Jacques Prevel (1915-1951) is known for a diary he kept through the last dying years of Antonin Artaud. And for nothing else. Artaud eclipsed him in life, and obliterated him in death. Yet Prevel was also a poet, and if he chronicled the dwindling existence of Artaud as a matter of obsession, he also did so with the hope that some glimmer of light shot out from the great man would in time illuminate his own literary efforts. This hope was in vain, its trajectory as simple as it was brutal: Prevel died, and then the few who knew him promptly forgot about him. Now we have a new opportunity to despise him, and perhaps raze his memory once and for all.

Prevel produced three scant collections of poetry over his short lifetime. This book is a complete translation of the first. The last time it was published in any language was by Prevel himself, in 1945. Prior to his encounter with Artaud, Prevel was loosely associated with the writers of the Grand Jeu (René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte) and other incendiaries like Arthur Adamov, who inhabited the demon-haunted underworld of French literature in the last century. But Prevel’s poems are darker, his themes at once more crude and more singular, the excreta of a crystalline nihilism which will affirm readers in nothing but their self-hatred. These are songs of the dying self. And this is a volume for those who believe, with Prevel, that poetry is another word for immolation.
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Translated and with an introduction by Tobias Freeman
Illustrated by Karolina Urbaniak

Hardcover, 92 pages, 190 x 148mm
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/deathpoems

 

 

Extracts from the introduction
Tobias Freeman

In July 1947, four years before his death at the age of thirty-five, Jacques Prevel wrote:

I hate writing, I love only life, and through the writing which I hate because it all too often it reduces me to slavery, I am only seeking life and when I find it, it is in this feeling of omnipotence that lifts me up and returns all my power to me… I am truly reduced to a monstrous sadness. I am reduced to suffering as a man of suffering. I am always lacking what is essential. I lack air, because they have gagged me, and I breathe with more and more difficulty as I struggle.

Prevel wanted to be loved, to be read, to be recognized as the great poet that he was. In life as in death, this desire has continued to elude him with astonishing constancy. Were it not for the efforts of another great French poet, Bernard Noël, who in 1974 compiled and published a selection of Prevel’s writing, he would not even merit the slim Wikipedia entry currently devoted to him. More damning and more ignominious, those who have heard of him at all have done so only in connection with Antonin Artaud.

 

 

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Prevel is known in extremely limited circles thanks to a single book entitled In the Company of Antonin Artaud. This book, whose existence we owe to Noël though the title is Prevel’s own, consists of Prevel’s journal entries for the last two years of Artaud’s life (1946-1948), a period during which Prevel was constantly by his side. In this respect the book is a fruitful source of quotations for admirers of Artaud, especially for those (and there are many) eager to confuse his madness with his genius. So, for example, we can listen to Artaud affirming:

Awful things happened to me this morning, M. Prevel. Just a while ago a crowd of men were masturbating on me, between Syria and Lebanon.

Or:

Every time a man and a woman engage in a sexual act I feel it, they take something from me.

 

There is no need to multiply the examples. Artaud was tragically mad, and Prevel desperately sane. The most sober verdict we can bestow upon Prevel’s haphazard documentary fiction is that its oversaturated presentation of the adoring acolyte collecting the pearls scattered by the great man does not capture the master so much as caricature him. Prevel is a poor Boswell, and while there are points of interest in In the Company of Antonin Artaud, the book’s most ready audience consists of devotees who will largely escape the inconvenience of learning anything about Artaud they didn’t already know. Mainly, they will relearn that for the last years of his life Artaud was crazy, and viciously addicted to opium. At one point he wields a knife and threatens to kill Prevel if he doesn’t reply to his questions immediately. Much of the time, he dances and screams, he does combat with imaginary creatures, he writes, he sleeps fitfully. And most of all, he conspires, pleads, wrangles, and violently coerces friends and acquaintances, all of whom are bequeathed the same essential mission, namely to procure him as much laudanum as possible. In a letter in verse that Artaud wrote to Prevel on 15 September 1947, we read:

… it was in 1915 that I / for the first time / experienced the need / for opium … opium is this energy-giver / essential and without / man can do / nothing … the question is that / I need to recover / my opium, all the opium / that I need / to preserve my immortality …

Such letters proliferate like deadly bacteria in the late correspondence of Antonin Artaud.

 

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Prevel’s life was dominated by poverty, sickness, and despair. The essential statement to be made about him is not the banal observation made of so many writers that they transformed their experiences into their art. Any deep understanding of Prevel must instead begin with the admission that the horror of his interior world overpowered him, and that he lived his perpetual defeat at the hands of life through an absolutist spirituality of negation. He was not the first, and much the same thing can be said of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, whose influence on Prevel was decisive. However, Gilbert-Lecomte achieved recognition during his short life, and even greater renown afterward. This cannot be said of Prevel. What is unique to Prevel is the encompassing totality of his abnegation. He was never spared, never cast in the light of redemption. And so the poetry we read is not an expression of his pain, but its residue, the excrescence which remains when everything in a life, in a mind and soul and a heart, is brutally wrenched from it and obliterated.

 

 

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Prevel’s poetry is an anti-poetry, and it makes more sense to call him an anti-poet rather than a poète maudit. This, for the simple reason that Prevel wrote poetry as if poetry had never been written before him. His work obeys no rules, makes no learned references, assumes no metrical forms, eschews rhyme, ignores the logic of image, neither normalizes nor innovates in matters of syntax, and lacks even the slight music sometimes attained by free verse. What Prevel wrote threatens, and then spits in the face of, the imperial canons defining what poetry is. In a poem from his second book, he writes:

What I can say is

That I’ve lived without understanding anything

That I’ve lived without looking for anything

And this has pushed me to the extreme limit

To an extreme denudation

This is as programmatic a statement as one can hope for from Prevel. It makes clear his yearning to go beyond knowledge, beyond the world, to the limits of language, and that this transcendental nihilism entails by dark necessity the erosion and eventual destruction of the self.

 

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Reading Prevel as a poet is a sterile, meaningless enterprise. Rather, reading him involves reconciling oneself in some measure to entering into his hell. It is only sitting on the lowest stool in the deepest circle of Prevel’s inferno that the reader can hope for, not intelligibility, but some faint recognition of what utter human destitution actually comes to. And this, again, without recourse to the intellectual and artistic frameworks typically employed by the reduced tribe of readers of poetry to conventionalize horror. Readers who have not known pain and suffering, readers incapable not just of dislike but of outright raw hatred, will be disappointed if not disgusted by the poetry of Jacques Prevel. He demands our atavism and by some obscene authority orders us to remove the accumulated rotting layers of our culture and thought. To read him is to take only the first teething step not beyond Eden, but just out of the pit of violence and terror that bygone philosophers glibly named the state of nature. If the argument holds that Prevel exchanged his life for poetry in a devil’s gambit, then we are not reading poetry so much as reading a human being, the flesh of the man himself stripped from his bones and laid out like printing blocks. Like the Prophet Ezekiel, we are being asked to eat the scroll, and be devastated by its bitterness in our mouths. There are no analogues, no comparisons to be made. There is just Jacques Prevel, born in 1915, dead in 1951, with a lifetime of active, muscular damnation in between. Reading Prevel is choosing, for the span of a few pages, to be damned to a very specific kind of hell.

 

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It is an open question whether Prevel’s mutilated world will attract new readers. The capitalist theology of our twilight modernity is cataphatic, in sardonic balance against the frail husks of the lives it nurtures. We want and need presence, and Prevel is all absence. In his short book on Prevel, Nicolas Rozier comments:

Prevel adored Artaud, Artaud loved Prevel like a stillborn child.

And perhaps we can say the same, now. Those who come to Prevel now, in English for the first time, will have to love him as a stillborn child, as the life that could have been, but wasn’t. They will have to read him in full consciousness of the vastness of his failure, because that is his context and his native land. We enter it like Dante’s Inferno, abandoning all hope, with the difference that we know the journey ends there, that purgatory and paradise will not follow. Hell is both the point of departure and the final destination.

 

Selected Poems

As a child I was surprised
To find myself in myself
To be someone among others
And yet being only myself.

Later I met myself
I met myself like someone supposedly dead
And who comes back one day to tell you their life story
And this dead man in me has bequeathed me his past
I have become a stranger to myself
Living through him
Responsible for his unreal and weighty message.

And Fear came
From my exile and this void around me
From the sound of my words which reached no one
And from my friendship, misunderstood and abandoned.
I’ve counted those who came
I’ve counted those who left
Those who stayed will leave.

 

 

Strange rumors
That speak of the end of time dying

We have stripped the coat off the blind
No longer on earth, no longer in heaven
It’s in us that this world is dead.
A loud bang
And the shattered stars scatter
From this death between two lives.

Torrential rain explodes
Stillborn desires that interkill
Old hopes in the shadow of pipe dreams
Cathedrals forgotten, cathedrals destroyed
Brains voided of their substance
Construction of the spirit in ruins
Days past collapsing again
Bodies seized with both hands and launched into the abyss
Chalice of blood in good company emptied to the dregs
And the frenzied waltz of a fire that never goes out.

The lost traditions
And the magical rings of spirits and of the dead
The great circles gleaming, the Demons lively.

We need to work until the end of time
We need to rediscover the Gesture and the Word.

 

 

These joys that are like pain
Let us not speak of them
we let this dead world flow out its streams
Of blood to the sea
We let the night climb and pierce the sky
With blinding night
World dark and cursed whose weight makes me rise
I load you with fear, I load you with evil
And fire that eats away at me
And I remain a man defeated on the borders of this present
Fatal and shorn of glory and of revolt.
I die slowly from living between myself
And the malediction of these useless days.

 

 

Your two presences
Alternate my pain and confound my life
And I remain immobile with my face blind and my arms dead
To pay off my dreams of the absolute that gnaw away my silence
Of an Evil which destroys me without finishing me off.
And if one of your lives calls me in the night
I die with the day of the other who eliminates me
And I return at moments equal to pains
Rejecting like the damned the choosing of any love.

 

 

I’ve suffered as much as you can in the world
But I’ve known the atrocious joy of dreaming
I’ve known the pain of erasing my face
In the fire of my reason
I’ve known the night greedy for my blood
The wind jealous of God
The wind who’s never known its voice as a child
I’ve known obscure expectation
The crowd greedy and mocking
Handing out its ghosts and drowning my memory
Tidal wave shattering my life
Through the fog of its scattered eyes
I’ve known the obsession of an evil I venerate
I’ve known the torment of doubt and its face
And its words ceasing my pain for an instant
And mistaking my night for its closed eyes.

 

 

I find myself without human form
Bloodied by my revolts and my struggles
And condemned to live dissipated existences
I find myself left to my life only
Without strength and deprived of that rest
When I lived off the insanity of our lives
And vagabond of an absent World
I drag the night with me
And the voracious pain of my dark disasters.
And my face is destroyed and my childhood in tears.
My fall is accomplished in silence
Where voices ring out torn and broken
My unrestricted fall vertiginous and without grandeur.

 

 

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Video

 

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Bios

Tobias Freeman teaches theology and philosophy in the south of France. He translates from French, Swedish, and Russian.

Karolina Urbaniak is a multimedia artist and co-founder of Infinity Land Press. She lives and works in London.

 

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Infinity Land Press website
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/infinitylandpress/

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Today the blog has the pleasure of being the chosen location of a ‘welcome to the world’ post for a collection of poetry by the nearly forgotten French poet and Antonin Artaud confidant Jacques Prevel, beautifully designed and published by the always stylish and daring Infinity Land Press. Feast and score, if you will. And thank you for the privilege, Martin and Karolina. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It’s already submitted but the festival, while saying they love the film, suggested a slight change which we totally agree with, so we’re revising a little portion of the film for them to further consider on the requested date of Friday. Halloween can not be taken too seriously, that’s my opinion. Love making Parisians take Halloween as seriously as I do, G. ** Gus Cali Girls, Hey there, Gus! Most awesome to see you! Well, Zac and I cast Ange Dargent, the star of the TMH, as one of the stars of our film based on his performance in Michael’s film, so there’s that connection. And thank you for the me-on-your-mind-edness. I’m so, so sorry to hear about friend. I’m honored that he liked my work and commented here. Death is so hateful. Really best of luck with the response to your thesis. You happy with it? And I hope your scattered project fall into place, or the ones you crave making the most. Thanks, man. Very happy to see you anytime. ** Jack Skelley, Hi. No, I’m totally bereft and crushed that I won’t make it to LA for Halloween. This film will not just let go of my steerage right now. Ugh. And missing Ben’s show to boot. I just saw the Dodgers got trounced, hugs. Sadly, that’s kind of classic Dodgers for you. You’re ‘finished’? Awesome, even in quotes. I have to say the words ‘Myth Lab’ made me happy. Love from all of me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. That assignment sounds highly doable and very ‘you’ as well, no? So cool. What’s the assigned reading? ** Florian S. Fauna, Hey, Florian! Hey, buddy! My Halloween plans are pretty fucked because I can’t go to LA aka the Kingdom of Halloween this year and will be stuck here where the poor level of Halloween celebration makes Valentines Day seem like Xmas. I saw you were in LA on social media. Nice! I remember the great pleasure of getting to hang with you there years ago. ‘Analog horror’, how so? I mean ‘analog’ in what sense? Sounds exciting, whether form it’s in. ** Toniok, I did glance at info on ‘Moffie’, and, yes, it looked pretty avoidable. I’ll stay away from ‘Close’ too, thank you. The big annual experimental film festival here just started, so I’m going to see as much of that as I can. ‘A Voice Through a Cloud’ is great. The issue with it is, as you may know, Welch died while writing it. The first large chunk of it is incredible, his best work, but then you can see him fading out in the writing, and then it just stops dead because he died. But, yes, it’s an amazing novel. ** Darbilly 🐖👨‍🌾, So rural! Film goes well. We’ve been editing down just a bit and that’s been a plus, and now we’ll see what the festivals think. So, it’s, like, waiting to see if big good things happen. I think I eat plant based meat all the time. I’ve been vegetarian since I was fifteen. I really, really don’t like the fake meat that simulates meat taste and ‘bloodiness’. I tried one of those burgers, and I almost vomited. Right, of course, all the learning and materials stuff you need to do the sculpture. Duh. Well, here’s to all of that’s availability. Your instincts with clay seem pretty topnotch, pal. Yeah, whenever I’ve looked at info sites about cannibalism, the advice is always to not eat the dead person’s brain or risk all kinds of fatal health stuff. Oh, gosh, I don’t remember where that ass/brain thing came from. My weird brain, obviously, but I can’t remember what might’ve triggered the thought. Nice prop. I’d shoplift it. ** 2Moody, That does please me, yes. I’m doing a Lucio Fulci Day in about a week and a half. You want to take about gore, lordy. Choir Boy … sounds vaguely familiar. I’ll have to go check. My gut instinct is that ‘shy’, silent vampires are probably the most successful. And probably hottest too. And, yes, Derek’s post was a storehouse. Read his books if you haven’t. ‘Castle Faggot’ first maybe. Hm, I do get the Friday deadline pleasure now that you mention it. Huh, interesting. Things are okay with the film other than money deprivation. I think we nailed an even better new cut yesterday. We’ll see. So, no need to be cathartic or whine about that stuff right now, but I’ll take a rain check on your open ears, thank you! ** Nick., Nice about Arca. No surprise. I’m going to start checking my local listings. I just scored a ticket to see Autechre. I’ve never seen them live before, and I’m massively excited. I was actually really interested ins chaos magic when I was writing part of the cycle. My novel ‘Guide’ is a sigil even. So there’s some magic in there somewhere. Oh, you can plant my titles in as provocative a place(s) as you like. I’m no prude, ha ha. The film work is fun. It probably doesn’t look like fun from the outside, but it actually really is. Editing is my favorite thing to do even or even especially in my writing. Thanks, sir. How was your day? ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I’m pretty good, thank you. You sound good. I will watch ‘Messiah of Evil’, I promise, Maybe even today if the internet gods provide. It’s kind of a day off from the film today, or sort of, so I don’t know what I’ll do. Hm. I hope your day + night was a delightful shebang. ** Right. You already know what’s in front of you, so please make fast or slow work of it. Thanks! See you tomorrow.

* (Halloween countdown post #7/restored)
* borrowed from Taddle Creek

 

A is for All Hallows Eve, or Halloween. All Hallows, also known as All Saints’ Day, takes place on November 1st. It is a day when Catholics celebrate those who have been beatified. All Souls’ Day is the day after All Saints’. The church decreed it a day to pray for those poor souls in purgatory—spirits suspended between heaven and hell. In the Middle Ages, the days were known collectively as Hallowtide. On the eve of All Souls’, churches would ring bells to scare away the dead. Some churches rang bells all night long.

B is for Robert Burns, the Scottish poet. Burns wrote “Halloween” in 1785. “Some merry, friendly, countra-folks / Together did convene, / To burn their nits, an’ pou their stocks, / An’ haud their Halloween / Fu’ blythe that night.” The poem refers to the Celtic Halloween custom of fortune-telling with nuts and apple peelings. Emigrating Scots brought the custom to Canada. Other Halloween customs carried here by Scots and Irish: bonfires, begging for food door to door, playing pranks on those who would not furnish food.

C is for Caledonian Society. Founded in Canada, in 1855, by affluent Scottish-Canadians, the Caledonian Society held banquets across Canada on Halloween. “We are not divining the future, or burning nuts, or catching the ‘snap apple,’ but [we are] celebrating Scottishness,” a speaker told Caledonians in Montreal, in 1885. In Toronto, George Brown was active in the Caledonians. Halloween here was a night of feasts: besides the Caledonian Society, different regiments of the military held a Halloween dinner, as did colleges at the University of Toronto. A meat market ran this ad on October 29, 1903: “HALLOWE’EN POULTRY. We are having heavy enquiries already.”

D is for Dennison Manufacturing Company. “You would be surprised,” said a young lady in Bookseller and Stationer magazine, in 1924, “how many people give Hallowe’en parties the last two weeks of October.” The young lady worked at a Toronto store. She supervised the crêpe-paper department. Dennison Manufacturing, of Framingham, Massachusetts, was the country’s main maker of crêpe paper. Dennison had a Toronto office in the early nineteen-hundreds. It was located on Wellington Street West. They were the first to sell yellow, orange, and black crêpe paper. They sold crêpe paper printed with owls, bats, jack-o’-lanterns, black cats with arched backs. They published The Bogie Book, the Bible of Halloween party guides. Place cards, Spanish moss, blindfolds, costumes—The Bogie Book told how to make them all from Dennison crêpe paper. Crêpe paper is combustible. The parties were firetraps.

E is for Eaton’s. “Don’t Miss The Hallowe’en Parade,” read an Eaton’s ad in the Toronto Daily Star, in 1929. The Eaton’s Santa Claus Parade involved several floats and many paraders. The Hallowe’en Parade? “A big pompous general will lead Felix, Bluebeard—A gypsy, a Zulu, and other familiar folk in a march around Toyland.”

F is for Frankenstein. Billy Pratt was a British lad. In 1909, he was flunking out of King’s College London. He was studying Chinese customs and languages; he wanted to act. He travelled to Canada and wound his way to Toronto. The Canada Company office found him work in Hamilton. Pratt became a farmer, but after three months, he drifted westward, working as a ditch digger, a tree cutter. Soon he convinced a stock company in Kamloops, British Columbia, to let him join the troupe. He changed his name to Boris Karloff. Karloff was a surname of some of his relatives; Boris was a name he said he “plucked out of the cold Canadian air.” Karloff toured Alberta and Saskatchewan, then he headed to Hollywood. His role as the monster in Frankenstein made him a star.

 

 

H is for Dr. H. H. Holmes. Holmes built himself a hotel in 1893, in Chicago, that boasted, in the words of the crime writer Connie Fillipelli, “iron-plated rooms, secret passages, hidden chutes that ended in the basement directly above zinc-lined tanks, sealed rooms with gas jets, stairways that led nowhere . . . trapdoors, a dissecting table, surgeons’ tools.” The building was a blueprint for every carnival and amusement park haunted house to come. It’s believed Holmes murdered more than a hundred people there. Then he went on the lam, landing in Toronto. He buried more bodies in the basement of a house near Barrie, Ontario. Pinkerton detectives shadowed him. Again he fled. They nabbed him in Boston, tried him in Philadelphia. In 1896 he was hanged.

I is for Isabel Grace Mackenzie. She died in 1917 and was survived by her son, William Lyon Mackenzie King. Mackenzie King became the prime minister of Canada. He hung a portrait of Isabel in his study, and kept it lit night and day. He spoke to her through a Ouija board and a crystal ball. He contacted her during séances. On October 6, 1935, his dead mother communicated the following to him: “Long ago I dreamt that you would succeed Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Long ago I knew God meant you to be prime minister. Long ago I [more than] knew that God meant that you would serve His holy will. Good night.” King was buried beside his mother in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

 

K is for kisses. “Ducking for apples is rather out of late,” said the Everywoman’s Column of the Toronto Daily Star, in 1913. The topic: suggestions for Halloween parties. What did the column recommend? A taffy pull. “For the taffy pull, pull the taffy from buttered plates and save mother’s busy hands next day.” A taffy pull fulfilled two functions: it provided entertainment, and it provided eats. For hosts who didn’t have time to cook candy, stores sold it. At Halloween, a confectioner called Hunt’s sold a “Taffy Sucker, Face on Stand” for a nickel. In 1925, Eaton’s advertised a variety of taffies for Halloween: “peanut crisp, cocoanut and peanut, peanut and butterscotch.” During the Depression, the molasses kiss grew in popularity. No one seems to know why. Maybe molasses was cheaper than the ingredients for taffy? “Just In Time For Hallowe’en Parties,” read an ad from Loblaw’s, in 1933, “HALLOWEEN KISSES.” Fifteen cents bought a one-pound bag.

 

 

M is for David Manners, who played the handsome John Harker in Dracula. Manners was born in Halifax. His real name: Rauff de Ryther Daun Acklom. He studied forestry at the University of Toronto, and acted at Hart House Theatre. He hightailed it to Hollywood, where James Whale spotted him at a party. Whale cast him in his directorial debut, Journey’s End. Manners went on to work with directors Frank Capra and George Cukor. Tod Browning cast him in Dracula. In The Mummy, Manners played opposite Boris Karloff. In The Black Cat he starred with both Bela Lugosi and Karloff. He eventually abandoned the movies. Some suggest he quit, in part, because his studio suggested he marry a woman (Manners was gay). Retiring from acting, he retreated to the California desert. He wrote novels, and died in 1998. Horror movies, he once said, were his “only claim to movie fame.”

N is for noise. Making noise was at the heart of Halloween in its early days. Revellers tossed rocks and mud at windows and doors. They crafted noisemakers from tin cans, wooden spools, roofing tiles. A mid-century Halloween package produced for Canadian schoolteachers included instructions for making a Halloween megaphone. As early as 1900, Halloween noisemakers were being produced in Germany and exported to the United States. Styles for sale included horns, rattles, cranks, snappers, and clappers. “Weird Spirits a-gamboling,” said a 1913 ad for Mason and Risch Limited, of Toronto. “Witch Caps—Pumpkin Heads—Dominoes—Flowing Robes—Holed-Out Eyes. Strange phantasies they are! Yet, who and WHAT are they? Listen, then, they are the phantom witcheries of Hallowe’en!” The ad was peddling the Victor Victrola. “To sit snugly around the open fire, revelling in all the mystic rhythms of this bewitching fairyland of Hallowe’en, conjured up so wonderfully by the little Victrola, will make the evening’s frolics complete!” Which mystic rhythms did the store recommend? “The Dance o’ the Fairies,” “Peer Gynt,” and “Will-of-the-Wisp.”

P is for Philip Morris. In the nineteen-fifties he toured across Canada performing in a ghost show—a magic show with supernatural and horrific effects. His stage name: Dr. Evil. To garner publicity, he’d arrive early in a town and pull stunts. Drive a car blindfolded. Raffle off a “dead body.” The dead body was a frozen chicken. The R.C.M.P. once arrested him for dressing as a gorilla in public. Years later he invented an artificial spiderweb made of cloth. He made a killing.

Q is for Kew Beach. In 1945, Halloween hooligans burnt bonfires on Queen Street East. To feed the fire, they tore down fences and gates. Police were called. When they rode up on horses, they were pelted with stones and bricks. Hooligans blocked fire trucks with piles of concrete blocks. Thirteen troublemakers were taken in. A mob of seven thousand marched on the Main Street police station, hell-bent on springing the hooligans. Police cruisers rushed to the scene with tear gas. Water cannons dispersed the rioters. Five firemen were injured, as were a couple of cops.

R is for rides. Leon Cassidy needed a “dark ride.” In 1928, Cassidy was the co-owner of a small amusement park in New Jersey. Lots of amusement parks had an “old mill” ride: boats floated riders down canals decorated with scary scenery. Cassidy couldn’t afford to build a boat ride. So he put dodgem cars on a twisted track in a darkened pavilion. The Pretzel, he called it. It was a sensation. He started the Pretzel Amusement Ride Company to provide Pretzel rides to amusement parks across the continent. In 1930, he came to Canada. He put down a floor base at the Canadian National Exhibition. He laid tracks on the base, then covered them in a black tent, covered by another tent. It was probably the first cartable dark ride on a midway anywhere.

S is for slogans. “Trick or treat!” It’s what children scream on Halloween. But “trick or treat” didn’t become the customary catchphrase in Toronto until sometime around the Second World War. Before then, kids yelled, “Shell out!” “HALLOWE’EN” said an ad for a grocery store chain, in 1929, “with its joyous merriment. . . . SHELLIN’ OUT to the district cut-ups, guessing who the strange figure is who knocks on your door.” From a Loblaw’s ad during the Depression: “When You Hear the Ultimatum! SHELL OUT. Be Ready with LOBLAW’S HALLOWE’EN KISSES.”

T is for Bill Tracy, a sculptor and engineer from New Jersey. In the nineteen-fifties, he revolutionized carnival dark rides by adding supernatural back-glows, glow-in-the dark stunts, trompe l’oeil to the decor. He created themed rides like the western ghost town and the haunted pirate ship. Sadly, he never invented safety features, like fire escapes. Wiring was makeshift. His rides tended to go up in flames. Very few still stand. The dark ride at Toronto’s Centreville Amusement Park—the Haunted Barrel Works—is decorated in a distinctly Tracy mode. And it is safe.

U is for University of Toronto. According to the historian Keith Walden, spontaneous Halloween celebrations erupted on campus in 1884. Students marched into the downtown core, singing, shattering lampposts, egging Eaton’s. Police dispersed them. Torontonians complained. The parade became an annual event. In 1899 students barged into the peanut gallery at Massey Hall, disrupting the evening’s performance. Veterinary students dangled dead horse parts over the balcony. Medical students banged human arm and leg bones. Some students slit open a political effigy, showering the audience below with chaff, hay, and excelsior. Hector Charlesworth, the future editor of Saturday Night, was sitting in the pit. His suit was ruined.

 

 

W is for whoopee cushion. In the early twentieth century, an American named S. S. Adams invented a plethora of classic pranks: dribble glasses, joy buzzers, sneezing powder. In 1930, a Canadian “rubber concern” approached him with a new novelty—a bladder that made a farting sound when someone sat on it. The rubber concern? The Jem Rubber Company, headquartered in Toronto, on Dundas Street West. It produced parts for printing companies. Adams turned down the fart cushion, so Jem manufactured it on its own. It was green, with a wooden nozzle. Stamped on the face was a picture of a Scottish lad. He sported spurs and a sporran, and carried a rifle. Wouldn’t bagpipes have been the obvious visual pun? The whoopee cushion was a sensation, even during the Depression. Adams ended up coming out with a copy of the Canadian cushion—the razzberry cushion, he called it.

X is for XEPN, a Mexican border-blaster radio station near the Rio Grande. In the late nineteen-twenties and early thirties, Bob Nelson and his brother Larry hosted an astrology show on the station. Listeners sent in a dollar and, in return, the Nelsons sent them a mimeographed horoscope. The Nelsons also operated Nelson Enterprises, of Columbus, Ohio, which supplied mediums and mentalists with fake fortune-telling equipment—mind-reading codes, mechanical crystal balls, two-way radios that could be concealed under capes or in turbans. “Be it distinctly understood,” said their 1931 mail-order catalogue, “that all effects described in this catalogue are accomplished by normal means, and are entirely divorced from any supernatural or supernormal powers.”

Y is for yellow. “Green and red have come [to] be the Christmas colors,” said a newspaper article from 1925, “just as black and yellow tell us of Hallowe’en.” An article in Bookseller and Stationer, from 1925, advised those celebrating Halloween to obtain “yellow and black crêpe paper for decorative purposes.” In 1927, an ad for crêpe paper in that same magazine recommended “Orange and Black for Hallowe’en.” In coming years, orange and black would come to be considered the Halloween palette par excellence. What changed? Why did yellow fade out and orange fill in?
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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!!! Welcome back! So happy about the recharging. Me, I’m amidst a heavy film work week — what else is new — for a Friday deadline, so that’s me of late in totality. I’m obviously and seriously down for the portal installation. Problem solved. Ooh, free Yaoi. And in small booklets no less. Nice store you got there. Love pretending he’s just your friend, G. ** Misanthrope, Workmanlike but satisfying long weekend there. I’ll give it a B+. Helluva deep sleeper, you. ** Darbilly 👨‍🌾, Nice name variation. I had to look up Scotch Yoke. I see the appeal, yes. I don’t think I know the names of gear types well enough to identify what I like. I guess I just look at gears of all types and think, “Amaze me’. Well, is it illegal to will your body to a machinist? Strange law, if so. If you believe the masters on the master/slave sites that I scour for my posts, and I don’t, necrophilia is as common as a blow job. I think you should make that silicon/ resin installation, naturally. Heck, let’s collaborate. Not too long at all, of course. Edible-ized or not. I have a hungry brain. At least when it comes to you. ** _Black_Acrylic, Happy that it/he snagged you. How are you? Have you gotten your homework assignment yet? ** Bill, Cool. Yeah, I wish I could see them. Surely one of the many cinephile venues here in the big P will pony up. All mechanical, ooh. High hopes on your finding the resources. If I can help, … ** Nick., No, yeah, that happens a lot, no? Life lessons sneaking up on one? I don’t know, sounds very familiar. No, we’re editing a new version for a festival this week. We’ll be editing/finishing the film in some way or other probably until December. Takes time, and, as often said, our producer stiffed us, so we have no funds to boot. Eating? Last night Capellini pasta with mushroom sauce. Tonight probably a wrap consisting of a large tortilla, slab of microwaved seitan, a couple of microwaved soy dogs, and a thick smear of mashed potatoes. I’m weird. Oh, wow, that’s crazy cool about your tattoo idea even if I worry a bit about stamping my stuff on you, except that you’re the one stamping, so I guess it’s okay. I mean, yeah, honored, deep bow and etc. Mm, I think ‘The Marbled Swarm’ was the hardest to write. It took me forever to figure out that voice that would do so many tricks. So probably that one. Arca, nice. Pray tell on the live manifestation of his shebang. I’m interested. I hope your energies stay so awesome. ** Toniok, Hi, Tk! Always lovely to see you! I can’t remember exactly but I think it’s possible that you were the one who turned me on to Val del Omar in the first place. I’d never heard of ‘Moffie’. What/how was it? And belated good luck. ** Cody Goodnight, Hey, Cody. I’m fine, busy busy. Glad you slept, and glad to see you’re on a fine horror roll there. Impeccably scary day to you! ** Steve Erickson, Well, Davies was hardly the first person to make wonders out of deep personal torment. Not that his suffering was a blessing or anything. DJ Wesley Gonzaga: news to me. I’ll go find out. We’re just plugging away on the film. No funding breakthroughs (yet). I think we’re skipping Tribeca. We did end up submitting to Rotterdam because a couple of programmers saw the film and love it and asked. We’re finessing a last minute new edit for them right now for a Friday deadline. Thank you for asking. ** Okay. It’s an annual Halloween tradition here on the blog to repost prose genius and Halloween mega-expert Derek McCormack’s HALLOWEEN ABCS, and today’s the lucky day. Enjoy. See you tomorrow.