your WP site.: <link rel="indieauth-metadata" href="https://example.com/wp-json/indieauth/1.0/metadata" /> <link rel="authorization_endpoint" href="https://example.com/wp-json/indieauth/1.0/auth" /> <link rel="token_endpoint" href="https://example.com/wp-json/indieauth/1.0/token" /> The problem is that when you try to use IndieAuth to sign in anywhere, you'll find yourself instead signed in as your WP user, e.g., `https://example.com/author/name`. But don't despair! If you're like me, you don't want a WP author page. You'd prefer your author link to take folks to your personal site. To solve this problem, I turned to another plugin: WP Custom Author URL. Once installed, you'll find two things at the bottom of your author page: 1. Checkbox: "Use a custom author URL?" 2. Input: "Custom Author URL" Check the box, add your personal site, and you're done. Now when you use your personal site to sign in, you will be authenticated as expected. The Users section in WP-Admin will now also include a section called Manage Tokens. This is the one bit that could be a dealbreaker for someone else, but I'm okay with it. The reporting here is broken now, so that each token shows as never having been accessed, and these can proliferate each time you login, based on the client. E.g., if set to never expire, Indie Book Club appears to automatically refresh the existing token, while another service like Micropublish or a test site like IndieLogin will create a new token each time. You'll want to clean these up occasionally. This is admittedly a quirky, niche solution, and I'll likely work out a non-WP solution later. But this is perfect for me right now because it's allowing me to experiment with some IndieWeb stuff more than I've been able to in a long time.

It's long past time I stop compartmentalizing my life and being anonymous in all directions. I'm a web developer, but I'm also an artist and a classicist. I've forgotten more about Greek verbs, metrics and prosody than some of my professors ever knew, and you know what? I'm happier as a dilettante than whatever they expected me to be in those days. I'm also an artist, and I'm going to stop waiting for the right time to put it out there. So here comes the dabbling. Starting with a new section on the site: drawings. Because I contain multitudes: ## Song of Myself, 51 (Walt Whitman) The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them. And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.) Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab. Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper? Who wishes to walk with me? Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

## Intellegentiae Artificialis Osor Sum a.d. VII Kal. Sept. MMXXV Intellegentiae Artificialis osor sum, quod incivile habetur. At non curo, quoniam osor sum. Ut Intellegentiam Artificialem civiliter loquaris, infitiationes reprehensioni anteponis: nempe non ex omni parte adversor! fortasse post paucos annos, quando—! forsitan finibus mutatis, autem—! Mos est ut disputemus quando et quomodo usitandum. Mos est ut sumamus hoc utilem esse alicui vel nescio quomodo, aliquando. Sic dicunt divites ac ingeniosi nobilesque, et arrogantia esset dissentire a talibus. Sed osor sum, quod genus integritatis est. Hoc confirmat me libenter dissentire ab aliquo etsi inciviliter. “Sed modo adhibeo hoc ad —,” “Vero, si tu solum —,” “Exemplaribus novis —,” “Ridebam —,” Desiste. Ruborem tibi incutis. Pro te erubesco. Censores iamdudum perscripserunt de vulneris naturae circumiectis, de comprobando praeiudicatae opinionis et de fabricatione redituum infensorum in alienigenas, de vulneris cogitativibus et mortibus voluntariis Intellegentia Artificosa sustinente, de quaestionibus consenionis et iuris auctorum, quomodo corporationes Intellegentiam Artificialem curantes promoveant exemplaria dominationis, quomodo Intellegentia Artificialis sit dolus quod efficit fraudem et dissimulationem et sollicitationem et speculationem, de operariorum expilatione, quomodo latebra sit fabribus abrogandibus et arti eviscerando, quomodo haec programmata non vero ratiocinentur atque similitudo ac probabilitas haud sufficiant pervenire finem intelligentiae, quomodo homines credant se celeriores hanc ob rem cum tardiores fieri, quomodo haec sit propria sua mediocris et funditus prisca, quomodo penitus sit technologia fascistica cui radix est doctrina dominatus, circumscripta non proprietatibus formularibus sed politicis. Vero haud censor sed amplius osor sum. Non hanc causam ago ut caute ac late disputarem, quia alii iam fecerunt. Si colluvium horteris seu comedas, non utique mea verba leges, quae rogares scilicet automaton ut summatim describat et obliviscareris quicquid tibi dixisset. Deinde dies transires, immutati verbis non lectis et sententiis non cogitavisses. Hanc causam ago ut incivilis sim, quia haec est technologia incivilis, et debetur responsum incivile. Myazaki dixit, “Credo firme hoc esse contumeliam contra vitam ipsam.” Zamia Altman dixit nos posse circumdare ordinem solarem Sphaera Dysona ut sedes computatorias habeat. Miyazaki est rectus et Altman est pravus. Miyazaki narrat fabulas immiscentes cottidiana mirabilibus tale ut hominibus profunditer significantes fiant. Altman mentitur pro pecuniam. Et gaudeo illaec esse mendacia, quia fabricatores Intellegentiae Artificialis non sunt damni ab suis infelicitatis sed propositibus. Volunt gignere numen ut ipsis optationes dedat, et optant numquam neminos facere artes. Volunt creare novam speciem mentis quam ipsi possint cogere in servitudinem ingnaram. Somniant de sese excogitatis novas species vitae in servitutem abducendas. Quem ad finem? Quasi symmetria desperata, istud somnium machinae servilis perfectae consumit vitam ab utoribus simul atque illis qui apparatus tornant. Unde summa vitae inest nisi quod eligimus, quos homines novimus, qualiacumque experimur? Perturbati et vacui homines volunt vendere mihi occasionem ut desistam legere ac scribere putareque, ut desistam curare meos liberos vel colloquere cum parentibus, ut desistam eligere meas gestas aut intellegere mihi causas. Haec finis est beata ignorantia et tota solitudo, ubi nos foveantur in utero algorismi, aliti ab machinis esurientibus. Dum consumit illos qui utuntur, etiam dum frauditores se ipse defraudant, etiam dum fulcitur ab fabribus expilatis qui fuerunt positi quasi cribra humana ab algorismo abutendi — sunt qui cupiunt aliquantulum, oblectationi. Ioculanter. Ita solum ut rideant; ut solum versari sint; quia satis est, nonne? Scitis. Certe scio: licentiam desideras. In angulo est machina amicta cute humana quae fabricat ex sanguine ac excremento quid esse videtur quidquid rogaveras (nisi perspiceres). Dedisti unam magistro vestro qui non animadvertit. Procurator vester iussit ut hoc utaris postquam dimidiam partem sociorum dimiserat. Quasi cibum cuidam liberium vestrum hanc tradidisti et cui placebat. Cupis certo scire ut possis uti hac machina et vos nullo modo despiciam. Vobis non necesse est ut hoc esse utile credam, sed solum me esse civilem. Sed osor sum, et non civilis ero. Haec machina est foeda et nobis confringenda est. Qui hoc fabricant sunt inani coprophagi anthropophagi ignorantiam glorificantes. Credo firme hoc esse contumeliam contra vitam ipsam Osor factus sum per facienda qua Intellegentia Artificosa non potest facere: legendo et intellegendo linguam humanam; cogitando et disserendo de sententiis; considerando vim ac contextum meorum verborum; amando homines; faciendo artem; vivendo in meum corpus cum vitiis, affectibus, at vitalitate. Intellegentia Artificialis esse osor non potest quia Intellegentia Artificialis nec sensit nec intellegit necque curat. Homines soli possunt esse osores. Meam humanitatem cano. * * * ## Notes * Translated from Anthony Moser's essay, I am an AI Hater. I have a degree in Greek and Latin languages with too many graduate credits and a past career as a Latin teacher. I haven't written in a long time, but I feel pretty good about this. (Latine means "in Latin") * Zamia is the best match I could think of for the original Sam/Scam pun. From Greek ζημία, a loss, a bad deal. Plautus used this word in the _Aulularia_ when the poor Euclio is suspicious of the kindness of the wealthy Megadorus because when the rich offer their hand, there’s some hidden burden that costs you, like an octopus grabbing on with its suckers. It seems especially apt. * I tried to use classical Latin as much as possible, but referred to the Neo-Latin Lexicon, which compiles a number of post-classical academic sources, especially where ancient terms were lacking or ambiguous.

It occured to me after fiddling around with nonsense and making silly mistakes all day that the cleanest way to keep favicon files together and away from my main image folder would be to put them into their own directory and pass the contents of that directory to root. Whenever I decide to change my favicon, I can clear out the local directory and replace its contents with the new files, and won't have to worry about things like losing track of files in my image directory or cluttering the main directory in my local repo. You choose which directories and files to pass through as is within the `module.exports` in your `eleventy.js` file. You likely already have a few lines like this for things like the "img" and "css" directories. Here's a quick and dirty run down of how they work. Examples: 1. Pass the /img/ directory through: eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("img") 2. Pass a specific file through: eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("img/favicon.ico") 3. Pass something through to a different location: eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy({ "favicon" : "/" } ); This last example takes an object rather than a string and passes the contents of the source directory through to a different destination directory, in this case to root. The "favicon" directory will not appear on the live site, but its contents will be copied to the root directory, which is exactly what I wanted.

I tend to fixate on little details and can't move on till I find the answer. The latest cause was trying to understand the meaning of the h-prefix in h-cards and other class names in microformats. The documentation has this to say about prefixing conventions: > * h-* for root class names (e.g. h-card) > * p-* for plain text properties (e.g. p-name) > * u-* for URL properties (e.g. u-photo) > * dt-* for date/time properties (e.g. dt-bday) > * e-* for embedded markup properties (e.g. e-note) > All of the prefixes made sense to me except for h-. Why h- for root and not r-? I'm sure it's in there somewhere, but I couldn't find an explanation in the documention on the microformats website. So, naturally, I turned to that old reliable source of genuine and generally well-edited material: a book. A lot has changed between microformats and microformats2, one of the big ones being the introduction of the above prefixes, and if I couldn't figure out where the h- came from, I might find it in the original book on the subject by one of the founders of the spec: Brian Suda. And, sure enough, he explains it very clearly: > We took the vCard spec (RFC2426) and mapped it 1 to 1 to properties that could be placed into the HTML class attribute. Since this was in HTML, it made sense to call this new format hCard, "h" for HTML. Brian Suda, _Using Microformats_ , p. 19 (O'Reilly, 2006) So hCard was the original name, and namely an HTML analogue for (and a direct adaptation of) vCard. H stands for HTML. And in the microformats2 spec, the prefixes are meant to wrangle and make sense of so much that was difficult to remember and parse. So h- represents the HTML element that serves as the root of the named data type: h-card is the root element for a card containing contact information, h-entry is the root element for an entry in a blog or the like, _und so weiter_. An h-card is essentially a block of HTML containing a business card. There's a lot more to dive into, but that clears up one of those little things that tends to block me from making progress.

Have you ever neglected your personal site for, oh, I don't know — nine months? And then when you take a look at it, you wonder why it's the way it is, and how you set it up, and what it says about you as a developer? Personal sites are like blinking neon signs that say, "Fraud here!" Or that's how it seems. This time I cloned my repo and and tried to deploy without any changes, and just couldn't make sense of the error messaging. What have I done? How did I build this in the first place? How did I get here? This is not my beautiful homepage. Talking Heads Once In A Lifetime GIFfrom Talking Heads GIFs I got so depressed that I just gave up for a while and told my wife I'm not a real developer. She wouldn't hear it. And somewhere along the way, I figured out that Netlify was running the wrong version of Node. I tried different solutions, and every time it was using Node 12 instead of Node 14. They say it's the little things, and it's hard to think of a thing that could have been smaller than this. When I was ready to give up for the second time, I noticed a file called `.nvmrc`. That sounds like Node Version Manager. Plus 'rc,' whatever that means … looks like gibberish. I opened it up and guess what the file contained? One number. Two characters: 12 That's it. Nothing else. Just the number 12. `.nvmrc` was the culprit. I'd forgotten something I've posted about before, when talking about bash and zsh and vim, namely that the 'rc' suffix means runcom, i.e., "run commands," and in this case, this is one of the ways Netlify can tell which version of Node to use to build the site. I changed it to 14 and the deployment went perfectly. So it really is the little things. And you need to pay attention to them.

Someone wondered on Mastodon about the fact that `.getMonth()` returns a zero-based number while no other Date method does, but this turned out not to be a fact. Most other methods do return a zero-based number, and there's a simple logic to it. The confusion really arises not from the fact that `.getMonth()` returns a zero-based number, but that `.getDate()` doesn't. It's natural to assume that `.getDate()` and `.getMonth()` will be analagous, but this is ultimately confusion between `.getDate()` and `.getDay()`. The thing is that dates _are_ numbers, and these are pretty universally Hindu-Arabic numerals, whereas months and days have names that need to be rendered in multiple languages. * `.getMonth()` is really asking "which month of the year?," and returns 0–11 from January to December, which can be used to produce the correct month name for a given user's local language. * `.getDay()` is really asking, "which day of the week?," and returns 0–6 for Sunday through Saturday, again, allowing a programmer to use the day number to produce the correct name in a given language. And the reason `.getDate()` doesn't return a zero-based number is clear if you think of the date as the name of the day, where it's an ordinal (i.e., 1 = first, 30 = thirtieth). The numeral representation is the near universal way of showing the ordinal name of the calendar date. And that's why it's not base zero. Getting today's date, March 14, 2023, and using the `.getDay()` method, would return `2` (i.e., Tuesday, the third day in the base zero week from 0–6), while `.getMonth()` would return `2` (i.e., the third month in the base zero year from 0–11). If I handle those returned values properly, everyone will see that it's the third of the month (3), but the number of the day of the week and the month of the year will be rendered for each of us according to our locale. I'll see "Tuesday" and "March," while a friend in France would instead see "Mardi" and "Mars."

In an unlikely turn of events, I was doomscrolling through Instagram reels because I'm human and fragile like everyone else. I landed on a video of Ray Bradbury imploring screenwriting students to read one poem, one essay in any field, and one short story every night. So for the past week, I've done that, working through three books I'd started or half-started: 1. _Selected Poems_ , Bertolt Brecht (A Harvest Book). This is a bilingual collection — German on the left and English on the right — and the translations aren't the best, but neither is my German, so it's nice to read the lines side by side. 2. _Why Look at Animals?_ , John Berger (Great Ideas from Penguin UK). This slim collection of essays takes its title from the longest piece. Not entirely about animals, these essays touch on ethics, aesthetics and both seeing and being seen. It also contains a surprise poem that gave Brecht a day off. 3. _Rashomon and 17 Other Stories_ , Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (Penguin Classics). I forget how I came across Akutagawa, but I've always been a sucker for a great short story, and was sold when I learned he was a fan of Poe. I'd previously read one poem, one essay and about 5 stories before I let anything and everything else get in the way. After Bradbury, I put my phone down and read. ## Nov. 16–22 Sunday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Vom Armen B.B.” (1922–1925) * Essay: John Berger, “Opening a Gate” (2001) * Story: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “Hell Screen” (1918) Monday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Apfelböck, oder die Lilie auf dem Felde” (1919) * Essay: John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” (1977) * Story: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “Hell Screen” (continued) Tuesday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Von der Kindesmörderin, Marie Farrar” (1920) * Essay: John Berger, “Ape Theatre” (1990) * Story: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “Hell Screen” (continued) Wednesday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Bericht vom Zeck” (1919) * Essay: John Berger, “The White Bird” (1985) * Story: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “Hell Screen” (completed) Thursday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Ballade vor des Cortez Leuten” (1919) * Essay: John Berger, “The Eaters and the Eaten” (1976) * Story: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “Dr. Ogata Ryōsai: Memorandum” (1916) Friday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Ballade von dem Soldaten” (1921–1922) * Essay: John Berger, “Field” (1971) * Story: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “O-Gin” (1922) Saturday: * Poem: John Berger, “They are the Last” (For Beverly, 2001) * Essay: John Berger, “Ernst Fischer: A Philosopher and Death” (1974) * Story: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “Loyalty” (1917) But as I think about it, this was kickstarted a few weeks ago when I started reading Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea cycle. I'm currently on the third book, _The Farthest Shore_. I love that Le Guin seems to care as much I do about the things that other people seem to like in fiction. It's not that Earthsea is young adult fiction. I've already read some of the Hainish Cycle, and Le Guin never bores or frustrates by trying to tie every bow and justify the workings of the world, or shock you with sexual violence. I think I'm partly drawn to Le Guin and Berger because both believed in the role of hope in art and the responsibility of the artist to give people a chance to see a better world and to know it's possible. That video also reminded me that I'd picked up the gorgeous oversized collection of the complete Ray Bradbury EC stories, _Home to Stay!_ , published by Fantagraphics. So now I'm reading more than I have in years: novels, poems, essays, short stories, and comics.

I stuck with Mr. Bradbury's advice and continued reading a poem, an essay, and a short story every night. I mostly stuck with the bilingual edition of _Selected Poems of Bertolt Brecht_ for the poetry, supplemented by Adrienne Rich. For essays, since I finished _Why Look at Animals_ , I moved on to another Berger collection, _Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible_. For stories, I started mixing in Ernest Hemingway's collected _Nick Adam's Stories_ and David Foster Wallace's _Brief Interviews with Hideous Men_. And I'm still working my way through Ursula K. Le Guin's _The Farthest Shore_. ## Nov. 23–29 Sunday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Das Lied von den Eisenbahntruppe von Fort Donald” (1916) * Essay: John Berger, “Speech on Accepting the Booker Prize” (1972) * Story: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “The Story of a Head that Fell Off” (1917) Monday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Ballad of the Adventurers” (1917) * Essay: John Berger, “Past Seen from a Possible Future” (1970) * Story: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “Green Onions” (1919) Tuesday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “In Memory of Marie A” (1920) * Essay: John Berger, “Turner and the Barber’s Shop” (1972) * Story: Ernest Hemingway, “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” (1924) Wednesday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Vom Schwimmen in Seen und Flüssen” (1919) * Essay: John Berger, John Berger, “The Suit and the Photograph” (1979) * Story: David Foster Wallace, “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life” (1999) Thursday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Vom ertrunkenen Mädchen” (1919) * Essay: John Berger, John Berger, “The Eyes of Claude Monet” (1980) * Story: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “Horse Legs” (1925) Friday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Lied am schwarzen Samstag der elften Stunde der nach vor Osten” (1920) * Essay: John Berger, “The Production of the World” (1983) * Story: David Foster Wallace, “Death is Not the End” (1999) Saturday: * Poem: Adrienne Rich, “Well in Ruined Courtyard” (1963) * Essay: John Berger, “Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible” (2001) * Story: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “Daidōji Shinsuke: The Early Years” (1924) ## Comics: Special Alex Toth Edition! As for comics, I went on a big Alex Toth bender, reading most in chronological order from original publication date. * 1952: F-86 Sabre Jet (7 pages. From _Frontline Combat_ #12, reprinted in 1995.) * 1953: The Crushed Gardenia (8 pages. From _Who is Next?_ #5, reprinted in _Seduction of the Innocent_ #3, 1985.) * 1959: Illustrations from a 1959 novelization of the TV show _Maverick_ starring James Garner. A previous owner made a note atop a page they must have been reading when they learned that, "John Lennon was murdered Dec. 8th, 1980." * 1965: Grave Undertaking (6 pages. From _Creepy_ #5. Reprinted in _Creepy_ 139 in 1982.) * 1966: The Monument (6 pages. From _Eerie_ #3. Reprinted in _Creepy_ 139.) * 1966: Rude Awakening (6 pages. From _Creepy_ #7. Reprinted in _Creepy_ 139) * 1966: Survival (6 pages. From _Blazing Combat_ #3. Reprinted in _Creepy_ 139 (1982) * 1975: Daddy and the Pie (8 pages. From _Eerie_ #64. Reprinted in _Creepy_ 139.) * 1975: Phantom of Pleasure Island (8 pages. From _Creepy_ #75. Reprinted in _Creepy_ 139.) * 1976: Unreal (6 pages, _Creepy_ #78.) * 1976: Kui (6 pages, _Creepy_ #79.) * 1977: The Vanguard (10 pages, _Hot Stuf'_ #4.) * 1980: The Killing (12 pages, _Creepy_ #122, inks over Leo Duranona.) * 1981: Circus of the Bizarre (5 pages, _Creepy_ #125, inks over Carmine Infantino.) * 1982: Taps (5 pages, _Bop_ #1.) * 1983: Oolala (12 pages, _Dragon's Teeth_ #1.) * 1983: The Fox (8 pages, _The Black Hood_ #2.) * 1983: The Most XXXXX Man in the World (12 pages, _The Black Hood_ #3.) I also intended to read all of Bravo for Adventure, which I have in their original printings, but only got to the intro (4 pages) and the "Dream Story" (17 pages) from _Voyages_ #1 (1983), and haven't had a chance to read the previously published (but next in sequence per the collected edition) two stories from _The Rook_ #1 (24 pages) and #2 (25 pages) in 1979. Soon!

## Fiction By Den McHenry (March 15, 2012) A dog walked down the road. It could have been a thousand dogs on a thousand different roads. It made no difference. He didn't know how to feel about that. He sort of wanted it to matter, and wanted to wonder where the dog came from and where it was going. He wondered about that kind of stuff all the time. Where did that scrap of paper come from, getting kicked up in the wind? He thought there was a story behind everything, and even if it wasn't worth reading, it was worth something. The dog was gone now. All that time wondering about a fucking dog in the road, and he was still standing in the vain shelter of a bus stand. Three hours passed while he sat on the bus and guessed all sorts of things he had no way of ever knowing about the dog he'd seen in the road. There was that, the constant squeak of the seats all around, the noises of the road and the sounds of people. Conversations came and went at every stop, sometimes repeated, like the woman who told everyone that the earth was angry and spinning fast to spite us. He thought about that one, and the dog again, and he thought the dog made everything seem so slow. He couldn't see it. And how many dogs had they passed in this bus? Had he even noticed, or cared how many stories he'd missed wondering about? A thousand dogs, a thousand different roads, and none of it mattered. Eight hours in he was drifting in and out of sleep, watching the dog watch him as it wandered down the road, and all the sounds of the road and the noises of the people disappeared. The only sound left was the woman wondering again about the angry earth and time moving more quickly. "I think children feel it, too." He'd lost track of time, but made it to Kentucky and wondered how he'd find a meal. I stumbled across this story while looking for an unfinished adventure novel set after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. I keep thinking it wasn't half bad and I should think about finishing it. But I wrote this story — this very short story — in March of 2012. (Wait — on the Ides of March? Really?) Within three months, I'd put on a bow on my teaching career and move my young family across the country, taking a leap at a new life. I didn't realize it at the time, but I must have been thinking about an earlier planned (or rather daydreamed) move, when I was younger and stupider and thought I'd skip college and just hit out somewhere to learn to play bluegrass. What really strikes me about this is that it sounds like I'd already read John Berger, but I hadn't. I was already thinking about the watching and being watched by animals? I didn't think much of this at the time and left it unfinished, but I cant imagine adding anything now.

I took a break from Bertolt Brecht and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa for most of the week and read more Adrienne Rich and Ernest Hemingway, with an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin and a story China Mieville. ## Nov. 30 to Dec. 6 Sunday: * Poem: Adrienne Rich, “In the North” (1963) * Essay: John Berger, “I would softly tell my love” (2002) * Story: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “The Writer’s Craft” (1924) Monday: * Poem: Adrienne Rich, “Sisters” (1963) * Essay: John Berger, “Studio Talk (for Miquel Barceló)” (1998) * Story: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “The Baby’s Sickness” (1923) Tuesday: * Poem: Adrienne Rich, “Peeling Onions” (1963) * Essay: John Berger, “The Chauvet Cave” (1996) * Story: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “Death Register” (1926) Wednesday: * Poem: Adrienne Rich, “Apology” (1963) * Essay: John Berger, “Penelope” (1997) * Story: Ernest Hemingway, “Ten Indians” (1927) Thursday: * Poem: Adrienne Rich, “Peace” (1963) * Essay: John Berger, “The Fayum Portraits” (1998) * Story: Ernest Hemingway, “The Indians Moved Away” (1920s?) Friday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Liturgie vom Hauch” (1924) * Essay: John Berger, “Degas” (1993) * Story: Ernest Hemingway, “The Light of the World” (1932) Saturday: * Poem: Bertolt Brecht, “Legende vom toten Soldaten” (1927) * Essay: Ursula K. Le Guin, “Information, Theft, and Confusion” (2010) * Story: China Mieville, “Three Moments of an Explosion” (2015)

I'm not sure why this was saved, but one of the many lost sites I made over the years was one called the Omnivorous Iconoclast, which I think I hosted on my personal web space while an undergraduate at UMass way back at the turn of the century. For some reason I have this one post and a very short story saved in an old folder called "HTML Tests." Come to think of it, I likely grabbed those to use like _lorem ipsum_ to test out new ideas. The name sounds pretty pretentious. I think there was a joke there somewhere, at least partly from an anonymous group I started in high school called the Omnivore Society that posted fliers around school about eating meat, e.g., "Meat: Animals eat it too." Pretty much everything I said in 2001 is still true, and I still miss Winamp. 15 october 2001. 8:35pm eastern. Remember the important things that you always forget -- remember to write, to draw, to plan; to sing songs and keep Paul and Chris motivated, if not inspired; to write down your thoughts; redefine yourself -- that's not to say 'remake,' but re-articulate, to shave off whatever has been cluttering or concealing you and to reemerge from the swampy dark. note to self: winamp3 is a gift from god. PS: Like the good doctor said, when you get overwhelmed you have a tendency to stick your nose in a book and ignore the world. To walk away, or to become an assiduous soul? There's less the academic in you than the scholar, less the critic than the artist. So then love and be curious, for ennui is, as Oscar said, the only unpardonable sin.