The following is a draft excerpt from my novel in progress, Housebreaking the Muse. The novel is haunted by the character of Jacques Rigaut, the French dadaist, gigolo, drug addict, dandy, and suicide. This fragment is from one of a number of first-person passages that present Rigaut on the night of his suicide. Rigaut Failure…
Joe Strummer: 21 August 1952 – 22 December 2002 This is a reprise of a post from a couple years ago. Hard to believe ten years have passed since Strummer's passing, more than 30 since I saw The Clash at the State Theatre in Akron, OH. In a week, I'll also be marking the 30th anniversary…
Simone Kahn was the first wife of André Breton, founder of Mouvement Dada in Paris and more famously known as the lifelong "pope of Surrealism." But before she knew Breton, Kahn, a young student at the Sorbonne, was the close friend of Jacques Rigaut, the dadaist poet, gigolo, drug addict, and suicide who haunts the…
I haven't posted one of these for a while. This short bio-fictional piece is part of a series I'm writing under the title Evocations. Peter Falk Renders Lieutenant Columbo in Charcoal Well, yeah. It happens all the time. Like paying sales tax: a small percentage added, insignificant and worth more to the greater good than…
Praised for his works of historical fiction, notably Symphonie Fantastique and Henry Boulanger of Mushannon Town: A Novel of the American Revolution, Mark Seinfelt has ventured afield to give us Baldr and Beatrice, an impressive appropriation of Norse legend. In this telling, Seinfelt unravels a rich and subtle analysis of the psychology of friendship and…
