Pieces, Items, and Sundry Shorts collects 75+ terse works and quick hits: like a blow-by-blow parody of world literature, a fake ’90s zine, and a children’s book from 1893, with dozens of original comics, illustrations, and doctored photos pulled in along the way. The contents of P.I.S.S. have been extensively road-tested for comic value by the author in 20 hard years’ work of amusing and/or pissing off surly drunk people at readings in bars.
Some excerpts:
The Holistic Integrative Institute of Transcendental Unaccredited Studies: Fall Course Catalog
Some Other Gangs of New York (Excerpts)
The Readers Digest Condensed Version of the Collected Works of Charles Bukowski
A Selection from Pettifoggery and Pompousness, by Jane Austen (excerpted from Dead White European Male Explorations: A Source-Book of Western Literature)
The Holistic Integrative Institute of Transcendental Unaccredited Studies: Fall Course Catalog
Shamanism 220 Prerequisites: Animism 140 or equivalent, Chanting 160 or above, and introductory Face-Painting sequence (prerequisites may be waived in favor of graduate Sympathetic Magic Seminar). Introduction to core shamanic skills will include hut dwelling, spirit-guide and cryptic-speech skills, spirit animal identification, and the use of mud as shampoo. Students will be tasked as a course midterm to generate incomprehensible prognostications. Note: this course's final exam involves an immersive three-day ahahuasca vision quest. May not be appropriate for students with heart conditions, or who are under 18, or who object to hours of violent puking.
Conspiracy Theories 350 If you are serious about studying how world history is being guided to nefarious ends by the Trilateral Commission, Illuminati, Bilderbergs, Masons, Jaycees, Rosicrucians, and others, then please stay away from this class. They’re monitoring the sign-up lists.
UFO Studies In a series of directed hypnosis sessions, students will be helped to recall past experiences which are guaranteed to include crop circles, strange lights in the sky, encounters with transcendent beings, and, ultimately, sexual abuse. Instructors should be notified if students are taking this course concurrently with Recovered Memory Implantation 140, so that the professors can coordinate their stories.
Science for Anti-Intellectuals A broad array of smarty words will be explored to help concepts antagonistic to an empirical worldview carry scientific weight. Topics will include prefixes, suffixes, root words, and compound phrases (quick tip: wherever possible, put “quantum” before a new age term, “energy” in the middle, and “technologies” at the end. It works!)
Mother Earth Warm Growth Num-Nums 110 This course explores Lady Gaia in all her glory and plenty, praise be! The bounty and lush snuggum traditions of herbal yoni mother goddess will be covered extensively in this seminar channeling rainbow scribe light visions of native fertility, chanting-based inner-power raising, and quantum hawkstar Energy Ceremony technologies. Protractor required.
Various Jungian Crap 210 For the fall term we will focus on the study of weird-ass Gnostic stuff, like that one totally cool story where Jesus and Judas have sex together?, under the premise of exploring something profound about the human mind.
Introduction to Holistic Placebo-Based Healing Methodologies A range of ineffectual means to enhance health and collect fees will be explored. Students will encounter a diversity of traditions in which customer-patients are empowered to visualize a make-believe healing-force technology passing through their bodies at the discretion of the alternative healthcare practitioner, followed by discussion of multiple payment techniques. Special topics include reiki, chi, orgone, credit card processing, prana, and HMO/PPO accreditation. (Our spring Advanced session will cover further subjects including qigong healing crystals, tachyon bioplasma, and collection agency referrals.) Prerequisite: Homeopathic Financial Management 310.
Special Topics in Meditation (Online only) A weekly text will be delivered to all course students instructing them not to think about anything for ten minutes or so. :
Some Other Gangs of New York
(By Herbert Asbury, III, Jr. – Excerpts)
Given the rarity of clean drinking water in 19th century Gotham, most citizens had grown to adulthood tasting of no beverage but 180-proof corn alcohol (as if they were Chinamen!). This is why so many gangs could extract surprising acts of loyalty from their members with nothing more than a tumbler of smooth gin.
Due to the lack of clean water, and universally unsanitary conditions in the tenements, human teeth could generally survive no more than a fortnight within a man’s mouth if he remained anywhere south of Houstoun Street (this explains the enormous popularity of tapoica to this day among outlaws of every stripe).
“The feared Teddy Bear Gang’s weapon of choice was the stuffed animal, which in those days was filled not with padding but with lead buckshot.”
Conditions were untidy even in the wealthier, northerly neighborhoods, despite heavy preventative use of astrology and radium enemas. In fact as late as the mid 1920s, Cornelius Vanderbilt remained the only adult New Yorker who had ever possessed a full set of teeth. The Commodore’s choppers (false, of course) had been held in place with a paste made of urchins (1), and were fashioned painstakingly from Indian ivory (2).
(1) Meaning not abandoned children, naturally, but sea-urchins.
(2)
Meaning not elephant tusks from the subcontinent, naturally, but the carved bones of native Americans.
It was under these conditions – in which a healthy tooth came to be of priceless value – that The ‘Tooth-Plucker’ rose to prominence. The ‘Tooth-Plucker’ was a fearsome thug some seven and a half feet tall, forever clad in bear-skin, with a live beaver strapped to each arm. Over his shoulder was slung a coarse sack in which he kept several ‘rat-kings’; eg, balls of live rodents bound tightly together by their own tails.
There is little doubt that this man known as ‘Tooth-Plucker’ was the origin of the modern myth of the tooth fairy. Although, rather than leaving a coin on his victims’ pillows after seizing a tooth at night, he would deposit a bolus of rats. Also, he would shit at the foot of the bed. And, rather than daintily remove his dental prize from under a pillow, the ‘Tooth-Plucker’ used rusted pliers to tear it directly from the mouth. The overpowering stench of this most criminal dentist was usually adequate to keep his victims in an unconscious state for the extraction.
As terrifying as the ‘Tooth-Plucker’ may have been, the most feared criminal of all – in terms of sheer, vicious ferocity – was one Charlie the Pickler, a gambler and pugilist whose affability was permanently curtailed after his ears were chewed off in a fracas at the Five Points with threescore rabid pimps. Charlie was often heard to say he had murdered more men in his life than he had taken warm baths: a facetious boast, since the man was known to have killed some 2000 men, women, and children, but by the time of his death (during the Typhus Jamboree of 1872) he had yet to wash up.
“Social diseases were rampant in old New York: syphilis, chlamydia, warts, herpes – and, by far the most prized of them all, gonorrhea.”
Charlie the Pickler’s right-hand man and compatriot in mayhem was a short, stocky deaf-mute named Simon. The taciturnity of this much-feared factotum was given explanation shortly after Simon was murdered in a melee, in which he had been jumped unexpectedly in an alley-way by 700 ruffians. An autopsy revealed Simon had never actually been a human deaf-mute at all! In fact he had been a close-shaved baboon all along.
Each city block of New York in those days supported one or more professional haters, known as loathesmen, specializing in detesting Irishmen, Italians, Jews, Chinese, or Negroes. A loathesman’s work may have been difficult, but he was free to set his own hours, and was encouraged to drink on the job. Also, handsome bonuses could be earned for coining new ethnic slurs. In a marathon run, one prolific loathesman of the lower 68th ward was said to have created more than 800 unfavorable names for an Irishman during a single weekend’s boozing. Among them:
- Irishey
- Ire-ish
- Red-hair-and-stipple-cheeks
- You-of-whose-kind-many-have-freckles
- Fair-complexioned lout
- Loutey lout, of Ireland
- Leper-chaun
- Spud sampler
- Russet rustler
- Yam smacker
- Tuber gourmand
- Bon vivant of potatoes
- Famine quitter
- Dumb Irishman
- Son of an Irishman
A New York beggar in those days could hope to earn no more than a ha’penny – worth approximately half a penny - after a sixmonth’s effort. This could actually take half a year to accomplish. But even then, the luckless beggar would most likely see his throat cut by brigands seeking to snatch his ha’penny loot. One might ask why a rollabout would spend so long seeking the very coin which would spell his instant death? But in that era, anyone not fortunate enough to have a sweatshop job to fill 22 hours of his day found himself in desperate want of something to do.
Also, people in those days were often rather stupid.
Throughout the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth, the city burned flat to the ground at least once a week, usually on Thursday. But if a major riot or fixed election were scheduled, the fire might be moved to accommodate it.
“The winter of 1852 was far and away the harshest in New York’s history. By early December, an acute shortage of bed bugs caused widespread looting and mayhem until an emergency bargeload of nymphs could be sent up from Baltimore. Indeed, so bitter was the cold that by the time of the New Year, many prostitutes could no longer afford to keep their vaginas. ”
On election days particularly, the tasty peppermint sticks and salt-pork hats distributed as bribes at polling centers were enough to convince most arsonists to kick off early from their weekly work. But this made election days tough indeed for New York’s overworked Arson Truancy officers, tasked to locate the often inebriated or cathouse-ensconced firestarters and lock them up in the Tombs for neglecting to immolate the city....
The Readers Digest Condensed Version
of the Collected Works of Charles Bukowski
I got up, hung over. The old lady had run off again. I finished last night's bottle of wine from the nightstand. I went down to the bar. There was a 20-year-old chippie there and we got to talking.
“I want to be with you,” she said.
“But there will be problems,” I said.
“I don't care,” she said.
“My old lady might kill you,” I said.
“I still don't care,” she said.
So we went to the racetrack. I showed her all the angles. I won $50.
We went back to my apartment. Luckily the old lady was still gone.
“Are you ready for fucking now?” I asked the 20-year-old chippie.
“I've been ready all day, Hank,” she said. Then I laid her down and fucked her real good. I passed out afterward, probably because I drank another bottle of wine. And a fifth of whiskey. When I woke up the chippie was gone.
THE END
of The Readers Digest Condensed Version
of the Collected Works of Charles Bukowski
DWEM Explorations:
A SOURCE-BOOK OF WESTERN LITERATURE
Part 7: Jane Austen
Everybody loves a good yarn about a bunch of women dithering on and on and on – and on, and on, and on and on – about whom they want to marry. Few writers have tackled this irresistible subject with more pluck and moxie than Jane Austen. This short (and, be warned – cliffhanging!) selection is from Chapter 52 of her twelfth novel on the subject, Pettifoggery & Pompousness. This text has been translated to English from the Pre-Victorian.
Importuned by the occasioning of a happy yet unrelished felicity, Miss Periwinkle transmitted to her young charge only such chastening as the immodesties of her station might rightly allow.
“The efficaciousness, though paramount, of dispatch in the conduct of one’s affairs, needs must find due relegation second to such reflections as are needful to wise choosing,” she said; and Katherine’s cheeks burned hotly at the sharpness of the rebuke.
“Such partiality of heart as may obtain withal,” Katherine near stammered, “is an avocation alacritiously undertaken under powers mine own – and thus thank I you for, as shown thereunto, due discretion.” Such a rejoinder duly vouchsafed within the duress of this dire intercourse a preservation of dignity not unequal to the assurance of mien likewise effected; yet in the very broaching, the aforementioned coronary matters were, to her interlocutor, the object of a perfect divulgence.
“Katherine,” announced her governess crisply, “you are bold. Bold, I daresay!, and in a manner unbecoming to your sex.”
“Miss Periwinkle,” Katherine whispered, “whatever might you mean?”
“Is it of aught but a plainness? You do love him true!”
A gasp sounded from the door: for Abigail stood there, agog, and had heard all!
