Archived News from the Poison Pie Publishing House.

News Updates From 2020:

 

On-going Blog Series

December 13, 2020
Shrinky Dinks
The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House rendered several characters from books published in recent years by the PPPH as shrinky dinks, for the purposes of decorating the holiday tree. Images and references to the various published and unpublished appearance of these characters are provided here.

 

December 12, 2020
Hebeloma's Cleromancy Kits
Almost a year after the writing of the horoscopes in A Practicum on Divination via Cleromancy was completed, the cleromancy kits have been assembled. The delay was due in part to the pandemic as well as the mild incompetence and questionable priorities of the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House. In any case, the kits can now be examined in some detail here.

For those without access to the physical kit, an electronic implementation, titled, The Oracle of Hebeloma, remains available online via free and anonymous access from the Poison Pie Publishing House.

 

November 10, 2020
New Issue of the International Journal of Exploratory Meta-Living
As part of the course taught at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, The Golden Age of Non-Idiomatic Improvisation, the International Journal of Exploratory Meta-Living has published an interview with French saxophonist, vocalist and composer, Alexandra Grimal, titled, The Efficient Thought-Opener of Joy: An Interview with Alexandra Grimal. As always, the content of this issue and all previous issues from IJEML is available via free, anonymous download.

Related Posts: We have previously published only one review of an album with Ms. Grimal, namely Désordre, a duet by Joëlle Léandre & Alexandra Grimal.

 

November 3, 2020
Interview with David Keffer

A short interview from September, 2020 conducted by Clifton Sluss, a doctoral student in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville with David Keffer, staff writer at the Poison Pie Publishing House, has been posted here on the UTK MSE website The interview was conducted via Zoom (of course). Although brief, the Q&A touches on the intersection of creativity in the arts and sciences, the waterphone, Charles Musès and Ornette Coleman.

 

August 15, 2020
The Oracle of Hebeloma

The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House are pleased to present The Oracle of Hebeloma, an electronic implementation of A Practicum on Divination via Cleromancy by Hebeloma Crustuliniforme (2019). In a joint exercise of apophenia and introspection, the oracle projects the future into a fourteen-dimensional space, in which each axis is associated with a spectrum of a quality ranging from vice to virtue. The readings are expressed in terms of interactions between a pair of individuals, who were among those seven youths and seven maidens sacrificed to the minotaur, which dwelt in an abandoned, Cretan mine. In its current incarnation the oracle possesses some interactivity, allowing the supplicant to determine the relative weights associated with the fourteen axes.

 

July 28, 2020
New Issue of the International Journal of Exploratory Meta-Living
The International Journal of Exploratory Meta-Living has published an article, A Materials Perspective on Waterphone Acoustics describing the work of a team of four University of Tennessee engineering students who designed, built and characterized several waterphones. The relationship between the materials used to construct the instruments and the resulting acoustical properties is reported. As always, the content of this issue and all previous issues from IJEML is available via free, anonymous download.

 

April 18, 2020
The Ornithological Collection of Uwetsiageyv is published online with free access
As the COVID-19 quarantine continues, the Poison Pie Publishing House is making available the full text of the novel The Ornithological Collection of Uwetsiageyv. Originally written in 2016, the novel has only been available in a limited hardcover edition. It is now being made available online for free, anonymous access. The novel is a post-existential fantasy generated through a non-idiomatic improvisational creative process. It is subtitled, A Flight of Fancy in Two Hundred and One Parts.

  • The Ornithological Collection of Uwetsiageyv
  • full text online; free, anonymous access
  • a one-page flyer describing the novel
  • additional, inessential notes on the novel for the curious

 

March 28, 2020
The Portable Library of Hong Samud is published online with free access
As folks are quarantined at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Poison Pie Publishing House is making available the full text of the novel The Portable Library of Hong Samud. Originally written in 2015, the novel has only been available in a limited paperback edition. It is now being made available online for free, anonymous access. The novel is a post-existential fantasy generated through a non-idiomatic improvisational creative process. It is subtitled, a novel that grew as a vine grows, guided by an innate, phototactic sensitivity.

  • The Portable Library of Hong Samud
  • full text online; free, anonymous access
  • a one-page flyer describing the novel
  • additional, inessential notes on the novel for the curious

In addition to The Portable Library of Hong Samud, the Poison Pie Publishing House hosts full text of several other novels available via free, anonymous access. To date this list includes

  • Wouldn't the Wood Weird, a post-existential romantic fantasy, or Impractical Prayers from the Spindle of the Void (2016) full text (flyer)
  • 2017: The Year of the Every-Day Magician, A Second-Hand Account of the Rise and Fall of the Renegades of the American Muslim Registry (2017) full text (flyer)
  • Piecemeal: Proceedings of the International Congress on Exploratory Meta-Living (2018) full text (flyer)
  • A Practicum on Divination via Cleromancy (2019) full text (flyer)

There are also several illustrated books for readers of all ages freely available from the Poison Pie Publishing House. Links to a few of these books are provided below.

 

February 15, 2020
Hebeloma's Cleromancy Kits

The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House has created an addendum titled, Hebeloma's Cleromancy Kits. This document describes the tools used in the cleromantic ritual as prescribed by Hebeloma Crustuliniforme in the text, A Practicum on Divination via Cleromancy.

 

January 1, 2020
2019: The Year in Review at the Poison Pie Publishing House
In the year 2019, the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House produced exactly one book: A Practicum on Divination via Cleromancy.

A Practicum on Divination via Cleromancy was recorded in real time. It is a post-existential fantasy generated through a non-idiomatic improvisational creative process. It was serially published on a daily basis in 2019, resulting in a novel composed of 365 passages each nominally three hundred words in length. The full text of the novel remains online via free, anonymous access. A one-page flyer describing the work is online here.

Much of the inspiration behind a literature of non-idiomatic improvisation comes from non-idiomatic improvised music. The novel was improvised in the following manner. The author wrote a passage each day while listening to a different album. For the curious, several indices were generated, noting the artists, labels, countries and years of the recordings. The page numbers in the index correspond to a book, which currently does not exist, in which each page contains the writing from a single day of the year. Thus an entry of "1" in the index corresponds to January 1, 2019 and an entry of "365" corresponds to December 31, 2019. The index is posted as a pdf file here.

Also of note in 2019, the Staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House continued to engage in two other activities including (i) music reviews and (ii) weekly updates of A Survey of Bestiaries and an end-of-the-year bestiary review.

The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House is no longer setting annual goals. However, one possibility appears on the horizon for 2020. The daily blog will continue, with the intention of generating a fourth novel in the tetralogy that began with 2017: The Year of the Every-Day Magician (2017) and Piecemeal (2018). This fourth novel is titled Shaharazad and the 10,001 Diluvian Knights (2020). It is described as a post-existential apocalyptic horror generated through a non-idiomatic improvisational creative process.

Although we are especially ill-suited to crafting materials by hand, we also hope to create a full set of cleromantic materials (stones, coin and mat) to accompany A Practicum on Divination via Cleromancy. Some progress has already been made but much remains to be done. This work is peripherally related to the illustrated essay begun in 2018 devoted to contemporary paraphernalia associated with cleromancy.

To our readers, we, the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House, thank you for your patronage and support and we look forward to another mutually creative and unpredictable year.